The trap had been sprung with devastating, apocalyptic precision.
Hovering above the shattered streets, Jack of Hearts could only watch in absolute horror as Colonel James Rhodes was completely consumed by the alien parasite. The terrified civilian Rhodey had just pulled from the rubble was nothing more than a trojan horse.
The civilians who were supposed to have been cleansed by Thor's divine lightning hadn't been freed at all. The lightning had merely shocked the Klyntar cells into a microscopic dormancy. Now, fully reawakened, the symbiotes violently expanded, mutating their new, super-powered hosts.
War Machine and Darkhawk were gone. In their place stood two towering, heavily armored, biomechanical nightmares bearing the jagged red emblem of the King in Black. Along with the Hulk, Knull's roster of corrupted heroes was rapidly expanding.
The two symbiote-monsters instantly turned their milky, void-like eyes toward Jack of Hearts and Living Lightning. Because the two heroes were composed of pure, volatile energy, the symbiotes couldn't bond with them. So, the monsters defaulted to their secondary directive: slaughter.
But the infected heroes weren't the immediate problem.
Whirrrrr-CLACK.
Standing on the asphalt below, the tactical android known as Citizen V suddenly locked its optical sensors onto the corrupted War Machine. The android's internal programming registered a catastrophic anomaly. A lethal override protocol engaged.
Citizen V's chassis violently shifted. Heavy, modular weapon systems deployed from its internal storage. A glowing arc reactor materialized in the center of its chest plate, a heavy rotary machine gun extended from its right shoulder, and a pair of razor-sharp, metallic flight wings violently ejected from its back.
"THREAT DETECTED. ALLIED COMBATANTS COMPROMISED," Citizen V's synthetic voice boomed over the chaos. "INITIATING LETHAL PURGE."
"What the hell are you doing?!" Jack of Hearts yelled, diving between the heavily armed android and the corrupted War Machine.
"They are infected, not dead!" Living Lightning shouted, his body crackling with raw electricity as he hovered beside Jack. "We just need to contain them! We do not use lethal force on our own team!"
"NEGATIVE. TARGETS CLASSIFIED AS HOSTILE BIOLOGICAL EXTREMITIES. ELIMINATE."
Citizen V opened fire.
Jack of Hearts cursed, throwing up a massive energy shield to block the android's barrage. The U.S.Avangers were officially at war with themselves. They had to simultaneously dodge the lethal attacks of their own robotic teammate, fend off the bloodthirsty symbiote monsters that used to be their friends, and survive the endless swarm of alien foot soldiers pouring out of the alleys.
The street-level heroes weren't faring any better.
Operating under the assumption that Thor's lightning strike had cleared the sector, the Defenders had pushed deep into the back alleys of Hell's Kitchen to check on the local gang territories.
They walked right into a slaughterhouse.
The alleyways were completely choked with black symbiotes. But as the Defenders braced for a fight, they realized something was horrifyingly wrong. The monsters leading the pack weren't just random civilians.
Towering at the front of the horde was a symbiote with jagged, stone-like dermal plating—Tombstone. Beside him, swinging a massive, hardened biomechanical skull, was Hammerhead.
Knull hadn't just infected the innocent; he had actively targeted the criminal underworld. The city's gang leaders, armed with their inherent superpowers and specialized equipment, had been upgraded into elite symbiote generals. The Defenders were completely surrounded by heavily enhanced, alien-infused mobsters. And looking at the heroes' raw potential, the symbiotes clearly viewed the Defenders as the next high-quality upgrades for the hive.
As for Nick Fury's Thunderbolts? They were completely missing in action. Fury had nominally deployed them to run rescue ops alongside the Avengers, but they were nowhere to be found. They had vanished into the shadows on a classified, off-the-books objective.
"Avengers Tower has fallen!" Captain America yelled, hurling his vibranium shield to decapitate a leaping symbiote before catching it on the ricochet.
Steve Rogers stood back-to-back with Spider-Man in the center of a ruined intersection. The protective, golden mystical ward Doctor Strange had placed over the super-soldier was flickering violently, its magical reserves nearly drained.
"The dormant infections triggered inside the medical bays!" Steve reported, his chest heaving. "The survivors mutated and attacked the perimeter from the inside! We've lost the Baxter Building, too—Johnny Storm just flew off to reinforce the Fantastic Four!"
The primary evacuation squad had been whittled down to a skeleton crew. It was just Captain America, Iceman, Emma Frost, Spider-Man, and J. Jonah Jameson clutching his camera behind an overturned taxi. Five people holding the line against the apocalypse.
"Seriously!" Peter yelled, delivering a devastating, bio-electrically charged flying kick to the jaw of a charging monster. "If this were some massive comic-book crossover event, the Avengers, the Thunderbolts, the Defenders, and the Fantastic Four would all be getting their own six-issue spin-off series right now just to explain what the hell is happening!"
Peter landed in a crouch, his white lenses narrowing. "And what about Thor?! He just blasted the Hulk with enough lightning to power the eastern seaboard! Why didn't the symbiote peel off him?!"
"I don't know, son," Steve grunted, bashing an alien away with his shield. The golden magic flickering around his uniform let out a final, dying spark and vanished. His immunity was gone.
Steve looked at Peter, his blue eyes dead serious.
"Spider-Man. You need to leave. Now."
"Cap, I'm not leaving you here!"
"We will fall back to the Sanctum. It is the only secure location left on the island," Steve ordered, his tone brokering absolute authority. "Strange said you are the key to defeating Knull. I don't pretend to understand how you are the lynchpin to killing a space god, but if the Sorcerer Supreme says you are the key, you need to be out there figuring out how to turn the lock. Go!"
Peter stared at the captain for a fraction of a second. The tactical logic was undeniable. If Peter stayed here and just punched grunts, the world would end.
"Don't die, Cap," Peter said quietly.
He fired a web-line into the smoke and swung away, leaving the captain to hold the line.
Peter swung high above the financial district, tracking the deafening shockwaves of Thor and Hulk's battle.
He landed softly on the edge of a shattered skyscraper, peering over the gargoyle. Below, the two titans had completely leveled a four-block radius. Thor swung Mjolnir, channeling a blinding pillar of divine lightning directly into the symbiote-Hulk's face. The impact sent the gray-and-black behemoth crashing through a bank vault.
But when the smoke cleared, the symbiote hadn't flinched. The alien sludge just hissed, its tongue lolling out, and charged right back at the Thunder God.
"How is that possible?" Peter muttered to himself, watching the carnage. "Thor's lightning shattered Riot's connection. Why didn't it sever the Hulk? If Knull is projecting his power from that frozen dragon, how is he maintaining a permanent lock through a lightning strike?"
Because these symbiotes do not possess a mind to sever, Venom's dark voice echoed in Peter's head.
"What?"
To break a psychic link, the host and the symbiote must both possess individual consciousness, Venom explained. The drones Knull is forging tonight are empty vessels. They have no will. No personality. They are simply biological extensions of Knull's own fingers.
The realization hit Peter like a freight train. You can't sever a radio signal if the receiver doesn't have a computer chip; it's just a raw wire.
"So, we have to cut the signal at the source," Peter deduced, his mind racing. "We have to hit Grendel. Knull's consciousness is trapped inside the dragon. But we can't kill Grendel, because if the dragon dies, Knull wakes up on Klyntar and he begin his invasion all over again."
Peter paced the edge of the rooftop. "Ghost said Grendel doesn't have a host. The dragon is 100% pure symbiote biomass. How do we knock out a fifty-meter, unkillable alien dragon without actually killing it?"
It was a paradoxical nightmare.
SKRRRRK.
A horrific, wet scraping sound echoed directly behind Peter.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Peter sighed, his shoulders slumping. "Riot?"
Peter turned around.
Unlike Spider-Man, who gracefully adhered to the glass using micro-static friction, the massive, hulking gray symbiote had simply climbed the skyscraper by punching its thick, bladed fingers directly into the concrete and steel. Riot pulled himself over the ledge, his milky eyes locking onto the red and blue suit.
"Alright," Peter said, cracking his knuckles and deploying the glowing Dragonfang blade from his wrist. "Round three. Let's send you back to your maker."