Max drove through the city toward the research facility where Doctor Octavius was working under Fisk. He already knew what was going to happen tonight. The Spider-Men were going to hit this place within the next couple of hours.
He just planned to get there first.
He parked a short distance away from the building. The black McLaren looked completely normal on the outside now, but Max could feel the hellfire engine quietly rumbling like a living creature waiting for orders.
As he stepped out, one of the scientists walking toward the building noticed the car and stopped.
"Man, that's so cool," the scientist said, walking closer to look at it.
Max paused for a moment, then glanced back at the car.
He had been wanting to test something.
He leaned slightly toward the hood and whispered quietly, "You can eat him if you can."
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the car hummed.
The engine growled softly, almost happily.
As the scientist got closer, the hood suddenly popped open.
Before the man could react, black tendrils shot out from inside the engine bay, wrapping around his arms and torso. He didn't even have time to scream before he was dragged forward and pulled into the hood of the car.
The hood slammed shut.
There was a muffled crunching sound.
Then silence.
Max stared at the car for a moment.
"…Good car," he said calmly. "I'll be back."
The engine rumbled again like it understood.
Max walked toward the facility entrance, his clothes shifting as black biomass crawled over his body and reshaped into a scientist's outfit—lab coat, dress shirt, ID badge, even glasses.
He adjusted the glasses slightly.
"Alright," he muttered. "Let's see what you guys are hiding."
Getting through the security doors was surprisingly easy. Max had already looked into the facility layout beforehand.
Most of the doors had electronic locks, but the system was flawed—if the lock mechanism failed or was forced open, the system treated it as a normal manual override instead of triggering an alarm.
So Max simply applied a small amount of pressure at the exact weak point of each lock, breaking the internal mechanism without setting anything off.
Door after door opened without issue.
Eventually, he reached the area he was actually interested in.
The server room.
He knew the Spider-Men would be focused on Doc Ock, the collider, and the labs. They probably wouldn't check the data servers right away.
Which meant this was his chance.
Surprisingly, the server room security was minimal. Just a locked door and a camera that Max easily disabled by cutting the wire at a precise point he instinctively knew would loop the last five seconds of footage.
He sat down at one of the computers and started trying to access the system.
"…Alright, let's see…" he muttered, typing slowly. "I know basic hacking, but nothing crazy. So what am I supposed to—"
He stopped.
His vision changed.
The screen didn't just look like code anymore.
He could see it.
Weak points in the security structure. Flaws in the encryption. Lines of code highlighted in his mind like cracks in a wall.
He instinctively knew where to insert commands, where to reroute processes, where to bypass authentication.
"…What the hell…" he whispered.
His fingers moved almost on their own, typing commands he didn't consciously know but somehow understood perfectly.
Within minutes, he was inside the system.
Max leaned back slightly, thinking.
"So… I really was a mutant," he said quietly. "The ability to see weaknesses… and now the symbiote enhanced it to work on everything. Machines, code, systems…"
That explained a lot.
He started digging through the files, searching for anything useful.
"Let's see… research logs… anomaly reports… experimental energy readings…"
Then something caught his eye.
"Oh?"
He opened a file and skimmed through it quickly.
"They have a partial solution for cellular decay," he muttered. "Highly unethical, lots of human testing… yeah, that tracks for Fisk."
He kept digging deeper.
Eventually, he found something more interesting.
Anomaly Reports.
"…Several anomalies detected over the last couple of weeks… energy signatures not matching known materials… organic readings inside meteor fragments…"
Max froze.
"The asteroid…" he said slowly.
He pulled up another file.
Impact reports.
Recovery attempts.
Biological residue found inside fragments.
Max leaned closer to the screen.
"That asteroid that hit the graveyard… was one of their anomalies?" he muttered. "Meaning something on it… or in it… was organic."
His mind started racing.
"Did something come out of that meteor? Did something take Alice's body? Her soul? Was she revived somehow? Taken to another universe? Experimented on?"
Before he could dig further—
Alarms blared throughout the facility.
Max sighed.
"Ah… damn. The Spider-Men are here already."
Suddenly the computer screen locked him out, and the server room lights turned red.
A mechanical voice spoke overhead.
"Oxygen purge initiated in server room."
Max looked up as vents opened in the ceiling.
Air began to get thinner.
"…Interesting," he muttered. "Guess they actually did think things through."
He stood up, walked to the door, and punched the exact weak point in the locking mechanism. The door snapped open instantly.
In the hallway, chaos had already started—guards running, alarms blaring, people shouting about intruders.
Perfect cover.
Max calmly walked through the confusion like he belonged there, then slipped into a side hallway and exited the building without anyone paying attention to him.
Outside, he looked back once.
He was tempted to meet the Spider-Men now.
But he knew something.
They would eventually go to Peter Parker's secret bunker.
That would be a better time to introduce himself.
Right now, though…
He had a strange feeling in his chest.
A pull.
Something telling him he needed to go home.
"…Yeah," Max muttered as he walked toward his car. "Something's about to happen."
And he had learned by now—
When his instincts told him something like that…
He should listen.