Mechanical-Arm Spider #68.
The Space Hog screamed through Gotham's smoke-choked sky like a mechanical predator that had evolved past caring about atmospheric resistance.
Lobo sat astride the bike's oversized frame with the posture of someone who'd never learned the concept of defensive driving and had no intention of starting now. The city sprawled beneath him in patterns that suggested urban planning had given up sometime in the seventies and never recovered -- buildings leaning against each other like drunks sharing support, streets that wound without apparent logic, and enough fire to make the whole place look like someone had decided arson was an acceptable urban renewal strategy.
He liked it immediately.
The bike's sensors were already painting threat assessments across his HUD -- heat signatures from multiple burning structures, movement patterns that suggested armed conflict in at least seven districts, atmospheric toxin levels that would kill an unaugmented human in under three minutes. The kind of data most pilots would use to calculate safe approach vectors and extraction timelines.
Lobo ignored all of it and angled the Space Hog into a dive that would take him straight through the thickest concentration of smoke.
The heat hit like a physical thing when he dropped below the cloud layer. Chemical fires burned with colors that didn't belong in nature -- nightmare greens and blues mixing with conventional orange in ways that suggested someone had been manufacturing compounds that really shouldn't be manufactured outside of controlled laboratory settings. The bike's hull plating absorbed the worst of it while Lobo studied the streets below with the focused interest of someone evaluating real estate they were definitely going to trash.
Gotham was eating itself. That much was obvious even from altitude. He could see groups moving through the streets with weapons raised, engaging each other or engaging nothing or just firing because the city had reached that special threshold where violence stopped needing reasons. Police barricades were visible in clusters -- token efforts at containment that looked about as effective as putting band-aids on arterial bleeding.
And threading through all of it, wearing tactical gear that was definitely not GCPD issue: military personnel.
Lobo's grin widened behind his mask. The fraggin' army had rolled into Gotham proper. That meant someone upstairs had decided the situation was degraded enough to require actual intervention, which meant the chaos had reached federally-recognized-disaster status, which meant the Main Man had arrived at exactly the right time to make everything significantly worse.
He brought the Space Hog down to street level in a controlled drop that turned into a power slide across intersection pavement. The bike's rear thruster kicked sparks across concrete while Lobo oriented on the nearest concentration of movement -- a cluster of figures in mismatched gear taking cover behind overturned vehicles, weapons trained on something Lobo couldn't see from his angle.
Gang members. Had to be. The kind of low-level talent that thought holding territory in a burning city constituted a viable business model.
Perfect.
Lobo gunned the throttle and the Space Hog responded with acceleration that would have liquified a baseline human's internal organs. He crashed into their position doing something north of eighty miles per hour, bike slamming through cover positions and scattering bodies like someone had kicked over an anthill. The ones who weren't immediately crushed scrambled for new positions, and Lobo was already off the bike and moving before momentum finished distributing what remained of their defensive line across forty feet of street.
His hook-chain came off his belt with practiced ease -- weighted links that sang as they unwound, the barbed hook at the end catching ambient firelight in ways that made the whole thing look like it was already tasting blood. The nearest gang member tried to bring his weapon around and Lobo sent the chain through the space where the man's center mass had been a fraction of a second earlier. The hook punched through flesh, buried itself somewhere vital, and Lobo yanked.
The body came apart in a way that suggested internal structural integrity had been more theoretical than functional.
"Any of ya bastiches know about a Spider?" Lobo's voice carried across the intersection with the volume of someone who'd never learned indoor manners. The chain was already moving again, wrapping around another target's throat and separating head from shoulders before the question finished landing. "Enhanced freak, likes webbing, been operating in Gotham?"
The survivors scattered. Lobo let most of them go and grabbed the one who'd been too slow -- lifted him off his feet by the front of his jacket and held him at eye level while the man's legs kicked empty air and his hands scrabbled uselessly at Lobo's grip.
"Spider," Lobo repeated. "Where's he at?"
"I don't -- we don't know nothing about --"
Lobo dropped him and moved on. If the street-level talent didn't know, that meant the information was higher up the food chain. Which meant he needed to find someone with actual operational awareness instead of the cannon fodder who'd been left behind to guard territory that was already lost.
He climbed back onto the Space Hog and opened the throttle. The bike launched forward through Gotham's grid with the kind of reckless velocity that treated traffic laws as suggestions for other people. Buildings blurred past on both sides -- some intact, some burning, all of them wearing the accumulated grime of a city that had given up on maintenance budgets sometime around the Carter administration.
Gunfire erupted from his left.
Lobo registered the impacts a half-second before his combat implant finished analyzing trajectory and point of origin. Military-grade ammunition, fired from elevated positions, converging on his current vector with accuracy that suggested proper training instead of spray-and-pray desperation.
He looked up and saw them -- soldiers positioned on rooftops and behind makeshift barriers, weapons trained on the unidentified aerial vehicle that had just entered their containment zone doing speeds that definitely violated about fifteen different FAA regulations.
The Space Hog's shields absorbed the first volley without apparent effort. Lobo triggered the bike's weapon systems and felt the satisfying kick of mounted cannons engaging. High-explosive rounds streaked upward in arcs that terminated in fireballs -- not particularly aimed at the soldiers so much as aimed at everything in the general vicinity of where the soldiers happened to be standing.
Buildings detonated. Rooftop positions vanished into expanding clouds of debris and flame. One round caught something that used to be a major structure on Gotham's northern edge -- a sprawling complex behind reinforced walls that looked like it had been built to keep something contained rather than keep people out. The explosion tore through whatever structural integrity remained and brought down sections of wall in cascades that exposed interior spaces to the burning sky.
Lobo didn't know what the building was. Didn't particularly care. It was on fire now and that made it part of Gotham's general aesthetic.
More gunfire converged from multiple angles. The military had decided the airborne threat warranted concentrated response, which meant units were breaking from their containment positions to engage. Lobo banked the Space Hog hard right and dropped to street level again, threading between buildings with clearances that would make traffic safety advocates weep.
His HUD was painting targets faster than he could engage them. Soldiers in tactical gear emerging from side streets, APCs rolling into intersections with mounted weapons tracking his trajectory, drone signatures multiplying in airspace that was getting progressively more hostile.
He loved every fraggin' second of it.
The chain came off his belt again as he brought the bike into another power slide. This time he kept moving with the momentum, letting the chain extend its full twenty-foot reach and catch a soldier who'd been trying to establish firing position behind a concrete barrier. The barbed hook buried itself somewhere unpleasant and Lobo used the man's body as a flail, swinging him into three of his squad mates with enough force to make the collision audible over the general chaos.
Return fire caught him in the chest. Center mass, three rounds that punched through to the other side. Lobo looked down at the holes, watched his regeneration kick in and seal the wounds with speed that made baseline human healing look like it was operating on geological timescales, and then he looked back at the shooter with an expression that suggested professional courtesy.
"Nice grouping," Lobo said, and then he closed the distance between them with speed that made the soldier's weapon-tracking look sedentary.
The chain wrapped around the man's torso and tightened. Lobo heard ribs crack, then something more fundamental give way. He dropped the body and grabbed the next soldier -- lifted him off his feet by the throat while rounds from the man's squad continued impacting Lobo's back and shoulders and head with the effectiveness of throwing rocks at a tank.
"Spider," Lobo said, holding the soldier at eye level. "Enhanced freak, webs. Where is he?"
The soldier's eyes were wide enough to suggest he'd processed that this situation had degraded beyond any scenario his training had covered. His mouth worked but nothing came out except a sound that might have been the beginning of several different words, none of which made it to completion.
Lobo shook him. "I ain't got all day, bastich. Spider. Where?"
"Gone -- he's gone -- left the city --"
Now that was interesting.
Lobo dropped the soldier and let the man collapse onto pavement that was slick with fluids Lobo didn't care to inventory. The surrounding squad had stopped shooting, which showed some minimal tactical intelligence -- their bullets weren't accomplishing anything except wasting ammunition and making Lobo's coat need more repairs than usual.
"When'd he leave?" Lobo asked the pile of soldier currently trying to remember how lungs worked.
"Last night. Broke through the military barricade beyond Gotham's bridge. If you find him, make him pay for what he did to our comrades."
Lobo processed that while more gunfire erupted from positions further down the street. The military was still trying to establish control of Gotham's grid, which meant they were operating on the assumption that conventional tactics would eventually work if applied with sufficient force and organization. Lobo knew better. A city this far gone didn't respond to conventional tactics. It responded to overwhelming violence applied until nothing remained that needed controlling.
But that wasn't his problem.
His problem was that the Spider had burned Gotham and then left, which meant the little bastich was mobile, which meant Lobo needed to figure out where something that burned cities would go after finishing with the first one.
He looked around at Gotham's flaming infrastructure and grinned.
If the Spider burned one city, he was bound to burn another. All Lobo had to do was follow the smoke trail, and something told him a freak who could generate this much chaos wasn't the type to stay quiet for long. Death had taken an interest in something as mundane as spider powers for a reason, and standing in the middle of Gotham's collapse, Lobo was starting to understand why.
The Space Hog was exactly where he'd left it -- idling in the middle of an intersection with bodies scattered around it like someone had been testing the effectiveness of high-velocity impacts on human durability. Lobo climbed back onto the bike and pulled up navigation. His HUD painted a map of the eastern seaboard, major metropolitan areas highlighted in clusters of light that suggested population density and economic activity.
Star City sat south of Gotham like it was waiting for its turn.
And according to the news feeds Lobo's systems were pulling from public broadcasts, Star City had woken up to chaos. Sirens, gunfire, reports of enhanced individual engaging multiple response units in the downtown district. The kind of breaking news that suggested someone was having a very bad morning.
Lobo locked coordinates and opened the throttle. The Space Hog launched skyward with thrust that punched through Gotham's smoke layer and into clear air above the burning city. Below him, the military continued their futile containment efforts while Gotham continued eating itself with the enthusiasm of something that had been hungry for decades.
He left them to it and oriented to Star City.