The hum of fans filled Ethan's hotel room like a steady drumbeat, a white-noise lullaby for the architect of chaos. He sat cross-legged in his chair, screens flickering around him in pale light, each one a doorway into someone else's secrets.
He exhaled once, steady, and began.
A simple handshake command pushed him through Oscorp's perimeter. Not the outer firewall—he'd slipped through that hours ago using credentials cribbed from Felicia's earlier heist—but the deeper shell where the meat of the operation lived.
The server tree unfolded in neat branches across his main display: project folders, accounting ledgers, HR archives, subdirectories of encrypted correspondence. Most hackers would salivate at the raw volume alone. Ethan was more discerning. He mapped what mattered:
/arachnid/: proprietary weapons research, hidden facilities.
/bio_ext/: human testing logs, buried beneath R&D jargon.
/acct_ldr/: Norman's private ledgers, tucked inside a "Legal" subfolder like a child hiding candy beneath vegetables, foreign government contracts, secret documents. (On a private server that can only be accessed with credentials that only Norman holds.)
Ethan didn't stay long. He wasn't here to download any data, as that could be traced, which was why he only did so once before. He just needed the pathways to these specific files. With a few keystrokes, he dumped the directory paths into a tracker file and disconnected.
Now came the real fun.
He opened a fresh script window and began weaving. False transfers, laundered through shell companies so clean they practically gleamed. A biotech start-up in Madripoor, a logistics front in Symkaria, and a shadowy "consulting firm" in Latveria. Each layered with false officers, signatures, and bank account metadata.
Line by line, he falsified Oscorp ledgers until they told a damning story: Norman Osborn, selling biological weapons to foreign enemies. Every transaction watermarked, every signature traceable—just enough to hold up under cursory inspection, just real-looking enough to investigate but would collapse once the right people started tugging. When that happened they would investigate those areas and would find the real evidence of treason.
The whistleblower file came next. Dr. Anthony Kelso—now with his falsified HR trail firmly knotted into Oscorp's payroll system—drafted a long, desperate email about corruption within the company and attached the names of the files that held evidence of the money they made legal, plus attached a file or two he personally wrote. Ethan polished the prose: just enough technical jargon to sound authentic, just enough fear to be believable. Then he queued it up, addressed to watchdog groups, federal agencies, and one particular journalist who would sink his teeth into this story like a terrier: Ben Urich.
On another screen, the countdown timer ticked. The messages were loaded, encrypted, waiting for the right push.
Oscorp IT Department – Same Evening
The fluorescent glow of Oscorp's cubicle farm had never looked less inspiring. Three sysadmins leaned over their monitors, frowning at the anomalies scrolling past.
"Hey, you see this?" one muttered. His screen blinked with error logs. "Ledger pathways keep duplicating. Looks like phantom accounts."
"Same here," his colleague said. "Might be some kind of cross-write. It could be a hacker. Let's check just to be sure."
They exchanged uneasy glances. The patterns weren't random. Someone was poking around, but the traces were faint.
Before they could dig deeper, a sharp voice cut across the floor.
"What's the hold-up?"
Their supervisor, tie crooked, face shiny with sweat, strolled over with a mug in hand. He glanced at their screens, lips curling.
"OS patch dropped last night. Bugs like this are normal. Just make a note, log it, and move on. I need the monthly compliance report before the closing of the business day."
"But sir—"
"You heard me." His voice snapped like a whip. "Not your job to play detective. Just do the assignment you were given."
He set his mug down on one of their desks and walked away, muttering something about them being "overpaid button-pushers."
The three sysadmins shared a look of mutual hatred.
"Jackass dumped his whole workload on us again today," one grumbled.
"The guy's just allergic to doing his own job. Asshole," another muttered.
"Let him be. He just ordered us to let it go, so it's not our problem. When the hammer drops, it'll land on his desk only."
They went back to work, cursing under their breath.
The error logs continued to crawl.
Later in the afternoon at the Insight Offices. The print shop smelled faintly of ink and coffee. Inside, the staff huddled around new desks covered in drafts and notepads. Peter Parker leaned over Clara Hensley's shoulder, her brow furrowed at the screen in front of her.
"This doesn't make sense," she said, tapping a highlighted paragraph. "These records—transfers this one specifically—where the hell would anyone get them? Even a mole inside Oscorp couldn't grab a trail this clean. Osborn should have buried these records along with the bodies."
Mark Donnelly, perched on the corner of the desk, nodded. "Yeah, Pete, this stuff is too polished. Either someone upstairs has god-tier sources or we're looking at fabricated junk."
Peter forced a smile, pushing his glasses up. He could hear Ethan's voice in his head, calm and smug: Just give them enough to believe it and let them see what they want.
"Mr. Maddox," Peter said instead, invoking Ethan's Isaac persona, "has connections. High-level ones. There are people in government who think Osborn's a traitor to the country and are looking to bring him down without their direct involvement. They handed this off because they can't move openly."
Clara's eyes narrowed. "That's a bold claim."
Peter shrugged. "Look at the files yourself. Nobody outside Norman's circle could conjure this much detail unless they were Norman himself. That or it's the government, you know, those conspiracy theories about them watching us have some merit. Either it's authentic, or it's divine intervention."
The staff fell silent. Clara chewed her lip, then leaned back. "Fine. But I want triple verification before we run it. I don't want my name attached to a fake story. I finally got a chance to spread by name, and you can be damn sure I'm not gonna waste it."
Peter nodded. Inside, his stomach twisted. The data was indeed too perfect. Even he would have doubted its source—and he'd fought Osborn as the Green Goblin on rooftops. But he knew how Ethan liked to do things, and he trusted the kid to some level. So if Ethan said this information was good, then it was, and Peter knew better than to dig too deep.
In the evening, back in his hotel room surrounded by his cocoon of screens, Ethan leaned over his keyboard, eyes darting. The skeleton of his next masterpiece stretched across the code: a program designed not just to drain the data on Oscorp's servers, but to prioritize which data to go after first, since time was of the essence.
The script would skim the cream off the top—arachnid, bio_ext, acct_ldr—before wasting time on the chaff. That way, even if Oscorp's IT department caught on, they'd still be able to get what Ethan needed at the bare minimum.
Ethan's fingers flew, each keystroke a careful cut, weaving the program into something lethal. He knew exactly what to take, exactly how to hide it, because his meta-knowledge filled the gaps. He wasn't just hacking Oscorp—he was rewriting its history with the benefit of foreknowledge Norman Osborn himself didn't possess.
He paused at the most delicate part, frowning at the logic tree branching across his screen. This was the core, the heart of the drain. If he got it wrong, the worm would stall mid-operation.
A knock.
"Ethan?"
His mother's voice.
"Dinner's ready."
He froze, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
"…Coming, Mom," he called.
He closed the screen with a sigh, the glow winking out. For now, Norman Osborn's empire could wait.
He pushed away from the desk and followed the smell of food down the hall, leaving the storm of data waiting, restless, for his return.