He was supposed to flick his wrist and seal the Red Goblin's wrist.
He didn't. Why? Why did he kill Nick Fury? Why did he just lunge and kill him?
His fist was buried deep inside his heart. There was no going back. No reviving him. The man coughed up blood and limped on his shoulder.
'F-Fury...?'
Felix knew he was dead. Every fibre of his body told him as such.
He tried to pull back and…and…
"W-what did you—what did you do to me!?"
He just couldn't.
'Rash!? Herbie!?'
Nobody replied. He was alone. All alone.
With him. The devil.
The Red Goblin's finger left Fury's temple. He yanked the director from the neck to let him fall. To let Felix see the gaping hole he had left inside him. The Red Goblin cackled and spread his arms wide, the gesture of a man who had been waiting for the curtain to rise.
"You weren't the only one waiting to do something!"
Like a frozen statue, he couldn't slam his fist into his mask. He just…he just stood there. Spider-Man looked at his hand. The suit was suddenly moving wrong. Directed-wrong, to be precise, the black liquid crawling up his forearm in a direction he hadn't asked it to go.
"Y-you—!"
"I told you, beating you is impossible." Harold rolled his neck, the pleasant looseness of a man whose gamble had paid out. "Which is why, when we were fighting, I plunged the Beta Symbiote."
'Four of us.'
'Four.'
'Rash—? RASH—!'
Silence where Rash should have been. Then:
'We are here.'
Again, it was not Rash. The cadence was wrong. It was like Multiplemtones stacked on top of each other like harmonics from an instrument tuned incorrectly.
'We are here. We are here. We are here.'
The Control Symbiote was divided into two: the alpha Symbiote and the controlled, Beta Symbiote. But the latter had to be injected into him.
His lips were allowed to move and speak, Felix realized. "N-no, n-not possible…!"
"Definitely possible. I shoved four dosages inside you. Remember, when your chest was opening. I wasn't going for your lungs for fun, you know!"
His eyes widened. The goblin grinned.
"Glad to see you remember~!" He held up the fingers and counted them with obvious pleasure. "With four, I know, it's generous. I wanted to be thorough."
'Thorough.'
'Thorough.'
'We are thorough.'
'Fight it—! RASH, FIGHT IT—!'
"Oh, right, you have your own Symbiote." Harold snickered. "Four beats one. I imagine it was consumed rather quickly."
'N-no…!'
'Yesss…!'
"Oh, and maybe the voices confused you?" He tilted his head. "Who said it was your Symbiote talking to you? They were simply taking their time. Getting comfortable and learning the layout, so to speak."
Felix stood very still. He tried to meditate and was instantly felt like he was on fire. The inside of himself felt like a house where all the furniture had been subtly rearranged. Everything was where it should be. Everything was wrong.
"Now then." Harold's voice dropped into something clean and businesslike. "Kill the SHIELD agents."
'No.'
His legs moved.
'No—NO—!'
His legs moved anyway. There was a SHIELD agent against the far server rack, one of the ones who had survived. Laceration across the thigh, hand pressed to it. He looked up when Spider-Man's shadow found him.
"Spider-Man? F-fight it…!"
'Kill.'
Felix screamed into the inside of himself. The outside of him was very quiet and his hand came down to grip his neck.
"Spider-Man…!"
Felix had killed before. He had done it for revenge. He did it out of necessity. It was never done out of…this. It was never done with fear. It was never done with stoicism.
He just watched the agent's eyes roll back. He watched as his fingers squeezed and he inflicted lethal pain.
Harold could have made this quick and easy. He didn't. He prolonged the choking. He heard every second of this man gasping and wheezing.
"P-p-please, I have a family—! S-Spider-Man…!"
He squeezed and heard the man screaming. He felt the man's pulse stop and his voice die under his fingers. He felt the exact moment. He had never felt that before. He didn't want to ever do it again.
'Next.'
'Don't. Don't do this. STOP—'
Felix was already turning to do it again. Two more agents: one trying to crawl toward the door and the second laying down and pretending to be dead. His Spider-Sense was functioning. He could feel the layout of the room as clearly as ever. Every living person in it registered like a point of warmth.
He didn't realize his own capacity for death until now.
He crossed to the crawling agent in four steps. The agent turned over onto his back and raised a hand, defensive. The agent already understood it would not work.
"Spider-Man, please—"
'I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm—'
'Kill.'
He didn't close his eyes. He didn't look away. If he was going to do this, the least he could do was witness it. He owed them that. He owed them witnessing. But it was so hard. His eyes became wet.
He lifted him by the neck, apologizing repeatedly in his head, and then snapped his neck. The sudden order of brutality was commanded by Harold.
The third agent had been playing dead. He tried to roll and run the moment Spider-Man approached and made it two steps further than anyone else had.
'Good.'
'Good…!'
'More!'
But Spider-Man was death incarnate. The agent could never get away. Not in a million years.
'Rash—I know you're in there—I know you're still in there somewhere—FIGHT THEM—'
Silence. From somewhere very deep and very far, like a sound through water: '...Fe...lix...' It was barely a syllable. It was enough to know Rash was still there, maybe.
'Kill.'
'Don't you DARE—'
He dared.
And Felix snatched the man from his feet and shoved his other arm through his heart. He was instantly killed.
"Guess the lady's the last one," Harold said, chippery.
Maria Hill had been trying to move and failed. Her hand still pressed to her shoulder. "S-Spider-Man…! Please…!"
Felix's body turned toward her.
"After this woman is gone, the government won't even realize SHIELD is gone. I'll do some impersonating, sniff out the last major operators of this facility, and have you kill them all.'
'No.'
'Last one.'
'Absolutely not. ABSOLUTELY NOT—'
His feet carried him forward. Ten feet away, eight feet away…
'Kill.'
'Felix, come on, do something. Do something!'
'Kill.'
'I WILL NOT—'
Six feet. His hands were already rising. The Symbiote suit carried him even his muscles twitched and begged not to.
Maria looked up at him, her jaw set. She took her hand from her shoulder and put it flat against the server rack behind her to push herself up, because if it was going to happen she was going to be standing for it. That was who she was.
"Spider-Man. I know you're in there."
'Kill.'
Four feet.
'Kill.'
Three.
'RASH—!'
'...h e l p...'
He couldn't stop his hands from reaching for her throat.
He could feel Maria's warmth registering on him — alive, alive, still alive — and the voices pressing down on that signal like a thumb on a scale, trying to reclassify it, trying to make it mean something else, and Felix held onto the word alive with everything that he had left that was still his.
'Kill.'
Felix Faeth was screaming somewhere no one could hear him, fighting for an inch, losing the inch, screaming anyway.
"Hey, catch!"
"Hey, catch!"
But hope always existed, and how else would hope manifest but in the form of another Spider-Man.
From the hole in the ceiling — the one the Red Goblin had punched through on his way down — Hobie threw him the Sheath.
Felix couldn't catch the Sheath, though fortunately, it didn't matter. The black casing split open upon contact with his shoulder and hit him like a wave, spreading across the Symbiote suit. The hand that had been gripping Maria Hill's throat simply…stopped.
He released her.
He didn't choose to. His hand just opened.
"—hh—"
He gasped. It was akin to being underwater for too long. He was choking on water, on something he shouldn't be choking on. He stumbled back, his hands coming up in front of his face and being his hands again, shaking and trembling.
Spider-Man fell to his knees.
The server room floor was cold through the suit. All five senses felt like they had been dialled up to ten. Felix put both palms flat on the ground and stayed there. "Gah! Ngggh!" His shoulders shook. His head dropped.
Physically, mentally, and spiritually, his essence was converging. Felix Faeth went limp.
…
…
…
Hobie's Spider-Man suit was a patchwork. To put it another way, it was incomplete. He spent about three months on it with the resources of what was effectively a normal guy. In the past two weeks, with the aid of Felix and the supercomputers, he managed to make it workable and combat-ready.
But of course, was it ready against a man like the Red Goblin? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Primarily red and blue with a web pattern, the suit was irregular in the best way. The lenses were asymmetric: one slightly larger than the other, giving the mask a permanently skeptical expression. There were black spikey collars everywhere and the actual mask had this mohawk that was literally made of steel spikes. Around his wrists were silver tech-bracers that were web-shooters and quite clearly something else as Harold would soon find out.
"Okay, and you are—?"
Bam!
One second, he was up there atop the hole, crouched. The next second, the punk Spider-Man was gone and struck the Red Goblin in the jaw. It was a hell of a surprise. Harold's head snapped sideways and he went into the server rack hard enough to bend the casing and scatter a cascade of sparks across the floor.
He straightened up slowly.
"Didn't expect that."
Hobie had let the invisibility dissolve, standing eight feet away. He looked over to the black Spider-Man. He was still on his knees, staring at nothing and turned toward nothing. Maria Hill had inched away from him in fear.
Still.
"What did you do?" the goblin asked. "He's not listening to me. He's not…doing anything."
"Really expect to tell ya why?"
"Yes!"
Hobie shrugged nonchalantly. "Too bad."
Whoosh! He was gone. The Red Goblin was still working through what was happening when a kick struck his side. He skidded across and nearly tripped over Nick Fury's corpse.
"Another Spider-Man." The Red Goblin looked at the suit, from the asymmetric lenses to the tech at the wrists. "Oh, wait a minute. I know you! How the hell are you here, Spider-Punk?"
"Uhh, yeah, sorry." Hobie tilted his head. Naturally, Harold was told of the Devil. The other way around though? "Don't think we really know each other."
"But I do. And I'm going to enjoy beating you to a pulp."
Instantly, his Spider-Sense going off, Hobie went invisible.
The Red Goblin turned like a nocturnal animal, tracking sound and tracking the minute displacement of air. His laser-finger came up, ready to strike.
Zwoom!
He nicked his shoulder and Hobie came visible again, grimacing and already mid-swing. He came from his opponent's blind side with one of the silver tech-bracers charged and crackling. The impact landed across Harold's shoulder and discharged. This pulse could have stopped an elephant's heart.
It caused the goblin to stumble and use his hands to not fall flat on his face. Hobie took that as his chance to strike again.
Zwoom!
But he recoiled and jumped away when the laser struck that same shoulder. Another nick, fortunately.
"Phew, hot! You're not bad, are ya?"
"Tech from 2099." The Red Goblin laughed and rolled to his feet. He cracked the shoulder that had just been discharged. "I knew it! I knew it was you!"
Hobie didn't answer and glanced at Felix discreetly. He was still on his knees and unresponsive. "Dammit, man…"
He went invisible again and Harold threw himself sideways on instinct and the second bracer discharged into the server rack instead. There was a chain of minor explosions that took a chunk of the room's light with it. The goblin tracked the sound of landing — Hobie hit the floor and rolled — and launched himself across the room.
"Spider-Sense tingling," Hobie quipped. He came visible for half a second and fired a web-line at the ceiling, yanking himself up and through the hole he'd entered from. The Red Goblin followed without hesitation, through the hole. Hobie was running and he cackled and gave chase.
"Come on, spider! Don't run away just now!"
Hobie disappeared and reappeared. Zwoom! Zwoom! Laughing manically, the Red Goblin pointed and shot at him. His suit quite obviously couldn't stop it. Hobie dove through another hole, catching the elevator cable and going down.
The chase was on.
The thirtieth floor was largely computing infrastructure. Black blocks that were servers blinking blue. They were neat rows and neat rooms. The corridor was like the central tree. The rooms were akin to branches.
Hobie crawled through the corridor with the goblin chasing on foot.
"Crawl all you want! I'll catch you!"
"No, you won't!"
Zwoom! Zwoom!
He popped open a vent and tried to hide in there. It hardly worked. Hell, it made things worse and Hobie soon found himself taking a turn and dropping down in the middle of a room.
Zwoom!
Harold kicked open the door to the room Hobie thought he could hide in for at least a couple seconds. There wasn't even a moment's delay and it dawned on Hobie why. "Dammit, this bugger got X-ray vision...?"
"And really good super-hearing!"
Zwoom! Hobie dove under a row of workstations as the laser swept the room, shearing through monitor screens and leaving burning lines across the carpet tiles. He rolled, came up, fired both web-shooters at the ceiling panels above Harold's position, and yanked. The acoustic tiles and a section of the suspended lighting rig dropped directly onto him.
The goblin smashed his fist upward, breaking the pathetic attempt, and standing in the wreckage of it.
"Really?"
Hobie was already gone. The ventilation grate in the far wall had been opened. The Red Goblin groaned.
He started blasting his lasers inside the vent. Hobie had to drop down into the room immediately.
Boom!
And the Goblin didn't bother to be stealthy. He broke through the wall that separated them with a lunge. Lightning fast, he caught Hobie's wrist — the right one, the one with the charged bracer — and stopped the counter punch before he could throw it.
The size difference was immediate and total. The Red Goblin's grip closed around the bracer and the wrist inside it like it was made of balsa.
"There we go," the Red Goblin said. "That's it~!"
"Get off already, you nonce!" The bracer discharged harder into Harold's palm. At contact range, it should have been catastrophic. Harold's hand smoked and his fingers loosened by two degrees.
Hobie used the two degrees.
He yanked his arm back, left the bracer in Harold's grip, and kicked off the goblin's chest with both feet, backflipping clear and landing on a workstation that immediately collapsed under him. He hit the floor in a roll and kept moving. The bracer exploded in Harold's hand a second later. Delayed charge, duh. The Red Goblin rode the explosion sideways into a server rack.
He got up. One hand slightly blackened.
He was laughing.
His hand swiftly healed.
With his X-ray vision, he saw the new Spider-Man crawling down the vents into the floor below. Dusting himself off, he slammed his foot down and created a hole down there.
The ninety-ninth floor had a cafeteria. Round tables, plastic chairs stacked against one wall, and a back area where the cafeteria lady would serve food. Right about now, it was empty. The emergency lighting had kicked in and everything was amber and shadow.
Hobie had intentionally chosen to crawl down here. The goblin knew this and after jumping down, he walked out through the serving hatch, feeling theatrically satisfying.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are~!"
The first thing that hit him was a chair. Thrown hard, not as a weapon but as concealment. The Red Goblin batted it aside and the impact was cover for the web-line that yanked a cafeteria table end-over-end into his legs. He didn't so much as flinch. The table broke upon contact.
The second thing was the industrial coffee urn, swung on a web-line like a flail, which connected with the side of his head and ruptured and covered him in twelve-hour-old coffee. The Red Goblin again didn't flinch.
"Seriously?"
The third thing was Hobie himself, coming off the ceiling directly above him. "Yep!" He threw a ball of webbing that went BOOM! It was a sonic burst device that had no business existing in this era, that rattled the sneeze guards off the counter and blew every plastic tray off its stack.
Even the almighty goblin had to concede to this. He was blasted through the serving counter. He ended up in the kitchen space, on his back, surrounded by pots and a toppled industrial refrigeration unit.
He lay there for three seconds.
Hobie landed in the serving hatch and looked in.
"Hah…hahahaha!" The Red Goblin's hand came up through the debris and found the edge of the refrigeration unit. He pulled himself to his feet, grunting. "Hah…"
That was slower than anything he'd done today.
"Looks like someone's getting tired!"
He looked at Hobie in the serving hatch. He was gone. He had gone invisible. He casually leaned back to avoid several punches and when Hobie understood how futile that was, he jumped back, panting.
"The hell kind of shit are you pumped with?"
"Right back at you. You're more of a pest than I expected," the Red Goblin admitted. There was a deadly cadence to it. He healed fast but considering the other Spider-Man was still alive. "I'm going to sincerely try and kill you know."
"Cheers," Hobie said, and threw the sonic device at his face.
Harold caught it, crushed it, and let it discharge into his palm. Fleetingly, he looked at what was left of the device.
"That was your last chance too. How sad," the goblin said.
He blasted through the cafeteria and Hobie was already running, invisible before he'd cleared the doorframe. The corridor showed nothing, no footsteps loud enough to follow. Harold stood in the corridor and breathed through it and listened.
"Gotcha!"
He lunged like an animal and managed to grab the spikes of Spider-Man's head. Hobie tried to kick him off. He failed. Fingers spread across the skull. The goblin ignored the leaking blood as he planked his fingers and palm down the tall, steel spikes.
"Looks like you and I are going to have some fun!"
Slam!
Hobie's head hit the floor and the goblin started running and dragging him across. Dragging, dragging, dragging, even against those precious vents he loved to hide in so much.
"Haha!"
Slam!
Just for fun, the goblin slammed him into a random door. Slam! The goblin went inside to destroy a water cooler with Hobie's head. Slam! Slam! The floor made holes. Hobie's suit taking damage it was designed to take and taking it and taking it.
"Hahahaha!"
There wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. The Red Goblin couldn't let go even if he wanted to.
The window received Hobie's head. He gasped and took in the fresh air and the glass shards.
"B-b-bastard…!"
The Red Goblin momentarily hung off the edge of the window. One arm held onto the window and the other kept a firm grip on Spider-Man's skull.
The goblin couldn't stick to the walls but what he could do was run really, really fast and run on walls. As Hobie seethed and sputtered to recover, the Red Goblin jumped and started running.
"Hahaahah!"
The night air of New York heard the goblin's laugh and couldn't do a damn thing about it. A helicopter, however, did spot them. But the goblin was too fast.
He reached the roof at speed and threw Hobie horizontally into where this all began. The top floor whose roof had been blown to a oblivion.
Hobie pulled himself up, his suit torn at the shoulder. The asymmetric lenses were cracked, one of them dark. He noted the black cocoons and the dead agents. The living and the dead. He ended up looking at the man responsible for all this chaos.
"Hah…is that the best ya got?"
His taunt did not amuse the goblin. The villain crossed the floor at a walk. The rush of it was gone now, replaced by something that functioned like appetite. This was not a real fight for him. When Hobie swung, he spun on one heel, dodging, and casually kicked him up in the jaw, in the stomach, then his foot. It was all one motion. A three-pronged assault.
As Hobie gasped and was about to drop to his knees, the goblin heel spun again, charged up a palm, and struck him at the base of the spine.
Spider-Punk collapsed and slammed onto the floor. Dropping down, the goblin lifted him by his spikes again.
"Regardless of which world..." Slam, slam! For no particular reason, he punished him with a mouthful of the floor. "...a superhuman like you deserves to die."
Like some toy, he turned him and seized Hobie by the throat. Slowly, the goblin lifted himself and Hobie up.
"Any last words?"
Hobie's feet no longer touched the floor. Serious spine damage stopped him entirely from attacking. He was coughing up blood too.
So he laughed.
Was it the performance of a brave man? Or actual laughter coming from someone who found the moment funny on its own terms? The goblin couldn't tell which until Hobie spat blood at his face. It landed on the cracked devil mask.
"You superhumans...you really think you can just laugh this off? You think you're better than everyone else? That you can laugh at the face of death?" He threw him aside like a ragdoll. His fingers curled and uncurled as he walked over. "Fuck off. Fuck you! Let's see if you can laugh when I beat you to death!"
He straddled him, cackling and enraged, and lifted a fist high up.
It came down.
Thwip!
Only to be stopped by a single line of white webbing. It caught the goblin's wrist from behind and pulled it taut.
The villain couldn't believe it. His fist of all things was suspended. Very slowly, he turned his head. The Red Goblin's mouth moved into a smile.
"I have no idea how you're back…but welcome back, Spider-Man!"