— Broadcast—
The hole was deep enough that no ambient light reached its floor.
Stussy stood at its edge and let her X-ray vision do what it did. The vision penetrated the rock and soil without effort, finding the body below in the same state it had arrived in: crumpled, extensively damaged, the spine disrupted at multiple points from the initial impact, internal surfaces lacerated by the gravel the descent had driven through them. The lungs had stopped moving. The heart had stopped.
She watched for the interval required to confirm what she was seeing, then let her eyes return to normal.
"He's dead. The danger is over."
Vegapunk sat down on the floor. His body had been maintaining a crisis posture for longer than his cardiovascular system appreciated, and the release of that posture produced a visible deflation. He was not afraid of death — he had made peace with that possibility before any of this had begun — but the sustained proximity to it had a cost, and the cost presented itself now in the form of exhaustion.
Ada looked at Stussy with an evaluative expression that she did not bother to conceal. She had known her as a CP0 colleague. She had not known her as something that could drive a man through multiple floors of reinforced scientific facility. The distance between those two versions of the same person was significant.
And she simply obeys this old man. Ada turned the thought over. Why does a person who can do that choose to follow someone who can't?
She filed it as a question for a less urgent moment.
"What do we do now?" she said. "Sitting here waiting for the next problem to come to us isn't a strategy."
Stussy's practical assessment: Venom had taken Caesar Clown and retreated. The symbiote was not the type of organism to expose itself unnecessarily — it was hungry and damaged, and hunger combined with damage produces hiding behavior rather than aggressive behavior. It was somewhere in the facility.
To find it: the monitoring room. Surveillance systems would give them Caesar Clown's last logged location. Venom, operating on survival instinct rather than institutional knowledge, would not think to disable the cameras.
Before she moved to follow the others, she used her vision on the hole one more time.
The heart had not restarted in the minutes since. Theoretically — structurally, medically — there was no version of this that produced a living man. She was certain of that.
She jogged to catch up with Vegapunk and Ada. The three of them moved through the laboratory's remaining corridors together, each one's awareness covering what the others might miss.
— Below the Laboratory. —
The question of whether Garou was a normal person had a clear answer, established across a lifetime of people arriving at it the same way: by watching him do something that should not have been possible, and revising their assumptions accordingly.
His mind was in the revolving lantern.
The body had entered clinical death. The mind had gone somewhere else.
[The gymnasium. The white training uniform. The smell of chalk dust and old wood and effort.]
He had knocked them all down. Every fellow disciple in the hall, laid out in a pattern that radiated from where he stood — arms, legs, one or two of them at angles that would require a physician's attention and produce permanent consequences. He had not held back to avoid injury. He had held back to avoid killing, which was a different and narrower margin.
One person remained standing.
The old man had come out from wherever he had been when the sounds of the gymnasium becoming a disaster area reached him. Silver hair. A body that years had marked without diminishing. He stood on the steps with his hands behind his back and looked at what his best student had done to the people around him with the expression of someone who has arrived at a conclusion he didn't want to reach.
"Garou." The name carried everything that didn't need to be said alongside it. "Is this what you wanted."
It was not a question.
Garou set his stance. The posture was automatic — the thing his body did when it identified an opponent worth taking seriously. He had been waiting for this, he realized. The gymnasium, the disciples, the months of accumulated contempt — all of it had been building toward this. The old man was the point.
"Today I defeat you," he said. "I'm going to send you off properly."
What followed was not what he had imagined it would be.
Bang did not adjust. He did not escalate or unlock some reserve he had been keeping back. He used the Flowing Water Rock-Crushing Fist — the style he had created, the style he had taught to every student who had walked through the gymnasium's doors, the style that Garou had learned until he could execute it in his sleep.
The mediocre students had learned the shape of it. The fancy movements, the surface patterns, the way it looked from the outside when performed correctly. All of that dissolved the moment they encountered someone genuinely strong.
Garou had learned the inside of it.
And Bang had learned it deeper than he had.
He went down. Not once — the fight lasted long enough to be a real fight — but the conclusion was the same as it would have been if it had ended in the first exchange. The master's version of the technique had a depth that the student's version, for all its genuine excellence, had not yet reached. There were cracks in Garou's certainty afterward that had not been there before. Not in his body. In something that had been more confident.
He left. Bang did not pursue — not seriously, not to the end.
Garou ran anyway, because the fear that had built up during the fight needed somewhere to go, and running was the only direction available.
He ran for a long time. When the fear finally exhausted itself, he understood: if Bang had intended to kill him, he would not have let him reach the road.
The day he left the gymnasium, the relationship had ended. Not with punishment. Just with an ending.
Years later. The gymnasium again.
The yard was overgrown. The boards that had been worn smooth by thousands of training sessions were weathered now, beginning to splinter at the edges. Nobody had cleaned the place in a long time.
He found the tombstone in the backyard.
Bang's name. The dates. The markers of a life that had finished.
He stood there for a while.
"You couldn't wait?" The anger in his voice was not performative — it was the anger of someone who has been denied something they did not know they needed until it was gone. "I've been getting stronger all this time. I was going to surpass you. How do you just — how dare you die of old age?"
The weeds did not answer.
The quiet of the empty yard did not answer.
Something in his chest did.
The heart in the body at the bottom of the pit restarted.
Not gradually. A decision rather than a process — the organ that had stopped resuming its function as if it had simply been waiting for a reason sufficient to the task. The wounds that had been bleeding stopped. The tissue that had been torn began the first stages of repair. The lungs, which had not moved for several minutes, drew air.
He was not going to die here. He could not die here.
He had never been a hero. He had never tried to be. He just wanted to be himself — the self he had built through every fight, every near-death threshold crossed, every opponent who had pushed him to somewhere new. Not the version Bang had tried to shape, not the version anyone else had decided he should become. His version.
Bang had died without seeing it finished.
He was not going to give the rest of his enemies the same satisfaction.
In the dark at the bottom of the pit, something dripped from above.
He registered it with the margins of his returning awareness — a liquid impact on his shoulder, the tactile wrongness of something that moved with purpose rather than gravity. By the time the recognition assembled itself into an identification, the surface had already spread.
It moved fast. It knew what it was doing — it had done this before, with Caesar Clown, and the mechanics were established. The black film covered him completely in seconds, conforming to every surface, finding every gap. He could feel the boundary where his body ended and the thing on top of it began, and he could feel that boundary dissolving.
He struggled. The film did not respond to struggle in the way physical restraints respond to it. It simply continued.
His face was the last thing to go. His eyes, in the moment before they were covered, held the expression of someone who understands exactly what is happening to them and cannot prevent it.
Then there was only the dark.
Then there was Venom, wearing a body that had crossed death and come back, with a physical architecture it had been trying to find since it left Caesar Clown's inadequate frame.
The thing that stood up in the pit was not Garou. It was not Venom. It was the product of both, and the desire it carried was simpler and larger than either of them had contained alone.
It wanted to kill something.