"Are there... any left?"
Peter's voice tore from his throat in a wet, ragged wheeze. His knees bowed inward. An unimaginable weight pressed down on his shoulders. He was holding up an entire section of the elevated railway. Four or five hundred tons of concrete and steel ground against his spine. The surviving structural columns groaned under the shifted load, but Peter felt the brunt of the entire world trying to crush him into the asphalt.
He had never truly tested the upper limits of his strength before today. Now, he was staring into the absolute bottom of the barrel. His muscles screamed in agonizing, fiery failure. If a single pigeon landed on the tracks above him, his femurs would snap. Blood roared so violently in his ears that he thought his eardrums might burst. His vision swam with flashing, star-bursting white light, fading into absolute black around the edges. He couldn't even hear his own heartbeat anymore—just a high-pitched, dying mechanical whine echoing inside his skull.
He had no idea if the platform was clear. His enhanced hearing was completely gone. He tasted nothing but hot copper and rust in the back of his throat.
"Everyone's clear!" someone yelled from the street.
Peter didn't hear it. But he felt something else. A rhythmic, violent vibration traveled down the steel girder, through his palms, and straight into his bones.
A subway train was pulling into the station.
The vibration escalated into a deafening roar. Peter swayed, his boots grinding deeper into the cracked concrete. A crowd had formed at a safe distance outside the blast zone. They watched him struggle in horrified silence. Then, their heads snapped in unison toward the sky.
Red consumed Peter's vision. The crushing weight on his back vanished instantly. The sudden absence of pressure shocked his nervous system. His legs gave out. He blacked out entirely, collapsing straight into the massive expanse of red.
It wasn't a hallucination. It was a giant, crimson-gloved hand.
"I've got the kid," a booming voice echoed over the street. "Tony, we need the MK38 right now."
Ant-Man towered over the intersection like a kaiju, easily sixty feet tall. He cradled the unconscious Spider-Man in his left palm and propped up the sagging railway overpass with his right shoulder. The commuter train roared safely over his back. The crowd below erupted into thunderous applause. The Avengers had arrived.
Seconds later, a streak of blue and silver cut through the lingering smoke. A massive, heavily reinforced rig plummeted from the sky and hit the asphalt with a cratering thud. The Iron Man MK38 suit Igor stepped under the fractured overpass. The suit lacked repulsors or weapon mounts; it was pure structural support. A massive hydraulic spinal jack unfolded from its back with a heavy metallic clang, locking into the steel beams above.
Ant-Man slowly eased his weight off the bridge. The MK38 groaned once, then held the tonnage steady.
Ant-Man shrank rapidly, pulling the unconscious Peter down with him to normal size. He hauled the kid onto his back, hopped onto a waiting flying ant, and took to the sky. He tapped his earpiece.
"I'm taking the kid back to the Tower," Hank Pym reported over the comms. "Where's Herman? Tony?"
"Cap and Wasp are on him," Tony Stark's voice replied. "I'm tracking from the air."
Herman Schultz was barely conscious. Dehydration, exhaustion, and a catastrophic cooling failure in his suit had reduced his vision to a blurry, tunnel-like slit. He launched himself through the air with panicked, erratic shockwaves, struggling to maintain altitude. He never even saw the shield.
The vibranium disc ricocheted off a brick facade, defied physics, and slammed squarely into the small of Herman's back. He dropped like a stone. Sparks showered across the pavement as his gold-titanium armor skidded violently down the avenue.
"It's over, Herman."
Captain America braked his motorcycle sharply, stopping a few yards away. He caught the returning shield flawlessly. "You don't understand how dangerous those gauntlets are. Disarm immediately."
"Yeah, just surrender to the Avengers." The Wasp materialized out of nowhere, buzzing near Herman's helmet. She fired a concentrated bioelectric sting directly into the back of his neck.
Nothing happened. The kinetic mesh absorbed the energy without a single spark.
"I don't understand?"
Herman wheezed. His desperation dissolved into a furious, sandpaper-dry laugh. He didn't bother trying to stand. He just curled his fingers inward.
The gauntlets whined at maximum pitch. Continuous, rippling shockwaves radiated outward in every direction. The asphalt beneath him disintegrated into gravel. The raw concussive force distorted the air density itself, creating visible ripples. Traffic lights, streetlamps, and fire hydrants buckled and warped under the sustained acoustic pressure. Captain America threw his shield up, staggering backward against the invisible wall of force. Wasp was blown entirely off course.
Herman planted his boots, pushing himself upright against his own shockwave.
"I know exactly how powerful my invention is!" Herman roared over the deafening hum. "Powerful enough that they had to send the Avengers!"
Cap charged, angling his shield to split the wave. The moment he moved, Herman slammed his gauntlets down. The street completely caved in. Cap leaped sideways, driving the edge of his shield deep into the remaining concrete to anchor himself over the sinkhole. Herman didn't wait. He triggered a massive blast and launched himself over the nearest building.
"Where are you going, Herman?" Wasp pursued, easily pacing him mid-air. She peppered his armor with rapid-fire stings. "There's nowhere to run!"
The stings didn't penetrate, but the kinetic feedback was throwing off his flight trajectory. Mid-arc, Herman twisted his torso, trying to line up a shot on the tiny, darting target.
He never got the chance. A red-and-gold blur struck him at supersonic speed. Iron Man tackled Herman out of the sky, driving him brutally back down to the street. Tony landed in a flawless, three-point crouch. A high-tech smart-munition popped up from his forearm housing, locking instantly onto Herman's chest.
"Stand down, Herman," Tony's voice modulated through the faceplate. "I don't know where you sourced the gold-titanium plating, but I know for a fact your servos won't survive an armor-piercing round."
Herman lay on his back, staring up at the invincible Iron Man. And then, he smiled.
He realized something. Killing the spider was one way to make headlines. But making the Avengers look like fools? That was a legacy.
Herman raised both hands slowly, feigning a surrender. Tony took a step closer.
"Goodbye, Avengers."
Tony fired. But before the micro-munition even cleared the launcher, Herman fired both gauntlets directly into the pavement beneath his own back. The street instantly dissolved into a massive crater. Herman dropped perfectly into the underground sewer system, immediately collapsing the tunnel ceiling behind him with a secondary blast. Thousands of tons of asphalt and dirt buried his escape route in seconds.
Cap rode up to the crater's edge on his motorcycle. He stopped, looking down at the massive pile of rubble. Iron Man and Wasp hovered over the sinkhole, their weapon systems tracking empty air.
The Shocker was gone.
Herman only had one place left to go.
Riding a series of underground concussive leaps, he dragged his overheated armor through the sewers until he reached Otto's hidden underground lab. This time, he didn't need to pick the lock. The heavy steel door hung wide open. Before Herman could step through, a metallic claw snaked out from the darkness, grabbed his shoulder plating, and hauled him inside. A flurry of smaller, tentacled welder-bots slithered out, scrubbed the tunnel of his boot prints, and sealed the heavy vault door behind him.
"I watched your performance on the feeds," a harsh, synthesized voice echoed from the unlit depths of the lab. "You had Spider-Man trapped. You could have killed him. Why did you pull your punch?"
Herman popped the seals on his helmet. He pulled it off, dumping a literal cup of sweat onto the floor. One of the robotic claws extended from the ceiling, holding a chilled bottle of water. Herman snatched it and downed half in a single gulp.
"I don't know," Herman rasped, sliding down the wall until he hit the floor. "Maybe because I'm not a murderer. Maybe because I knew the bug was stupid enough to actually hold up that bridge. If I dropped the overpass on those people... I don't want to cross that line."
He sat there, chest heaving, waiting for a response. The room remained silent for a long minute. Finally, a series of heavy breaker switches clacked. The harsh fluorescent lights overhead flickered to life.
For the first time, Herman got a clear look at his mysterious benefactor.
Otto was a middle-aged man trapped entirely within a massive, bloated mechanical life-support harness. He was completely quadriplegic, unable to even twitch his neck. Surgical tubing and wires pierced the skin of his throat, bypassing his ruined vocal cords to connect directly to an electronic voice synthesizer. He wore thick, tinted goggles over his eyes, squinting painfully as the lights buzzed on. Four massive, flexible titanium tentacles sprouted from a harness welded directly into his spine. They were his arms, his legs, and his only connection to the physical world.
"I thought the light might make you more comfortable, my friend," Otto's synthetic voice buzzed.
"I... I didn't expect you to look like this," Herman breathed.
Otto ignored the reaction. He turned away, using two tentacles to rapidly type across a bank of aging computer terminals. "When you have an old friend like Norman Osborn, you are incredibly lucky to end up like this."
Herman felt a deep, unspoken history radiating from the crippled scientist, but he knew better than to pry. He dumped the remaining half of the water bottle over his head, shivering as the cool liquid soaked his hair.
"Can you put me in contact with the big boss?" Herman asked, wiping his eyes. "I'm guessing he won't turn down an engineer who can crack any vault in the city."
Otto paused. One of his mechanical claws reached up and delicately adjusted his goggles. "Is this your grand plan, then? You make a spectacle, get famous, and immediately seek employment as a common thug?"
"My next step is dealing with the Avengers," Herman said, his voice tightening. He had the tactical sense to leave Thor and the Hulk off his list, focusing strictly on the tech-based heroes. "Iron Man, Captain America, Ant-Man. I'm going to prove to the entire world that Herman Schultz built better gear in a basement than Tony Stark and Hank Pym did with billions of dollars. I'm a genius."
It all came down to money. Herman needed serious capital to overhaul the Shocker armor. The cooling system alone required a complete redesign, and high-grade thermodynamic materials weren't cheap. Bank robberies were too slow and too loud; the Avengers would catch him before he finalized the Shocker V2. But Kingpin had deep pockets. Kingpin had already sponsored his initial build. If Herman proved his raw capability, Kingpin would put him on the payroll.
Otto didn't dismiss the idea. He had his own reasons. He needed an operative strong enough to test the Avengers' response times and combat capabilities, gathering data for his own weapons-manufacturing vendetta.
"And what of the spider?" Otto's mechanical voice hummed. "You can hardly claim you defeated him. Are you simply letting it go?"
Herman stared at his bruised hands.
"He'll come looking for me. And when I upgrade this suit... he won't stand a chance."