The standoff lasted about five seconds.
That was enough time for Clayface to revise his threat assessment upward. Solomon's charred skin — blackened and cracked by the explosion, split open by the concrete — was already healing. The wound on his skull shrank visibly, dark red muscle knitting itself back across white bone, grey-blue skin closing over the top like a slow tide. The speed of it was obscene.
His defense is one thing. But that regeneration rate...
Clayface had been sent because nobody else from the Riddler's operation could reliably handle this matchup. He understood why now. The saving grace was simple: Grundy fought with his fists. Physical attacks meant nothing to a body made entirely of clay. They could do this all night and only one of them would get tired.
He stopped waiting and charged.
Grundy answered with a roar and came straight at him, because Grundy always came straight at things. His iron fist swung down like a wrecking ball. Clayface's hand twisted and reshaped mid-stride — clay flowing around fragments of broken masonry and bent rebar until his arm terminated in something roughly hammerhead-shaped — and he swung it directly into Grundy's oncoming punch.
The collision was audible three blocks away.
Both of them staggered. Grundy's knees sank into the concrete, half his body wrenched sideways, shoulder visibly caved. Clayface's entire left side simply exploded outward, a spray of clay and gravel, leaving him standing on two legs and half a torso.
Both of them roared.
Grundy hadn't expected the mud to harden. Clay wasn't supposed to feel like rebar-reinforced concrete. The punch had shattered the grey skin over his shoulder like a ceramic plate.
Clayface hadn't expected that kind of force to come back through. Even hardened, even packed with steel, the impact had disintegrated the entire side of his body.
"Futile," Clayface said, already pulling himself back together. His clay flowed in from the edges, rebuilt his arm, packed his torso back into shape. Physical damage was noise. Grundy could hit him forever and accomplish nothing permanent. The undead zombie's healing, on the other hand, required time — time Clayface intended to deny him.
His arms reshaped into meteor hammers, the hammerheads spiked with jagged rebar ends, and he brought them down on Grundy in a sustained rhythm. Keep him moving. Keep him bleeding. Don't give him five consecutive seconds to close up.
Grundy didn't try to take the hits this time. He dropped to his hands, heaved himself up, and ran — directly into the burning factory.
"Even Solomon Grundy runs?"
Clayface's arms stretched out like taffy, hammers swinging on the ends of elongated clay cables, and caught Grundy across the back. No crack of bone, but the rebar spikes tore through grey flesh in several long strips. Grundy disappeared into the fire and smoke.
Clayface pulled up at the factory threshold.
The flames were bad. Not immediately fatal, but sustained heat was an attrition problem — the moisture in his body would cook off over time, and a dry Clayface was a brittle Clayface. He stood at the edge of the firelight and waited.
Solomon Grundy — born on a Monday.
Grundy came back out of the fire carrying two H-shaped steel beams. Structural members, cross-section as thick as a man's torso. He was swinging them at his sides with a loose, easy motion that made it easy to forget each one weighed several tons. The steel was burning at both ends from its time in the fire.
Clayface didn't convert back to raw clay — that would cost him the hammer forms he'd already built. He swung to meet the beams head-on.
The impact rang out like a cathedral bell being struck with a sledgehammer. The steel beams bent. Clayface's weapons came apart entirely, rebar and stone fragments scattering across the factory floor.
Outside the gates, the hat-wearers had finished converging. Hundreds of them, pressing toward the factory entrance in silence, guns in hand, following orders they hadn't chosen. In a few minutes they'd be inside.
Then two shapes dropped out of the sky.
Kite Man spotted it first, pulling up above the factory and looking down through a gap in the smoke. "That's Solomon Grundy and Clayface. No wonder the place looks like a demolition site."
"They didn't fight in here long," Batman said, already reading the damage patterns. "Most of those injuries came from the initial explosions."
Kite Man looked at the crowd below. "So what do we do about all of them? There's no way we hold that many people back."
"The hat-wearers only respond to commands. We can't stop them by force — not without removing their hats individually."
"We don't have that kind of time."
"There's another way."
Batman pulled up the miniature Batcomputer on his gauntlet and keyed a sequence. Somewhere above the cloud ceiling, an engine note shifted. The Batplane descended out of the dark, sweeping low over the factory.
"We remove the problem."
He dropped something from his hand as the plane came in — a mushroom, ice-blue, that hit the factory floor and detonated in a silent, expanding wave of cold.
The freeze radius caught both of them mid-swing.
Clayface and Solomon Grundy were encased in ice within seconds — two enormous figures locked mid-motion, like exhibits in the world's most dangerous natural history museum.