Mechanical-Arm Spider #82.
The Carnage suit was still settling across his shoulders when he fired a feint. The strand went wide left while he went right, dropping low and closing the distance in the half-second Lobo spent tracking the wrong vector. He came in under the chain's natural arc and drove his right fist into Lobo's ribs.
The impact registered in his shoulder.
Lobo rocked one inch to the left, looked down at Jake with the expression of someone who has just been tapped on the arm by a child, and smiled around the cigar.
"There we go."
Jake was already gone -- webline to the ceiling strut, body swinging wide, momentum carrying him around Lobo's right side before the chain could complete its rotation. He released at the apex, dropped behind Lobo's shoulder, and drove his knee into the back of the big man's knee joint. The joint bent forward. Lobo went down to one knee.
The chain came around in the same second.
Jake read it through the spider-sense -- the arc, the angle, the spike -- and went flat, the chain passing two inches above his back with enough force that the displaced air pressed his suit against his skin. He rolled, came up on Lobo's left, and the mechanical arm swung hard into the side of Lobo's jaw.
Lobo's head turned three degrees.
He was already standing again.
"Okay." He rolled his jaw, testing it. The cigar had held. "Okay, I'll give you that one."
The chain came out in a flat horizontal sweep and Jake jumped it, firing two lines simultaneously -- one to the wall, one to the Space Hog's handlebar -- and the competing tensions pulled him in opposite directions for exactly the moment he needed, holding him suspended above the chain's arc while it passed under him and then releasing. He swung wide, came back in fast, and drove both feet into Lobo's chest.
Lobo stepped back.
Just the one step, absorbing it, but the step was real and the mechanical arm had contributed to it and Jake filed that.
Then Lobo stopped being patient about the distance.
He threw the chain aside -- not at Jake, just aside, the links hitting the floor with a crash that shook the room -- and closed the space between them in two strides that had no hesitation in them. His right hand came out and Jake got his forearm up and the block worked but the force behind it drove him sideways into the equipment bench and the bench came off its mounts.
Jake shoved off the wall behind it before Lobo could pin him there.
He went low, under Lobo's reaching arm, webbed the back of Lobo's head and used it as the anchor point -- swinging himself up and over in a tight arc, feet finding Lobo's shoulders for one second before he pushed off and landed behind him.
"Did you just --" Lobo turned, slowly. Something in his expression was recalibrating. "Did you just use my head as a fraggin' swing set."
Jake fired a web at Lobo's boots, both feet, and pulled.
The web held for almost two seconds before Lobo tore it apart with one motion, but those two seconds were enough to get another line out to the ceiling, enough to get airborne, enough to come back down from a completely different angle with the mechanical arm extended.
The arm connected with Lobo's shoulder and the impact moved through the sleeve all the way to Jake's elbow joint and he felt the difference -- not his arm absorbing the hit, the engineering absorbing it, the neuro-interface translating force into feedback that was information rather than pain. Lobo staggered half a step.
Half a step. But it was there.
Lobo threw a refrigeration unit at him.
Jake sent it back, and the unit came apart on the man's face. He webbed a piece of the debris mid-tumble and sent it back. Lobo caught it and set it aside. Jake webbed the Space Hog's rear housing and pulled with everything he had -- the bike didn't move, didn't shift, sat exactly where it was with the complete indifference of something that had decided it belonged to one person and wasn't open to alternate arrangements.
He let go before Lobo could use the tension against him.
"Bike's not gonna help you," Lobo said, and threw a punch that Jake barely got out of the way of -- felt the wind of it across his cheek, the sheer displacement of air as Lobo's fist passed close enough to read the knuckles.
He was still processing that when the second one came.
He didn't get out of the way of the second one.
It caught his left shoulder and sent him across the room into the far wall and he hit it and stayed on his feet through stubbornness more than stability, the Carnage suit hardening across his back on impact. His spider-sense was cycling -- not gone, not sharp, running somewhere between the two in a way that was giving him angles a half-second late. He'd been working around it the whole time. He kept working around it.
He pushed off the wall.
He went at Lobo again, closing the distance, and they were in close quarters before either of them had fully decided to be -- Jake trading on the spider-sense's angles to stay inside the chain's reach, Lobo not bothering with the chain anymore, both of them working with what they had in a space too small for the tools they'd arrived with.
Lobo was fast.
Faster than something his size should have been, the punches coming in short tight arcs that didn't need space to carry force. Jake blocked what he could, redirected what he couldn't block, used the webs in close -- a line across Lobo's forearm to pull a strike wide, a strand webbed to the floor to change his own angle mid-dodge, the Carnage suit flagging the incoming trajectories in a way that felt different from the spider-sense, fuller, like fighting with two sets of eyes looking at different parts of the same picture.
He took a hit to the ribs. Something compressed and held together and he kept moving.
He caught Lobo across the jaw with a right hook and Lobo's head moved and Lobo grinned and caught him by the shoulder and threw him into the ceiling and he swung off it before gravity finished the job.
They landed at the same time.
Lobo's fist came out.
Jake saw it coming -- read the angle, the speed, the exact trajectory -- and he made a decision that had nothing rational behind it. He planted his right foot and drove his right fist forward to meet it.
The fists hit each other and the shockwave came out in all directions -- loose debris moving across the floor, cracks spreading through the wall panels, Lobo going back two feet and Jake going back four. He landed on both feet and stood there with his right hand doing something that wasn't quite pain, the bones reassembled by adrenaline into something that was still functional if he didn't examine it.
Lobo looked at his own fist.
"Hnh."
He came again. Jake came again. Right met right and the shockwave was the same -- debris, cracks, both of them pushed back. Jake's right hand had a new opinion about its own existence but he brought it up again because the third time was already coming and he had a different plan for it.
Lobo's fist came out.
Jake raised the mechanical arm.
The impact was different -- the engineering taking the force differently than bone, distributing it up through the sleeve, the elbow joint reading the hit as data and reporting it in real time. Jake went back further than he had with the right hand, six feet instead of four, but he was still standing and the mechanical arm was still articulated and the palm was still open at the end of it.
Lobo stood there for a moment.
He was breathing slightly harder than he'd been breathing at the start of this. Not much -- not enough to mean anything definitive -- but there was something in the way he held himself that was paying Jake a different kind of attention than the beginning of the fight had required.
"Either that," Lobo said, "is the stupidest thing I have ever seen a man choose to do." He looked Jake over -- the suit, the arm, the right hand that Jake was not currently drawing attention to. "Or one of the bravest."
Jake's right hand was sending him detailed reports he was ignoring.
"You're right," he said. "This is stupid."
He went for the hole in the ceiling.
One web to the exposed rebar at the ceiling's broken edge, body swinging up and through before Lobo could close the distance -- he felt the big man's hand pass through the air below his feet as he cleared the floor's debris field and found open sky above him.
Behind him, from the room below, came a sound that wasn't Lobo's voice so much as Lobo's entire opinion expressed through language and volume simultaneously. He caught one word in the Interlac that translated roughly to the offspring of an unflattering species, and then he was through the hole and Star City opened up around him.
He swung.
His first line caught the corner of the parking structure two blocks north and pulled him into the city's vertical space, and he got three full swings of height and momentum before he heard the Space Hog's repulsors cycling up from below.
He went faster.
Star City's canyon geography worked in his favor the same way Gotham's had -- the buildings close enough that swing arcs could compound on each other, each release setting up the next, the city moving beneath him as a grid of options rather than obstacles. He took a corner around a glass tower by firing low and using the angle of the wire to slingshot himself around the building's face, changing direction by sixty degrees without losing speed.
The Space Hog came around the corner six seconds later.
The chain was already out, Lobo standing on the saddle with one hand on the handlebars and the other working the chain in a slow rotation that suggested he was enjoying the geometry of the chase more than he was focused on closing it. Below them, Star City was still running its damage -- the fires east of Castellan had pulled emergency response to the south end, the downtown grid sparse enough that the streets they were covering had only scattered vehicles and people already pressed against buildings watching the sky.
Jake swung through a covered walkway connecting two office buildings at the fourth-floor level, the web catching the overhang's steel frame and pulling him through the enclosed space and out the other side.
The Space Hog hit the walkway's corner at speed and the Hog's reinforced housing took most of it, the rest going into the building's facade -- glass and aluminum framing raining down into the street below as Lobo corrected and came around the wreckage without losing the sight line.
"Running's not gonna work forever, Spider," Lobo called across the open air, perfectly conversational.
Jake fired low, using a fire escape to redirect his angle downward between two buildings where the alley was too narrow for the Hog's full profile. He heard the repulsors adjust pitch above him -- Lobo going up and over rather than through. He came out of the alley on the south end and fired high, cresting the roofline of a parking structure, and for one second he was standing on the structure's roof with the city spread out around him.
He picked up a concrete barrier from the roof's edge -- four hundred pounds, the spider-sense pinging the Space Hog's incoming angle -- and threw it.
The Hog's deflection system registered it and the repulsors pitched hard right, the barrier missing by eight feet and going over the building's far side. Something structural gave way in the parking structure's upper level from the shift in weight distribution, a section of roof pulling away from the frame and beginning a slow, grinding descent. Jake was already off the roof, already back in the swing, the collapse happening behind him as Lobo threaded through it.
The chain came through a gap in the falling debris and caught a parked car on the street below, swinging it in a wide arc. Jake heard the impact two blocks back.
He went north.
The residential towers on the north end of downtown were older construction, closer together, the gaps between them shorter than the commercial district. He pushed his swing arcs tighter to use the spacing -- shorter releases, lower lines, trading speed for maneuverability. The Hog was faster in open air but the dense tower spacing forced it to navigate, and navigation was costing Lobo seconds he was visibly running out of patience with.
The first explosion went off behind and to Jake's left.
He didn't see it -- felt the pressure wave at the edge of a swing and released a half-beat early, the thermal draft throwing his next arc wide. He looked back and found one of the older towers with its middle floors burning, the Hog having put something through it that didn't care about what the building was or who was in it.
Below, in the street: a bus that had been trying to navigate the chaos, stationary now, passengers already off the back. Three storefronts with their facades blown in. A water main that had found the new pressure differential and was making its own decisions about direction.
The second explosion hit the tower's structural supports at the base.
The building didn't come down -- it listed, the frame finding a new relationship with gravity that was not immediately catastrophic but was working toward it, the upper floors pulling south while the foundation tried to hold. Jake got a web to the corner of the structure and pulled against it hard enough to buy the frame a second of counter-tension, long enough for the three people still on the lower floors to get clear into the street.
He let go.
Lobo came around from the north end, the Hog cutting off the angle Jake had been building toward, and the chain came out in a flat throw that he had to go straight up to avoid -- webbing a satellite dish on the nearest rooftop and hauling himself vertical as the chain passed beneath him and tore through the upper floors of an already compromised storefront.
He swung off the satellite dish before the mounting gave out.
They'd been moving in a loose orbit around a block of mixed-use towers in the northeast quarter for the last several minutes -- Jake using the building cluster's geometry to stay just ahead of the Hog's interception angles, Lobo adjusting each time and getting a half-second closer with each adjustment. The cigar was gone somewhere in the first explosion's pressure wave. Lobo had not mentioned this. His expression suggested he had noted it and added it to the account.
The third explosion came from above.
Lobo had gone up -- high, higher than Jake had tracked him going, the Hog's repulsors carrying him above the tower cluster -- and whatever he'd put through the roof of the tallest building in the block came down through the floors with enough force that the top four stories began a staged collapse, each floor transferring the load to the one below, the whole upper section coming apart in a slow cascade that sent glass and concrete outward in all directions.
Jake was navigating the debris field mid-swing when the spider-sense hit him from a direction that wasn't the building.
He looked south.
A motorcycle, moving fast along the cleared street two blocks down. Oliver at the front, leaning into the speed. And behind him, sitting up straight with her hair forward across the bruised side of her face, both hands on Oliver's shoulders and her chest already rising with the particular slowness that meant she wasn't trying to get there quickly -- she was trying to get there with something left.
He was still looking when she opened her mouth.
He dropped, hard and fast, releasing every web line simultaneously and firing two new ones below him to break the fall. The Cry came out and moved along his trajectory anyway -- the sound finding the air his body had just occupied and pushing through it, and the Carnage suit flagged the frequency a half-second before impact.
The wave caught him sideways.
The suit held, mostly -- the Carnage symbiote pulling back from the frequency in sections, the coverage thinning on his left side where the full force hit, and what got through was enough to spin him in the air at forty feet above the street with the web lines going slack and his equilibrium making a strong case for complete reorganization.
He fired both wrists on the way down.
Two lines. One caught the side of a building. One caught a lamp post and the lamp post lost the argument and came with him until the tension gave and he caught the building line again and managed the fall into a controlled swing that became a controlled slide that became both feet on the pavement with the knees absorbing what the swing hadn't.
He stayed upright.
Behind him, the bike was in the street and so were Oliver and Canary, neither of them having made the landing cleanly. Oliver was already rolling -- one fluid motion into a crouch with the bow coming up from wherever he'd had it. Canary was slower, one hand on the pavement, pushing to her feet with her hair across her face and her expression not confused, not stunned, just resolved in the way of someone who has already decided what comes next and is waiting for their body to be ready.
She was watching Jake.
The Space Hog came down from above, the repulsors cycling to a landing pitch, and Lobo stepped off it with the chain already in his hands and his eyes already on Jake and something in his face that had moved past enjoying itself into something more focused.
He produced the stone.
The red light inside it moved the way it always moved -- restless, pressing at the surface, the patterns shifting in a way that suggested the stone had opinions about what it contained. He held it up without explaining it, without announcing it.
He was just holding it.
Jake stood in the street with the Canary Cry still cycling through his chest and the building debris still falling around him and three targets and the stone he didn't have a name for, and the day pressed down on all of it.
~MimicLord
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