Chapter 182: The Garfield Spider-Man Arrives
Late night in New York City.
On the surface, nothing unusual. The city ran its night shift the way it always did — cabs, insomniacs, the particular energy of a place that never fully committed to sleeping.
Underneath that, on the construction sites along Sixth Avenue, a different kind of work was happening.
"All cranes on Sixth — swing your booms out over the street!"
The voice on the radio was steady, no-nonsense, carrying the specific calm of someone who had decided to do something and was doing it.
"Ninety degrees! Get them aligned! Give Spider-Man a path through!"
The crane operators looked at each other, and then they started climbing.
There was no long deliberation. The city had opinions about Spider-Man, and most of them were complicated, but tonight the decision was simple: the man had taken a bullet in the leg and was still trying to stop something terrible from happening to everybody on the island, and the least they could do was swing some booms around.
One by one, the cranes came to life. Their jibs swung out over the street in a rough line, creating something that wasn't quite a highway and wasn't quite a bridge — just a set of intermittent handholds in the dark air above Sixth Avenue, a statement from the city that it was paying attention.
On a rooftop several blocks away, Peter Parker was trying very hard not to pass out.
The bullet had gone through his thigh. His web-shooter had temporarily jammed. He was white-faced and breathing through his teeth, and below him the gap between his current position and where he needed to be was substantial.
He looked up and saw the cranes moving into position.
For a moment he just looked at them.
They're doing that for me.
He stood up, webbed the wound in a rough compression wrap, and ran.
The leg screamed at him and he kept running anyway, because that was what this particular version of the job meant, and when he hit the edge of the roof he jumped and fired — the web caught the first crane arm, swung him to the second, the third, each one a gift from the night crew who'd decided to show up.
He cleared the last one and dropped onto the tower roof.
The Lizard was already there, watching the countdown on Connors' device with the satisfaction of a creature that had stopped being a man some time ago and had decided that was an improvement.
Two minutes.
Peter didn't wait for a speech. He closed the distance and put his foot into the Lizard with everything he had left.
They went over the edge together and hit the rooftop of Oscorp.
The fight that followed was not elegant. Peter was hurt, the Lizard was strong, and the device was counting down. He took a grip to the web-shooters that broke them. The Lizard put a claw into his shoulder and said the thing that was designed to break him — no mother, no father, no uncle, nothing left — with the specific cruelty of something that had identified the exact wound and pressed on it.
Then George Stacy came through the door.
The nitrogen pipe exploded in a spray of cold. Peter found his angle and hit the Lizard with everything the cold had taken out of it, and George put rounds into it from across the roof, and when it finally went down it was a collaboration.
George handed him the antidote.
"Go," he said. "I've got this."
Peter took it and looked at him for a second — the father of the girl he loved, handing him the thing that would save the city and staying behind to cover the retreat — and then he ran.
Elsewhere in the city, approximately simultaneously, Ethan stepped out of a portal onto a rooftop he didn't recognize and looked around.
Okay. Different universe. Unclear which one.
He glanced at the skyline. The details were close but not identical to home — the particular arrangement of lights, the Oscorp tower visible in the middle distance, the general texture of a New York that had diverged from his at some point and taken its own path.
"On Your Right."
Two figures appeared beside him. Tobey-Peter, who had immediately started scanning rooftops with the reflexive alertness of someone who'd spent years in this kind of environment. Harry, who was looking at everything with the expression of a person whose first parallel universe visit was not meeting his advance billing.
"It looks exactly the same," Harry said.
Tobey said nothing, but his expression agreed.
"This isn't tourism," Ethan said. He kept his voice level but made it clear this was not a negotiation. They'd practically climbed into his luggage to get here — Tobey had an obvious emotional investment in anything involving Spider-Man universes, and Harry had not been willing to be left behind — and Ethan had decided that letting them come was a reasonable concession given that they'd missed the Hell's Kitchen battle entirely. But there was work to do. "Split up, find the local news, figure out what's happening. I'll locate this universe's Peter Parker."
He closed his eyes.
Observation Haki. He extended it outward, feeling for the signature he'd learned to recognize — the specific quality of someone operating at Spider-Man levels in a city that was used to Spider-Man operating.
Somewhere north and up. Moving fast. Hurt.
He had his heading.
He opened his eyes, left Tobey and Harry to their assignment, and went up.
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