Chapter 85: Let's Play a Game, Peter
Green Goblin stared at Ethan.
The math had shifted, and he knew it. Three targets instead of two — theoretically the same problem, just larger. He reached for another pumpkin bomb.
The bomb left his hand on the right trajectory.
And then it didn't.
It curved. A smooth, impossible arc, physics rewriting itself mid-air, the bomb completing a neat one-eighty and arriving back at its sender with the unhurried certainty of a corrected mistake.
The detonation was spectacular.
Peter flinched toward Harry instinctively — and felt nothing. No shockwave, no heat. He turned and found a wall of assembled steel between them and the explosion: rebar, window frames, structural supports, drawn together by invisible force into something that held long enough to matter.
He stared at it. Then at Ethan.
"You have superpowers too."
Ethan didn't respond to this. He was watching Peter and Harry with an expression that was doing something other than concern.
Still holding on to each other, he thought. The movies made so much more sense now.
The steel wall came apart piece by piece, floating aside with a gesture, revealing the aftermath: rubble, scorched flooring, and Green Goblin flat on his back in the middle of it. Still alive. Not, from the look of things, by much.
Ethan lifted him with a slow pull of force — not all the way upright, just enough to see his face clearly.
"I heard you had other gifts prepared for Peter," Ethan said. His tone was the same one he might use to ask about the weather. "What were they?"
Goblin's face was a ruin, but the smile came anyway. The kind of smile that meant you'll find out whether I tell you or not.
"You'll see soon enough," he managed.
Beside Ethan, Peter's expression had already run the calculation.
"MJ." His voice came out wrong — too tight, the composure he'd been holding cracking at the edges. "You took MJ too, didn't you."
It wasn't entirely a question.
He thought it through: Harry couldn't have sent that text while bound and unconscious. Which meant someone had used Harry's phone. Which meant the operation had been coordinated from the start. And MJ's message — hey, want to hang out — so casual, so unlike her, arriving on exactly the same night—
Goblin said nothing.
He laughed instead. Something broken and gleeful in it, the laugh of a man who still had something to enjoy even here.
Peter got his answer.
Ethan let the silence sit for a moment, then tried a different question.
"Are there others? More people from parallel universes — others like you?"
Goblin's laugh changed quality. Got looser. More expansive. He wasn't going to answer this one either, and the laugh was the answer.
Ethan looked at him for another second.
Then he closed his hand.
It was quiet after that.
In the last moment before the end, something shifted in Goblin's face. The architecture of it changed — the split-personality fracture Ethan had clocked weeks ago, two people sharing one body, one of them significantly worse than the other.
The worse one stepped back.
Norman Osborn lifted his head.
He found Harry in the room. His son. Looking at him from across the wreckage with the expression of someone who had been through too much to know what to feel.
"Kid," Norman said. His voice was almost nothing. "I'm sorry."
Then he was gone.
The room held that for a moment.
Harry didn't move. Didn't speak. His face was doing the specific kind of nothing that meant something was happening underneath it that he wasn't ready to let out yet.
Peter put a hand on his arm. Harry let him.
Ethan turned toward Peter.
"Stay here."
Peter was already trying to get up, which was ambitious given the state of his ribs. "She's out there, I have to—"
"Peter." Ethan's hand on his shoulder, not forceful, just present. "You go out there right now, you die. Your injuries are real and whoever has MJ is expecting you to come running alone." He held Peter's gaze until it steadied. "I'll bring her back. In one piece. You have my word."
Peter opened his mouth. Closed it. The helplessness of it was visible — that particular frustration of caring enough to act and being physically unable to.
"My MJ," he said quietly, not quite to Ethan. Mostly to himself, or to the floor, or to the particular awareness that the word my had just escaped without permission.
Ethan chose not to comment on this.
He stepped to the window, and the night received him.
He was three blocks up when every screen in the city turned on at once.
Billboards. Storefronts. The rolling news ticker on the Daily Bugle building. Phone screens in people's hands. All of it snapping to the same feed simultaneously, the city becoming one enormous display.
Ethan landed on a rooftop and looked at the nearest screen.
Two figures. One he recognized immediately as Vulture — flight suit updated, hovering with the easy patience of someone who had rehearsed this. The other was harder to parse at first, the silhouette wrong, the proportions off in a way that took a second—
Venom.
Eddie Brock, or what Eddie Brock had become, stood in front of a camera somewhere in the city with the comfort of a man who had been on television before and knew how to fill a frame.
"Hello, New York." His voice carried the distortion of the symbiote layered under it — Eddie speaking, something else harmonizing. "My name is Venom. Future superhero. Obviously." He spread his arms. "Tonight, I want to play a game with someone. Peter — sorry, Spider-Man — I know you're watching. So let's make this interesting."
The feed split.
On one side: a bridge. MJ suspended from the supports, hands bound, the drop below her a long one. Vulture standing beside her with the air of a man who considered himself a professional.
"Option one," Vulture said to the camera. "Save the girl."
The feed split again.
On the other side: the Daily Bugle building. Every person on the floor — anchors, producers, camera operators, the night cleaning staff — zip-tied and corralled in the main broadcast studio. Dozens of them. Ordinary people who had come to work that morning with no expectation of becoming props.
Venom's voice came back, almost cheerful.
"Or option two. Save them."
The city watched.
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