The Osborn family estate in upstate New York was less of a home and more of a heavily fortified tax write-off. Located hours away from the claustrophobic concrete canyons of Manhattan, the sprawling, multi-acre property was entirely secluded by dense pine forests. Norman Osborn had purchased the massive stone manor for two reasons: property values were drastically lower outside the city limits, and it afforded him absolute, unregulated privacy.
Harry stepped through the cavernous front doors. The foyer was dead silent. There was no live-in housekeeper, no warm lights, no ambient noise. For Harry, the estate was a suffocating mausoleum of bad memories. For Norman, it was just a secure place to sleep when the city got too loud.
Harry didn't bother taking off his jacket. He moved purposefully down the shadowed, hardwood hallway, making a beeline for the one room in the house he had been strictly forbidden from entering his entire life.
"Alright, Pete. Let's see if this master key of yours actually works," Harry muttered under his breath, staring at the heavy oak doors of his father's private upstate study.
He pulled a sleek, matte-black metallic sliver from his pocket. It didn't have the jagged serrations of a normal key. Peter had fabricated the vibrating lock-pick tool back at the Web, calibrating it specifically to defeat Oscorp's proprietary tumbler systems. Harry slid the thin metal into the lock. A high-frequency hum vibrated up his wrist.
Click. The heavy internal deadbolt slid back. Harry pushed the door open, slipping inside and shutting it silently behind him. The study smelled of aged paper, expensive scotch, and cold dust.
He moved quickly to the massive mahogany desk, switching on a small penlight. Based on Peter's tactical breakdown, Norman was playing a high-stakes game of corporate chicken with the Military. Norman was intentionally leaking the existence of the Savage Force project to drive up its value. Harry needed to find the actual leverage. He needed the paper trail.
"Come on, old man. Where do you hide the skeletons before you come home for the night?" Harry whispered, rifling through the locked side drawers.
At the bottom of the lowest drawer, hidden beneath a stack of mundane financial ledgers, Harry's fingers brushed against a thick, leather-bound dossier. He pulled it out, shining his light across the embossed cover.
Savage Force Project Proposal: Herbert Edgar Wyndham Version.
Status: OBSOLETE.
Harry frowned, flipping the heavy cover open. The pages inside were a chaotic mix of highly advanced bio-engineering schematics, geographic coordinates, and paragraphs written in what looked like alien cuneiform.
He scanned the English sections, his brow furrowing deeper with every line.
"Planet Kant... no, wait. Counter-Earth?" Harry squinted at the faded type. "Counter-Earth Experimental Field Report. Completed without authorization. What the hell is this? My dad funded a counterfeit planet? Are you kidding me?"
Harry pulled out his encrypted phone and started snapping rapid-fire photos of the documents, sending them directly to Peter's secure server. As he kept reading, the sheer scale of the scientific insanity made his head spin.
...Based on the unknown xenobiological ruins discovered in the Blue Area of the Moon... the translated texts of a semi-plant advanced civilization, designated as the 'Cotati,' have revealed a framework for planetary biosphere re-engineering. The objective: to construct a mirrored 'Counter-Earth' utilizing negative mass within the Negative Zone. The localized spatial tear providing access to this test site is tethered directly opposite Earth's current orbit...
Harry rubbed his eyes. Alien ruins on the moon? A plant civilization? A mirror planet tucked inside a dimension called the Negative Zone? It sounded like the fever dream of a sci-fi novelist.
According to the introductory notes, Herbert Edgar Wyndham—a brilliant, utterly unhinged geneticist—had originally pitched this insane terraforming project as an offshoot of Savage Force. Norman, calculating the sheer astronomical cost and the absolute lack of short-term profit, had firmly rejected the proposal.
But Wyndham hadn't stopped. The report detailed how the madman had gone rogue and actually succeeded in carving out a pocket dimension in the Negative Zone to build his Counter-Earth. He wanted a private petri dish to play God.
Harry flipped to the back of the dossier, finding a series of Oscorp satellite tracking logs.
Exploration Report 007: Oscorp unmanned temporal probe has successfully located the Negative Zone entrance created by H.E. Wyndham.
Exploration Report 016: Entry denied. The spatial barrier is genetically locked. No baseline terrestrial organism can breach the Counter-Earth atmosphere without fatal cellular destabilization.
Exploration Report 023: Breakthrough. It has been discovered that the specific genetically modified organisms synthesized by Richard Parker's cross-species DNA project possess the necessary genetic anomalies to bypass the Counter-Earth detection barrier.
Harry stopped breathing. His thumb hovered over his phone screen.
Wait a minute.
Harry slowly lowered the file. He looked around the quiet, perfectly ordered study. He had walked right in. He had found the most deeply classified document in the room in under five minutes.
It was bait.
Harry let out a harsh, dry laugh, a knot of cold dread tightening in his stomach. His father wasn't stupid. Norman knew exactly what he was doing. He had left this specific dossier in the most obvious hiding spot, knowing his rebellious, snooping son would come looking for dirt. Norman wanted Harry to find this. He wanted Harry to send these photos to Peter.
If Spider-Man believed this report, and the Military intercepted it, the government would suddenly realize that Norman Osborn's super-soldiers weren't just weapons. They were the exclusive biological keys to an entire, untapped alien planet in the Negative Zone.
"You sick, manipulative bastard," Harry muttered, shoving the file back into the drawer. The information was useless for taking Norman down; it was just another advertisement for his twisted products. Harry slammed the drawer shut and kept digging, determined to find something Norman actually cared about hiding.
Sixty miles away, high above the glittering Manhattan skyline, Norman Osborn sat in his pristine executive office at Oscorp Tower.
He was leaning back in his leather chair, a crystal glass of bourbon resting on his knee. His eyes were fixed on the glowing monitor recessed into his desk. The high-definition, infrared security feed showed a perfect, top-down view of Harry frantically searching the upstate study.
Norman took a slow sip of his drink, a cold, utterly emotionless smile playing across his lips. He wasn't angry. In fact, he was mildly bored. He had expected Peter Parker's little team of teenage vigilantes to mount an offensive tonight. Let them dig. He had sanitized his paper trails years ago. Whatever they found was exactly what he wanted them to see.
Setting his glass down, Norman stood up, adjusted his silk tie, and casually strolled out of the office.
Two minutes later, the heavy reinforced glass of Norman's office window slid silently open.
Felicia Hardy dropped from the ceiling frame, landing on the plush carpet without making a single sound. Clad in her sleek, black leather Black Cat suit, she scanned the empty office, her domino mask catching the ambient city lights.
Peter had given her a very specific shopping list. She completely ignored the computers and the filing cabinets, moving straight toward the mahogany bookshelf against the far wall. She traced her gloved fingers along the wood until she found the slight, imperceptible groove. She pressed hard.
With a pneumatic hiss, the bookshelf slid sideways, revealing a hidden, dimly lit private laboratory.
Felicia slipped inside, her eyes darting around the steel workbenches. According to Peter's multiverse theories, this was where she was supposed to find Norman's true arsenal. She was looking for a terrifying, green-tinted demon mask. She was looking for spherical incendiary explosives—pumpkin bombs. She was looking for a weaponized, bat-winged flight glider.
She found none of it. The workbenches were stripped completely bare.
"Well, I guess the Green Goblin is just an AI," Felicia murmured to herself, resting her hands on her hips. "Nothing. Not a single explosive."
She turned to leave, but something caught the corner of her eye.
Sitting alone on a polished silver pedestal in the center of the room was a thick, cylindrical specimen jar. It was filled with a glowing, pale blue preservation fluid. Suspended in the center of the liquid was a massive, multi-eyed spider.
Felicia stepped closer, the blue light reflecting in her goggles. There was a pristine, brass plaque bolted to the front of the glass jar.
It read: Richard Parker.
A cold shiver crawled up Felicia's spine. "So... this is the little gift Norman specifically left behind. How delightfully psychotic."
She didn't touch it. Norman was a monster, but he was a theatrical one. He wanted Peter to know he had total control over the board.
Meanwhile, a few floors down, Norman Osborn pushed open the door to a seemingly ordinary, mid-level executive lounge. It was empty, the leather couches sitting in the dark. Norman walked to the back corner, sank into a heavy armchair, and deliberately leaned back.
The pressure against the seat back triggered a mechanical relay. A perfectly hidden, seamless door in the wood-paneled wall clicked open. Norman stood up and stepped into the pitch-black corridor beyond.
The door began to swing shut behind him.
Before the latch could catch, a nearly invisible shimmer in the air slipped through the gap.
Gwen Stacy, her heart hammering violently against her ribs, held her breath as she followed the billionaire into the dark. She was wearing a specialized, form-fitting stealth suit Peter had heavily modified.
As she crossed the threshold, a red laser grid flashed to life, sweeping directly across her chest. A thermal-infrared detector pinged, registering a sudden drop in ambient temperature.
Gwen froze, squeezing her eyes shut, waiting for the alarms to blare.
The sensor blinked.
Fortunately, her newly 'Ghost' power did not disappoint her and she manage to trail Norman.