Ethan had expected noise or a commotion after he returned from dinner.
Alarms. Lockouts. Counter-intrusion hacking attempts. A digital storm of some sort.
Instead—nothing.
He sat cross-legged on the edge of his hotel bed, the soft hum of his laptop the only sound in the room. Lines of green text scrolled lazily across the screen: network logs, access timestamps, checksum reports. It was all clean.
Ethan leaned closer, scrolling back through the data, waiting for something—anything—that showed that someone at Oscorp had noticed his hack. But there were no flags, no pings, no blacklisted IPs, no rapid firewall cycling. It was as if his incursion hadn't existed.
That was impossible.
He'd left fingerprints all over the system—on purpose. Of course, they weren't really his, and they led back to Oscorp, making it look like they had a mole, but they were obvious. They were blunt, heavy-handed trails that any half-awake security analyst should've caught his trail. His fake IP bounced through Singapore, Warsaw, even a public café node before returning to Oscorp. It was practically waving a red flag that said: "Hey, Norman, someone's in your house."
And still—silence.
Ethan's frown deepened. He ran another diagnostic. Then another.
Nothing.
"Come on," he muttered. "Somebody must've seen this. There's no way nobody saw it."
He combed deeper into the server logs, eyes darting across entries like a detective scouring a crime scene for missed bloodstains. Eventually, he found something—a few minor access attempts from low-level sysadmins, halfhearted pings that lasted all of twenty seconds before they'd logged out again. Then silence.
'No escalation. No report filed. Not even a follow-up.'
Ethan slumped back in his chair, rubbing his temples. The irony burned slow and bitter.
He'd built his entire plan around the assumption that the system would fight back—that Oscorp, for all its corruption, was at least vigilant. He wanted to stress-test them, make them panic, see if there were any hidden security protocols that would reveal themselves if attacked, draw Norman's attention so the company would tighten its digital walls, and leave a trail for the government officials to find and exploit. But they hadn't.
They hadn't even noticed.
For a long moment, he just stared at the scrolling code, his expression unreadable. The laptop's glow threw sharp shadows across his face.
'They didn't even look.'
Ethan shut his eyes and leaned back, the chair creaking beneath him. His mind felt hollow, filled with static. He'd prepared for a war against intelligent adversaries—people like Norman Osborn, dangerous because they cared too much about control. But this was indifference wearing a corporate badge.
If negligence this deep existed at Oscorp, then maybe the world didn't need saboteurs. Maybe all it took to bring down empires was a few thousand tired employees clicking "Ignore."
A bitter laugh escaped him.
"One of these idiots probably would've just sold me the information I needed," he murmured. "When I start my own tech company, I need to make a system that routes out individuals like these."
He rubbed his eyes, exhaustion creeping in. "Regardless, I just wasted an entire evening on this instead of finding the person I need for later."
For the first time in a long while, Ethan felt small. His intellect—his entire careful, manipulative design—suddenly felt like overkill in a world so willing to crumble on its own.
He closed the laptop, the click sounding loud in the stillness. Then he lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. "Oh well, no need to dwell on this anymore."
Elsewhere, Felicia Hardy crouched beneath the hum of fluorescent lights in the safehouse basement of her laundromat. The place was half-empty, half-home. A cot, a crate of clothes, two duffel bags filled with gear, and some cash. The air smelled faintly of detergent and gun oil.
She dragged one of her older safehouse crates onto the concrete floor, flipping the latch open. Inside: gadgets, burner phones, grapples, a few tools for museum break-ins. Familiar comfort.
Piece by piece, she laid them out on the workbench. Each tool was checked, polished, and wiped down. Her black gloves clawed, making a faint clank as they lightly tapped against the metal.
A faint smile tugged at her lips. The setup wasn't glamorous—not like her penthouse years ago when the city called her The Silent Cat—but it was hers. A quiet hideout like this was useful in its own way, even if built on lint and detergent.
She paused, glancing around. Bare concrete walls. A string of bare bulbs. The faint hum of washers above. Slowly, her smirk faded.
She missed the chaos and thrill of stealing things. The old life. But even she had to admit that this was safer and a bit more fun. 'Corporate espionage, I might have to make a career change.'
Her comm buzzed once—Ethan's coded ping. The mission had a date.
"Two days."
A charity gala. The perfect distraction. With the important guests and media around, a good portion of the security would need to be redistributed. Of course, this didn't mean that there was no security but rather that most would be around the gala to make sure no one left or entered a secure area.
Felicia smirked, spinning a compact device—the harvest ring, as Ethan called it when he handed it to her the day before—between her fingers. It gleamed silver under the harsh light, the tiny spider-web etching glowing faintly with the device's charge.
"Two days," she whispered. "Let's make it party."
On the Insight Rooftop, wind tugged at Peter Parker's hoodie as he paced the roof of the print shop. The Newark skyline stretched in the distance, neon bleeding into the fog. Below, the presses thudded rhythmically, a mechanical heartbeat.
Peter couldn't sit still. Every muscle ached for motion. He'd fought thugs, monsters, but this was different. This wasn't a battle of fists or webs; it was committing a crime, but for the purpose of sending Norman to jail so MJ and Aunt May could be safe.
Peter wasn't stupid; he knew that Ethan wasn't a generous person based on what he had seen of the young man. He was always scheming in his head and made sure he got something, even if no one noticed what he got in the end. So his offering to help Peter take down Norman was probably something he would have done regardless, but he used it to make 'Spider-Man' indebted to him.
He leaned on the railing, looking out across the rooftops. He could almost see Oscorp's tower from here—the chrome spire that haunted his dreams. Norman Osborn's monument to himself.
Ethan's voice echoed in memory: "The charity gala will be held in two days. There will be maximum press coverage there, so it'll be a double-edged sword for us. Norman and security will be distracted, but equally, we won't be able to actively predict how things will go, so most of the plan will be made up on the fly. It'll be difficult, but that's our best window."
Peter clenched his jaw.
He'd told MJ the gala was just another story. She'd smiled, said she understood. But her eyes said otherwise.
A gust of wind ruffled his hair. He closed his eyes, trying to shut out the noise. The guilt toward MJ. The fear of what Norman might do to Aunt May should they fail. The excitement he didn't want to admit.