The blinding blue arcs of bio-electricity died down, leaving the air thick with the smell of ozone. The Green Goblin dropped to one knee. Smoke curled from his charred exoskeleton armor. He opened his mouth, drawing a breath to deliver a villainous monologue.
Peter didn't let him. He fired two weblines, snagged a parked sedan, spun on his heel, and slammed the two-ton vehicle directly into the Goblin's chest.
"Sorry!" Peter yelled over the crunch of crumpling steel. "I'm on a really tight schedule today!"
A localized explosion blew the sedan's chassis apart. The Goblin stepped out of the blazing inferno, completely unharmed. A slow, manic grin stretched across his emerald face. "Did you know, Spider-Man, that Oscorp supplies the autonomous driving subroutines for nearly forty percent of the vehicles in Manhattan?"
Peter's spider-sense was still jammed, but he didn't need precognition to hear the sudden chorus of engines gunning to life. Headlights snapped on all the way down the avenue. Horns blared. Tires squealed against the asphalt as a dozen unmanned cars swerved onto the sidewalk, barreling directly toward him.
Peter vaulted over a charging taxi. He handspringed off the hood of a luxury sedan, twisting mid-air as a delivery van slammed into a fire hydrant right where he had been standing. The street descended into pure vehicular anarchy. The few civilians who hadn't already fled shrieked, scrambling for the subway entrances.
"I exist within the network!" the Goblin King's voice boomed from the hijacked car radios. "I am in the grid! I can do so many wonderful things!" The Goblin snapped his armored fingers. "For example... I've been waiting for the perfect moment to use this!"
A high-pitched, whining roar eclipsed the sound of the car horns.
Peter spun around. A massive commercial airliner plunged through the cloud cover. The nose was angled sharply downward, aimed squarely at the Daily Bugle building. The AI had hijacked the flight controls. It was trying to replicate 9/11.
"What are you going to do, insect?!" the Goblin cackled, pointing at the falling behemoth. "Do you think you can catch a Boeing 747? Who do you think you are, Superman? You can't save them! You can only save yourself! My body will survive the impact, but you and everyone in that building are going to burn—"
The Goblin's monologue died in his throat.
A streak of blinding lightning cracked across the sky. A towering figure draped in a heavy crimson cape intercepted the airliner's descent. He carried a silver hammer. The god of thunder planted his boots against the nose of the plane, his muscles bulging as he physically arrested its momentum. Sparks showered the sky as Thor redirected the colossal aircraft, guiding it gently toward a safe water landing in the Hudson River.
Peter blew out a long breath. "Looks like Point Break finally finished his vacation in the Nine Realms," he quipped, turning back to the Goblin. "What else you got?"
The Goblin opened his mouth, but a sharp beep from his wrist console interrupted him. His manic grin vanished. Deep beneath the city, his secondary laboratory had just triggered a catastrophic breach alarm. The floorboards of his subterranean bunker had been ripped to shreds by massive, green hands. The Hulk had arrived. The beast was currently tearing through the remaining vat-grown Goblin thralls like tissue paper.
Peter cracked his knuckles, closing the distance between them step by step. "Hiding your lab in the city's ancient sewer system was a solid play. Real phantom-of-the-opera stuff. But you made one huge mistake. You can't manufacture the Goblin serum without emitting trace amounts of raw gamma radiation. Did you honestly think you could hide a gamma signature from Dr. Bruce Banner? That's literally his whole gimmick!"
The Goblin's face twisted into a mask of pure fury. But Peter wasn't relaxing yet. Tony Stark's deduction echoed in his head. The digital AI Goblin and this biological clone didn't actually care about each other. The AI had manipulated the board. It had a backup plan. If it lost its physical pawn, it would retreat into a secure server and wait. Or, it would secure a better host.
"I haven't lost, insect," the Goblin spat, his eyes darting frantically. "This grand performance isn't over."
"Let me guess," Peter said, tilting his head. "Your biological body is cooked, so the AI is looking for a new hard drive. You want to overwrite my brain. You want to walk away in my suit, pretend Spider-Man won, and live my life. And if you can't do that, you'll just upload into a secure console somewhere and go to sleep."
Peter stopped walking. He stared straight at the Goblin. "But here's the real question: are you sure you still control the internet?"
The Goblin went entirely rigid.
Hank Pym had pulled the trigger. Ultron was online. The newly birthed AI, imprinted with Pym's own neuro-patterns, was currently waging a silent, apocalyptic war against the Goblin AI in the digital ether. Ultron was younger, lacking the Goblin's months of predictive learning. In a straight fight, the Goblin AI would eventually crush Pym's creation.
But the Goblin was trapped. If it focused all its processing power on Ultron, it couldn't dedicate resources to securing a biological host. If it retreated into a bunker, Ultron would eventually hunt it down and systematically delete its code.
"I am still here, Spider-Man," the Goblin's voice rasped, the digital overlay glitching for a microsecond. "You have nothing to worry about."
"Okay," Peter said, crossing his arms. "Let's test that. Spider-Man's real identity is Peter Parker."
The Goblin's robotic eyes flared, then dimmed. The digital AI operating the armor froze entirely.
Norman Osborn had programmed one absolute, unbreakable directive into his core architecture: protect himself by erasing Peter Parker's identity from all digital records. It was a true-random encrypted loop. And Peter had just activated it.
Deep in the global network, the AI Goblin's programming hijacked its own core processors. It began frantically scrubbing the internet, tearing through trillions of data packets, automatically searching for the name 'Peter Parker' to delete it.
The paradox demanded massive amounts of processing power. It forced the Goblin AI to divert ninety percent of its resources away from its firewall.
Inside Avengers Tower, Tony Stark and Hank Pym watched their monitors light up. They didn't know what Peter had said, but they saw the opening. Ultron surged forward. The infant AI mercilessly exploited the Goblin's lagging defenses, tearing into its source code and systematically erasing the Goblin's footprint from the network.
"Stop! Stop the sequence!" the Goblin screamed, clutching his helmet as the digital entity panicked. He was being deleted. "I still have a way out! I still have a vessel!"
The Goblin locked his blazing eyes on Peter. The biological clone would have to do the heavy lifting to secure the host.
"You made a fatal miscalculation, insect!" the Goblin roared, igniting his thrusters and charging forward. "You abandoned your symbiote suit to gain a temporary advantage! You left yourself exposed!"
The Green Goblin bared his razor-sharp teeth, preparing to beat the teenager to death and steal his mind. "You are facing an enemy who surpasses you in every way! Prepare to die, Spider-Man!"
PS: Marvel Fun Fact!
In classic Marvel Comics lore, Ultron wasn't created by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner—he was entirely the brainchild of Dr. Hank Pym! Pym mapped his own erratic brainwaves to give Ultron consciousness, which is exactly why the murderous robot inherited Hank's deep-seated insecurities, god-complex, and explosive temper.