Chapter 341: Batman vs Blade
"I've hunted anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand vampires, but you're a first. I'm starting to wonder if you're even a vampire at all."
Blade's gaze locked onto Batman through his sunglasses, studying him through the torrential downpour.
"Take off your mask. Let me see if you're really a vampire. Or I can stab you and find out that way."
Removing the mask would expose his identity as Peter Parker. Letting Blade's blade touch his cells would accomplish the same thing. Neither option was acceptable.
Rain hammered down in sheets. Batman stood silent, facing Blade without a word, enduring the sharp pain each raindrop sent through his battered body as it struck the Vulcan Armor.
"No weapons. No claws. Just a weird pair of wings." Blade shook his head slowly. "But I won't hold back."
As he spoke, Blade swept his long leather coat aside with a flourish, revealing the black combat armor beneath. Modified pistols hung from both sides of his belt. Teak daggers were sheathed against his calves.
The moment the coat flared open, a shuriken slightly larger than a palm shot toward Batman from an impossible angle.
Clink!
The instant Blade's shuriken left his hand, Batman's arm snapped forward, releasing a batarang. The two projectiles collided with perfect precision in the curtain of rain, both clattering to the muddy ground.
"Last chance. Take off the mask and prove you're not a vampire." Blade frowned at the two weapons lying in the mud.
Batman's response was the same as before: silence.
Blade sighed and shook his head slowly. Then his hand reached back, gripping the long blade sheathed across his shoulders.
Shinnng!
Sword in hand, Blade twirled the blade casually, cutting a clean path through the rain in front of him. Then he charged.
Batman gritted his teeth against the waves of discomfort radiating through his body. A slight flex of his forearm muscles triggered the mechanism—click—and serrated blades extended from the outer edges of the Vulcan Armor's gauntlets.
In just minutes, the pounding rain had carved shallow, muddy craters across the abandoned shipyard's floor.
Batman stepped forward. His boot plunged into one of the shallow pools, sending water spraying outward. The next second, he clashed with Blade at close range.
'Peter's abilities are gone. But I planned for this from the beginning.'
Batman activated the Vulcan Armor's auxiliary power system—something he'd never abandoned on any of his suits, even with Peter Parker's enhanced abilities at his disposal.
He'd noticed early on that super-criminals in this world possessed uniformly greater strength. Even that first encounter with Squid-Man had demonstrated inhuman power—the villain could flip a car without breaking a sweat.
And Batman had never stopped training since his arrival in this world.
Reaction time. Muscle memory. Strength. Speed. Even his senses—smell, hearing—Batman had pushed himself to remain a capable warrior even without Peter's powers.
He knew his condition was poor. And his opponent carried guns. Victory required close combat. He couldn't afford to create distance.
Blade, for his part, feared Batman would escape. He couldn't risk letting the distance open either.
This had been pure chance—spotting the Batmobile tearing through the streets. Even following from a distance, Blade had been detected. If Batman escaped now, finding him again would be exponentially harder.
Both men had reasons to keep the other locked in close quarters.
Any attempt to disengage would be met with relentless pursuit. Fists, blade, serrated edges, knees, foreheads—at this range, every part of the body became a weapon.
'Another hallucination!' Batman's fist shot forward. Through the darkness and rain, Blade's blurred features twisted into Kara Zor-El's face—Supergirl. Without hesitation, Batman snapped backward.
Bang!
The instant Batman retreated two steps, Blade's hand whipped to his waist, drawing his pistol and squeezing the trigger.
The bullet struck the Vulcan Armor and ricocheted immediately, punching through Blade's leather coat before bouncing off his own armor beneath.
The suit protected Batman from serious injury, but the impact force far exceeded the pain of raindrops striking the armor. He grunted despite himself.
The hallucination shifted—Supergirl's face morphed into Billy Batson, Shazam. Batman took a deep breath and charged forward.
Through the black night, the blade flashed. Clusters of raindrops exploded where Batman and Blade collided, bursting into fine mist.
Within the mist, two dark figures separated and came together again in endless repetition.
One was the Dark Knight from Gotham. The other was a vampire hunter freshly returned from Japan.
In the space of an eyeblink, the two men had clashed and separated multiple times. Each contact sent sparks flying before they vanished back into the rain.
Both were experts in their respective fields. But Batman's physical condition was deteriorating. Even with willpower suppressing the pain and hallucinations, physiological symptoms like tinnitus were impossible to ignore.
Blade couldn't gain much advantage either. Nearly all his weapons had been specifically designed to counter vampires.
But whether Batman was truly a vampire or not, the full-body protection of the Vulcan Armor rendered blades, shurikens, and bullets equally ineffective at achieving immediate results.
Under these conditions, Batman possessed a broader tactical repertoire. Blade fought with a pure exchange-of-injury philosophy. After dozens of seconds of combat, both men understood: neither could defeat the other quickly.
This would be a war of attrition. A pure test of hand-to-hand skill.
On the rooftop of Pym Technologies Tower.
Rain poured down, soaking Ant-Man Hank Pym from head to toe. But the Wasp, Janet, had no time to worry about him.
The shattered skylight Batman had destroyed had become the only channel for rainwater to flood into the building's interior. The Wasp was searching desperately for something suitable—something she could enlarge with Pym Particles to plug the deluge.
Finally, her eyes landed on a serving platter in the cafeteria. She grabbed it in one hand, a Pym Particle disk in the other, and flew toward the skylight.
Just as she was about to call Ant-Man back inside the building, Hank wiped rain from his face and walked toward the skylight on his own.
"I've identified the problem. Ants alone can't help us accomplish anything. Against an opponent like Batman, ants are virtually useless." Ant-Man looked at the Wasp holding the platter.
"Can this wait until after I deal with the flooding?" The Wasp rolled her eyes.
Ant-Man nodded. He leaped off the roof, shrinking rapidly mid-air and landing on a flying ant's back. After touching down safely, he returned to normal size and headed to a long-unused laboratory.
A few minutes later, the Wasp finished enlarging the serving platter and inverting it over the Pym Technologies rooftop to act as a rain shield. She grabbed two towels and entered the lab.
She handed one towel to Ant-Man and used the other to wipe rain from her own face.
"Hank, what were you trying to say?"
"Ants alone can't protect us. I need intelligent robots to assist us." Ant-Man looked up at her. "I'm going to call it 'Ultron.'"
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