Chapter 88: Vulture KIA — and Spider-Man 2099
Vulture had altitude and he intended to keep it.
The laser rifle was new — Oscorp's R&D budget had been generous, and the upgraded hardware had a range that made close-quarters combat entirely optional. He circled above the bridge, picking his shots, watching the man in the red suit below scramble and duck and generally have a difficult time.
"Would you come down?" Wade shouted, dodging a burst that scorched the pavement where his feet had been. "You're like a really aggressive pigeon! I can't even enjoy this!"
Vulture did not come down.
He banked, lined up another shot, fired.
Wade threw himself sideways behind a car, let the laser punch through it, and used the moment of cover to recalibrate. Vulture was good up there — the flight suit was genuinely excellent engineering, the angles kept changing, and a man who stayed in the air was a man who controlled the geometry of the fight.
Fine, Wade thought. Different approach.
He waited for the next pass, read the arc, and instead of dodging let the shot graze his left shoulder — healing factor would handle it in forty seconds — and used the impact to spin himself into a sprint directly at the bridge support.
He went up the vertical surface like it was a suggestion rather than a physical constraint, reached the top, and launched off the apex into Vulture's flight path.
The swords came out.
One connected with the left wing assembly at the joint where the struts met the main body. Metal meeting metal, the blade finding the gap in the engineering that the designer hadn't fully accounted for.
The wing buckled. Vulture screamed — genuine shock, the kind that comes from something that was impossible a moment ago — and then he was falling, the asymmetric thrust sending him into a spin, the altitude that had been his advantage now working against him.
Wade followed him down.
The second cut was clean and deliberate and ended the conversation permanently.
Wade landed. Found a cloth in his belt somewhere. Cleaned both blades with the methodical attention of a man who considered this part of the job.
He looked at the body.
"Should have just come down," he said.
Behind him, MJ was standing with the expression of someone who had survived several impossible things in the past hour and was running on fumes and adrenaline. She was looking at him with the particular quality of attention that teenage girls deploy on mysterious masked figures who catch them from fifteen-story drops.
Wade clocked it. Filed it.
"You good?" he asked, without turning around.
"I think so," she said. "I — yes. Thank you."
"Great." He sheathed the swords. "Go home. Call someone. Do normal things."
He tilted his head at the sky, addressing no one in particular.
That should be the last one, he thought. Goblin's gone, Venom's gone, Vulture's gone. Ethan's done his thing at the Bugle. We're done here.
As if in response to this thought, the universe did something.
It wasn't visible, exactly — more like a pressure change, the atmospheric equivalent of a sound at the edge of hearing. Something in the fabric of the Raimi universe shifted, settled, began the slow process of closing around its wounds like a body healing a cut.
The rifts that had been bleeding multiverse visitors into this timeline were knitting shut.
Three miles away, in the ruins of the Osborn house, Ethan felt it too. He looked at the Sling Ring on his hand.
The enchantment light was blinking.
In a place that existed adjacent to all Spider-Man timelines simultaneously, Miguel O'Hara put his fist through a table.
The Spider-Society's headquarters had the particular aesthetic of a place designed to process a lot of information about a lot of realities at once — screens, webs of data, the central display that mapped the canonical event threads across every known Spider-universe. At the moment, that display was showing an anomaly.
One of the threads had changed.
"Who did this." Miguel's voice had the quality of a question that wasn't actually a question. "Who changed the Web? Why is Uncle Ben alive in that universe?"
The other Spider-People in the room found various interesting things to look at that weren't Miguel O'Hara's face.
They understood his anger. Not just as policy — personally. Miguel had lost his daughter. Had watched another universe's version of himself die and inherited that man's child, becoming her father across the dimensional boundary. That choice had fractured the Web in ways he was still accounting for. He had learned, at significant cost, that the canonical events — the losses that defined each Spider-Person, the deaths that made them who they were — couldn't be changed without consequence.
Uncle Ben dying was a canonical event.
Someone had prevented it.
Jessica Drew, eight months pregnant and still somehow managing to project authority from a chair, looked up from her console. "Temporal anomalies aren't exactly new lately. I'll send someone to look." She pulled up a roster. "We just got a new Spider-Woman in. Good timing."
Miguel breathed.
"Find whoever did this," he said. "I want them found."
He turned and walked out of the room toward the portal array, already looking for the thread that would lead him to the answer.
Ethan didn't know any of this.
If he had, he would have noted that he wasn't technically the responsible party — Miles Morales had been the original disruptive element in this whole chain of events, and whatever the Spider-Society's complaint was, it should probably be addressed to the kid who'd started blowing holes in timelines before anyone else had gotten involved.
But he didn't know, so he wasn't thinking about it.
He was thinking about the blinking Sling Ring, and about the conversation he needed to have before he used it.
He found Doc Ock first.
Otto was in the living room with a pot of tea and what appeared to be three different notebooks open simultaneously, writing in all of them at irregular intervals the way scientists sometimes do when they're trying to work a problem from multiple angles at once.
"We're leaving," Ethan said.
Otto looked up. Something bright moved across his face — the specific brightness of a man who has been given a direction after a long period of uncertainty.
"The new universe," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"The new universe. Pack whatever you need. We're leaving tonight."
Doc Ock set down his pen, looked at the three notebooks, and began very purposefully closing them one at a time.
"I've been ready," he said, "since the moment I woke up without the arms."
Sandman was sitting on the back steps, looking at nothing in particular.
Ethan sat down beside him.
"Your daughter's safe," he said. "The arrangement from the other universe held. The money got to the right people, the treatment's been scheduled." He looked at Flint. "You made that happen. It counts."
Sandman was quiet for a long time.
"I know I'm not a good person," he said finally.
"Most people aren't," Ethan said. "Doesn't mean you can't be useful."
Flint thought about that. Looked at his hands — the way the grains shifted when he wasn't paying attention, the sand that was him and the him that was sand.
He nodded.
Ethan checked the system display.
「DING!」「Congratulations, Host! William Baker's Friendship Level has increased to ★★★!」「Congratulations, Host! William Baker's Friendship Level has increased to ★★★★!」「Congratulations, Host! William Baker's Friendship Level has increased to ★★★★★!」「Congratulations, Host! William Baker's Friendship Level has increased to — FAMILY!」「Attribute Gained: Sand Form (Passive) — Enhanced structural resilience against dispersal-type damage!」
Ethan looked at the notification for a moment.
Fifteen, he thought. On Your Right levels up.
He looked at the Sling Ring again. The light was still blinking — patient, unhurried, waiting for him to be ready.
Almost time.
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