Carl King hurled himself off the rooftop, firing a jagged line of webbing. His swing was a grotesque parody of Spider-Man's smooth arcs. He jerked through the air, heavy and clumsy, the frigid wind biting through the thin spandex of his stolen cosplay suit.
But beneath the cheap fabric, raw power surged. He remembered the crunch of his mother's bones. The wet tearing of the comic book store clerk. Every life he digested fed the hive. He could feel his internal structure shifting, thousands of individual spiders acting as muscle, bone, and sinew. He could collapse into a swarm at will. He could wear any face he consumed.
And right now, the only face he wanted to see was Peter Parker's.
Skinny little Parker, Carl thought, his mandibles clicking beneath the mask. Gets a spider bite and thinks he can make me live in fear. He tightened his grip on the webline. His dad was right. The weak existed to feed the strong. "Time to show you who's actually in charge, Parker."
He crested the skyline, his erratic swing carrying him higher. His plastic red lenses caught a flash of movement. Across the district, another figure in red and blue swung smoothly between the high-rises. Carl grinned beneath his mask.
Found you.
Inside an unmarked surveillance van parked three blocks away, Quentin Beck leaned over a bank of glowing monitors. He tapped the glass. "We've got eyes on Spider-Man. But something is off." Beck frowned, zooming in on the pixelated feed. "The profile is wrong. And he's wearing the old suit design."
Dmitri Snerdyakov adjusted the web-shooters on his wrists. He was fully suited up in the high-tech Mk. 2 armor, waiting for the ambush signal. "Is he airborne or on the ground?" Dmitri asked over the comms.
"Airborne," Beck replied.
Dmitri scoffed. "Then it's him. He probably dragged the old suit out of the closet just to differentiate himself from me. It doesn't matter. Set up the projection relay, Beck. We're ending this." Dmitri racked the slide on his customized pistol and stepped out onto the roof of the target building.
A moment later, Carl crashed onto the gravel roof, cracking the concrete beneath his boots. He straightened up, glaring at the imposter standing thirty feet away. He had no idea he was looking at a Russian assassin covered in a holographic overlay. To Carl, this was just Peter Parker trying to play mind games.
"Another imposter?" Dmitri said, his voice modulated by Beck's tech to sound exactly like Spider-Man. He slapped a hand over his mask in mock exasperation. "Seriously, man? Are you done messing around? You know I'm the real deal."
"You're nothing but a dead man!" Carl roared. He lunged forward, his massive fists raised.
Dmitri didn't even flinch. He let out a sharp laugh, leveled his pistol, and pulled the trigger. The bullet punched dead-center through Carl's masked forehead.
Carl's body jerked backward and collapsed onto the gravel. Dmitri lowered the smoking gun. "Well," Dmitri muttered, deactivating the vocal modulator. "That was anticlimactic. Tell Fisk his explosives are completely unnecessary."
A wet, tearing sound echoed across the roof.
Dmitri stopped. He looked back. The cheap Spider-Man suit wasn't bleeding. It was moving. The fabric rippled and collapsed inward as thousands of fist-sized spiders poured out of the bullet hole, cascading over the roof edge in a tidal wave of chittering black legs.
Dmitri stared at the swarm. His brain short-circuited. What the hell is that? Survival instinct took over. Dmitri turned and sprinted toward the ledge, his heart hammering against his ribs.
The swarm cascaded down the brick wall, but the individual spiders lacked human momentum. The black mass converged on a fire escape, weaving together, stacking bone and muscle until Carl King's hulking silhouette reformed inside the cheap fabric. He fired a web and launched himself after the fleeing assassin.
"Why are you running?!" Carl bellowed, his voice distorted by thousands of clicking mandibles. "Thought you were a hero, Spidey! Hahahaha!"
Dmitri swung wildly, desperate to put distance between himself and the nightmare behind him. He dropped toward the target zone: an abandoned thirty-story construction site.
Mac Gargan stood in the shadows of the skeletal ground floor, his thumb resting on a detonator. Dmitri hit the dirt, sliding behind a concrete pillar. "Gargan!" Dmitri yelled, ripping his mask off to gasp for air. "Blow it! Blow it right now! You have no idea what that thing is!"
Gargan sneered. "I told you the bait would work. Keep moving before I vaporize you with him."
Dmitri didn't need to be told twice. He scrambled up the scaffolding toward the rear exit point. Carl King crashed through the second-story drywall a moment later, tearing the steel studs apart with his bare hands. "Where are you, Spidey?" Carl hissed.
Dmitri stood on the exposed steel girders of the third floor. He looked down at the monstrosity. "Die," Dmitri spat. He dove backward out the open window frame, the web-wings under his arms snapping open. He caught an updraft, gliding rapidly over the adjacent rooftops.
Gargan pressed the detonator.
The basement gas mains ruptured in a blinding flash of blue fire. The structural columns shattered like glass. A chain reaction of high-grade explosives ripped upward through the thirty-story skeleton. Floors pancaked. Plumes of thick, black smoke choked the skyline. Thousands of tons of reinforced concrete and steel collapsed inward, burying Carl King under a massive, grinding mountain of rubble.
Dmitri banked hard on his web-wings, soaring away from the shockwave. He threw his head back and laughed. "I did it! I actually—"
CRACK.
A high-caliber sniper round punched through the air. The bullet clipped Dmitri's shoulder armor, shredding his web-wing. His laughter turned into a scream as he spiraled out of the sky, crashing brutally onto the jagged edge of the rubble pile.
Four blocks away, Peter Parker dropped onto the rooftop next to Frank Castle. Peter stared at the towering mushroom cloud of dust rising over the Garment District. He hadn't even engaged yet.
"Uh..." Peter pointed at the burning crater. "What exactly happened over there? I literally just got here."
Castle lowered his heavy rifle. He didn't look at Peter. "You should go check your perimeter. Someone else is running around in your pajamas. Only this guy is made entirely out of bugs."
Peter's mechanical eye lenses widened, zooming in on Castle's deadpan face. If he had a mouth visible, it would be hanging completely open.
Down in the ruins, Dmitri groaned. The impact had nearly shattered his spine, but the armored suit had absorbed the lethal force. He coughed up a mouthful of blood and forced himself onto his hands and knees. I have to move, he thought frantically. Castle is going to put the next round through my eye.
A wet, rustling sound echoed from the center of the debris field.
Dmitri froze. He slowly turned his head. Deep within the smoking crater, thousands of spiders were clawing their way out from under the crushed concrete. The black swarm poured over the jagged rebar, flowing together, slowly rising to form a towering, terrifyingly familiar human shape.