Chapter 393: New Vehicle -- The Villain
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
It began as something irregular and heavy, like a novice finding the rhythm of a drum -- each impact arriving just slightly off from the last, the ground absorbing the force with a deep, resonant thud.
Within a few seconds, the rhythm found itself. The gaps closed. What followed was a continuous rolling percussion, relentless and escalating, the kind of sound that suggests something very large moving with serious intent.
It was, in fact, something very large.
On Batman's activation signal, the enormous mech stored in the Batwing's hold at Wakanda's border came online.
Designation: Villain.
The dense tree cover of the border jungle began to fall. Anywhere the Villain mech moved, it opened a corridor approximately three meters wide -- and in most cases, the trees hadn't reached the ground before the mech had already moved past them. The sound that carried across Wakanda's terrain was the rhythm of six mechanical legs alternating against the earth, each impact resonating through solid ground and traveling outward until it became something close to rolling thunder.
It had barely cleared the jungle's edge when Wakanda's military encircled it.
Dozens of Wakandan warriors emerged from the tree line and the terrain, weapons already raised. Their spears caught the low light with the pale blue luminescence of weapons built around Vibranium technology. Behind the ground forces, three hovering fighter craft and five armored vehicles had their weapons trained on the mech -- cannons of the same cold blue glow, charged and waiting.
The Villain mech stood at the jungle's edge. All six legs still.
"Stop where you are! Exit the mech! Invader!"
Fifty kilometers away, at the Vibranium mine, Batman's brow tightened.
The scan data coming through from the Villain told him everything he needed to know about the Wakandan ordnance. The spears could penetrate the mech's current armor plating. The fighters and vehicles could put it in a sustained-damage condition that would render it ineffective. Under normal circumstances, this was a problem.
He had other data to process simultaneously.
When the Enchantress had reversed time and hurled Klaue into the Vibranium mine, the sonic weapon at the end of Klaue's arm had still been firing. The weapon had been discharging actively into a Vibranium-dense environment -- and Vibranium, Batman knew, was acutely sensitive to specific sonic frequencies. The interaction between the weapon's output and the raw ore had destabilized the Vibranium at a molecular level, and Klaue had been in the middle of it. The sonic energy and the man had converged into something that was now neither.
Batman threw a web line toward the high ground, swung clear of the Noise's latest discharge, and landed on the far side of a rock formation.
He had no time to attempt a remote hack on the Wakandan vehicles from this range. If the situation at the mine dragged on, the Noise would find him eventually.
But he had prepared for this. He had, as a matter of practice, prepared for the contingency within the contingency.
He pressed a button.
Inside the Villain mech, fifty-odd kilometers to the west, a sealed glass tube fractured. The Pym Particles it contained flowed into a small disc-shaped device waiting to receive them. A mechanical release dropped the disc from its housing. It fell, struck the inner surface of the mech's armor plating, and adhered.
The hum it produced was felt before it was heard.
The Wakandan warriors watched the mech grow.
It did not grow gradually. It grew with a speed that made stepping backward involuntary rather than considered. By the time their eyes had adjusted to the new scale, one of the mech's mechanical legs was already thicker than their armored vehicles from wheel to roof. The full height of the machine had reached twelve meters. Its width was approaching fifteen. The proportions of an enormous deep-sea crustacean, all hard plating and angular limbs, now looming over them against the sky.
One leg rose slowly. It fell.
The ground took the impact with a sound like a close lightning strike, and when the leg lifted again, it left a crater half a meter deep.
The Wakandan fighters and vehicles had been a genuine threat to the mech three minutes ago. They were not a genuine threat to this. The fighters scrambled sideways to avoid being walked on. The armored vehicles stopped moving entirely.
The Villain mech didn't alter its course. It moved toward the Vibranium mine at a pace that a charging rhinoceros would have found competitive, its six legs striking the earth in thunderous sequence, making no effort to conceal itself. Boulders that sat in its direct path were sent spinning. Low earthen ridges were simply stepped flat.
The three fighters recovered their composure and attempted to locate weak points in the enlarged armor. Their success was minimal.
"What is that thing?" The Wakandan warriors watched from what they had decided was a safe distance. "Why is it growing?"
One of the fighters made the intuitive connection. "Could it be the prince -- no, the king -- " He reconsidered his titles twice. "Could it be T'Challa? Has he returned?"
"If it were T'Challa, he would simply tell us," said another. "He wouldn't grow to fifteen meters and step over our positions."
The warrior with the most beast-teeth threaded on his necklace -- an earned mark of rank among this unit -- made the call.
"I need two of you to get close to that thing and find the entry hatch. The rest of you, follow it and maintain contact. I'll notify M'Baku and have him reach out to Princess Shuri for a remote hack attempt. Under no circumstances does that mech reach the Vibranium mine."
The fighters stayed high, circling, continuing their search for weak points. The ground forces moved in pursuit at a distance.
The mech's heading was unmistakable.
"It's going straight for the mine." A Wakandan warrior's voice carried the flatness of a bad diagnosis.
"Could Klaue's people be behind this?"
The unit captain said nothing to that, because an unanswered question was still better than a wrong answer. He focused on the mech's trajectory and kept moving.
The Villain's footsteps traveled a long way through Wakanda's terrain. Twelve meters of mech putting full weight through six points of contact created a ground transmission that spread outward for kilometers. The closest the mech's route would bring it to the royal city was under ten kilometers.
The sound reached the Vibranium mine.
It reached further than that.
Forty meters beneath the royal city, in the underground space where the ancestral temple stood, the guardian black panther was no longer in one piece. Skurge had worked methodically. The limbs had gone first, each severed and each dissolving into purple mist before reaching the floor. Then the tail. Then, with one final downswing of the axe, the head.
The great guardian came apart entirely, its whole body breaking into the same purple mist and dispersing.
Skurge stood over the empty space where it had been.
Nearby, the Enchantress remained crouched before Venom Robin, his face held in her hands. Robin's tongue hung loosely at the corner of his mouth, his white eye-markings giving nothing away. They were decorative, not functional -- he had no eyes to look into.
And yet Amora had found her way inside anyway.
What she found there made her stop.
A sword. A massive double-edged blade covered in black and deep red veins that branched and spread across its surface like something grown rather than forged. The veins pulsed. Slowly, steadily, with the patient rhythm of something alive. The sword did not sit still -- it breathed.
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