The pulse made no sound.
It still hit like a fist.
Glass burst across the warehouse. Steel containers groaned. Men dropped their weapons and clutched their heads as the air folded wrong around them.
Gwen screamed.
It felt like the machine had hooked something deep inside her and was dragging it out through every nerve at once. She curled in on herself, both hands locked over the sides of her mask.
Across the room, Natalie dropped to one knee. Her perfect balance vanished. Blood ran from one ear and darkened the collar of her tactical suit.
At the center of the lab, Tinkerer started laughing.
Then the Hammer monitors began to pop.
His laugh died.
The machine was not just firing.
It was burning itself alive.
Outside, Hell's Kitchen reacted to a frequency humans couldn't hear.
A flock of pigeons roosting on a nearby tenement roof suddenly scattered in a blind panic, flying erratically into the night. Every dog within a ten-block radius began to howl.
A few streets over, sitting alone in a dark apartment, a blind lawyer dropped his braille book. He rubbed his temples, a sudden, agonizing spike of static piercing his radar sense like a physical needle.
Up in the warehouse, Ethan's vision flooded with red. The Multiversal Tracker in his interface was going wild, warning him that the fabric of reality was straining.
Ethan could not pull the first pulse back.
He could stop the next one.
Golden circles snapped shut around the lab, layer after layer, squeezing the space around the core until the air itself seemed to choke.
The Oscorp cell flared brighter, trying to force another charge through the broken frame.
Then Ethan reached for the ugly little hook the machine had sunk into Gwen’s signal.
He snapped it.
Gwen collapsed against the concrete, gasping as the grip on her mind vanished.
With Gwen unlinked, Ethan didn't hold back.
He raised his hand and closed his fist. Telekinesis slammed into the heavy steel stabilizer frame. The thick metal groaned and buckled inward, crushing the delicate Hammer sensors.
The third pulse began building inside the Oscorp cell anyway.
Ethan flicked his wrist. A small, jagged hole of mirrored glass tore open in the air. He ripped the massive power cell out of the machine by its thick cables and hurled it straight into the Mirror Dimension. The portal snapped shut, cutting the power instantly.
The Vulture core cracked. The green light sputtered, hissed, and died.
The megaphone was broken.
In the chaos, the surviving Fisk mercenary saw only one thing left worth money.
Spider-Woman.
He scrambled across the concrete, grabbed Gwen by the ankle, and dragged her toward the loading dock.
Gwen’s muscles refused to answer.
Natalie intercepted him.
Her fingers were burned from the Eldritch thread, so she went back to the language she knew best.
Her boot crushed into his throat. His grip broke. She caught his wrist, drove a knife through the gap in his gauntlet, and finished him with an elbow to the temple.
He hit the floor and stayed there.
Gwen watched through her white lenses, her chest heaving. She saw the blood on Natalie’s gloves. She saw her choose to intercept the mercenary instead of securing the room.
She had chosen her again.
Across the warehouse, Tinkerer watched his masterpiece smoke and die.
He saw the red-haired woman put down his last guard. He saw the man in the leather jacket turn his golden eyes toward him.
Mason didn't stay to chat.
He grabbed a rugged, heavy-duty hard drive off his folding table and slammed his fist onto a detonator box.
Three smoke charges blew at once, flooding the lab with thick, blinding chemical smoke.
By the time Ethan waved the smoke away with a gust of wind, Tinkerer was gone. A heavy steel grate on the floor lay open, revealing a dark, rusted drop shaft leading straight down into the old subway tunnels.
Ethan stepped up to the edge of the shaft. Sparks crawled around his fingers. One portal, and Mason was finished.
Gwen saw it through the haze. She saw him look down into the shaft. Then she saw him look back at her.
The sparks died.
Ethan turned his back on the escape route and walked to her.
The warehouse was quiet, save for the crackle of a few small electrical fires burning in the wrecked lab.
Gwen sat against the crate, pulling her mask completely off. Her face was pale and slick with sweat.
Natalie stood a few feet away. Her black tactical suit was torn at the shoulder. Her knuckles were bruised, her fingers burned, and a streak of dried blood ran down the side of her neck from her ear.
Gwen looked at her.
“Who are you?” Gwen asked, her voice raspy.
For once, Natalie did not answer like Natalie.
“Natasha Romanoff,” she said. “Someone Fury sent to watch Ethan.”
Gwen went completely still. The words hit her harder than the sonic trap. She slowly turned her head, looking up at Ethan.
“You knew.”
“Yes,” Ethan answered. No dodge. No joke. Just the truth.
Gwen looked away first. That hurt more than the trap.
"And someone who just saved your life," Natasha added, her tone entirely devoid of apology. "Twice."
Gwen’s eyes snapped back to the spy. "That doesn't make the lie better."
"No," Natasha agreed, holding her gaze. "It just makes it more complicated."
A translucent blue screen flared to life in Ethan’s vision.
[ Main Quest Chain Updated: Hide the Spider ]
Results:
Tinkerer’s primary beacon destroyed.
Partial Web echo escaped.
Tinkerer escaped with backup data.
Current Threat:
Active local tracking disrupted.
Higher hunter awareness risk increased.
Exact coordinates not transmitted.
Rewards:
3,000 System Points
Anti-Totem Ward Blueprint Progress +35%
Multiversal Tracker upgraded: Web Echo Detection
Ben Tennyson Template Sync +1%
[ Optional Objective Failed: Capture Phineas Mason ]
Consequence:
Tinkerer may reproduce anti-spider tech using the stolen data.
Ethan read the text silently and dismissed it with a thought.
Deep beneath the Hell's Kitchen docks, a heavy iron door groaned open.
Phineas Mason stumbled into the damp, dimly lit safehouse. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, shaking from adrenaline, and half-deaf from the pulse.
A man in a sharp tailored suit—one of Fisk's representatives—sat at a small table, peeling an apple with a pocket knife.
He looked up at the ruined engineer.
“Was it worth two million dollars?”
Tinkerer walked over to the table. He reached into his coat and dropped the heavy, rugged hard drive onto the wood.
Everything was on it: the map fragment, the trap readings, and the one fact Fisk would care about most. Spider-Woman could be hurt.
Mason wiped the blood out of his eye and looked at the drive.
"It worked," Tinkerer said.