Later that night, under the same sky that had watched him swing through New York for the past three months, Spider-Man was moving through the upper floors of the Oscorp building while humming the Mission Impossible theme under his breath.
The suit was different tonight.
He had based the design on a combination of Andrew Garfield's suit and the Superior Spider-Man's, which was an unusual pairing that somehow produced something that worked, the lenses matched the first film's Peter Parker rather than either suit's original design because he preferred the aesthetic, and the whole thing had been assembled from the materials Reed had contributed to the cause unknowingly.
The bullet-resistant lamination ran throughout.
The carbon fiber microcircuits handled the systems integration and power distribution.
It was not yet what he eventually wanted it to be, but it was considerably better than the Noir suit and it was a genuine beginning.
He pressed against a shadow as a light swept past.
"Cortana," he said quietly.
"Already in the network," she said, through the mask's integrated audio.
"Motion sensors in this wing are offline. Cameras on this floor are looping footage from forty minutes ago."
"Good girl."
He moved.
The office he needed was on the current floor.
He produced the laser cutter, the same design as the Mission Impossible version he had always wanted an excuse to build, and went to work on the window glass.
Thirty seconds later he was inside.
The room was standard Oscorp office space.
Desks, computers, filing systems, the accumulated administrative infrastructure of a company that had its hands in a very large number of things.
He pulled out a chair, sat down at the nearest terminal, and connected the USB drive he had prepared.
"This is your moment," he said.
"Understood." A pause. "Inside. They have better security than I expected for a pharmaceutical company."
"That is because they are not really a pharmaceutical company."
"I see that now." Another pause. "It is remarkable how much they are hiding."
"Copy everything. Corrupt the most volatile research data. You know what falls into that category."
"Perfectly, Chief."
He stood and closed the terminal while she worked.
"Scan the building and give me a map."
A schematic resolved across his visor's display, floor by floor, updated in real time as Cortana's scan progressed.
He had been thinking about Oscorp differently since arriving here tonight.
The original plan had been data acquisition, which was still the plan, but Oscorp was Norman Osborn's house and Norman had significant reach into the technology sector, not at Stark's level but substantial, and a building this size, running this much research, had resources that were worth more than just the data on their servers.
He filed the thought and moved.
The hallway was clear for approximately four seconds before it was not.
He ducked behind a storage box as a guard passed, waited, and when the guard was far enough away he came up behind him and had his arm around his throat before the man had registered the sound of movement.
Crack.
"Sweet dreams," he said quietly, and dragged the body into a storage crate.
He was still finding the ceiling when two more guards came through a door ahead of him.
He watched them from above, timed the gap between their sweeps, dropped, took the one on the left by the skull and introduced it to the floor, and was already moving sideways when the second one reached for his radio.
The kick to the throat stopped that.
The body pin against the wall stopped the rest of it. He put them together in the shadows and kept moving.
The room he found next was larger and more populated, a working lab with a full complement of guards and at least a dozen scientists across various stations. He settled into a corner above the door and listened.
"Are you certain we should be doing this, sir?"
A young man with glasses was addressing someone older at the central bench.
"Captain America is a living legend. A product of science done correctly.
But there is a reason he is unique, and it is not simply the serum. Look at what happened with Red Skull.
If Rogers is the example of the right result, Red Skull is the example of the wrong one. This is not worth the risk. Please. Stop."
The older scientist sighed.
"You do not understand the situation, Jerome. Pierce has been funding Oscorp for years. Norman has been delaying the serum deadline repeatedly.
There is nothing we can do at this point. It is too late."
Peter's attention sharpened.
Pierce. Alexander Pierce, senior SHIELD official and, as Peter knew from both the films and the copied Fury protocols on his private server, the man who looked like Robert Redford and served Hydra with the specific conviction of someone who had decided that history would eventually vindicate him.
Using SHIELD as a cover.
Funding Oscorp's super-soldier research..... Of course.
"I suppose," Jerome said, still unhappy about it.
"The formula is nearly complete at least. I just hope this does not end badly."
He looked at the three green vials on the bench in front of Jerome.
"Oh," Peter said, very quietly, close to Jerome's ear. "I can assure you it ends in a greenish mess."
Jerome went rigid. Looked around frantically.
"Who? Who said that? Who is there?"
His colleague looked up. "Are you alright?"
"I thought I heard...." Jerome touched his shoulder and immediately regretted it.
"Who is there?! Who touched me...."
Peter brought Jerome's head down onto the desk with controlled force.
Not enough to do lasting damage. Enough to produce unconsciousness.
Everyone looked at Jerome.
Peter was already moving toward the storage rack against the far wall where a tank was labeled in the specific typography of chemical storage.
He found the pipe connecting it to the room's ventilation node and broke it at the joint.
The room filled with Fluothane within seconds.
Sleeping gas, efficient and fast-acting, and he was already wearing the gas mask from his belt by the time the first scientist began to sway.
"It is genuinely useful," he said to himself, watching the room go down, "feeling like Batman. He has a solution for everything. I just need to produce a piece of Kryptonite and the comparison is complete."
He crossed to the bench.
Two of the three vials went into the hydrochloric acid flask he had prepared.
The third went into his belt, carefully sealed.
Cortana was already working on the lab's computers from his USB connection in the other room, corrupting the research files with the thoroughness of someone who has access to the entire architecture.
He went to the ventilation grate, moved through it with less comfort than the PS4 Spider-Man managed on vertical glass surfaces, which he noted as something to practice, and emerged in a different section of the building.
He stopped.
He knew this room.
"Cortana," he said.
"Yes, Chief?"
"What is this room?"
"The Nest. Four hundred and seventy-three specially modified spider species, housed here following a failed attempt to recreate the super-soldier serum using spider venom.
They were retained for Biocable production after the experiment was terminated."
"Are all of them genetically modified?"
"No. Of the four hundred and seventy-three, seven were personally modified by Richard Parker."
A moment of quiet.
"Tell me which ones."
"MM-42, SS-01, AG-17, TH-01, KP-119, BR-114, MO-99."
He found a set of jars on the supply shelf near the door and began working.
Seven jars, seven specimens, careful and methodical.
"Hold on in there," he said, sealing the last one. "Try not to eat each other."
"What do we do with the rest of them?" Cortana asked.
He looked at the room.
Four hundred and sixty-six spiders that had been modified and used and were now producing material for a company that would eventually lose control of its own research in ways he was already working to prevent.
"Eliminate them," he said.
"Capture all the biological data first. I can design a spider from scratch with the data.
But we cannot leave this available for Norman or anyone else who comes through here."
He found a cable from the room's generator and began building the device.
From the corridor outside, he heard voices and then pounding on the door.
"Cortana. At my signal, flood the opposite cables and nodes with current."
"Understood."
He positioned himself, waited for the door to open, and when it did he put his shoulder into it.
Nobody expects a masked figure in a tactical suit to charge a door from the inside.
The guards found themselves on the floor before they had processed the sight of him, and he was already running, turning a corner, pressing into shadow behind the nearest wall junction.
"Cortana. Give them a formal greeting."
"Understood." A brief pause. "Goodbye, you sons of bitches."
The generator sparked.
The wires lit.
The explosion was contained to the immediate area and was significantly more effective than a grenade at the same cost of materials.
"That is my girl," he said, wiping a nonexistent tear from the outside of his visor.
The second explosion was not in the plan though.
"Cortana!"
"Already on it." She cut the power to the affected systems and he was moving before she finished the sentence, heading for the roof access while guards ran past the corridor he had just vacated.
He cleared the remaining distance in a series of ceiling traversals that were technically impressive and practically uncomfortable, came out on the roof, ran to the edge, and jumped.
On the way down he caught a glimpse of a face in the window of the executive floor.
Norman Osborn, looking up at the direction of the explosions with an expression that contained several things at once, none of them pleasant.
"Always late to the party, Norme," Peter said, in free fall. "I took all the fun out of it."
The web connected. He swung away into the dark.