Mechanical-Arm Spider #81
The chain came before Jake could finish processing Lobo's entrance.
Not a warning swing, not a testing arc -- it came out of his hand the moment he said "nah" and it crossed the room in a flat trajectory that had nothing lazy about it despite the casual wrist flick that sent it.
The links were thick, each one the width of Jake's thumb, and the tip was a single curved spike that caught the room's broken light as it came -- not a hook, something worse, the kind of engineering that said the chain had a preferred outcome and the spike was how it expressed the preference.
Jake dropped Canary.
His spider-sense had already made the decision for him, the warning arriving sharp enough that his hand was opening before his mind had formed the thought. She hit the floor and he went sideways and the chain passed through the space she'd occupied and snapped back toward Lobo on the return arc.
He caught it.
His right hand closed around the chain two links behind the spike and the momentum hit him like a vehicle -- not violence exactly, just mass in motion that had somewhere to be and didn't register his grip as an obstacle worth acknowledging. It pulled him off his feet and across the room in a single arc, his body swinging wide, feet dragging a line through the scattered debris, and he let the momentum carry him through the rotation instead of fighting it.
The rotation was a full turn. He planted his feet at the bottom of the arc, twisted his core into the pull, and hauled.
The chain went taut.
The Space Hog skidded eight inches across the floor and Lobo's weight shifted on the saddle, the big frame absorbing the pull without going anywhere further -- just that eight inches, and then the resistance in the chain told Jake everything he needed to know about the strength differential without requiring him to test it again. He held the tension for one second, both hands on the links, feet braced, the chain trembling between them like a living thing that couldn't decide which end to obey.
Lobo stepped off the bike.
He set his boots on the floor and looked at Jake across the length of the chain with something that hadn't been in his expression before -- a reorientation, the eyes doing a second read on a target that had earned a second read. The cigar moved from one corner of his mouth to the other.
"Hnh." He tilted his head. "You're not exactly a nobody, are ya?" He glanced at the chain still held taut between them. "No wonder she was interested in you."
Jake released the chain. It dropped and Lobo caught it without looking.
"She who," Jake said.
Lobo tugged the chain back across the floor, coiling it with the practiced motion of someone who'd done it ten thousand times. "There a contract on your head, Spider. That's all you need to know about the she."
Jake's eyes tracked the coiling chain and his mind was already moving -- pulling through everyone who had the means and the motivation, stripping the list down. The Batfamily wouldn't contract Lobo, the methodology was wrong. No one in Gotham had the proper channels to hire a space hounty hunter. He moved through them and arrived at the one that fit -- the one that had told him, in Gotham two days ago, that he deserved everything coming his way. The one whose attention he'd been drawing with every totem redeemed, every soul pulled out of the ledger she'd been counting on.
"Death's gotten impatient," he said.
Lobo stopped coiling. He looked at Jake with something that shifted behind his eyes -- not quite surprise, not quite respect, something between them. "Smarter than you look." He bit down on the cigar. "And you look pretty smart, for somethin' that's been running on fumes."
"I'm guessing she didn't explain why she wanted me."
"Don't tell me you're offended she didn't elaborate." Lobo shrugged one massive shoulder. "Actually, yeah -- I'll say, I've been curious. In my experience, the lady doesn't rattle easily. Does her job, keeps her books, sends things back that need sending back." He turned the chain over in his hands. "Whatever you've been doing with her ledger's got her looking at things different. Never seen her put a contract on something she usually just -- waits for."
Jake held his position. His eyes moved briefly to where Oliver had been standing, registered the absence, moved back to Lobo.
"Go back and tell her she hasn't earned me yet," Jake said.
Lobo was quiet for one second -- the particular quiet of someone turning something over, examining it from different angles. Then he laughed, short and genuine, the sound bouncing off what remained of the walls.
"Boy, you've got guts." He uncoiled the chain again with his right hand, the links swinging in a slow circle that was already building momentum. "I mean that. Not a lot of things say that to me." He watched the chain's arc. "But the Main Man doesn't walk away from a contract. Not once. You understand me -- not once." He looked at Jake across the room with something that was almost apologetic, the expression of someone delivering news they don't find personally objectionable. "Nothing personal, lad."
Jake calculated.
He thought about Lobo's regeneration, the near-immortality, the way the man couldn't be killed. A fight with no time limit against someone who could absorb damage and come back for more was not a fight -- it was an endurance contest, and his endurance had been running a deficit for long enough. The arm was functional, the time bank was somewhere he hadn't fully looked at for a while, and Sleeper was absent in a way that made every calculation harder.
The Navigator's thread blinked at the edge of his vision.
He hadn't noticed it blinking before -- it had been constant since they'd entered the building, a steady pull oriented toward the interior of the room. Now it was pulling differently, the thread jumping with the urgency of proximity confirmed, and he found the direction it was pointing and followed it across the room to where Oliver had been standing.
Oliver wasn't there. Canary wasn't where she'd fallen.
But the bow was gone, which meant Oliver had taken it, which meant Oliver was moving -- and the thread was still blinking, which meant Oliver hadn't gotten far.
The floor trembled.
Not the Space Hog, not the chain -- something underneath, a vibration coming up through the epoxy from the corridor behind him, the one that led back to the entry point and the utility passage and eventually up to Castellan. The lights in that direction were already flickering. The vibration built and something came through the dark at the corridor's far end -- massive, stumbling, full-bodied in the way that the arm and the leg had suggested but neither had delivered, a construction that was 1.5 Lobo's size and built with the intention of being impressive even in its incompletion, the joints sealed, the frame solid, the whole assembly running forward with the lumbering determination of something that had been given an instruction and couldn't fully execute it.
Dr. Chen's absence registered.
The full body came through at a run and was already losing its balance, the stabilization system not finishing what it started, the whole frame tilting sideways as it crossed into the room.
Lobo was the closest thing to it.
It fell toward him with all its weight and he caught it one-handed, and the thing he said about it was not printable in any language Jake was aware of, and then the full body was fighting back because the instruction inside it was still running and Lobo's expression moved from irritation to something more focused and he started taking it apart with the efficiency of someone who considered this a minor interruption.
Jake was already moving.
He went through the corridor at a run, the Navigator's thread pulling east and slightly up, the blinking steady now in the way it went steady when the target was close enough to matter. His spider-sense caught the trip-line two steps before he reached it -- a strand of something across the corridor at knee height, not webbing, engineered -- and he went over it without breaking stride.
Light at the corridor's far end. The utility passage opening, the entry hole above, light coming through.
Oliver was at the passage wall, Canary across his shoulder, one hand pressed to the joint where the bow had broken to hold the two halves against each other. He heard Jake coming -- turned, one smooth motion, and the arrow was already launched before Jake had closed half the distance.
The arrow came out of a broken bow held together by Oliver's grip at the fracture point, and the shaft had a head on it that Jake didn't recognize until it detonated four feet in front of him and the wind came out.
Not an explosion -- a compression, a contained rotation that hit him like a wall and kept hitting, the wind driving him back the way he'd come with a force that outweighed his forward momentum entirely. He tried to web to the wall and the web tore. He tried to angle and the angle collapsed. He went back down the corridor with his feet off the floor and came out into the room and landed on both knees on the epoxy.
The full body was in pieces across the floor. Lobo stood in the middle of the debris with the chain in his hand and the cigar still going and a specific expression on his face that had decided to be done with this.
"Okay," he said. "Let's finish this."
Jake looked up at him from his knees.
"Gladly."
His arms went out to both sides.
He fired.
The web lines hit two of the assistants on his left, two on his right, and the pull was not gentle -- four people snapping forward across the floor with the physics of bodies caught mid-panic, hitting things on the way, the lines doing what they did. Lobo watched this with his head tilted and the chain still in his hands and his expression somewhere between confusion and genuine uncertainty about what he was watching, because there was nothing in the room that needed this to happen and the Main Man had been in a lot of rooms and could not immediately locate the tactical purpose.
Jake fired again.
The fifth line caught someone near the interior door and he pulled and Lobo's expression did not become disgust -- it became something more fundamental than that, the look of a being who had organized the universe into a set of categories and was having trouble placing what he was currently watching into any of them.
"Let me suit up first," Jake said.
The Bonus Rewards had been sitting in his vision since the totem redeemed, patient, waiting on his input. He'd been aware of them the same way he'd been aware of the time bank and the Navigator's thread and all the other information the interface carried -- background, queued, available when he was ready. He looked at item four now.
"Kill Milestone," he said.
The symbiote came back.
Not from his body -- from somewhere fundamental, the black material covering him from the feet up in a single unbroken wave. The coverage was complete before Lobo had finished watching it happen. Something moved across the symbiote's surface as it settled -- a texture, a color at the edges that hadn't been present before, red bleeding through the black in patterns that weren't random.
🕷️
Kill Milestone Reward: Carnage granted.
🕸️
The interface updated.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
[Totem redeemed!]
Select two Bonus Rewards:
1. Bundle of Cash -- a little something to keep you going during this time crunch.
2. Totem Icon -- for your navigation needs and a chance to collect your next totem faster.
3. Mystery Reward
4. KILL MILESTONE: 60/60 -- on select, the system extends its hand. Time is limited by totem rarity. Valid only if milestone is completed.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
[Progress Tab]
Completion: 10.5%
Totems redeemed: 8
Time Bank: 02:29:35
Kill Milestone: 00:47:59
System Tools: Symbolic Extraction? Enabled.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
Lobo looked at the suit.
At the red threading through the black.
He bit down on the cigar and the chain went into a slow rotation at his side.
"Alright," he said. "Now we're talkin'."
~MimicLord
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