Kite Man stared at two frozen giants on the factory floor.
"Okay. Is that a new weapon but that is a mushroom, did you work something out with Mr. Freeze or with Poison Ivy? Or did you just steal from them?"
"It was a gift from a friend."
The Batplane descended on cue, a retrieval net deploying from the fuselage, scooping up the ice block with practiced efficiency before the aircraft pulled back up to altitude. Batman was already moving toward the cockpit hatch as it opened.
"Hold the wing. The people below are clear."
The hatch closed. Kite Man was left standing on the wing in the wind, blinking.
"You couldn't have installed a second seat?"
Nobody answered. He gripped the wing and hit the control on his wrist, folding the kite backpack flat against his body before the airspeed could rip it off his shoulders. The communicator crackled in his helmet.
"Batman. Where exactly are we taking them?"
"No Man's Land."
How do we actually neutralize them out there?
"I have a plan."
Inside the cockpit, Batman had just locked in the flight path when the monitoring screen flagged an alert. He pulled it up, expression settling into something measured and grim.
The feed showed a figure in a black robe and ghost mask moving at speed down an empty street, a bicycle cutting through the dark. Ahead of him, spread across three city blocks, roughly a hundred hat-wearers had formed a loose defensive cordon — armed, silent, evenly distributed. The spacing looked deliberate. It wasn't.
Batman had previously run the numbers on the Mad Hatter's hat factory — production rate, operational start time, total output. At minimum, a thousand hats had been manufactured. Even accounting for the deployment around Solomon's territory, there were five hundred people unaccounted for.
The Mad Hatter has set a trap. He'd expected as much — it was the Riddler's play, bleeding obvious once you knew what to look for. Tonight was a loyalty audit. The Riddler wanted to know if there were any remaining leaks in his operation. Which meant that tonight, helping Jude directly would answer that question in exactly the wrong way.
He closed the monitor. Jude's end was moving. Now Batman had his own part to execute.
The cockpit shook.
WARNING — CRITICAL DAMAGE: LEFT WING / FUSELAGE
"Batman!" Kite Man's voice punched through the comm. "They've thawed! Clayface has a steel beam and he's tearing the plane apart!"
"Solomon broke the net! He's climbing up the fuselage!"
"Kite Man, get clear."
Batman was already moving through the broken canopy glass, cape snapping in the open air. Something whistled behind him and he lunged forward — a structural steel beam swung through the space where his head had been, the kinetic energy enough to send a ripple through the air in its wake.
He turned. Clayface and Solomon Grundy were both standing on the disintegrating plane, still fighting each other. The aircraft was tilting badly, one wing shredded.
Above him, Kite Man's voice cracked with urgency. "The plane is gone — what are we doing?!"
"I knew it would crash." Batman activated his microcomputer, confirming the landing trajectory — he'd calculated it before takeoff, but he wanted the number fresh. "The freeze only holds for four seconds. Slowdown effect lasts sixteen. On subjects this size, even less." He'd clocked the data firsthand during the previous operation with Jude.
"Then why did you use a plane?! We're over a commercial district! If those two hit the ground from this altitude, they could take half a block with them!"
"The plane is going to come down at the football field. No one's there right now." A pause. "And when everyone sees the Batplane crash, they'll believe I was completely unprepared for tonight."
"I have absolutely no idea what that means."
"We still need to get them to the destination. Your kite backpack is rated for the load."
Kite Man's expression changed immediately. The uncertainty dropped off his face, replaced by something that was almost offensively confident. The kite rig had gone through three upgrades in the past week, and there wasn't a civilian rescue application it couldn't handle.
"Most people underestimate how much weight a kite can carry," he said. "Good to know you're not most people."
They flew toward Clayface and Grundy, who were falling — and still fighting, seemingly indifferent to the altitude. Batman fired his grappling hook, caught the retrieval net, and tossed the trailing end to Kite Man.
Thumbs up. Net secured.
"It's too heavy!"
Thirty seconds later, the kite rig was losing altitude fast. Both hands locked on the net, the alloy frame of the backpack making a continuous metallic groan, the whole assembly bending under the combined weight of two superhuman monsters who had declined to stop grappling with each other even while being airlifted.
"Do they have to keep fighting over the steel beams?!"
Batman was hauling on his end of the rope, but the flight wing was a single-person tactical suit — built for speed, concealment, and surviving explosions, not load-bearing operations. He could have simply let go. That option remained on the table.
"Do something, Batman, or we're all going down!"
"Hold the net."
He reached into his belt and pulled out a clover-shaped device.
"I've got it! Now what?!"
The wind answered for him. A concentrated blast hit from behind — the clover detonating in a directional gust that caught the kite, caught Batman's cape, and most importantly, caught the two massive bodies suspended in the net below. The metal groaning stopped. The freefall leveled out.
Kite Man exhaled. "What did you just do?"
"Where are we going? You should at least tell me that much."
"Liquid nitrogen factory."
The kite backpack fired its boosters, trimmed the angle, and banked toward the industrial district on the horizon.
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