Everything was too loud.
Gwen lay in the wreckage of the wooden table, her cheek pressed against the freezing concrete. The warehouse lights burned through her white lenses like staring directly into the sun. Every heavy footstep from the approaching mercenaries felt like a hammer striking the inside of her skull.
Her spider-sense wasn't just warning her; it was a continuous, suffocating scream. It drowned out her balance, her strength, and her coordination. Her enhanced muscles twitched uselessly against the concrete.
She hated it.
She had walked out of the Sanctum owning the room. She had felt untouchable, wearing Ethan’s mark on her neck and absolute confidence in her chest.
Now, she was on the floor. Bait in a trap she had willingly jumped into.
Through the agonizing ringing in her ears, Gwen saw the heavy mercenary looming over her. He reached down, the thick, heavy metal of the blinking restraint collar opening in his hands.
He never got to close it.
A small, glowing blue disc slammed directly into the side of the mercenary’s throat.
The man convulsed violently, his eyes rolling back in his head as thousands of volts locked his muscles. He dropped like a stone, the collar clattering loudly across the concrete.
Natalie didn't pause to watch him fall.
There was no secretary posture. No playful, subservient maid persona. No hesitation. She moved like the warehouse had already been mapped, judged, and sentenced.
A second mercenary raised his rifle. Natalie stepped inside his guard before his finger even touched the trigger. She grabbed the barrel, twisted it sharply outward, and drove the heel of her hand directly into his elbow. The joint snapped with a wet crunch.
The man screamed, but Natalie was already pivoting. She used his falling body as cover, ripping his sidearm from his holster in a fluid motion.
Crack. Crack.
She fired twice from the hip. A third mercenary charging from the left dropped instantly, both of his kneecaps shattered.
A shotgun blasted from the catwalk stairs, shredding the wooden crates behind her. Natalie didn't flinch. She dropped into a slide, gliding across the slick concrete right under the spread of the buckshot. As she popped back up, her wrist flicked forward.
The weapon on Natalie’s wrist discharged. A concentrated burst of electroshock slammed into the shooter’s ribs, throwing him backward over the railing to crash onto the floor below.
Gwen watched it all through a haze of pain, her chest heaving.
The woman tearing through Fisk's heavy security wasn't a maid. She wasn't an assistant. She was a weapon.
Natalie Rushman had never existed, Gwen realized, the cold truth cutting through the sonic static in her brain.
Across the room, a heavy gunner stepped out from behind a converted shipping container. He was too far away for Natalie to reach in time. He racked the heavy bolt of an assault rifle, the barrel dropping dead onto Gwen's paralyzed body.
Natalie holstered the stolen pistol. She didn't run. She planted her boots, dropped her center of gravity, and raised her right hand.
A thin orange-red thread sparked between her fingers.
It was ugly. Unstable. Barely holding together.
The thread burned through the fabric of her glove and bit into her skin, but Natalie forced her hand steady. Pain did not matter. Not now.
She snapped her wrist.
The thread crossed the warehouse without a sound.
The gunner pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
The front half of the rifle barrel slid off and hit the concrete.
He looked up just in time to see Natalie close the distance. She drove a combat knife through the Kevlar seam under his arm. He collapsed before he could scream.
Up on the steel beam, Ethan saw the gun barrel hit the floor just as he moved.
A translucent blue screen flared silently in the corner of his vision.
[ Companion Development Quest Updated: Mystic Widow ]
Field Breakthrough Detected:
Natalia Romanova manifested Widow Thread under combat pressure.
Skill Unlocked:
Widow Thread I
Rewards:
2,500 System Points
Mystic Widow Stage I completed
Mystic Combat Instruction I acquired
Stage II Requirement:
Emotional anchor required.
Ethan dismissed the prompt instantly. He dropped from the rafters, landing between Gwen and the advancing reinforcements.
The trap clung to Gwen’s nerves like a hook. Breaking it carelessly would only make it dig deeper.
He dropped to one knee and slammed his palm onto the concrete. A tight golden mandala snapped open around Gwen, wrapping her in a protective shell.
A second gesture crushed the sound around her, muting the sonic field into a dull pressure.
Then Ethan looked up.
The ceiling speakers twisted inward like crushed cans. Sparks rained down as the emitter arrays died one by one.
The agonizing pressure instantly lifted.
Gwen let out a desperate, ragged gasp, dragging air into her lungs. The screaming in her skull faded into a dull, throbbing ache. She pushed herself up onto her elbows, her arms shaking violently. She still couldn't stand, but she could breathe.
Ethan didn't look back at her. He kept his eyes on the remaining mercenaries.
"I told you to follow my lead," Ethan said, his voice terrifyingly calm.
Gwen swallowed hard, shivering on the concrete. "Not the time, Ethan."
"It is absolutely the time," Ethan replied, stepping over her to face the lab.
Phineas Mason backed away from his folding tables.
The trap had worked.That was the worst part.It had worked, and somehow Mason was still losing.
The spider was alive. The red-haired woman was cutting through Fisk’s heavies with the bored precision of someone cleaning a room. And the man in the leather jacket had just dismantled his multi-million-dollar acoustic array by crushing it with his mind.
Tinkerer realized he couldn't win the firefight. But if Fisk found out he had lost the tech, the money, and the spider all in one night, his life was completely forfeit. He had to prove the machine worked.
"Hook it up!" Tinkerer screamed, pointing at the massive Oscorp industrial cell.
The last surviving Hammer fixer stared at him, terrified. "Are you insane? It's not calibrated!"
"Do it!" Tinkerer shouted, grabbing a heavy bundle of cables himself. "If Fisk wants the spider, I’ll make the whole damn Web hear her!"
Tinkerer jammed the heavy connectors directly into the Vulture core's intake ports. He didn't wait for a diagnostic check. He slammed his hand down on the heavy industrial breaker.
The warehouse lights instantly turned a blinding, sickly green-white.
The jagged alien core screamed.
It was not a machine scream. It sounded like space itself being peeled open.
On the floor, Gwen violently convulsed, clapping both hands over the sides of her mask as a new, infinitely heavier pressure slammed into her mind.
Fifty feet away, Natalie staggered sideways, her flawless balance completely failing. She clamped a hand over her ear as a thin line of dark blood trickled out from the sudden pressure shift.
Ethan turned sharply toward the lab, his coat whipping around his legs from the displaced air.
Ethan moved.
The machine fired first.
The first pulse ripped out of the core.
It passed harmlessly through the concrete, through the steel, and through the sky. But high above the warehouse, invisible to ordinary human eyes, a thin, jagged green crack flashed through the atmosphere like lightning across shattered glass.
Something left Earth.