The Batwing was nearly the pinnacle of Earth's aircraft technology: fast, heavily armed, and relatively easy to operate. Its ability to outpace even Doomsday at full speed during the future Dawn of Justice conflict demonstrates this point.
Now, facing the pale-skinned, iron-muscled giant zombie Grundy, it held an overwhelming speed advantage. Even with Thea's enhanced dynamic vision, she could only catch a blur as it streaked by. Then the Batwing's cannons roared to life, unloading a torrent of bullets into the zombie's head, eyes, heart, and other vital areas.
Solomon Grundy had no defense against this sudden aerial assault and bellowed in pain.
The barrage lasted thirty seconds. Shell casings rained down like hail—standard rounds, incendiary bullets, armor-piercing shots—all fired relentlessly at the zombie as if ammo grew on trees.
Occasional explosions mixed with Grundy's howls reached Thea's ears. She couldn't help but think she was the poor one here. Bruce must have spent millions in those thirty seconds alone. What a guy.
Smoke and fire filled the scene, forcing everyone to pull back and assess the Batwing's handiwork.
"Roar—" Grundy staggered out of the haze. The barrage had done some damage. His right eye was blinded, his arms and shoulders bore varying degrees of injury, and his pale skin was riddled with bullet holes. Yet none pierced through; his muscles had stopped them cold. No blood flowed from the wounds, which writhed as they slowly tried to heal.
"It's regenerating, and pretty fast too," Thea said, maxing out her goggles' scanning function. The sight of his pallid, dead flesh turned her stomach, but she spoke up to warn the others.
"Does your freeze arrow work on it?" Bruce asked. He'd noticed the regeneration too and felt a pang of frustration. The recovery speed was astonishingly fast. In just those few seconds, the destroyed eye had already reformed. The Batwing was built for speed, not sustained dogfighting, and its ammo reserves were limited.
"To some extent, but this thing's too strong. It can just break free," Thea replied. To demonstrate, she swooped in, firing a freeze arrow from two hundred meters away. It struck Grundy's shoulder, freezing it briefly, but he shattered the ice with brute force.
Bruce observed for a few moments. "It seems to slow down its recovery speed."
That was stating the obvious, Thea thought privately. Anything atomic can be frozen, and of course, it can't recover if it's frozen solid.
"Got any bright ideas?" Bruce asked, his tone more like a mentor testing a protégé than a direct order.
The best plan would be to call in some heavy hitters to slug it out with Grundy, but she knew Bruce wouldn't go for that.
"Lasers wouldn't do much, and nukes are off the table. Maybe we freeze it solid and bury it deep underground," Thea suggested.
Her idea wasn't far from Bruce's own plan: lure Grundy into a valley, seal it off, and pour in quick-drying concrete. Neither strategy was brilliant; both exploited Grundy's inability to fly, but they were the best they had.
Both plans had merits and flaws. Thea didn't have enough arrows, and there weren't any suitably sized valleys near Gotham. As Bruce weighed the options, Selina's voice crackled over the comms channel.
"The Talons got away, but we managed to nab Mr. Freeze. Could his tech help?" Her voice was shaky; clearly, capturing him had been a struggle.
This was good news. Thea's freeze arrows were a stopgap at best, and her magic wasn't ready for the spotlight. Besides, she didn't know flashy spells like fireballs or ice storms; those kinds of magic had largely faded from the modern world anyway. Missiles outdid fireballs any day. Modern magic was subtler, more about mystery and bypassing conventional defenses.
"Then let's go with the freezing plan," Bruce said. Scouring the countryside for a pit seemed impractical, and stumbling into another hero's turf would be embarrassing.
He and Thea hashed out details over the comms, and they quickly identified several problems.
First, Mr. Freeze's gun had a pitiful range. Despite Selina and the others removing his helmet and holding a dagger to his throat to force his cooperation, he said it only had a range of fifty meters. It wasn't designed for combat at longer distances.
Frankly, fifty meters was dangerously close. Grundy's super strength posed a massive threat; he could easily hurl a car or a street sign with lethal force. At fifty meters, even Thea's reflexes wouldn't save her, let alone Mr. Freeze, whose icy physiology made him sluggish. It'd be a death sentence.
Bruce wasn't that ruthless, and Mr. Freeze certainly wouldn't volunteer for a suicide mission.
"How do we pin it down?" This question hung over both their minds.
Theoretically, by exploiting thermal shock (the principle of rapid expansion and contraction), alternating Thea's freeze and fire arrows, occasionally mixed with high-impact armor-piercing shots, could inflict significant damage on the giant zombie. Atomic structures are vulnerable to rapid temperature changes, and even Grundy, despite his strength, was still a carbon-based lifeform. He wasn't some abstract entity yet.
Bruce's arsenal could do the same, cost be damned. However, both billionaires independently shied away from these options, viewing them as wasteful measures akin to throwing money down the drain, only to be considered as a last resort.
"I nabbed Hugo Strange from the asylum," Commissioner Gordon chimed in opportunely. "He says this zombie was fished out of the river after the water levels rose. Its own consciousness isn't awake; its body is being controlled by a virtual personality they forcibly implanted."
Gordon's intel didn't shift the tide much. Thea already suspected Grundy wasn't the legend she'd heard of; he seemed too dim. The river flood bit gave her a shiver, though.
Did my rain-making summon this hidden boss? Thea listened with detached interest as Commissioner Gordon read out various experiment parameters. She had to admit, the Court of Owls had some capability. Fearing they couldn't control the giant zombie, they combined their radiation technology with brainwashing techniques to create a pseudo-personality to control the zombie's actions.
However, this personality was too fragile, or perhaps Grundy's body was too powerful. Control slipped fast, and chaos followed.
So they bailed from Arkham, leaving the mess for the heroes to clean up.
Typical—cause the problem, then leave others to clean up the mess.