Toby moved.
The taxi driver only heard a sharp whistle of wind. By the time he turned his head, the passenger who had just opened the door had vanished into thin air.
The driver blinked, looking around the empty street. He figured he was being pranked for a YouTube video. "Motherf—! If you don't want a ride, don't flag the cab! Don't let me catch you again, or I'll bust your head open!"
In the "Land of the Free," between the daily gunfire and the general madness of New York, you learned to expect the bizarre. The driver muttered a few more curses, slammed his door, and sped off.
He didn't see the shadow that had flickered into the mouth of a nearby alley.
Deep in the darkness, Toby held the secretary by the face, hoisting him three feet off the ground. The man's muffled whimpers were the only sound in the alley; Toby's grip on his jaw was so tight he couldn't even scream for help.
Toby didn't waste time with a monologue. He slammed the man's head into the brick wall with the casual force of a wrecking ball.
CRACK.
The sound was like a watermelon hitting pavement. Toby let the lifeless body slump to the ground, wiped his blood-flecked glove on the man's expensive silk suit, and picked up the fallen briefcase.
Was it cruel? Toby didn't care about "innocence." In the shadow of a man like Norman Osborn, no one was untainted. This secretary had spent years burying Osborn's bodies and silencing his victims. He was the frost at the edge of the avalanche—and today, the mountain had finally come down.
Toby popped the case, removed the vials of regeneration serum, and webbed them into a secure bundle inside his suit. He tossed the high-tech briefcase into a dumpster.
Rule number one of a heist: never take the container home. A company like OsCorp definitely had GPS trackers embedded in the casing. Toby had learned that lesson the hard way during his early days with Kingpin, when a "clean" bag of cash turned out to have a hidden transmitter. Since then, he only took the prize, never the packaging.
From the kill to the acquisition to the exit, the entire operation took less than sixty seconds.
While Toby was leaping across rooftops toward home, the battle on the Manhattan Bridge was still in full swing. It had devolved into a bizarre game of "toss and catch." The Lizard was hurling cars off the bridge, and Peter was frantically firing webs to snag them before they hit the water.
It was almost poetic, if you ignored the screaming passengers inside the vehicles.
Toby glanced back one last time and shook his head. They were two sides of the same coin, but their priorities were worlds apart. Peter's first instinct was to save every soul; Toby's was to finish the job. If the Lizard were Toby's target, he wouldn't have bothered with the cars. He would have used the distraction to put a fist through the monster's heart.
Good luck, Pete, Toby thought, disappearing into the skyline. I've got research to do.
Ten minutes later, Toby was back in the living room, sitting on the sofa with Ben and May, calmly watching the live news coverage of the "Dinosaur Man" vs. the "Man in Tights."
When Ben asked where Peter was, Toby didn't skip a beat. "I talked to him. Turns out he was depressed over a girl at school. I gave him a pep talk, and he's currently climbing out his window to go beg her for a second chance. He was too embarrassed to walk out the front door."
Ben and May, being the soft-hearted souls they were, bought the lie instantly. Ben even chuckled, remarking that a man needs a thick skin to win a woman's heart—just like he did with May. He lamented that Peter didn't just ask to borrow his new Ford Raptor; a truck like that would definitely help seal the deal.
Toby suggested his Audi R8 would have been a better choice for a high school girl, leading to a long, heartwarming lecture from May about the "purity of young love" and how she fell for Ben's character, not his beat-up old car.
Toby and Ben nodded along, though they'd heard the "Good Ol' Days" story so many times they could recite it from memory.
May eventually noticed their glazed-over expressions and gave them both a playful pinch on the ear before turning back to the TV. The news was showing a close-up of Spider-Man swinging between the bridge cables.
"Hey," May said suddenly, her eyes narrowing as she studied the screen. "Have you two noticed? That masked hero... he has almost the exact same build as our Peter."
Toby went still.
Is it really that obvious? he wondered.
He knew that in many universes, Aunt May eventually figured it out. But he hadn't expected her "Spider-Sense"—the intuition of a mother—to trigger the very first time she saw him on the news.
Maybe the real superpower in this family belongs to her, Toby thought, staring at the screen.