Blinding, white-hot lightning arced into the heavens, illuminating the entire Manhattan skyline in a stark, sterile flash.
The air smelled violently of ozone and scorched concrete. Peter dropped to his hands and knees on the shattered dock, his chest heaving as he gasped for breath. His muscles burned with a deep, agonizing lactic acid fire. The bio-electric trick had worked. Back in the wasteland, he had proven worthy of lifting Mjolnir. His mutated nervous system still carried a faint, residual spark of that divine thunder. By dumping every single volt of his bio-electricity in one massive, localized burst, he had forcefully scrambled the symbiotes' telepathic hive-mind link.
I am entirely out of juice, Peter thought, his arms trembling as he pushed himself up. If this didn't work, I'm going to have to throw rocks at them.
The downside to localized lightning was its total lack of target discrimination. Beneath his suit, the black sludge felt incredibly sluggish, practically vibrating with exhaustion. The blast had severely weakened Peter and Venom's psychic tether, but their connection held. They had wielded the hammer together; Venom carried the same residual immunity.
The monstrous Hybrid was gone.
In its place lay Grant Ward, completely unconscious on the cracked pavement, surrounded by four distinct, trembling puddles of alien sludge: gray, purple, yellow, and green. Riot, Agony, Phage, and Lasher had been violently forcefully separated.
Peter didn't waste a second. He shot a web-line, snagged the collar of Ward's tactical vest, and dragged the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent ten feet away from the biological hazard. He couldn't risk the parasites regaining their bearings and re-assimilating their host.
Peter leaned against a chunk of rubble, running the grim math in his head. Agony, Phage, and Lasher were manageable. They hadn't been bonded to their hosts long enough to forge a permanent Codex. If they died right now, their genetic imprints would just dissolve.
But Riot was the ticking time bomb. The gray symbiote had been hiding inside Grant Ward for a long time. The Codex was set. If Riot died, that localized genetic imprint would act as a beacon, shooting straight up into the Arctic Circle to awaken Knull. Riot had to be imprisoned, not killed.
We could eat them. Venom's voice echoed weakly in Peter's mind.
"Are you entirely sure about that, buddy?" Peter muttered aloud, keeping his eyes fixed on the gray puddle. "Does digesting them actually destroy the Codex, or does it just transfer the upload to us?"
I am uncertain. It is a strong instinct.
"Yeah, well, the God of the Abyss is currently taking a nap a few thousand miles north of here," Peter warned, stepping cautiously toward the gray sludge. "I'm betting Knull is the one whispering that little dietary suggestion in your ear. Hard pass."
Peter reached down and scooped up the trembling gray mass of Riot. It felt like cold, wet clay. As Peter's gloved fingers dug into the biomass, the symbiote violently twitched, regaining a sliver of consciousness.
At the exact same moment, Grant Ward gasped.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. agent shot upright, his eyes wide with raw, unfiltered panic. He frantically patted his own chest. "Spider-Man! Drop it! He planted a biometric sensor bomb!"
Peter froze. "A what?!"
"A dead-man's switch!" Ward yelled, scrambling backward across the asphalt. "Riot drilled a microscopic filament of his biomass directly into my aortic valve! He synced it to a S.H.I.E.L.D. explosive casing under the pier! If our symbiotic link is completely severed the bomb detonates!"
The gray sludge in Peter's hands suddenly began to thrash violently.
Peter's spider-sense didn't just buzz; it screamed like a high-pitched siren directly into his eardrums. He had half a second to choose. If he grabbed Ward and left Riot, the separation would trigger the bomb, Riot would die in the blast, and Knull would wake up. If he grabbed Riot and left Ward, the bomb would still kill the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.
Peter didn't think. He reacted.
He slammed the thrashing gray sludge directly against his own chest, pinning it to the Spider-suit. He fired a heavy web-line, anchoring it to Ward's tactical harness.
Peter vaulted off the edge of the pier, plummeting toward the dark water below. He fired a second web-line high into the steel girders of a nearby suspension bridge and hauled back with every ounce of his remaining strength.
He catapulted upward, ripping Ward off the ground just as the S.H.I.E.L.D. bomb cooked off.
BOOM.
A blinding sphere of orange fire obliterated the entire west bank dockyard. A massive mushroom cloud of pulverized concrete and boiling river water rolled into the Manhattan sky. The shockwave slammed into Peter's back, pushing him higher into the air.
"Well," Peter groaned, fighting the turbulent air currents. "Spider-Man officially blows up a city pier. J. Jonah Jameson is going to have a stroke trying to print tomorrow's Daily Bugle front page."
Peter swung toward the skeletal frame of an unfinished high-rise, landing heavily on a steel I-beam dangling two hundred feet above the street. Ward hung beneath him, swaying wildly at the end of the web-line.
"Okay, seriously," Peter yelled down at the dangling agent. "He rigged a high-yield explosive to your actual heart? Who even thinks of that?!"
"He assimilated my tactical training!" Ward shouted back, gripping the webbing tightly.
Suddenly, a horrific, freezing sensation pierced Peter's chest.
Riot wasn't just squirming anymore. The gray sludge was actively attempting to force a secondary hybridization, violently trying to merge its biomass with Venom. Riot didn't actually want Peter's body. It just needed to scramble Peter's nervous system for a single, chaotic second. It wanted Peter to lose his grip on the web. If Ward fell to his death, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent died, the Codex transferred, and Knull resurrected.
They literally planned for every single contingency, Peter thought, gritting his teeth as a wave of paralyzing cold swept up his neck. This guy isn't just an alien. He's a psychopathic chess grandmaster.
Peter's fingers began to slip.
He didn't try to hold on with his failing muscles. He slammed his wrist against the steel I-beam, physically locking the mechanical web-shooter in place. The line went completely taut.
Ward didn't hesitate. Recognizing the tactical maneuver, the HYDRA specialist wrapped his boots around the web-line and rapidly slid down the cord, fast-roping safely to the street below.
"Has anyone ever told you that you'd make a great Batman?" Peter wheezed, watching Ward hit the pavement.
With his hands finally free, Peter violently dug his fingers into his own chest. He grabbed the writhing gray mass and forcefully ripped Riot off his suit. It felt like tearing off a layer of his own skin. Peter held the struggling puddle of slime out at arm's length, utterly exhausted.
"You really will do absolutely anything to die, won't you, you miserable idiot?" Peter panted.
Riot couldn't speak. It just bared a tiny, jagged maw of fangs, letting out a weak, hissing roar.
Peter leaned against the steel beam, ready to shove the gray sludge into a containment vial.
A shadow dropped onto the I-beam directly above him.
Peter looked up. A dark green tendril shot out of the darkness, wrapping like a python around Peter's wrist.
Lasher.
Wait, Peter's exhausted brain misfired. How did Lasher survive the dock explosion?
Peter squinted through the smoke. Hanging from the green sludge was the mangled, half-conscious body of the dockworker Lasher had possessed earlier. The temporary meat-puppet had absorbed the brunt of the blast, keeping the symbiote insulated and alive.
"Damn it!" Peter yelled. "You guys really accounted for everything!"
It was entirely outrageous.
Lasher didn't attack Spider-Man. The green monster lunged directly for the gray sludge in Peter's hand.
Simultaneously, Riot surged upward, attempting a second forced-hybridization spike directly into Peter's wrist. The sudden, agonizing neural shock broke Peter's footing. His boots slipped off the dew-slicked steel beam.
Peter plummeted backward into the open air. He instinctively fired a web-line, catching the edge of the building to arrest his fall.
But he dropped Riot.
The gray symbiote fell freely through the night sky. Lasher didn't hesitate. The green monster dove off the beam, plummeting after its commander. Mid-air, Lasher caught Riot.
There was no rescue. There was no loyalty.
With a sickening, wet tearing sound, Lasher violently ripped Riot's gray biomass entirely to pieces. The ultimate sacrifice. Lasher murdered its own commander to fulfill the condition, then plummeted the remaining two hundred feet, crashing into the concrete street below with a devastating, lethal splat.
Peter swung down, landing heavily on the cracked pavement. He stumbled to his knees, clutching his ribs, and let out a string of exhausted, breathless curses.
He stared at the pulverized, mixed remains of Lasher and Riot.
For a second, the street was entirely silent.
Then, the gray and green sludge began to violently wriggle. The two distinct puddles of dead alien biomass flowed together, pooling in the center of the crater. The colors drained away, bleeding into a deep, void-like, absolute black. It looked exactly like Venom's organic structure, but it radiated an aura of suffocating, primordial cold.
The black puddle bubbled.
A single, withered, impossibly pale hand reached up from the center of the dark sludge, its elongated fingers gripping the edge of the concrete.