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Because he wanted to leave the face intact so the dead man's identity could be confirmed, the Wild Boar had been aiming for the neck.
No matter how effective the Green Goblin serum was, if it could give Norman Osborn the ability to spend an entire day fighting him, fine. But if someone could still survive after being decapitated, that would be the plot of a horror movie, not a superhero movie.
Yet there was no one beneath the blade, leaving the Wild Boar momentarily stunned.
The flight glider that had been stabbing toward him had disappeared along with its rider.
What was going on?
The only thing that had not disappeared was Spider-Man, who had caught up afterward.
The guy seemed to have gone crazy, frantically firing webs behind himself and trying to restrain the Wild Boar Armor's movements.
"What did you do... What did you do! Who gave you the right to kill someone? You murderer!"
Using the elasticity of his web, Spider-Man launched a powerful strike at the Wild Boar Armor from behind.
The Wild Boar first used his dog-leg blade to cut through the webs behind him, but that still could not stop the momentum of Spider-Man's kick.
The grappling hook gun on his shoulder fired, its steel claw firmly catching onto a nearby concrete wall. The winch pulled the Wild Boar Armor away from its original position.
At the same time, the Wild Boar raised his empty left hand. A crossbow mechanism popped out from the inside of his arm, and an arrow shot toward the path Spider-Man was bound to take.
If Spider-Man took that arrow head-on, he might not die, but he would definitely be checking into a hospital today.
All the weapons carried by the Wild Boar Armor for dealing with the Green Goblin were lethal weapons. There was nothing on it designed merely to knock someone unconscious.
Fortunately, Spider-Sense was sensitive enough, while Spider-Man's reflexes and bodily coordination were even more formidable.
He fired a web toward another direction, gently twisted his body, and effortlessly changed the direction of his kick, dodging the arrow fired by the Wild Boar Armor.
"You say I killed someone. Where's the body?" the Wild Boar Armor asked through its electronic voice.
Henry often used this counter-question when challenging law enforcement and police authorities.
He could always confidently claim that as long as there was no corpse, nobody could say he had killed anyone.
But today's situation was different.
Although there was likewise no corpse, that was not the result of any plan on the Wild Boar's part.
The Green Goblin's disappearance had baffled him as well.
Unfortunately, Spider-Man was not going to invent an explanation for him, and the Wild Boar had no way to explain where the Green Goblin had gone.
Capturing criminals and handing them over to the police was what New York's friendly neighborhood Spider-Man had spent most of his time doing recently.
The Green Goblin was arguably the first exception in which Spider-Man had failed.
Naturally, he did not want to fail a second or third time.
So Spider-Man had apparently decided to make this a personal fight with the Wild Boar.
He stubbornly spat out one word:
"Murderer!"
Then he fired three web projectiles.
A fourth strand of webbing was aimed at the wall above this pig-headed, humanoid metal man, preparing to use it for another attack.
The Wild Boar slapped his empty hand against his left thigh.
Using the shooting technique of a gunslinger from the Wild West, he drew a weapon, spun his wrist, and fired three shots to intercept the three web projectiles.
The fourth shot went directly at Spider-Man!
Whether the kid was a superhero or a villain, the Wild Boar had no intention of holding back.
He kicked off the wall and leaped into the air, swinging the blade in his right hand toward Spider-Man.
The trajectories of aerial combat were relatively monotonous and easy to predict.
Under this assumption, Spider-Man fired several more web projectiles at the pig-headed humanoid.
But the Wild Boar possessed flight capabilities at the hovering level.
He intended to use precisely this misjudgment to create an opening for himself.
The web projectiles struck the flat surface of the Isu armor. Their tiny amount of kinetic energy could not possibly penetrate its defenses.
The Wild Boar merely needed to avoid having webbing stick to joints where it would interfere with his movements.
As for the webs that hit his eyes, he simply ignored them.
The eyes were indeed external detection devices on the Wild Boar Armor, but they were not its only sensors.
Spider-Man's movements remained completely within the Wild Boar's grasp.
At the very last moment before closing the distance, the Wild Boar activated his hovering capability and shifted sideways like an ice skater.
Then he slashed.
It was a strike that an ordinary person would have had absolutely no chance of dodging.
Yet this guy, who was even more ridiculously flexible than an Olympic gymnast, somehow twisted his body into an utterly bizarre posture in midair and avoided it.
The Wild Boar had no idea where Spider-Man had borrowed the strength to twist his body like that in midair.
Had all those years of swinging through the air left him with a talent for this?
After one exchange, the Wild Boar eventually gave Spider-Man a symbolic kick with barely any force behind it, and the two separated.
Only then did another group of police officers arrive belatedly.
They surrounded the area from the outside, guns raised, but did not dare approach rashly.
Were they afraid of accidentally shooting Spider-Man?
Or had they looked at the pig-headed humanoid metal man and instinctively decided that the little pistols in their hands would be useless, so they might as well not shoot?
Whatever the case, ever since the world had begun going off the rails, people's understanding of supernatural powers had amounted to little more than the X-Men and Brotherhood of Mutants fighting each other.
A true supervillain, in the meaningful sense of the word and one widely known to the public, had yet to emerge.
Then the Green Goblin had appeared out of nowhere and blown several top figures from the financial and industrial worlds to pieces at the Osborn Carnival.
For certain groups, that bombing was no less shocking than the terrorist hijacking of passenger planes the previous year and crashing them into those two Twin Towers.
Police officers who had been inside the scene had already confirmed that their pistols were not powerful enough to injure the Green Goblin.
And the opponent could fly, with a flight glider equipped with machine guns and small missiles beneath his feet.
He was not someone that poorly equipped police officers could handle.
Supervillains might not yet have become deeply ingrained in the public consciousness, but the fear and helplessness they inspired had already taken root.
So what was this pig-headed humanoid standing before them?
Since he was hostile toward Spider-Man, he must be a bad guy, right?
That was what the police thought.
And it made them even more cautious in their actions.
Spider-Man seemed to have reached the same conclusion: the Wild Boar was not an opponent ordinary police officers could handle.
So he took the initiative and charged forward, engaging the pig-headed humanoid metal man in close combat.
He would not give the other party any opportunity to hurt the ordinary officers.
As for the Wild Boar, who had lost his actual target and inexplicably found himself entangled with Spider-Man, he was thoroughly irritated.
Then he saw the police closing in.
Spider-Man charged him again without saying a word.
The Wild Boar responded by raising his gun and firing without hesitation.
But the first shot was knocked off course by a web projectile.
It was obvious that Spider-Man's strength was even greater than the Wild Boar had predicted.
The second web stuck to the weapon in his hand and suddenly yanked it away!
The gun in the Wild Boar's left hand immediately tore free from his grip.
He did not bother trying to retrieve the weapon.
Instead, he activated a certain destruction mechanism.
Rather than counting down, the weapon simply exploded the moment before Spider-Man could seize it.
Once again, Spider-Sense saved Spider-Man's life.
He severed the webbing himself just before the gun exploded and leaped away from its original position.
The explosion was not particularly powerful, slightly weaker even than a standard military grenade.
After all, the weapon's primary purpose was self-destruction, not use as a hand grenade.
Taking advantage of the moment when Spider-Man's attention was diverted, the Wild Boar fired the grappling hook gun on his shoulder at the upper wall of a nearby apartment building.
The powerful winch pulled him upward.
He was preparing to leave.
His target was gone, and there was no point in continuing to fight Spider-Man.
The moment the police saw Spider-Man and the metal man separate, with the latter now an obvious target, they immediately opened fire.
Even they could not say whether they had simply missed or whether the bullets had hit but been completely ineffective.
Either way, the man who leaped onto the rooftop looked perfectly fine.
Spider-Man, however, refused to give up.
He fired a web that stuck firmly to the metal man's back, then pulled hard, intending to drag him back down to the ground.
That way, he could cooperate with the police and capture this metal man.
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