Chapter 86: I'm Not God
Venom smiled at the camera.
"Every five minutes," Eddie Brock said, the symbiote layering something wet and wrong under his voice, "I eat one. So, Spider-Man — make your choice."
The laugh that followed carried across every screen in New York simultaneously.
Ethan watched it from a rooftop three blocks away and thought: this guy does know how to make an entrance.
He also thought: I don't have to choose.
He pulled out his phone and called Wade.
It rang twice.
"Big brother Ethan! I was literally just—"
"Bridge. Girl hanging from it. Vulture's there. Go."
A pause. Then, with genuine enthusiasm: "Copy that. On my way. Should I bring snacks?"
Ethan hung up and turned toward the Daily Bugle building.
The five-minute clock ran out before he arrived.
He saw it on a storefront screen as he moved — Eddie selecting a hostage with the casual deliberation of someone choosing from a menu, the symbiote's tendril snapping out, the man disappearing. Eddie turning back to the camera with the expression of someone who was genuinely enjoying himself.
"Five minutes. That's how long Spider-Man had." He spread his hands. "Remember this, everyone. You died because Spider-Man didn't show up."
The hostages — anchors, producers, camera operators, ordinary people who'd had a normal Tuesday morning — were fracturing. Some were crying. Some were shouting at the cameras, at Spider-Man through the cameras, at anyone who might be listening.
"You coward!"
"Where are you? You're supposed to be a hero!"
"Garbage! Useless! Come save us!"
Eddie watched this with satisfaction. This was the part he'd planned carefully — not just the hostages, but the narrative. The city that had spent three days cheering for Spider-Man needed to see what happened when Spider-Man didn't come. Needed to feel that disappointment turn into something sharper.
He reached for the next hostage.
Something hit him from the side.
Not hard enough to matter — he shed the rebar shards easily, symbiote absorbing the impact — but the direction surprised him. He spun.
"Who's there."
The figure came down from above, unhurried, descending through the air with the specific lack of urgency that communicates more threat than any dramatic entrance would. He landed on the studio floor and stood there while the hostages stared and the camera — still live, still broadcasting to every screen in the city — caught him in frame.
One of the children watching from a nearby apartment pressed her face against the glass and tugged her mother's sleeve.
"Mama," she said, very seriously. "Is that God?"
Ethan heard her.
He glanced toward the window, caught the small face peering through it, and his expression softened for just a moment — the particular warmth that children produced in him without him entirely meaning it to.
He shook his head, addressing the room in general but not not addressing her either.
"You can call me Ethan. I'm not God." A beat. "If you need a title — Lord of Hell's Kitchen works."
The hostages stared at him. Eddie stared at him. The city, watching through every screen, stared at him.
The confusion was understandable. Lord of Hell's Kitchen was not the reassuring divine-intervention branding most people would have selected for this moment.
But he meant it, and it wasn't for them anyway. It was a statement of terms. He wasn't here because he cared deeply about the Daily Bugle's broadcast staff, or because he felt the weight of innocent lives bearing down on him with cinematic gravity. He was here because Eddie Brock was a problem on his list, and the hostages were in the same building, and leaving them there had costs he didn't want to pay.
He was a selfish man from another universe, doing his job.
That was enough.
Across the city, on the bridge, Wade Wilson had already found the girl.
On the bridge, MJ was running out of prayers she knew the words to.
The rope held her arms above her head and the drop below was fifteen stories of nothing — she'd looked once and decided not to look again. Vulture stood on the bridge railing with his wings folded, watching the city with the patience of a man who'd done this before.
"Your Peter isn't coming," he said.
MJ's mind was doing several things at once, as minds do in moments like this. Part of it was pure terror. Part of it was the hostage-survival advice she vaguely remembered from somewhere — stay calm, establish rapport, don't antagonize. And part of it was processing, with a particular quality of stunned disbelief, the fact that the name Peter Parker had just come out of a supervillain's mouth in reference to Spider-Man.
Peter Parker. Her neighbor. Who always looked slightly slept-in, who got flustered when she said hello, who she'd texted tonight because—
Because he texted her first.
Except he hadn't.
She pushed that aside and focused on immediate survival.
"Please," she said. She wasn't too proud to beg. "I don't know any Spider-Man. I have a boyfriend. Peter and I aren't even close, you have the wrong person, please just—"
Vulture looked at her the way someone looks at an argument they don't find interesting.
He pointed his arm at the street below and fired.
The burst scattered across the pavement, civilians scattering, car windows exploding. Not aimed at anyone specifically — just a demonstration of what aimed at someone specifically would look like.
The police arrived three minutes later. Tactical units, standard response, weapons up. They found two metahuman threats, both with hostages, both functionally bulletproof, and settled into the grim calculation of finding an angle that didn't end with civilian casualties.
There wasn't one. So they held position and waited.
Back in the studio, Eddie had decided Ethan needed to understand something.
"You can't save all of them," he said. The symbiote rippled across his shoulders, considering. "You're one person. I've got a building full of hostages and my friend's got the girl. Whatever you do here, someone dies."
Ethan looked at him with the expression of a man doing arithmetic.
"Vulture's handled," he said.
Eddie blinked. "What?"
"The bridge." Ethan rolled his neck once, something settling into place. "Someone's already there."
The calculation on Eddie's face ran visibly — surprise, then recalculation, then the particular anger of someone whose carefully constructed dilemma had just been answered wrong.
"That's not—" He stopped. Restarted. "You're bluffing."
"Sure," Ethan said pleasantly.
The rebar came off the floor in a cloud and Eddie had to move.
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