Chapter 101: A One-Sided Massacre
The slow drag of claws across wood set every hair in the room on edge.
Norman found the effect useful. That particular sound worked like the scoring in a horror film, the kind of BGM that climbs in the moment before something awful resolves. Visual and auditory pressure applied simultaneously.
The base had lit up with urgent red alarm lights. Because the targeted building housed the officer corps, the soldiers assembled with impressive speed.
Through the drifting smoke, Norman advanced on Carter step by deliberate step in his crimson suit. The suit had changed since the Carnage fusion, denser and tougher, its material fundamentally different from anything it had been before. A slender tail had grown from the base of his spine, angular and barbed, the kind a demon would have.
Carter pressed himself against the wall and fought through the pain and the nausea. He heard boots in the corridor. He drew his sidearm and started firing.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
He cleared the entire magazine. In seconds.
Whatever you might say about the American school of combat training, the habit of emptying every round in one go was consistent regardless of timezone.
The bullets hit Norman's suit and produced nothing. No resistance, no stumble, not even a pause in his stride. As if the rounds had found no surface to transmit any force into.
This was what made the symbiote what it was. Even a baseline human wearing it could stop small arms fire completely. Venom's host had walked out of a military engagement against rifle fire without taking damage. And Carnage outperformed Venom across every metric, by a factor of four. Strength, resilience, recovery: all of it, four times over. After fusing with Norman and becoming the Red Goblin, those numbers had climbed further still, and the weaknesses that remained for other symbiotes, fire and sonic frequencies, had been erased entirely.
In the comics, the Red Goblin had put down Spider-Man, Miles Morales, the Scarlet Spider, Anti-Venom, and most of the other spider-totem heroes in sequence. The combat capability needed no argument.
Which made Norman, as things stood, the second most accomplished thing Matthew had produced. After Nemesis.
Not without its limitations. When the points had been available, Matthew had only removed the hive-mind uplink and inserted the fanatical loyalty modification. The rest of Carnage's default tendencies remained intact, including its genuine enjoyment of killing and its habit of extending engagements beyond what was necessary. Next to Hunk or Nemesis, the efficiency was lower. Norman was prone to playing.
If Nemesis had been assigned this mission, Carter would have been processed with one strike the moment identification was confirmed. Norman was currently arranging atmosphere.
"A pleasure to finally meet you, Vane Carter."
His voice carried a mockery that had nowhere particular to go and was quite comfortable about it.
Carter kept his face steady and let his ears track the footsteps getting closer in the corridor. He needed time.
Norman saw through it and felt nothing about it. He let the demon tail extend across the room in a single motion. It cut through Carter's lower leg like a wire through soft material.
Blood soaked into the carpet in long, fast-spreading stains.
Carter screamed.
Norman listened to the sound with visible appreciation. Everything about his posture relaxed fractionally.
"Oh, Vane. Buying time, were you." He stepped on Carter's head as Carter tried to claw his way toward the door. "Shame. That particular strategy isn't going to work tonight."
He pressed down lightly and looked down at him.
"You want to know who sent me? Think back. Anyone you've upset recently? I'll count to ten. If you work it out before I finish, I'll let you go."
The sudden offer of survival cracked Carter's focus. His mind started running through names. People. Grudges. Operations.
Norman's voice began:
"...one."
A beat of silence.
"Ten."
Carter froze.
What kind of counting goes straight from one to ten?
CRACK.
Carter's head was still in the middle of working the problem when Norman's boot came down on it.
The soldiers who arrived at that moment saw exactly what happened to their commanding officer.
No hesitation.
"Open fire!"
The corridor erupted. Gunfire poured down the hallway. Muzzle flash and smoke filled the space. The sound of sustained automatic fire overlapped itself into a continuous roar.
Bullets hit Norman's crimson suit like driving rain against a window.
He smiled.
Three blood-red whip-blades condensed along his arms. Before the rounds reached him, the blades swept out and batted them away. The deflected bullets scattered back into the crowd. Several soldiers went down immediately, struck by their own fire.
Then, one whip-blade swept low.
The six soldiers at the front had their lower legs sheared off at the ankle simultaneously. They hadn't finished falling before the blade reversed and swept through at waist height. Several of them were bisected where they stood.
Two pumpkin bombs arced through the air.
"Bomb! Fall back!"
BOOM.
The soldiers nearest the detonation were reduced to bone.
The formation came apart.
The ones further back were pushing forward. The ones in front had nowhere to go. The corridor was less than five meters wide. Dozens of fully armed soldiers were packed into a choke point where they couldn't fire freely without hitting each other and couldn't retreat because the press of bodies behind them kept driving them forward.
Norman went in.
One punch into a ballistic shield. The shield caved and the soldier holding it flew backward, taking down the people behind him. The other hand closed around a rifle barrel from the side. One wrist rotation and the weapon changed hands. He drove the stock across the next face in range.
Bone breaking, screaming, and gunfire mixed together without pausing.
In less than thirty seconds, the corridor was something else entirely.
This wasn't a fight.
This was a massacre.
A one-sided massacre.