Having temporarily lost sight of Spider-Man, Mysterio calculated the obvious: the kid had tucked himself away in an enclosed space to regroup. Beck didn't care. The spider would come crawling back.
Captain America was formidable, but even he couldn't punch through a swarm of drones in seconds. Iron Man was currently tangled up in anti-aircraft fire. The rest of the Fantastic Four were occupied elsewhere. That left only the Human Torch.
Mysterio was currently toying with Johnny Storm for the third time tonight. Clearly, the hothead had ignored Tony Stark's orders, taking Beck's bait and chasing after yet another phantom. Still, the Torch was learning. He'd figured out that extreme heat warped light refraction. He was maintaining a high altitude, sticking to wide-area blasts that melted drones without dropping debris on civilians.
Flush with that minor victory, Johnny tore after Mysterio's illusions with reckless speed.
Mysterio ducked and weaved. Johnny chased relentlessly, spiraling higher into the sky.
"You know, Johnny," Mysterio's voice echoed from nowhere, "the air gets awfully thin up here."
"No kidding," Johnny yelled back. "But we're still in the dome!"
The Human Torch surged upward, intending to blast through the artificial darkness. He'd just been bailed out by Iron Man; he knew his exact altitude limits. This was a breeze.
He was wrong.
When he broke through the black clouds, he didn't see the New York skyline. He saw the curvature of the Earth. He was staring at the raw, breathless edge of the upper atmosphere.
"I have to admire the enthusiasm," Mysterio's voice purred in his ear. "If only you believed you could keep burning. If only you thought you could push past your limits. Unfortunately, I just needed you to see the view."
Johnny's flames sputtered. His brain, convinced he was entirely out of oxygen, forced his fire to die. The drone he'd been chasing materialized from the illusion and immediately detonated. The shockwave hit Johnny square in the chest.
His flames winked out completely. Weightlessness seized him. He plummeted. Panic seized his throat as the wind whipped past him.
Through blurred vision, something dropped alongside him. Metal flashed in the dark. Hands grabbed him.
"I'm seriously telling Susan about this," Tony Stark's voice crackled. Iron Man stabilized their descent, thrusters flaring. "You're acting less mature than a high schooler. Stand down, kid. I've already sent the best Avenger for the job to handle Mysterio."
Johnny coughed, shivering in the cold air. "Is it Cap? People always say we look alike."
It wasn't Captain America.
It was Spider-Man.
Right before JARVIS had gone offline again, the AI had fed Peter one crucial piece of intel. Following the disbanding of the X-Men, Oscorp had quietly acquired experimental brainwave tech. They'd built a "neural transmission device." The prototype was sitting in a lab on the 27th floor of the Osborn Building.
Peter swung blind through the city. He didn't need to see the skyline to know his way around New York.
Mysterio, however, knew he was coming. The illusions hit him in waves. A swirling black hole opened in the middle of 5th Avenue, twisting the gravity around him. Glass skyscrapers buckled and collapsed, raining phantom debris onto his head. Desperate, agonizing cries for help echoed from empty alleyways, blending the fake with the terrifyingly real.
Don't look, Peter told himself, squeezing his eyes shut beneath the lenses. Trust the webs. Trust the swing.
He had never been inside Oscorp. He relied entirely on his spatial memory of the exterior, launching himself feet-first through the massive plate-glass window of the ground-floor lobby.
Glass exploded around him. Before his boots even touched the marble floor, his wrists flicked in a chaotic blur. Thwip-thwip-thwip. He fired webbing in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spread. Strands stuck to pillars, walls, the ceiling, and the reception desk. He wove a massive, intersecting network of silk across the entire room.
He dropped into the center of the web, crouching low. He popped a fresh cartridge into his shooter, clicking it into place.
Spiders hunt on a web, Peter thought. They don't need eyes. They feel the vibrations.
He placed his fingertips lightly against the taught strands. The lobby was pitch black to his actual senses, obscured by holograms.
Snap. A strand vibrated on his left. Something had just broken a line.
Peter didn't look. He just fired. He triggered his web-shooter's electric mode, sending a taser-laced net directly into the void. Sparks showered the floor as a cloaked drone short-circuited and slammed into the marble. Peter shot another line, tying the downed machine into the broader web. Exactly like catching a fly.
But he wasn't here to catch drones. He was mapping the room.
The vibrations gave him the contours of the lobby walls. He found the elevator bank.
Peter pried the metal doors apart, slipped into the dark, greasy shaft, and webbed the doors shut behind him. An out-of-service elevator shaft was a completely sealed environment. No drones. No projectors. Just raw, echoing reality.
"Okay, Quentin, I'll admit you're a genius," Peter muttered.
He wasn't talking about the tech. He was talking about the massive metal box currently rocketing up from the parking garage, aiming to crush him against the roof of the shaft.
Peter dropped squarely onto the roof of the ascending elevator car. He tapped the metal, listening for a heartbeat inside. Empty.
He grabbed the thick steel hoisting cables and wrenched his arms apart. The metal groaned and snapped. The car dropped away beneath him, plunging down the shaft with a deafening screech.
Peter leaped, latching onto the concrete wall at the 27th floor. He dug his fingers into the seam of the doors and tore them open.
The lab was pitch black. No lights. No sound. Mysterio was waiting.
Peter stepped onto the tile floor. He instantly shot lines of webbing into the dark, anchoring the loose ends to his waist. He walked forward, turning himself into the nerve center of a giant tripwire grid.
"I'll admit, Spider-Man, the web trick is clever," a voice echoed from everywhere at once.
A dozen holograms of Mysterio flared to life in a circle around Peter. Their capes billowed in non-existent wind. Their fishbowl helmets gleamed.
"But in a confined space like this," the Mysterios spoke in perfect unison, "you're completely outmatched."
"I didn't come up here to punch you, Quentin," Peter said, his voice deadly calm. "I came up here to tell you you're wrong."
Peter raised his hands. He grabbed the fabric at the base of his neck.
The Mysterios all took a synchronized step back. "What are you doing?!"
"You think I wear this mask because I'm afraid," Peter said. He pulled the fabric up, dragging it over his chin, his nose, his hair.
"You're wrong. I wear the mask to protect the people I love." Peter dropped the crumpled red fabric to the floor. "I don't hide because I'm a coward. I hide so they don't become targets."
Peter took a breath of the stale, unfiltered air. "And right now, I'm taking it off to beat you."
The second Peter's bare face hit the air, the drones whirred. Holographic light blasted Peter's face, projecting a digital Spider-Man mask perfectly over his real features.
But the cameras had already captured him. And Quentin Beck, sitting at the control console, was looking directly through the lenses. Beck could see through his own illusions. He could see the teenager underneath.
"No!" a raw, terrified voice screamed from the far corner of the room.
The panic was real. The sound wasn't filtered through speakers. Peter instantly snapped his head toward the source of the noise.
Miles away, Wilson Fisk slammed his massive fists onto his mahogany desk. The wood cracked under the impact.
"What are you doing, Beck?!" Kingpin roared at the blank monitor screen. "Turn the feed back on! He unmasked! You cut the signal!"
Back in the lab, Quentin Beck was hyperventilating. He clawed at the heavy neural-transmission rig strapped to his skull. "This isn't supposed to happen! This is wrong!"
He heard Peter's heavy, measured footsteps approaching in the dark.
"Put it back on!" Beck shrieked, his voice cracking. "Hide! You're supposed to hide! Put the mask back on!"
"I'm right here, Quentin. Look at me!" Peter stepped into the center of the control rig. "This is reality. Look at it!"
Peter grabbed the thick bundle of fiber-optic cables connecting the console to Beck's armor and yanked. Sparks showered the floor. He hauled Beck up by the collar of his motion-capture suit.
The illusions were still rendering around them in a chaotic, glitching sphere. But Beck squeezed his eyes shut. He threw his arms over his face, trembling violently.
Beck had built a world of lies no one could see through. But the tech was wired to his brain. He was the only one who could always see the truth. He couldn't perceive his own holograms. He couldn't see the fake mask he was desperately trying to project onto Peter's face.
"What's wrong?" Peter asked. His anger bled out, leaving only a cold pity. "You told me the helmet made you fearless. You said it let you be your true self."
Peter tightened his grip. "Is the real Quentin Beck just a guy who's completely terrified of the real world?"
"Put it on... please put it on..." Beck sobbed into his gloves, curling in on himself like a frightened child.
Fisk sneered at the dead monitor. Disappointment radiated from his massive frame.
"Gargan," Fisk barked into his comms. "You are on-site. Equip your thermal optics and put Spider-Man down. If you fail, at least bring me his face."
Mac Gargan, lurking in the shadows of the 27th-floor corridor, tapped his earpiece. He flipped down his specialized tactical goggles, cutting through the holographic noise. He stalked silently into the lab.
Gargan scanned the room. Beck was a blubbering mess on the floor. And there stood Spider-Man—maskless, distracted, sporting messy brown hair.
Gargan grinned. At twenty paces, this was an execution. Fisk better double my rate for this, he thought.
Gargan raised his suppressed pistol, lining up the iron sights with the back of Peter's skull. His finger tightened on the trigger.
Peter didn't even turn his head. His wrist flicked backward.
Thwip. A line of webbing struck the barrel of Gargan's gun, jerking it violently to the left. At the exact same microsecond, a completely different strand of silk snapped out from the darkness behind Gargan. It stuck square to the mercenary's shoulder blade and yanked him backward with terrifying force.
The sudden, violent rotation whipped Gargan's arm inward. His finger fully depressed the trigger just as the barrel swung flush against his own abdomen. The gun barked. Gargan dropped to the floor, screaming as a hollow-point bullet tore through his gut and lodged deep in his spinal column.
Peter flinched at the gunshot. He looked down at the shivering man at his feet. His fist dropped like a hammer, shattering the glass of Beck's unused fishbowl helmet sitting on the console.
The hard-light projectors shorted out. The phantom black holes, the screaming civilians, the burning buildings—all of it vanished, leaving only a trashed corporate lab bathed in emergency lighting.
Peter turned. Cindy Moon stood in the doorway, the sleek fabric of her suit catching the dim light. She casually retracted a line of webbing into her wrist.
"I don't know the city routes yet," Cindy said, stepping over Gargan's groaning body. "But following your rhythm is easy. Don't mention it."
She glanced down at the sobbing illusionist on the floor. "What do we do with him?"
Peter watched Beck for a long moment. He bent down, scooped his crumpled red mask off the floor, and pulled it tightly over his head. The white lenses locked into place.
He dropped into a low crouch next to the broken man.
"It's alright, Quentin," Peter said, his voice quiet, muffled by the thick fabric. "Look. I'm wearing it."
Beck flinched. He slowly lowered his arms. His red-rimmed eyes locked onto the blank, expressionless white lenses of Spider-Man's mask.
The sight grounded him. Beck let out a broken, shuddering breath, curled his knees tightly to his chest, and wept.