Chapter 100: The Green Goblin Steps Out, the Red Goblin Steps In
Half a month passed in an eyeblink.
Location: Korea. A US military base, late at night.
Vane Carter stared at the documents spread across the desk in front of him, something dark moving through his eyes.
To the outside world, he was a Colonel in the US Army. In reality, he was a piece placed inside the military by HYDRA.
His mission was not complicated. Burrow into the military hierarchy, work his way toward Umbrella Corporation, gain enough leverage over it to direct their research toward affordable and mass-producible super-soldiers, ideally something that made the Winter Soldier look like a baseline prototype.
For most of the operation's lifespan, this had seemed like a manageable brief.
That sense of ease had begun to dissolve a few months ago, when a HYDRA base in Spain was torn off the map entirely.
At first he had assumed it was a government clearance operation. Routine.
Then a piece of satellite footage arrived on his desk.
The footage showed the Nemesis moving through the site as if there were no field at all. Nothing slowed it. Nothing stopped it. And alongside the Nemesis, T-103 Tyrants throughout the installation.
Carter had spent considerable time working backward through his Umbrella contacts until the trail converged on a name: Matthew Lawrence. The recently installed security director.
The deeper he dug, the worse his assessment became. This same man had quietly positioned himself on the board at Stark Industries. Shortly after that, he had taken the largest single shareholder position at Oscorp. Both moves made without creating any observable disturbance.
Matthew Lawrence had ambitions that were not small. No one who moved like this was content staying a department head at a private company. He would keep expanding. Absorbing Umbrella itself probably wouldn't satisfy him.
Which meant he needed to be removed before he became a disruption to the organization's actual plans.
Carter turned his pen through his fingers.
He thought about Spencer, who had not been young for some time and had the decision-making patterns to show for it. An impatient look crossed his face.
Old age made people useless. There was no charitable way to put it.
"When a man gets old, he stops being good for anything useful." Carter muttered to himself. "At this rate, I'm going to need to start identifying a replacement."
He had briefly considered the possibility of backing Matthew for the role. He had rejected it just as quickly. HYDRA needed someone controllable, someone who could be shaped and directed. Matthew Lawrence was self-evidently not that person.
For now, his best hope was that Spencer would stop hesitating and move against Matthew before Matthew grew too large to contain.
He was still working through the question of who he would install after Spencer when his time finally ran out.
A shoreline. Somewhere. Night.
Moonlight cut lines across the dark water, shifting and breaking with the movement of the surface.
Out on that water, a ship moved toward shore without showing any lights.
Standing on the beach in ordinary street clothes, Norman Osborn watched two men carry cargo down the gangway. From each of them he accepted a hard-sided case: one containing the Goblin Glider, one containing the new suit.
He paid them what had been agreed and stretched his shoulders, stiff from waiting. He watched the ship pull away.
"That took long enough," he said under his breath, without a great deal of patience in his voice.
The Norman Osborn who stood on this beach was not quite the same person who had run Oscorp from behind a board room table. The fusion with Carnage, combined with the completed Green Goblin formula that Matthew had provided, had worked a change that went deeper than chemistry. The two personalities that had always competed inside him had stopped competing.
"Merged" was perhaps not the right word for what had happened. What had happened was closer to a consumption. The Green Goblin had taken everything Norman was and absorbed it, closing the gaps in its own personality, the fractures that had always made it unstable. The result was something complete. Neither one nor the other, but with the Green Goblin's proportions decisively larger.
"Vane Carter." He said the name quietly, with the tone of someone who had been looking for something for a long time and had finally found where it was. "You were quite difficult to track down."
It had taken weeks of quiet work to locate Carter's precise position. Korea had been the conclusion. The boat had been arranged in advance to bring his equipment in without records.
He checked his watch.
00:30.
Not too early. Not too late. Just right.
"Time to begin." His mouth pulled into a particular smile.
As if answering it, Carnage shifted from his shoulder and put its face close to his ear.
"Been waiting for this." The voice that came out of the symbiote was a damaged, jagged thing, like something that had learned speech through a series of violent encounters with it. "Let's start a new round of carnage."
Above the city, a crimson shape cut across the night sky, trailing laughter that had no interest in being contained.
On the street below, people stopped and looked up. First came the confused murmur, then the phones came out.
"Look, look! What is that?"
"Is someone doing a stunt?"
"Is that Iron Man? Did Iron Man come here?!"
" Even if it is Iron Man, flying around making noise in the middle of the night, does he not think about other people trying to sleep?"
"Okay, but look more carefully! That is obviously not Iron Man. That is our country's latest technological development."
None of it reached Osborn. He was already past them, pushing the upgraded Glider to a thousand kilometers per hour, a streak of red vanishing toward the military base perimeter before anyone's camera had time to focus.
Inside the base, Carter closed the folder on his desk. He rubbed his temples and reached for the lamp.
Insane laughter split the night and went through every wall in the building.
Before the sound had fully registered, a shape blurred past the window at speed. A pumpkin bomb hit the glass from outside, punched through it, and landed in the room.
A sharp, fast clicking.
Carter didn't process the situation consciously. His body was already moving. Years of HYDRA field conditioning made the decision without asking him: table flipped, body rolling behind the sofa in one continuous motion, face down on the floor.
Muscle memory. Written over years of surviving things that should have killed him.
BOOM.
The upgraded pumpkin bomb hit considerably harder than the previous generation. The blast took the entire exterior wall of the room with it. Carter, flat against the floor, was still thrown three meters by the pressure wave and hit the back wall hard.
He spat blood. Fragments in it.
His vision went soft at the edges. His stomach turned over.
He was still pushing himself up off the floor, fighting through the spinning and the nausea, when the dust that hadn't settled yet parted around a figure walking out of it.
The walk was unhurried. Almost elegant. Sharp crimson claws trailed idly across the surface of a solid wood side table as the figure passed, drawing long, deep grooves through it without effort.
"Hello, Vane Carter."
"We finally meet."
***
30+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces