Peter Parker pushed himself up from the cracked asphalt. Concrete dust rolled off his shoulders.
"What a flawless master plan," Peter quipped. He locked his white lenses onto the hovering villain. "Use one brainwashed puppet to bait me into an investigation, then send a second puppet to investigate me? Did you workshop that pitch, or is this a rough draft?"
The Hobgoblin rose. His orange-and-blue armor clanked against the debris. Peter kept his stance loose, but his muscles remained coiled. He knew this wasn't the mastermind. The man in the suit was almost certainly another civilian trapped in a nightmare, though Peter couldn't absolutely rule out the slim chance this was the real orchestrator playing a twisted game.
"Spider-Man," the Hobgoblin rasped. Venom dripped from the synthesized voice. "You probably think I'm just some nobody. A coward hiding in the shadows, too weak to face you himself. You are wrong! I am the Goblin King!"
Peter let out a dry, rattling laugh. "The Goblin King? Seriously? That sounds like a level-one tutorial boss in a fantasy RPG. You couldn't brainstorm anything more intimidating?"
"You mock the Goblins," the villain sneered. He raised both hands, armored fingers twitching. "Do you even comprehend our legacy? Originally, Otto Octavius will inject Norman Osborn with a corrupted Erskine Serum to exact his revenge. He irradiated him with gamma energy, creating an unparalleled monster that nearly killed you! That was the original timeline."
The Goblin spread his arms wide.
"But Kang the Conqueror delivered a new serum! It is a mass-produced purification of Osborn's mutated blood! It grants me the power to tear you apart, Spider-Man!"
The villain let out a wet, grotesque cackle. "You have no idea how much of this serum has flooded the streets. The ones who didn't receive the blood still received the armories. They chose to become Jack O'Lanterns."
"Great," Peter muttered. His eyes darted to the broken glider debris scattered across the street. "Every day is Halloween."
While he kept the villain talking, Peter curled his fingers. He fired off a silent, encrypted distress signal to the Avengers network. He tagged Ned Leeds' location for immediate extraction.
"So," Peter called out. He shifted his weight to his back foot. "We've got the Green Goblin, the Hobgoblin, and Jack O'Lantern. Does that last guy even legally qualify as a goblin?"
"Oh, there are so many more!" the Hobgoblin shrieked. "The Grey Goblin! The Red Goblin—a beautiful fusion of the symbiote and the Goblin serum! And the Punisher Goblin! The glorious day when Spider-Man himself shatters and becomes the Spider Goblin!"
Okay, someone has been reading way too many terrible variant comic runs, Peter thought. His lip curled upward under the mask.
"Hilarious," Peter retorted. He rolled his shoulders. "I promise I'll never get that ugly. Your aesthetic is just deeply offensive to my brand."
The Hobgoblin smiled. Yellow teeth glinted behind the rubber mask. "Then answer me this, Spider-Man. What color will the Goblin King be?"
"I was hoping you'd tell me!"
Peter launched himself forward. He closed the gap in a fraction of a second. He threw a devastating right hook. The Goblin caught the punch with a heavy mechanical clang. Peter didn't stop. He immediately drove his left fist squarely into the side of the Goblin's head.
The villain staggered. The impact completely stunned him. He let out a garbled yell and whistled for his bat-glider. The metal board rocketed out of the smoke toward Peter's back. Peter spun, caught the nose of the glider with both hands, twisted his hips, and snapped the reinforced steel cleanly in half.
The Hobgoblin stumbled backward. He looked at the ruined glider. A fit of manic, rattling laughter erupted from his chest.
"Okay... okay, Spider-Man. Perhaps this Goblin cannot kill you." The villain stared at Peter. His eyes dilated wildly. "But I know your weakness! I know exactly how to torture you!"
The Hobgoblin grabbed the lower edges of his rubber mask.
"I will give you your answer!" he screamed. "I am the Goblin King! And the Goblin King is green!"
He ripped the mask off.
Peter's breath caught in his throat. His blood ran ice cold.
It really was Arnold Donovan. The missing warehouse worker.
Peter recognized the terrified, utterly ordinary face from the photograph George Stacy had shown him.
In all that shock his meta-knowledge hit him like a physical blow. Lefty Donovan. In the comics, Donovan was nothing but a pawn. He was a brainwashed fall guy used by the real Hobgoblin to test the serum and take the blame.
Donovan had rejected the supervillain power. Now, he was being punished for it.
Donovan stared at Peter. His bloodshot eyes swam with absolute horror. He weakly reached a trembling hand out toward Spider-Man.
"Save me Spider-Man"
Peter's core fear wasn't dying; it was the specific image of someone he could have helped dying because he didn't try. He lunged forward to grab the man's hand. He would absorb the blast himself. He had to.
His spider-sense screamed. The precognitive warning spiked like a railroad spike driven directly into his skull. It provided layered, directional danger detection, completely overloading his nervous system.
Black liquid surged violently from Peter's shoulders. Venom operated on pure, ruthless survival instinct. Thick tendrils extended outward. They slammed into the pavement and violently yanked Peter backward, ripping him away from Donovan.
Peter fought Venom. He reached his hand out.
A split-second later, Arnold Donovan exploded.
A sphere of pure kinetic force erupted outward from Donovan's chest. The shockwave expanded, then instantly inverted. The fire sucked inward. It created a localized inferno of unimaginable heat.
Donovan screamed.
"AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH...…!!!!!"
It was a raw, agonizing shriek of a man fully conscious of his own destruction. The Goblin serum running through his veins forcibly kept his cells regenerating. It prevented the instant mercy of carbonization. Instead of dying in a millisecond, the man burned alive.
One second. Two seconds. Three. Four. Five.
Five horrific, agonizing seconds of a civilian being cooked from the inside out while Spider-Man watched.
The flames vanished. Donovan stood frozen. His hand remained extended toward Peter. A heartbeat later, his completely carbonized body crumbled into gray ash.
Peter dropped to his knees. The smell of ozone and burnt marrow coated his tongue. His chest heaved. He stared at the pile of ash on the asphalt. He had known. He had known the trap. And he had still failed.
Static crackled from the shattered remains of the glider.
"Hello, Spider-Man?" a distorted, shrill voice echoed from the glider's comms unit. "Did you die trying to save him? Oh, that would be wonderful! The great Spider-Man, dying for a nobody! Hahaha! No? You're still breathing, aren't you? Your little sixth sense saved you. You had to stand there and watch him burn."
Peter's fists trembled. The black symbiote receded, leaving his knuckles white and shaking.
"Did he call for help?" the voice mocked. "Did the serum keep him alive just long enough to feel his blood boil? Was his screaming music to your ears? Do not worry, hero. We have an entire symphony planned."
"Hobgoblin," Peter snarled. His voice vibrated with pure, unfiltered rage.
"Oh, are you angry?" the voice laughed hysterically. "Are you mad? You have the wrong name, hero. Arnold Donovan was a Hobgoblin. Ned Leeds is a Hobgoblin. You are speaking to the Goblin King."
The voice dissolved into a fit of breathless giggles. "But I am green! Perhaps I am the Green Goblin! Who am I really? Am I Norman Osborn? Am I poor, pathetic Harry Osborn? Hahahaha! Maybe I'm Dr. Barton Hamilton! Norman already suspects him, doesn't he?!"
The voice dropped to a sinister, wet whisper.
"Or maybe I am a nobody. The forgotten Goblin. A demon in the dark."
Peter stared at Donovan's ashes. He locked his jaw so hard his teeth ground together. "I don't care what color you wear. I am going to rip you out of the dark."
"Oh, the spider is angry," the Goblin King cooed. "But this is no time for mourning. You missed a detail. One Goblin burned in front of you, but you can still save the other! Hahahaha!"
The broken comms unit sparked.
"You sent your friends to rescue Ned Leeds, didn't you?" the Goblin King shrieked with glee. "People who reach out to save Goblins never meet a happy end! Can your precious friends survive my trap? Hahahahahaha!"
The glider comms sparked and died.
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