The S.H.I.E.L.D. safe house was located in the industrial dockyards on the west bank of the Hudson River. For whatever reason, shady paramilitary organizations and apocalyptic cults always gravitated toward abandoned shipping containers. While the docks felt isolated, they were actually surrounded by a dense, civilian-heavy commercial district.
Right now, the entire block was burning.
Spider-Man crouched on the edge of a brick smokestack, a heavy Stark-tech comms unit pressed against his masked ear. The roaring inferno below cast jagged, dancing shadows across his black symbiote suit.
"FDNY dispatch, listen to me very carefully," Peter ordered, his voice cutting through the radio static with absolute authority. "Do not send your engines into the West Bank pier. I repeat, hold your perimeter. We have highly lethal, hostile alien biologicals inside the blast zone. Park your rigs on the edge and prep your triage units for incoming wounded."
He switched the radio channel, his finger tapping the side of his mask. "Captain Stacy? NYPD? I need a hard barricade set up between 71st and 78th Streets. Nobody gets in or out."
Peter dropped the comms unit and launched himself off the smokestack. He plummeted toward the blazing port, firing a web-line at the last possible second to swing over the towering flames. The heat radiating off the burning warehouses was suffocating. Smoke stung his eyes beneath the white lenses. It was an environmental nightmare for a symbiote, but according to Coulson's panicked briefing, Riot was built different. Peter took a shallow breath of the ash-choked air. Without Venom taking the lead, he was going to have to rely heavily on his own raw instincts to survive this.
The heat is scrambling the infrared scanners, Peter thought, tapping his wrist console. Switching to sonar.
He activated the echolocation tech he had originally integrated to fight Mysterio. The HUD inside his mask washed out the blinding orange flames, replacing the environment with crisp, digitized blue outlines. He immediately caught a cluster of frantic, overlapping heartbeats inside a locked shipping warehouse directly below.
Peter dropped onto the scorching metal roof and vaulted down to the loading bay. He fired a thick web-line, yanking a burning forklift away from the entrance, and dug his fingers into the glowing-hot steel of the rolling door. With a strained grunt, he ripped the door clean off its tracks and threw it aside.
A dozen terrified dockworkers spilled out into the cool night air, coughing violently.
"Thank you, Spider-Man!" a burly foreman gasped, wiping soot from his face. He looked at Peter's shifting, inky black suit and took a nervous step back. "Though, I gotta say, the red and blue spandex is a lot less terrifying!"
"Everybody's a fashion critic!" Peter yelled over the roar of the fire. "Keep your heads down and run straight for the NYPD barricade! Go!"
As the civilians fled, Peter's sonar pinged a massive, hostile signature deeper in the docks.
He swung over a burning crane and landed softly on a stack of shipping crates. Below him, the green symbiote—Lasher—had cornered a small group of stragglers against a wall of fire. Two thick, green tendrils whipped out from the monster's spine. With a sickening, wet crunch, Lasher decapitated two of the dockworkers. The green sludge instantly poured into their severed necks, reanimating their corpses into grotesque, stumbling meat-puppets.
Lasher dropped the two headless bodies and turned his milky white eyes toward a third screaming civilian.
Peter didn't hesitate. He dropped directly between the monster and the hostage. The customized web-shooters on his wrists hummed. He unleashed a sustained, high-voltage burst of pure white taser-webbing. The localized electrical current arced through the air, violently striking Lasher's umbilicals.
The green whips shattered into smoking, liquefied sludge. The two reanimated corpses collapsed to the pavement like cut marionettes. The remaining civilians scrambled away in a blind panic.
"Ah, Spider-Man," Lasher hissed, unhinging a jaw full of jagged teeth. "My old rival."
"You remember me!" Peter quipped, dropping into a low combat stance. "I'm touched. I'd give you a hug, but you look like you smell like a toxic waste dump."
"You stole my dinner," Lasher snarled. New green tendrils slithered from his spine, latching back onto the headless corpses to hoist them up. "You will pay for that."
"Earth isn't a drive-thru, ugly. Take humans off the menu."
Peter lunged. The meat-puppets swung wildly, but the black suit moved with fluid, terrifying perfection. Venom didn't need to manifest to help Peter dodge; the symbiote simply micro-adjusted Peter's musculature, allowing him to weave effortlessly through the barrage of tendrils.
Peter closed the distance. He drove a brutal, electrically charged right hook directly into Lasher's chest. The high-voltage impact lit up the dark alley like a flashbang. Lasher shrieked, his cellular structure boiling under the intense heat and electricity.
The monster retaliated with a desperate, sweeping whip strike. Peter backflipped, twisting perfectly through the air to land directly on Lasher's broad shoulders. He fired a web-line at a nearby pile of burning debris, yanked a flaming two-by-four into his grip, and drove the jagged, burning wood straight down into Lasher's collarbone.
Lasher let out a deafening, agonizing howl. He violently thrashed his upper body, throwing Peter off. Unable to handle the localized fire, the green monster blindly threw himself off the concrete pier and plunged into the freezing, dark waters of the Hudson River.
Peter landed in a crouch, watching the ripples.
Before he could catch his breath, a massive, bio-organic purple blade exploded upward from the water, slicing entirely through the concrete dock a foot away from Peter's face.
A sleek, feminine, deeply terrifying purple symbiote vaulted out of the river. It landed gracefully on the ruined pier, its long, prehensile purple hair thrashing like a nest of vipers.
"Hello, Spider-Man," the purple monster purred, her voice a horrifying blend of alien echoes and Jemma Simmons's British accent. "Nice to meet you. You can call me Agony."
"I usually avoid toxic relationships, but sure," Peter bantered, gripping the flaming two-by-four like a baseball bat.
He charged forward, swinging the burning wood in a tight, aggressive arc. Agony didn't flinch. She morphed both of her hands into elongated, razor-sharp purple broadswords. With a single, blurring strike, she sheared the flaming wood completely in half. She spun on her heel, driving the bio-blade straight toward Peter's ribs.
Can't you conjure up a weapon or something?! Peter yelled internally.
I can do better, Venom rumbled back.
Black sludge surged down Peter's forearms. His five fingers elongated, hardening into wickedly sharp, metallic-black talons. Peter caught Agony's descending blade with his bare hand, the alien bio-metals clashing with a loud CLANG. He twisted his wrist, locked her blade in place, and delivered a devastating front kick to her chest, sending her skidding backward across the wet concrete.
Peter pulled his punch. He was actively holding back.
He knew the biology. Until the forty-eight-hour mark passed and a Codex was formed, the symbiote and the host were not fully integrated. If someone shot Peter with a Gatling gun right now, Venom would absorb the kinetic impact and heal the tissue. But Jemma Simmons was just a hostage trapped inside a purple meat-suit. If Peter hit Agony with his full, enhanced strength, he would shatter Jemma's ribcage into dust.
He needed a surgical strike.
Agony recovered instantly. She shrieked, brandishing her dual blades, and spat a stream of highly corrosive, bubbling acid. Peter's spider-sense flared. He vaulted off a shipping crate, twisting his body to let the acid splash harmlessly against the pavement, where it immediately began melting the concrete.
When Agony looked up, Spider-Man was gone.
He hadn't swung away. He had simply vanished. The active-camouflage stealth tech woven into his suit rendered him completely invisible against the dark, smoke-filled sky.
Agony frantically swung her blades in wild, defensive arcs, searching for a target.
Thwip.
Peter dropped from the smokestack directly above her. Before Agony could raise her guard, Peter slapped his palm against her forehead. A metallic click echoed in the air.
He had just attached Leo Fitz's miniaturized, overclocked sonic emitter directly to her skull.
Peter triggered the device and immediately backflipped away.
An ultra-high-frequency sonic wave blasted point-blank into the symbiote's brain. Agony unleashed an ear-piercing scream, her purple biomass violently rippling and tearing. The localized agony was too much. The symbiote forcefully peeled itself back, retreating off Jemma Simmons's body and collapsing into a writhing purple puddle on the dock.
Peter didn't hesitate. He shot two thick web-lines, snagging Jemma by the shoulders, and violently yanked the unconscious S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist out of the puddle. He caught her in mid-air, fired another web, and vaulted cleanly over the roaring wall of fire.
He landed softly behind the perimeter of flashing red and blue police cruisers. He gently laid Jemma on the back of an open FDNY ambulance.
Captain George Stacy jogged over, his trench coat blowing in the wind. He looked down at the unconscious woman, then up at the masked vigilante.
"Spider-Man. What's the situation?" Captain Stacy asked, his voice gravelly with authority. "Are there any civilians left inside?"
"According to my sweeps, they're clear," Peter replied, his chest heaving slightly. He looked back at the burning dockyard, the orange glow reflecting off his lenses. "But I couldn't get to everyone in time."
"You did a hell of a job, son," Stacy said firmly, placing a hand on Peter's shoulder.
A massive, concussive explosion rocked the interior of the harbor. A fireball shot fifty feet into the air, raining burning debris down on the water.
Stacy withdrew his hand, his eyes narrowing at the inferno. "The civilians are clear. But the hostiles are still inside, aren't they?"
"Yeah," Peter muttered, his fists clenching at his sides. "I need to go finish this."
Spider-Man leaped off the ambulance, launching himself back into the burning battlefield.
He landed on the shattered remnants of the primary loading pier. The concrete was heavily cratered. Standing in the center of the destruction was Phage.
The yellow symbiote had completely consumed Leo Fitz. It was short, incredibly broad, and built like a walking Abrams tank. Its arms ended in massive, disproportionate, spiked fists that dragged against the ground. Phage slammed its fists together, the impact echoing like a thunderclap.
The yellow behemoth slowly turned, its jagged eyes locking onto Spider-Man.