Mechanical-Arm Spider #85
Jake closed the gap.
Not because it was the smart play -- because it was the only one. The chain owned the distance. Every second he gave Lobo room to work it, the links were already finding the angle, the spike already reading his trajectory.
Stay out there and the chain wins. Get inside it and maybe something else does.
He went in low and fast, firing a web at the ground three feet to Lobo's left and using the anchor to cut his approach angle at the last second. Lobo's arm came down where he'd been. Jake came up under the elbow, drove the heel of his right hand into Lobo's chin, and was already moving left before the big man's head finished moving.
Lobo's expression didn't change. His head had turned maybe four degrees.
"Sure," he said.
He threw a backhand.
Jake was under it, webbing the back of Lobo's knee and yanking while he pushed off the leg -- the same swing-set geometry from before, using the man's own mass as the anchor, his body spinning around and down and coming up on the opposite side. The mechanical arm drove into the back of Lobo's shoulder. The impact ran up the sleeve and reported in as data, clean and without complaint, and Lobo went forward half a step.
Half a step.
Jake was already gone before the chain came around.
He went at him again. And again. Short arcs, low trajectories, using webs to cut angles that his legs alone couldn't reach -- webbing a knee here, a wrist there, using the brief tension to redirect his own body through space Lobo's arms were still swinging through.
The Carnage suit flagged incoming vectors in the half-second before they arrived and he fed that into his movement without deciding to, the two of them building a grammar of evasion that kept him in Lobo's face without letting Lobo's face find him.
He hit the jaw. The temple. Got his feet on Lobo's chest and pushed off hard enough to stagger him two inches.
Two inches.
Lobo stopped swinging.
He went still, one hand loose at his side, the chain coiled on the other forearm, and looked at Jake with something that had moved past irritation into a register with no comfortable name.
His breathing hadn't changed. But something in the set of his shoulders had -- the way a man's shoulders change when he stops categorizing something and starts paying it full attention.
"You done buzzing?" he said.
Jake shot two webs simultaneously -- one to Lobo's left wrist, one to a building behind him -- and pulled. The tension crossed in the space between them. Lobo's arm yanked left and his weight came with it and Jake was already inside the motion, the mechanical arm swinging hard at the ribs.
The hit connected.
And Lobo bled.
Not much. A split along the side where the arm's edge caught the skin over the ribs, and what came out was the same red as anyone else's, and Lobo looked down at it for a moment with his hand pressed flat against the spot.
Jake was already back and moving.
Lobo pulled the chain free of his wrist with a motion that didn't look fast and covered six inches in no time at all, and the links came out in a low flat throw aimed at Jake's ankles. He jumped it. Got a web to the facing wall and used it to stay airborne, swinging back in from the left, the mechanical arm cocked.
Lobo caught it.
His hand found the arm mid-swing -- fingers closing around the elbow joint, the grip total and immediate, and Jake's body followed the momentum and swung forward and Lobo drove him down into the road face-first. The impact detonated through the Carnage suit and Jake felt the ground's opinion about his face through the suit's coverage, which was doing its job and complaining about it.
He pushed up.
Lobo pulled the chain.
The links wrapped once around Jake's left forearm -- the mechanical one -- and the yank went through the shoulder mount hard enough to make his teeth press together. He went forward toward Lobo. Lobo's fist was already coming, wrapped in chain links, the spike facing back so the knuckles hit instead of the point, and Jake got both arms up and the block worked and the force behind it drove him back twenty feet with the Carnage suit hardening across his forearms under the impact.
He landed with his feet under him.
Lobo pulled the chain again.
Jake pulled back.
The links went taut between them, the tension humming, and Jake was already planting his feet and firing a web to the building above him for additional anchor, and Lobo was pulling with both hands, and for four seconds nothing moved except the links vibrating at a frequency that sent small chips of road surface rattling.
Then Jake ran the chain.
He ran toward Lobo along the chain's own length, closing the gap in the time it took Lobo to register that pulling wasn't working, and got inside the reach and drove the mechanical fist into the side of his jaw.
Lobo's head moved.
Jake hit him again. The mechanical arm read the contact and reported the load distribution across the joint and Jake didn't read the report, just hit him again, and again, the third one a right cross that caught the cut over the ribs and opened it wider.
Lobo spit blood.
Looked at it.
Then he grabbed Jake by the neck with both hands and drove his forehead down into Jake's face.
The headbutt hit like a piston. Stars, not metaphorical -- white points in his vision that stayed for a full second, his spider-sense screaming about a threat that had already happened, his legs suddenly having a democratic debate about whether to keep doing their job. The Carnage suit hardened across his skull as the second one came.
He got his arms up. The block caught most of it but his arms drove back into his own face and his head snapped back and his feet went sideways.
Lobo headbutted him again.
And again. Not fast -- rhythmic, deliberate, each one hitting in the same place, his grip on Jake's collar keeping him from going anywhere, the chain still loose on his forearm and the stone still in his left hand and Lobo working through Jake's guard with the patience of someone who had all the time there was and knew it.
Jake's guard was going.
His arms were still coming up but they were coming up slower, the mechanical arm responding a half-beat behind his intent, the right arm doing most of the work and starting to do it poorly. The Carnage suit was sealed across his skull but the cumulative load was settling in behind his eyes in a way that had nothing to do with the suit's coverage.
He threw everything he had into a right hook at Lobo's temple.
Lobo stopped.
Looked at him.
There was another split at his cheek where the punch had caught the bone, and the blood from it was running slow, and Lobo's hand was pressed against it for a moment the way you press against something without thinking about it. His expression had moved somewhere past what it had been. He'd been holding something in check -- the chain's trajectories always stopping short, the punches landing at angles that cracked rather than ended. The one rule he'd been working around in the middle of everything else.
He looked at the blood on his hand.
He looked at Jake.
"You keep making me do this," he said. Low, not loud. "I'm trying not to kill you, lad. I want you to know that."
His grip shifted. The chain unwound from his forearm and looped instead around Jake's throat, and his left hand came up with the Dreamstone and the red light inside it was still moving.
"You put up a hell of a fight." He held the stone level with Jake's chest, and his voice had settled into something that wasn't unkind. "Almost makes me sorry I have to do this. Almost." His thumb moved across the stone's surface. "But the Main Man always fills his contracts."
The light came out.
It moved like liquid and like light simultaneously, crimson bleeding from the stone's surface in a slow pour that found Jake's chest and sank into it, and what it touched went cold -- not the cold of temperature, cold of subtraction, like something being pulled out through the surface. Jake's mouth opened.
The sound that came out wasn't language.
Something in him was moving. Something he'd never been able to see or name but had always been present -- the part of a person that was the person, beneath the strength and the suit and the spider-sense and the two weeks of decisions he'd made while moving too fast to examine them -- was rising toward the surface, reaching toward the stone, the stone reaching back.
No.
The word formed from somewhere below thought.
No.
He got his feet under him.
No.
The Carnage suit ran red from the edges inward. Lobo felt the shift -- his hand tightening on the chain, pressing in closer, the stone angled up toward Jake's face -- and Jake grabbed the chain at his throat with both hands and pulled.
The chain held.
He pulled again. His whole body behind it this time, legs driving, the mechanical arm pulling with its own strength separate from his own, the Carnage symbiote flowing down both arms and hardening where the links bit in, the red threading through the black like something that had been waiting for exactly this temperature to wake up.
"I'm not--" His voice came out wrong, ragged, the cold from the stone still working at his chest. "I'm not letting anyone -- capture me -- again--"
He screamed and pulled.
The chain snapped.
No -- the chain held. What didn't hold was Lobo's left arm.
The elbow joint separated at the same moment Jake's whole body weight went backward, and he hit the ground with something in his hands that was still and not attached to anyone.
Lobo made a sound.
It wasn't a word. It was mass, expressing itself through a mouth. His right hand pressed against the elbow socket where the arm had been and his face did something that Jake hadn't seen it do before -- raw, unmanaged, the expression of a being who could survive anything and had just been reminded that surviving wasn't the same as not feeling it.
The Dreamstone had fallen with the arm.
It was on the ground between them, the red light still moving inside it, the patterns pressing at the surface. Lobo looked at it. Then at his arm in Jake's hands. Then at Jake.
His right hand came up.
Jake ran.
He didn't think about where. His feet found the Space Hog and his legs made the decision for him -- because Lobo was already regenerating, the socket already knitting at its edges, and in sixty seconds there would be a full arm and a chain and no distance left. The Space Hog was the only thing in this street that moved faster than a chain.
He got on it.
The controls didn't respond. Handles, throttle, the interface display -- dead, dormant, waiting for something it wasn't going to get from him. He heard Lobo's voice from behind, thick with pain and fury, telling him to get off the bike right now, and the accent made every syllable into something absolute, and Jake wasn't listening.
Lobo's arm.
He pressed it to the interface panel. The palm found the bike's recognition system and the Space Hog came alive -- not smoothly, not cleanly, the systems arguing with each other about whose authority this was, but the repulsors lit and the display came up and when Jake pulled the throttle it moved.
"GET BACK HERE--"
The bike hit the air.
Star City fell away beneath him, the grid of it spreading out, the smoke still rising from a dozen places, the streets below looking like the aftermath of something that had gone on too long. The day light hit the Space Hog's housing and came back cold.
He felt his body get heavier.
The chain hit the bottom of the Space Hog a second later. He looked back and Lobo was already off the ground -- one arm and the chain and pure intent, the big man hanging below and climbing.
Jake pulled the throttle hard.
The Hog responded and the drag responded with it, the weight below compounding against every maneuver. He rolled left and Lobo swung wide and came back. He pulled up steep and the chain went taut and the Hog's nose dipped. He cut right and the chain slid along the undercarriage and caught on a housing bracket and Lobo used it to climb faster.
He found the first button by accident.
A panel on the right side of the display, flush with the housing -- his mechanical arm brushed it and the undercarriage opened and three bombs dropped in a line in front of him and went off below in a chain of detonations that lit the street for two seconds and moved a delivery truck forty feet through a wall.
He looked at the panel.
Found three more and pressed them all.
The bombs dropped behind him this time and Lobo took the first one direct and the chain went slack for a half-second before it came taut again. He pressed them again and the second series hit and the chain went slack for longer and when it came taut Lobo was lower on it and climbing faster.
Jake pushed the Hog nose-down and hit the air-brake with the mechanical arm.
The deceleration was total.
Lobo left the chain.
He didn't let go -- the momentum took him, physics taking over from intention, the big man arcing forward over the Hog and past Jake and out in front of them both, the chain trailing behind him in a long curve.
Jake opened the throttle and fired everything at once.
The bombs fell in front of him and Lobo was in the middle of them and the detonations went off at the same moment Lobo's expression changed from fury into something that was working out the geometry of its own situation with less time than it needed.
He came through it.
He always came through it.
He landed on the Hog's nose.
His left hand -- regrown, new, the skin still too smooth -- found the housing and his eyes found Jake from three feet and there was nothing in them that had anything to do with a contract anymore.
Jake pressed every button on the panel.
Nothing came out.
The display changed.
The Hog's systems had gone quiet in the way electronics went quiet when they were doing the kind of work that didn't allow for anything else. The repulsors changed pitch -- not louder, lower, the frequency dropping into something Jake felt in his sternum before he heard it. The panel lights all shifted to the same color at once.
His spider-sense went off like a fuse.
Not warning. Not pressure. The complete and undivided attention of every threat-sense he had, all of it pointed at the machine he was sitting on, all of it saying the same thing at the same volume.
Lobo's expression changed.
For the first time, the Main Man looked at something and did not look certain about its outcome. His eyes moved from the display to Jake and the certainty had gone somewhere it hadn't been before.
"That's not for--" His voice, low, the accent stripping every syllable. "That is not a -- stop -- stop that--"
Lobo let go of the chain and dived.
Jake was already off.
He fired two webs simultaneously and got three full swings of distance in the time the sound was still building beneath him, the Hog hanging in the air above and behind him with its repulsors at the wrong pitch and its lights at the wrong color and his spider-sense still screaming without pause.
He swung and swung and the ground was coming up and he fired again and --
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
Star City had been burning since before midnight.
It had taken blows across its whole surface -- territorial lines redrawn in fire, infrastructure pulled apart, twenty-three years of layered criminal architecture tested against a single night of pressure and found to have less give in it than anyone had known. The city had absorbed it. Stayed vertical. Kept its shape against the day in the way cities do when the thing burning them is human-scale, when the damage has a limit that belongs to the things making it.
There was no human-scale limit to what happened next.
The Hog didn't explode.
It opened.
What came out of it went downward first -- not one detonation but a cascade, a series of charges releasing in sequence from the inside out, each one triggering the next, the intervals between them shrinking until there were no intervals and the whole sequence became a single event.
Buildings ceased to exist.
Not collapsed -- ceased. The ones in the immediate radius were there and then they were information about having been there, the structures converting to their own debris faster than the eye could track the change, the facades and frames and interiors going outward in a wave that had no interest in the distinction between structural and decorative. The wave hit the buildings beyond those and did the math on their structural tolerances and found them wanting.
The sound arrived everywhere at once.
What was left when the sound passed was not rubble. It was reduction -- a radius of matter that had been sorted into components small enough that the day light fell evenly across all of it, and the skyline on the east side of downtown had gaps in it that hadn't been there when the sun came up, the silhouette of the city suddenly wrong in a way that would take time to understand.
Then the dust came down.
And the city went quiet in the way it had not been quiet for twenty-three hours.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
The regeneration started with chemistry.
It always started with chemistry -- the cellular conversation that Czarnian biology conducted with itself when the situation demanded reconstruction, the molecules finding each other in the dust and the morning light and beginning the slow argument about which of them went where. It was not a fast process. It was not supposed to be a fast process. It was supposed to be humbling, which it was, every time, even after centuries of it.
The blood found itself first.
A pool of it in what had been a street and was now a survey of what streets were made of, and the pool moved -- not spread, moved, the edges drawing inward and upward with the patient insistence of something that had places to be. The cells stacked. The structure emerged from the stacking. What grew out of the blood was small and red and then larger and less red and then had a shape that was identifiable as the beginning of something.
The arm came before the head, which was typical.
The head came eventually.
The dreadlocks took the longest. They always did.
Lobo's head sat in the remains of a city block and felt the last of it finish and ran his tongue across teeth that had assembled themselves in the correct order, mostly, and looked at what Star City had become in his immediate vicinity.
"Fraggin'--" He stopped. Looked at the radius. Looked at the gaps in the skyline above it. Looked at the specific quality of the silence that had settled over.
"Psychopath," he said.
His voice landed flat in all the space there was now for it to land in.
He sat there for a moment longer, the morning light on the dust, the city's remaining shape pressing down from the edges of what the explosion had taken. It was quiet.
He reached for the Dreamstone.
It wasn't there.
He looked at his hand. Looked at the ground around him. The stone had been in the severed arm when the sequence had started. He ran the geometry of it and looked out at the radius and understood that the Dreamstone was somewhere in that radius, which meant it was somewhere in the general composition of the radius, which could mean it was no longer a stone so much as it was a concept.
He sat with that for a moment.
The contract. Death's terms, her voice in that space between spaces, her eyes meeting his with the absolute certainty of something that had been decided and was only being communicated. Soul extracted via Dreamstone, permanent removal from timeline. One million credits. Guaranteed resurrection. One item from her collection, and he still hadn't decided what he wanted from there.
He was going to have to have a conversation about the Dreamstone.
He was going to have to have a conversation about a lot of things.
He looked out at the radius again. Looked at the quality of what remained -- the material thoroughness of it, the specific completeness of what the Hog's charge had done. He'd deployed that payload twice before in his career, both times on things that had needed to stop existing, and both times nothing in the radius had argued with the result.
"No way," he said. "No fraggin' way he survived that."
He said it to the air, and the air agreed with him, and he sat in the agreement and found that it did not feel the way contract completions usually felt.
"I'll follow him to hell if I have to," he said. "Because the Main Man always--"
He stopped.
Looked at the radius.
The Main Man had not always, today. The Main Man had held the stone to the Spider's chest and watched something fundamental begin to leave and had -- not felt regret, exactly, but had felt the particular weight of being the instrument of an ending that the thing being ended was fighting with everything it had. Had felt the Spider's hands on the chain with the full force of someone who had decided that this specific thing would not happen to them, not again, not ever again, the refusal bigger than the body making it.
The Main Man had not filled the contract.
The Main Man was sitting in rubble.
"Not in a million ways," he said.
Quieter.
The certainty in it different from the first time -- not the certainty of someone stating a fact, but of someone trying to determine whether a thing they were saying was true.
He looked at the radius one more time.
Then he stood, because sitting in rubble was not something the Main Man did indefinitely, and he began the slow work of finding his bike.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
Because the Spider was dead.
Not missing -- dead. There was a difference, and this was the second kind.
There was no soul in the Dreamstone, because the Dreamstone was component dust in a radius where buildings used to be. There was no body to find, because the radius had an opinion about bodies. There was a piece of the suit -- a fragment of red and black the size of a hand, caught on what remained of a steel beam at the radius's far edge -- and it was not moving, and nothing in it was the red that had been threading through the black, and whatever had worn it had worn it past its capacity to hold a shape.
In Gotham's ledger: outstanding.
In Star City's new geography: closed.
In Death's accounting: unresolved, contested, the Dreamstone gone and the soul unextracted and the contract technically incomplete in a way that would require a conversation.
What there was not: a ghost. An echo. A presence remaining in the spaces between things.
What there was not: a name in the register of any place that handled the dead.
Not in the place that had sent back a formal letter requesting Lobo never return.
Not in the place that had barred him for the incident with the harps.
Not in the spaces between, where Death waited with her motorcycle leaning against nothing and genuine warmth in her expression for the things she guided.
This world had never been his.
He had arrived in it moving, from somewhere else, through means that belonged to a different order of things than the ones this world ran on. Had landed in Gotham with two weeks and a system and a direction and had moved through it for fourteen days at the speed that a person moved through something they were passing through, not something they were living in. Had taken from it. Had left marks in it. Had not, in any fundamental sense, ever belonged to it.
He was not in the suit. He was not in the body.
He was in the dark.
The dark between things, between worlds, between the places where the system ran its threads and the places where it didn't reach.
A pool. Black, still, with no light source to explain why it could be seen.
A hand broke the surface.
Then an arm.
Then a shoulder.
Then a face, turned upward, the eyes closed, the mouth pulling air.
Then the eyes opened.
And Jake breathed.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
Mechanical-Arm Spider Arc -- Complete.
Spider-Man in DC: Book One -- End.
This arc comes to a devastating end. Not with victory. With breath.
With Jake--
With Lobo regenerating in the middle of an apocalypse, uncertain for the first time in centuries.
Thank you for fueling this. For giving me confidence to write what I'm thinking and express it well enough for you to feel. Words fall short here. They always do when something matters this much.
In the next arc, I take you deeper. Sink you into Jake's origin pool. Show you everything behind the scenes -- almost everything. Get you rooting for him, because you can't honestly be rooting for him right now. Not after Canary. Not after the bow.
But you will. And when the curtain closes again, you'll be yearning for just one more glimpse. The undisclosed truth always waits.
See you there.
MimicLord
"I am not letting anyone capture me again."
Up Next: The Undead Spider
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
Word Count: 63, 166
Chapters: 26
T. Finder Progress: 13.5%
Totems Collected: 9
Time Bank: 245 hours (10 days, 16 hours)
Days in DC: 16
~MimicLord
See you in the next post!
Support: Patreon.com/mimiclord for SMiD (+30 Chapters advance), TDBB (+10 Chapters advance), Side Quests (Full Access for: Dear Death, Firelord's Avatar, Marvel Gacha with DC Power-ups... and more!), Free Art Illustrations, Weekly Side Quest Polls, Commissions (DM) and more!
SMiD Forum: