Wanda Maximoff's fingers were violently trembling.
Thick spheres of dark crimson chaos magic surrounded Max Dillon, compressing him into a tight, floating sphere in the center of the crater. But the containment was failing. Max's skin had shifted from a pale blue to an almost translucent, blinding white. The ambient heat radiating off his body warped the air, and his screams sounded less human and more like the grinding of heavy industrial gears.
"The energy is compounding," Wanda gasped, cold sweat beading on her forehead. "He has nowhere to vent the current! If I keep compressing him, he is going to physically detonate."
Cutting off Genosha's power grid was no longer an option. Max had already gorged himself on too much voltage. His cellular structure was tearing itself apart.
Peter processed the tactical variables in a fraction of a second.
"Throw him up!" Peter yelled, pointing at the sky. "High as you can, right now!"
Wanda hesitated, her teeth gritted against the strain. "But—!"
"No buts, Wanda! Clear the blast radius!" Peter stepped forward. "We cannot risk the civilians. We don't know his explosive yield. Launch him!"
Wanda didn't argue. She threw both hands upward.
The crimson sphere shot into the night sky like a ballistic missile.
Peter didn't wait to watch. He tapped the mental trigger in his mind. Obsidian-black symbiote wash over him and tendrils erupted from his back, snapping outward into sleek, razor-thin glider wings. Peter bent his knees and launched himself off the pavement, catching the intense thermal updraft to chase the glowing human bomb into the clouds.
High above the Genoshan skyline, Max stabilized his flight path.
"Finally!" Max roared. The chaotic, agonizing pressure in his cells reached a breaking point. He didn't have to hold it in anymore. He raised his hands, aiming his palms directly downward at the densely populated metropolis. He was going to empty his entire battery into the island.
Then, he saw the black blur rocketing up toward him.
Max scoffed, his eyes burning white. "Spider-Man?! What are you going to do, bug? You think you can absorb a city's worth of current?!"
Peter knew he couldn't. Even with his bio-electric upgrades and the lingering residual tolerance from wielding Mjolnir, tanking a direct hit of that magnitude would instantly boil the blood in his veins.
So, he didn't try to catch it. He threw a distraction.
Peter fired two massive, thick streams of insulated webbing directly at Max's face. Max sneered, casually waving his hand. A jagged arc of lightning vaporized the incoming webbing into a cloud of fine, gray ash.
But it was just a smokescreen.
Peter dove straight through the cloud of ash. Max fired a desperate, point-blank bolt of lightning. The current clipped Peter's shoulder. His teeth violently rattled in his skull. His vision flashed a blinding white. He ignored the burning pain and closed the distance.
Peter slammed his hands squarely against Max's chest.
Instead of punching, Peter let the symbiote loose. The black alien biomass surged off Peter's arms, rapidly expanding to completely envelop Max's head, shoulders, and wrists.
The symbiote forcefully jerked Max's arms upward.
Max unleashed his payload. A blinding, deafening pillar of solid blue lightning erupted into the stratosphere, harmlessly dispersing the catastrophic voltage into the upper atmosphere. The Genoshan sky lit up as if it were high noon.
The agonizing pressure inside Max's body vanished. But his fury didn't.
Max channeled a high-voltage current directly across the surface of his own epidermis. The intense, searing heat instantly burned the symbiote. Venom shrieked in Peter's mind, violently recoiling and retreating back to Peter's suit to escape the thermal damage.
Peter didn't give Max a single second to breathe.
He fired two rapid web-lines, anchoring them to Max's shoulders. Peter yanked himself forward. Mid-freefall, he drove a brutal right hook directly into Max's jaw. Then a left.
Max tumbled through the air, enduring the relentless punches. Panic finally set in. He had dumped his lethal charge. He couldn't fry the spider. He realized, with absolute dread, exactly how this fight was going to end. He was going back to Mutant Prison. He was going to spend the rest of his life rotting in a cold, dark, rubber-lined cell without a single electrical outlet.
Max stared at Spider-Man. Absolute terror overtook his features.
"No!" Max shrieked.
Max's body simply gave up. The forced secondary mutation couldn't sustain the biological stress. A blinding, omnidirectional flash of plasma ignited the sky.
Peter threw his arms over his face, his lenses instantly blacking out to protect his retinas. The concussive shockwave hit Peter like a physical wall, blowing him backward into an uncontrolled spin.
When the spots finally cleared from his vision, Peter stabilized his freefall. He looked around the empty sky.
Max Dillon was completely gone. Did he just self-destruct? Peter thought, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Then, the ambient static electricity in the atmosphere shifted.
Thousands of stray, microscopic blue sparks paused in mid-air. They didn't dissipate. They violently snapped together, spiraling into a swirling vortex of raw current. Slowly, a distinct human silhouette formed out of the pure lightning.
Electro hovered in the air. He looked down at his intangible hands. He had no flesh. No bones. The secondary mutation had completely discarded his mortal shell. He was a being of pure, living energy.
He let out a low, echoing sigh.
"I am starving..."
It wasn't a biological hunger. He didn't crave food or water. It was a hollow, endless void in the center of his consciousness that demanded raw wattage. He was completely drained. He didn't care about the wretched mutants on the island below him. He needed an all-you-can-eat buffet of electrical power.
He turned his glowing gaze toward the American mainland. Manhattan.
With a deafening sonic boom, Electro streaked across the Atlantic Ocean like a blue comet.
Peter was still plummeting toward the earth. He let the wind roar in his ears, waiting for the optimal altitude to deploy the glider wings again. Freefalling was simply faster.
Suddenly, his downward momentum ceased.
An invisible, gentle grip caught him in mid-air. He was smoothly lowered the remaining fifty feet, his sneakers touching down softly on the cobblestone plaza.
Magneto lowered his right hand. A supremely smug, satisfied smile played across the mutant king's lips.
"My profound thanks, Spider-Man," Magneto said smoothly, his cape settling around his shoulders. "You have spared Genosha immense collateral damage and saved countless lives."
Magneto turned his gaze away from Peter, looking directly at Logan and the panting, exhausted squad of New Mutants standing nearby.
"It appears your new generation of X-Men is woefully immature, Wolverine," Magneto noted coldly.