"Spider!" Sexy's voice cut in sharply. "The drone has triggered a Green Goblin sighting alert. Target is on the move!"
"Damn it!" I cried out.
"What's wrong?" Jean asked.
"A very dangerous enemy just showed up," I said, tapping the side of my helmet. "Sexy, bring the car around." I ran through the list in my head — Sue and Johnny were off visiting their father's grave, Reed wasn't a fighter under normal circumstances, and the X-Men had just been through a full battle. I couldn't ask more of them.
"Do you have to go?" Jean asked.
I turned to her. The look on her face stopped me for a second — something genuine and unguarded in it. I sighed. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't unless I had to. But I don't think anyone else is ready for what's coming."
Jean sighed. Then, before I could say anything else, she stepped forward, pulled off my helmet, and tossed it over her shoulder. She leaned in and kissed me — both hands coming up around my neck as I placed mine on her hips. It was brief but real.
She pulled back, her forehead resting against mine. "When can I see you again?"
"I...I don't know," I admitted. "Things have been difficult to manage lately."
"Peter, what exactly are you planning?" Her eyes went slightly distant for a moment as images filtered across her face — the full, crowded whirl of everything running through my head. Her expression widened. "Oh. That's...a lot. Is all of that really—"
"Not now," I said softly.
She nodded. "Will you visit me soon? When you have time?"
"I promise," I said. She smiled, pressed another brief kiss to my lips, picked my helmet up from where she'd thrown it, and settled it back onto my head.
"Go get him, Tiger," she said.
"Yes, ma'am." I looked up as my car came clearing the tree line. I jumped — clearing well over thirty feet — and landed in the driver's seat. I punched the throttle and blasted south toward New York.
"His car can fly?!" I heard Kurt cry out behind me as I streaked away.
"Sexy — put the drone's feed on the HUD," I called out. The display in my helmet flickered on, showing the New York night sky from the drone's perspective. I could see it was already pursuing the target. A metallic glider came into view: bat-shaped figurehead, blue-fire thrusters burning hot. Riding it — black armor with green highlights, half-face mask and goggles. Classic design, updated engineering.
Then the glider's thrusters hit overdrive.
The backwash caught the drone and sent it tumbling, slamming it into the face of a building. The feed cut to static.
"Damn it!" I banged the steering column. "Sexy — do we still have Harry's location from the nanobots?"
"Yes, Peter. We're tracking him — though we lose signal resolution outside New York city airspace. We'll regain it once we cross the city limits."
Nothing to do but drive fast. I pushed the throttle and kept pushing. Twenty minutes later I hit the New York air corridor, and Harry's signal immediately resolved on my HUD.
"Spider," Sexy said, "there are reports of a major disturbance at Times Square. Something is causing structural damage. Details are still coming in."
"That's Harry," I growled. I swung the car hard west. As Times Square came into view in the distance I could already see smoke rising.
"Doc — find somewhere safe to land!" I told the car's autopilot as I opened the door and dropped out, falling fast before shooting a web line and swinging upward to gain altitude. I landed on the rooftop of a building overlooking the Square below.
In the center of the open plaza, a man in green armor had a car over his head. He roared — a raw, animal sound — and tore the vehicle in half before hurling both sections outward into the crowd.
"Damn it!" I fired two web lines but I was too far and too high to catch both halves in time.
Something else did.
A glowing orange sphere came flying in from above, two separate shots striking each half simultaneously. Both impacts triggered clean explosions — no shrapnel, no debris, just fire burning downward and out. The car simply ceased to exist as a threat.
The flames parted, and through them, riding his glider down into the square, came the figure in black and green armor. The glider had the classic curved figurehead, the design Harry had clearly built around a certain aesthetic. The armor was more advanced than I expected — robotic in construction, similar to the film version of the Goblin suit — and the helmet was a partial mask with tinted goggles rather than the full face piece.
The man in green down below — he had a tail. A robotic one. Long and articulated at the base of his spine.
The Scorpion.
"Hey, ugly!" Harry called out as he swung into a diving pass and released a pumpkin bomb. The Scorpion's tail whipped around and batted it back toward him. Harry banked hard, the bomb arcing away — directly toward a crowd of civilians.
"No!" Harry shouted.
My turn.
I jumped from the rooftop, pulled a freeze pellet from my belt, and threw it at the bomb in midair. My aim held. Pellet met bomb. Both detonated — but the cryogenic burst contained the explosion's radius completely. No one was hurt.
I landed on a lamp post and looked down. "What is going on here?!"
"S-Spidey?" Harry looked up from his glider, startled.
"Spider-Man!" The Scorpion's voice cut through the commotion. "Please — you have to help me!"
I blinked. "What?"
The Scorpion's body seized. The green armor suddenly bled to black as his muscles locked up and he began foaming at the mouth. Something was wrong with him — deeply wrong.
"ARGH!" The roar that came out of him wasn't human anymore. He swung his tail toward me and fired a stream of green liquid on reflex. I jumped and dodged, my spider-sense pulling me clear. The liquid hit the lamp post where I had been standing and ate straight through the metal.
Acid.
"Right!" I launched myself across to a different position. The Scorpion had already turned away from me — he was moving toward the cluster of civilians near the barricades. "No!"
"I've got it!" Harry swooped low and hurled a series of bladed projectiles — small, precise, each one finding a gap in the Scorpion's armor and drawing blood. The Scorpion reeled, maddened rather than slowed. He swung his tail at Harry — Osborn pulled up sharply to dodge, but the acid continued forward and arced down toward the crowd below.
"STOP!" I thrust my arm out and channeled my magic. The Whip of Vástha shot from my hand like a cracking bolt, launching forward and expanding into a wide protective barrier between the acid and the people below it. The acid hit the magical barrier and burned through it slowly — slowly enough that the civilians had time to read the situation and run.
Thank God I had actually practiced. I turned back to the Scorpion. He grabbed a car and cocked his arm.
I pulled out a web cartridge and threw it.
SPLAT.
The entire Scorpion was blanketed in webbing — both arms pinned, the car still clutched over his head. He couldn't drop it, couldn't throw it.
"Great shot, Spidey!" Harry called out.
"Don't," I said sharply, but Harry had already drawn a pumpkin bomb and thrown it at the pinned car.
BOOM.
My webs burned off. The Scorpion stumbled forward out of the blast, screaming in pain, his armor melting in patches, burns across his exposed skin. I ran to a fire hydrant and extended a stinger, slicing the top off. Then I grabbed the pipe with both hands, bent it, and aimed it directly at the Scorpion. Water hit him hard — a sustained, forceful stream that doused the flames and drove him back until he slid to the ground and stopped moving, unconscious.
I pinched the pipe shut with my hands. The water cut off.
Harry landed beside me, excitement rolling off him. "Hell yes! Did you see that! That was incredible!"
"What were you thinking?!" I turned on him.
Harry blinked. "W-what? I stopped him."
"No — you didn't. Didn't you hear him? He was asking for help before the seizure hit him."
"He went completely psycho and tried to melt your face off!"
"He was in pain. He was not in control of himself. Does he look like that to you normally?" I pointed at the figure lying in the pooled water — armor partially melted, skin burned, body still twitching. "Someone did this to him. Something is wrong."
Harry was quiet for a moment, looking at the Scorpion with something new in his expression.
Before either of us could say anything else, the bass thrum of a helicopter reached us. I looked up.
An Oscorp helicopter descended into the airspace above Times Square, and hanging from the doorframe with a megaphone was Norman Osborn.
"People of New York! My name is Norman Osborn. I was born in this city. I was raised here. I have watched this city face alien invasions and dimensional catastrophes, and through all of it, I have asked myself what I could do. What I owe this place." He paused for effect. "The answer was simple. I could give it a hero."
Harry flew up alongside the helicopter and stopped, hovering in place, straight-backed and composed.
"May I introduce Oscorp's newest gift to New York City — the Glider! Equipped with the finest technology Oscorp can produce, this hero is not just mine to deploy. He belongs to all of you. I owe this city a debt, and this is how I begin to pay it back!"
The helicopter swept away. Harry followed. They were gone in seconds, leaving me alone in a ruined square with a half-burnt super villain and a very shaky grip on what was happening.
What the hell is going on?
Three large vans rolled in from the north end of the square, each bearing a prominent green 'G' on their sides. They stopped and people poured out — paramedics, clean-up crew, public relations people. They moved fast and efficiently, attending to the injured, beginning rubble clearance, coordinating with the gathering crowd.
They were so focused on the people that they hadn't even noticed the Scorpion. I did what I could — used my webbing to cover the worst of his burns, sealing the open tissue before infection could set in.
A few minutes later the police arrived. Five cars formed a perimeter while the officers coordinated with the Oscorp crews. A handful broke off and approached me and the Scorpion.
"Thanks, Spider-Man," said the man leading them — blonde, trench coat, the kind of face that had seen too many bad nights in this city. I recognized him. "We'll take it from here."
"Captain Stacy," I said, nodding. "Haven't seen you around in a while. How are things?"
"Fine enough, I suppose." He looked down at the Scorpion. "Who's this?"
"I'm going to call him the Scorpion," I said with a shrug.
Stacy snorted quietly. "Fitting. What happened here? Walk me through it."
I sighed. "Norman Osborn just turned his son into a corporate superhero. The Glider — which is a terrible name, for the record. The Scorpion here came in aggressive and Harry engaged him. The Scorpion was using explosive acid from that tail. Harry was using pumpkin bombs. Result is what you see."
"Poor bastard," Stacy said, looking at the burnt figure. "Don't get me wrong — I know his history. But still—"
"He's not evil," I said. "Before he lost control he was asking for help. Whatever he's become — someone did this to him. He wasn't choosing it."
Stacy looked at me. "Mind control?"
"I've personally seen two cases in the last year alone," I said. "It's not as rare as people want to believe."
Stacy rubbed his jaw. "I'll look into it." He glanced at me. "You're still technically a wanted man on about six old warrants, Spider-Man. I don't want to arrest you, so do yourself a favor and disappear."
I chuckled. "Right, Captain. Take care of yourself." I leaped to the lamp post — what remained of it — and shot a web line.
"You too, Spider-Man," he nodded as I swung away.
I cast one look back as I cleared the block. The Oscorp tower in the distance was lit up against the night sky. The giant O logo on the tower facade had a small modification. Just beside it, a new addition to the branding: a small, stylized green G.
I didn't fully understand what was coming. We were officially beyond anything I had a reliable map for. But I understood one thing clearly.
Things were about to get significantly worse.