Chapter 408: Batman vs. Logan
Logan committed the moment he decided Batman wasn't Peter Parker. There was no transition between assessment and attack. One second he was standing, and the next he was moving on all fours across the ground, low and fast, the way an animal closes distance.
Batman could not explain the truth -- not the real truth, not the version that started with a different world and a different body. He had one option.
He planted his right foot hard into the concrete, compressing it slightly, feeling the surface compact and hold under him. The stance locked him in place with his full weight behind it. His right fist drew back, the whole upper body coiling like something under tension.
Logan came in close.
Batman's counter arrived first.
The punch landed square and Logan went off his feet, hit the ground rolling, and came back up in one continuous motion.
The impact had felt wrong in both directions. Batman had put enough force behind that punch to break the bones of anything in a normal biological category, and Logan had not flinched, had not shown any visible injury, had simply bounced. More than that: the feedback through Batman's knuckles was the specific jarring sensation of striking high-grade steel -- not flesh and bone reinforced by density and conditioning, but something else, something that pushed back at a structural level no organic material should be able to match.
"I knew it." Logan stood a short distance away, breathing in sharp controlled bursts -- not fatigue, Batman recognized; accumulation. "You're not Richard's boy. They were regular people. Whatever that gene is you're carrying, it didn't come from them."
"X gene?" Batman's processing moved automatically to the new vocabulary even as he tracked Logan's positioning.
And then Logan's hands came up.
Six blades extended from between his knuckles, three to a hand, each one a foot long -- raw metal, polished where it had been used, no visible seam at the point of emergence. They crossed in front of him in an X formation. The reflections moved in the low light with a quality that suggested extraordinary edge geometry rather than simple sharpness.
The spider-sense, which had been silent since Batman walked into the house, started screaming.
"I know what you are," Logan said. His tone was absolutely certain. "I've smelled it before. Change back. Tell me where the real Peter is."
Batman stood his ground.
"Tell me who gave you the address. Tell me how you found her."
Logan shook his head once. He was done talking.
His weight dropped another degree -- the terminal compression before a charge. Batman read the geometry and made the call simultaneously.
His right foot shifted. His eyes went up.
Something was falling out of the sky with velocity, a heavy dark object dropping along a line that would intersect Logan's current position in under a second.
Batman was already moving sideways.
Logan's instincts were faster than his warning. He cleared his original position in an eyeblink, five meters in a direction he chose before any conscious thought could have processed the incoming object, and watched from a distance as something large punched into the ground where he'd been standing with enough force to throw dust and broken concrete in all directions.
He looked up.
A shape -- angular, unusual, built for speed -- ghosted through the cloud cover and disappeared.
Then the dust settled around the object on the ground.
It was a metal container. Roughly oval, standing about two meters, with the compressed dimensions of something designed to survive a high-velocity atmospheric drop. As Logan watched, one side was punched outward from the inside by a flat horizontal impact.
The container slid across the ground and came to rest against a chain-link fence.
In the space it had occupied, a figure stood still.
Deep blue armor, so dark it was barely distinguishable from black except at the edges where the material caught light. The chest plate -- gray, matte, with the bat symbol embossed at its center in broad sharp lines -- caught the ambient glow from the surrounding buildings and held it. Two pointed ears rose from the cowl. The eyes were white-cold with a faint thread of purple running through them, and they were looking directly at Logan with the fixed quality of a predator that has identified its target and is no longer in the process of deciding anything.
Logan had seen a lot of things. He still stopped for a moment.
"You're not Raven." He sounded genuinely uncertain for the first time. His nose was working -- he kept pulling air and reading it. "Then who the hell are you? I can smell it. You are not Peter Parker."
"No comment."
Batman moved first this time. A line of black webbing shot from his palm and wrapped around Logan's legs -- the upgraded compound, refined through multiple generations of field use, each strand capable of suspending several tons of dead weight. He pulled the line taut and simultaneously launched himself forward with a kick aimed at Logan's center of mass.
Logan grinned.
A single casual sweep of both arms.
The webbing snapped.
Not strained, not torn through by brute force -- cut. Each strand parted cleanly with a sound like a guitar string hitting its tension limit, the kind of failure that happens when something sharp enough moves through a material faster than the material can distribute the stress. Logan had barely extended himself.
Batman recalibrated in real time while still airborne.
Claws sharp enough to section high-tensile webbing on a casual pass. That was the first data point.
He changed the attack's character before he landed, driving both forearms outward. From the outer surface of each forearm, six blades deployed -- integrated components set into the Gargoyle suit's arm sections, extending rearward in a serrated pattern. The dark purple luminescence that had appeared during Robin's weapons test pulsed once across the armor surface as the blades locked out.
Logan adjusted instantly -- six claws up, meeting the blades coming in.
The contact sound was a clean metallic note that got immediately buried under the concussive impact of their combined forward momentum meeting.
One exchange, close range. Batman got the better of it by a margin, controlling Logan's claw angle with his left arm while driving a right-hand strike with roughly two tons of force behind it.
He knew from the first punch that Logan's body operated at a structural level no human skeleton had any business achieving. He was not expecting that two tons would be decisive. It wasn't. The arm Logan raised to receive the strike took the force and held, the bones not buckling, the musculature behind them not giving way, the whole structure simply absorbing the impact and then pressing back.
But Logan had paid a small price for the exchange.
The blades along Batman's left forearm had been caught in the leverage moment. Logan shifted his wrist just slightly -- a single controlled rotation, the kind of adjustment that required almost no effort if your grip strength was sufficient and your mechanical leverage was right -- and the Vibranium blade snapped at the base.
Batman registered this consciously without allowing it to interrupt anything he was doing.
Vibranium was among the hardest materials on Earth. It was not theoretically unbreakable, but the force geometry required to snap a Vibranium blade should not have been achievable through a wrist rotation in a close-quarters grapple without exceptional preparation.
Logan's claws had done it casually.
The only substance Batman could identify that would give a blade that property was one he didn't yet have the formula for.
Adamantium.
He activated the Gargoyle suit's biological scan mid-fight, running it across Logan while they separated and reset. The results came back in under two seconds.
Batman went still for one fraction of a moment that would have been invisible to anyone watching.
The claws were metal. That was expected after what he had seen and felt. But the scan read metal throughout the entire skeleton. Every bone in Logan's body -- every single one, from the metacarpals to the thoracic vertebrae -- had been replaced, or coated, or transformed into dense metallic alloy.
Batman looked at Logan across the short distance between them.
"Your entire skeleton," he said quietly, more to himself than to Logan.
He was looking at a live Adamantium sample.
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