Chapter 87: Deadpool Does Not Go for Green Tea Girls
Eddie Brock looked at Ethan the way a man looks at someone who has stolen something that was rightfully his.
He'd built this whole evening around Spider-Man. The broadcast, the hostages, the five-minute clock — all of it designed for a specific audience of one. And instead of Peter Parker in a red-and-blue suit, he'd gotten this guy, floating down from the ceiling like he owned the building, introducing himself as the Lord of Hell's Kitchen and radiating the specific energy of someone who found the whole situation mildly inconvenient.
"I don't care if you're God or whatever kind of hell you crawled out of," Eddie said. The symbiote rippled across his shoulders, something dark and hungry moving just beneath the surface. "Die."
He launched himself across the studio floor.
The hostages flinched back as one.
Ethan reached into his jacket and produced a belt.
He held it up for a moment — not performing, just ensuring the geometry was right — then snapped it around his waist.
"Eternal."
The transformation sound filled the studio: mechanical, resonant, the particular frequency of something industrial becoming something else. Light bloomed outward from the belt and kept going, washing over Ethan's frame, and when it contracted again he was standing in blue-white armor with a black cape that moved like it had opinions about the situation.
Kamen Rider Eternal looked at Venom.
Venom threw a punch that should have taken someone's head off.
Ethan caught it.
Not blocked — caught, fingers closing around the symbiote-wrapped fist with the casual precision of someone who had already calculated where it was going to land. He held it for a moment, letting Eddie feel the difference in their situations, then turned the force sideways and added his own.
The kick connected at center mass.
Eddie went across the studio, through the air, and introduced himself to the far wall at considerable speed. The wall expressed its feelings about this by cracking from floor to ceiling. Eddie slid to the floor and stayed there for a moment, the symbiote cycling through its threat assessment.
The hostages — anchors, producers, the overnight cleaning crew — stared at the armor from behind their cable ties and said nothing. Then, somewhere in the middle of the room, someone started crying with relief, and that broke something loose, and the rest of them followed.
On a hospital television three miles away, Harry Osborn watched the blue-white figure standing in the wreckage of the studio wall and said, with the reverence of someone discovering something true about the world: "I didn't know he could transform."
In the same building, Peter watched it too. His ribs ached. His hands were wrapped around a paper cup of something the nurses were calling tea. He watched Ethan — the man who had taught him how to fall, how to land, how to put his weight behind a punch — standing in that armor in front of the city's cameras, and felt something that wasn't quite gratitude and wasn't quite awe but lived somewhere between the two.
Eddie got up.
Of course he did.
"That's not possible," he said. His voice had the quality of a man arguing with evidence. "You can't be the Kamen Rider. You were just—"
"I was," Ethan confirmed. He rolled his right shoulder once, settling into it. "Ready?"
Eddie answered by attacking again, this time with more structure — circling, probing, the symbiote extending and retracting in feints while the body behind it looked for an opening. He'd fed. He'd rebuilt. He'd come into tonight at something approaching full strength, and he'd watched this man's fight with Doc Ock in his memory and thought: I can handle this.
He was revising that assessment.
Ethan tracked every feint without urgency, moved exactly as much as the situation required and not a centimeter more, and projected the specific tranquility of someone who had decided this was over and was simply waiting for the timeline to catch up.
His hand went to the belt.
"Let's finish this."
The USB drive clicked in.
His right boot gathered blue fire — not metaphorically, not as a glow effect, but as actual energy coiling around the leg with the patient intensity of something that had been waiting for permission. He jumped. The ceiling was fifteen feet up. He reached it easily, hung for the fraction of a second at the apex, and came down.
The Rider Kick landed.
The silence afterward had a different quality than the silence before.
Eddie Brock was gone. The symbiote dissipated slowly, black tendrils losing coherence, the darkness bleeding out of what remained until what remained was just a man, and then just the floor.
The hostages began to move toward Ethan as the cable ties came off — some of them walking, some of them not entirely walking, all of them with the look of people who have been on the wrong side of a very long night and can finally see the end of it.
Ethan was already gone by the time the first one reached where he'd been standing.
He stood on a rooftop two blocks away, watching the Daily Bugle building go bright with interior lights as people found each other and the police moved in to help. His display showed a column of system notifications scrolling upward with the energy of a slot machine that had finally hit.
「DING!」「Congratulations, Host! Studio Technician A has been added as a friend!」「Congratulations, Host! Studio Technician B has been added as a friend!」「Congratulations, Host! ...」
He watched it scroll for a moment and smiled.
That's why I walked in without the armor on, he thought. Let them see the face first. Face recognition generates better Friend Points than a helmet does.
He was going home eventually. Might as well harvest while he could.
On the bridge, Vulture had run out of patience approximately four minutes ago.
He looked at Mary Jane Watson — suspended, pale, still mechanically repeating variations of please let me go, I don't know anything, please — and made a calculation. No Spider-Man. No movement on any of the screens. Whatever was happening at the Daily Bugle, it had apparently consumed everyone's attention.
She wasn't useful anymore.
"He's not coming," Vulture said. "Which makes you irrelevant." He raised the gun, aimed at the rope above her head, and fired.
The rope snapped.
MJ fell.
The bridge dropped away. The city inverted. The ground came up at the speed that fifteen stories of free fall produces, which is faster than you think and slower than it feels, and MJ closed her eyes because there was nothing else to do.
Something hit her from below.
Arms. Going the right direction, moving to absorb the impact, adjusting for her weight in the half-second before contact. She opened her eyes and found a red suit and a masked face looking back at her with the expression — somehow conveyed entirely through body language — of a man who was doing mental math about how much she weighed.
"Lady," said Deadpool, "you might want to think about going to the gym."
MJ stared at him.
"I just fell off a bridge," she said.
"And I caught you! So statistically, things are going great."
He set her down on the pavement with the practiced ease of someone who had done significantly weirder things before breakfast, checked that her feet were under her, and turned around.
Vulture was already diving.
MJ watched her rescuer unsheathe a pair of swords and thought several things in rapid succession. The first was thank God. The second was that she was apparently at an age where men in full-body suits who caught her in freefall and then immediately pivoted to sword fights were a normal part of her Tuesday evening. The third, which she would not have predicted, was that the suit was kind of—
"Thank you," she said quickly, to his back. "I — what's your name? Can I do anything—"
Wade half-turned, the way someone turns when they're already thinking about something else.
"Deadpool," he said. "Don't worry about it." A pause. "No offense, but you're giving off a very specific energy and I'm not really interested."
MJ blinked.
Wade turned back to the fight.
The symbiote had fed, built itself back up over the past two weeks, and come into tonight at something close to peak condition. Vulture had upgraded hardware and Oscorp funding and the confidence of a man who'd fought Spider-Man before and come out ahead. Between them, they'd been a reasonable threat.
Wade Wilson had been shot, stabbed, blown up, and reconstituted from pieces on at least four occasions in the past year alone. He found the pairing considerably less intimidating.
He went after Vulture with the cheerful focus of someone who had genuinely been looking forward to this part.
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