Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King by Alan Grant (best english novels to read .txt) 📗

The Stone King tore one arm free with a wrench that sent Manhunter sailing over his head. Wonder Woman had no space to avoid him, and they both went down in a crumpled heap.

The other arm lifted Superman off the ground, slamming him into the chamber's corbeled ceiling with brutal force.

Lunging at Batman, the Stone King tore through the vigilante's martial arts defense like paper. Clutching fingers raked his costume's Kevlar lining in a trail of blue sparks, slashing clean through it and ripping his cape in half.

As the hand clawed through the air again, Batman back-flipped to avoid it. His heel struck the low ceiling, throwing him off balance.

He recovered to land acrobatically on the chamber floor, relieved that his comrades were already preparing to renew their attack.

Deep within the Earth, tectonic plates ground together, unstoppable force meeting immoveable object. Piezoelectricity shot upward in tiny plasmoid spheres, passing through the bedrock, flowing toward the pyramid.

In the burial chamber, the Stone King felt the shock and welcomed it.

Deeper still, molten rock at a temperature of thousands of degrees swirled and eddied, creating forces as yet unknown to science. As they surged through the ground in massive low-frequency waves, the pyramid absorbed their power and channeled it to the Stone King.

And deeper yet, deeper than any man had gone or ever could, at the very center of the earth, electromagnetic forces pulsed and twisted. The gravity-compressed, near-solid iron core broadcast on a wide range of frequencies, weaving webs of unbelievable force as it spun on its orbit around the sun.

In the chamber, planetary energies caressed the Stone King's skin, pulsing through it, man and planet merging.

With a wild shriek of triumph that shook the entire pyramid and sent boulders cascading down its slopes, the Stone King began to grow.

Clinging to him, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Manhunter were dragged along as he shot up at colossal speed, smashing through the slabbed ceiling in an explosion of stone.

Half the pyramid was demolished as his body expanded and swelled, thrusting hundreds of tons of rock and soil aside as if they were marbles. The plateau on top was already half destroyed, from the last time the power manifested here. The Stone King grew past it, sending avalanches racing down its sides.

Almost deafened by the initial roar, Batman collected his thoughts and sent a desperate message to Superman and Wonder Woman. You must go underground! Disrupt his power at its source!

Batman saw two beings peel away from the monstrous, pulsating figure. They looped once in the air, then dived groundward like twin missiles.

Rocks and debris rained around him as Batman grabbed Green Lantern's arm and tried to haul his teammate to some kind of safety. He raised an arm to ward off a falling chunk of rock, and grunted as another thudded into his shoulder.

The Flash needed help, too, but there was no way Batman could carry both heroes at once. Batman saw that the altar stone had been half torn out of its foundations; he hoped it would provide the Flash with sufficient protection until Batman could return for him.

Typically, his first thoughts weren't for himself. It was at Batman's instruction that Manhunter had negated Green Lantern's force field. If the Emerald Warrior died, crushed by one of the multiton boulders that were crashing around them, Batman would bear the responsibility.

He backed up just in time. A massive lintel beam plunged to the floor just ahead of him. The air was full of choking dust. Batman's respirator would protect him, but what about Lantern?

Desperation lent him strength. He dragged Green Lantern under a huge rectangular block that had fallen at an angle, leaving a crawlspace beneath. Batman pushed the Emerald Warrior in. Hardly satisfactory, but he had no other option.

He moved away again, intent on rescuing the Flash, and was surprised to find the Scarlet Speedster had already recovered.

Stay in cover, the Flash warned him. I'll handle this.

Moving so fast that the plummeting granite blocks seemed to be falling in slow motion, the Scarlet Speedster was able to shove them aside with ease. For the tiny fraction of a second that he touched them, they seemed weightless to him, easy to direct away from his teammates.

Outside, the Stone King reached a height of a hundred feet before his size stabilized. The energy that had kept the pyramid invisible was siphoned back to him, and now a bright glow lit up the sky for miles around.

Towering over the countryside, surrounded by an aura of swirling fluorescence, the Neolithic shaman raised both arms in a gesture of victory. Flashes of blue fire flickered from the bull's skull that covered his head, running down the animal hides that clothed his body in a sparkling, fiery waterfall.

Clinging to the giant's shoulder, J'onn J'onzz dodged the rivers of flame that fell past him. The Martian's only weakness was a vulnerability to fire, which could reduce one of the Justice League's mighty members to abject helplessness. This was why he hadn't accompanied Superman and Wonder Woman on their subterranean mission–the risk of encountering lava and pockets of fire was too great.

Then the Stone King began to chant The low, oscillating mantra was so far down the tonal scale that Manhunter felt it rather than heard it. Great, slow waves of painful nausea writhed through his internal organs.

Ultralow frequency sound, Manhunter thought. Immensely destructive to all physical material. I have to stop him before it shakes my body apart–from the inside!

Manhunter soared away from the massive figure, circling in a broad loop to increase his speed and momentum. He set his teeth grimly against the waves of pain mat continued to assail him and dived headlong toward the Stone King's chest.

Streaking in like a bullet, at the last moment Manhunter increased the density of his molecules to their maximum.

He cannoned into the Stone King's chest with the force of a nuclear explosion.

Superman's heat vision seared through the solid bedrock of the earth's crust, tunneling a path