Chapter 371: The Caped Crusader
It was early October. The temperature had dropped to the low forties overnight, and the wide swing between day and night had breathed a thin mist across the Adirondack Mountains.
When you were far enough away, and the night was dark enough, that mist turned black.
Lizard Professor glanced back. In the black haze, Batman was nothing more than a blurred silhouette. Ant-Man and Wasp had dissolved into it entirely, two ghosts drifting through the dark.
Using the suspended moisture in the air as cover, the two of them flickered in and out of existence -- growing large, shrinking small, attacking that black shape from every conceivable angle.
Their strikes churned the mist into spiraling vortices, and in the half-dark, Lizard Professor had the strange, momentary impression he was watching an ink-wash animation.
"He might not be able to hold much longer," Lizard Professor muttered, his brow creasing.
Ant-Man and Wasp were attacking at an insane frequency, from angles that made no rational sense. By shrinking down and reducing their body weight -- and the air resistance that came with it -- they could leap and dart between water vapor particles faster than a flea. Batman was spending most of his time on pure defense, arms and body working constantly to block attacks raining in from all directions.
"Go." Lizard Professor didn't linger. He turned away, said the word to Lunella, and unleashed the full eighty-plus tons of his strength into a dead sprint.
The thunder of his footsteps was loud enough to reach Batman's ears.
"Twelve hundred meters..."
Batman tracked the sound as it receded rapidly, calculating distance in his head. When it stretched to three thousand meters -- when he was satisfied they were completely safe -- he suddenly thrust both hands backward.
CRACK.
The cape didn't make the expected swish of fabric. Instead it produced two sharp, explosive pops -- the sound of a bullwhip at full extension. Batman's hands locked onto both edges of the cape. His left arm wrenched it forward, pulling the entire length up in front of him, covering everything from his chin down.
In the thin mist, the white lenses of his cowl caught the water vapor, sending two faint beams of scattered light outward into the dark.
Spider-sense was screaming. It mapped incoming strikes from every direction -- Ant-Man, Wasp, position after position. Batman ignored all of it.
Since crossing into this world, his cape had seen limited real combat use. Against enemies like Kingpin it was overkill; against Lizard Professor or the Hulk it was barely relevant. The cape had mostly served as a gliding surface -- a practical concession to the extremes of this universe.
But he had never abandoned it. Not once.
In Gotham, Batman was not merely Batman. He was the Dark Knight. And he was also -- the Caped Crusader.
The cape on his back had never been decoration. It was a tool for intimidating criminals. A weapon against dangerous opponents. The instrument of last, unexpected victories.
Woven from memory fiber reinforced with metal wire and an alloy skeleton, the finished cape weighed over twenty pounds -- heavier than most weapons a street criminal would ever carry. Back when Jason was still Robin, he'd complained the thing was like wearing a refrigerator.
WHOOSH.
The cape came alive in Batman's hands like a storm cloud given form, swinging again and again at Ant-Man and Wasp, who had shrunk to near-invisibility. The mist churned. The impacts came fast and thick as rain.
From a distance, it looked like a black silhouette fighting the air itself -- the cape rising, scattering mist, drawing muffled grunts; falling, blasting clear another pocket of fog; swinging wide before the vapor could close the gap, already moving toward the next target.
Any ordinary bystander would have assumed the man in the bat costume had lost his mind.
Only Ant-Man and Wasp knew exactly how badly they were faring.
The cape wasn't soft. When it connected at full swing, it hit like a wall. Wasp Janet had the better end of it -- her wing membranes gave her enough aerial agility to dodge most of the strikes. But Ant-Man couldn't fly. He relied entirely on suspended water vapor to stay mobile, and Batman's rhythmic, cracking swings kept slamming his shrunken body directly into the mist.
The Ant-Man suit wasn't waterproof. Not the face, anyway.
The repeated impacts sent him plunging into the moisture, and the violent movement combined with his ragged breathing nearly drowned him in mid-air. It forced him to grow large to escape -- but at full size he was nowhere near fast enough to land a hit. Even expanding to thirty feet hadn't given him much of an edge against this man. He had personal experience with exactly how quickly Batman could vanish from directly under his feet.
Wasp managed to avoid most of it, and her wing beats let her resist the wind the cape threw off. But there was another problem -- the cape was wired. Batman could electrify it on command, hardening the material into something closer to a rigid weapon. And the Arkham suit, while lacking the dedicated microwave defense layer of the Uru armor, had its own electrified outer shell that Batman had added specifically with Ant-Man and Wasp in mind.
Wasp found herself with no clean approach. She grabbed Ant-Man instead, pulling him clear before the mist could finish the job the cape had started.
"Cough -- cough -- cough--"
Ant-Man hacked repeatedly. Janet held him aloft as he sputtered back to full consciousness.
"Janet! Put me down! I've still got moves!"
"Shut up." Janet's voice was flat. "It's dark. I'm going home to sleep."
"What do you mean sleep--" Ant-Man blinked and looked down.
Below them was nothing but mist. Batman was gone. They had left -- or to be more precise, they had fled.
...
"Ant-Man and Wasp weren't driven off by me. They withdrew on their own terms."
Batman stood motionless in the Adirondacks, his expression carrying none of the ease that should follow a won fight.
"Wasp's intent to engage was low from the start. She never used the Wasp Sting -- Robin mentioned it once. Ant-Man didn't deploy any offensive weapons either."
"And caught off guard the way I was, I could only match them by relying on the cape."
"The Arkham suit needs further upgrades." He paused. "No. A new suit entirely. That needs to move onto the schedule -- soon."
Batman drew in a slow breath of the cool, mist-heavy night air and pressed a button on his forearm.
***
20+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces