The world dissolved into a blade of silver light.
My spider-sense screamed, a high-voltage hum at the base of my skull that was less a warning and more a full-blown panic attack. I threw myself backward, the wind of the sword's passage ghosting across the fabric of my mask. It wasn't a wild swing, the kind of haymaker you expect from a guy in a skull mask. The arc was a perfect, efficient crescent of death, calculated to intersect not where I was, but where I was going to be. He'd factored in my precognitive dodge. My heart hammered against my ribs. This guy was different.
"Whoa there, Skeletor!" I flipped, sticking to the underside of a massive I-beam thirty stories above a sleeping New York. "Buy a girl dinner first, why don't you?" My voice came out breezy, a carefully constructed mask for the cold knot of dread tightening in my gut.
He didn't answer. He just moved. His arm snapped forward, and the round, familiar shield on his other arm left his grasp with a sound like a muted thunderclap. It ricocheted off a concrete pillar, then a stack of rebar, its trajectory a nightmarish geometry problem I had to solve in a split second. I let go of the beam, plummeting into a web-swing just as the shield slammed into the spot where I'd been clinging, shivering the entire half-ton girder. It spun back to his hand with a magnetic thunk.
Captain America's shield throw. My brain was racing, trying to stitch together the impossible profile of the man below. He stood amidst the skeletal framework of the skyscraper, a predator in his natural habitat of steel and shadow. The single, unblinking red eye of his mask stared up at me, a void of analysis.
He didn't give me time to process. One moment he was standing there, the next he was a blur of motion, flowing across the unfinished floor with a fluid, terrifying grace. He vaulted a pile of construction debris with an acrobatic flair that was pure Black Widow, landing in a low crouch before springing forward again. A grappling hook shot from his wrist, not a web line, but its purpose was the same, pulling him upward with mechanical speed.
I swung to meet him, planning a classic aerial kick, but he was ready. Mid-air, he twisted, his body contorting in a way that screamed "years of ballet and espionage." He caught my leg, using my own momentum to hurl me down toward a scaffold. I hit the wooden planks with a jarring crack, the impact rattling my teeth.
"Nice moves," I grunted, rolling to my feet. "You get those from a coupon book? 'Buy one Avenger, get one free'?"
He landed silently on the opposite end of the scaffold. "They're yours now, too," he said, his voice a distorted, metallic rasp. He mirrored my stance perfectly—the slight crouch, the hands ready to shoot webs. It was like looking into a funhouse mirror, one that wanted to kill me.
He pulled a compact, high-tech bow from his back. Hawkeye. Of course. The thwip of the string was almost silent. I dodged, but the arrow wasn't aimed at me. It struck a cannister on his belt, which he'd already thrown. The cannister ruptured with a sharp hiss, blanketing my end of the scaffold in a cloud of freezing vapor. The wooden planks were instantly coated in a treacherous, slick layer of ice. Iceman, an evil, dollar-store version of Iceman.
My footing vanished. I scrambled for purchase, my boots sliding uselessly. He was already moving, striding across the ice with practiced ease, his boots deploying micro-crampons. He was herding me, limiting my greatest asset: my mobility.
I fired a web line, aiming for his face. He didn't even flinch. He just sliced the incoming strand in half with his sword, the motion so casual it was insulting. I fired two more, one high, one low. He dodged the high one and vaulted over the low one.
"I don't need to beat you," Taskmaster's voice echoed in the cavernous, unfinished space. The wind whistled through the steel skeleton of the building, carrying his words. "I just need to learn you."
That was it. The final puzzle piece slotted into place with a horrifying click. This wasn't a fight; it was a data acquisition session. I was a living textbook of combat techniques he was speed-reading. Every dodge, every punch, every web-shot was another file saved to his biological hard drive. The dread in my stomach turned to ice. Reacting wasn't working. It was just feeding the machine.
Time for a new plan. Time for chaos.
"You want to learn me?" I yelled, my voice echoing. "Class is in session! Pop quiz, hotshot!"
I stopped thinking. I let instinct and desperation take over. Instead of neat, arcing swings, I started jerking through the air in spastic, unpredictable patterns. I fired webs not at him, but everywhere. I coated girders in thick, sticky traps. I created a curtain of webbing between two pillars, blocking his line of sight. I ricocheted off a dangling crane cable, using the spin to launch myself at him from a bizarre, sideways angle.
For a moment, it worked.
He was expecting a frontal assault, but I came at him from the side, my feet slamming into his ribs. He grunted, a flicker of surprise in his posture. As he staggered back, I fired a web-grabber, and the sword was ripped from his hand, clattering away across the concrete floor.
A surge of triumph shot through me. Yes! Unpredictability! That was the key!
The triumph lasted for exactly 0.8 seconds.
He didn't even look at his lost sword. He just drove his shoulder into my chest and brought the shield up in a brutal, crushing blow to my jaw. My head snapped back, my vision exploding in a supernova of white-hot stars. He recovered his balance with an inhuman effortlessness, the brief moment of chaos already analyzed, cataloged, and countered. The next time I tried that move, he'd be ready.
I scrambled back, shaking my head to clear the fog. My jaw throbbed, a deep, resonant ache that was already turning into a symphony of pain. He was recording everything I did. Every new trick, every piece of improvisation, was a one-time-use weapon. Once he saw it, it was his. And it became useless to me. How do you fight someone who learns faster than you can invent?
The fight spilled out from the central floors, becoming a deadly ballet across the entire construction site. We were dancers on a stage of precarious steel beams, with a thirty-story drop as our audience. The wind howled, a mournful chorus to the percussive clang of shield on steel, the thwip of my webs, and the grunts of exertion.
He was a master of this environment. He used the chaos to his advantage, turning the half-finished building into a weapon. An explosive arrow would detonate near the supports of a platform I was on, forcing me into a desperate leap. He'd use the long shadows cast by the city lights to disappear, only to reappear right behind me, his presence announced only by the scream of my spider-sense. He wasn't a brawler anymore; he was a hunter. And I was the prey he was patiently, methodically running to ground.
My movements were getting slower. My ribs felt like a bag of broken glass from that shield bash. My web fluid was running low—I hadn't planned on a multi-hour, city-spanning chase culminating in a duel with a human super-computer. I was tired. He wasn't. He didn't seem to feel fatigue. He was a machine, a collection of other people's perfect movements, and machines don't get tired.
I tried one last gambit. Swinging low, I webbed a pallet of concrete bags and, with a desperate heave, swung it around like a colossal wrecking ball. It was clumsy, telegraphed, a move born of pure exhaustion.
He saw it coming a mile a way.
He didn't dodge it. He ran up it.
His boots found purchase on the swinging bags, and he sprinted along the makeshift pendulum, closing the distance between us in a heartbeat. Before I could even react, he leaped. His kick connected with my chest with the force of a battering ram.
The world became a blur of motion and pain. I flew backward, my grip on the web line torn away. My back slammed into a different stack of cement bags on a lower floor. The impact was a brutal, full-body concussion. The bags exploded around me, a choking cloud of fine grey powder filling the air, my lungs, my mask.
I lay there, half-buried in a pile of ripped paper and cement dust, coughing rackingly. Every muscle screamed. My vision swam. Through the settling dust, I saw him land gracefully a dozen yards away.
He didn't rush in to finish me. He didn't gloat. He simply stood there, calmly, as if he had all the time in the world. He holstered his shield on his back. The compact bow was clipped to his belt. Then, with a series of efficient clicks, he began attaching a new set of weapons to his tactical harness. A different loadout. He was done learning. He was moving on to the final exam.
He drew his sword from its sheath, the polished steel catching the distant city lights. He leveled the point at me, a silent, final judgment. The red eye of his mask seemed to burn through the dust-filled air.
"You improvise well," his filtered voice cut through the ringing in my ears. It was a flat, academic observation. "But you'll fall just like the rest."