Chapter 198 – Battle Zones

Klaus smirked as the steel wall slammed into place between him and the American superhero. Foolish woman. Now he could get on to a more useful task than playing bait.

He wasn’t expecting the feeling of something invisibly grabbing his head, and so he didn’t react in time.

The telekinetic grip slammed his face into the steel wall. He slumped to the floor and didn’t get up.

*               *               *

Jo Lupo watched as Finn moved swiftly down the stairwell. Not only was Finn swift, but he was very nearly silent, much to the detriment of the guards they had come across.

Finn was using a nasty little handgun that he’d said Q had just recently invented. Jo figured that meant the SRI was probably still trading on their Terawatt connection, because the only ways Jo knew that the SRI could have gotten it were through Lord Rupert Giles or Hermione Granger. Granted, it was possible that General O’Neill had more SIS connections from his ‘blacked-out files’ days. Technically, the weapon wasn’t a semi-automatic or a revolver. It had a small drum that held a belt of darts that were more of a thin, headless bolt than a bullet. The thick stock held the compressed air cartridges. And it made a noise like you were blowing a fly off your dinner. She’d never heard — or not heard — anything that quiet and still able to take down a soldier instantly.

That might have also had something to do with Finn’s aim. He had dropped four guards with it, and every shot had been through the eye or the temple. He had also taken out four security cameras with the handgun. She thought that was a waste of darts, since as soon as he took out a security camera, the red team had to know he was in the area.

She sat on the railing and slid down to the landing where he waited. It was quicker and quieter than walking down the steps, and gave her a fast look up and down the stairwell, too.

She gave him the hand signal for ‘clear’. He nodded and gave her the signal to continue the advance.

They reached the ground floor and moved out into a courtyard area. Finn switched to his M203, while Jo stuck with her M240G.

Someone had money to burn. These buildings were classy and expensive. The courtyard was elegant. The garden areas over toward that high wall were gorgeous and probably mostly edible, from what she could see. And they looked well-maintained, which meant gardeners and screwing around with soil and other farmer-y shit she figured Finn knew without even thinking about it.

She ghosted along behind Finn and got ready. She was running the scenarios in her head, and most of them looked pretty fucking grim, because as soon as they ran into a dozen heavily-armed Orphans with superpowers, too, two highly-trained American soldiers were going to be toast. Depending on the powers they ran into, they might even be toasted. And Finn knew it, too.

Three Orphans came flying around the corner of the building, while one super-fast Orphan sprinted at maybe eighty miles an hour across the courtyard to a flanking position, and five possibly-normal Orphans just stepped around the corner with AK-47s.

It was time.

Jo slid forward silently, pulled out her combat knife, and buried it in Finn’s lower back.

She twisted her wrist viciously, and Finn collapsed face-down with a crunch, thanks to all the gear he was packing on his tac vest.

The speedster was already at her side. He looked at the massive volume of blood pouring onto the expensive tiles of the courtyard. “Is he dead?”

She glared at him. “Hell no. Are you retarded? I only sliced his kidney apart and did a little whittling on his GI tract. He’s virtually unconscious already, and what consciousness he has is pretty much all pain, all the time, but he won’t be dead for another minute. I could’ve killed him directly, but then I wouldn’t have had the chance to do this.” She stopped and spit on Finn’s body. “Stupid asshole, I’m your mole! Forget that moron Eddings. ME! Finn, I’m laughing at the superior intellect.” She kicked him in the side.

One of the male flyers landed in front of her. She could see flame rippling around his hands and forearms for a couple seconds. He asked, “Codephrase?”

“Masada mesosaur. Jesus, could you guys be any more cliché? At least you didn’t go with ‘Schloss Adler’. But you’ve got a tepui, and you’re going with ‘Masada’, and you’ve got Walsh brewing that dinosaur shit up over there and you have ‘mesosaur’ in the codephrase, too. Why don’t you just spell everything out for the fingies?”

The female flyer landed, as the ground forces moved forward. She said, “You seem pretty hostile, Lieutenant.”

Jo snorted. “Sorry. It’s just … I’ve been having to put up with Colonel Clenched-Sphincter here for fucking months while I waited for you people to do something smart for a change, and then I get here at Collective Central, and you’re running around with more fucking AKs like you’re some third-world homo inferior. It’s pathetic.”

One of the ground forces muttered, “We have a source, and these are convenient to obtain without being truly sub-optimal.”

“Yeah, Christakos. I know. Terawatt and O’Neill pegged them a fucking age ago.” She held up her firearm. “Now this is what you ought to be hauling around. An M240G.” She patted it with her other hand. “I’ve got this baby set to fire between 650 and 750 rounds a minute, and I’m packing ninety pounds of belt-fed ammo on my back. That’s more firepower than your whole team’s carrying, and every fucking one of you ought to be wielding something this heavy or bigger.” She spotted the shadow lurking just around the corner. It was definitely a female shadow, and it was wielding something bigger than a crappy AK. She guessed, “Am I right, Tobias?”

Clare Tobias stepped around the corner with an M32 in one hand. She saluted with her other hand. “Yes, sir, lieutenant. Would’ve been nice to know I didn’t have to expend all that effort trying to convert you, when I needed to focus more on your teammate the man-mountain.”

Jo shrugged. “Carlson? You wouldn’t have been able to convert him. Not unless you’ve got people here who can do bionics or cybernetics, so his wife can have a leg again.”

Tobias shrugged. “We’ve got a cybernetics research program going, but we’re a long way from anything practical. Give us a decade or two.”

The male flyer looked down at the big puddle of blood, which had stopped pouring out from Finn’s lower back but was still oozing. “We’ll have to get someone to power wash this.”

Jo told him, “You’ve got bigger problems than that, flyboy. Terawatt’s around here somewhere, and Action Girl ought to be swinging in to kick your asses any minute now.”

The other male flyer landed. “We’ve got both of them handled. Terawatt shredded one of our primary defensive batteries, but we have three more.”

Jo rolled her eyes. “If you think you’ve got Terawatt stopped already, you’re setting yourself up for one hell of a nasty surprise. That bitch is unstoppable. Gojira smashed her through an entire fucking building and then dropped a skyscraper on her, and even that didn’t kill her. And she kicked that thing’s scaly ass. She took down North Korea’s whole Evil Legion of Evil, or whatever the fuck they called themselves, and she didn’t even have her hairdo messed up. I’ve seen her in action. You think you’re tough? You ain’t seen nothing yet. You’d better get every super-powered Orphan you’ve got and prepare for some serious warfare.”

The fire-wielding flyer looked at the other two and admitted, “We are all the supers we have. So far.”

Jo looked around and guessed, “So you’ve got three flyers. You’re a pyrokinetic. She’s a telekinetic. He’s something else. You’ve got that speedster. Don’t tell me you don’t have anything else.”

“How’d you know I’m a telekinetic?” the female flyer wondered.

“You’ve got a utility belt full of throwing knives and throwing spikes. You wouldn’t be bothering with that if you had something better.”

The guy she’d mentally dubbed ‘flyboy’ admitted, “Two of our infantry over there can do the silvery shapeshift, and he can hurl lightning, but not as accurately as Terawatt. Atron’s still working the kinks out of her GC-161 variants. The latest one had about a thirty percent success rate, but it also had about a thirty percent death rate.”

Jo shrugged. “You ought to give her a couple gold stars. The original GC-161 didn’t work anywhere that well. I can tell you that, even if no one else seems to have figured it out. Atron dumped GC-161 hazardous wastes all over the place. Paradise Valley’s got an abnormal cancer rate, and only one flying superheroine. And that’s still better than those North Korea morons managed. Nine useful powers out of two thirds of a million people? And a couple of them had serious limitations? Losers.”

Scowling, the flying telekinetic said, “Well, we’re Orphans. We don’t need additional superpowers. We just need to be prepared to handle your teammates.”

Jo figured that meant some dedicated Orphans had taken the stuff, even knowing it might kill them pretty horribly. She added, “Your stupid chopper pilot Eddings didn’t turn himself in when he got that KOBO email, so O’Neill and Finn and Miller have been feeding him disinformation ever since. And believe me, O’Neill is a hell of a lot smarter than he acts. So I want to talk to someone in charge and debrief properly.”

“Dr. Walsh is occupied, and Dr. Locke is working on a time-critical project, while Ms. Christakos is busy down below, but we can take you to speak with our base security command.”

Jo shrugged. “I guess that’ll do.”

*               *               *

Danielle Atron used her controls to take a step forward while aiming both wall-mounted heavy machine guns at Terawatt.

The woman strode forward and started walking down the stairs toward Danielle. She didn’t even bother to glance over at the firepower mounted on the walls. She just focused on Danielle.

And she strode down the stairs like she was some kind of Fury come to wreak vengeance on the wicked.

Danielle immediately fired off several hundred rounds at her arch-enemy.

Nothing happened. Terawatt just kept walking down the stairs like some kind of Terminator. The bullets seared through the air and … missed. Danielle adjusted the aim, and then fiddled with the computerized auto-aim, and she still wasn’t hitting. Every single bullet just detoured slightly and ripped up the wall behind Terawatt.

That wasn’t good.

Danielle pivoted the laser on her shoulder and the wall-mounted maser, and activated the triggers with her TK. Nothing happened. She pressed again, and the holographic control system told her that her shoulder-mount system had shorted out. Somehow. Either Terawatt had phenomenal TK feel and a ridiculous understanding of the technology, or else … What if Terawatt also had control over probability at the quantum level? Danielle suddenly felt the need to gulp.

She swiveled the two grenade launchers to point at Terawatt. Danielle still wasn’t sure the power armor would stand up to multiple nearby grenade explosions, because she didn’t trust Walsh’s scientists as far as she could chuck their lab building.

Terawatt was at the bottom of the stairs, and still striding forward. And she looked determined. Angry. Ruthless. Not like the Terawatt that Danielle had faced back in Bakersfield. This Terawatt looked like she wanted to rip someone’s spleen out. And force-feed it to her victim.

Terawatt glanced coldly at Danielle in her power armor, and the weaponry around the room, then dismissed all of it as if it wasn’t worth looking at. She growled, “Let’s dance … bitch.”

Danielle suddenly realized she might be in real trouble.

*               *               *

Hanna tried to make a lightning-fast grab for her sidearm, but her muscles locked up as her body convulsed in agony.

Maggie Walsh knelt down next to Hanna. “You won’t be able to move anything below your jaw without getting some rather painful neural feedback. I’d recommend trying not to move at all. Even swallowing might prove quite painful.”

Hanna tried to strike Walsh in the throat, but as soon as she tried to move her arm, her entire body convulsed again. The pain was astonishingly intense. At least her body was still breathing and her heart was still beating. For the moment.

Walsh slid the sidearm from under Hanna’s armpit and looked it over. Then Walsh leaned forward … and gently stroked the hair out of Hanna’s face.

The smile on Walsh’s face frightened Hanna even worse than seeing those dinosaurs when they just decided to leave her alone because she smelled like she was part of their pack.

*               *               *

Julie was having second thoughts about this whole Batgirl persona, even if the skintight black costume and the long red-haired wig looked really sexy. She had taken out half the anti-aircraft battery before Batman’s smoke and gas weapons had cleared enough for them to target her, but now she was in trouble. She was pinned down behind the trunk of a fallen tree, and half a dozen soldiers were blasting her surroundings to pieces with their machine guns.

Suddenly she heard a noise loud enough to make out even over the firing of the heavy weapons. It sounded like a hundred howler monkeys. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what could make a sound like that.

She figured she had better find out, and fast. She used a tiny periscope to take a look. She only called it a bat-iscope when she was trying to get a rise out of Bruce.

Holy primate invasions, Batman! It really was a hundred howler monkeys! Well, an awful lot of howler monkeys. And smack in the middle of the pack of monkeys was a redhead in an ‘African safari’ outfit and a Terawatt-like superheroine mask, swinging along on the vines as easily as Bruce swung on those bat-grapples. And … a chimpanzee in blue shorts and a blue-and-white striped tank top? Jesus, that was maybe weirder than a supervillain who was part plant.

The monkeys swarmed over the soldiers’ defenses like they were playground equipment, and … holy crap those things were strong! They looked cute and harmless. They really, really weren’t.

The superheroine made howler monkey noises as the monkeys ripped firearms out of the arms of full-grown men and smacked soldiers hard enough to knock them over. Then the woman began making pig noises that made the hair on the back of Julie’s neck stand up. A herd of peccaries charged in and began ripping up everything they could get at. Those peccaries did NOT look cute and harmless. They looked more dangerous than a machine gun emplacement.

Julie leapt out of her hiding spot and fired off a grapple that let her swing past where six monkeys and several peccaries were turning a manned heavy machine gun emplacement into a garbage pile. She hastily made sure the last truck-based missiles couldn’t be fired, and then she turned her attention to the Strelas, making sure they were all inoperative according to official Bat-guidelines.

The superheroine dropped to the ground near her and hooted at the monkeys, then grunted at the peccaries. They all stopped what they were doing and turned to face her. She grinned at Julie. “Hi! I’m Shaman. Did Batman tell everyone I was coming, too? Let’s head out.”

Julie looked around at the battlefield that had been soldiers and emplacements just moments ago. She remembered watching ‘Captain Planet’. She wondered why she had thought that Ma-Ti’s power was stupid and useless.

*               *               *

Sam Carter liked this new arrangement. Ultraman was flying horizontally, and he was holding her against his chest so she was face-down and essentially a ‘belly gunner’. And she’d made sure that his hands weren’t anywhere she didn’t want hands wandering. She also wasn’t going to think about what happened to a lot of belly gunners in aircraft that crash-landed.

She had easily strafed the previous anti-air battery before they had landed in the center of it and ripped apart a set of emplacements that had been designed so you couldn’t accidentally shoot at anyone in the middle of your encampment.

They were doing that same maneuver again. Once she took down the soldiers in the center, they only needed to take out the anti-infantry emplacements around the exterior and make sure their MANPADS were out of action. Then they could move on around the tepui. She suspected the next position would already be out of commission, thanks to Batgirl and the Batcopter’s weaponry.

She opened fire with her P90, taking out the guards and the operators around the missile trucks, as Ultraman flew them in and landed in the middle of the area. That left four small, concrete machine gun or grenade launcher emplacements with anti-infantry weaponry, none of which could fire on them.

Ultraman sprinted to the far emplacement and tore the concrete roof off it, while she extended her right arm palm-out and concentrated. Her blast smashed in the side of the closest emplacement, hurling rubble into the soldiers who weren’t on the far side of the center post. Ultraman smashed the next emplacement in line, while she blasted in the side and roof of the remaining emplacement.

And she gasped. There was a monster standing just this side of the next-to-last emplacement. A big, dangerous monster. It looked like a seven-foot-tall orc, only uglier and more massive if that was possible. Horrid spittle drooled past its fangs and out of its mouth. It spotted her, and it quickly picked up in one hand a chunk of concrete that had to weigh over four hundred pounds.

There was no doubt in her mind what was about to follow. A thing like that didn’t pick up a weight like that for a little cardio workout in the middle of a battlefield.

She swung her arm to point at the creature and focused as hard as she could. She usually needed four or five seconds minimum. She didn’t have anything like that.

And the thing was fast. It wound up and threw that concrete slab like it was a baseball. She strained as hard as she could, and she managed to fire a partial burst.

It was just enough. The concrete shattered in mid-air, but plenty of the fragments still hit her hard enough to knock her down. She figured she was extremely lucky nothing shredded her or even punched its way completely through her. But the monster wasn’t stopping.

And it was in exactly the wrong place. Her situational awareness was good enough that she knew where Ultraman should have been, and that was exactly where the orc-thing had been standing. And he was nowhere in sight now.

Sam remembered hearing stories from Tera about the threats she had faced, and what she had needed to do in order to stop them. Sam figured she was risking her life, but she did have a rational model of the situation to work from.

She pulled up her P90 and fired. She started just to the left of the thing and fired, turning to her left and firing across the missile systems and the trucks and the face of the tepui. She ignored the creature, even as it charged at her.

A man screamed, and suddenly the creature vanished. In its place was Ultraman, charging right at her. Damn, that was going to hurt. She tried to dive off to the side, but he was moving far too fast for her to get out of the way in time.

At the last moment, Ultraman reacted. He leapt upward and cleared her easily.

She rolled to her feet and darted over to the trucks, where a guy in ill-fitting BDUs was holding his chest and slowly sliding down the side of a missile truck.

The guy sank onto his butt, while blood poured out over his hands and began to trickle from the corner of his mouth. He looked like he wanted to ask her a question, but he couldn’t get a word out.

Ultraman sprinted over at high speed and stopped right beside her. “How’d you know? I thought I was fighting a big, hairy monster.” He cringed. “I could’ve killed you!”

She looked down at the guy, who was fading fast. She had an emergency med kit, but nothing to handle something like a bullet through the lungs and at least one major artery. She could patch herself up if she took a flesh wound in the leg or if she got dosed with that hate plague, but this guy needed immediate admission to an ER, and major surgery using a heart-lung machine.

She explained, “I knew Psych was one of the escapees, so this sort of attack was a possibility. And the ‘monster’ was standing right where you should have been, plus it just appeared out of nowhere while I was concentrating on my situational awareness, which made it likely I was looking at an illusion.”

Ultraman winced. “I never even thought about that. I really need a ton of work before I’ll be any good at this.”

She told him, “You’re already good at this. You just need more training. Maybe you should take a summer job working with Team Two so you could learn the sort of thing soldiers learn.”

“Can we help him?”

She admitted, “I doubt it. And as long as he’s conscious, he’s a threat.”

Over her comms, she heard a gravel voice. “B to Alphabet. We have a threat. Proceed with phase one ASAP.”

Ultraman looked at her and unwillingly said, “I guess we better get going, and fast.”

She nodded. She wasn’t expecting him to scoop her up in his arms and sprint so fast that she had trouble getting a breath of air.

*               *               *

“B to Alphabet. We have a threat. Proceed with phase one ASAP.” Batman was already diving off the truck cab as he called out the warning.

Azure Crush was driving straight at Bane, but he doubted she knew the man’s capabilities. Az was a ‘grab ’em and smash ’em’ type, not a scientific fighter. Batman assumed that she thought she could plow through Bane and his team without any problems.

But Bane looked a lot bigger and a lot more dangerous than in their previous encounter, and that minion was off to the side with some sort of remote control panel. Batman knew Bane’s minion was an inventor of weaponry, so there was no telling what might be hidden in the greenery or flying around the battle zone.

Even worse, Poison Ivy was standing off to the side, and she was armed. She wasn’t armed with a rifle or a knife. She was armed with dozens of her vines, several of her pod-bearing plants, and something new. Two massive trees that were moving to protect her from the vehicle.

Batman was worried about that. How had she created new, mobile plants that quickly? Could she control all plants around her? He had been certain that she could only control the plants she had genetically spliced with her own altered DNA. If she could now do that in a matter of hours instead of months, she could take over vast stretches of the jungle in no time. This could be just as serious a crisis as The Collective.

But he had no time to contemplate that.

A three-foot-wide quadcopter strafed the right side of the truck cab, shooting out its tires, and the cab suddenly rolled onto its right side, skidding along until it hit a boulder. Batman snap-threw a batarang and nailed the rotor system of the quadcopter, causing it to crash into the ground.

Bane strode forward, but the windshield of the truck cab exploded outward, forcing him to dive to the side to avoid it. Az ripped her way out of the front of the cab, growling, “What the hell, this is better.”

One of the trees creaked as it reached down and grabbed her in four massive limbs.

She reached up with her free hand and ripped the biggest limb off the tree. “I ain’t puttin’ up with shit from some ‘Wizard of Oz’ reject!” She twisted her confined arm and tore through the tree branch holding that arm against her side. Then she took the torn-off limb and smacked the tree with it. Wood shattered and splinters flew everywhere.

But Batman was already using his grapples to move through the tree canopy. It wasn’t as if there were clear lanes to swing along, so it was an intricate effort that required much shorter swings and far more detours. But he doubted that Azure Crush was going to be able to stop Bane and that minion and Poison Ivy as well, so he was planning ahead. In fact, he was estimating how far Az would manage to get before requiring help from him, and he was proactively moving to support her.

*               *               *

Azure Crush ripped her way free from the stupid tree and then punched it right in the trunk. Wood flew all over the place, and it tilted. She grabbed the stupid boulder the truck had slid into, and she hurled it right at Tall, Dark, and Leafy.

Bingo! She nailed that sucker about fifteen feet up the trunk, and it tipped right over.

The green bitch with the red hair screamed. Someone was pissed off. The Bat-dude had told her that the green bitch was part plant and these plants were part her, so she was super-protective. Tough shit. And how the hell did she keep her hair looking that good in this heat and humidity? Probably one of those superpowers people like Az didn’t get to have.

Az moved right at the Bane guy. Bats had warned everyone about this guy, too, but if Action Girl could take him, Az was pretty sure she could punch him into next week.

And he was a big musclebound goon. She was a big girl, but this guy was huge. He probably weighed twice what she did, and it was all muscle. Bats had said the guy wore one of those Mexican wrestler masks, and she could see why with that head and that non-hair and that weird mask over his nose and mouth. Fuck, he made Old Fat Jo Baker look like a fucking Disney princess.

And here he came, right at her. Just the way she liked it. She threw a punch right at his jaw.

He slammed her fist off to the side with an open palm and followed that up with a punch to her face and a fancy karate kick to her stomach. The punch caught her right in the jaw and almost knocked her over. The kick was even harder, and made her stagger back a couple feet. She tried to grab his foot after he kicked her, but she missed by a mile. Son of a bitch, he was strong! And fast!

Had Action Girl really kicked his ass?

Okay, he wasn’t anywhere near as strong as Captain Hairball had been, but he was faster. And that was another fucking martial arts move. Since when did super-strong guys start going with the Bruce Lee shit?

Maybe Terawatt was right. Again. Az could really get to hate someone who looked like Terawatt and was fucking right all the time, if it wasn’t for the whole ‘saved my ass’ thing and the ‘saved Sergei when I was about to accidentally kill him’ thing. And the ‘you are making fun of me on national TV and I will just call up and be nice about it’ thing.

Az watched Bane come at her again, and she faked an uppercut then went with a hard gut-punch with her other hand. He blocked the uppercut even if he had to work at it, so she caught him by surprise just as he was kicking her in the knee.

If she’d been a normal chick, he probably would’ve crushed her leg with that one, the bastard. On the other hand, if she’d been a normal chick, her punch to his gut wouldn’t have knocked him into the air so he landed on his back twenty feet away.

He just did this shoulder-roll move so he was standing back up and facing her. And if he was going to fight dirty, then he was so asking for it. She was gonna be wearing his nuts on a necklace.

She charged him, but he was charging right at her, too. She tried to smash right into him, but he did this freaky martial arts cartwheel around her and kicked her right in the kidney. She stumbled and fell, and he just cartwheeled right at her. As she rolled onto her back, he tried to flip over and smash her face in. His boot came right down at her nose.

She got her hand in between her face and his foot. Some normal chick? That would’ve been useless. He would’ve smashed her hand into her skull. Or right through her skull. But Azure Crush? Hells no. She pushed hard, and he ended up flying a good ten feet in the air.

Not that it did any good. He landed gracefully, and he was already trying to kick the fuck out of her before she was even standing up all the way. She got a solid hand in the way of his kick to her face, but he had a follow-up kick to her stomach that she let him take, and another kick at her throat. The kick to her stomach hurt some, but not enough to slow her down. She got a grip on the end of his boot when his foot came in at her throat.

He snapped his leg back so hard that she ended up with a chunk of shoe in her hand and nothing else. But she was getting pissed, and she knew she did stupid shit when she lost her temper. That wasn’t good. She was already just barely staying even with this fuckwad. If she lost her temper, she had no chance.

There was a small explosion off to the side, and Batman swung in to land twenty feet to her right. He growled in that sexy ‘I am way scarier than I look’ voice he had, “Tag, partner. I’ve got Bane. You stop Poison Ivy and her plants.”

She had no idea how a guy with no superpowers was supposed to take on a brick shithouse like Bane, but she’d agreed to follow his orders, and she really didn’t want Terawatt to be all disappointed in her.

She spun to her left and charged past Bane’s sidekick who looked like one of his gadgets had blown up in his face, courtesy of one of those bat-boomerang things. She yelled, “Okay, plant-bitch, let’s do this!”

*               *               *

Batman let Bane glance his way. The man was just as fast as before, and still as well-trained, only he was significantly stronger. Bane was bound to assume that Batman would be easy prey.

Only Bane was now depending on whatever was pumping into his body from the tanks on his back. And Bane no longer had minions supporting him and creating distractions for him.

Bane moved toward him in a smooth motion that was probably Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Then Bane dived forward into a capoeira stance with his hands on the ground, and he tried to kick a hole in Batman’s chest.

If Batman hadn’t already seen Bane use capoeira on Azure Crush, or if he hadn’t researched the fighting styles Bane could have learned, he could have been caught by surprise. He dived to the side, did his own cartwheel to get into position, and threw a batarang. It sliced through two of the tubes pumping biochemicals into Bane’s upper body. Black liquid squirted out of the tubes and high into the air, revealing that the liquid was under fairly high pressure. Probably at least a hundred PSI, judging from the height.

Bane reacted immediately, moving into an upright stance and protecting his back from another attack.

But Batman was already throwing another batarang, this time underhand and at a much lower target. The breathing mask Bane wore had to limit the man’s range of vision. Bane didn’t spot the batarang in time, and it sank into Bane’s right foot just in front of his ankle bone.

Bane didn’t even react. Batman had wondered if the mask might be providing some sort of gas providing additional powers, or providing protection against some environmental stress the chemicals made Bane susceptible to, or one of several other options. It looked like the mask was pumping some manner of painkiller, which suggested this massive dosage of the strength chemical was injuring Bane constantly and possibly even killing him slowly.

That also meant that punching or kicking Bane would be a massive waste of effort and would only give Bane a chance to deal out serious damage to his opponent. However, that wasn’t what the batarang had done. No, the batarang had damaged the inferior extensor retinaculum and the extensor digitorum longus tendons in the top of Bane’s foot.

Bane tried another smooth glide-step, and his right foot refused to cooperate. The front of the foot drooped and caught on the ground, causing Bane to stagger. The painkiller in his system was making Bane’s ‘invulnerability’ into a weakness that Batman could exploit.

Batman shifted to Bane’s left and moved into a jeet kune do stance, bringing his hands up too high as if he was expecting to be blocking overhand strikes from Bane. It gave Bane an opening, and the man took it.

Bane tried to slide into a balanced stance so he could launch a kick at Batman’s lower body, but his injured foot — which he wasn’t feeling — failed him, and he staggered forward, having to catch himself with both hands. But he expertly turned that into a capoeira maneuver.

Batman was already two moves ahead of Bane. When Bane went down on his hands, Batman slashed through another two tubes. When Bane smoothly transferred his motion into a capoeira stance, Batman slashed through two tubes going down to Bane’s legs and threw a batarang as he dived out of Bane’s way. The batarang destroyed the pump connected to the tanks on Bane’s back, and black fluid poured out of the tanks.

Batman somersaulted backward out of Bane’s reach, just in case Bane was still mobile. But the man seemed to shrink in on himself. He lay there face-down on the ground and struggled futilely to get to his knees.

Batman used his grapple to swing off to the side and around Bane, on his way toward Poison Ivy.

But it was already too late to help Azure Crush.

 
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