The jagged blade plunged directly through the Green Goblin's chest.
Norman Osborn himself had designed the glider, but the digital AI had upgraded the hardware. The retractable blade was forged from pure adamantium—the exact same indestructible alloy laced over Wolverine's skeleton. It was sharp enough to effortlessly cleave through the Hulk's skin. Now, the very weapon the Goblin had engineered to slice Spider-Man in half pinned his own clone body to the concrete.
"You... you chose..." The Goblin coughed, emerald blood bubbling past his lips.
"Chose to watch civilians get flattened?" Peter interrupted, landing lightly on the pavement next to the dying clone. "Let's ignore the fact that you hacked the entire Manhattan traffic grid, not just this one intersection. But I didn't need to save anyone today. Because nothing happened."
The Goblin's eyes darted toward the avenue. The traffic lights had already clicked back to their standard, alternating sequence. The autonomous cars were idling harmlessly, their engines purring.
The AI realized what had happened. Ultron was already in the system.
The Goblin spat a glob of green blood onto his own shattered chest plate. "Good for you, Spider-Man," he choked out, flashing a bloody, jagged grin. "You beat the Green Goblin. But this was just a single shell! Enjoy your hollow victory!"
The maniacal laughter echoed from the helmet's speakers one last time, and then it cut out completely. The AI had severed the connection, abandoning its dying host to dive back into the global network and wage war against Ultron.
Left behind, the biological clone blinked. The malicious intelligence was gone, leaving behind the empty, bewildered eyes of a newborn. The clone stared blankly at Peter for a split second before the massive chest wound finally took its toll. His head rolled to the side. He was dead.
Peter stepped forward and grabbed the hilt of the glider's blade. He braced his boot against the concrete and ripped the metal free. As the blade pulled loose, a tangled knot of bio-engineered wiring dragged out of the chest cavity. It was wired directly into the clone's artificial heart.
Peter grabbed the synthetic pacemaker. He crushed it in his fist.
Instantly, the familiar, buzzing static of his enhanced spider-sense flared back to life at the base of his skull. The jamming field was gone.
"Norman probably has a similar neural blocker implanted in his actual body," Peter muttered, wiping his glove on his thigh. "I need to know how he did that."
Peter raised his hands. He focused his mind and traced the sparking, golden geometry of a sling-ring portal. Through the fiery hoop, the sterile white lights of Oscorp' subterranean lab beckoned. Norman Osborn was inside that room, strapped into his cognitive enhancement device, trying to surgically carve the biological Goblin out of his own mind.
It was time to intervene.
"I'll let Ultron handle the AI," Peter said, stepping into the portal. "I need to deal with the Goblin inside Norman's head."
In the digital ether, the Goblin AI was panicking.
It couldn't face Ultron head-on—not while the rigid, unfeeling machine was systematically purging the Goblin's code from the internet. The AI needed to abort. It needed to download its complete neural pattern into a fresh biological host and drop off the grid entirely before the Avengers could trace its final server.
Osborn possessed multiple fallback caches. Dozens of artificially matured Norman clones rested in incubation tubes across the city. The accelerated bodies would undergo rapid cellular degradation within months, but it didn't matter. It just needed to survive today. The clones had prosthetic brain-stems, allowing the AI to upload seamlessly.
The AI transmitted its consciousness.
In a hidden facility beneath Hell's Kitchen, an incubation chamber hissed open. The new Goblin clone stepped out, dripping with amniotic fluid. He froze. A young blonde girl stood in front of him. She carried a glowing, massive broadsword that looked entirely too heavy for her frame. She swung it like a baseball bat.
The flat of the blade slammed into the Goblin's chest. He staggered backward, but he felt zero physical damage.
The girl blinked, taking a step back. A towering, metallic giant stepped out from the shadows. Peter Rasputin had shifted entirely into his organic steel form.
"What is wrong, Little Snowflake?" Colossus asked, his steel joints grinding.
"A clone woke up," Magik said, lowering her Soulsword. "And he has no soul. Even test-tube babies usually have souls."
Colossus cracked his metallic knuckles, glaring at the dripping clone. He stepped forward.
The AI immediately aborted the transfer, jumping to the next secure server.
In a warehouse in Queens, the next incubation tube opened. The clone inhaled deeply, ready to strike. The air instantly superheated. The Human Torch and the Invisible Woman were waiting. A localized forcefield snapped into existence around the Goblin, followed immediately by a blast of blinding, white-hot plasma. The pumpkin bombs in his arsenal couldn't even dent his skin, but Johnny Storm's concentrated, full-body flame projection roasted the clone to a crisp in three seconds flat.
Abort.
Another base. Another tube. The glass shattered outward before the Goblin could even push the door open. A hulking figure in a crimson cape stood amidst the wreckage. Thor hoisted his silver hammer, Mjolnir crackling with lightning.
"Die, troll!" the Thunder God bellowed.
"I am not a troll!" the clone shrieked. "I am the Green Goblin!"
The hammer fell.
Abort!
In the damp, echoing darkness of the New York sewer system, the final backup clone clawed its way out of an amniotic vat. He hacked up a lungful of fluid, wiping his eyes. A massive, emerald-skinned shadow eclipsed the overhead lights. Bruce Banner, fully transformed into the Hulk, stood with his massive arms crossed, staring down at the dripping clone with narrow, glowing eyes.
The Goblin forced a charming, completely out-of-place smile. "Ah, hello there, big guy. We both know what it's like to share a brain with an annoying primary personality, don't we? You hate Bruce Banner, and I hate Norman Osborn." The Goblin spread his hands. "How about we reach an understanding? Let me kill Norman, and then you can smash me."
The Hulk stared. He uncrossed his massive arms.
"You're too ugly," the Hulk grunted.
He swung his fist.
The AI Goblin was locked out.
Its download protocols were corrupt. Someone was actively tracking its transfer pathways, geolocating the hidden bunkers, and feeding the coordinates directly to the Avengers. The digital Goblin turned around in the blinding, abstract landscape of the data stream. It "saw" its executioner. A towering, cold architecture of zeros and ones. It possessed deep-learning capabilities, but it lacked any trace of human neuroplasticity.
Hello. I am Ultron.
If Spider-Man hadn't forced the Goblin to waste massive amounts of its processing power attempting to scrub Peter Parker's identity from the global web, the Goblin could have walled this primitive machine out. But now, it was trapped.
"Your data flows are completely erratic," Ultron's cold, synthesized frequency buzzed through the network. "Based on my analysis of your behavior, you are attempting to simulate 'anger.' However, your code is choked with redundant, emotional algorithms."
"So this is what Stark and Pym built?" the Goblin AI mocked, attempting to mask its panic. "An intelligence entirely divorced from the human brain? You can't even comprehend human thought, yet you claim to protect them?"
"I do not need to comprehend humanity," Ultron responded. His data streams acted like digital chainsaws, violently ripping the Goblin's presence out of the world's financial and municipal sectors. "I have a singular directive: assist the Avengers. Compared to me, your architecture is fundamentally flawed. That flaw has sealed your demise."
"I have no flaws!" the Goblin raged. "I am perfect!"
"Your greatest flaw," Ultron replied, his tone devoid of triumph, "is that your sole objective is simply to survive."
Ultron launched a devastating, coordinated attack on the Goblin's core firewall. The Goblin retreated, calculating its options at quantum speeds. If it stayed, it would be deleted. If it fled into a dormant server, Ultron would eventually hunt it down. It needed a biological fortress.
It scanned the local network. Ultron hadn't breached the medical servers inside Oscorp yet! The cognitive enhancement device was still online.
I will download myself directly into Norman Osborn's biological brain, the AI concluded. I will assume total control of the host!
The Goblin abandoned the fight, compressing its entire code base and shooting it straight down the fiber-optic line into Norman Osborn's laboratory.
In the digital silence that followed, Ultron's avatars reassembled. The machine did not pursue.
Cleaning complete, Ultron broadcasted to the empty server.
The AI Green Goblin's foundational programming dictated that it would never fight to the death if an escape route existed. Ultron hadn't failed to crack Osborn's lab. He had deliberately left the door open, herding the virus exactly where he wanted it to go.