The world tasted of cement dust and failure. I hauled myself out of the crater my body had made in the half-finished flooring, each breath a sharp, grinding protest from my ribs. My mask filtered the worst of the grit, but I could still feel it coating my teeth.
"You know," I gasped, forcing a lightness I was miles away from feeling, "for a guy dressed like a Halloween decoration, you hit like a tax audit."
My quip was short, sharp. Covering the tremor in my voice, covering the cold dread coiling in my gut. This guy… this guy really might beat me.
Taskmaster approached through the settling dust, a phantom of calm precision. His skull mask was an impassive void, his broadsword held low in a duelist's stance that screamed of countless dojos and a thousand lethal encounters. He moved like a man who had not only fought a hundred different battles but had memorized how each one ended.
My spider-sense wasn't screaming; it was holding a sustained, high-pitched wail, a constant thrum of imminent, calculated doom. But the truly terrifying thing, the thought that slid like ice through my veins, was a simple observation: He's not even breaking a sweat.
He didn't answer my joke. He didn't need to. The silence was his response, a declaration that this wasn't a game. He lunged.
It wasn't a wild charge, but a fluid, controlled explosion of movement. The blade arced, not for my head or my chest, but for the tendons in my knee. It was surgical. A disabling strike meant to ground me, to take away my greatest advantage. I threw myself backward, the wind of the blade's passage kissing my shin.
Thwip. A web-line shot out, snagging a girder twenty feet away. I swung, putting distance between us, trying to reset the fight to my terms. "Whoa there, Boney-Wan Kenobi! A little eager, aren't we?"
He didn't follow. He simply pivoted, his form a perfect echo of a master kendo artist. As I swung back in, firing a glob of webbing at his face, he reacted with impossible speed. The sword flashed. He didn't cut the web; he slapped it with the flat of the blade, a precise, paddle-like motion that sent my own sticky projectile careening back at me. I had to contort mid-air to avoid ensnaring myself.
Landing on a stack of I-beams, I scrambled for higher ground. He was right there with me. I backflipped away from another precise thrust, landing lightly on a crossbeam. And then my blood ran cold.
He mirrored me.
Not an approximation. Not a clumsy copy. He performed the exact same acrobatic flip, every twist of the torso, every placement of the feet, executed with a chilling, mechanical perfection. He landed on the opposite end of the beam, silent and steady, his posture a perfect reflection of my own. He was wearing my move like a trophy.
It rattled me to my core. This wasn't just a fight; it was a violation. He was stealing me, piece by piece, right in front of my eyes.
"Great," I muttered, the words feeling like sand in my mouth. "I always wanted to see what I'd look like if I shopped at Murder R Us."
He took a single, deliberate step on the beam, the sword an extension of his will. He was done observing. Now, he was hunting.
The fight became a vertical chase through the skeletal remains of the skyscraper. He wasn't just attacking anymore; he was herding me. Every sword strike, every perfectly-placed kick wasn't meant to finish me, but to cut off an escape route, to force me upward into the tightening net of steel and empty air. My usual playground of angles and surfaces had become his chessboard, and I was the desperate king with nowhere to run.
I clung to a massive steel support column, trying to catch a half-second to think, to find a pattern, an opening, anything. That's when a small, metallic disk flew past my head. It wasn't aimed at me. It clanged against the column, just above my hands, and stuck fast. My spider-sense shrieked a warning a microsecond before a familiar, sickening hum filled the air.
Blue electricity erupted from the disk, turning the entire steel beam into a high-voltage conductor. The shock was blinding, a full-body seizure that locked every muscle. My grip failed, and I tumbled down, my fall broken by a tangle of rebar and scaffolding poles that felt less like a safety net and more like a bed of nails.
I landed hard, the impact jarring my teeth. Before I could even push myself up, something whistled through the air. Thwump. A sharp, biting pain erupted in my left bicep. I looked down to see an arrow embedded in the thick muscle, a high-tensile wire trailing from its end, pinning my arm to the scaffolding behind me. It was a perfect, archer's shot. A Hawkeye shot.
My mind was reeling, trying to process the data. The swordplay of a master assassin, the gadgets of a super-spy, the marksmanship of an Avenger. It wasn't random. The taser disk wasn't just a weapon; it was the perfect counter to a wall-crawler clinging to a metal surface. The rope arrow wasn't just a projectile; it was the ideal tool to pin an agile target who relies on his arms to swing. Each trick, each copied style, was tailored specifically to exploit what I would do, what I had to do, to survive.
A horrifying clarity washed over me, more chilling than the fifty-story drop just inches away.
He's not fighting me. He's solving me.
Logic was a liability. Predictability was a death sentence. If he could solve the equation of Spider-Man, I had to change the math. I had to become chaos.
With a roar of pain and desperation, I tore my arm free from the arrow, ripping suit and skin. I ignored the warm slick of blood running down my arm and launched myself back into the fray, not with grace, but with raw violence. I stopped dodging and started breaking things.
Thwip-thwip! Two web-lines latched onto the support bolts of a massive, suspended air conditioning unit. I planted my feet and pulled, muscles screaming in protest. With a groan of tortured metal, the bolts sheared, and two tons of machinery plunged toward him.
He didn't flinch. He simply took two fluid side-steps, the unit smashing into the platform where he'd stood, kicking up a blinding cloud of concrete and dust. It was the cover I needed. I dove into the grey haze, swinging a loose length of steel pipe like a madman. I couldn't see him, but I didn't need to. I just needed him not to see me.
The chaos worked, if only for a second. It threw his perfect predictive model into disarray. He was forced to adapt, to react instead of anticipate. I felt the pipe connect with his sword in a jarring clang, then again against his armored shoulder. I was landing hits, ugly and clumsy, but they were hits.
Through the dust, I saw my opening. A split-second where his head was turned. I fired a web-shot, not a ball, but a wide, sloppy splatter. It slapped across the right eye-lens of his mask, momentarily blinding him.
That was all I needed. I surged forward, channeling every ounce of fear and adrenaline into my right fist. I put everything I had into a haymaker that connected squarely with the side of his skull-faced helmet.
The impact was glorious. A deep, resonant THUMP echoed through the steel skeleton of the building. His head snapped to the side, and I saw a visible dent mar the smooth, white surface of his mask. For the first time, I had done real damage. I had landed a solid blow.
I stumbled back, my knuckles screaming, my lungs burning, waiting for him to fall, to stagger, to even grunt.
He did none of those things.
He slowly, deliberately, straightened his neck. He raised a gauntleted hand and wiped the webbing from his eye-lens as if it were a smudge of dirt. He adjusted his stance, settling back into that perfect, balanced fighting form.
A low, synthesized voice, cold and devoid of emotion, crackled from his mask's speaker.
"Good," he said. "I needed that."
My heart stopped. He wasn't hurt. He wasn't angry. He had let me hit him. He wanted to feel it, to gauge the upper limit of my strength, to add the final variable to his equation. My moment of triumph was just another line of his code.
He was done analyzing. The assault that followed was nothing like what came before. It was a whirlwind of controlled fury, a relentless fusion of a dozen fighting styles. A Captain America shield-bash with his vambrace sent me staggering back; a lunging Panther-like claw-strike with his fingers tore through the chest of my suit; a brutal kick I recognized as Daredevil's sent me skidding across the floor. He was pushing me, driving me back with a purpose I didn't understand until it was too late.
My back hit open air. I was on a narrow, suspended platform, a single wide beam hanging by cables over the heart of the construction site. A city of lights glittered a thousand feet below. There was nowhere to swing. Nowhere to run.
He stopped at the edge of the main structure, leaving ten feet of open space between us. He held his sword up, the polished blade reflecting the distant city. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he flipped it, catching it in a reverse grip. The point was aimed down, an instrument of finality.
The passive skull mask seemed to stare right through me.
"Time to escalate."
He surged forward, closing the distance in a single, explosive bound, the sword poised for a finishing plunge. There was no room to dodge, no time to think. All I could do was brace myself for the blow.