Chapter 409: The Shield Man Again
Logan's claws could do more than cut Vibranium webbing. Over the next few exchanges, Batman learned they could leave marks on the Gargoyle suit itself.
The lines were shallow -- the armor was doing its job -- but they were there, and nothing Batman had encountered since crossing into this world had produced them. The edge geometry on those six blades was in a category of its own.
The suit's condition and the direction of the fight were two separate questions. On the latter, the balance was running clearly against Logan.
Batman was hitting him every time a claw came in. Not trading -- hitting. Each punch slightly heavier than the last, the force increments controlled and deliberate, the precision of someone who can output effort in calibrated steps rather than going from nothing to everything. It felt less like a person fighting and more like a machine that had been set to a specific output and was simply executing that program without fatigue or emotional variation.
Logan was being driven back. Not dramatically, not helplessly, but steadily -- each impact absorbed and walked off, each step backward bought with the force that was trying to put him into the concrete. He was good at it. He had clearly taken enormous amounts of force over a long career and understood how to manage his body's relationship with incoming impact. But he also knew that the math was not improving. The force coming at him kept going up, and his capacity to receive and dissipate it was fixed.
Twelve seconds of exchange. Dozens of punches. Dozens of claw stripes on the Gargoyle suit's surface.
The dark purple-black luminescence was building in the Vibranium chest plate and spreading outward across the armor in slow pulses, intensifying with each hit absorbed.
Logan's internal calculus shifted.
He stopped trying to stop the next punch.
He took it on the chest deliberately, full-surface, absorbing it without trying to redirect it. The impact discharged against his ribcage and the explosive force that couldn't go into his bones went somewhere -- into his lungs, which compressed and burst. He coughed blood immediately, a hard wet sound, and his eyes went slightly wild with it.
But he was already inside the reach. Already past the strike.
His free hand drove a tight line upward toward the base of Batman's chin -- six inches of exposed skin below the cowl, the one gap in the Gargoyle suit's head coverage, the point where a single committed thrust would be sufficient and final.
Batman's other hand was there first.
Five fingers closed around Logan's wrist and held.
Both of them stopped.
Batman was looking at the scan data the suit was already displaying -- the organic damage in Logan's torso recovering at a rate that had no biological precedent. The hemorrhaging in the pulmonary tissue was cycling back. The vascular ruptures were closing. By the time he had registered the injury, it was already most of the way to healed.
Peter Parker's healing factor was real. He had tested it, understood its upper limits, knew what it could and couldn't handle. Logan's was something else entirely. It wasn't faster by degree -- it was faster by category.
And the thrust had gone soft. Batman had felt it the moment his hand closed on the wrist -- the force behind the strike had already begun to withdraw before contact. Logan had made a decision in the half-second it took the attack to travel.
He hadn't wanted to land it.
The same recognition arrived in both of them at essentially the same moment.
"He doesn't want to kill me," Logan thought.
"He doesn't want to kill me," Batman thought.
They stepped apart. The distance between them reset to something mutually workable. The claw tips still showed, but the angle had changed -- threat maintenance rather than active threat.
"Why?" Batman asked first.
Logan's eyes moved to the base of his chin -- the target he hadn't used.
"You're not Raven. You're not anyone I recognize." He rotated his wrists slowly, the claws retracting into the bone channels behind his knuckles. "But if by some chance you actually were Richard's boy and I put one of these through your skull--" He didn't finish the sentence.
He turned and scanned the ground around them. Found the discarded cigar several meters away, retrieved it, blew the dust off, and struck a match.
"Your turn," he said, through the first exhale.
"The energy in the suit comes from the armor's material properties," Batman said. "It isn't mine to direct."
Vibranium's kinetic absorption had a ceiling. Push enough force into it and the material reached its storage limit and discharged. The black-purple luminescence was the visible precursor to that discharge -- the suit warning its wearer that it was approaching maximum retention. Batman could have waited for the discharge to release. He had chosen not to because he had already decided this fight did not need to end with Logan in pieces.
"Now we can talk." Batman kept his voice level. "How did you find the address?"
Logan sat down on the ground cross-legged, elbows on his knees, the cigar working steadily. Smoke rolled up past his face and dispersed in the November air.
"What if I told you Richard Parker gave it to me himself?"
Batman looked at him through the smoke.
"He was worried that the things ordinary people can't see would come for you eventually. He asked me to make sure they didn't."
This was not the same quality of statement as the logging-camp story. Batman could distinguish the two clearly now -- the fabrication from earlier in the evening had carried the smooth, prepared delivery of something rehearsed. This had a different texture. Reluctant, specific, slightly uncomfortable. The delivery of someone recalling something real.
"That still doesn't tell me how you found the address."
"I'll get to it." Logan drew on the cigar again. "My question first. You're Peter Parker, and you're not Peter Parker. Which is it?"
Batman sat down opposite him, keeping the same few meters of distance.
"I'm Peter Parker."
"Nothing about you matches them except the face. And the face doesn't tell me anything -- I've known people who could wear any face they wanted."
Batman was quiet for a moment.
"Ben Parker died five months ago." He said the name quietly, and acknowledged internally the weight of using it as cover. "After that, I made a decision. I was done letting the world stay dark when I could do something about it."
"That's not possible," Logan said, without heat. Just a flat statement of what he believed.
"Before tonight, you'd never come to the house. You've known the address for years, presumably, and you never came. Aunt May has never mentioned you, and she would have." Batman kept his tone neutral. "You didn't come to see an old friend's son. You came for a reason. What was it?"
Logan pressed the glowing tip of the cigar against the heel of his palm, holding it there until the cherry went dark. The wound closed before the smoke finished rising from it.
"A man with a shield," he said.
The same thread. Again.
Batman let the silence sit.
"He's the one who brought it back to me -- the promise I made to Richard. Without him, I wouldn't have thought about you at all. Wouldn't have known you existed."
"And his connection to the address?"
"He knew. He told me where you'd be." Logan met Batman's eyes. "He's been looking into something. Something from two years ago."
Batman said nothing and waited.
"That's why I came," Logan said. "Not just to see Richard's son. To warn you that what got your parents killed is looking for you now. And to tell you that a man who doesn't forget anything has been putting pieces together, and the pieces point this direction."
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