Phil Urich had a massive, terrifying secret: he was a superhero.
It started two weeks ago. Like half the city, Phil had received a strange, metallic sphere. A holographic warlord calling himself Kang the Conqueror delivered a grim prophecy. In the original timeline, Phil was destined to inject himself with the Green Goblin serum, fight crime as the heroic Goblin Knight, and eventually suffer a total psychotic break, devolving into a villain called the Goblin King. But history had fractured. The timeline had shifted.
Phil had done what any sane New Yorker would do: he called the cops. Two beat cops showed up, refused to even bag the metal sphere as evidence, and told him to stop wasting police time with science-fiction stories.
Phil kept the serum. Days later, he stumbled into a convenience store robbery. Faced with the choice of walking away or doing something, Phil injected the formula. He pulled his jacket hood over his head, hid his face, and dismantled the armed crew.
The adrenaline high didn't last. Phil quickly discovered the robbers were muscle for a vicious Manhattan crime syndicate. Panic set in. If the mob found out who he was, they wouldn't just come for him. They would go after his parents. They would go after his uncle, Ben Urich—the Daily Bugle's top investigative reporter.
Terrified, Phil hid his identity. He locked the glider and the pumpkin bombs in his closet. He hadn't touched the weapons of mass destruction since.
Then, this morning happened.
Phil watched the news footage of the Goblin King's maniacal army. He watched them laugh while hurling explosives at civilians. The reality of the serum crashed down on him. The formula didn't just give you strength; it actively rotted your brain into a psychopathic pulp.
Am I going to turn into that?
Desperate and terrified, Phil packed his Goblin gear into a cardboard box. He hauled it all the way to the Daily Bugle offices. He needed to confess to Uncle Ben. If things went south, maybe Ben could contact the Avengers to extract the serum from his veins.
Phil stepped off the elevator, his knuckles white around the cardboard box. He could hear J. Jonah Jameson screaming from fifty feet down the hall.
"It's amateur hour!" Jonah roared, his face an angry, pulsing red. He was pacing behind his desk, ranting about Spider-Man violently hauling Roderick Kingsley out of the Fantasy World studio. "Anyone with functioning eyes can see Roderick is a sleazeball! He's a born actor! He knew we were coming! Our investigation was flawless! We could have leveraged his sheer arrogance to squeeze a full confession out of him! But no! The web-head has to smash through a window and ruin a perfectly good journalistic sting!"
Ben Urich leaned against a filing cabinet, completely unfazed by his boss's rising blood pressure. "They've got a telepath on their payroll, Jonah. They'll probably just read his mind to get what they need."
"Mind reading?!" Jonah slammed both hands onto his desk. "That is a gross violation of civil liberties! It's a complete trampling of a citizen's right to privacy! And no judge in this city is going to accept a telepathic vision as admissible evidence in a court of law!"
Ben just offered a mild shrug.
Phil swallowed hard. He squeezed past a pair of scrambling editors. "Excuse me. Mr. Jameson?" He set the heavy box down on a side table. "I pulled the archival files you asked for. Everything we have on Roderick Kingsley and Dr. Barton Hamilton. Mostly old magazine profiles."
"Fine. Good work, Urich," Jonah muttered, barely glancing at the folders. His mind was already spinning toward his next grievance. "And another thing! Why was Roderick so prepared for a surprise Daily Bugle ambush interview? There's a mole in this building! Someone tipped him off! I will not tolerate a rat in my bullpen!"
Phil nodded frantically, sweat beading on his forehead. He turned away, desperate to blend into the background.
He noticed Mary Jane Watson. The redhead, currently working her reporter-track internship, was standing dead still by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. She was staring out at the Manhattan skyline, her eyes wide and unblinking.
"Mr. Jameson?" She asked, her voice wavering. "Is there... a situation outside?"
Jonah scowled. "What is it now, Watson? Another vigilante turf war?"
"No," Mary Jane whispered, taking a slow step backward. "It looks like... it looks like a Goblin is flying straight at us."
The bullpen froze. Everyone had seen the morning news.
Jonah didn't hesitate. "Get down!" he shrieked, diving under his heavy oak desk and covering his head with his arms.
Unlike Hamilton's theatrical broadcast, the AI Green Goblin hadn't called the news stations. It hadn't hacked the Times Square monitors. It was moving with surgical, terrifying silence. It just needed a host—a compatible body that the Avengers hadn't dragged into a holding cell yet.
Mary Jane threw herself behind a large potted ficus plant. She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for the shattering glass and the inevitable blast of a pumpkin bomb.
The screech of a jet-glider rattled the windowpanes.
Suddenly, the air inside the bullpen snapped with static electricity. A ring of golden, burning sparks flared into existence directly in front of the glass.
A figure stepped through the portal. He wore a sleek, pitch-black Spider-Man suit.
Peter Parker didn't even break his stride. He stepped up to the reinforced glass and shattered the entire floor-to-ceiling pane with a single, devastating punch.
Outside, a Gray Goblin reared back on his glider, hurling a glowing pumpkin bomb straight at the breach.
Peter's arm blurred. He fired a thick webline, catching the explosive mid-air. With a violent jerk of his wrist, he whipped the bomb backward. It detonated over the street in a harmless, deafening blossom of orange fire.
Before the Goblin could react, Peter fired two more webs. They plastered against the thrall's chest. Peter planted his boots on the window frame and hauled backward with superhuman strength capable of throwing multi-ton marble columns.
The Goblin screamed as he was ripped off his glider. He flew through the shattered window, sailed across the bullpen, and slammed into the far concrete wall with a sickening crunch. Peter pinned him to the plaster with a rapid-fire barrage of industrial silk.
The room fell dead silent, save for the wind howling through the broken window.
Mary Jane slowly stood up from behind the planter. She brushed the dirt off her skirt and walked over to the overturned desk. "You're alright, Mr. Jameson," she said dryly.
Peter stepped past her. He grabbed the edge of the massive, solid-oak desk and casually flipped it aside with one hand, exposing a trembling J. Jonah Jameson.
Jonah blinked up at the black-suited vigilante. "Oh. Uh, Spider-Man? Why did you just throw my desk?!"
"I'm having a really bad week," Peter said. His voice was flat, carrying zero trace of his usual humor. He didn't offer any further explanation. "Which one of you is Phil Urich? I need to escort him to Avengers Tower immediately."
Ben Urich pushed off the filing cabinet, his investigative instincts flaring. He stepped between Peter and his nephew. "Why do you need him?"
"He received one of Kang's metal spheres," Peter said bluntly. "He's a genetic candidate for the Goblin serum. The AI Green Goblin is actively hunting him to steal his body."
The blood drained from Phil's face.
Before Phil could say a word, Jonah Jameson pointed a trembling, accusatory finger from the floor.
"You!" Jonah roared at the terrified teenager. "You were the mole, Urich!"
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