Herman Schultz hadn't stopped thinking about Spider-Man.
He was absolutely convinced that if he wanted to demand respect from this city, he had to publicly break one of its so-called heroes. Compared to the billionaire in the flying tank and the literal Norse god, the kid swinging around Queens in a cheap spandex suit was undeniably the easiest target.
The late afternoon sun bled through the exposed steel skeleton of the unfinished high-rise. Mottled shadows stretched across the raw concrete floor.
Suddenly, a flash of silver and gold caught the light.
Herman dropped from the steel rafters. He hit the concrete with bone-shattering force, his heavy mechanical gauntlet slamming into the floor. A deafening, concussive roar tore through the building. The entire concrete slab instantly pulverized. Herman plummeted through the structural failure, crashing cleanly through three separate floors before cratering into the basement level, kicking up a massive cloud of white dust.
"Finally," Herman wheezed, pushing himself up from the rubble. "It works."
Upgrading the kinetic gauntlets had been the easy part. What had eaten up his entire week was fabricating the kinetic-absorption suit.
He had cannibalized the heavy gold-titanium plating, wiring an internal energy-circulation system that fed directly into a high-capacity battery pack mounted on his spine. The alloy plates were thick enough to stop automatic rifle fire, but the real genius was the kinetic conversion system. The suit absorbed the massive recoil of the shockwaves and redistributed the energy through the servos, giving Herman localized superhuman strength and speed. Concrete shattered like dry crackers under his fists, and the three hundred pounds of metal plating didn't slow his sprint speed by a single fraction of a second.
The only downside was actually putting the suit on. It wasn't a sleek, automated exoskeleton like Iron Man's armor. It was a brutal, mechanical puzzle of heavy plates and transmission cables that had to be ratcheted into place piece by piece, like a medieval knight gearing up for a siege.
Herman hit a release valve on his chest, letting the heavy helmet hiss open. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was exhausted. He had planned to use the last of his cash to buy a decent meal, but as he walked past a bodega, the television in the window caught his eye.
J. Jonah Jameson was on the screen, his face bright red, screaming about the "masked menace" while footage of Spider-Man played on a loop.
Herman looked at the sleek, bright red-and-blue suit on the TV. He looked down at his own armor. It was raw, unpainted silver, covered in ugly welding burns and the heavy dents of a ball-peen hammer. It looked like scrap.
He didn't buy food. He walked into the hardware store next door and spent his last twenty dollars on a yellow and brown spray paint.
"It's time for a shocking entrance," Herman muttered.
"Today! Is! Just! An! Ordinary! Day!"
For Peter Parker, the first few weeks of high school had flown by in a perfectly average, remarkably uneventful blur.
The Detective Club's grand investigation into Spider-Man's identity had hit a massive, unyielding brick wall, exactly as Peter had planned. Harry and Amadeus were regularly coming over to the Parker house for chaotic, junk-food-fueled Lego-building nights. Gwen was secretly taking drum lessons with the school's rock band. The Homecoming dance was rapidly approaching. Everything was aggressively normal.
His only real problems were that the Daily Bugle still hadn't responded to his internship application, and he currently had absolutely zero ideas for a costume for the school's superhero-themed Spirit Day. He was seriously considering just wearing his Spider-Man suit and telling everyone he bought it at Party City.
As for Spider-Man? The "friendly neighborhood" business was booming, mostly because there was absolutely no actual crime to fight.
No supervillains. No alien-tech cartels. Even the low-level muggers seemed to have taken the weak off. If Peter couldn't physically see the Avengers Tower dominating the Manhattan skyline, he would have assumed he had slipped into a parallel universe where he was the only super-powered person on Earth.
WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO.
"Oh, that doesn't sound good."
A massive convoy of police sirens and ambulance klaxons shattered the quiet afternoon. Peter didn't hesitate. He dropped off his rooftop perch, firing a web and swinging in perfect parallel with the speeding police cruisers below.
"Okay, what are we dealing with today?" Peter muttered to himself, the wind rushing past his mask. "Organized crime? Another bank heist? Rogue alien tech?"
He followed the sirens for ten blocks before landing lightly on the side of a familiar brick building. He looked at the shattered facade and scratched the back of his head.
"Or is it all three? Seriously, who robs a bank that was already robbed last week?"
It was the Midtown Bank. The building was supposed to be condemned due to the catastrophic structural damage caused by the Shocker crew's botched heist. However, Tony Stark had deployed a ring of massive Stark Industries repulsor-jacks to physically hold the building's foundation together while the insurance companies argued over asset retrieval.
The partially collapsed, glowing bank had accidentally become one of New York's newest, weirdest tourist attractions.
Peter wasn't entirely sure if there was actually any cash left in the vault, but looking down at the two NYPD cruisers that had been violently flipped onto their roofs outside the front doors, he knew he was needed.
Spider-Man dropped down from the brickwork, landing lightly on a streetlight directly above Captain George Stacy.
"Hey, Captain," Spider-Man called down casually. "Long time no see. How's the family?"
George Stacy jumped slightly, looking up. As much as the NYPD officially disliked vigilantes, George had to admit that when cars started flying, a kid in spandex was incredibly useful.
"You're just in time, Spider-Man," George said, his hand resting on his holstered sidearm.
"Who's inside?"
"We're assuming it's Herman Schultz. The ringleader of the salvage crew you strung up in this exact lobby last week," George explained grimly. "He picked the lock on his holding cell and walked right out the front doors of the precinct. His crew claims he engineered those alien weapons himself. Both of my lead cruisers were just thrown through the air by something similar, so we're assuming he's back."
Peter snapped his fingers. "Oh! Mr. Shocker! I remember him. Don't worry, Captain, I'll bag him up for you again."
George watched the vigilante casually stroll through the shattered front doors of the bank. He keyed his radio. "Set up a two-block perimeter. Nobody goes inside."
Spider-Man walked into the ruined lobby. Nothing had changed. The blast marks and shattered marble from his fight last week were still exactly where he left them. The Stark repulsor-jacks hummed loudly, glowing blue in the corners of the room.
More importantly, Peter's spider-sense was completely dormant. There was no immediate threat. The lobby was completely empty.
"Hello? Herman?" Peter called out, his voice echoing off the marble. "Mr. Shocker? You in here?"
Silence. Peter walked deeper into the bank, stepping over the caution tape.
He rounded the corner and saw the massive, circular steel door of the main vault. The door was slightly ajar. Strangely, the heavy steel locking mechanisms hadn't been blown apart by a shockwave. They looked like they had been surgically bypassed.
"I used to tell people I was the best locksmith in New York."
A heavy, distorted voice echoed from deep inside the dark vault.
"No safe could stop me," the voice continued. "I thought I was just bragging. But this vault? I didn't break it. I picked it."
Spider-Man stood outside the heavy door, leaning casually against the frame, waiting for the monologue to finish. "That's a great resume builder, man. How about you step out here and we can talk about it? Or I can come in, provided you promise not to blast me through another ceiling."
"Do you think they're stupid, Spider-Man?"
"Who? The cops? Or the guys who decided to rob an empty bank?"
"They didn't take a single cent."
Heavy, metallic footsteps echoed from the dark.
"They left it all right here," Herman's voice vibrated with a dark, terrifying amusement. "It's almost like they were waiting for me to come back and finish the job."
BZZZZZT.
A spike of pure, blinding agony drove directly into the base of Peter's skull. It was the hardest his spider-sense had fired since he looked up and saw the Chitauri mothership.
Peter didn't think. He violently threw himself backward.
The three-ton solid steel vault door exploded outward.
It sheared cleanly off its massive hinges, flying through the air exactly where Peter had been standing a fraction of a second prior. The steel slab crashed into the marble floor, completely obliterating a teller desk.
"Holy—!" Peter yelled, scrambling backward as a literal avalanche of hundred-dollar bills erupted from the vault.
Stepping out of the cloud of flying money was an opponent Peter did not recognize.
The man was encased in heavy, brutalist armor. The plating was painted a high-visibility industrial yellow and deep, rusted brown. Segmented metal overlapping plates protected his joints, while a thick, quilted shock-absorption weave covered his undersuit. Massive, heavily reinforced gauntlets were bolted over his forearms, the air around the barrels literally warping with raw kinetic heat.
His face was hidden behind a heavy brown tactical helmet featuring a glowing, V-shaped visor that made him look like a mechanized owl.
"It's almost like I was waiting for you to come back!"
Herman Schultz—the Shocker—stepped forward.
He didn't hesitate. He threw a devastating left hook.
The gauntlet fired. The kinetic shockwave was massive—infinitely more powerful than the prototypes from last week. The concussive blast completely leveled the remaining walls of the vault antechamber.
Peter's spider-sense screamed. He dove sideways, firing a web at the ceiling and violently slingshotting himself back into the expansive main lobby, desperate for room to maneuver.
"I'm actually incredibly flattered, Herman!" Spider-Man yelled, sticking to the wall near the ceiling. "You built a whole super-suit just for me? Look at this tech! You're a literal genius! You could be making millions at Stark Industries! You could be a hero! Why are you doing this?!"
The Shocker stopped walking. He lowered his heavy gauntlets.
Peter felt his spider-sense dial back from a scream to a low hum.
"You make a good point, Spider-Man," Shocker said, his mechanically modulated voice echoing through the ruined bank. He looked up at the wall-crawler. "Except for one thing."
Shocker raised both gauntlets, the cores glowing a blinding, furious white.
"You should have given me that speech when I was still a nobody!"
Outside the bank, Captain George Stacy ducked behind his cruiser as a massive, concussive explosion rocked the street.
A massive hole blew outward from the side of the brick building.
Spider-Man was launched violently through the hole, tumbling through the air before firing a desperate web-line at the pavement to arrest his momentum.
"Captain, fall back!" Spider-Man yelled, hitting the street in a three-point crouch. "Evacuate the block! He upgraded!"
Spider-Man didn't wait for a response. He fired two webs back through the jagged hole in the wall and violently catapulted himself back inside. The blast radius of the new gauntlets was absurd. Even with his spider-sense firing at maximum capacity, Peter couldn't dodge the shockwaves in an enclosed space. He needed to end this fast.
He landed heavily on the shattered marble floor, standing directly in front of the massive, yellow-and-brown juggernaut.
"Alright, Herman," Spider-Man said, dropping into a low combat stance. "Looks like we're doing this the hard way."
PS: The description of the armor here matches his heavy, tactical redesign from the Insomniac Marvel's Spider-Man game, which makes him look like an absolute tank.