The atmosphere in Times Square had curdled from chaotic spectacle into outright terror. The brilliant, flickering digital advertisements served only to backlight a growing confrontation between the beloved, bruised Spider-Man and the terrifying, incandescent figure of Max Dillon.
The fire of jealousy in Max's heart wasn't just burning; it was consuming the last vestiges of his identity as a forgotten electrical engineer. His luminous blue skin crackled, and arcs of raw energy danced around the edges of his dark hoodie.
"Spider-Man, am I the danger? Look at me! They notice me now! Is this the only way to be seen?" Max's voice was a frantic echo, amplified by the static, a plea for validation disguised as aggression.
Peter Parker, shaking off the lingering metallic taste of adrenaline and fear, realized Max was not a villain but a victim teetering on a psychological precipice. His immediate priority shifted from capture to emotional stabilization.
"Hey, Max, calm down! Look at me," Peter insisted, stepping back slowly, raising his hands in a posture of surrender. "You're not dangerous, Max. You were my friend. The problem is you can't control the energy in you, and it will hurt other people. We can fix this, but you need to trust me."
"I can control this power. I can be a hero, just like you!" Max's voice spiked with impatient fervor, desperate to prove himself, to earn the cheer that Spider-Man received as a birthright. As he spoke, his emotions surged, and the electrical energy enveloping him intensified, crackling, spitting, and bursting outwards in visible, volatile blue bolts.
Max took two quick, charged steps forward, and Peter's Spider-Sense screamed in his mind. The ground was slick with moisture from a recent cleaning crew—a perfect conductor. If Max continued to advance, the radiating energy field, even before a discharge, could transmit lethal current through the wet pavement to the retreating onlookers.
"Calm down, Max! You need to stop!" Peter commanded, his tone sharp. "If you keep going, you might hurt innocent people right now! We are standing on water!"
Max stopped instantly. As an engineer, the mechanics of conductivity were etched into his mind. He looked down, saw the damp reflection, and understood the danger. He paused the physical advance, but the electrical hunger remained, and his rationalizations grew twisted.
"I can control this power," he insisted, pointing to the roaring confluence of main power cables he had exposed. "It's just hungry. I just need to eat my fill, absorb what I need, and then I can control it. I need to be full before I can be calm."
Max's focus returned to the cables. The sheer, relentless flow of power through the underground lines—power that belonged to everyone but him—was an irresistible siren call. He dismissed everything else and returned to the torn-up section of the pavement, ready to resume his ravenous feast.
Peter Parker knew he could not allow this. The power grid of Manhattan was massive, but Max was absorbing energy exponentially. Beyond the financial loss, Peter couldn't be sure Max would ever stop. The current leaks alone were catastrophic; if Max consumed the power he desired, the force he could wield—bolts comparable to natural lightning strikes—would be terrifying and indiscriminately lethal.
"Stop, Max! You have to stop right now!" Peter shouted, shooting out a single, desperate web line. The high-tension polymer strand shot across the short distance, clinging perfectly to Max's upper arm.
Max felt the sticky restraint and the accompanying sharp pull. He realized Peter had been constantly trying to interrupt him, to restrain him, to prevent him from achieving the power that would validate him. The last flicker of friendship evaporated in a blinding flash of fury.
He didn't need to aim. Max simply extended his arm along the line of the web, and a thick, searing bolt of blue-white lightning shot toward Peter.
Peter's Spider-Sense reacted instantly, a violent, deafening alarm bell in his skull. His body instinctively ducked and twisted, narrowly avoiding the main, devastating blast that vaporized the storefront glass behind him.
However, the speed of the current was instantaneous. The small surge of lightning energy traveled along the polymer line, zeroing in on the nearest electrical conductor: the battery and circuitry of the web-shooter on Peter's left wrist. With a sharp, stinging crackle, the web-shooter instantly overloaded, short-circuited, and violently exploded in a shower of melted metal and plastic against Peter's forearm.
The electrical energy, finding a new, conductive path, quickly transferred into Peter's body. The voltage was immense, far exceeding any shock he'd ever sustained. Peter was electrocuted, his entire body convulsing.
It felt like every nerve ending was a frayed wire being dragged across sandpaper. His muscles locked up, seizing in mid-air. He tumbled down, hitting the damp asphalt heavily. He didn't just fall; he collapsed, completely paralyzed, enduring intense, searing pain.
It was only Peter's superhuman constitution and lightning-fast healing factor that prevented him from dying on the spot. An ordinary man would have been reduced to a smoking husk.
The massive crowd, retreating only slightly but still numbering in the hundreds, fell silent in shock. No one expected the seemingly invincible Spider-Man to be neutralized so easily, so brutally.
Peter lay there, his mind racing, but his body a useless, rigid weight. It took him a staggering ten seconds—an eternity in a crisis—to recover minimal motor control. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, his entire body trembling uncontrollably.
He looked up and saw Max, already plunging his hands back into the pit, beginning to absorb electrical energy again. This is not good. This is exactly what I couldn't let him do, Peter thought, gritting his teeth.
As Peter struggled to his feet, the audience's silence broke, erupting into a fresh wave of hysteria and displaced aggression.
"Spider-Man! Spider-Man!"
"I knew Spider-Man wouldn't fail! Get up!"
"Take down that monster! Stop him!"
The last shout, repeated and amplified by the surrounding buildings, was the final trigger for a nervous, hyper-aggressive audience member.
"Monster! Go to hell!"
A half-full can of cheap soda, thrown with an angry, panicked force, sailed through the air, hitting Max squarely on the shoulder.
Peter, just finding his balance, saw the metallic projectile. He wanted to scream a curse at the sheer stupidity of the act. At this moment, when the volatile Electro was at his weakest and most confused, these people chose to provoke him. If Max were truly angered and unleashed his stored energy, the consequences would be a Times Square massacre.
Peter instinctively went to shoot a web, only for his right hand to grasp air—the web-shooter on that wrist was also now useless, the battery having fried moments before.
There was no other way. Peter, injured and weaponless, had to risk it all. He charged toward Max, hoping to control him physically and prevent a murderous backlash against the crowd.
Max, however, was in the midst of ecstatic consumption when the cheap metal can struck him. He whipped around, his blue-tinged face contorted in incandescent fury. He looked at the group of people who had cheered for Spider-Man, who called him a hero, while he, who had not harmed anyone, was called a monster.
On the giant, shimmering screens all around them, Spider-Man's image—leaping, smiling, triumphant—was everywhere. Max, the man whose face was only now being truly seen, wasn't even worthy of being a footnote.
The more Max thought about it, the angrier he became. He lifted his hands, prepared to discharge an indiscriminate storm of electricity.
Fortunately, Peter arrived in a desperate, lunging blur, grabbing Max's uplifted arm with both hands and wrenching it downward.
"Max, stop! Don't do it!"
The massive electrical energy Max had built up was not discharged into the crowd, but Peter was shocked again, receiving a full, sustained jolt by grasping his conductive skin.
Being electrocuted twice in quick succession was continuous, catastrophic damage. Peter's muscles locked up instantly; he felt the energy ripping through his costume, turning his entire body into a conductor. The powerful current surged through his core; even his superhuman physical constitution was stretched to its absolute breaking point.
Max watched Spider-Man seize up, his heroic mask rigid with pain, then collapse to his knees, utterly defeated. A primal, dark sense of triumph washed over Max. He had always seen Spider-Man as omnipotent, a powerful rival for the attention he craved. Now, the hero lay before him, incapacitated, a moment that greatly satisfied Max's shattered vanity.
He withdrew the current, letting Peter fall weakly to the ground.
Max had expected cheers. He had expected the crowd to finally recognize his superior strength.
What he received was deafening panic and vitriolic anger.
"Monster! Go to hell!"
"Spider-Man failed! How is this possible?"
"Who else can defeat this freak?"
"Oh my God, we're all going to die! Stand up, Spider-Man!"
Max stood amid the din, completely confused. His confusion instantly metabolized into a terrible, burning rage—anger at these onlookers who refused to see him, and anger at Spider-Man for distracting them.
"I haven't hurt anyone! I'm not a monster!" Max screamed, his voice shaking.
No one listened to his defense; their fear and anger had completely blinded them to his humanity. They just wanted Max to vanish. The accumulated slights of a lifetime—the condescension, the neglect, the constant looking down upon him—boiled over. Now, he wasn't just overlooked; he was actively treated as a freak.
Max turned his glowing gaze back to Peter, his mind fixating on one central idea: Spider-Man had ruined his debut.
"It's all because of you, Spider-Man! You said I was dangerous, so they treat me as a monster! I was your friend! Now, you tell them! You quickly tell them I'm not a monster!" Max snarled, his voice a distorted, buzzing static.
Peter was incredibly weak, crawling weakly away from the spreading dampness. "Yes, Max, you're not a monster. You are my informant, my partner. We can figure this out. Just stop absorbing the power, please."
But Peter's soft, desperate reply did not satisfy the electrical god Max had become.
"No, Spider-Man, that's not enough!" Max roared, lifting his hands, streams of pure energy flowing from his palms. "I'm stronger than you are! Spider-Man is a thing of the past! I am the future!"
Max began to conjure a fantasy: a world where he was revered, where thousands cheered his name, where the screens displayed his glorious, powerful image. He was on the verge of his triumphant apotheosis.
But his grand vision was abruptly shattered by a new wave of noise.
"Enough, monster! Let go of Spider-Man!"
"NYPD! Drop the current now! Drop it, or we will shoot!"
The street was suddenly filled with police cruisers. The high-pitched wail of dozens of sirens cut through the chaos. The lights of the arriving vehicles—spotlights and flashlights—stabbed through the darkness.
Captain George Stacy, having tracked the epicenter of the city-wide power outage, arrived with a full tactical team, who immediately began setting up a containment zone and preparing for a lethal response. The sight of his daughter's boyfriend, Spider-Man, twitching on the pavement only hardened his resolve.
The police presence was the final escalation, the point of no return. Max screamed in frustration, surrounded by people who demanded his death, people who now had guns aimed at him.
On the rooftop of a corporate building, several hundred yards away, Su Yi and Gwen Stacy stood silently. Gwen was no longer composed; she was trembling, her hand clamped over her mouth as she watched the live feed on her phone and saw her father and her boyfriend in the same frame, about to be vaporized.
"Su, we can't keep watching! My father, Peter… someone will get hurt! That voltage will kill them!" she pleaded, tears welling up in her eyes.
Su Yi, who had been analyzing the entire scene—the crowd's movements, Max's power output, George Stacy's positioning—nodded once. He had given Peter his chance to learn the limits of his own idealism, and the lesson had been learned the hard way: not every enemy can be reasoned with, and sometimes, the power of a hero must be absolute.