Vworp-pop!
Spider-Man jerked his head to the other side and dodged. Light struck and imploded on concrete in some distant background.
Vworp-pop!
The speed of light was far too great for Felix even as he was now. He couldn't see it. His Spider-Sense, however, could detect when the cannon was being loaded up. He could anticipate where the cannon and beam of light would go. Like the genius he was, he loaded his instincts with basic calculations and coolly dodged with his head.
Vworp-pop!
That cannon shot fast. Spider-Man was faster. He ducked, skipped forward like a divine blur, and slammed a fist through the chest of the cyborg.
Except his fist went through nothing. Static hissed against his knuckles, a shimmer like heat off asphalt, and Anderthrop Henton's chest simply wasn't there anymore. Gone soft as smoke and twice as slippery.
'Phasing,' Felix thought.
Anderthrop laughed, cocky and irritable. The cyborg jumped back, cannon arm swinging up, aimed square between Felix's eyes.
"Fool."
Thwip!
Who was the fool now?
Red webbing slapped over the barrel a half-millisecond before it fired. The shot never left the chamber. The beam of light backed up on itself instead, pressure with nowhere to go, and the whole arm blew up in a bright glow. "No!" cried the cyborg.
His arm became a dying firework. Henton didn't even get a word out.
With a dramatic front-flip, Spider-Man's proceeded to kick him under the jaw. A kick of power, plain and dramatic. Henton left the ground like he'd been hit by a bus doing eighty. He crossed the width of the hideout sideways, clipped the edge of the scaffolding hard enough to buckle it, and slammed into the concrete wall with a BOOM!
The wall cracked in a spiderweb of fractures. There was this moment where the room itself flinched. Dust rained down. Somewhere, a chunk of ceiling tile gave up entirely and thudded to the floor.
"Hey, uh, Felix, mind holding back?" Hobie quipped. Going by the tone of voice though, there was thick shock in him.
"...I did."
Really. That was maybe thirty percent of his power.
The cyborg peeled himself off the new dent in the wall, sliding down onto one knee, and for the first time that fatherly, red-skinned smile dropped entirely. Wires sparked visibly at his collar. His remaining hand trembled like a phone losing signal.
"Repair…repairing…shit...fu...ck..."
Repair?
'Not on my watch.'
Spider-Man crossed the gap in a single burst. From everyone's perspective, the red figure simply stopped being in one place and started being in another. His arm reached out, standing upright, not even remotely slouching or crouching. Blood-like webbing snapped down from his fingers and yanked Henton's skull up into his palm. He held him like a basketball, like a meek pathetic ball to hoist.
"You don't understand," Henton wheezed, voice glitching at the edges, "the Big Man will come for you for this…!"
His fist swung and he struck Spider-Man's abdomen. It did nothing. As a matter of fact, his metallic fist bent inward.
"Hey, Hobie?" Felix suddenly prompted. "What should I do with this guy?"
"Dismantle him! Take care of his cybernetics! Bastard is hard to kill! And he's gonna send a signal soon, I bet! Let me get my—"
"No need. I got it."
Tendrils spilled from his knuckles, thin as thread, red going on black, and drilled down through the seams of Henton's neck. Forcing needle-like holes and threading the gaps between plating like a key finding a lock.
'Motor functions,' Felix thought, and felt the thought answered before he'd finished having it. 'Kill the motor functions. Nothing else. Keep him breathing though.'
Rash understood. Rash always understood.
'Feeels greeeeat to be back!'
He smiled. It did.
The tendrils didn't rip through Henton's body so much as strangle it from the inside, finding wiring bundles and servo clusters. This was not brute instinct, this was Felix's knowledge, dragged up out of years of R&D blueprints and college. Man and symbiote reading the same circuit diagram at the same time. Agreeing on where to cut.
Henton's remaining arm seized, twitched, went limp. His legs folded under him like a puppet with its strings snipped one at a time, carefully, in order. His eyes stayed open. Dim, but open. Alive, in whatever sense a thing like this counted as alive.
Then it was over.
There echoed the hum of the dormant portal and the drip, drip, drip of water somewhere in the tunnels, and Anderthrop Henton dropped down on the floor, twitching faintly, a fatherly smile still frozen crooked on a face that no longer worked.
Spider-Man's hand remained extended. Tendrils wisped and flicked like a tongue.
Hobie sauntered over with his hands in his pockets like none of this was anything new. "You good?" Casual as he was, Hobie has this concerning aura around him. Felix could feel it.
"Yeah." Felix flexed his fingers, watching the last of the tendrils retract back under scarlet. "I'm good."
"Cool new suit. You got that from your Symbiote?"
"Mhm."
"Cool, cool. Two of you did a hell of a job with this guy." Hobie nodded at the twitching heap. "Kinda scary though."
"I saved us and kept him alive, didn't I? Think that matters more."
"Aye, fair."
"I want us to take him apart properly and figure out how he works." Felix looked at the crumpled thing that used to walk and talk and pitch anti-pollution task forces hours ago. "The fact that he got in here without tripping a single sensor, that shouldn't be possible. Herbie and Marilyn should've caught something. Anything."
Hobie snorted. "That's our future tech for ya. Makes your stuff look like cave paintin's." He clapped Felix on the shoulder. "But I guess he was no match for you in a fight, eh?"
"Seems so."
Felix glanced past him. Maria was already back on her feet, brushing brick dust off her jacket. Xina was coming close and training a flashlight squarely on Henton's twitching body.
"So, time to rip 'em this guy open and do some investigating," Hobie said. To that, Felix agreed.
***
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER
Guilt and sympathy really weighed on Felix. Henton's body lay cracked open on a steel table dragged up beside the portal rig, cables running from the ruined chest cavity into the side of the van. There, Xina sat inside amid a laptop on her lap. Along with the laptop with holograms that sifted through a flood of scrolling data.
"It'll take some time to analyze all of this," Xina called out. "There's over a hundred terabytes in here."
"A hundred? You're kidding," Felix said.
"Not at all."
Fists on the table's edge, Spider-Man loomed over the cyborg. His mask had peeled back to his collar, the rest of the suit still clinging to him. He frowned. He didn't exactly like what he did. In the moment, it kinda felt good.
'Because we are baaack!'
'Yeah. We are.' At that, he smiled. 'Good to have you back, buddy.'
'Yessss! We feel stronger than ever! Stronger!'
What was strange was that Rash's voice no longer echoed. It was identical—nay, it was a reflection of Felix's own voice. This fusion, this bond, it ran as deep as blood. As deep as conscience itself. That moment, as he looked down at the cyborg corpse, he felt guilty. But he understood it was necessary for this enemy and to live and he quickly moved on. That side of self-preservation, he suspected it came from Rash. And it felt like a long-time coming.
"Practically a lifetime," Felix murmured.
"Mm." Xina scrolled, eyes narrowing at something. "Looks like they were able to plug in most of the original Anderthrop Henton. Memories, voice patterns, mannerisms. All preserved. This…amazing…"
Felix glanced at Hobie. He sat at the hammock and appeared stunned. "Sounds like no one has heard of cyborgs like this."
"No. Never," Xina said.
"Nope. Putting memories into data is common and all. We make movies out of 'em. But personality? Habits? That's different level, man," Hobie explained.
"You mentioned the original Anderthrop Henton. What, you're saying that's not him," Maria questioned.
"At first I thought it was him but…." Xina pulled up a wireframe render of the skull structure, rotating it slowly. "No. I'm not even sure if I can call this a cyborg."
"Isn't that what he is?" Felix asked.
"No. A cyborg is a living organism that is augmented. There's still a beating heart in there somewhere. Flesh doing flesh things but wrapped in machine parts, whether it's an arm or a lung or a skull. What's left of Henton in this..." Xina looked up from the inside of the van and gestured at the ruined chassis on the table. "All dates don't go further back then a year ago. His heart, his lungs, everything. It's one thing if he had heart surgery or lung surgery and there's tech in it, but...everything? That's impossible. Unless...unless this is an android wearing a dead man's face."
"You're shitting me. They got androids now?" Hobie scoffed. "I thought that was—"
"Time has passed," Maria pointed out. "Lots of time. Remember, one year in here is…far more there."
There was this loud gulp that no one actually sounded. The implication hung like sparks, though. Cyborgs were still human, still made of flesh and metal. But androids were all metal. All inhumanity.
'And none of my sensors could tell...!'
What kind of wizardry was put into this abomination?
"The phasing tech is the real prize here," Xina went on after a beat. "State-of-the-art matter displacement. Near the whole body could shift out of phase at will, which is why your fist went straight through him, Felix."
"So that was what that was."
"Now we got phasing tech? Lord have mercy, I never thought our tech would get THAT good," Hobie remarked. "Shit, man. We've really been gone too long…"
Xina continued, "The engine driving the matter displacement tech was routed entirely through the cannon arm, and the processing core is in the skull. That made two parts of him that he couldn't phase. He had to stay solid or else he'd die."
"Which is why he didn't just phase that cannon-arm through the webbing," Felix said.
"And why aiming for the head worked once you got close enough. Real sensitive area." Xina nodded slowly, something almost like respect crossing her face. "Once you got the cannon though, he probably couldn't phase even if he wanted to. You got lucky then."
"Not luck," Hobie corrected. "Bet your Spider-Sense guided you a little, didn't it?"
"...I think so," said Felix. There was this tingle when he delivered his strikes.
"Good." Hobie nodded. "Our Spider-Sense, see, we can be warned of attacks and see glimpses of the future. All that is to service us into living. Being alive. With training and meditation, we can really stretch thin on what we can do."
Felix looked at Hobie. "You can do all that?"
"Me? Oh hell no. Maybe the future sight if I meditate. Gotten the hang of it. But, I got my lessons on the Spider-Sense from another fellow spider."
Felix fully turned, head tilted. "Who?"
Hobie chuckled. "Hah, not telling."
"Why not?"
"You wouldn't believe even if I told you. And, well, it'll be funny when you meet him. I will say though, the two of you have equally cool costumes."
Okaaay. Something to look forward to then?
Anyway, Felix looked down at the ruined husk on the table. The white ponytail was matted and the fatherly face gone slack and inert, wires spilling out of a chest that used to hold a whole personality.
Looking at it like this, it was a marvel.
"He mentioned the Big Man. Then this must be…"
"Yeah. State of the start shit, this must be one of the Big Man's subordinates," Hobie murmured. "His Shadow Squad, his Death Sentence. Fuck."
"The technology to be able to create an android that perfectly replicates a person. There's no way the public knows about it. Alchemaxx might not even know about it," Xina said.
Felix snapped his head at that. "What? How is that possible?"
"The Big Man isn't an official member of Alchemaxx. He tempers crime, he injects crime, he does what he is ordered to and has been allowed his own pocket of influence and power in Nueva York. His own scientists, his own laboratories across different Earths…he's a monster in everything he can do."
A monster indeed. This android, Felix wondered if it even had any willpower. Or if he was simply an extension of the Big Man.
"He tried to kill us. If he's a monster, then he needs to be slayed."
"Well said! From one monster to another!" Hobie cackled, arms crossed and legs dangling from the hammock. "Real glad you're officially on the side of good, mate!"
There was a small smile on Felix. Hobie sure knew how to gas a guy up. "Have you seen the Big Man in action?" Felix asked, trying to stay professional.
"I mostly dealt with his underlings if I'm being perfectly honest. The one time we did meet...alas, I didn't catch a full glimpse of him. He did chase me though, like a goddamn horror monster. I escaped by toppling a skyscraper on top of him."
"You did what?"
That was Xina and Maria. They couldn't believe it. Felix was more focused on the second part of Hobie's heroic terrorism.
"He survived?"
"Forget survived, he was holding the whole shit up! Three days go by, he's still holding it, and they're doing repairs on it!" Hobie exclaimed.
"Huh. Is that right?" Felix stroked his cheek. "Interesting."
"Uh, dunno how interesting it is for a guy to hold up a six hundred meter tall skyscraper but okay. Seems like it's terrifying more than anythin'."
"It's interesting because it means the Big Man cares a whole lot about property damage, and more importantly, he cares about money."
A lengthy pause went around. Hobie blinked twice. He stared at Felix, crossed his legs, and straightened. "Huh…you're right. Good point. If he wanted to, that monster could have just kept going after me but he purposely held the scraper up…"
"Do you think a psychological profile is going to help us?" Xina questioned.
"Of course it will," Maria chimed in. "Every bit of information helps."
"Agreed," said Felix before a predictable, meaningless argument broke out. "We need everything for an opponent like this. Everything."
He looked between them. Xina seemed to understand and agree with a mumble. Nodding in appreciation, Felix then started walking toward the direction of the exit. Everyone's eyes followed him.
"Uh, where are you going?" asked the other Spider-Man.
"Hobie, you can take care of the 'cyborg' in case it goes crazy. Xina, you scan it properly. Get as much information as you can."
"And you?" Hobie asked. "You goin' for a stroll?"
"I think I need to get ready." Felix rolled his shoulders and his mask crept up to cover his face. "Gonna do some patrols."
It was the mark of Spider-Man after all.