Chapter 402: Forging the Vibranium Suit
On the rooftop of the Empire State Building, Batman dismantled the Ultron robot he had left behind as New York's guardian before the Wakanda operation. He worked by hand, breaking it down to its component parts with efficient, practiced movements, and stripped the Arkham suit shell from its frame.
He was gathering the pieces together when the moon shifted.
The change in the light was subtle at first -- a brightening, a concentration -- and then Khonshu was simply there, appearing on the rooftop without invitation or warning. The moon god stood in his white burial wrappings with the falcon skull centered above his shoulders and the crescent staff held at his side.
"I hope you've brought something worth hearing," Batman said. He set the components aside and looked at Khonshu directly. No preamble, no courtesy.
He had last seen Khonshu the night he located Dane Whitman -- the confrontation where he had leveraged access to nuclear deployment systems to force the moon god's cooperation and demand information on the spider-related power system. He had not forgotten what he asked for, and he had not forgotten that it had gone unanswered.
Khonshu spread his hands in a gesture that somehow managed to suggest a shrug without any part of his body technically shrugging.
"I couldn't find it."
Batman's expression did not change.
"But you came for another reason."
There was no point in Khonshu materializing uninvited otherwise.
"Correct. The Ancient One asked me to deliver a message." Khonshu's voice was even. "The power you are searching for exists neither in the material world nor in the dimension where beings like myself reside."
"Higher than that?"
"Higher."
"The multiverse?"
Khonshu paused.
"You know that concept?"
Batman did not answer the question. His attention had shifted to a different problem -- the Ancient One.
He had not forgotten the letter postmarked August thirteenth -- the exact date he had crossed into this world -- advising him not to go to Wakanda. Everything he had been able to determine about the Ancient One pointed toward precognitive ability. The letter had proven that. But the Ancient One also appeared to know things about the spider totem system that Khonshu himself did not. That combination -- foreknowledge plus specific knowledge about his situation -- suggested the Ancient One's intelligence on him might be extensive.
Until he could determine the full scope of what the Ancient One knew, talking freely was a liability he could not afford.
"Tell me about the Ancient One," Batman said, moving the conversation sideways. "That name keeps surfacing and I know almost nothing about her."
Khonshu declined to answer that one.
"When the time is right, she will come to you herself."
"Norse mythology, then." Batman shifted again. "In Wakanda I encountered figures who appear to originate from that tradition. The Ancient One warned me against going. You told me there was a conspiracy aimed at me there." He kept his voice level. "I went anyway. I need to understand what I walked into."
At that, Khonshu went quiet. A long silence, the falcon skull tilted slightly as though weighing something. When he finally spoke, there was a measured quality to it.
"Who did you encounter in Wakanda?"
Batman's eyes narrowed.
"I thought you and the Ancient One had eyes on everything."
Khonshu shook the great skull back and forth -- a slow, deliberate negation.
"You are right, and you are wrong."
Batman pressed his knuckles together slowly. He was considering whether the situation warranted applying some of his interrogation training to a god.
He decided against it -- for now -- when Khonshu turned without being prompted and walked several paces to the edge of the rooftop. He sat down on the parapet and waved a hand toward the open space beside him.
Batman crossed the roof and sat.
"Anywhere you go," Khonshu said. "Anything you touch or come into contact with. Even the Ancient One cannot predict what will happen when you are involved."
He let that settle before continuing.
"Your presence here has already bent the path of events in ways that were not foreseen. Dr. Otto should not be on your island teaching your Robin. Robin himself should not exist in this world at all -- the form he takes, the person he has become, none of it belongs here. The Lizard Professor should be in the sewers. Electro, the Goblin and his son, the Hulk, Abomination -- none of them should be in the state they are now."
Batman absorbed this without expression, but something shifted quietly behind his eyes. He had now confirmed it directly: both the Ancient One and Khonshu knew he did not belong to this world.
"So if I had stayed out of Wakanda," he said, keeping himself from being led off course, "events there would have proceeded according to what you and the Ancient One could predict."
Khonshu tilted the skull once.
"Yes."
"I accept that as the Ancient One's reason for warning me off." Batman's voice stayed measured. "But the conspiracy aimed at me -- if I had followed that advice and never gone to Wakanda, how could any conspiracy there have been directed at me at all?"
"I don't know." Khonshu's laugh carried an odd hollow resonance through the falcon skull. "I am a moon god. I am not omniscient. The Ancient One is the one who said it."
Batman looked at him for a moment.
"She's at XZ. I'll go to her myself."
"If she chooses not to be found, you could search every mountain in the Himalayas and never locate her. If she chooses otherwise, she will be standing in front of you before you finish the sentence."
Batman filed that and moved on.
"The ritual you gave Robin before we entered Wakanda."
Khonshu did not wait for the question to finish.
"Yes," he said. "Whatever conclusion you have already reasoned your way to -- however unlikely it seems -- that conclusion is correct."
Batman stood, gathered the dismantled robot components, and said nothing more.
He burned the list of Norse mythological figures at the City Hall Batcave -- all of it, every name, every notation -- and watched the paper reduce to ash.
Then he moved. Without the Batmobile, his only option was the grapnel line, swinging building to building through the pre-dawn dark toward Bat Island. The pace was slower than he preferred, but the situation was not urgent, and the transit time gave him something to do with the thoughts he needed to organize.
The conversation with Khonshu had confirmed one thing clearly: whatever had happened in Wakanda was preliminary. It was not the main event. The Enchantress and Skurge had been testing the ground -- probing for totems, learning what was present, retreating when they met resistance they had not anticipated. The real pressure had not arrived yet.
Against that backdrop, the question of the mysterious shield figure remained frustratingly disconnected. Daredevil's account, Silver Sable's account, the interrupted conversation with Luke Cage -- all pointing at the same person conducting the same systematic survey of New York's established heroes. Taskmaster, operating under S.H.I.E.L.D. authority. But no matter how Batman turned it, he could not find the thread connecting a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent with photographic combat reflexes to a scheme involving Asgardian sorcerers and totem manipulation.
The lines did not converge. Not yet. He needed more.
What he did not need more of was delay on the suit.
He had been putting it off for months. Every time he had cleared space to begin, something had filled it -- the dinosaur invasion, the Kingpin standoff, Pym Technologies, Wakanda. The Arkham suit had served its purpose, but it was designed around what he had access to when he built it. He was no longer working from the same inventory.
He had five hundred kilograms of refined Vibranium and a complete understanding of how to work it, built from fabricating T'Challa's Black Panther suit. He had the sonic frequency data that could destabilize the material -- memorized and dissolved. He had the workshop infrastructure on Bat Island.
He had no reason to wait any longer.
The lift platform carried him down into the underground cave beneath Bat Island. The large-scale fabrication equipment powered on in sequence, one system after another, filling the space with a deep industrial hum.
While the machines reached operating temperature, Batman sat at the drafting table and began to draw.
No computer modeling. No projected overlays. Pen on paper, clean lines, moving with the focused economy of a man who had been building this image in his head for a long time and was finally permitted to put it down.
The suit that took shape on the page was nothing like the Arkham suit. Different in silhouette, different in construction philosophy, different in what it asked of the person wearing it. The Arkham suit had been improvised -- assembled from available materials under time pressure, designed to serve immediate needs.
This was not that.
As the pen moved across the paper and the design continued to develop, the shape of something new emerged from the drafting table -- a suit built not for what Batman had needed when he arrived in this world, but for what he knew he was going to face in it.
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