Chapter 405: The Vibranium Gargoyle Suit
The Spider Totem.
The words formed in Batman's mind the instant Professor Morbius finished speaking.
His existing analysis had pointed here. Both Peter Parker and T'Challa drew their abilities, in some form, from the animal that defined them. That was the premise behind his totem theory -- the observation that the most powerful figures in this world carried animal-based identities, and that the connection wasn't cosmetic. It ran deeper than a name or a costume.
T'Challa was the clearest example. Generations of Wakandan kings had devoted themselves to the Black Panther God. The power passed through the Heart-Shaped Herb not as a chemical reaction but as a conduit -- a medium connecting the chosen person to the totem itself. T'Challa's fighting style, his suit, even the way he moved under the Black Panther's enhancement all reflected the animal at the center of the tradition. The correspondence was total.
Peter Parker's spider abilities followed the same logic, even if the mechanism was less formally structured. Batman had confirmed it himself when the powers vanished and returned. The suit mattered. The symbol mattered. Something in the relationship between identity and ability was not purely biological.
So by that reasoning: Morbius had described a creature that was recognizably a spider. A giant one, with bat wings. And it had appeared inside a mass of black threads -- webbing -- and swept away a figure that had been attempting to manipulate someone through dream-based suggestion.
But Professor Morbius -- Batman studied him for a moment, cataloguing what he actually knew about the man. Brilliant biochemist. Transformed through his own experimental treatment into something that shared more characteristics with a vampire than a living human. Gray-black skin, collapsed nasal bridge, elongated canines, acute senses -- a profile that matched the folklore template more closely than most people would ever know. In New Mexico, Morbius had even used Batman's name while operating independently.
If any of the people in this room had an organic connection to the bat rather than the spider, it was the man standing in front of him wearing a black-over-red coat with a face that looked like it belonged in a cathedral at three in the morning.
Batman could not reconcile the description. A spider with bat wings had no clear fit in the totem framework as he currently understood it. He filed it as an incomplete data point rather than a conclusion, and said nothing.
Morbius summed up his account.
"That's the full content of the dream. It has repeated several times without variation. Each time, the figure stands behind me in the same position, speaks in the same unidentifiable language -- the meaning coming through regardless -- and each time, that spider interrupts and takes the figure away before it can finish."
"Professor," Dr. Connors said, "could you reproduce any of the phonetics? Even an approximation of the sounds that figure was making?"
Morbius shook his head with visible regret.
"I tried. I can't reproduce them. The sounds don't correspond to any phoneme set I know."
"That's unfortunate. If we had even a rough phonetic record, we could attempt to cross-reference with known runic script pronunciations. There might be an overlap." Connors shook his head as well. "Possibly the spoken form of the symbols on the axe."
Another dead end. Another thread to hold and wait on.
Batman made no outward sign of frustration. He committed the entire exchange to memory as a set of partial clues and moved on.
Five days passed.
November arrived without ceremony, and with it the quiet acknowledgment that Batman had been in this world for four months. The fabrication equipment on Bat Island had been running throughout that period in continuous shifts, and on the day Venom Robin came back from North Brother Island with the greataxe slung across his back, every machine in the underground workshop fell silent at the same moment.
Robin came down the steps into the cave and stopped.
On the central workbench, under the workshop's overhead lighting, a suit was laid out.
The color was not the pure black of the Arkham suit. It was not the red and blue of the Spider-Man suit either. The primary tone was something closer to deep ocean blue -- but as Robin moved around it, the blue receded and the surface looked black again, as though the color only existed at certain angles, embedded in the material rather than sitting on top of it.
Batman stood at the workbench with his arms folded and one hand raised, fingers moving slowly along his jaw.
The chest section was the most immediately striking element. The armor there was thicker than anywhere else on the suit, built up into a visible relief -- and Robin recognized the material at once. The central chest plate was Vibranium, processed to a matte finish that gave the surface a deep gray tone. The edges were sharp enough to function as weapons in their own right. The plate covered nearly the entire chest, and set into its face was a bat symbol -- broad wings, peaked ears, the tail tapering to a narrow point, every edge as clean and precise as the armor surrounding it.
The bat symbol on the Arkham suit had been angular, assembled from improvised components, carrying the tension of something built under time pressure. The symbol here was different. The wings were broader. The tips curved slightly downward at the ends -- an echo, Robin noticed, of his own symbiote wings in gliding configuration, the ones that couldn't sustain flight but could cover ground.
The helmet read as a continuous design evolution from the Arkham suit's cowl, the pointed ears steeper and sharper than before. Robin couldn't immediately identify what had changed about it, only that the proportions felt more deliberate.
The abdominal armor, knee guards, elbow guards, forearm plates, and leg segments all carried a visible metallic quality, but none of them were solid panels. They overlapped in layered sequences, each plate articulated against the next like scales on something built to move as well as endure.
Where the Arkham suit had been relatively lean through the upper body, this one had shoulder guards -- thick, substantial pauldrons that added width and mass to the silhouette, making the whole upper frame look considerably more imposing. The cape fell from the shoulder guards rather than the neck, and it had a different character. Robin reached out and touched it.
Heavy. Much heavier than it looked.
He pressed down on it. It resisted.
He tried to lift a section.
"This has to be at least fifty kilograms," he said.
"Close."
Robin circled the suit, studying the cape from different angles. He could see the internal structure now -- Vibranium fiber woven through memory fiber, the combination producing a ribbed texture that resembled a membrane with the structure of a folded wing.
He also noticed the cape appeared to be removable. Further, it appeared to divide into two independent halves along a vertical line at the center of the back.
Behind the cape, a line of reinforced spinal armor followed the backbone of the suit's rear panel, each segment fitted precisely against the lateral armor on either side. Everything connected. Robin moved around to the front again and looked more carefully at the zones between the main armor plates.
"Modular?" he asked, with the air of someone who considered this a technically sophisticated observation.
Batman gave him the courtesy of a genuine response.
"Essentially, yes."
The suit as it stood was not the finished version. Once Dr. Otto had the Adamantium synthesis complete, an inner Adamantium layer would be fitted inside the Vibranium armor -- adding weight and substantially increasing the defensive ceiling. The current weight of the assembled suit was approximately two hundred and twenty kilograms. With the Adamantium layer, the projected total would approach five hundred kilograms -- half a ton.
This was a suit built for a world that generated super-strength threats as a routine condition of operation. The added mass addressed the problem that the Adirondacks fight with Ant-Man had confirmed: at Peter Parker's weight, a sufficient force differential could simply throw Batman out of a fight regardless of technique. Vibranium's kinetic energy absorption, combined with the weight increase, changed the calculus substantially. Even a hundred tons of incoming force had to contend with the interaction between the suit's mass and the material's absorption properties.
The modular design was deliberate insurance for the opposite scenario. If the spider abilities failed again -- if Batman found himself operating without enhanced strength as the baseline -- the heavier armor components could be shed in sequence, leaving a progressively lighter configuration that could still function.
The detachable sections had been engineered to resist removal by anything other than direct disassembly, specifically to prevent an opponent from exploiting the modular design as a tactical weakness.
Batman put the Arkham suit aside and changed into the new one.
Venom Robin immediately reached back, pulled the greataxe off his back, wound up, and swung at Batman with everything he had.
Eighty-plus tons of force behind a blade that had already demonstrated it could cut through most materials it encountered.
The result was the same as it always was. Within a few exchanges, Robin was on the ground.
What surprised him was what happened to the suit while they were fighting.
The deeper into the exchange they went, the more pronounced it became -- a dark luminescence building around the armor, concentrated where Robin's strikes landed, radiating outward in a color that sat somewhere between black and purple. The harder he hit, the more vivid the glow.
He sat on the cave floor and stared at it.
"What's it called?"
"The Gargoyle," Batman said.