"That all you've got?" Gargan looked down at Peter struggling in the rainwater below him. Peter's furious punch had shattered nearly half the mechanical tail, but the rest of it was still very much attached and moving behind Gargan.
"I couldn't do a damn thing against that monster from before, but you three circus freaks? You're nothing."
Gargan knew perfectly well that tonight he had run headfirst into something far beyond him.
That man with the S on his chest, with his horrifying power and casual brutality, still had him shaken.
He had seen his own men caught in those red beams, watched their legs vanish without so much as a scream, then watched the rest of them disappear completely.
That wasn't some street-level vigilante with a code.
That was something else.
Something worse.
Gargan had already decided he was getting the hell out of New York as soon as he could, but now these three costumed weirdos had shown up and kicked his fear into something else.
A challenge.
They were strong.
Fast.
But their fighting was sloppy.
And as long as they kept making mistakes, he still had a shot at beating all three of them.
"Peter!"
Seeing Peter get pinned down, Gwen and Cindy cried out at the same time.
Gwen fired a strand of web, trying to force Gargan off him.
But the mechanical tail moved on its own, cutting through the web and whipping toward Gwen instead.
"You can take a nap too!"
Gwen couldn't dodge in time. The tail caught her by the ankle, yanked her straight out of the air, and slammed her hard into a nearby dumpster.
Bang!
Her back hit the metal with a brutal crash, and she dropped to the ground in a daze.
Seeing both of her teammates going down almost at once, Cindy started to panic.
A second ago, they had all the momentum.
And in less than a minute, two of the three of them were already wrecked.
Still, she had no choice. She had to keep fighting.
Gwen shook her head, trying to clear the stars from her vision, and prepared to keep going.
Peter, on the other hand, really was in bad shape.
He had been hit hard enough to black out and was still lying on the pavement.
Thankfully, though, the communicator Clark had given them before they left was still in his ear.
"Peter!"
From a rooftop not far away, Clark had been watching the entire fight unfold. Seeing his hopeless little brother passed out in the middle of the battle, he finally shouted.
The other two were still down there fighting, and the main damage dealer had gone to sleep.
Was that really okay?
Peter was jolted awake by the sheer force of Clark's voice. He rolled over, grabbed Gargan's leg, and yanked just as Gargan was turning to deal with Cindy and Gwen, sending him crashing face-first into the flooded ground.
"Clark... I..." Peter started instinctively, already trying to explain himself.
"Anger can give you strength," Clark said sharply over the communicator, "but it can blind you too. Peter, just now you fought like a wild boar charging into traffic."
It was a brutal assessment.
And completely honest.
Clark wasn't impressed with Peter's performance so far.
Still, people grew.
Just like he had.
"So listen carefully."
"He's a veteran of the streets. He knows exactly how to exploit your emotions, and he knows how to punish every gap in your coordination."
"Gwen, Cindy, you can hear this too. Stop with the pointless head-on attacks. You're fighting, not venting your feelings. If one of you could just crush him in a single punch, then sure, what I'm saying wouldn't matter. But you can't. So now you listen to me."
"That exoskeleton gives Gargan massive strength, but his stamina is still limited. More importantly, his nervous system can't keep up with your speed, especially not against three of you at once."
"Cindy, his helmet is fully enclosed. It has infrared and night vision. Use your webs to seal the visor. Blind him."
"Gwen, stop hanging in open air. Stay low. His exoskeleton is weakest at the knees and ankles. Go after those joints and take away his balance."
"Peter, control your strength. The instant he loses both vision and footing, that's your opening. Hit the power core in the chest plate with everything you've got, and break it."
Clark laid out the plan.
Yes, it was a little controlling.
But at this stage, guidance mattered more than pride.
And with just a few sentences, the three kids who had been fighting like headless chickens started to settle down. Their panic and anger receded, and they finally began using their powers deliberately instead of blindly.
"What's wrong?" Gargan sneered, trying to sound confident. "Realized the gap and decided to give up?"
He was talking tough, but in truth he was more scared than any of them.
He had clearly heard Clark's voice.
That meant these three had someone guiding them.
Someone connected to the monster from earlier.
And that was very, very bad.
"Move!" Peter shouted.
The moment he said it, Gargan understood something terrible:
He might actually be finished.
But as a villain, he still had to fight back.
Who knew? Maybe he could still win.
And if he did, maybe he wouldn't even kill them.
Cindy struck first.
Webs shot toward him.
Gargan instinctively tried to counter with the tail's flame discharge, but he misread the target.
The webs curved past the tail and splattered across the front of his helmet instead.
Splat.
His vision went white.
"Damn it! What is this?!"
The sudden blindness rattled him badly. He clawed at the webbing over his visor, but it was too sticky. The more he tugged, the worse it got.
"Gwen!"
"On it!"
Gwen stayed low, sliding across the slick ground, then turned the momentum into a slicing strike against the exoskeleton's knee joint.
The hit landed clean.
Gargan dropped to one knee instantly, then lost his footing completely and crashed into the water, because his center of gravity had already shifted while he was fighting the webbing over his face.
Peter saw the opening and, for once, made perfect use of it.
"Here goes!"
He had been gathering himself for that exact moment.
His muscles tightened.
Both fists drew back.
Several tons of force gathered in his body.
And in the fraction of a second when Gargan had lost both sight and balance, Peter drove his punch straight into the power core in the center of the chest plate.
BOOM!
A visible white shockwave burst through the rain.
The chest armor, made from high-strength alloy, cracked under the punch like a cookie.
Inside, the precision electronics blew apart in a spray of sparks, and even Gargan's ribcage let out a sickening break beneath it.
He didn't even get a chance to scream.
His huge frame, plus all the armor, was launched clear off the ground and hurled more than thirty feet backward.
Crash!
Gargan smashed through a streetlight in the alley and then collapsed onto the pavement like a dead dog. Sparks flickered across the armor once, twice, then died completely.
He was unconscious.
The fight was over.
Peter bent over, sucking in huge breaths, his chest heaving.
He looked at his own fist, then at Gargan lying there like scrap metal, and felt more than a little shaken.
He genuinely hadn't realized that one punch of his had nearly killed a man.
He really was that strong.
"Nice work," Clark said over the comms. "That's more like what you should've been doing from the start. Go check on Eddie. The ambulance is almost there, and the cops aren't far behind."