Felix stood up.
Harold stood up.
It happened at the same time. Two men that had both decided simultaneously that waiting was finished. The ambient noise of the café continued around them, utterly indifferent.
"Ah, are you two finished?" The server appeared between them like a comma in a sentence that didn't want one. She had her notepad out, smiling. "I can get the bill if you want."
Neither of them looked at her.
"Are you really going to use her?" Felix asked flatly.
Harold looked at the server girl, then at Felix. He turned the question over with the unhurried consideration of a man deciding between two items on a menu, his head tilting slightly. The goblin receding just enough behind his eyes to let his humanity appear.
He was thinking.
Soon, the smile came back.
"You know what," Harold said pleasantly, "yes. I think I will."
He looked at the server.
"Kill yourself, sweetheart."
The girl's expression didn't change for half a second. Then it emptied, like a vacancy, the lights of a house going off room by room. Her hand moved toward the pen on her notepad—
Thwip!
Felix's wrist moved first and the web caught her wrist and yanked, pulling her sideways and spinning her into the wall beside the counter where the second line of webbing pinned her firmly — shoulders, waist, ankles — against the plaster before the pen had made contact with anything. The server struggled against it with the same empty diligence.
Harold hit him.
It was a good punch. Harold was not a small man nor was he weak. The fist came in fast, aimed at the jaw, with force that could have knocked out a normal man's jaw.
Felix didn't so much as turn his head as he caught his fist in his palm.
Spider-Man was still stronger.
The impact did make the table jump. The caramel latte tipped and spread gold across the white surface.
Harold grinned up at him from the caught fist. Up close, the goblin was fully present now — not the surface charm and not the performance. Just the thing underneath, which had always been there.
"Every worker in this building," Harold announced to the room at a conversational volume, as though commenting on the weather, "end your life. Right now."
His Spider-Sense sang to him. One by one, he noticed the people that were under his control. The goblin bastard must have done this before he ever arrived here…!
The first was the barista who reached for the industrial steam wand. Then there was the man cleaning glasses behind the counter turned it toward his own throat, a woman in an apron near the back lifted a ceramic pot with both hands, and finally, a busboy near the window began walking toward the plate glass with the intention to die.
Four people. Four bubbles of his Spider-Sense.
'Rash…!'
'We will noooot let them die!'
The black poured out from inside him, the suit snapping across his body and the red spider emblem spreading across his chest like something breathing.
THWIP!
Tendrils branched from his wrist and shoulder blades. The café became a web in the truest sense. Actual lines of black extending in every direction simultaneously, finding wrists and ankles and pulling, wrapping, holding.
'HOLDING THEM. HOLD ALL OF THEM—'
Felix hadn't let go of Harold. He reeled him and hit him with everything he had. A right hook—bam—and Harold left the café. The window, frame and glass and the small adhesive letters spelling out the café's name, ceased to exist as a barrier, and Harold Osborn meteored into the street, hitting a couple cars and promptly stopping traffic in both directions. The nearby protests too.
Spider-Man glanced over at the suicidal people.
Four tendrils held the workers. Two more extending toward the busboy to seal him up. Same for the barista. Soon, they were cocooned in black webbing.
Which was when the very reasonable response of the customers happened.
"Oh my god—"
"Spider-Man!?"
"L-look at what he did to them—!"
Screaming. That was fine. The customers didn't realize he had saved those people. But maybe later, once the truth came to be. For now, he had pressing matters.
Through the demolished window, across the street, came the sound of laughter.
His Spider-Sense was already talking, then it screamed.
Something small rolled onto the table. It was the size of a fist and in the shape of a grinning pumpkin. The world was in slow motion as Felix looked down at it.
Beep.
Herbie instantly identified what this was:
'PLUTONIUM CORE. YIELD ESTIMATE: VARIABLE. BLAST RADIUS IN ENCLOSED SPACE—'
Beep.
Not just any plutonium, but special plutonium Anthony Stark had stolen for the Red Goblin from Ororo's island.
Oh no.
BEEP.
Felix and Rash. responded with everything they had. Tendrils poured down his arms, wrapping around the device, layering over it in black and pressing inward, trying to contain, to compress, to hold together something that had been built with the specific intention of coming apart.
'Rash—!'
'WE KNOW! FELIX—! HOLD ON! WE MUST REMAIN TOGETHER!'
BEEP!
The nuclear pumpkin bomb detonated.
The world became white.
"Gah…!"
The white faded.
What replaced it was red. He was spitting out red.
It sheeted down his face, filling the creases of his knuckles, dripping from his chin and his opened gaping chest in thick, dark ropes. The suit was in pieces across his torso. Rash worked frantically to reknit himself, his tendrils trailing down his arms and legs in thick black ribbons. He was talking to him — he could feel the Symbiote — but the ringing in his ears buried the words.
He was on one knee on the table. He had tanked it.
He coughed. He wheezed.
He glanced over his shoulder. Everyone and everything was okay. Alive. checked that first, before anything else. Four heartbeats in the cocoons were steady and present. The customers had fled.
'Felix. Felix, get up…!'
The thought was but a motion. "I'm up," he said aloud, and stood. Of course he'd get up. He was Spider-Man.
Then the cackle came. Bright and unrepentant, from somewhere above, from somewhere moving.
Felix's eyes went up.
The Red Goblin was something, alright. It was genuinely something. He was in what was effectively a Halloween costume atop a red-jetted glider. It was a contrast of technology that didn't make sense. There was red chainmail at the sleeves and leggings, with a black tunic being the centerpiece. A black aviator flying cap with lengthy straps was merged with his scarlet horned mask. The red mask grinned with a face that could be mistaken for the devil.
The glider beneath him was angular and complex. Eight separate thrusters emitted a bright red energy. It was tech that had no business being in this century.
Harold reached into his tunic and announced, "Incoming~!"
He was throwing a second nuclear pumpkin.
Felix was ready. Rash was ready. His intentions made clear, their thoughts as one, his fist turned soft. Literally, his knuckles lost their hardness and gained a webbing-esque feeling, something that gave and absorbed and redirected rather than met force with force. Spider-Man punched upward. The nuclear pumpkin connected with his fist and reversed direction, launching skyward, spinning up and up and up into the low cloud cover—
BOOM!
The detonation lit the sky white from the inside.
The shockwave came down like a hand pressing on the city. Car alarms. Windows. Pigeons in panicked scatter from every rooftop within six blocks.
If New York didn't know the Goblin was fighting Spider-Man, now they did.
The Red Goblin charged at him, his eyes having already moved past Spider-Man to what was behind him. The black box resting and waiting to be used. "You're mine now, Sheath!"
Thwip!
One moment it was there, the next the table was bare. Spider-Man hadn't done a thing too. Well, at least not the Spider-Man of Earth 65.
'Right on time, Hobie!'
At the very back of the café, behind the counter, the other Spider-Man had been waiting. Invisible, the box fell into his arms and now…
Now, the Red Goblin was within striking distance.
Spider-Man came down on the glider's nose with both feet, crumpling the front edge inward. The Red Goblin flinched. Too late.
Bam! Like a fountain, the Red Goblin's head went vertical and he spewed out blood. "Always with the tricks—!"
No tricks here. He elbowed him across the cheek and then cocked back a full-power punch. The Red Goblin scrambled at a kick. Spider-Man leapt off the glider, but, with the world in slow motion and his opponent less than foot away, it was game over.
Bam!
Except somehow, that full-power fist never hit
The Red Goblin and the glider vanished.
Only two objects were left behind: pumpkin bombs.
'Oh fuck—!'
His Spider-Sense hit like lightning.
The hero didn't have time to redirect them. He had just finished a swing, his whole posture committed to killing the Goblin. The soft webbing required a second of transition that he did not have. His turning head was the only part of him facing the floating bombs.
'RASH—!'
He made the only decision available to him and his Symbiote tentacles yanked the bombs inside himself. He shoved the bombs to his stomach area and the Symbiote merged with his flesh in every way, strengthening and sealing every gap possible. His body curled inward over the twin pumpkins like a man covering a grenade—
BOOM!
The detonations were simultaneous. His feet hit the sidewalk while his chest smoked. "Haah…haah…" His arms shakily removed themselves from his stomach.
Extremis. Extremis was the only reason why he hadn't died.
"Fucking...! Hell...!"
Extremis was the only reason why he could still be alive when his ribcage was blasted open and half his heart was gone.
Then the glider's lengthy swords punched through his back.
The Red Goblin came in from directly behind, the glider's damaged front edge still crumpled but functional enough. Spider-Man tried to stop it but—the acceleration! The glider took Felix off the asphalt and forward through the front of a dry cleaner, through its back wall, through the narrow service alley beyond, and into the side of the next building's face.
They were moving at Mach speeds. It was impossible, it should have been impossible.
New York on every side became a blur of brick and glass and signage. Felix's hands came up and grabbed the glider's struts by feel alone, trying to get purchase and stop it but—
He crashed into brick wall after brick wall. Building after building at over three thousand miles per hour.
Speech was impossible. The Symbiote was flattened against him by the sudden velocity and the need to heal his exposed organs, her tendrils streaming back like black hair in a hurricane.
'This is future tech,' something in Felix's mind said, very clearly and very specifically, cutting through everything else. 'This glider is from 2099—!'
Dammit, he should have known he wasn't completely incapable.
At Mach 5, the city was not a city anymore. Everything was a smear. The sound barrier was broken and rendered irrelevant. Felix's grip on the struts was the only thing keeping him on, and his grip was — good. His grip was very, very good. But the upper part of his chest leaving behind ribbons of blood and organs, he didn't have the strength in him to stop him.
"Hahaha! Your regeneration is slowing down! Just like I thought! Radiation is your cancer!"
He growled. He was about to elbow the metal blades and snap them off when the glider lurched to a stop.
Here was the thing about deceleration that instantaneous: a sonic event happened. Glass cracked in windows for two blocks in every direction and Spider-Man was unsheathed from the twin blades and flung forward at Mach 5. Gasping, he twisted himself and hurled through two alleyways in a row. But at last, he met a building with the full and undivided attention of his body. The glass and the reinforced steel frame received him without consent.
Fortunately, he didn't burst through. He was like a spider that stuck himself with webbing. It was his own doing; while Rash worked on healing him, Felix's wrists had poured out webbing to cushion him.
He couldn't really breathe with his punctured lungs and missing heart. So what?
The Red Goblin drew nearer. His cackles echoed despite being two neighbours away.
"You feel it, don't you!?" Cheerful. Genuinely cheerful. "The math is elegant! Normal radiation, your factor burns through it! But this modified plutonium, it'll keep your factor occupied for a while! It's a tax! Hahaha, having fun finally paying taxes like the rest of us, Spidey!?"
Human. He was healing and injured like a human. That was what it was.
The Red Goblin was grinning and zooming through that alleyway. Spider-Man peeled himself off the wall.
Camera drones and helicopters from a middle distance. The protest, three blocks north, had gone quiet. The national news had found them. Evacuations were already beginning too.
The Red Goblin raised one finger and the laser zapped at him, a thin red line from fingertip to target, precise and fast. Spider-Man leapt sideways and was forced to dodge again and again. Thwip! A flat panel of webbing caught the red beam and dispersed it in a spray of melted filament .
"Hahaha! Come on, come on!"
Zwoom! Zwoom!
The Red Goblin teleported twice and a couple lasers nicked him. Spider-Man cursed and had to close his eyes and react on instinct.
Dodge, thwip!
Zwoom! Zwoom!
The glider was capable of short-range teleportation. That alone allowed the Goblin to keep himself at a distance. Flinging himself at the Goblin was like trying to catch smoke. 'Ridiculous, can't even—nggh!' Another laser scorched through his stomach. It came from behind. He gasped and nearly lost his grip on his webbing.
Spider-Man momentarily clung to a nearby building to recalibrate. "Nggh!" But another laser to his shoulder forced him to come back into the fight. If those lasers hit his brain, it was game over.
Zwoom! Zwoom!
It was a contest of intelligence, speed, instincts, and precision. It was hard to tell who was superior to who in these aspects. Perhaps Spider-Man possessed greater speed and instincts. Perhaps the goblin possessed great intellect and precision.
Web panel left, web panel right, jumping and gaining altitude. Against any other opponent, his gaining altitude might not have been a concern. But the Red Goblin was no fool. The Red Goblin figured he was up to something and his pouch automatically opened up and zipped a pumpkin into his hands. Two of them.
"Huh? Huh, huh?"
He was too slow and too late. Spider-Man wasn't there anymore. Not to the cameras and not even to him.
He had turned invisible.
"Haha, where's the spider gone to play!"
Another pumpkin appeared in his head. With three of them, the Red Goblin probably planned to just nuke the neighbourhood. Or maybe not, because he was far too slow in making the attempt and Spider-Man was able to come up from underneath the glider. The Goblin felt the weight but again, he was too slow in acting and his nemesis was right in front of him.
"Gah!"
His nemesis had already struck him.
Bam, bam, bam!
The first combo: elbow to the jaw, then the same arm rotating into a hammerfist on the downswing across Harold's collarbone. The measly chainmail took the surface of it but the force went through regardless, and the collarbone made a sound like a green branch.
The Red Goblin's head snapped sideways. He healed too fast to die, however, and his hand reached over and squeezed the spider's exposed heart.
"Gotcha!"
He squeezed it to paste. The spider recoiled and the devil searched deeper, finding his lungs and latching onto them..
'C-can't let him—!'
Closed fists closed down the Goblin's temples and caused a concussion. He healed fast and still kept that grip on his healing lungs. He needed that to stop. His fists slammed on his temple again and then turned into a strong grip. Holding his head, he slammed him down his knee and then pushed him away. The devil's hand schliiirched out of his bloody chest.
The spider grabbed his arm and began to spin him rapidly on one heel. Spinning, spinning, spinning, and at the apex of his momentum, he released him. The Red Goblin was flung off his glider and into the SHIELD building's forty-third floor face-first.
Neither the glass nor the frame held.
Spider-Man thought he could catch a minute to recover. "Woah!" But the glider moved on its own and chased after its owner. They followed through the hole the Goblin had made, with Felix noting the destroyed computers and the crater on the other side. That was where the Goblin was.
His heart wasn't pumping anything and his lungs…!
He was starting to lose his vision without his oxygen. Extremis was trying to fix it up as was Rash but…
His Spider-Sense went off. The goblin was still alive and still healing.
It was now or never.
"Alright," Spider-Man glanced down, a fist balled up, "no more of you—!"
Herbie had located the central powersource. His fist crashed through the thick metal layers of red and black and pulled out the central core. It was…
'Shit…!'
It was a miniaturised nuclear fission reactor. It was the size of a fist and, being extracted in the method that it was, began to meltdown. To put it simply, it was about to explode. Quickly, Herbie ran the calculations.
This was tech originally made in Earth 2099 and crudely repaired by the minimal resources of this Earth. It combined a plutonium core with an arc reactor. As a result, it was highly unstable and prone to error. To use it in battle was a risk to the glider's rider. Indeed, it was only viable in a battle to the death.
In a battle against Spider-Man.
The conclusion didn't make it to the hero in time. Either way, it didn't change what he did, which was tossing the core up into the ceiling and praying for the best.
BOOM!