Chapter 25: "The Spider, the Jewel, and the Crowd That Watched"
In which Harlem sees a superhero battle up close, and nobody can agree on what just happened.
Even with half the police station in ruins, the streets of Harlem had begun to stir.
Because if there's one universal truth in New York City, it's this: people always come out after the danger has passed to see what all the fuss was about.
Smoke still curled lazily from the shattered remains of the 25th Precinct. Rescue crews bustled like ants around the wreckage, and exhausted cops leaned against ambulances sipping cheap coffee. But beyond the cordons—just outside the yellow tape, police lines, and makeshift barriers—Harlem's civilians had gathered.
And they were buzzing.
Old men in pajamas. Moms with rollers still in their hair. Teens with phones held high. Even the local bodega cat had somehow wandered over to spectate.
The first reaction?
Silence.
Everyone was staring at the rubble, the webbed-up villains, and the melted crater where a cop car used to be.
Then came the voices.
"Yo... that was Spider-Man, right?"
"No way he did all that alone. That's like... movie-level destruction."
"I told y'all I saw someone get suplexed through a lamppost. Look at that bend!"
Teenagers were already uploading shaky vertical videos of glowing fists, red-suited blurs, and something that might have been a backflip kick. One girl, no older than thirteen, proudly told the livestream audience:
"You see that?! That was Jewel lifting a whole freakin' wall! She's so underrated—y'all better stop sleeping on her!"
In a second-floor apartment overlooking the station, an elderly woman clutched her rosary and muttered:
"Dios mío… I told my grandson not to join the police. Now look at this. Harlem's becoming Gotham."
A little boy on his father's shoulders stared wide-eyed at the scene, gripping a toy Thor in his hand like it was suddenly made of gold.
"Dad… was that the real Spider-Man?"
"Yeah, buddy," his dad replied, equally awestruck. "And I think he just saved the whole precinct."
There were skeptics too, of course.
"Man, I dunno. Half the station's gone. Who's gonna pay for that, huh?"
"You'd rather Tombstone got away?"
"...Fair point."
A young reporter-in-training from a local college ran through the crowd, notebook in hand, glasses sliding down her nose.
"Excuse me! Did anyone see Spider-Man up close? What did he look like? Was he glowing? Did he say anything dramatic?"
Someone from the back yelled:
"He said 'Sweet dreams' after knocking out that giant albino monster!"
"Really?"
"No idea. But it sounded like something he'd say."
Laughter rippled through the crowd. Because even after the bloodshed, after the screams and explosions and gunfire, humor was the heartbeat of Harlem.
Some residents murmured their concerns. Others argued about superhero ethics. But many... just watched. Quiet. Processing.
Because heroes didn't usually fight on their doorstep. And now that one had, it changed things.
A kid in a Ironman hoodie turned to his mom, eyes glowing with a mix of fear and fascination.
"I wanna be like him."
His mom gently pulled him close.
"Then be kind. Be strong. And maybe learn to dodge flying cars."
The night wore on. Rescue crews kept working. The media vans rolled in. Drones buzzed overhead.
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The first ambulance pulled up just behind the fire trucks, sirens still wailing as the flashing lights danced across a scene that no first responder was trained for.
Paramedic Keisha Alvarez had seen plenty in her ten years on the job—shootings, stabbings, apartment fires, one guy who'd glued a kitchen knife to his forehead "for fun"—but this?
This was unreal.
She stepped out of the vehicle and froze. The Harlem Police Station—once a solid, if slightly outdated, brick structure—was now half rubble, half smoking crater. Burnt-out cop cars lined the street like fallen dominoes. And lying in the middle of it all, tangled in a cocoon of webbing, were at least twenty criminals in high-tech armor looking like someone had shoved the Avengers into a tumble dryer.
"...I didn't bring enough gauze for this," Keisha muttered.
Her partner, Malik, was staring up at a webbed SUV stuck halfway up a lamppost.
"Why is that car… up there?"
"Better question," she said, pointing, "Why is that guy glowing purple and foaming at the mouth?"
Indeed, one of the thugs—Tombstone—was lying unconscious, his rock-like skin twitching as faint lines of purple toxin pulsed beneath his veins.
A nearby officer approached them, waving them toward a group of survivors who were being gathered under an emergency triage tent.
"We've got wounded officers here, multiple with burns, shrapnel wounds, and one impalement. There's a guy who tried to walk it off with a bullet still in his leg, and someone passed out from smoke inhalation. The worst is inside."
Keisha blinked. "And the webbed-up guys?"
"Spider-Man left a note. Said to keep them sedated. Apparently one of them has mind-control powers."
Keisha and Malik stared at the group of unconscious villains. One of them twitched in his sleep and mumbled something about caviar and jet skis.
Malik shook his head. "I don't get paid enough for this superhero nonsense."
Still, they moved fast—training took over, and soon they were checking pulses, applying pressure, stabilizing fractures, setting up drips, and transferring the critical cases to gurneys. They worked side by side with Jessica Jones, who had stayed to help carry the worst cases herself, her arms effortlessly lifting injured officers two at a time.
"This one's fading," Keisha warned, checking a cop with severe internal bleeding.
"On it," Jessica said, tearing through debris to clear a path to the ambulance. "Try not to die before I get you there."
The injured officer managed a half-smile.
In the chaos, a younger EMT, barely twenty-two and fresh out of training, stood pale and shaking beside a puddle of blood. His eyes hadn't left Tombstone's giant body since they'd arrived.
"Is… is he dead?"
Malik shook his head. "Nah. Just sleeping. Probably dreaming about crushing cars with his pinky toe."
The rookie's hands trembled. "Why does it look like someone stomped on him with a truck?"
Keisha gave him a grim smile. "That's probably because someone did."
By the time the night wound down, the triage area was overflowing, the ambulances were stacked with patients, and everyone's scrubs were stained with blood, soot, or worse.
As Keisha climbed back into the driver's seat, Malik handed her a cold energy drink he'd stolen from a supply tent.
"So. What do you call tonight?" he asked, cracking his own can.
She glanced out at the destroyed police station, the broken villains, the smoldering streets—and the glowing web that still read:
"Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man was here."
"I call it Tuesday in New York," she muttered, then drove them toward the hospital, sirens once again cutting through the smoky Harlem night.
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As the first responders worked and the fire was finally extinguished, a heavy silence settled over what remained of the Harlem Police Precinct.
Cops wandered through the wreckage like shell-shocked ghosts—shells of men and women who had walked into work expecting an evening of paperwork, maybe a drunk and disorderly, not a full-scale war between a monster in a tailored suit and a ninja-spider in black armor.
Captain Morales, the station's commanding officer, stood beside what used to be his office—a blackened skeleton of melted bricks and shattered glass.
He stared at it blankly for a moment, then slowly lowered the half-melted mug he'd somehow found among the debris. The words "World's Okayest Boss" were still readable. Barely.
"...This is the third time in six months," he muttered to no one.
A young sergeant next to him gave a bitter laugh. "What was it last time? The Lizard and those cybernetic dogs?"
"Yeah. And before that? Rhino hijacked a garbage truck and drove it through the precinct because someone gave him a parking ticket."
Another officer limped past them, one arm in a makeshift sling and his uniform covered in soot. He looked up at the pair, grim-faced.
"I've officially run out of ways to write 'giant albino man with railgun destroyed the armory' in a police report."
Inside the temporary command post—hastily set up in what was once the station's parking lot—officers worked under emergency lights and portable fans. The air was thick with smoke, tension, and the scent of singed paperwork.
Someone passed around bottles of water like it was holy wine.
"Who was that guy again?" asked Officer Ramirez, still catching his breath after being pulled from under a collapsed ceiling.
"Tombstone," grunted Officer Greene, massaging a bruised shoulder. "Real name: Lonnie Lincoln. Former street brawler turned crime boss. Likes violence, hates shirts that fit."
"And the kid?" asked another, gesturing toward the webbed-up heap of criminals.
"Spider-Man," Morales said flatly. "The new hero, I think. The one that actually does paperwork for his battles."
Everyone nodded like that somehow made things make more sense.
"He took everything," one detective muttered, scrolling through what little security footage survived. "Weapons, vehicles, tech—he even webbed a guy's shoes to the precinct gate."
"Serves 'em right," another replied. "Those punks came loaded like it was a warzone. If it wasn't for Spider-Man and Jewel, we'd be pulling a lot more bodies out of here."
Someone let out a long sigh. "Do we… do we thank him?"
Everyone went quiet.
"I mean… yeah?" Ramirez ventured. "But how? Do we leave a fruit basket on a rooftop or something?"
Captain Morales finally stood, brushing the dust off his jacket and glancing toward the roof where Spider-Man had last been seen.
"No," he said. "We do our jobs. We pick up the pieces. And next time one of these psychos shows up, we pray that kid's somewhere nearby."
There was a collective nod—tired, battered, but resolute.
As dawn slowly crept over Harlem, the surviving cops got back to work—cataloguing weapons, tending to the wounded, filing damage reports, and helping each other rebuild. Most of them still had adrenaline in their veins and disbelief in their eyes, but they were alive.
And as one officer tagged a confiscated heat glove—still smoldering faintly—he turned to his partner and muttered:
"Next time we see that Spider-kid, remind me to buy him a sandwich."
"And maybe a therapy voucher," the other added.
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By the time the SHIELD Quinjet landed outside the smoldering ruins of the Harlem precinct, the sun had just begun to rise—its golden light stretching over cracked asphalt and broken steel. The streets were quiet now. Most civilians had been cleared out. The police were regrouping. Fire crews were packing up. The last of the ambulances were rolling out.
And then came them—the agents in black, with mirrored visors and posture so stiff it could've snapped steel. The SHIELD response team.
They weren't here for the press.
They were here because six of their enhanced field agents—equipped with advanced armor, genetically reinforced musculature, and prototype plasma casters—had been wiped out in under three minutes.
Wiped out by one man.
Lonnie Lincoln. Tombstone.
Agent Victoria Dawes, one of SHIELD's top crisis investigators, stepped out of the Quinjet with a scowl etched so deep into her face it could've qualified as a geological feature. Her sharp black trench coat fluttered behind her as she surveyed the devastation.
"...This isn't a gang fight," she muttered. "This is escalation."
Her second-in-command, Agent Takashima, knelt beside the body of one of their agents—still clad in advanced armor. The chest plate had been crushed inward like it was tinfoil.
"Carmichael had double-density skeletal grafts and a reinforced heart cage," he said grimly. "Whatever hit him cracked through both."
Another agent passed them a scorched heat gauntlet retrieved from the scene—still warm. Dawes took one look at it and handed it to her tech analyst.
"Run the power signature. I want to know who designed this and how it got into Tombstone's hands."
She turned to survey the battlefield again.
And there it was—proof that the underworld had evolved.
The scattered wreckage of military-grade SUVs, weaponized exosuits, hyperconductive firearms, and black-market augmentation gear. SHIELD had classified most of this tech as "containment only." It wasn't supposed to be on the streets.
And yet… it was here. Used. Field-tested. Effective.
"These weren't just thugs," Agent Dawes muttered. "They were soldiers."
Takashima stood beside her, jaw clenched. "And Tombstone? He's not just a meta anymore."
Dawes said nothing. She walked over to where Tombstone had been webbed down before his extraction. The ground was cratered, cracked, and soaked with his blood—but the real horror was the footage they'd recovered from police drones.
Footage of Spider-Man—the young one, definitely not the original—going toe-to-toe with a meta-human whose strength, durability, and arsenal now made Captain America look underdressed.
And barely winning.
"Lincoln tanked six enhanced agents, took a chakra-infused beatdown from Spider-Man, and still laughed," Takashima said, showing the feed on his wrist console. "This guy's got next-gen muscle fiber enhancements, thermal shock gear, a railgun designed for anti-aircraft use… and no conscience."
Dawes nodded. "If he's working with Kingpin, and Kingpin's handing out tech like candy…"
She turned toward her Quinjet, already barking into her comms.
"I want satellite sweeps of every known Fisk warehouse. Cross-reference Tombstone's crew with biotech labs hit in the last 12 months. And for God's sake, put in a requisition—LEVEL SIX PRIORITY—for new armor and next-gen reinforcement. I don't care if the R&D lab cries."
One of her agents hesitated. "What about the enhanced heroes?"
Dawes didn't even look back.
"They'll be dead within a year if we don't match this tech. We've been playing catch-up since Sokovia. Now the villains are outpacing the curve."
She paused, watching the drone feed replay once more—Tombstone swinging his heat-gloved fists, police scattering, enhanced agents falling like dominoes.
"This wasn't a fight," she said flatly. "This was a field test."
Her voice dropped to a whisper. "And we failed it."
As SHIELD's agents moved into the wreckage with clinical precision—recovering weapons, tagging bodies, and analyzing destruction zones—one thing became chillingly clear.
The criminal underworld was upgrading.
The villains were preparing.
And next time, it wouldn't just be Harlem.
It would be war.
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Barely hours had passed since Spider-Man and Jessica Jones had vanished into the night, leaving behind a shattered battlefield, stunned officers, and a growing mountain of questions. The rescue workers were still hauling debris, police still taping off zones, and medical teams still tending to the wounded.
And then—
The media arrived.
To be precise: the Daily Bugle.
Led by the indomitable—and aggressively caffeinated—Betty Brant, the Bugle's field reporters rolled up in a white van that screeched to a halt half a block from the wreckage. The logo was painted in bold red letters across the side, as if subtly promising drama, blame, and tomorrow's screaming headline all at once.
Betty Brant popped out first, mic already in hand, flanked by a camerman with nervous eyes and a backpack full of backup batteries.
"Let's move, Frank! If we don't get someone on record in the next ten minutes, Jameson's gonna eat my badge!"
Frank groaned, adjusting his lens. "Can he do that?"
"He's tried."
Betty practically marched toward the yellow police tape like a queen addressing her court. "Excuse me! Daily Bugle! Can someone please tell the public why half of Harlem looks like a warzone?!"
The nearest police officer flinched like she'd been hit with a flashbang. "Ma'am, this is an active scene—"
"Oh, I can see that," Betty cut in brightly, flashing her press badge. "But the public has a right to know. Were those SHIELD agents that got wiped out? Is it true Spider-Man was involved? Were there any civilian deaths?"
"Uh—we're still sorting through the details," the officer mumbled.
"Uh-huh. Translation: 'yes, but we're not cleared to say it.' Got it." She pivoted without waiting for a reply. "Frank, zoom in on that collapsed wall. That's the west wing of the precinct. That was reinforced concrete. You don't melt that unless you're cooking with military-grade firepower."
Frank leaned into the camera. "How do you know that?"
"My ex-boyfriend was a demolitionist, Frank, keep up."
As Betty prowled forward, she caught sight of a cluster of civilians standing near an ambulance—witnesses, judging by the shocked looks and trauma blankets.
Perfect.
She strode up to a shaken young man whose hoodie was still flecked with soot. "Excuse me, sir! You were here when the attack happened?"
The man blinked. "Uh… yeah. I—I was down the street when it started."
Betty turned slightly so the camera could frame both of them. "Can you tell our viewers what you saw?"
The man hesitated, then blurted, "It was a monster. The big guy—Tombstone—he was shooting, like, this huge gun. Like a cannon. Cops were flying everywhere—Spider-Man dropped outta nowhere and just slammed into him."
Betty raised an eyebrow. "So you're saying Spider-Man was here?"
"Yeah! He saved, like, everyone! He was kicking the big guy across the street like a ragdoll—"
Frank mouthed, Ragdoll. Got it.
Betty nodded crisply, switching gears. "And how do you feel about SHIELD losing agents here tonight?"
The man's face twisted. "Wait—those guys were SHIELD? I thought they were Iron Man knockoffs! They died fast."
Betty gave a thin smile. "No comment on that from SHIELD so far—but thank you for your honesty."
She moved on, catching a glimpse of Luke Cage leaning against a lamppost across the street, arms crossed and watching the chaos.
Betty immediately made a beeline.
"Luke Cage, correct? Daily Bugle. Did you assist in this conflict?"
Luke didn't even flinch. "No comment."
"Can you confirm whether Spider-Man was the one who subdued Tombstone?"
Luke shrugged. "Spider-Man did what he always does. Showed up, saved lives, didn't charge a dime."
Betty raised a brow. "Is it true he left Tombstone in a coma?"
Luke gave a slow, sarcastic smile. "Oh, is that what the Bugle's going with now? 'Spider-Man Puts Man in Coma'? Real snappy. Definitely not 'Spider-Man Stops Supercriminal Massacre.'" He turned to walk away. "Tell Jameson he owes me lunch."
As Luke vanished into the morning haze, Betty sighed. "Why is it always the powered ones with the attitude?"
Frank chuckled. "Maybe it's because they're tired of getting blamed for everything."
"Frank," Betty said sweetly, "if you want to write the headlines, go start your own paper."
Back at the scene, the Bugle team wrapped up with hurried notes, shaky footage, and far too many unanswered questions.
One thing was certain:
Tomorrow's front page would be loud, dramatic, and controversial. Probably something like—
SPIDER-MAN VS. TOMB MONSTER — WHO'S THE REAL THREAT?
Or worse—
EXCLUSIVE: SHIELD LOSING CONTROL? HARLEM ATTACK SPARKS GLOBAL CONCERN!
Whatever the headline, the world had changed tonight.