Every officer there froze. Every weapon came back up. The truck's trailer rocked from side to side, slowly at first and then with increasing violence.
DUN!
An enormous dent appeared in the trailer's door — punched outward from the inside.
DUN!
My eyes widened. Something was coming, and it was coming fast. I moved quickly, firing web lines from the lamp posts on either side of the highway, creating several thick, concrete-hard strands stretched across the road. I could only hope they'd be of some use.
"Everybody get down!" I yelled.
DUN!
The trailer doors tore free from their hinges and spun through the air over our heads. What landed on the highway in front of us was a walking tank.
It was enormous — a hulking grey bipedal suit layered in armour plating, twin machine guns mounted to its flanks, a missile launcher fixed to its back, and a horn the size of a grown man jutting from its semi-humanoid head. The impact of its landing cracked the asphalt.
The Rhino. One of Peter Parker's most notorious enemies. And spray-painted in bold white letters along its side were two words: HammerTech.
"Oh, hell," I breathed.
The cockpit cracked open. A broad-faced man with a flat nose and cold, hard eyes grinned out at us like he'd just won something. "I am the Rhino! Get out of my way!"
He dropped to all fours. The machine's systems whirred and calibrated as it locked its orientation. Then it launched.
It was headed straight for Stacy.
"Look out!" I fired a web line and yanked Stacy sideways, pulling him clear as the Rhino ploughed through the police cruisers like they were made of cardboard. I looked back at the captain. "Are you alright?"
"Y-yes," he said, voice tight. "Thank you."
"No problem." I scanned the scene — no other casualties — then looked back to see the Rhino switch lanes and land hard on the other side of the highway. The road shook. He was trying to escape.
I launched myself onto a lamp post, fired two web lines around the Rhino's torso, and immediately felt the full force of his momentum drag me off my feet and send me flying forward as he leapt down from the elevated highway and into the streets below.
'I have to stop him.'
I hauled myself forward on the web lines as he charged into the busy intersection below. Cars scattered. People abandoned their vehicles and ran screaming as the Rhino tossed them aside with his horn, barely slowing.
"Hey, Grey! Over here!" He didn't react. Could he even hear me through all that armour? I landed on his back and crawled toward the cockpit, rapping on the reinforced glass. "Hello in there?"
"Get off!" he roared.
"Sorry — can't do that." I smothered the cockpit glass in webbing, hoping to blind him.
"Foolish boy. I can still see!" He laughed, shaking his head. I held on.
He must be using cameras, I realised. I scanned the exterior and spotted three — one beneath the horn, one on each shoulder. I fired quickly, coating all three in webbing.
"What did you do?!" Rhino bellowed.
"Just something I threw together." I adjusted the viscosity setting on my web-shooters to maximum hardness and crawled to his undercarriage, launching cables at his legs and pinning the armour to the road. The forward momentum combined with the sudden resistance was enough to send him tumbling.
I leapt clear as he crashed down onto the street. I fired rapidly, webbing both arms to the ground, then coating the gun barrels and missile housings for good measure. I yanked a nearby sewer cover free with a web line and swung it overhead like a club, bringing it down hard on the cockpit glass.
"Stop it! You'll destroy everything!"
"Not everything. Just the suit," I said, and brought the lid down again. The sewer cover bent inward with each strike, but I could see fracture lines spreading across the glass. It was heavy-duty — rated to withstand an explosion, by the look of it. But not indefinitely.
The glass shattered.
The man inside yelled as shards nicked his cheek. I reached in, found the manual emergency release lever — there was always one in a system like this — and pulled it. The back of the armour split open with a hydraulic hiss, and I dragged the operator out by the collar.
He was bleeding lightly from the cut on his cheek and looked considerably less intimidating without ten tonnes of armour around him. I held him up and growled, "Who paid you?"
"I — I don't know what you mean!"
"You're not smart enough to steal tech like this, let alone operate it. Who. Paid. You?"
"I don't know! I swear I don't know!"
I turned him toward the wreckage. "You see that sewer cover? It's supposed to be solid cast iron. That glass was rated against a direct missile impact. I broke both. What do you think I can do to you?"
"Please don't hurt me! I didn't do anything!"
"You didn't do anything?!" I spun him back to face the street — flipped cars, shattered asphalt, bleeding civilians. "Look at what you did! Look at the people you hurt!"
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"
"One chance. Tell me everything, or every single person here that you hurt gets a pound of you to remember it by. And if I run out of you, I'll use the bones."
The words broke him. "His name was Gentle, that's all I know! He reached out to me — said a client wanted to hire my crew to steal some gear. He provided everything — cash, the truck, all of it. He's the one you want!"
"Who hired Gentle?"
"He didn't say! Just that the guy was powerful and loaded. The tech he gave us — it was like nothing I've ever seen. Like alien stuff."
"Where is it now?"
"Our hideout! That's all I know, I swear! Please!"
I grabbed him by the collar and threw him straight up. I let him fall just long enough before catching him with a web line, swinging him up to a lamp post and stringing him there upside down like a fly caught in a web. Nice and secure.
Then I turned and ran toward the injured.
For the next hour I worked the scene. I used webbing as improvised tourniquets. I pulled a man out from under an overturned car, shoulder burning from the weight. I smothered a burning vehicle in webbing to cut off the oxygen, ripped the doors off their hinges, and pulled a mother and son to safety.
It was always so much faster to break things than to fix them.
By the time the ambulances arrived, news vans had too. I could see camera lenses pointed at me from the cordoned perimeter. A reporter was already waving a microphone in my direction.
"Spidey! Can we get a word?!"
"Sorry — no time," I said, and swung away.
I retrieved my school bag from the wall where I'd stashed it, then swung toward Manhattan. The Rhino's operator had given me a location. It wasn't hard to find — tucked into a quiet corner, unremarkable to anyone who didn't know what to look for.
I slipped in through a window.
The place was a mess — takeaway containers and worse. I moved past it all and found a back room that was cleaner: a planning board covered in details of the job. The truck to be used, the cargo manifest, the optimal timing. Everything about the heist — but nothing about who commissioned it or why.
I pulled out a compact SA from my pocket, expanded it, and scanned the entire board in a single pass. Never know when that might come in useful.
Then I checked the table.
It was covered in equipment I hadn't expected. Night-vision goggles, stun guns, a pair of sub-machine guns. Magnetic footwear, laser cutters, and a safe-cracking decoder box — the kind used for high-security systems. These were the tools they hadn't even brought along. The operator had come prepared with considerably more than just a stolen armour suit.
I pocketed the night-vision goggles and the decoder box.
Back at the Baxter Building, I set the goggles aside and started pulling the decoder apart on my workbench. Just as I'd settled in, Reed appeared in the doorway. He looked mildly surprised to see me still in costume but didn't comment. He studied the device and said, "Is that a decoder?"
"You figured that out with one look?"
"Yes. What are you doing with it?"
"Did you see the news?"
"The armoured thief, yes. Sue was genuinely worried. Johnny seemed confident you'd handle it." Reed paused. "Impressive work, honestly. The hydraulics on that suit must have been remarkable — to allow something that heavy to jump that height, they'd need some kind of superposition fluid to—" He caught my expression and cleared his throat. "Sorry. Nerd moment."
"Relax, so am I," I smiled. "The operator told me he was hired. I found his base and took this." I tapped the decoder box. "His employer supplied it. Something this sophisticated has a paper trail — production records, registration data. If I can trace it back to the source, I might have something."
Reed hummed thoughtfully. He took the reassembled decoder, connected it to my desktop terminal, and navigated through the root system with practised ease, sorting through tens of gigabytes until he found the factory production records.
He stopped scrolling.
I leaned in. And there it was, rendered in green type on the screen — two words I'd been hoping not to see.
Oscorp Industries.
"Bloody hell," I said quietly.
"Oscorp," Reed murmured. "I wouldn't have pegged Norman Osborn for corporate espionage."
"What do you mean?"
"That suit — the Rhino — it was Hammer Industries' answer to Stark's Iron Man armour. Not an impressive one, as it turned out, and certainly not after a fifteen-year-old with web-shooters brought it down on camera. Hammer's stock value is in freefall as we speak. The combat viability of that system is now publicly discredited. If Osborn was behind this, I imagine it's because he wanted Hammer embarrassed."
I turned it over. "That tracks. But without proof I can't do anything with it." I drummed my fingers on the table. "Why, though? What does Osborn gain? Are Oscorp and Hammer competing over a military contract?"
"If they are, it's not public knowledge," Reed said. "But ever since Tony Stark became Iron Man, there's been an arms race. Everyone wants the suit. Congress has a hearing scheduled in a few days specifically to address that. Companies will do a great deal to stop a competitor from getting there first."
I groaned. That made too much sense. And if Hammer was making the Rhino suit, then what exactly was Oscorp developing in return? Flashes of a green exo-suit and a glider crossed my mind. I really, sincerely hoped that didn't mean Norman was going to go off the deep end any time soon.
I worked in the lab a while longer before heading home. Sleep came quickly.
The next morning, Spider-Man was the talk of the school again. In history class, half the room was crowded around Flash's phone watching a video of the fight.
Flash cheered as my web-covered fist went through the Rhino's cockpit. "That's it! That's how it's done! You see that?! He had it taken apart in under a minute!"
"He's pretty good," Harry admitted with a grin.
"Pretty good? He broke into that armoured cockpit with his bare hands and yanked the guy out!" Flash sounded like he'd barely slept. "Did you see the way he grounded the whole suit? He pinned that thing to the road!"
"Yeah, he's something," Kong said with a shrug.
Flash whipped around. "Are you kidding me right now?!"
I took my seat. Flash spotted me almost immediately.
"Parker! You see this? This is what a real hero looks like!"
"Sure, Flash."
"You think he could take Iron Man?" Harry asked.
"No way," Kong said.
"Of course he could!" Flash nearly shouted. "He'd have no problem!"
"He wouldn't last ten seconds against Stark," Felicia said quietly. I glanced at her. She gave me a small, knowing smile.
"You're out of your mind! Iron Man's great, sure, but take the suit off — what is he?"
"Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist," I said without thinking. The line just came out. Some habits die hard.
"Shut up, Parker," Flash growled, then shoved his phone in my face. "Look at this. Tell me this doesn't make him a hero."
I looked at the footage — me throwing myself at the Rhino, punching through the cockpit at full force. "It's impressive."
"Exactly!"
"It doesn't make him a hero, though."
Flash stared at me. "What?!"
"Peter, you literally wore his costume yesterday," Harry said, confused. "And now you're saying he isn't a hero?"
"I didn't say that. I said taking down the Rhino doesn't make him one." I took the phone and scrubbed past the fighting footage, to the long sequence that followed. The cleanup. The car lifted off the trapped man's legs. The burning vehicle. The webbing used as tourniquets on the injured. "He fought the Rhino for maybe a minute. Great. But this went on for over an hour."
The room watched.
"This is why he's a hero. Not the flashy moments — any glory-hungry idiot can throw a punch. But this? Staying after the fight is over to carry the weight of what happened? That's Spider-Man. That's what makes him what he is."
I handed Flash his phone back and turned away. The class drifted back to their corners. Flash sat holding his phone for a long moment, staring at the screen with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"That was surprisingly mature of you, Tiger," Felicia murmured.
"I think I still prefer Muscles," I said.
"No — Tiger is better. I really need to thank Red for that one." She glanced toward MJ, who was deep in conversation with Liz across the room. "When she stops pretending we don't exist."
I shrugged. "Such is life. And I am sorry about yesterday, by the way. I didn't mean to cut the afternoon short."
"It wasn't really a date," she smiled.
"Maybe one day it can be a proper one," I said, and we settled in as class began.
The rest of the week passed slowly. Between homework, street patrols, and a couple of dash-deliveries of injured people to the hospital when the ambulances were too far out, there wasn't much time for anything else.
And on Friday evening I sat down with Ben and May and watched the Stark Expo broadcast. The camera panned to the stage. The roof opened. Tony Stark landed in the centre in full armour, smiled for the crowd, gave his speech, made his jokes.
And just like that, Iron Man 2 had begun.