When the Midtown High convoy finally rolled into Madrid, the Wild Pack immediately hijacked the itinerary.
Silvija Sablinova stepped out in front of the exhausted students, her silver hair pulled back, white tactical armor gleaming under the streetlights. She didn't offer a polite tour guide greeting. She barked a series of sharp commands. The students were ruthlessly hustled off the buses and corralled into a secure holding zone.
Instantly, a swarm of heavily armed, dead-eyed mercenaries descended on the vehicles. They carried heavy-duty industrial shop vacuums and high-pressure water hoses. They aggressively scoured every inch of the upholstery, vents, and undercarriages.
They weren't taking any chances. One stray grain of silica could be a dormant piece of Flint Marko.
The students pressed against the holding area windows, buzzing with adrenaline. Silvija was the primary topic of conversation. She didn't look much older than the seniors, yet she was actively commanding a paramilitary kill-squad against walking natural disasters. Half the guys in Peter's class were currently staring at her with stars in their eyes.
Peter stood near the back of the crowd, quietly putting the geopolitical puzzle pieces together. He finally understood why the Wild Pack existed.
Symkaria was a tiny European nation wedged into the Carpathian Mountains. Its borders brushed up against Romania and Serbia, which were manageable. But its other neighbor was Latveria.
When your literal next-door neighbor is Victor Von Doom, you don't form a neighborhood watch. You build a highly specialized, superhuman-hunting army.
The Wild Pack capped its active roster at around a thousand operatives. On paper, Silver Sable International was just a high-end private security firm. In reality, they were the official, deniable defense force of the Symkarian government. They hunted super-criminals across the EU to fund their operations, maintaining a razor-sharp edge just in case Doctor Doom ever decided to march his Doombots across their borders.
It was a stressful way to run a country.
Silvija finished directing the decontamination crew. She turned to the students. "You will all proceed directly to your hotel rooms," she announced, her voice cutting through the chatter. "You will shower immediately. You will bag the clothes you are currently wearing and hand them over for industrial dry cleaning. Do not keep a single grain of sand. Am I understood?"
Without waiting for an answer, she turned and marched toward a waiting military jeep.
Peter slipped away from the crowd, vaulted a concrete barrier, and dropped into the back seat of the jeep just as Silvija opened the driver's side door.
She paused, resting her hand on the steering wheel. She glared at Peter in the rearview mirror. "I am not your chauffeur. Get in the front."
"Oh, my bad," Peter said. He popped over the center console, dropping into the passenger seat and pulling the heavy canvas seatbelt across his chest. "I thought you were riding shotgun."
Silvija ignored him. She threw the jeep into drive and peeled out of the lot.
They had a deal. Back in Lisbon, Peter had requested access to a high-tier laboratory. He needed to study the chemical desiccant the Pack used, along with the physical residue left behind by the Elementals. The Wild Pack lacked the necessary infrastructure in Portugal, but Madrid was a different story. Several massive research institutes here were under Wild Pack protection contracts.
"We don't have an exact timetable for the Elementals' next strike," Silvija said, keeping her eyes on the dark road. "It could be tonight. It could be three days from now. You need to pace yourself. Do not stay up all night in the lab. I need your operational readiness at one hundred percent."
"I'm fine," Peter replied, adjusting his web-shooters. "Unless I'm burning a massive amount of calories in heavy combat, my enhanced metabolism only requires about three or four hours of sleep a night. I'm good to go."
Silvija glanced at him, raising an eyebrow. "What are you, an elf?"
Peter blinked. "Wait. You play Dungeons & Dragons?"
She didn't answer.
"Because, technically," Peter continued, leaning forward, "elves in 5e don't actually sleep. They enter a semi-conscious meditative state called a reverie for four hours. The rulebook explicitly states their fey ancestry makes them immune to magical sleep effects—"
Silvija slowly turned her head. Her silver eyes bored into his lenses with lethal intent.
Peter cleared his throat. He pointed at the windshield. "Eyes on the road, Silver."
The jeep veered off the main highway, approaching a heavily fortified compound in the Madrid suburbs. Klieg lights swept the perimeter. Coils of razor wire topped the concrete walls. Spanish military personnel walked the fenceline, flanked by heavily armed Wild Pack mercenaries.
Silvija parked the jeep and led Peter through a series of biometric security checkpoints deep into the Royal Institute. She introduced him to a handful of lead researchers. Peter didn't recognize any of their names, which meant they probably hadn't invented anything that had tried to destroy New York yet.
Peter rested his hands on a stainless-steel workbench. "Alright, I have a question. The Elementals have been hitting completely random targets. Hospitals, chemical warehouses, old Soviet bunkers. There's zero overlap in the inventory they're stealing. How do you actually know they're going to strike Madrid?"
The scientists exchanged a hesitant look. They turned to Silvija. She gave a curt nod.
"The Elementals operate on a unique biological frequency," the lead researcher explained, pulling up a holographic map of Europe. "If they remain in a single geographic location for more than twenty-four hours, their ambient radiation begins to spike. We can track the decay."
"They leave a footprint," Silvija added. "When they first appeared, they just smashed into targets. But the Pack adapted. We started deploying countermeasures. Now, if they want to hit a high-level Marvel science facility, they have to run reconnaissance first. If they breach a zero-point energy lab blindly, they could vaporize themselves. That prep time gives us a readable radiation spike."
Peter nodded slowly. That made sense. "Okay. But who is feeding them the blueprints to these labs in the first place? Where are they getting their intel?"
Silence fell over the room. Neither Silvija nor the scientists had an answer.
"Right," Peter sighed, clapping his hands together. "Next question. Point me to my lab. If you have samples of the Sandman, Hydro-Man, and Molten Man, I need them under a microscope right now."
"Follow me," Silvija said, turning down a sterile white corridor. "We have samples of all three. I expect results, Spider-Man."
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