Chapter 73: Pass Update!
Pft.
The needle hit the Green Goblin's neck.
The fluid inside it injected automatically in a single instant.
The Green Goblin felt the sting and spun around. Bullseye was standing on the second-floor landing, unhurried. The Green Goblin ripped the empty needle from his neck and looked at it.
"Who are you?"
"And what did you just put in me?!"
Something was already spreading through him. Wrong, unfamiliar, impossible to name. His foot flicked up. A pumpkin bomb landed in his palm. He reached for the detonator.
Bullseye flicked a finger.
A button, picked up from somewhere on the floor, shot across the room.
Crack.
The plastic button hit the pumpkin bomb square and split it apart in the Green Goblin's hand.
"Relax." Bullseye's voice carried down from the landing without any urgency. "It's just a welcome gift from my boss."
"You'll understand what it does soon enough."
"What it does," the Green Goblin muttered.
The words weren't out of his mouth before the pain hit.
A tearing sensation erupted at his chest and spread outward through every nerve in his body at once. He clawed at his chest, his face, anything. The tearing was everywhere and it drove him to the floor, rolling, unable to get purchase on what was happening to him. Under his skin, thin restless tendrils pushed and shifted without pattern.
At some point, it stopped.
Bullseye stepped alongside him and looked down at the Green Goblin gasping on the floor. "How do you feel?"
"How do I feel..." The Green Goblin wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. His eyes had gone blank. Then, as they cleared, a grin split his face.
Wild. Unhinged. Like something had been stripped out and replaced with something considerably better.
"I have never felt this good in my life."
The thought surfacing in the back of his mind right now was that he genuinely wanted to go back out and fight Spider-Man for real.
"I like what this does."
He pushed himself to his feet and rolled the stiffness out of his neck. "Tell your boss thank you."
Bullseye waved a hand. "Don't thank him yet."
"Boss also mentioned he's very interested in the Human Enhancement Formula your company developed. I'll need to take several samples back with me."
"And the Goblin Glider blueprints. He wants those too."
The Green Goblin listened to the list of demands. Some part of him bristled. But hearing that the boss had asked for them was apparently sufficient. He handed over the samples and the blueprints without further argument.
Bullseye collected everything and turned to go.
He was almost at the door when the Green Goblin started muttering to himself. Spider-Man. Working through options. Running scenarios out loud.
Bullseye stopped.
"One more thing." He said it without turning around. "Boss says to keep a low profile for now. Stop going after Spider-Man. He still has plans for him."
"And to keep the warrants and suspicion off you, boss recommends getting yourself a new look. A better one. Find a couple of media contacts and put out a story that Oscorp's experimental technology was stolen. That'll give you cover."
He walked out without waiting for a response. Three jumps and he was gone, leaving the Green Goblin standing alone in the empty estate with a thoroughly put-upon expression.
"Are you kidding me. Before the boss showed up, I couldn't deal with Spider-Man. After the boss shows up, I'm not allowed to deal with Spider-Man. So what exactly was the point of any of this?!"
He said it.
Then he did exactly what he'd been told.
The old suit went into destruction as directed. He was unhappy about it and made sure the empty room was aware of this throughout every stage of the process.
That look, destroyed and redesigned on someone else's orders. Criminal waste of a perfectly good aesthetic.
And what did "get yourself a better look" even mean? Was his previous design not good enough?
This was a considered artistic statement. Sensibility drawn from a fantasy tradition. It had texture. It had vision.
Even conceding that the boss was right about most things, on the subject of design, the Green Goblin had his reservations.
Half a month passed.
Matthew had not made a single public appearance in that time. Tony came looking for him several times. Ada turned him away each time without visible effort.
The official story: Matthew was quietly recovering.
What was actually happening was something else entirely.
Sometime in the first few days, Matthew had set up a private testing facility. Training was the polite word for it. What it actually was: a series of deliberate near-death experiments designed to force his body to keep evolving.
Liquid nitrogen immersion. Industrial furnace survival. Radiation tolerance testing. Lightning exposure. Industrial hydraulic press resistance. Vacuum chamber survival. Strong acid immersion.
To make the process survivable, he had also applied a System modification first: Selective Pain Blocking. Targeted numbness, leaving everything else intact.
At the end of half a month, Matthew had triggered ten staged evolutions.
By his own estimate, he was sitting somewhere around G-Stage 10.
The experiments had been conservative by design, pushing himself to the edge without crossing it. But ten targeted positive evolutions were not nothing.
The current version of Matthew could be dropped into liquid nitrogen, frozen solid, and thaw out in full working order. He could be pressed flat by an industrial hydraulic machine and reconstitute himself from the blood with enough liquid contact. In near-death states, he had developed the ability to direct his own blood and flesh outward, actively seeking whatever material his body needed to rebuild.
The term that applied, generously but accurately, was unkillable.
In his office that evening, Matthew pressed two fingers against his temple and rubbed.
Sitting with the memory of the past half month had that effect on him. The Selective Pain Blocking had handled the physical side. The mental pressure of repeatedly triggering near-death states, the instinctive crisis response that no modification could fully suppress, had accumulated in its own way.
He closed his eyes.
The System fired a notification.
[Pass duration has ended.]
[Updating Pass theme.]
[Update complete.]
[Current Pass theme: "E-Type Mold."]
Matthew opened his eyes.
"E-Type Mold?"
He turned it over, and placed it.
The E-Type Mold appeared in Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 8. A naturally occurring ancient fungal entity. Its root source was referred to as the Megamycete. It had the capacity to enhance and rewrite human biology, and those who successfully adapted to it could develop a range of powerful abilities.
The Mold preserved an infected host's consciousness and memories with perfect fidelity. It could extend a host's lifespan considerably, and it was capable of preserving the soul of a deceased person within its network indefinitely.
In the games, those who had fully adapted to the Mold's gifts came into a wide variety of capabilities. The clearest demonstration of that potential was Heisenberg. Karl Heisenberg, whose command over metal made him effectively the RE universe's answer to Magneto.
The new Pass theme had arrived at exactly the right moment.
Not long ago, Matthew had been turning over the same thought: his physical strength and durability were solid, but raw force alone was still missing something. There was a ceiling to how many problems you could punch away before that ceiling made itself known.
And now the System had gone ahead and provided superpowers.