The city's heartbeat pulsed across the monitors in Ethan's darkened hotel room. Cool, humming light spilled across the cheap carpet and illuminated his still frame at the desk. The only movement came from his eyes, darting between windows of grainy surveillance footage. He barely blinked.
The hack was already complete—slick and silent. It wasn't even a challenge. The city's CCTV network had weak perimeter protocols, reliant on outdated firmware and vendor complacency. Ethan hadn't needed to breach anything with force. He simply slipped in with a diagnostic signature, hijacking a weekly update request. The city never even knew he was there.
The real challenge was time—or more specifically, volume.
He combed through endless hours of footage, cross-referencing movement logs, vehicle records, and even the subtle time gaps between pedestrian flows. His eyes tracked a high-speed, accelerated playback of streets, alleyways, and building perimeters across Queens, Hell's Kitchen, and Brooklyn.
The neural boost from Sage's power allowed him to process it all, to accelerate his thinking beyond the human threshold. But even then, it wasn't easy.
Delilah left no trail.
Or so she tried to.
Her movements were rare, masked, and irregular—but not invisible. Ethan, after two hours of real time and what amounted to nearly a month of video footage, began triangulating her habits. There was a pattern in her unpredictability.
He leaned forward, freezing the screen.
A figure—tall, athletic, walking with a loose but confident sway—stepped into a side entrance of a reinforced warehouse in Queens. No signage. No registered use but it wasn't abandoned. The woman matched Delilah's combat posture perfectly. Ethan ran a gait analysis in his mind to confirm.
A hit. Likely her personal hideout.
Then came the other lead.
A nondescript building near the docks. Used frequently by the same woman and a single masked man—white suit, older, often with a bodyguard escort. The body language, posture, and timing matched everything Ethan knew about Jacob Conover. Once a Daily Bugle crime reporter. Now a disgraced former journalist with a grudge against Joe Robertson and J. Jonah Jameson.
And the current identity holder of the Rose mantle.
Ethan leaned back slightly, exhaling through his nose.
Conover wasn't the threat. He was just another angry man in a mask, punching sideways at the world. The white suit and purple mask were more style than substance. With the right leverage, Ethan could dismantle him quickly—leak data, manipulate networks, take apart the empire brick by brick.
But Delilah… Delilah was the problem.
She was the muscle. The deterrent. The ghost.
There was so little on her. Ethan scrolled through a compiled dossier, mostly conjecture and what he knew of her from the comics. She had no listed real name. No traceable family. No origin story. Nothing about how she came under Rose's command, why she stayed loyal, or even what she believed in.
To a strategist like Ethan, that wasn't just frustrating—it was dangerous.
He couldn't manipulate what he didn't understand.
There was only one event that provided insight—one moment in the original timeline that stood out.
Delilah, during the turf war with a rising villain known as Black Tarantula, would reach out for help. Not from the Rose. Not from the underworld. But from a new masked figure—Ricochet. A fresh vigilante. Fast, witty, unpredictable.
In truth, Ricochet was Peter Parker, operating under a different persona to escape public scrutiny. Together, Ricochet and Delilah would engage two of Black Tarantula's top operatives: Roughhouse and Bloodscream.
The battle was brutal. Delilah held her own against Roughhouse—until Bloodscream grabbed her. The mutant vampiric abilities he wielded drained her fast. She bled out, unconscious, and was taken to the hospital by the authorities.
That was the moment.
Ethan didn't need to infiltrate her base. That would be suicide. Walking into an assassin's den—especially one as reclusive and loyal as Delilah—with his current power set was a death wish. He was smart, not arrogant.
No, he'd wait.
He'd watch.
And when Delilah fell—when she was at her weakest, confused and betrayed by the people she trusted—he'd be there.
Not as a captor. Not as a threat. As a rescuer. A benefactor. The one who knew her secrets, understood her loyalties, and offered her something no one else could: purpose plus a lot of money.
He could give her an identity more powerful than "Rose's enforcer." He could give her options.
But for that to work, he had to know her better than she knew herself.
He had to figure out her psychological framework. Understand her triggers. Define her loyalty complex. And—if possible—identify who she had been before she became an assassin.
That meant more surveillance. Tracking her interactions, voice recordings, mannerisms. He needed to gather enough data to build a working model of her psyche.
Ethan sighed, rubbing at his temples. The neural fatigue was setting in. Even with his cognitive enhancement routines, this level of concentration took its toll.
And this was only one front.
He still had Felicia's safehouse and identity infrastructure to finalize, monitoring on Rachel and Amy to maintain, and negotiations with Peter to continue. The print shop buildout hadn't even started, and now he was planning an infiltration of New York's underworld too?
He laughed, dry and sardonic.
"Before I can finish one job, three more land in my lap," he muttered. "At this rate, I'm going to need a clone—or ten."
The terminal pinged softly. One of his automated scripts had picked up footage with audio from a warehouse camera. Delilah's voice—gravelly, clipped, dismissive—just audible.
"Tell him I don't do cleanup. If he wants that trash gone, he can do it himself."
Ethan tapped the audio filter, amplifying the background noise. There—another voice. Male. Laced with panic.
"B-but it's the Tarantula's turf! I'm not going back there!"
"Then I guess you're dead."
The line went silent after that.
Ethan leaned back, gaze narrowing.
She was brutal. Efficient. And she had limits. She wouldn't cross certain lines—even for her employer. That was something.
He saved the audio and flagged it for voice pattern analysis.
He wasn't ready to make a move yet.
But the moment she hit that hospital bed—drained, betrayed, and left behind—he'd be there.
Waiting.
And she wouldn't even realize how thoroughly she was being studied.