From the moment the Goblin King's arrogant broadcast echoed across the city, J. Jonah Jameson stopped pretending to care about Roderick Kingsley. He snapped on the television. Then, unsatisfied with the volume, he threw open the office window to hear the maniacal voice bouncing off the skyscrapers.
"Madman!" Jonah roared, his face flushing a dangerous shade of purple. "The guy is completely out of his mind!"
Roderick Kingsley blinked from across the room. "Are you talking about Spider-Man?"
"I'm talking about that damn Goblin King! He's a complete lunatic! An antisocial psychopath! A terrorist! He's playing with the lives of everyone in New York like it's some sick joke! Who does he think he is? The Joker?!"
Phil Urich wandered back into the room, holding a camera. "What's going on?"
"That damned maniac, the Goblin King!" Jonah bellowed, pivoting mid-rant. "What the hell is his endgame? Hunting down superheroes?"
"Didn't you always say Spider-Man was a masked menace?" Phil asked, raising an eyebrow. "Shouldn't you be thrilled two criminals are taking each other out?"
Jonah slammed a fist on the windowsill. "That is the police's job! Unless it's an absolute emergency, vigilantes have no right to act as judge, jury, and executioner. And criminals sure as hell don't get a free pass to murder vigilantes in the street!"
Mary Jane wasn't listening. She stared out the glass. A swarm of goblins tore through the sky. They were heading directly toward her.
Wait. Not her. They were swarming the building.
"JARVIS can't crack the NYPD's security network!" Tony Stark slammed his fist against the holographic table. He gritted his teeth, glaring at the cascading streams of red code. "They're using a stream cipher with a true random number generator. The encryption key shifts every microsecond based on physical environmental variables. JARVIS's brute-force algorithms can't keep up. The decryption relies on real-time air humidity, localized solar radiation, minute weather fluctuations—if I can't isolate the exact physical seeds, the cipher is mathematically unbreakable!"
Hank Pym leaned over a secondary console, his fingers flying across the glass interface. "Norman Osborn just sent a secure transmission. He's driving to Avengers Tower."
Tony didn't look up. "Why?"
"He tried to manually sever the Oscorp servers running the NYPD network," Hank replied. "It failed. The system locked him out and started running autonomously. He tried to override it with his own AI, but he can't initiate a manual restart."
Steve Rogers stood by the panoramic window. He tracked a distant, flashing explosion high above the Manhattan skyline. He tapped his earpiece. "What's the play here, son?"
"Keep the team grounded, Cap," Peter's voice crackled over the comms. "I'll handle them."
Peter stood on the edge of a midtown rooftop. He tracked the incoming swarm of gliders screaming toward his coordinates. He took a steadying breath and popped open a concealed compartment on his utility belt.
Hank Pym's shrunken spider-drones were still nestled inside. He needed them. Roderick Kingsley's studio wasn't rigged with explosives, but these Goblins were.
The problem was time. Peter wasn't worried about dodging a few dozen gray-suited lunatics on jet-boards. He was terrified of the ticking clocks wired into their chests. He had to disarm them mid-fight. He had to keep the battle at high altitude. Pumpkin bombs had a notoriously small blast radius, but if one went off at street level, civilians would die.
The black symbiote shifted beneath his suit. Venom let out a low, vibrating purr in Peter's mind. The alien sensed his host's rising fury. It latched onto that rage, flooding Peter's nervous system with cold, dark adrenaline.
Fearless.
Peter kicked off the ledge. He launched himself directly into the oncoming Goblin legion.
A Gray Goblin reached him first. The thrall cackled, raising a glowing pumpkin bomb. Peter fired a thick glob of webbing directly into his face. He grabbed the Goblin by the collar, ripped the bomb from his hand, and hurled it skyward. It detonated harmlessly in the clouds.
Peter didn't stop moving. He stripped the rest of the Goblin's bandolier and tossed it. The entire payload exploded seconds later. He deployed a micro-drone to snip the thrall's internal fuse. Once the drone flashed green on his HUD, Peter drove a heavy punch into the Goblin's jaw. He fired two web-lines, pinning the unconscious rider and his glider to a nearby skyscraper.
Three other Goblins swooped past. They didn't aim at Peter. They hurled their bombs at the webbed thrall on the wall.
The blasts converged. The pinned Goblin burned to ash in a heartbeat.
"Oh, the tragedy!" The Goblin King's voice mocked through the public address system. "Look at the brave Spider-Man trying to save my poor, brainwashed foot soldiers! What if that guy was a scumbag? What if he deserved it? Don't worry, Spidey, I'll roast him just to be safe!"
The voice cackled. "Hey, what if he was a saint? Should I feel bad?" A pause. "Nah! He's already dead!"
Thousands of New Yorkers stared up from the asphalt. They watched the aerial dogfight unfold in terrified silence. Peter strictly maintained the engagement zone at least a hundred feet above the street.
The Goblins adapted. They started diving.
A Pumpkin-head variant tilted his glider into a steep nosedive. He aimed straight for a crowded intersection. He raised a bomb.
Peter fired a web-line. He caught the Goblin's back. He hauled backward, wrenching the glider off course. The bomb slipped from the thrall's grip and exploded in mid-air. The riderless glider spun wildly, rocketing back toward Peter.
Peter twisted his hips, dodging the razor-sharp wings. He snagged the glider with a web and whipped it around like a flail. He smashed it directly into another approaching Goblin. The secondary explosion painted the sky in a blinding burst of orange fire.
The flaming wreckage plummeted toward the crowd.
Black, liquid tendrils erupted from Peter's shoulders. The symbiote snapped out, catching both ruined gliders mid-fall. Peter swung his arms. He used the momentum to slam the burning scrap metal safely against a concrete wall.
"Double kill!" The Goblin King cheered. "Or is it a triple? Did Spider-Man know that bomb would go off? Maybe! Maybe not! Like I said, dead is dead!"
Peter's jaw locked. He braced for the next wave.
His spider-sense screamed.
A Gray Goblin blitzed him from his blind spot. The thrall tackled Peter, locking his arms. "Got him!"
Venom reacted instantly. The black mass surged outward, physically shoving the Goblin away with brutal force.
Simultaneously, two other Goblins hurled bombs at Peter's exact location. With Peter shoved clear, the Gray Goblin absorbed the blasts point-blank. The man vaporized in a flash of heat.
One of the bombers banked too hard through the expanding fireball. He lost control, screaming as his glider clipped a traffic light. He plummeted to the asphalt. His neck snapped on impact.
This is not your fault.
Venom's voice echoed in Peter's head, attempting a rare moment of comfort.
Peter didn't offer a philosophical debate. He didn't spiral into guilt.
"I know!" Peter snapped out loud.
He fired a web. He ripped a damaged streetlamp from its concrete base. He swung it like a baseball bat. He caught an incoming Goblin right in the chest, launching the thrall over the skyline like a home run.
PS: Marvel Fun Fact!
Stream ciphers are a real-world encryption method! They work by combining plaintext digits with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream. Because normal computers can only generate pseudo-random numbers (which follow a predictable mathematical pattern if you figure out the seed), they can eventually be broken by advanced AI like JARVIS. However, if you use a True Random Number Generator (TRNG)—which relies on unpredictable physical phenomena like ocean waves, atmospheric noise, or in this case, real-time Manhattan weather and traffic—the cipher becomes theoretically unbreakable.