Mechanical-Arm Spider #71
Sleeper was gone.
Not retreated, not thin -- gone, pulled back to the space between his shoulder blades in a mass that pressed against the wall of the storefront behind him, pooled low where the next sonic wave couldn't reach it. Jake could feel the symbiote's presence like a cold hand at his back, close enough to confirm it hadn't abandoned him entirely, far enough to make clear it wasn't coming forward until the frequency threat passed. He'd seen the suit peel off him in sections during the fall. Had felt each piece retract like fingers uncurling from a grip. Sleeper had made a calculation and the calculation hadn't included Jake's comfort.
That left him in the classic suit, or what remained of it. The material was torn from the shoulder down across his left side, and his left arm ended at a ragged sleeve that exposed skin where his stub ended. His ribs were intact -- Sleeper had seen to that before retreating -- but the container webbed against them had not been so lucky.
He became aware of it slowly, the way you become aware of something burning when the adrenaline finally quiets down enough to let sensation through. The last remaining compound he'd collected as raw material had cracked somewhere between the Canary Cry and the impact against the back wall.
He could feel the chemical seeping through the web-casing and into the tears in his suit, not instantly corrosive, but working at exposed skin with a low and steady insistence that would become a real problem given another few minutes. The plan to synthesize even a rough approximation of Kobra-Venom, to buy back some of the stamina the night had bled out of him, was dissolving at approximately the same rate as the compound itself.
He was on one knee behind the collapsed display rack when Canary appeared in the shattered window frame.
Her hand was still at her throat where Sleeper had crawled and then been torn away. Her eyes moved across the wreckage of the store interior, tracking him with the kind of patience that suggested she wasn't afraid, just recalibrating. He watched her shoulders drop slightly as she found her footing on the glass-littered sill, watched her chest begin to rise.
Jake's spider-sense was noise. Not absent, not sharp -- just a low and undifferentiated pressure that painted the whole room threat-red without giving him anything useful to work with. He had to estimate.
He could see her lungs filling, could track the slight tension moving through her jaw and throat as the Cry built pressure, and he had to make a decision before it released because once that sound hit the air, the decision made itself.
The window frame. Distance. His own trajectory if he went left versus right.
His right arm was already up, wrist aimed at the ceiling, and he fired.
The web caught a ceiling beam and he launched himself up and forward off the one knee he'd been kneeling on, using the pull of the webline and every bit of muscle he still had functional, and the air behind him exploded.
The Canary Cry hit the back wall of the store like a freight train that had been compressed into a sound wave, and the building shuddered so hard that plaster separated from the frame in sheets. Jake was already moving through a gap in the ceiling where the crash had already taken out one section -- except that he wasn't moving the way he'd planned. He was moving up, which he'd expected, and forward, which he'd expected, and then something cold and mechanical closed around his midsection from the right and he stopped being in control of the direction entirely.
The grip was immense in the way that geological things are immense -- not violent exactly, just categorically indifferent to resistance. Jake registered metal, articulated joints, a construction that was sleek rather than industrial, and then all of that became secondary because the world rotated ninety degrees and he was ascending. Through the gap in the ceiling he hadn't made. Through a second ceiling he definitely hadn't made. Wood and insulation and concrete fragment slapped across him in sequence and then open sky appeared and he was still going up, and the grip was still there, and the altitude kept climbing in a trajectory that had nothing to do with momentum and everything to do with whatever held him.
Then the direction changed.
Not gradually. The way a thrown object changes direction when something hits it in midair -- sudden, total, definitive. Up became down and his stomach did the corresponding math, and the ground came up to meet him with a sincerity that Sleeper registered before his conscious mind did, the symbiote flooding back from his shoulder blades in the fraction of a second before impact, filling the spaces the suit had left exposed, wrapping his torso and neck and skull in reactive mass that cushioned the absolute worst of it.
The absolute worst of it still drove him three feet into the pavement.
He felt his teeth hit together and tasted blood before he'd finished the descent, and the crater walls -- actual walls, compressed earth and broken asphalt rising around him on all sides -- held him for a moment at the bottom like a bowl. His ears were still ringing from the Canary Cry. The impact layered on top of that like a second instrument joining a noise that was already unbearable. Every bone in his body filed a separate complaint. His heart was running at a rate that he could feel in his molars.
Through all of it, the grip was still there.
It hadn't released. It was pressing down now, mechanical fingers tightening at his midsection while whatever arm they belonged to used the crater as leverage, bearing down with a force that Sleeper absorbed at first and then began to resist, the symbiote hardening across his ribs and pushing outward in slow, grinding increments against the pressure from above. Jake added his own strength to it -- not gracefully, not in any coordinated way, just hands finding the wrist of the thing holding him and pushing against the joint where the thumb connected, looking for the mechanical equivalent of a weak point.
He found it, or something close enough. One finger snapped outward with a resistance that cost him more than he wanted to admit, the joint not breaking but bending past its engineered limit, and the grip released all at once with a force that suggested it had decided to let go rather than been forced to.
The arm retracted.
Jake pushed off the crater floor -- three feet down, asphalt on all sides, morning light filtering in from above -- and made it to standing on the second attempt, his legs finding the wall and climbing rather than leaping because leaping was currently beyond him. He cleared the crater's edge and got his first real look at the street.
The arm was already retracting back toward the figure it belonged to, folding into place at the elbow with a mechanical precision that made no biological sound whatsoever. The figure stood maybe twenty feet away, and even across that distance, at the tail end of what Jake's nervous system was currently doing, the image was hard to miss. Height in the range of six feet, built in the way that suggested the muscle itself had been restructured rather than developed, with the right arm -- the mechanical one -- ending at a matte-grey construction that caught the morning light without reflecting it. The arm from elbow to fingertip was sleek in the way precision instruments are sleek, jointed smoothly at each knuckle, and it was clicking back into a fist as the figure left the ground.
Jake's spider-sense said something fragmented and delayed, half a warning arriving after its context had already passed, and he turned.
The leg came down from above him and to the left, and it was mechanical in the same language as the arm -- grey and jointed and indifferent -- and he threw himself sideways on instinct because instinct was what he had when the sense wasn't functional, and the foot connected with the street where he'd been standing and the ground didn't just crack. It buckled. The asphalt folded inward and a shockwave moved outward through it in a radial pulse that lifted Jake off his feet in the air he'd already dived into, and for a moment he was airborne in the worst possible way -- not controlled, not webbed, just bounced by the concussive force of a leg hitting a street with what could only be described as geological intent.
The fist was already coming.
He got his forearms up. Sleeper hardened across them in the microsecond before contact, and the punch connected with a force that detonated outward from the impact point in a visible wave -- not Canary-Cry visible, but close, the kind of concussive bloom that moved wrecked cars a few inches and scattered glass from already-broken windows across a twenty-foot radius. Jake flew backward through it, tumbling, and managed a half-rotation in the air that was more desperation than technique, and landed hard on both feet and one hand with the other arm trailing behind him to slow the skid across the road surface.
He stopped.
His spider-sense came back online all at once, not gradually, the adrenaline finally spiking high enough to override whatever the Canary Cry had done to his perception. The world sharpened. The two figures resolved into something he could actually process.
They were standing apart from each other by maybe fifteen feet, positioned at angles that were too specific to be accidental. The one with the arm -- right arm, mechanical from the elbow, currently hanging at its side -- was on his left. The one with the leg -- left leg, the same sleek grey construction, currently carrying the figure's weight with each step causing a faint tremor that moved through the road surface like a subterranean suggestion -- was on his right, and it was already moving.
Not running. Not approaching in any normal sense of the word. Just -- crossing the distance. One moment the figure was fifteen feet away and the next it was seven and Jake's spider-sense registered the movement the way it registers something traveling faster than it should, as a gap in time rather than a continuous event. The step was short and controlled, economical, and then it stopped. Testing something. Showing him something.
Jake filed it and kept moving his eyes to the one with the arm, which had raised its right hand, and the palm was open, and the familiar blue light gathered at the center of it in the shape of energy he'd seen before -- not the color exactly, more faded, older, like the same thing running on a depleted source -- and his spider-sense hit him hard enough that he was already sideways and running before the projectile released. It crossed where he'd been standing and hit a fire hydrant at the corner, and the hydrant came apart in a spray of water and cast iron that rained across the intersection.
He ran three steps, webbed a lamppost, changed direction.
His mind was assembling the picture without asking his permission. The arm and its energy discharge. The leg and its flash step. The muscle development on both figures that was structural rather than cosmetic, the helmets that covered everything above the nose and left the mouth exposed, the red-screened eyepieces that tracked him now with a coordination that didn't require any visible communication between the two of them. He'd seen the blue energy before. Two days ago, in Gotham, at floor three of the building where he'd been working his way up to Harley, four metas who'd been built to do multiple things and had done none of them well enough to stop him.
These two had not been built to do multiple things.
The Leg hit the ground in a single deliberate stomp, and the road ruptured. Not from the impact point outward in a circle -- in a line, directed, a rupture seam that tracked toward Jake's position and sent the asphalt pitching upward on both sides like a wave moving through water rather than rock. Jake went up, webline catching a fire escape overhead, and the Arm was already in the air above him, having used the moment of ground disruption as cover for the jump, positioned to come down with the mechanical fist at the apex of whatever arc the webline had started.
He couldn't go forward. Couldn't go back into the rupture. Went sideways instead, releasing the webline early and firing another to redirect mid-air, and the fist came down behind him and the shockwave caught his back and pushed him another twenty feet in the direction he was already going.
He landed on a car roof, which caved in under him, and stood on the buckled metal and looked back at the intersection.
They were already repositioning. Moving apart again, re-establishing the angles they'd been standing at before, unhurried, as if urgency didn't apply to what they were doing because the outcome was a question of time rather than chance. The Arm discharged another projectile without breaking stride -- aimed wide, Jake registered, not to hit but to bracket, to take away the space on his right.
Star City's version. That's what they were. The same program that had produced four metas in a building in Gotham two days ago, built to test everything, had produced these two built to test one thing at the highest intensity the program could manage. Not sound and speed and strength and energy scattered across four bodies. Just strength, concentrated, dedicated, given two forms and a target and turned loose.
Star City's rot forced into the open.
The Arm fired again and the Leg flash-stepped closer and Jake swung between them while he predicted what would happen next now that he'd caught the attention of someone with real weight in Star City's crumbling facade.
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