Chapter 16: Overload
Peter had never seen Manhattan like this.
The city was supposed to glow. Even at night. Even during storms. Even during the occasional blackout, emergency lighting usually bled through the darkness somewhere—streetlamps powered by backup circuits, neon signs stubbornly clinging to life, traffic lights blinking red in the distance.
Tonight?
Nothing.
The skyline looked like someone had taken the world’s biggest dimmer switch and twisted it all the way down.
Peter swung between buildings through a darkness so complete it felt wrong. No headlights crawling through the avenues. No glowing windows stacked like stars across the skyscrapers. Even Times Square—Times Square—sat behind him like a dead husk.
Only the sirens were still alive.
Police.
Fire.
Ambulances.
Their red and blue lights painted streaks across the black city as they fought traffic accidents and confused pedestrians in intersections where signals no longer worked.
Peter fired another webline and vaulted over the edge of a darkened office tower, wind whipping against the fabric of his mask as he arced out over the street canyon below.
The blackout alone would have been bad enough.
But this wasn’t just a blackout.
Something was wrong.
He saw it again two blocks ahead.
A transformer mounted to the side of a utility pole burst apart in a spray of sparks. The flash lit the street for half a heartbeat before dying just as quickly, plunging everything back into darkness.
Then another one exploded.
And another.
The bursts of light were too regular to be random failures. They marched down the grid like dominoes, jumping from one piece of infrastructure to the next.
Peter landed on the side of a building and sprinted along the vertical glass like it was pavement, trying to get a better angle.
Another flash erupted three blocks away.
Electricity arced violently between the metal rods of a rooftop transformer array, bright white tendrils snapping through the night air before racing away down the power lines.
Not powering anything.
Not lighting anything.
Just moving.
The realization crawled up Peter’s spine.
The energy wasn’t dispersing through the city.
It was traveling.
Rod to rod. Line to line. Substation to substation.
As if Manhattan’s entire electrical grid had suddenly turned into a highway.
Peter vaulted off the building and swung hard to the right, following the chain reaction as another transformer burst in the distance. The electrical arcs leapt again, sprinting through cables strung between buildings like veins glowing under the city’s skin.
Except the veins weren’t feeding the body anymore.
They were feeding something else.
Or someone else.
His stomach sank as a memory snapped into place.
A blue figure standing in the chaos of Times Square.
Electricity crawling across his skin.
The giant screens flickering alive with his face as power surged through the grid.
Electro.
Peter swung faster.
If the grid was the highway, Electro was the car. Every power line in Manhattan was carrying energy straight to him, feeding him more and more electricity as he moved.
Which meant the longer this went on, the stronger he was going to get.
Peter needed to find him.
Now.
…
The city had gone dark.
Not the quiet kind of dark you got during a thunderstorm when everyone stayed inside and waited it out. This was the ugly kind. The kind that came with sirens and shouting and the distant wail of car alarms that had lost whatever sense of order the electrical grid used to give them.
Max Dillon stood on the sidewalk in the middle of it all.
People rushed past him.
Some running. Some yelling into dead phones. A few just staring up at the skyline like the darkness might explain itself if they looked hard enough.
The towers of Lower Manhattan loomed overhead, windows black from top to bottom. Whole blocks looked abandoned. Streetlights flickered weakly before giving up entirely.
And Max—
Max knew why.
His hands trembled.
They glowed.
Thin lines of blue electricity crawled along his skin like restless veins, lighting the pavement around his shoes in quick, stuttering pulses.
A man shoved past him without even looking. “Watch it!”
Max flinched like he’d been hit.
“Sorry,” he said automatically.
The man was already gone.
Nobody looked back.
Nobody ever did.
Except now the lights were out because of him.
Max stared down at his hands.
They hummed. Not loud—more like the faint buzz of a transformer on a summer afternoon—but the vibration ran all the way up his arms and into his chest.
Something inside him felt… wrong.
Too full.
Too charged.
Like his whole body had become a wire that somebody kept pushing more current through.
A police cruiser screamed past the intersection, tires sliding when the driver realized the traffic lights weren’t working anymore.
Sirens echoed through the dark canyon of buildings.
Max swallowed.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
He hadn’t meant—
He’d just wanted to help.
That was the stupid part.
Even now that thought still clung stubbornly to the edges of his mind.
Help.
The memory replayed whether he wanted it to or not.
Spider-Man’s mask.
Ghost-Spider’s white hood.
The way they’d looked at him that day in the street when the car almost hit him.
Like he mattered.
Like someone actually saw him.
Max squeezed his eyes shut.
“Yeah,” he muttered bitterly. “Great job, Max.”
Another surge rippled through him.
Blue lightning snapped between his fingers with a sharp crack.
A nearby streetlight exploded in a shower of sparks.
Several people screamed and scattered.
Max staggered back like the pole had bitten him.
“No—no, I didn’t—”
But the words didn’t matter.
They never did.
He wrapped his arms around himself, trying to hold the energy in, but the electricity kept crawling across his skin anyway, leaking out in thin arcs that licked across the asphalt.
It felt like standing inside a storm.
Too much power. Too much noise. Too much pressure.
Something inside him needed to discharge.
His gaze drifted down the street.
The city was still dark.
Block after block.
And suddenly a familiar mental diagram surfaced from the part of his brain that had spent years staring at electrical schematics.
The grid.
Max had spent countless late nights monitoring the damn thing. Oscorp’s infrastructure fed into half of Manhattan’s power routing system, but the real backbone—the thing designed to stabilize the whole network—was the experimental capacitor array.
Empire State University.
The new system Connors had been bragging about during one of the engineering briefings Max had quietly sat through while nobody noticed he was there.
Bio-electric capacitor storage.
Grid balancing.
Emergency surge absorption.
Max’s eyes widened slightly.
That system was designed for exactly this kind of problem.
If the city lost power suddenly, the capacitor network could redistribute energy and restart the grid piece by piece.
He looked around again at the dark streets.
People panicking.
Ambulances struggling through intersections with no signals.
All of it happening because of him.
Max swallowed hard.
“Well…” His voice sounded small in the empty street. “You wanted to be useful, right?”
For once in his life, he actually could be.
The realization landed slowly.
Carefully.
Like stepping onto thin ice.
If he could get to the capacitor network—
If he could feed power into the system—
The grid could stabilize.
The lights would come back.
The sirens would stop.
People would look up at the skyline and see the city glowing again instead of falling apart.
And maybe—
Maybe for just a second—
Somebody would realize Max Dillon had helped.
Electricity sparked along his arms again.
Stronger this time.
The pressure building inside him surged like a rising tide.
Max gasped as a nearby transformer hummed loudly.
The metal box mounted on the telephone pole vibrated.
Energy tugged at him.
Not physically.
Something deeper than that.
Like a magnet inside his chest had suddenly noticed the world was made of wires.
His head snapped toward the pole.
The transformer buzzed louder.
And then—
CRACK.
A bolt of blue lightning leapt from the metal casing straight into Max’s chest.
He screamed.
Not in pain.
In shock.
The electricity didn’t burn.
It flooded him.
Filled the hollow pressure in his body with something even bigger.
Brighter.
Stronger.
Max staggered as the energy poured through him, his vision flashing white for half a second before settling again.
The streetlight above him flickered—
—and came back on.
Max blinked.
He looked up.
Then down at his hands.
More electricity danced across his fingers now, thicker and brighter than before.
But the pressure inside him felt… better.
Balanced.
Like the system had just equalized.
“Oh,” Max whispered.
The realization sent a nervous laugh bubbling out of him.
“Oh. Oh, I get it.”
The grid.
That pull he’d felt—
It wasn’t random.
His body was responding to electrical infrastructure the same way a wire did.
Current flowed.
Circuits connected.
The whole city was one enormous network.
And he was part of it now.
Max looked down the street again.
Somewhere miles north sat the ESU capacitor facility.
If transformers reacted like this—
If the grid itself could feed him—
Then traveling through the electrical network might actually be faster than running.
He took a cautious step toward the telephone pole.
Energy rippled along the wires above him.
The pull grew stronger.
Max reached up hesitantly and touched the metal casing of the transformer.
Another surge of electricity poured into him.
This time he was ready.
The current flowed through his body like water through a pipe.
He didn’t fight it.
He directed it.
Instinct took over.
Max leaned forward—
—and vanished in a flash of blue light.
Half a block away, a streetlight exploded with a thunderclap as electricity burst out of it.
Max stumbled into existence beneath the pole, sparks crackling around his feet.
He looked back the way he’d come.
Then up at the wires stretching across the street.
A slow, amazed smile spread across his glowing face.
“Well,” he said softly.
“Would you look at that.”
He reached up again.
Touched the line.
Lightning swallowed him whole.
Across Lower Manhattan, transformers began popping one by one as a streak of blue energy shot through the city’s electrical veins.
Every connection fed him.
Every junction added more power.
Every mile he traveled made the glow beneath his skin brighter.
Stronger.
But something else grew with it too.
The humming inside his body deepened into a constant roar.
Like standing beside a high-voltage tower.
The electricity didn’t just pass through him anymore.
It stayed.
Stored.
Building.
Max burst out of another transformer three blocks later, landing hard on the pavement as arcs of lightning crawled across his arms.
He sucked in a breath.
The air tasted like ozone.
The power inside him surged restlessly, searching for somewhere to go.
North.
The pull remained there.
The grid’s stabilization network.
The capacitor array.
Empire State University.
Max straightened slowly, sparks snapping between his fingers as he looked up the dark street.
“Okay,” he muttered.
The pressure inside him swelled again.
Too much energy.
Too much current.
But the system at ESU could handle it.
That was the whole point of the design.
“Okay,” he repeated, more firmly this time.
Another bolt of lightning ripped him into the grid.
As he shot through the city’s power lines, the energy feeding into him grew stronger.
And stronger.
And stronger.
By the time Max Dillon reached Midtown, the electricity blazing beneath his skin was bright enough to turn the darkness of the blackout into a flickering blue dawn.
…
The dance had been fun.
Honestly? Surprisingly fun.
Which was impressive, considering the city was currently experiencing the worst blackout in recent memory and a man made of electricity had decided to turn Times Square into a Tesla coil about twenty minutes earlier.
Still, there were limits.
Even for teenagers trying very hard to pretend life was normal.
Gwen and I slipped out of Midtown High through a side exit while the faculty tried to wrangle several hundred confused students into some kind of orderly dismissal. The gym behind us buzzed with phone flashlights and speculation, the kind of nervous energy that only happened when people sensed something big was wrong but didn’t know what yet.
The city outside confirmed it.
Manhattan was dark.
Not dim. Not reduced.
Dark.
Streetlights were dead. Traffic signals hung useless over intersections where cars crept cautiously through four-way negotiations. The skyline, normally a forest of glowing windows and neon advertisements, looked like a silhouette cut out of the night.
Only emergency vehicles still painted the streets with color as sirens wailed somewhere deeper in the city.
Gwen stared out the passenger window as our car rolled down Fifth Avenue.
“That’s… unsettling.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, guiding the wheel around a stalled taxi. “New York without electricity is like seeing a shark without teeth.”
“That analogy did not make me feel better.”
“Working as intended.”
Despite the tension, she snorted softly, shaking her head before her gaze drifted back toward the skyline. Even in the darkness I could see the way her brain was chewing through possibilities. Gwen Stacy didn’t really do idle concern. If there was a problem, she attacked it like a physics equation that refused to balance.
Which meant it took about two minutes for both of us to reach the same conclusion.
Fun was fun.
But there was a supervillain on the loose.
Oscorp Tower loomed ahead of us like a black monolith, the upper floors still powered by independent generators. The penthouse windows glowed faintly against the dead skyline as security waved us through the garage entrance. One elevator ride later and we were stepping into my lab, the familiar hum of backup systems filling the space.
I moved automatically, flipping on the workstation monitors while Gwen drifted toward the wall-sized display.
“Grid telemetry,” I said, fingers already moving across the keyboard. “Let’s see what our friendly neighborhood electrical demigod has been up to.”
Lines of data spilled across the screens. Oscorp monitored a ridiculous amount of infrastructure across the city—energy flow, load balancing, transformer health, distribution nodes. Normally it was the kind of thing only engineers cared about.
Tonight it looked like a crime scene.
Spikes crawled across the digital map of Manhattan like glowing wounds.
Gwen stepped closer to the display as the system finished compiling the last few minutes of activity. “Those are power surges.”
“Yep.”
“They’re moving.”
“Also yep.”
The spikes weren’t random failures. They formed a path—one that zigzagged across the grid as transformer stations overloaded and dumped their energy down the next available line.
Like a chain reaction.
Or a trail.
Gwen leaned forward, eyes narrowing as she followed the glowing line across the map. “He’s not just blowing things up.”
“Nope.”
“He’s traveling through the grid.”
“Looks that way.”
The spikes continued marching across Manhattan in real time as we watched, each one feeding into the next.
I felt the creeping sense of familiarity long before my brain finished putting the pieces together.
The path wasn’t random.
It was converging.
Toward a location I’d spent the last few weeks hearing about from two very enthusiastic interns.
The map zoomed out slightly as another surge appeared.
The line pointed straight toward lower Manhattan.
Straight toward—
“ESU,” I muttered.
Gwen blinked. “What?”
I pointed at the screen. “Empire State University.”
Her eyes flicked back to the map.
The realization hit her about half a second later.
“Oh.”
That single syllable carried the kind of dread normally reserved for discovering your lab partner had replaced the experiment’s control sample with Mountain Dew.
“The capacitor network,” she said quietly.
Right.
That.
The ESU stabilization system was basically the city’s safety valve. A massive capacitor array designed to absorb fluctuations in the grid and release energy back out in controlled bursts so New York’s ancient electrical infrastructure didn’t melt down every time half the city turned on their air conditioning at once.
Normally it worked great.
Normally it also didn’t have to deal with a human lightning rod barreling straight toward it.
Gwen grabbed a tablet from the workstation and started pulling up the ESU schematics from her internship files. “Okay. Hypothetically speaking.”
“That’s never a good phrase.”
“If Electro reaches the capacitor array,” she continued, ignoring me, “the system will read him as an energy source.”
I frowned. “Right.”
“Not a consumer.”
“…Right.”
Her fingers froze over the screen.
Slowly, she looked up at me.
“You know what happens when a grid designed for normal power loads suddenly gets connected to something outputting that much energy?”
The answer formed in my head with horrifying clarity.
It would be like plugging a fusion reactor into a phone charger.
The grid wouldn’t just overload.
It would try to use him.
Routing power through him.
Drawing more electricity from every connected line.
Every generator.
Every substation.
Every transformer.
The entire network would begin feeding into the same point until something gave out.
“Implosion,” I said quietly.
“Implosion,” Gwen confirmed.
Manhattan’s entire electrical infrastructure collapsing inward on a single node.
Best case scenario?
Massive citywide blackout for weeks.
Worst case?
Infrastructure failure cascading through the grid until half the eastern seaboard joined the party.
Somewhere across the city, another transformer detonated. The telemetry map flared as the spike moved closer to ESU.
Gwen inhaled sharply.
“Well,” she said, already turning away from the screens, “that’s unacceptable.”
She disappeared into the adjacent room before I could respond. I stared at the telemetry display for another second, watching the glowing trail crawl steadily closer to the university.
This was bad.
Like, Avengers-level property damage bad.
Which meant—
The bedroom door slid open behind me.
“Harry?”
I turned automatically.
And immediately wished I hadn’t.
Because Gwen Stacy had just changed out of her formal dress and into her suit.
The white and black fabric hugged her frame as she adjusted the gloves, mask pushed up on her forehead while she tied her hair back with quick, practiced movements. It was the same outfit she’d worn the night we went after Walter Hardy—refined since then into something sleeker, more flexible.
Functional.
Dangerous.
Also extremely unfair to my ability to maintain eye contact.
My brain short-circuited for a moment before survival instincts kicked in and I snapped my gaze toward literally anything else in the room.
Preferably something that wasn’t my very smart, very capable, very attractive girlfriend getting ready to jump into a supervillain fight.
“Right,” I said to the far wall with great conviction. “Hero stuff.”
She didn’t miss the reaction.
“Harry.”
“Yep.”
“You can turn around.”
“I’m giving you privacy.”
“I’m fully dressed.”
“…Good for you.”
A beat of silence passed.
Then Gwen laughed softly.
“Dork.”
Probably accurate.
I finally glanced back just in time to see her pull the mask down over her face. The familiar white lenses looked back at me, bright even under the lab lighting.
She stepped toward the balcony doors.
Then hesitated.
“You coming?”
And there it was.
The question I’d been trying very hard not to think about since we walked into the building.
My eyes drifted toward the cuff of my suit. The cuffs the symbiote made.
Venom had been blissfully quiet. Letting me and Gwen actually have a moment for just us. And yet right now, I’d actually really like to get his input. I wanted to go with Gwen. I wanted to keep her safe. Keep my city safe. But…
Norman’s threat hung over my head like the Sword of Damocles.
Peter.
Gwen.
Two teenagers trying to do the right thing.
My father wouldn’t hesitate to expose them if I went out there again.
Not for a second.
The silence stretched just long enough for Gwen to notice.
“You’re… not,” she said slowly.
I forced a small shrug, leaning back against the workstation like this was no big deal. “Grounded, remember?”
Her head tilted.
“Harry.”
“It’s fine,” I said quickly. “Seriously. You two have this handled.”
Another transformer spike flashed across the telemetry map behind me.
Closer now.
Gwen glanced at it.
Then back at me.
Something complicated flickered across the white lenses of her mask.
She knew me well enough to recognize when I was lying to myself.
But she also knew the clock was ticking.
“…Okay,” she said quietly.
The balcony doors slid open.
Cold night air rushed into the lab as she stepped onto the ledge.
For a moment she looked back over her shoulder.
“Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”
“I make no promises.”
“Harry.”
I smiled faintly. “Go save the city.”
A webline shot into the darkness.
And just like that, she was gone—swinging out into the pitch-black skyline toward ESU.
The balcony doors whispered shut behind her.
Silence settled over the lab again.
Outside, Manhattan remained a dark ocean broken only by the distant flashes of exploding transformers.
I stared out at the empty sky for a long moment.
Yeah.
Definitely hate to see her go.
…
Love to watch her leave.
A familiar voice curled through my mind like smoke.
We should go with her.
‘You know why we can’t.’
We know you’re being a baby.
And here we go again…
…
The Allan apartment was dark.
Not quiet—New York was never quiet, even now—but the kind of heavy, powerless dark that made every little sound feel louder. Sirens somewhere in the distance. Car horns arguing at intersections where traffic lights no longer worked. The faint murmur of neighbors through thin apartment walls.
Liz’s phone was the only real light in the room.
The small blue glow illuminated the couch, the coffee table, and the two of them sitting side by side while the city outside struggled through the blackout.
Mark knew they shouldn’t be watching.
Battery power mattered right now. No one had any idea when electricity would come back, and phones weren’t exactly renewable resources in a city-wide outage.
He knew that.
And yet he couldn’t look away.
The footage looped again.
Times Square.
Even through a shaky phone video and news overlays, the chaos was unmistakable. Smoke rising from shattered billboards. Police sirens screaming in every direction. Emergency lights flashing across broken glass and overturned vendor carts.
And in the center of it all—
Him.
Molten skin glowing like a furnace.
Cracks of orange light bleeding through the surface of his body as if the heat inside him was trying to escape.
Mark felt his stomach twist.
God, he looked like a monster.
The video cut to another angle. Someone filming from the second floor of a restaurant while the fight raged in the street below. The camera shook violently as a blast of heat flashed across the pavement.
Molten Man—him—roared something incoherent and hurled a chunk of melted street at a streak of blue electricity crackling across the intersection.
The image froze for a second as the footage buffered.
Liz leaned forward slightly, her brow furrowed.
“…That’s the guy they were talking about earlier.”
Mark’s throat tightened.
“Yeah,” he managed.
On the screen, the footage resumed. The glowing figure staggered backward as lightning arced across the pavement, the two forces colliding in a violent explosion of heat and electricity.
The reporters were already speculating.
Unknown superhuman.
Possible connection to the blackout.
Witnesses claiming he’d been attacking people before the other one showed up.
Mark shut his eyes for a second.
Attacking people.
That was one way to put it.
Another way would’ve been:
Losing control.
Burning everything he touched.
Trying to destroy the one man who’d sold him to the Russians like he was a piece of property. Who ruined his life… or was that really Mark’s fault? He wasn’t so sure, anymore.
The video cut again, replaying the moment where the molten figure—him—lashed out in blind rage while pedestrians scattered.
Liz watched quietly.
No recognition.
No suspicion.
Just concern.
Because to her, the thing on the screen was a stranger.
Some monster tearing up Times Square.
Not the brother sitting beside her on the couch.
The silence stretched between them.
Mark felt it pressing in from every direction.
The dark apartment.
The looping footage.
The weight sitting in his chest like a brick.
He couldn’t breathe around it anymore.
“I did that.”
The words slipped out before he could stop them.
Liz blinked.
“…What?”
Mark swallowed, staring at the phone screen where the footage replayed the moment Molten Man slammed his fists into the street.
“I did that,” he repeated, voice rough. “That’s me.”
The room went very still.
Liz slowly turned her head to look at him.
“That’s… not funny.”
“I’m not joking.”
“You’re not—”
“I’m Molten Man.”
The name tasted wrong coming out of his mouth.
Too dramatic. Too comic book.
But it was the one the news kept using.
Mark forced himself to keep talking before he lost his nerve.
“It’s a suit,” he said quietly. “Sort of. Not like Iron Man or anything. More like… it fused with me. I can show you. If you want.”
Liz stared at him.
Mark rubbed a hand over his face, exhaustion crashing over him all at once.
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” he muttered. “I just— I screwed up, okay?”
He laughed weakly, the sound hollow in the dark.
“Actually that’s not true. I screwed up a lot.”
Liz didn’t interrupt.
Didn’t yell.
Didn’t even move.
She just listened.
So Mark kept going.
“It started with the gambling,” he admitted. “You knew about that part.”
Her expression tightened slightly.
Yeah.
She knew about that.
What she didn’t know—
“It got worse.”
The words scraped their way out.
“Way worse.”
He stared at the dark TV screen across the room because looking at her face right now felt impossible.
“I owed money. A lot of money. Not just the usual guys either. Real bad people.” His hands clenched together. “Loan sharks.”
Liz’s voice came quietly. “How much?”
Mark let out a shaky breath. “…Enough.”
He didn’t say the number.
Didn’t need to.
“Eventually I couldn’t pay,” he continued. “So the guy I owed… he sold the debt.”
Liz frowned. “Sold it to who?”
“Russians.”
The word hung in the air like smoke.
Mark laughed bitterly. “Turns out some more bad people were running experiments, and they need test subjects.”
Liz’s eyes widened slightly.
“They… what?”
“They put this thing on me.” He tapped his chest weakly. “Some kind of experimental skinsuit. Liquid metal or something. It’s… mostly invisible unless it activates.”
His mind flashed back to that room.
Cold metal table.
Restraints.
The way the suit had crawled across his skin like molten wax.
“They were going to use me for something,” he muttered. “Didn’t really get that far.”
Liz leaned forward.
“Why?”
“Spider-Man.”
The name slipped out before he could stop it.
Mark shook his head slowly.
“Spider-Man and… the other one. The white one. Ghost Spider.”
They’d crashed through the warehouse like a pair of angry hurricanes.
Webbing everywhere.
Russian gangsters getting knocked unconscious before they even understood what was happening.
“They saved me,” Mark said quietly.
Technically true.
They’d also left him with a suit permanently fused to his nervous system.
Liz processed that in silence.
“But if they saved you,” she said slowly, “how did you end up—”
“Becoming a supervillain?”
Her eyes snapped up.
Mark gave a humorless smile.
“Yeah. That part.”
The confession kept spilling out now that it had started.
“A guy found me after,” he admitted. “A crime boss. We call him the Big Man. And, it turns out having superpowers makes you valuable to the kind of people who like breaking kneecaps for a living.”
“Mark…”
“I didn’t want to,” he said quickly. “I swear. I hated every second of it.”
He remembered the first job.
Standing in some alley while a man begged for mercy.
Feeling the heat building under his skin.
“I kept telling myself it was temporary,” Mark whispered. “Just until I could get out.”
But getting out of organized crime turned out to be harder than quitting a gym membership.
“Then tonight happened.”
The phone screen showed the footage again.
Molten Man roaring in fury as flames licked across the pavement.
“I saw the guy who sold me,” Mark said quietly. “The loan shark.”
Liz’s expression shifted.
“And you…”
“Yeah.”
Mark let out a hollow breath.
“I lost it.”
Everything after that had been heat and rage and molten metal tearing through the street.
Until lightning crashed into the fight and everything spiraled out of control.
“I’m sorry, Liz.” He choked out. “ I’m just.. I’m so sorry. For everything.”
The apartment fell silent again.
Mark finally forced himself to look at his sister.
Liz hadn’t moved.
Her phone rested loosely in her hands, the footage still playing softly across the screen.
For a long moment she didn’t say anything.
Mark braced himself.
For anger.
For disappointment.
For the moment she looked at him like the monster on the screen.
Instead, Liz set the phone down on the coffee table.
Then she leaned over and wrapped her arms around him.
Mark froze.
Her hug was tight.
Fierce.
The kind that didn’t leave room for argument.
“You idiot,” she murmured into his shoulder.
Mark’s throat closed.
“I know.”
“You absolute, unbelievable idiot.”
“I know.”
Her grip tightened.
“But you’re still my brother.”
That did it.
The dam broke all at once.
Mark’s vision blurred as months of fear, guilt, and self-hatred finally crashed through the walls he’d been holding up.
His shoulders shook as the first sob escaped before he could stop it.
Liz didn’t let go.
Not once.
…
The blackout hadn’t touched the club.
It wouldn’t.
Places like this paid too much money to ever sit in the dark with the rest of the city.
Soft amber lighting glowed over polished wood and velvet seating, the quiet hum of private generators keeping the room comfortable while Manhattan outside stumbled through a sudden return to the nineteenth century. The blackout might have paralyzed traffic lights and subway lines, but behind thick glass and guarded doors, the city’s wealth and power carried on without interruption.
Tombstone sat in a leather chair near the back of the room, a crystal tumbler resting loosely between thick white fingers.
The television mounted above the bar flickered with emergency news coverage.
Times Square.
Blackout.
Unidentified superhuman activity.
The footage looped again.
The reporters spoke in urgent tones, speculating wildly as shaky phone videos rolled across the screen.
A figure wreathed in lightning tore through the intersection like a living storm.
Electro, the news had begun calling him.
Not the worst name.
Accurate.
Another clip replaced it.
A much larger figure, glowing like a walking furnace.
Molten cracks bleeding orange light across a blackened body while the street beneath him sagged and melted under the heat.
Molten Man.
That one was less subtle.
Still descriptive.
The bartender muted the television, but the images kept playing. Lightning clashing against molten steel. Police sirens screaming in the background. Civilians scattering as two walking disasters fought in the middle of one of the most famous intersections on Earth.
The city had always attracted unusual talent.
Tonight it looked like the talent pool was expanding.
Tombstone took a slow sip from his glass.
Opportunity often arrived wearing chaos.
The power vacuum left behind when Wilson Fisk fell hadn’t stayed empty for long. Nature abhorred a vacuum. Crime did too. Several organizations had tried stepping into the space.
Most of them were already gone.
A few had proven more adaptable.
Tonight’s events would thin the herd even further.
The city was changing.
Superhumans appearing on the nightly news.
Masked vigilantes swinging between skyscrapers.
Costumed criminals throwing cars through storefront windows.
Some men feared that kind of chaos.
Tombstone didn’t.
He’d built his empire on it.
The television shifted again.
This time the footage showed a red-and-blue blur swinging across the skyline, chasing the crackling storm of electricity through the dead grid.
Spider-Man.
That boy was becoming a problem.
Persistent.
Resourceful.
Difficult to intimidate.
Not impossible, of course.
Just inconvenient.
Tombstone’s gaze lingered on the screen for a moment before drifting toward the man standing quietly beside his chair.
A large man in a dark suit.
One of his lieutenants.
The man held a tablet, its screen casting a faint blue glow across his face.
“Status?”
The lieutenant cleared his throat.
“Power outages across most of Manhattan. Police response is stretched thin. Several crews have already taken advantage.”
Naturally.
Looting.
Street gangs settling scores.
Smaller organizations scrambling to grab territory before someone stronger claimed it first.
Predictable.
“Casualties?”
“Unclear.”
That was also predictable.
In situations like this, clarity always arrived last.
Tombstone nodded once, turning his attention back to the television as another clip rolled across the screen.
Molten Man again.
Closer footage this time.
The glowing figure staggered across the intersection while lightning struck him repeatedly, the heat of his body warping the pavement beneath his feet.
The camera zoomed in just enough for the face to become visible.
Not clearly.
But enough.
Tombstone’s expression didn’t change.
His eyes did.
Because he recognized that shape.
The way the figure moved.
The proportions.
And, naturally, the molten skin.
Mark Allan.
The lieutenant noticed the shift.
“Problem?”
“Perhaps.”
Tombstone leaned back in his chair, watching the footage play again.
He’d acquired Mark Allan only recently.
A desperate young man with useful abilities and even more useful motivation.
Debt.
Fear.
Shame.
Those things made excellent leashes.
The Russians had built the weapon.
Tombstone had simply given it a direction to point.
Except tonight, that weapon had appeared on the evening news throwing punches in Times Square.
Without permission.
Without supervision.
The molten figure on the screen roared silently as lightning slammed into him again.
Tombstone studied the image for another moment before setting his glass down on the table beside him.
“Where is he?”
The lieutenant glanced down at the tablet.
“We lost track after the Times Square incident.”
“Lost track.”
The man shifted slightly under the weight of the words.
“Yes, sir.”
The television flickered to another shot of Spider-Man swinging across the dark skyline.
Tombstone barely noticed.
Mark Allan.
One of his assets.
Now missing.
Men like Mark didn’t vanish without reason.
They ran.
They panicked.
Sometimes they got ideas about second chances.
Redemption.
Freedom.
Those were dangerous ideas.
Tombstone folded his hands together calmly.
“If he runs,” he said quietly, “he will need somewhere to go.”
The lieutenant waited.
Tombstone’s pale eyes lifted slowly.
“Find him.”
The order landed softly.
Almost gently.
But everyone in the room understood what it meant.
Because Tombstone was a patient man.
He didn’t shout.
He didn’t threaten.
He simply solved problems.
And if Mark Allan had decided to become a problem…
Then Tombstone would respond.
…
The Empire State University power facility looked like someone had dropped a piece of industrial infrastructure into the middle of campus and forgotten to hide it.
Peter landed lightly on the edge of a concrete retaining wall and stared out across the complex.
Transformers the size of delivery trucks sat in long rows behind chain-link fencing. Steel towers rose like skeletal trees above thick bundles of power cables that ran from substation to substation. The air carried the low mechanical hum of electrical systems operating far beyond the scale of anything meant for a normal building.
Most people thought of electricity as something that came out of a wall socket.
Places like this were the reason it could.
The entire grid regulator system stretched across several acres—massive capacitor banks, stabilization towers, switching arrays, and control structures designed to manage the enormous flow of power moving through Manhattan at any given moment.
Tonight that hum sounded wrong.
Unsteady.
Like a machine running while someone kept kicking it.
Peter crouched on the wall, mask lenses narrowing slightly as he scanned the dark facility. Only a handful of maintenance lights glowed across the compound, dim emergency bulbs running on backup circuits. Beyond the fence, the silhouettes of the capacitor towers loomed against the dead skyline.
No explosions.
No lightning storms.
No glowing blue supervillain.
Which meant one of two things.
Either Electro hadn’t arrived yet…
Or he was already inside the system.
A soft thwip snapped through the air behind him.
Peter turned just as a white figure flipped over the fence line in a clean, effortless arc.
Ghost Spider landed beside him in a crouch, the white hood of her suit settling around the black mask beneath.
Her head tilted slightly as she took in the same industrial sprawl.
“Well,” Gwen said, straightening up and resting her hands on her hips, “this feels like the kind of place where something catastrophic is about to happen.”
Peter gestured broadly at the forest of electrical towers.
“Good news: we beat the walking lightning bolt here.”
“Bad news?”
“We beat the walking lightning bolt here.”
Gwen followed his gaze across the capacitor array, the faint hum of unstable power vibrating through the metal infrastructure.
“Yeah,” she muttered. “I’m getting the same vibe.”
Because if Electro had figured out what this place was—
Peter hopped down from the wall and landed inside the perimeter, boots crunching lightly on gravel.
“This whole system regulates the city’s grid,” he said quietly, glancing up at the towers. “Power fluctuations, load balancing, emergency routing—Connors walked us through it last week.”
Gwen dropped down beside him.
“And if someone made of electricity plugged himself into it?”
Peter looked at the nearest capacitor tower.
Thick insulated cables ran into the base of the structure like arteries feeding a heart.
“Best case?” he said. “Everything shuts down.”
“And worst case?”
Peter didn’t answer.
Because the worst case involved a human conductor sitting in the middle of the largest electrical network in the city.
Gwen exhaled slowly.
“Okay,” she said, rolling her shoulders. “New plan. We split up, check the control building and the capacitor banks. If sparky shows up, we regroup fast.”
Peter nodded.
“Try not to punch him unless you absolutely have to.”
She glanced sideways at him.
“That advice coming from experience?”
“Electric guy. Rubber suit. Learned a few things.”
“Good to know.” Gwen took a step back, preparing to vault toward the nearest structure.
Then Peter’s spider-sense exploded across the back of his skull.
Not a warning.
A scream.
The world turned white.
Lightning slammed down from the dark sky like a divine judgment and struck the central tower of the facility with a deafening crack. Electricity erupted across the grid in a blinding cascade of arcs, racing down cables and transformers like fire across a fuse line.
Peter spun toward the blast just as a figure materialized within the storm.
Blue.
Crackling.
Human.
Electro stepped down from the tower as if gravity were optional, bolts of living electricity snapping between his fingers and the surrounding infrastructure. The cables around him vibrated violently as the power flowing through them surged toward his body.
He looked… different.
Brighter.
Stronger.
Like the entire city’s nervous system had suddenly decided he was the brain.
Peter’s mask lenses widened.
“Uh… Gwen?”
“Yeah,” she said quietly beside him. “I see him.”
Electro glanced around the massive facility like a man walking into a cathedral built in his honor.
The faint hum of the capacitor array rose into a howl.
Then something strange happened.
Lights flickered.
Across the city skyline beyond the campus, windows began glowing again. Streetlights blinked back to life one by one. Traffic signals sparked into red and green across distant avenues.
Manhattan lit up.
Electro stared at the skyline, eyes glowing with childlike wonder.
“I fixed it.”
For one brief moment, it almost sounded like he believed that.
Then the system broke.
Every capacitor tower in the facility screamed as the load surged past every safety threshold designed to contain it. Electricity tore through the switching arrays in violent arcs, racing across the infrastructure in a runaway cascade.
The lights across Manhattan flickered wildly.
Then the entire grid redirected.
Not into the city.
Into him.
Electro’s body ignited.
The glow pouring off him intensified until the air itself started to distort around the heat of the energy building inside his form. Lightning lashed outward in wild tendrils, grounding itself into nearby transformers that detonated in showers of sparks.
The man at the center of the storm began to shine like a miniature sun.
Peter felt his stomach drop somewhere into his boots.
Because this wasn’t just a supervillain anymore.
This was the entire electrical output of New York City trying to pass through one human body.
And judging by the way Electro’s grin widened as the power poured into him—
He liked it.
Peter crouched instinctively, spider-sense screaming as the energy levels spiked higher.
“Okay,” he muttered.
Gwen shifted beside him, staring at the blazing figure across the facility.
“Please tell me you’ve got a plan.”
Peter watched the capacitor towers overload one by one as the city’s power grid fed straight into the glowing figure standing at the center of it all.
“Working on it.”
Because right now?
This wasn’t a fight.
This was a catastrophe waiting to happen.
…
The penthouse lab glowed with the cold light of a dozen monitors.
Most of Manhattan outside the floor-to-ceiling windows was still dark, the blackout swallowing whole neighborhoods at once, but the Osborn penthouse ran on its own power grid. Oscorp backups. Redundant systems. Enough batteries and generators to keep the lights on during the apocalypse.
Which, judging by the news feeds running across the screens, might be closer than anyone wanted to admit.
I leaned back in the chair, arms folded, staring at the data scroll across the central display.
‘They’ll be fine.’
The words sounded weak even in my own head.
Behind my eyes, something stirred.
Go.
‘It’s not the first time they fought someone tough without me.’
The lab hummed quietly around me. Servers. Cooling fans. Diagnostics. The soft digital heartbeat of a building that cost more money than most countries.
Go.
I exhaled through my nose and dragged a hand down my face.
‘In fact, I bet the last thing they want is for me to go rushing in during the middle of their plan.’
Silence lingered for exactly half a second.
Why aren’t you going?
‘Because,’ I muttered internally, leaning forward in the chair, ‘my father made it extremely clear what happens if I break grounding.’
They would never want to hold you back.
‘It’s not about what they want. It’s not about what I want. It’s about what they need.’
And they need to know their secret’s safe.
So I stayed in the chair.
Watching the feeds.
Watching the telemetry.
Watching the blinking signal markers that showed two familiar icons moving across a digital map of Manhattan.
Spider-Man.
Ghost Spider.
Still alive.
Still moving.
Still doing the job I was currently pretending I didn’t want to do.
Just go!
“They’ll be okay without me!” I shouted, throwing the nearest monitor to the ground in a fit of rage and frustration. Panting as I counted my breaths, and let the anger fade into rationality. ‘I shouldn’t have even been out there in the first place. The only reason I even have powers is because of you. On my own, I’m useless…’
A faint pulse rippled through the symbiote at the base of my spine.
Annoyance.
Disbelief.
You are lying.
‘No I’m not.’
Yes you are.
‘Look,’ I told it patiently, ‘I tried to be a superhero. And look at what happened! I got shot, my girlfriend got impaled. I couldn’t even get a spider to bite me! If I keep getting involved, I’m just going to get myself killed. Or worse, them.’
You are lying again.
I rubbed my temples.
‘Okay, you’re not listening to me—’
GO.
‘I’m not going to ruin their lives!’
No. You’re going to save them. Just like we saved yours. Just like you saved ours.
I slumped back in the chair.
Without you, we’d still be rotting in a lab. Getting poked, prodded, and probed. Because of you, we are more alive than we have been in hundreds of millions of years!
‘… wait, how old are you?’
Irrelevant!
‘Is it?’
Shut up, and go help your friends!
The monitors flickered.
For a moment I thought the system had glitched.
Then every single screen in the room lit up with warning indicators.
Red.
Flashing.
Shrieking.
My head snapped up.
“What?”
The central display exploded with incoming data as Oscorp’s grid monitoring systems suddenly started screaming like someone had plugged God into a wall socket.
Energy readings spiked across Manhattan.
Every graph on the screen went vertical.
“What the hell—”
The map zoomed automatically toward one location.
Empire State University.
My stomach dropped.
The telemetry markers updated.
Spider-Man.
Ghost Spider.
Both inside the facility perimeter.
Right inside the expanding radius of the energy surge currently rewriting the laws of electrical engineering.
Numbers scrolled across the screen so fast they blurred together.
Capacitor overload.
Grid rerouting.
Citywide electrical flow redirecting through a single point.
One human-shaped point.
The system ran the projection.
The simulation didn’t last long.
If the surge continued escalating at its current rate, the entire ESU regulator system would fail catastrophically.
Every capacitor tower.
Every transformer.
Every junction.
The result wouldn’t just be a blackout.
It would be an explosion of electrical discharge strong enough to turn half the campus into a smoking crater.
And Peter and Gwen were standing right in the middle of it.
My hands rested on the edge of the desk.
Tight.
Because if I walked out that door tonight…
Norman would follow through.
He always did.
But if I didn’t?
The monitors kept screaming.
The energy curve kept climbing.
And the simulation kept ending the same way.
Two red icons disappearing in the blast radius.
I stared at the screen.
At the two tiny markers representing the dumbest, bravest people I knew.
Peter Parker.
Gwen Stacy.
My best friend.
My girlfriend.
‘…screw it.’
The response came instantly.
Finally.
The tux dissolved.
Black tendrils surged across my body like living ink, swallowing fabric and replacing it with something far stronger. The symbiote flowed over my shoulders, down my arms, sealing into the sleek shape of the black suit in seconds.
Strength flooded my muscles.
The room sharpened.
The city outside the windows came alive with distant sounds—sirens, engines, the faint crackle of electricity tearing through Manhattan’s broken grid.
I pushed away from the desk and ran.
The glass doors to the rooftop access burst open as I hit them at full speed.
Cold night air rushed across the roof.
The skyline burned in the distance.
Not with fire.
With lightning.
Blue arcs of energy climbed into the sky somewhere near ESU, bright enough to light the clouds from below.
Even from here, it looked wrong.
We told you.
‘Yeah,’ I muttered, walking toward the edge of the roof. ‘You did.’
The drop from the Osborn tower stretched a long way down.
Normally, a sane person would hesitate.
Tonight?
Not so much.
Because Peter and Gwen were standing next to a human power plant about to overload the electrical grid of New York City.
And apparently I was the idiot who decided that was a problem.
I stepped onto the ledge.
‘Let’s go save the world.’
We like this plan.
Then I jumped.
…
The Allan apartment felt too quiet.
Liz sat on the edge of the couch, the television flickering silently across the room. The power had come back a few minutes ago—at least in their part of Queens—but the lights still felt uncertain, like the city itself hadn’t decided if it was allowed to turn them on again.
The news anchors on the screen certainly hadn’t figured it out.
Every channel seemed to be running the same shaky footage.
Times Square in chaos.
Police cars scattered across the intersection. A glowing blue man throwing lightning like he’d personally declared war on physics.
And something else.
A figure made of molten metal stumbling through the street like a walking furnace.
The reporters kept talking about superhuman incidents.
About the blackout.
About the electrical surge currently ripping through Manhattan.
But they didn’t know the name that kept ringing inside Liz’s head.
Mark.
She pressed her hands together, fingers tight enough to ache.
Liz didn’t look at the television anymore.
She didn’t need to.
She’d already seen enough.
Her phone rested loosely in her hands while she sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on her knees, staring at the dark screen.
Across the room, Mark sat hunched forward with his head in his hands.
He’d cried himself quiet a few minutes ago.
Now he just looked exhausted.
The kind of exhausted that went deeper than sleep could fix.
Liz glanced at him.
Her brother.
The same idiot who used to sneak snacks out of the fridge at midnight and blame it on her.
The same guy who’d once biked halfway across Queens because she’d called him crying after a bad day at school.
And now—
Now he had a suit fused to his nervous system.
Now a crime boss owned him.
Now the news was calling him a supervillain.
Liz inhaled slowly and looked back down at the phone.
Tombstone.
Mark had been scared to hell to tell her the guy’s name. Acted like he was freaking Voldemort. But Liz Allan knew exactly what kind of man this ‘Tombstone’ was.
A sad, pathetic little man who took advantage of people at their lowest points.
Just another crime boss.
People like that didn’t care about the person.
They cared about the asset.
Which meant the solution, at least in theory, was obvious.
Take away the asset.
Take away the suit.
No molten metal.
No powers.
No reason for anyone like Tombstone to keep looking for Mark Allan.
It wasn’t perfect.
Nothing about this situation was perfect.
But it was the only plan she had.
And there was exactly one person Liz could think of who might be able to help make it happen.
Spider-Man.
Her eyes drifted briefly toward Mark again.
He hadn’t moved.
Still staring at the floor like he was waiting for the universe to decide how hard it planned to kick him next.
Liz turned back to the phone.
Everyone at school knew Peter Parker took pictures of Spider-Man now. The Bugle had printed enough of them that it wasn’t even a rumor anymore. Which meant if anyone could get a message to him—
She tapped through her contacts.
“Okay,” she murmured quietly.
It felt ridiculous.
Calling a classmate to reach a masked vigilante.
But tonight ridiculous had already happened several times.
Liz scrolled through name after name until she found the one she needed.
MJ.
Her thumb hovered over the screen for a moment.
Then she tapped it.
The line rang twice.
Three times.
Then clicked.
“Liz?” MJ’s voice came through the speaker, slightly muffled by background noise. “Hey—what’s up?”
Liz opened her mouth.
For a moment nothing came out.
Because explaining that your brother was the molten man currently fighting a lightning monster in Times Square was not something people usually practiced saying. Let alone that said brother needed a photographer’s help.
“I—uh—sorry,” she managed finally. “I know it’s late.”
“It’s fine.” MJ sounded distracted. “Everything’s kind of… crazy tonight.”
Yeah.
That was one word for it.
Liz glanced at the silent television where the glowing figure of Electro flashed across the screen again.
“I needed to ask you something,” she said carefully. “About Peter.”
The background noise on MJ’s end quieted slightly.
“What about him?”
“He… takes pictures of Spider-Man, right?”
A small pause.
“Yeah.”
Liz tightened her grip on the phone.
“Do you know if he can contact him?”
Another pause.
This one longer.
“Why?”
Liz closed her eyes for a second before forcing the words out.
“My brother,” she said quietly. “Mark.”
Across the room, Mark shifted slightly but didn’t look up.
“He’s in trouble,” Liz continued. “With some bad people. Some really bad people.”
The silence on the other end of the call changed.
Less confusion.
More attention.
“He doesn’t want this,” Liz said softly. “He never did. But he’s in too deep, and it’s way over his head.”
She glanced toward the television again where the molten figure staggered across the screen.
“And the guy who’s been using him?” Liz continued. “The crime boss. He only cares because of what Mark can do. He doesn’t owe him anything.”
Her voice steadied slightly as the idea finally took shape out loud.
“So if someone could get him out of this mess,” she said. “Then he’s just Mark again.”
Just a guy who made some terrible mistakes.
Just a brother who deserved another chance.
Liz took a breath.
“Spider-Man helped him once before,” she said quietly. “When those people who kidnapped him.”
She stared down at the floor.
“I thought maybe… if Peter could reach him… maybe Spider-Man would be willing to help again.”
Silence filled the line.
Not awkward.
Not skeptical.
Just quiet.
Liz opened her eyes.
“MJ?”
“I’m here.”
MJ’s voice sounded different now.
Calmer.
Focused.
Liz tightened her grip on the phone.
“I know this sounds crazy,” she rushed out. “But Mark’s not a bad person. He just got trapped in something awful, and if anyone could help him—”
“I’ll talk to Peter.”
The answer came so quickly Liz blinked.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” MJ’s voice softened slightly. “If Spider-Man can help your brother, we’ll figure something out.”
Something in Liz’s chest loosened.
Not relief exactly.
But hope.
The fragile kind that only existed because there wasn’t any other choice.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Outside the apartment, distant sirens still echoed through the city.
On the television, lightning flashed over Manhattan again.
Liz ended the call slowly and set the phone down.
Across the room, Mark finally looked up.
“…Everything okay?”
Liz managed a small, tired smile.
“Maybe,” she said.
Because somewhere out there in the chaos, Spider-Man was still trying to save people.
And if anyone could help her brother stop being Molten Man—
It was him.
…
The ESU power facility looked like the inside of a lightning storm.
Gwen had never seen electricity behave like this outside a physics simulation.
Capacitor towers ringed the massive chamber like a forest of steel ribs, cables snaking between them in thick bundles that glowed white-hot under the strain. The air buzzed so loudly it vibrated in her teeth. Every few seconds another arc snapped across the room with a crack like a gunshot, leaving the sharp smell of ozone burning in the back of her throat.
And in the middle of it all—
Electro wasn’t even a person anymore.
He was light.
A human silhouette barely held together by blinding blue electricity, his shape flickering in and out like a bad hologram. Bolts lashed outward from him in every direction, slamming into the towers, the cables, the steel walkways overhead.
The entire grid was feeding into him.
And it was too much.
Gwen landed hard on a maintenance railing, boots skidding on metal slick with condensation.
“Peter!”
“Busy!”
Across the chamber Spider-Man swung through a storm of sparks, a pair of terrified technicians clinging to him like life preservers. He fired a webline to the ceiling and yanked them upward just as a blast of lightning shredded the platform they’d been standing on.
Debris rained down in a shower of glowing fragments.
Gwen winced.
Okay.
New plan.
She vaulted off the railing and fired two web lines into a sagging capacitor tower that had begun to tilt dangerously toward a cluster of coolant tanks. The structure groaned as she yanked the webs tight, bracing her feet against the opposite wall.
“Stay,” she muttered under her breath.
The tower creaked… then held.
For about three seconds.
Then another bolt from Electro slammed into the grid and the entire system surged like someone had jammed a cattle prod into the city’s nervous system.
The tower lurched again.
“Great,” Gwen breathed. “Love that.”
Another blast of electricity ripped across the room, forcing her to duck behind the steel column as sparks ricocheted like fireworks.
Electro’s voice echoed through the chamber.
Not speaking.
Not shouting.
Screaming.
The sound crackled through the electricity itself, distorted and panicked.
“I’m trying—!”
Another surge.
“I can’t—!”
The entire facility shook as a transformer exploded somewhere above them.
Gwen peeked around the column, heart hammering.
Electro hovered a few feet above the floor now, arcs of lightning snapping between his hands and the surrounding equipment like cables searching for a socket. Every time the electricity connected to the grid it surged back into him harder.
Like the city was force-feeding him power.
Peter swung past overhead and dropped onto the walkway beside her.
“Good news,” he panted, slightly out of breath. “Everyone’s out of the main control room.”
Gwen glanced across the chamber where sparks still cascaded from shattered panels.
“Define everyone.”
“Well… everyone who didn’t already evacuate themselves,” he amended quickly. “Also the break room vending machine may now legally qualify as lava.”
“Not the Doritos!”
“I know.”
Another explosion rocked the building.
They both ducked instinctively as a coil of electricity lashed across the chamber.
Gwen’s eyes snapped back to Electro.
He wasn’t attacking anything anymore.
Not really.
His arms were extended toward the central power conduit, lightning pouring out of him in controlled bursts—
—or at least trying to be controlled.
Each pulse slammed into the grid.
Each pulse came roaring back stronger.
He staggered midair, electricity sputtering across his body like a short circuit.
“He’s not aiming at us,” Gwen muttered.
Peter blinked.
“What?”
“He’s aiming at the system.” She pointed. “Look.”
Electro forced another surge into the main capacitor bank, trying to redirect the current—
The entire tower screamed in protest.
Power blasted back into him in a violent blue flash.
Electro recoiled with a strangled cry.
The lightning around him doubled.
Gwen’s stomach dropped.
“Oh no.”
Peter followed her gaze.
For a second he just watched.
Then everything clicked.
“He’s trying to stabilize it.”
Another surge roared through the facility.
Electro grabbed another conduit and forced energy away from an overheating transformer—
Only for the grid to slam it back into him like a tidal wave.
Peter’s voice went quiet.
“The system’s feeding him.”
Gwen stared at the storm of electricity building around Max’s body.
Every cable in the facility glowed brighter.
Every capacitor tower screamed louder.
The city grid was pouring power into him faster than he could push it out.
Like a generator hooked directly into a hurricane.
“He’s not causing the overload,” Gwen whispered.
Peter’s mask tilted toward her.
“He’s trying to stop it.”
Across the chamber Electro cried out again as another torrent of electricity ripped through him.
The lightning storm exploded outward.
Gwen fired two web lines instinctively, yanking a collapsing conduit away from a bank of fuel cells before it could detonate.
Peter shot upward toward a dangling maintenance rig where two workers still clung to the railing in shock.
Electro forced another pulse into the system.
The grid answered with a surge twice as strong.
His silhouette flickered violently.
The scream that followed wasn’t angry.
It was terrified.
Gwen planted her feet against a railing and hauled another tilting tower upright with every ounce of strength she had.
The steel frame groaned.
Her arms shook.
“Peter!” she shouted over the roar of electricity.
Spider-Man landed beside her again a moment later, the rescued workers now safely webbed to the exit ladder behind him.
“What’s the play?” he asked breathlessly.
Gwen looked at the storm tearing the facility apart.
At the man trapped inside it.
Now glowing like a dying star.
“He’s going to burn out,” she said.
Another surge slammed into Electro’s body.
His scream echoed through the chamber.
Gwen tightened her grip on the web lines holding the tower in place.
“Or explode.”
Peter followed her gaze.
Neither option looked survivable.
For him.
Or for the facility.
Or for the several million people currently connected to the same power grid.
Lightning ripped through the air again as the system overloaded further.
Electro tried to push the current away one more time.
The city answered by drowning him in it.
Peter’s voice came out low. “…Okay.”
Gwen glanced at him.
Spider-Man straightened slightly, staring at the storm.
“If he’s trying to save the grid,” he said, “then we need to help him.”
Another transformer exploded overhead.
The storm intensified.
And somewhere inside it, Electro kept fighting a losing battle against the entire electrical infrastructure of New York City.
…
Lightning filled the sky over ESU.
Not the normal kind either.
Not clouds. Not weather. Not anything nature had ever intended.
This was the New York power grid screaming.
I swung through the chaos with the wind tearing past my ears and the city glowing beneath me like someone had shoved a fork into the electrical socket of Manhattan. Whole blocks flickered on and off like dying Christmas lights. Transformers popped in the distance with muffled booms.
And somewhere ahead of me—
The storm.
Blue lightning exploded upward from the ESU power facility like a beacon visible halfway across the borough.
Peter.
Gwen.
Of course they had to be here.
Of course the universe had picked tonight to turn a guy who could absorb electricity into a walking generator plugged directly into the biggest grid on the East Coast.
We should eat him.
‘We are not eating Electro.’
We could eat a little of him.
‘No.’
Wasteful.
The symbiote sulked in the back of my mind as I launched one more web line and slingshotted toward the facility.
The roof had already been partially blown open.
Good news: easier entry.
Bad news: that meant the situation inside had already reached the catastrophic infrastructure failure stage of the evening.
Electric arcs lashed into the night sky as I dove through the opening.
The inside of the facility looked like someone had taken a lightning storm and stuffed it inside a steel cage.
Capacitor towers ringed the chamber, cables glowing white-hot under the strain. The air smelled like ozone and melting insulation. Sparks rained from shattered control panels.
And in the center—
Electro.
Max Dillon floated a few feet above the floor, barely recognizable as human anymore. His body flickered like a blown fuse, electricity crawling over him in violent pulses as he tried—desperately—to shove the power back into the system.
Every time he did, the grid punched it straight back into him.
The storm kept getting bigger.
The system kept getting louder.
And the whole place was seconds away from turning into the world’s most expensive fireworks show.
I landed hard on a steel platform.
Both Spider-people snapped toward me instantly.
“Harry?!” Peter’s voice cracked through the mask.
Gwen stared at me like I’d just materialized out of thin air.
“I though you were grounded!”
“Technically,” I replied, stepping past a sparking cable, “I still am. But right now, so is the city grid. So, I figured I could make an exception or two!”
You also came for your friends. Don’t forget that. It was very inspiring.
‘I said an exception or two.’
Another blast of electricity ripped across the chamber, slamming into a capacitor tower hard enough to make the structure scream in protest.
Peter swung down beside me.
“You’re supposed to be at the dance!”
“So are you two,” I shot back. “But I don’t see anyone slow dancing!”
Gwen dropped onto the platform a second later, breathing hard from hauling a collapsing support tower upright with webbing.
“Harry,” she said, half exasperated, half relieved, “what are you doing here?”
Short answer: breaking house arrest.
Long answer: preventing Manhattan from frying itself.
The longer I watched the energy cycling through the system, the more obvious the problem became.
Max wasn’t attacking the grid.
He was trying to regulate it.
And the grid was drowning him in power faster than he could dump it.
“Okay,” I muttered. “Yeah. This is going to be a tough one.”
Peter glanced between me and the storm.
“You’ve got that look.”
“What look?”
“The ‘I figured something out and it’s either brilliant or incredibly stupid’ look.”
“Well, good news,” I said. “It’s both.”
Another surge blasted through the facility, making the floor vibrate under our feet. Across the chamber, Electro convulsed as the power slammed through him again.
The capacitor towers screamed louder.
The whole system was approaching runaway overload.
I pointed toward the center of the chamber.
“The grid’s using him like a pressure valve,” I explained quickly. “Except nobody installed an actual release line. Every time he dumps power into the system it rebounds and feeds back through him.”
Gwen’s eyes tracked the energy flow instantly.
Smartest person in the room.
“Positive feedback loop,” she murmured.
“Exactly.”
Peter looked between us.
“…Which means?”
“It means the city grid is trying to turn him into a battery the size of Queens,” I said. “And when that battery overloads, it’s going to detonate every transformer connected to it.”
Peter’s mask tilted toward the storm.
“…That seems bad.”
“Excellent scientific conclusion.”
Another bolt ripped across the chamber as Max tried again to redirect the power.
The grid slammed it back twice as hard.
His scream echoed through the facility.
Gwen’s jaw tightened.
“So what’s the fix?”
I pointed toward the largest structure in the room.
The capacitor core.
A massive cylindrical tower at the center of the facility, surrounded by thick coolant lines and industrial shielding.
Built to absorb ridiculous amounts of electrical discharge.
If someone actually routed the power there.
“He needs to dump everything into that,” I said. “All of it. One massive discharge into the capacitor core.”
Peter followed my gesture.
“But the grid’s feeding him too fast,” he said. “He can’t redirect it.”
“Not alone,” I agreed.
Gwen’s gaze shifted between the towers.
“You’re thinking we redirect the system.”
“Exactly.”
The plan assembled itself as we watched the storm build.
Peter shutting down power relays with surgical web strikes.
Gwen anchoring the unstable towers long enough to channel the current.
Me getting close enough to Max to convince him not to panic when the entire grid suddenly changed direction.
Which was going to be tricky.
Because right now he was one emotional breakdown away from accidentally vaporizing Brooklyn.
He is loud.
‘He’s in pain.’
Still loud.
Another surge ripped through the chamber.
The capacitor towers howled.
Peter squared his shoulders.
“…Okay,” he said quietly. “Talk me through it.”
Lightning flashed across the room as Electro staggered under another wave of power.
The storm was getting worse.
But for the first time since I arrived—
There was a way to stop it.
“Alright,” I said, pointing toward the relay network feeding the towers. “Step one…”
…
Everything hurt.
Max wasn’t even sure that word still applied.
Hurt implied nerves.
Hurt implied something that could stop.
This—
This was something else.
The world had turned blue.
Not the color exactly. Not really. More like… light. Light everywhere. Inside him. Outside him. Crawling through every nerve like molten wire. The kind of brightness that lived behind your eyelids after staring too long at a welding torch.
He couldn’t tell where his body ended anymore.
His hands weren’t hands.
His arms were lightning.
The floor beneath him flickered between solid and glowing circuitry as arcs snapped outward from his skin and slammed into the machines surrounding him.
The grid roared back in response.
Too much.
It was always too much.
Max tried to push it away again.
Energy poured out of him in a violent pulse toward the surrounding towers—
—and the system slammed it right back into him.
The feedback tore through his body like someone had plugged him directly into the sun.
He screamed.
At least, he thought he did.
The sound that escaped him came out distorted and electric, echoing through the chamber like thunder trapped inside a metal drum.
The lights got brighter.
The pain got louder.
Everything blurred.
Somewhere in the storm, shapes moved.
Dark figures swinging through the light.
Spider-Man.
The white one too.
The girl with the hood.
They moved between the towers, webs snapping across the machinery, anchoring things that tried to fall apart every time the power surged.
Max couldn’t understand what they were doing.
Could barely focus on them at all.
Every time he tried to think, the electricity surged again.
Every time he tried to stop it, it got worse.
“I’m trying—!”
The words ripped themselves out of him.
Another pulse of power shot from his body toward the grid.
Another tidal wave came crashing back.
Max staggered midair as the feedback hit him.
“I can’t—!”
The machines screamed around him.
Capacitor towers glowed white-hot.
The cables feeding the system pulsed like veins.
And still the electricity kept pouring into him.
Too much.
Too fast.
His skin flickered in and out of existence.
His thoughts did the same.
Flashes came and went in the chaos.
A hospital room.
Doctors shouting.
The smell of burned plastic.
The moment the lights had exploded around him like fireworks.
He hadn’t meant to hurt anyone.
He hadn’t meant to break anything.
He just—
He just wanted to help. And to be left alone… for the first time ever, at that. Something really was wrong with him.
Another surge tore through him.
The storm exploded outward again.
Max dimly noticed the spider-people moving faster now.
The red one—Spider-Man—swung across the towers, webbing something near the ceiling.
The white one braced an entire support structure with lines of webbing that glowed under the electrical strain.
And the black one—
Max blinked.
There were three of them now.
The third one moved differently.
Darker.
Quieter.
He darted across the machinery with purpose, pointing toward something deep in the center of the facility while the others followed his lead.
Max couldn’t understand what they were doing.
But the system shifted.
Something in the grid changed.
The power feeding into him stuttered slightly.
Not stopping.
Never stopping.
But… moving.
Redirecting.
The towers began channeling the energy somewhere else.
Max tried to follow the flow.
Tried to push with it.
But the electricity inside him roared louder than anything he could control.
Another surge slammed through his body.
The scream that followed barely sounded human.
Everything blurred again.
Then through the noise—
A voice.
“Max!”
The name cut through the storm like a lifeline.
Max’s head jerked toward the sound.
Spider-Man stood on a shattered platform a short distance away, braced against the railing while electricity arced through the air around him.
“Max, listen to me!”
He… he knew his name.
Spider-Man remembered him. Spider-Man was actually talking to him. Not shouting orders. Not screaming in fear.
Talking.
The grid surged again.
Max convulsed as the power tore through him.
Spider-Man didn’t move.
“Max!” he called again. “You’re not the problem!”
The words barely made sense through the noise.
“You’re trying to help,” Spider-Man continued. “I know you are.”
The storm roared around them.
Lightning snapped between the towers.
Max stared at him through the haze of blue light.
All his life he’d been invisible.
The quiet guy in the corner.
The maintenance worker nobody remembered the name of.
The one who fixed things while everyone else walked past him.
And now—
Now someone was actually looking at him.
Actually needing him.
“Max,” Spider-Man shouted, pointing toward the massive cylindrical structure at the center of the chamber. “You have to let it go!”
The capacitor core glowed beneath layers of steel shielding, humming under the strain of the redirected current.
“Dump it all there!” Spider-Man continued. “Everything you’ve got!”
Max turned toward the core.
The energy inside him howled in protest.
Too much.
There was too much.
He didn’t know if he could control it.
Didn’t know if he could survive it.
But Spider-Man was still standing there.
Still watching him.
Still believing he could do something right.
For once.
Just once.
Max focused on the storm inside his body.
On the electricity screaming through every nerve.
On the power the city kept forcing into him.
“Okay,” he whispered.
The word came out in a crackle of lightning.
He reached toward the core.
And let go.
The energy exploded outward.
Not back into the grid.
Not into the towers.
Into the capacitor.
A blinding flash consumed the chamber.
Every light in the facility flared white-hot.
Across Manhattan, power lines shuddered as the surge tore through the system.
Transformers groaned.
Substations screamed.
Then—
The current stabilized.
The lights stopped flickering.
The city grid steadied like a heartbeat returning to rhythm.
Inside the facility, the lightning storm vanished all at once.
Max fell.
The electricity drained from his body in a fading cascade of blue sparks as he collapsed onto the scorched floor beneath the capacitor core.
The world dimmed.
Sound returned slowly.
The hum of the machines.
The crackle of cooling metal.
Distant voices shouting across the chamber.
Max tried to move.
His arms felt like lead.
His body barely responded.
But the electricity wasn’t screaming inside him anymore.
For the first time since the accident—
The silence felt almost peaceful.
His vision blurred as footsteps rushed closer.
Spider-Man’s red mask appeared above him.
Max managed a faint, exhausted smile.
He hadn’t made things worse.
Not this time.
Darkness crept in at the edges of his vision.
But his mind was lighter than it had been in a very long time.
…
The city came back to life one building at a time.
From the ESU rooftop, Manhattan looked like someone slowly turning the stars back on.
Streetlights flickered first. Long lines of orange dots stretching through the avenues as the grid stabilized. Then apartment windows blinked awake in uneven clusters. Offices. Neon signs. Traffic lights.
The blackout that had swallowed half the city earlier was retreating block by block.
I sat on the edge of the roof with my legs hanging over the side, the symbiote peeled back just enough that my mask had retracted. The night air felt cool against my face after everything that had happened inside the facility.
Behind us, the ESU power station still hummed like a tired engine cooling down.
Peter sat a few feet away, mask still on, elbows resting on his knees as he watched the lights return. Gwen leaned back against an air vent beside him, her hood down now, blonde hair slightly frizzed from static and sweat.
For once—
Nobody was running.
Nobody was fighting.
Nobody was trying to stop something from exploding.
Just three exhausted teenagers sitting on a roof watching the city breathe again.
Peter finally broke the silence.
“…You know,” he muttered, staring out at the skyline, “I feel like the whole ‘grounded from hero work’ thing didn’t last very long.”
“Hey now,” I said, stretching my shoulders, “I held out for a good… hmm, week and a half? It felt pretty long to me. Besides, I’m sure my dad will be lenient. You know. Considering.”
Peter turned his head slightly. “Considering what?”
“Well,” I shrugged. “We stopped the city from exploding. And all our stuff is here.”
Gwen snorted softly beside him. “Solid legal defense.”
The lights in another cluster of buildings flickered on in the distance, spreading across the skyline like a ripple.
Peter watched them for a moment longer before looking over at me. “…Hey.” His voice had shifted slightly. Less joking. More… sincere. Weird.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks,” he said quietly.
Aww! He does appreciate us!
‘Don’t ruin the moment.’
“If you hadn’t shown up,” Peter continued, “we wouldn’t have figured out the capacitor solution in time.”
Gwen tilted her head slightly, watching me. “Yeah,” she added softly. “We were trying to stabilize the towers, but the feedback loop was already spiraling.”
Her fingers brushed against the rooftop gravel as she leaned forward.
“Without that discharge plan…”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
Didn’t need to.
The facility would’ve overloaded.
The grid would’ve detonated half its transformers.
Electro would’ve burned out.
And the three of us—
Well.
That ending probably wouldn’t have involved quiet rooftop conversations.
I leaned back on my hands.
“Relax,” I said. “You two had it handled.”
Peter’s mask tilted. “…Harry.”
“Seriously,” I continued. “You had the system half stabilized already. I just pointed at the obvious solution and pretended it was a genius idea.”
“Pretended?” Gwen raised an eyebrow.
“Confidence is ninety percent of engineering.”
Peter let out a quiet laugh.
The tension in the air loosened a little.
But Gwen didn’t laugh.
She kept watching me for another second before looking back out at the skyline.
“…Still,” she said quietly, “we might have died.”
The words landed softer than expected.
Matter-of-fact.
Not dramatic.
Just honest.
A few more buildings lit up across Manhattan.
I studied the glow spreading through the city and tried not to think too hard about how close things had come tonight.
Max Dillon screaming inside that storm.
The towers collapsing.
The grid on the edge of catastrophic overload.
And the moment when the plan had hinged on a terrified man letting go of enough power to level half the campus.
Yeah.
That could’ve gone very differently.
Peter stretched his legs out beside him.
“You know,” he muttered, “this whole ‘three Spider-people’ thing is starting to feel less like a coincidence.”
Gwen nudged his shoulder lightly. “Team-up energy.”
“Trademark pending.” I piled on. “Who knows, maybe we could start our own franchise? I bet people would love to see all of our trauma unfold.”
“I mean… anything for a paycheck.” Peter huffed with a wry smile, as he glanced at me again. “You sure your dad’s not going to ground you for, like… the rest of the decade?”
That earned a quiet laugh from me.
“Oh, he absolutely will.”
Norman Osborn was many things.
Forgiving about broken rules wasn’t one of them.
Sneaking out of the house.
Suiting up as a vigilante.
Jumping into a citywide superhuman disaster.
Yeah.
That conversation was going to be fun.
But as I looked out across the skyline—
Watching Manhattan come back online because we’d managed to stop the grid from tearing itself apart—
Something in my chest settled into place.
I’d tried to stay out of the field.
Tried to listen when Norman said I needed to stop.
Tried to convince myself that Peter and Gwen could handle things without me.
That I should stay home.
Play the responsible son.
Let someone else take the risks.
Tonight had blown that illusion apart.
The city didn’t care whether I was grounded.
Disasters didn’t wait for permission slips.
People still needed help.
And if I had the ability to give it—
Sitting on the sidelines suddenly felt a lot worse than getting yelled at by my father.
We knew you’d make that right decision. And while you’re listening to our wise and valuable counsel, we have some notes…
‘Don’t start.’
Just putting it out there, humans have ten fingers to spare. Surely they wouldn’t miss just one? Plus, not a lot of criminals would be able to pull a trigger without their pointer fingers.
‘We are not eating fingers!’
Spoilsport.
I stared out at the city lights and let the quiet moment linger.
Peter shifted beside me.
Gwen leaned back against the vent again, her shoulder brushing lightly against mine.
Three kids on a rooftop.
A city full of problems waiting for tomorrow.
And somewhere down the line—
More nights like this.
Norman could deal with it.
Because one thing had become very clear tonight.
I wasn’t staying out of the fight anymore.
…
The law office of Nelson & Murdock was quiet in a way Hell’s Kitchen rarely managed.
Not silent.
Never silent.
Matt could hear the city through the walls like a living organism. Traffic moving along Tenth Avenue in restless waves. A subway rattling somewhere below street level. Someone arguing two floors down in a language he didn’t quite catch over the hum of a refrigerator compressor and the buzz of an aging fluorescent light.
Normal sounds.
Familiar sounds.
The kind that reminded him the world was still turning.
His fingers traced the edge of a legal pad while the radio on the desk murmured the late-night news.
“…officials from Empire State University confirmed the electrical incident has been contained. The individual believed responsible for the outage remains in custody at Bellevue Medical Center—”
Matt turned the dial slightly.
The volume dropped.
He didn’t need the broadcast to hear the story.
The city had been talking about nothing else for hours.
Police radios.
Ambulance chatter.
Hospital intake reports.
Newsroom phones ringing nonstop.
Everyone had a version of the story.
None of them matched.
Matt leaned back in his chair and listened to the building breathe around him.
Foggy had gone home hours ago. The office still carried the faint scent of cheap takeout and the stale bitterness of coffee that had been sitting too long on a hot plate. Papers cluttered the desk in uneven stacks, legal briefs and case notes layered like sediment from a dozen different battles.
Some fought in alleys.
Some fought in courtrooms.
Matt’s knuckles brushed the surface of the desk until they found the folder he’d been building all night.
Max Dillon.
The paper felt thin between his fingers.
Not much in it yet.
Employment records from Oscorp’s electrical division. A handful of maintenance reports. A preliminary hospital intake sheet from the night of the accident.
And then there were the other sources.
The unofficial ones.
Matt tilted his head slightly, focusing on the memory of a conversation from earlier that evening.
Harry Osborn’s voice carried a particular rhythm. Quick thinking layered over the careful pauses of someone constantly measuring how much truth to reveal. The boy had inherited Norman Osborn’s intellect but somehow managed to aim it in a completely different direction.
Matt had listened while Harry explained what happened at the ESU power facility.
Not the version the police were repeating.
The real one.
The city called him Electro now.
A supervillain.
A walking disaster.
Matt’s fingers tapped the folder once.
Heartbeat steady.
Breathing calm.
The law had a funny way of deciding who counted as a villain.
According to the official reports, Max Dillon caused a blackout across Manhattan and beyond, and nearly destroyed a university power station. He’d assaulted emergency responders. Endangered civilians. Caused millions in property damage.
That was the narrative already forming on the news.
Dangerous enhanced individual.
Potential terrorist threat.
Superhuman containment protocols.
But none of those voices had heard what Matt heard.
When the hospital records came through earlier that evening, Matt had asked for a copy through a friend in the clerk’s office. The paper told one story.
The man’s heartbeat told another.
Max Dillon’s pulse had been recorded during intake.
The rhythm had been erratic.
Not aggressive.
Not violent.
Terrified.
Matt slid the hospital report across the desk with two fingers.
Electrical exposure.
Severe cellular mutation.
Neurological trauma.
The accident itself had originated at Oscorp.
That part was buried in the middle of the document like a footnote someone hoped nobody would read closely.
Maintenance worker injured during equipment failure.
Transferred to ESU medical research facility.
Matt’s brow tightened slightly.
Transferred.
Not treated.
Transferred.
Which meant a university’s research department had taken custody of a man who’d just survived a catastrophic industrial accident.
The sound of Harry’s voice echoed in his memory again.
He wasn’t attacking the grid, Matt. He was trying to fix things. By the end, he helped us stop it.
Matt believed him.
Not because Harry Osborn wore a mask and swung across rooftops. Not because the boy had a talent for finding trouble in places most people avoided.
Because Harry’s heartbeat had been steady when he told the story.
People lied with their words all the time.
Their bodies were much worse at it.
Matt leaned forward, fingers moving across the documents again.
Oscorp accident.
ESU containment.
Electrical overload.
A man who lost control of powers nobody bothered explaining to him.
And somehow he ended up in police custody while two massive institutions quietly distanced themselves from the entire situation.
That wasn’t justice.
That was liability management.
Matt reached for the Braille typewriter beside the desk and fed a fresh sheet of paper into the rollers.
The keys clicked under his fingers as the first lines of the document formed.
Max Dillon v. Oscorp Industries.
Another line followed.
Max Dillon v. Empire State University.
Two lawsuits.
Maybe more.
Industrial negligence.
Failure to provide proper safety protocols.
Illegal human experimentation if the ESU research division had pushed things too far—which, based on Harry’s description of the facility, seemed entirely possible.
Matt paused, listening to the faint hum of the office again.
Hell’s Kitchen didn’t sleep.
Neither did the problems living inside it.
Some nights Daredevil handled them with his fists.
Tonight the fight was different.
Because there were limits to what a man in a mask could do.
Matt had learned that the hard way.
He could stop gang members in alleys.
Break up trafficking rings.
Punch Wilson Fisk hard enough to put him behind bars.
But Loki dropping out of the sky with an alien army?
Electro turning the power grid into a lightning storm?
Those kinds of problems belonged to people stronger than him.
Faster.
Built for battles that leveled city blocks.
Matt wasn’t one of them.
But the law—
The law was still a weapon.
And right now Max Dillon didn’t have anyone holding it for him.
Matt rolled the page out of the typewriter and set it carefully on the desk.
The case would be ugly.
Oscorp had money.
ESU had lawyers.
Both had powerful incentives to make sure the accident disappeared quietly beneath the label of superhuman incident.
But the truth had a way of surviving if someone pushed hard enough.
Matt reached for the next sheet of paper.
Across the desk, the radio continued reporting on the blackout.
“…sources confirm the enhanced individual known as Electro remains under heavy medical supervision—”
Matt turned the dial until the broadcast faded into static.
Then he started typing again.
Some battles were fought in the dark.
Others were fought under fluorescent lights with stacks of legal briefs and a stubborn refusal to let powerful people rewrite the truth.
Max Dillon might be the most dangerous client Matt Murdock had ever represented.
But tonight—
He was also the one who needed a lawyer the most.
…
The apartment felt smaller than Mark remembered.
Maybe it always had been.
Two rooms, thin walls, and the faint smell of old cooking oil that never quite left the place no matter how often Liz opened the windows. The radiator clicked softly beneath the sill, pushing warm air into a space that still carried the tension of a long night.
Mark stood near the door pulling on his jacket, fingers lingering a moment longer than necessary on the zipper.
He didn’t really want to leave.
Not because the place was comfortable.
Because it was the first time in a long while that Liz had looked at him without that expression.
The one that made his chest feel like it was collapsing inward.
Liz stood a few steps away, arms folded loosely like she wasn’t sure what to do with them.
Her eyes were still red.
Not from crying anymore.
Just… worn out.
It had been that kind of night.
Mark cleared his throat.
“Well,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck, “I should probably get going.”
Liz didn’t argue.
Didn’t try to stop him.
But she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him before he could turn the handle.
The hug caught him off guard.
Liz had always been the tough one between them. The one who handled things when life got ugly. The one who figured out how to stretch groceries another week or talk their way out of trouble with landlords.
She didn’t hug people much.
Mark froze for a second before slowly returning it.
Her arms were warm.
Solid.
Real.
“You don’t have to do this alone,” Liz said quietly against his shoulder.
Mark stared at the peeling paint on the door and tried not to let that sentence sink too deep.
Because if he started believing that—
Well.
That was dangerous.
“I know,” he murmured anyway.
Liz pulled back after a moment, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear as she stepped away. She looked tired, but the tight knot of worry that had been living in her expression earlier was… softer now.
Not gone.
Just… lighter.
Hope did that sometimes.
Mark shifted his weight awkwardly.
“So… about this whole Spider-Man thing.”
“What thing? Oh.” Liz rolled her eyes a little. “You mean the only plan we could come up with to maybe save you from prison and mobsters”
“Yeah, that one.”
A faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
“MJ said Peter hangs out at Stan’s Subs all the time,” Liz explained. “She was actually heading there herself this morning. Said we could tag along.”
Mark nodded slowly.
The plan still sounded ridiculous when you said it out loud.
Find Peter Parker.
Hope he actually knew Spider-Man.
Then hope Spider-Man might care enough about a screw-up like Mark Allan to help.
Three layers of maybe.
Four if you counted the part where Spider-Man didn’t immediately web him to a police cruiser.
But Liz was looking at him differently now.
The shame that had been sitting in her eyes earlier—when she learned what he’d done working for Tombstone, the people he’d helped hurt—had eased just enough to let something else through.
Hope.
Small.
Fragile.
But there.
And if chasing a rumor about Spider-Man kept that look in her eyes a little longer…
Mark would chase it.
“Stan’s Subs,” he muttered. “Got it.”
“Good. I still need to get some stuff ready for class.” Liz sighed, looking particularly more frustrated with school than she usually was. “Which I could have done earlier, if someone hadn’t knocked the power out.”
“Sorry.” He apologized, even though technically he wasn’t the one that caused the blackout.”
“It’s fine.” She said, meaning that it wasn’t. “You can go ahead without me. I’ll meet you at the restaurant. And don’t say or do anything stupid until I get there.”
“So, I can say or do something stupid after you get there?”
“Get out.”
Mark pushed open the apartment door halfway, the hallway beyond dim under flickering lights.
Guess he wasn’t the only one who’d had a rough night.
Not just Liz. MJ hadn’t even been able to reach Peter earlier. Apparently the guy had left the dance right before the blackout to check on his aunt.
Mark didn’t know the details.
Didn’t need them. He got the general idea.
Life had a funny way of kicking everyone at once.
He stepped into the hallway, turning back toward Liz one last time.
She leaned against the doorframe now, arms folded loosely again, but the tightness in her shoulders had eased.
“Hey,” she said before he could say goodbye.
Mark paused.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t disappear again.”
The words landed heavier than anything else she’d said tonight.
Mark nodded slowly.
“…Yeah.”
Then he stepped out into the night.
The city air felt cooler than it had earlier, the lingering traces of the blackout still hanging over the neighborhood. Streetlights buzzed faintly overhead, casting long yellow streaks across the pavement.
Mark shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and started down the short walkway toward the sidewalk.
Stan’s Subs.
Talk to Peter Parker.
Maybe talk to Spider-Man.
Maybe start fixing the mess he’d made.
For the first time in weeks, the weight on his chest didn’t feel quite as crushing.
Then headlights swept across the front of the building.
A car rolled slowly to a stop along the curb.
Mark’s footsteps slowed.
Dark sedan.
Engine still running.
The back door opened.
Two men stepped out.
Big.
Quiet.
The kind of quiet that didn’t come from politeness.
It came from confidence.
Mark’s stomach sank before either of them said a word.
He recognized the suits.
Recognized the posture.
Recognized the kind of men who didn’t come looking for you unless something had gone very wrong.
Tombstone’s men.
Of course.
Because redemption never came easy in this city.
One of them looked up the walkway toward him, expression unreadable beneath the streetlight.
“Mark Allan,” the man said calmly.
Not a question.
A statement.
Mark’s hands curled slightly inside his pockets.
Behind him, the apartment door creaked open a few inches.
The men noticed.
Their attention shifted.
Mark’s chest tightened.
His attempt to do the right thing had just become very dangerous.
And the night wasn’t over yet.
The car engine idled quietly at the curb as the men started walking up the path.
Toward him.
Toward the apartment.
Toward the thin sliver of hope he’d barely managed to rebuild.
Mark didn’t move.
Didn’t run.
Didn’t speak.
Because deep down—
He already knew.
Tomorrow was going to be a lot harder than talking to Spider-Man.
And this time…
Running wasn’t an option.