Marvel: Tomorrow MAX (Chapter 12)
Title: Marvel: Tomorrow MAX
Chapter 12: A Thousand Phantom Lilies
Author: V5_Vendetta
Fandom: Marvel Universe
Disclaimer: Crapsack future mine, general universe template Marvel's
Principal Characters: Avengers (OC), Redeemers (OC), X-Men (OC), Cuayin (OC), Laura Kinney/X-23, Callisto/May Parker, Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Kaine
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The battle ends, but what will be left to rise from the ashes?
Spider-Man and Callisto fought while standing on the side of a skyscraper. If they hadn’t had their wall-crawling abilities, they would have been in danger of falling to their deaths; in any case, their powers enabled them to treat the skyscraper’s façade as a flat surface on which they could stand and fight. Callisto flipped over Spider-Man’s head and landed behind him in a crouch, only for Spider-Man to whirl into a kick, which she flipped back to evade. Spider-Man fired twin web-lines at Callisto, only for Callisto to let both webs adhere to her palms, the better to yank Spider-Man to her.
Spider-Man let Callisto pull him, the better to kick her in the chest. Callisto fell back against the skyscraper façade, but sprang to her feet, ready to continue the fight. The glint in her eyes was the smirk that her lips would not form and he found out why a second later as he was suddenly thrown off the skyscraper by some kind of magnetic force. He shot a web-line to save himself, only for Callisto to slice it with her talons. As he fell, he spun a web-parachute for himself, allowing him to evade the worst of the fall.
Talda and Iron Man continued to fight, Iron Man sticking to ranged attacks and Talda evading them. Talda was also using ranged attacks, extending the metal of her suit into whip-like tendrils with which she lashed at Iron Man. Iron Man dodged her lashes and fired his repulsors at her, only for her to slice through his blasts with her tendrils and grab his arm with one of them. Iron Man activated the magnetic clamps in his boot soles to keep himself grounded, and despite Talda’s best efforts, she was the one who ended up pulled. Unfortunately for Iron Man, she used that to launch herself into a kick that actually succeeded in knocking Iron Man out the window.
As she jumped after him, Iron Man fired a massive Unibeam blast combined with his repulsors, knocking her down as he reoriented himself. Talda landed on the ground, her armor scratched and tarnished, but otherwise intact. She immediately retaliated with a lash of her tendrils, which Iron Man proceeded to grab and use as leverage for a throw. Talda twisted in midair, kicked off a skyscraper façade, and lunged at Iron Man, only for Iron Man to sidestep her attack.
Blitzkrieg and Lightning raced around the city, clashing at high speed. They moved so fast that they were invisible to human sight as anything other than colliding blurs, and even those eventually faded into seeming invisibility. Now the only way for humans to detect their presence was by the sonic booms that resulted from their blows meeting each other. Occasional flashes of violent light also helped alert normal humans to their presence.
Captain America continued fighting Saint, much to his frustrated sadness. He did feel empathy for her plight and the wrongs that had been committed against so many people around the world by the government he quasi-reluctantly served. But there had to be a better way to redress those grievances than just marching into a city and trying to destroy everything!
The other Avengers had their hands full with Sylph, who was only rivaled in mystical - or quasi-mystical - power by Arcane. Hulk and Warbird had raw strength and tactical prowess to work with, and Sting . . . well, there had to be something a woman with the power to shrink to insect-like sizes could do. Despite all their abilities, Sylph was easily getting the better of them, using her bandages to seal off their powers while pummeling them with spells derived from those same bandages.
“How do we beat her?” Hulk asked, getting frustrated.
“We leave her to me,” Arcane replied.
“You?” Warbird asked.
“I’m the only one with a chance of beating her,” Arcane stated simply.
“Give it a whirl, then,” Sting said. “We’ll back you up.”
“Thanks,” Arcane responded.
Sylph stretched her bandages to wrap around Arcane, but Arcane generated a quantum blade around her hand and used it to slice apart the bandages. To her surprise, Sylph merely let out an amused chuckle. “What the hell’s so funny?” Hulk asked.
“The bandages weren’t just seals on your power . . .” Sylph replied. “They were seals on mine, too.”
Arcane gulped, and her last thought was a simple, I f#$%& up. Then there was nothing but white in her vision, and then there was nothing but black in that same vision.
In Washington, D.C., President Nathaniel Cooper stepped out of his limo, despite the best efforts of his security detail to dissuade him, and looked at Cuayin and her entourage. “What do you want?” he asked evenly.
“What do I want?” Cuayin echoed sardonically. “That’s a lovely question. A very lovely question to ask me, because what I want, what you want, what someone else wants . . . well, that’s the very crux of everything that happens in this universe. ‘What do you want?’ My answer is a world without oppression, a world defined by something more than just the endless struggles of self-important men for the power they feel is their birthright. What is your answer, Mr. President?”
“That’s something we all want,” President Cooper replied. “We all want a peaceful world.”
Cuayin laughed derisively. “Don’t lie, Mr. President. If you wanted peace, you wouldn’t categorize people solely in terms of who’s a threat to your precious hegemony and who isn’t. You wouldn’t act on those categorizations by making people choose between selling their souls to your military and being locked up for the rest of their natural lives and stripped of their talents. You wouldn’t be in the process of crushing every single pocket of resistance that emerged against your policies. Those are not the actions of someone who wants peace; those are the actions of someone who wants power.”
President Cooper’s fists clenched. “You’re a hypocrite. Murdering your way across the world, butchering everyone whose way of living disagrees with the way you want to see things done. You think you’re better than me? In principle and practice, we’ve done the exact same things to ensure our goals.”
Cuayin threw her arm out, generating a quantum blade from her arm. “You will be silent . . .” She sped toward President Cooper, intending to kill him in one blow, only for her charge to be blocked by Madeline Crichton, the dhampir speedster known as Spitfire.
“No. You will be silent,” Spitfire retorted.
“How do you work for this man?” Cuayin asked heatedly. “How can you be part of this, when it is men like him that have the world’s most vulnerable in a stranglehold of greed and violence?!”
“No one’s saying we’re perfect,” Spitfire answered. “But the President had a point. For someone who goes on about peace and justice, you’re just as much of a butcher as you claim the men you hate are.”
At that moment, Lesedi and Nthanda went after the other members of the Special Secret Service. Citizen V, the latest representative of the V-Battalion, dodged Lesedi’s light blasts and threw V-shuriken at her, which were deflected by her light shield. The Colonel, yet another beneficiary of the super-soldier serum, blocked Nthanda’s plasma blasts with his dual-bladed plasma staff. Nighthawk, a black-armored man with a hawk-like helmet, attacked Atieno, attempting to dissipate her shadow barrier by doing so. Atieno’s answer was to project another blast of shadow to keep him at bay.
Spider-Man looked at the destruction of Stark-Kurosaki Tower and screamed, “NO!!!” Forgetting Callisto, he web-swung and roof-vaulted as fast as he could to the site of the explosion, hoping against hope that his fellow Avengers were still alive.
A similar reaction was had by Iron Man, who was a little more coherent in his horror and desperation. “Bobby!!!” He took off at roughly transonic speed, flying to the site where Stark-Kurosaki Tower had once stood. Below him, Blitzkrieg was running at roughly the same speed and toward the same destination.
When they got there, the rubble seemed to have formed into a hill. “My God . . .” Blitzkrieg murmured.
The rubble began to shift, as though something was moving underneath it. Indeed, something was moving beneath the rubble, namely a 40-foot Sting, who had used her size to shelter the other Avengers and even the Redeemers. Spider-Man darted beneath her to check out the situation, noticing Warbird cradling Captain America, with Saint looking almost sad.
“Is he . . . ?” Spider-Man trailed off, unwilling to speak his fear.
“Not quite,” Warbird replied solemnly.
“How did this happen?”
“It’s my fault,” Arcane answered. “I destroyed the seals on her power, and she went nuclear.”
“What about everyone else?”
“We couldn’t save everyone.”
“Damn . . .” Spider-Man muttered.
“I . . . I can heal him,” Sylph offered.
“What are you doing?” Saint asked.
“Repairing the damage I’ve caused,” Sylph replied. “I can’t bring back the dead, but I can keep any more people from ending up dead.”
“He’s our enemy!” Saint protested.
“And maybe we need to take a closer look at who our enemies are. These are merely foot soldiers, pawns being used in a larger gambit.”
“Can you really heal him?” Iron Man asked. “Or are you just pulling our chains for your sick amusement?”
Sylph glared at Iron Man. “I am many things, but a sadist is not one of them.” She turned to Warbird. “Give the Captain to me.”
With much hesitance, reluctance, and misgiving, Warbird surrendered Captain America to Sylph, who concentrated her aura into him. As she did, wounds began to appear on her body, remarkably similar to the ones that were once on Captain America’s body. When it was over, Sylph coughed up a small amount of blood, while Captain America began to stir.
“Cap . . . are you . . . ?” Hulk asked.
“Yeah,” Captain America replied. He looked at Sylph. “I suppose I have you to thank for my continued well-being.”
“Don’t think anything of it,” Sylph answered. “Your Avengers were more generous than would merit an opponent of theirs.”
“That’s what we try to do,” Captain America said. “Because I believe that, powers or no powers . . . we’re all human. Just human, deep down.”
Callisto watched the scene, feeling something tearing at her heart. Sylph had risked her life to save Captain America, even knowing what taking on his injuries would do to her. The Avengers had risked themselves to save the Redeemers, even when the Redeemers were invaders intent on . . . intent on . . . Callisto couldn’t even voice it, even in her own head. Not to mention the fact that there had been innocent people in that tower, and even Arcane’s powers hadn’t been enough to save them all.
“What . . . have I been doing?”
“May!” a voice shouted. “May!”
For some reason, the sound of the voice compelled her to turn around. When she did, she found two men in black, one tall and imposing with long brown hair sticking out of his mask and the other smaller and leaner with a large white spider on his chest, moving toward her. The tall and imposing one was bounding across rooftops, and the spider-branded one was swinging on web-lines, much like what she could do.
“May!” The voice sounded simultaneously tortured and overjoyed.
“My name is Callisto,” she answered.
The spider-branded one landed before her and pulled off his mask, revealing a handsome brown-haired man who looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties at most, but whose eyes bespoke of many long years of sorrow. “May . . . it’s your father.”
“My father?” Callisto echoed.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “I’m Peter. Peter Parker. And you’re May Parker. Or, you would have been, if I’d had the chance to keep you, to hold you in my arms, to raise you right . . .”
Callisto looked at Peter searchingly, even as the tall and imposing one landed before them. Unlike Peter, he didn’t remove his mask, merely watching the tableau between the spider-branded one and Callisto. Finally, he began to speak. “What Peter says is the truth. I know because . . . in a sense, I was him.”
“Who are you?” Callisto asked.
“You can call me Kaine,” the man replied.
“He’s like my brother,” Peter quipped. “Only taller, more scarred, and way more homicidal than me.”
Callisto looked at Peter and Kaine. “This . . . this doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense right now,” Peter answered, gently pulling Callisto into a hug. “You’re my daughter, May, and everything is going to be ok.”
“I don’t understand,” Callisto murmured. “You don’t even know me.”
“We’ll have time for that later,” Peter whispered. “Right now, I just want to savor this moment.”
Unfortunately, they would not be able to do so. The spider-senses of all three triggered, Kaine’s with a painful vision of May and Peter being gunned down. At that moment, a small platoon of the War Machine Guard, an armor-using private military company owned by Masato Kurosaki, emerged. The leader of the outfit wore black-and-silver Iron Man-like armor, while the grunts wore simpler harness-like exoskeletons underneath their severe black uniforms and stylized gasmasks.
“You’re under arrest,” War Machine declared. “All three of you.”
Callisto pulled out of Peter’s embrace, while Peter donned his mask once again. Stingers popped out of Peter’s wrists, while Callisto extended the talons beneath her nails. Kaine extended his claws as well. “Just try it,” Callisto snarled.
“If you insist, pretty lady,” War Machine sneered. He directed his next words to his troops. “Take them down.”
Kaine didn’t wait for them to make the first move, leaping over Peter’s and Callisto’s heads and slashing at the first War Machine Guard to attempt an attack. Peter impaled two War Machine Guards attempting to attack him from opposite sides with his stingers. Callisto shot her hand through a War Machine Guard’s mask, talons extended for additional damage.
War Machine locked his targeting computers on Callisto, pointing a repulsor at her back. “Good-bye, Spider-bitch.”
Back in Washington, D.C., the battle waged between Cuayin’s Redeemers and the Special Secret Service. Cuayin shifted her personal time-path out of phase with the timestream, leaving Spitfire virtually standing still in her eyes and thus unable to even see Cuayin’s attacks despite her own physical acceleration. Nighthawk and Atieno were fighting it out, Atieno generating shadow barriers to block Nighthawk’s attacks and even using them as rams to knock him off-balance. The Colonel clashed swords with Nthanda, her plasma-molded blade pushing against his dual-bladed plasma staff, and Citizen V used a combination of acrobatics and V-shuriken to distract Lesedi.
Leaving behind a seemingly beaten Spitfire, Cuayin charged President Cooper, intending to kill him in one shot. To her surprise, a young man, an X-Man by his uniform, blocked her attack. “Who . . . ?”
“Hi,” Synergy greeted, just before kicking her in the stomach. Cuayin sprang to her feet and attempted to telekinetically repel him, only for Synergy to generate a telekinetic shield that blocked her initial attack. Not one to give up, Cuayin shaped her power into hovering knives and propelled them all at Synergy, who deflected them with his bare hands, albeit bare hands wrapped in TK sheaths. It still took him by surprise - slightly - when Cuayin speed-blitzed him, striking him down.
She turned her attentions toward President Cooper once again, extending a TK spear to kill him. The spear was bodily blocked by a tall, well-muscled redheaded girl, also an X-Man if judged by her uniform. The spear had pierced her between her shoulder and her chest, but she didn’t seem to be that greatly harmed. Still, the blue-haired speedster X-Man Impetus took enough offense to Fairbrook’s injury to attempt a hyper-speed attack on Cuayin. The would-be messiah answered his assault with a telekinetic ram that beat him to the ground.
A torrent of sand suddenly crashed into the shadow-shielded battle arena. The sand attacked Atieno, Lesedi, and Nthanda, who all attempted to retaliate against it in their own ways. The sand was momentarily parted by their attacks, but resurged with a vengeance. Its real purpose was not to attack, but rather to obscure, to camouflage, as the Redeemers found when those not necessarily impeded by lack of vision - such as X-23 - began attacking them.
With a wrathful scream, Cuayin fused the sand attack into glass and then shattered it with a brutal TK-enhanced punch, telekinetically manipulating the shards into knives that flew at all her opponents, which were namely the X-Men and the Special Secret Service. Synergy and Daybreak blocked the shards with their own telekinetic abilities, inherent or duplicated, while X-23, Impetus, and Fairbrook dodged. The Colonel spun his dual-bladed plasma staff so fast the whirling blades formed a shield that deflected the shards, while Nighthawk’s armor largely protected him, and Spitfire and Citizen V used raw speed and good old-fashioned acrobatics, respectively, to evade.
X-23 launched into a jump kick with both foot claws extended, intending to skewer Cuayin. Unfortunately for her, a light barrier formed between X-23 and Cuayin, generated by Lesedi, who used the barrier as a repellant for X-23. X-23 flipped in midair and used Fairbrook’s hands as a springboard for a surprise attack on Cuayin which would have hit if Nthanda hadn’t chosen to throw herself on X-23’s claws.
“Nthanda!” Atieno shouted, immediately extending a shadow spear toward X-23 with lethal intent behind it. X-23 dodged, pulling her claws out of Nthanda as she did so. That didn’t stop Atieno from extending more shadow spears, these acting like tentacles that grasped at X-23, who dodged them in an insane display of acrobatics that would have put the best human gymnasts to shame. So focused Atieno was on killing X-23 for the wound X-23 had dealt to her fellow Redeemer that she didn’t notice Fairbrook darting behind her to deliver a knockout punch until . . . Lesedi generated a light shield behind her, blocking Fairbrook’s punch.
Immediately, Atieno whirled and turned several of her shadow spears on Fairbrook, who barely evaded being skewered. Impetus sped into an attack on Atieno to defend Fairbrook, dodging her shadow spears until he was close enough to just hit her. Despite that, Lesedi generated another light shield to protect Atieno, one that also forcibly repelled him from her. Impetus skidded on the balls of his feet and foremost hand before regaining his balance and hyper-rushing into another attack.
“This fight is fruitless,” Daybreak stated, her voice low and soft but somehow absolutely clear.
“You’re wrong,” Cuayin responded. “This fight is not fruitless. This fight will be the salvation of this world, its deliverance from the evil ones that have ravaged it through their lust for power and violence, who have violated, defiled, and brutalized every innocent soul in it.”
“And what are you doing?” Daybreak inquired offhandedly.
“I’m saving this world!” Cuayin shouted. “Look at everyone I’ve gathered to me! We are all cursed to be alone, to be feared, to be hunted and hated and exploited and murdered so long as these evil men that you are defending retain power! That is our lot unless we take their power from them, show them that what they think is power is nothing compared to the true power of justice!”
Daybreak chuckled softly, a small titter that grew into a full-blown belly laugh, as though she had just understood the punch line behind an obscure joke. When she calmed down, it was with one corner of her mouth curled up in a knowing smirk. “Really? That’s it? Oh, well. Not like I expected much from a child in a woman’s body.”
“I will not be mocked or judged by you!” Cuayin yelled, generating a bladed TK sheath around her arm and blitzing Daybreak, who blocked her attack with a telekinetic blade of her own.
“I’ve figured you out,” Daybreak spoke calmly. “You’re a child, a lost little orphan looking for a rhyme or reason to her existence and screaming into the darkness.”
“Be silent!” Cuayin snarled, pushing against Daybreak’s TK blade.
“I’m not done yet. You think you’ve caused all that carnage in the name of justice. You haven’t. You’ve caused it in the name of your own revenge on a world that you feel brought you into existence for the sole purpose of being a weapon and you’ve deluded yourself and all those women into thinking you’re some kind of messiah. You aren’t. You’re just an angry, ignorant child lashing out at a world you’ve never quite understood.”
“Blasphemer!”
“Oh, so you think you’re a god now, too?”
Cuayin looked like she was about to break down, but then she regained her composure. “Even if I am as selfish and childish as you seem to take me to be, I’m still going to make a better world. A paradise, a place where women and children can be safe from the exploitations and dominance of men, where we won’t need to hide or be afraid!”
Daybreak shook her head sadly. “You poor, deluded girl. Say you win. What are you going to do, then?”
“The world will be a paradise.”
“No, I mean, what will you do when people become unhappy with the way you do things? When they begin to dissent? Will you still be the benevolent dictator you want to be?”
“Yes! I’m not doing this because I want power! I’m doing this because I want to save this world!”
“That’s what everyone says.”
Unable to take anymore, Cuayin telekinetically blasted Daybreak into the other side of the shadow barrier. However, Daybreak’s words had done their work; Cuayin stood frozen in place, shivering in what seemed to be mortal terror. For the first time in probably her entire life, she knew doubt. She knew, beyond a cold certainty, what the world had become under the stewardship of its rulers. She had seen, through the eyes of the powerless and the helpless, how tightly the rulers squeezed their iron fists.
But would I be any better?
“What did you do?” Impetus asked Daybreak, while helping her to her feet.
“Nothing a skilled analyst of human behavior wouldn’t be able to do,” Daybreak
replied. “And she is human, no matter how much she would like to pretend she is more enlightened than that.”
“Just . . . let me . . . do one thing first,” Cuayin whispered.
“And that would be?” X-23 prompted dangerously. To her senses, Cuayin was preparing to do something, albeit the nature of which was unknown to her. She got her answer when space seemed to warp around Cuayin and suck her in; when it reverted to normal, she was gone.
“Where did she go?” Sandstorm asked.
“She went to save a life,” Synergy answered.
Back in New York City, War Machine never got the chance to shoot Callisto, because when he fired . . . Cuayin was on the other end of the repulsor blast, taking its full force. The blast, though, prompted the attentions of the three Spiders - Peter, Kaine, and Callisto - to check it out. Callisto’s eyes widened with horror, shock, and anguish as she saw Cuayin, her liberator, teacher, and guardian, fall after taking the high-powered repulsor beam.
War Machine stared at the fallen woman. While his artificially modulated voice would “naturally” betray little emotion, it was very hard to avoid the impression that he had absolutely no remorse about what he had done. “I wanted the Spider. But nailing the world’s most powerful posthuman terrorist since Magneto is a nice consolation prize.”
“Bastard!” Callisto screamed, lunging at War Machine despite Peter’s and Kaine’s near-simultaneous protests and warnings, talons extended for the kill. War Machine launched multiple seeker missiles at Callisto, who dodged them with inhuman speed despite the fact that they were locked directly on her heat signature. After a while of dodging, she ran straight at War Machine, who realized what she intended to do and simply shot another repulsor blast at her. It hit her, along with the missiles, but when the smoke from the missiles’ detonations faded, she was . . .
“I’ll be damned,” Kaine remarked.
Callisto was without a single scratch, due chiefly to the force shield that Cuayin had been just conscious enough to generate around her. She looked at Cuayin with tears of gratitude and sadness in her eyes, Cuayin returning the eye contact and even smiling gently at her. “My dear girl . . .”
“Thank you,” Peter whispered.
“Let’s see if you can stop this,” War Machine sneered, firing a repulsor blast at Cuayin’s head, only for it to be absorbed by a force field generated around Cuayin’s wounded body. The force field also reflected the repulsor blast, albeit with Cuayin’s own considerable power added to it, thus severely wounding War Machine and partially disabling his armor’s functionality.
Callisto moved to Cuayin’s side immediately. “Cuayin . . . is it over?”
“Not for us, dear girl,” Cuayin answered. “Not just yet . . .”
One week later, Bobby Stephens was resting in his bed, watching the news on his television set. “While there was considerable collateral damage in the form of civilian casualties and damaged or destroyed property, the former was far lesser than the latter,” the news anchor reported. “Many of the civilian survivors report being rescued in the heat of the conflict between the invading posthumans and the Avengers by costumed posthumans unidentifiable as being registered with the Initiative. President Nathaniel Cooper had this to say at his press conference three days ago.”
The screen cut to an image of President Cooper speaking in his press chamber. “I came to realize something those few days ago. There is justice and there is injustice, and sometimes one can masquerade as the other. The invaders believed that what they were doing was just, yet it led to undue suffering on the part of innocent people. At the same time, many within my government, myself included, believed that what we were doing was just, yet I came to understand that that not every lawbreaker is a villain and not every law enforcer is a hero. The law is nothing without the spirit of justice behind it, and we must never assume that they are automatically linked. . . .”
“Hi, Bobby,” Cara greeted from the door.
“Mind if we come in?” Toshiro asked, standing beside Cara.
“Come in,” Bobby answered.
Toshiro and Cara entered the room, taking up a perch on either side of Bobby. “Penny for your thoughts?” Cara asked.
“I keep thinking, we’re not so different,” Bobby mused. “All of us, in one way or another, were trying to do what we felt was the right thing. The Redeemers had a right to seek justice after what was done to them, the hells that were made of their lives.”
“But innocent people got caught in the crossfire,” Toshiro interjected. “That’s not right.”
“No, but would they have been caught in the crossfire if we didn’t have such an aggressive attitude toward regulating people with powers?” Bobby wondered. “If we weren’t treating anyone who wouldn’t sign the dotted line like they were Public Enemy Number One?”
“We’re all human, in the end,” Cara mused. “And in the end, we’ll all have to answer to the same god. Or gods, depending on your particular take.”
“Maybe things will change,” Toshiro remarked. “Those unlicensed heroes we’re so hard on? They were saving lives.”
“Yeah,” Bobby mumbled. “Like we should be doing. Like all of us who have any power in this world should be doing.” It rather surprised him when Toshiro suddenly hugged him, quickly followed by Cara embracing them both. “What are you doing?”
“Just . . . reminding you we care,” Cara replied.
“Thanks,” Bobby said.
Arachne had finally come back to New York City, web-swinging toward her house. She was going to come clean to her parents and sister, tell them everything. If they hated her, if they were scared of her, it was just something she would have to deal with. They deserved better from her than to live without knowing what had become of her. As she approached her house, she couldn’t help but get the feeling something was terribly wrong.
She landed on the roof and crawled down to the door, flipping onto the ground. She rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. She rang again, but there was still no response. She rang one more time, but there was yet to be any kind of reaction. She placed her hand on the doorknob and twisted, surprised to find the knob giving way without any application of her super-strength. She stepped inside, her symbiote shifting into a shoulder-less black shirt and black slacks with torn knees. Flipping on the light, she got an unpleasant surprise.
The furniture was in various states of disrepair and upheaval, as though there had been a struggle or someone had just trashed everything for the fun of it. Painted onto the walls, in a deep red shade resembling freshly spilled blood, was a message: “WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE, SPIDER-C#%&.”
Audrey Hopkins could do nothing except scream.
To be continued . . .
Chapter 12: A Thousand Phantom Lilies
Author: V5_Vendetta
Fandom: Marvel Universe
Disclaimer: Crapsack future mine, general universe template Marvel's
Principal Characters: Avengers (OC), Redeemers (OC), X-Men (OC), Cuayin (OC), Laura Kinney/X-23, Callisto/May Parker, Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Kaine
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The battle ends, but what will be left to rise from the ashes?
Spider-Man and Callisto fought while standing on the side of a skyscraper. If they hadn’t had their wall-crawling abilities, they would have been in danger of falling to their deaths; in any case, their powers enabled them to treat the skyscraper’s façade as a flat surface on which they could stand and fight. Callisto flipped over Spider-Man’s head and landed behind him in a crouch, only for Spider-Man to whirl into a kick, which she flipped back to evade. Spider-Man fired twin web-lines at Callisto, only for Callisto to let both webs adhere to her palms, the better to yank Spider-Man to her.
Spider-Man let Callisto pull him, the better to kick her in the chest. Callisto fell back against the skyscraper façade, but sprang to her feet, ready to continue the fight. The glint in her eyes was the smirk that her lips would not form and he found out why a second later as he was suddenly thrown off the skyscraper by some kind of magnetic force. He shot a web-line to save himself, only for Callisto to slice it with her talons. As he fell, he spun a web-parachute for himself, allowing him to evade the worst of the fall.
Talda and Iron Man continued to fight, Iron Man sticking to ranged attacks and Talda evading them. Talda was also using ranged attacks, extending the metal of her suit into whip-like tendrils with which she lashed at Iron Man. Iron Man dodged her lashes and fired his repulsors at her, only for her to slice through his blasts with her tendrils and grab his arm with one of them. Iron Man activated the magnetic clamps in his boot soles to keep himself grounded, and despite Talda’s best efforts, she was the one who ended up pulled. Unfortunately for Iron Man, she used that to launch herself into a kick that actually succeeded in knocking Iron Man out the window.
As she jumped after him, Iron Man fired a massive Unibeam blast combined with his repulsors, knocking her down as he reoriented himself. Talda landed on the ground, her armor scratched and tarnished, but otherwise intact. She immediately retaliated with a lash of her tendrils, which Iron Man proceeded to grab and use as leverage for a throw. Talda twisted in midair, kicked off a skyscraper façade, and lunged at Iron Man, only for Iron Man to sidestep her attack.
Blitzkrieg and Lightning raced around the city, clashing at high speed. They moved so fast that they were invisible to human sight as anything other than colliding blurs, and even those eventually faded into seeming invisibility. Now the only way for humans to detect their presence was by the sonic booms that resulted from their blows meeting each other. Occasional flashes of violent light also helped alert normal humans to their presence.
Captain America continued fighting Saint, much to his frustrated sadness. He did feel empathy for her plight and the wrongs that had been committed against so many people around the world by the government he quasi-reluctantly served. But there had to be a better way to redress those grievances than just marching into a city and trying to destroy everything!
The other Avengers had their hands full with Sylph, who was only rivaled in mystical - or quasi-mystical - power by Arcane. Hulk and Warbird had raw strength and tactical prowess to work with, and Sting . . . well, there had to be something a woman with the power to shrink to insect-like sizes could do. Despite all their abilities, Sylph was easily getting the better of them, using her bandages to seal off their powers while pummeling them with spells derived from those same bandages.
“How do we beat her?” Hulk asked, getting frustrated.
“We leave her to me,” Arcane replied.
“You?” Warbird asked.
“I’m the only one with a chance of beating her,” Arcane stated simply.
“Give it a whirl, then,” Sting said. “We’ll back you up.”
“Thanks,” Arcane responded.
Sylph stretched her bandages to wrap around Arcane, but Arcane generated a quantum blade around her hand and used it to slice apart the bandages. To her surprise, Sylph merely let out an amused chuckle. “What the hell’s so funny?” Hulk asked.
“The bandages weren’t just seals on your power . . .” Sylph replied. “They were seals on mine, too.”
Arcane gulped, and her last thought was a simple, I f#$%& up. Then there was nothing but white in her vision, and then there was nothing but black in that same vision.
In Washington, D.C., President Nathaniel Cooper stepped out of his limo, despite the best efforts of his security detail to dissuade him, and looked at Cuayin and her entourage. “What do you want?” he asked evenly.
“What do I want?” Cuayin echoed sardonically. “That’s a lovely question. A very lovely question to ask me, because what I want, what you want, what someone else wants . . . well, that’s the very crux of everything that happens in this universe. ‘What do you want?’ My answer is a world without oppression, a world defined by something more than just the endless struggles of self-important men for the power they feel is their birthright. What is your answer, Mr. President?”
“That’s something we all want,” President Cooper replied. “We all want a peaceful world.”
Cuayin laughed derisively. “Don’t lie, Mr. President. If you wanted peace, you wouldn’t categorize people solely in terms of who’s a threat to your precious hegemony and who isn’t. You wouldn’t act on those categorizations by making people choose between selling their souls to your military and being locked up for the rest of their natural lives and stripped of their talents. You wouldn’t be in the process of crushing every single pocket of resistance that emerged against your policies. Those are not the actions of someone who wants peace; those are the actions of someone who wants power.”
President Cooper’s fists clenched. “You’re a hypocrite. Murdering your way across the world, butchering everyone whose way of living disagrees with the way you want to see things done. You think you’re better than me? In principle and practice, we’ve done the exact same things to ensure our goals.”
Cuayin threw her arm out, generating a quantum blade from her arm. “You will be silent . . .” She sped toward President Cooper, intending to kill him in one blow, only for her charge to be blocked by Madeline Crichton, the dhampir speedster known as Spitfire.
“No. You will be silent,” Spitfire retorted.
“How do you work for this man?” Cuayin asked heatedly. “How can you be part of this, when it is men like him that have the world’s most vulnerable in a stranglehold of greed and violence?!”
“No one’s saying we’re perfect,” Spitfire answered. “But the President had a point. For someone who goes on about peace and justice, you’re just as much of a butcher as you claim the men you hate are.”
At that moment, Lesedi and Nthanda went after the other members of the Special Secret Service. Citizen V, the latest representative of the V-Battalion, dodged Lesedi’s light blasts and threw V-shuriken at her, which were deflected by her light shield. The Colonel, yet another beneficiary of the super-soldier serum, blocked Nthanda’s plasma blasts with his dual-bladed plasma staff. Nighthawk, a black-armored man with a hawk-like helmet, attacked Atieno, attempting to dissipate her shadow barrier by doing so. Atieno’s answer was to project another blast of shadow to keep him at bay.
Spider-Man looked at the destruction of Stark-Kurosaki Tower and screamed, “NO!!!” Forgetting Callisto, he web-swung and roof-vaulted as fast as he could to the site of the explosion, hoping against hope that his fellow Avengers were still alive.
A similar reaction was had by Iron Man, who was a little more coherent in his horror and desperation. “Bobby!!!” He took off at roughly transonic speed, flying to the site where Stark-Kurosaki Tower had once stood. Below him, Blitzkrieg was running at roughly the same speed and toward the same destination.
When they got there, the rubble seemed to have formed into a hill. “My God . . .” Blitzkrieg murmured.
The rubble began to shift, as though something was moving underneath it. Indeed, something was moving beneath the rubble, namely a 40-foot Sting, who had used her size to shelter the other Avengers and even the Redeemers. Spider-Man darted beneath her to check out the situation, noticing Warbird cradling Captain America, with Saint looking almost sad.
“Is he . . . ?” Spider-Man trailed off, unwilling to speak his fear.
“Not quite,” Warbird replied solemnly.
“How did this happen?”
“It’s my fault,” Arcane answered. “I destroyed the seals on her power, and she went nuclear.”
“What about everyone else?”
“We couldn’t save everyone.”
“Damn . . .” Spider-Man muttered.
“I . . . I can heal him,” Sylph offered.
“What are you doing?” Saint asked.
“Repairing the damage I’ve caused,” Sylph replied. “I can’t bring back the dead, but I can keep any more people from ending up dead.”
“He’s our enemy!” Saint protested.
“And maybe we need to take a closer look at who our enemies are. These are merely foot soldiers, pawns being used in a larger gambit.”
“Can you really heal him?” Iron Man asked. “Or are you just pulling our chains for your sick amusement?”
Sylph glared at Iron Man. “I am many things, but a sadist is not one of them.” She turned to Warbird. “Give the Captain to me.”
With much hesitance, reluctance, and misgiving, Warbird surrendered Captain America to Sylph, who concentrated her aura into him. As she did, wounds began to appear on her body, remarkably similar to the ones that were once on Captain America’s body. When it was over, Sylph coughed up a small amount of blood, while Captain America began to stir.
“Cap . . . are you . . . ?” Hulk asked.
“Yeah,” Captain America replied. He looked at Sylph. “I suppose I have you to thank for my continued well-being.”
“Don’t think anything of it,” Sylph answered. “Your Avengers were more generous than would merit an opponent of theirs.”
“That’s what we try to do,” Captain America said. “Because I believe that, powers or no powers . . . we’re all human. Just human, deep down.”
Callisto watched the scene, feeling something tearing at her heart. Sylph had risked her life to save Captain America, even knowing what taking on his injuries would do to her. The Avengers had risked themselves to save the Redeemers, even when the Redeemers were invaders intent on . . . intent on . . . Callisto couldn’t even voice it, even in her own head. Not to mention the fact that there had been innocent people in that tower, and even Arcane’s powers hadn’t been enough to save them all.
“What . . . have I been doing?”
“May!” a voice shouted. “May!”
For some reason, the sound of the voice compelled her to turn around. When she did, she found two men in black, one tall and imposing with long brown hair sticking out of his mask and the other smaller and leaner with a large white spider on his chest, moving toward her. The tall and imposing one was bounding across rooftops, and the spider-branded one was swinging on web-lines, much like what she could do.
“May!” The voice sounded simultaneously tortured and overjoyed.
“My name is Callisto,” she answered.
The spider-branded one landed before her and pulled off his mask, revealing a handsome brown-haired man who looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties at most, but whose eyes bespoke of many long years of sorrow. “May . . . it’s your father.”
“My father?” Callisto echoed.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “I’m Peter. Peter Parker. And you’re May Parker. Or, you would have been, if I’d had the chance to keep you, to hold you in my arms, to raise you right . . .”
Callisto looked at Peter searchingly, even as the tall and imposing one landed before them. Unlike Peter, he didn’t remove his mask, merely watching the tableau between the spider-branded one and Callisto. Finally, he began to speak. “What Peter says is the truth. I know because . . . in a sense, I was him.”
“Who are you?” Callisto asked.
“You can call me Kaine,” the man replied.
“He’s like my brother,” Peter quipped. “Only taller, more scarred, and way more homicidal than me.”
Callisto looked at Peter and Kaine. “This . . . this doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense right now,” Peter answered, gently pulling Callisto into a hug. “You’re my daughter, May, and everything is going to be ok.”
“I don’t understand,” Callisto murmured. “You don’t even know me.”
“We’ll have time for that later,” Peter whispered. “Right now, I just want to savor this moment.”
Unfortunately, they would not be able to do so. The spider-senses of all three triggered, Kaine’s with a painful vision of May and Peter being gunned down. At that moment, a small platoon of the War Machine Guard, an armor-using private military company owned by Masato Kurosaki, emerged. The leader of the outfit wore black-and-silver Iron Man-like armor, while the grunts wore simpler harness-like exoskeletons underneath their severe black uniforms and stylized gasmasks.
“You’re under arrest,” War Machine declared. “All three of you.”
Callisto pulled out of Peter’s embrace, while Peter donned his mask once again. Stingers popped out of Peter’s wrists, while Callisto extended the talons beneath her nails. Kaine extended his claws as well. “Just try it,” Callisto snarled.
“If you insist, pretty lady,” War Machine sneered. He directed his next words to his troops. “Take them down.”
Kaine didn’t wait for them to make the first move, leaping over Peter’s and Callisto’s heads and slashing at the first War Machine Guard to attempt an attack. Peter impaled two War Machine Guards attempting to attack him from opposite sides with his stingers. Callisto shot her hand through a War Machine Guard’s mask, talons extended for additional damage.
War Machine locked his targeting computers on Callisto, pointing a repulsor at her back. “Good-bye, Spider-bitch.”
Back in Washington, D.C., the battle waged between Cuayin’s Redeemers and the Special Secret Service. Cuayin shifted her personal time-path out of phase with the timestream, leaving Spitfire virtually standing still in her eyes and thus unable to even see Cuayin’s attacks despite her own physical acceleration. Nighthawk and Atieno were fighting it out, Atieno generating shadow barriers to block Nighthawk’s attacks and even using them as rams to knock him off-balance. The Colonel clashed swords with Nthanda, her plasma-molded blade pushing against his dual-bladed plasma staff, and Citizen V used a combination of acrobatics and V-shuriken to distract Lesedi.
Leaving behind a seemingly beaten Spitfire, Cuayin charged President Cooper, intending to kill him in one shot. To her surprise, a young man, an X-Man by his uniform, blocked her attack. “Who . . . ?”
“Hi,” Synergy greeted, just before kicking her in the stomach. Cuayin sprang to her feet and attempted to telekinetically repel him, only for Synergy to generate a telekinetic shield that blocked her initial attack. Not one to give up, Cuayin shaped her power into hovering knives and propelled them all at Synergy, who deflected them with his bare hands, albeit bare hands wrapped in TK sheaths. It still took him by surprise - slightly - when Cuayin speed-blitzed him, striking him down.
She turned her attentions toward President Cooper once again, extending a TK spear to kill him. The spear was bodily blocked by a tall, well-muscled redheaded girl, also an X-Man if judged by her uniform. The spear had pierced her between her shoulder and her chest, but she didn’t seem to be that greatly harmed. Still, the blue-haired speedster X-Man Impetus took enough offense to Fairbrook’s injury to attempt a hyper-speed attack on Cuayin. The would-be messiah answered his assault with a telekinetic ram that beat him to the ground.
A torrent of sand suddenly crashed into the shadow-shielded battle arena. The sand attacked Atieno, Lesedi, and Nthanda, who all attempted to retaliate against it in their own ways. The sand was momentarily parted by their attacks, but resurged with a vengeance. Its real purpose was not to attack, but rather to obscure, to camouflage, as the Redeemers found when those not necessarily impeded by lack of vision - such as X-23 - began attacking them.
With a wrathful scream, Cuayin fused the sand attack into glass and then shattered it with a brutal TK-enhanced punch, telekinetically manipulating the shards into knives that flew at all her opponents, which were namely the X-Men and the Special Secret Service. Synergy and Daybreak blocked the shards with their own telekinetic abilities, inherent or duplicated, while X-23, Impetus, and Fairbrook dodged. The Colonel spun his dual-bladed plasma staff so fast the whirling blades formed a shield that deflected the shards, while Nighthawk’s armor largely protected him, and Spitfire and Citizen V used raw speed and good old-fashioned acrobatics, respectively, to evade.
X-23 launched into a jump kick with both foot claws extended, intending to skewer Cuayin. Unfortunately for her, a light barrier formed between X-23 and Cuayin, generated by Lesedi, who used the barrier as a repellant for X-23. X-23 flipped in midair and used Fairbrook’s hands as a springboard for a surprise attack on Cuayin which would have hit if Nthanda hadn’t chosen to throw herself on X-23’s claws.
“Nthanda!” Atieno shouted, immediately extending a shadow spear toward X-23 with lethal intent behind it. X-23 dodged, pulling her claws out of Nthanda as she did so. That didn’t stop Atieno from extending more shadow spears, these acting like tentacles that grasped at X-23, who dodged them in an insane display of acrobatics that would have put the best human gymnasts to shame. So focused Atieno was on killing X-23 for the wound X-23 had dealt to her fellow Redeemer that she didn’t notice Fairbrook darting behind her to deliver a knockout punch until . . . Lesedi generated a light shield behind her, blocking Fairbrook’s punch.
Immediately, Atieno whirled and turned several of her shadow spears on Fairbrook, who barely evaded being skewered. Impetus sped into an attack on Atieno to defend Fairbrook, dodging her shadow spears until he was close enough to just hit her. Despite that, Lesedi generated another light shield to protect Atieno, one that also forcibly repelled him from her. Impetus skidded on the balls of his feet and foremost hand before regaining his balance and hyper-rushing into another attack.
“This fight is fruitless,” Daybreak stated, her voice low and soft but somehow absolutely clear.
“You’re wrong,” Cuayin responded. “This fight is not fruitless. This fight will be the salvation of this world, its deliverance from the evil ones that have ravaged it through their lust for power and violence, who have violated, defiled, and brutalized every innocent soul in it.”
“And what are you doing?” Daybreak inquired offhandedly.
“I’m saving this world!” Cuayin shouted. “Look at everyone I’ve gathered to me! We are all cursed to be alone, to be feared, to be hunted and hated and exploited and murdered so long as these evil men that you are defending retain power! That is our lot unless we take their power from them, show them that what they think is power is nothing compared to the true power of justice!”
Daybreak chuckled softly, a small titter that grew into a full-blown belly laugh, as though she had just understood the punch line behind an obscure joke. When she calmed down, it was with one corner of her mouth curled up in a knowing smirk. “Really? That’s it? Oh, well. Not like I expected much from a child in a woman’s body.”
“I will not be mocked or judged by you!” Cuayin yelled, generating a bladed TK sheath around her arm and blitzing Daybreak, who blocked her attack with a telekinetic blade of her own.
“I’ve figured you out,” Daybreak spoke calmly. “You’re a child, a lost little orphan looking for a rhyme or reason to her existence and screaming into the darkness.”
“Be silent!” Cuayin snarled, pushing against Daybreak’s TK blade.
“I’m not done yet. You think you’ve caused all that carnage in the name of justice. You haven’t. You’ve caused it in the name of your own revenge on a world that you feel brought you into existence for the sole purpose of being a weapon and you’ve deluded yourself and all those women into thinking you’re some kind of messiah. You aren’t. You’re just an angry, ignorant child lashing out at a world you’ve never quite understood.”
“Blasphemer!”
“Oh, so you think you’re a god now, too?”
Cuayin looked like she was about to break down, but then she regained her composure. “Even if I am as selfish and childish as you seem to take me to be, I’m still going to make a better world. A paradise, a place where women and children can be safe from the exploitations and dominance of men, where we won’t need to hide or be afraid!”
Daybreak shook her head sadly. “You poor, deluded girl. Say you win. What are you going to do, then?”
“The world will be a paradise.”
“No, I mean, what will you do when people become unhappy with the way you do things? When they begin to dissent? Will you still be the benevolent dictator you want to be?”
“Yes! I’m not doing this because I want power! I’m doing this because I want to save this world!”
“That’s what everyone says.”
Unable to take anymore, Cuayin telekinetically blasted Daybreak into the other side of the shadow barrier. However, Daybreak’s words had done their work; Cuayin stood frozen in place, shivering in what seemed to be mortal terror. For the first time in probably her entire life, she knew doubt. She knew, beyond a cold certainty, what the world had become under the stewardship of its rulers. She had seen, through the eyes of the powerless and the helpless, how tightly the rulers squeezed their iron fists.
But would I be any better?
“What did you do?” Impetus asked Daybreak, while helping her to her feet.
“Nothing a skilled analyst of human behavior wouldn’t be able to do,” Daybreak
replied. “And she is human, no matter how much she would like to pretend she is more enlightened than that.”
“Just . . . let me . . . do one thing first,” Cuayin whispered.
“And that would be?” X-23 prompted dangerously. To her senses, Cuayin was preparing to do something, albeit the nature of which was unknown to her. She got her answer when space seemed to warp around Cuayin and suck her in; when it reverted to normal, she was gone.
“Where did she go?” Sandstorm asked.
“She went to save a life,” Synergy answered.
Back in New York City, War Machine never got the chance to shoot Callisto, because when he fired . . . Cuayin was on the other end of the repulsor blast, taking its full force. The blast, though, prompted the attentions of the three Spiders - Peter, Kaine, and Callisto - to check it out. Callisto’s eyes widened with horror, shock, and anguish as she saw Cuayin, her liberator, teacher, and guardian, fall after taking the high-powered repulsor beam.
War Machine stared at the fallen woman. While his artificially modulated voice would “naturally” betray little emotion, it was very hard to avoid the impression that he had absolutely no remorse about what he had done. “I wanted the Spider. But nailing the world’s most powerful posthuman terrorist since Magneto is a nice consolation prize.”
“Bastard!” Callisto screamed, lunging at War Machine despite Peter’s and Kaine’s near-simultaneous protests and warnings, talons extended for the kill. War Machine launched multiple seeker missiles at Callisto, who dodged them with inhuman speed despite the fact that they were locked directly on her heat signature. After a while of dodging, she ran straight at War Machine, who realized what she intended to do and simply shot another repulsor blast at her. It hit her, along with the missiles, but when the smoke from the missiles’ detonations faded, she was . . .
“I’ll be damned,” Kaine remarked.
Callisto was without a single scratch, due chiefly to the force shield that Cuayin had been just conscious enough to generate around her. She looked at Cuayin with tears of gratitude and sadness in her eyes, Cuayin returning the eye contact and even smiling gently at her. “My dear girl . . .”
“Thank you,” Peter whispered.
“Let’s see if you can stop this,” War Machine sneered, firing a repulsor blast at Cuayin’s head, only for it to be absorbed by a force field generated around Cuayin’s wounded body. The force field also reflected the repulsor blast, albeit with Cuayin’s own considerable power added to it, thus severely wounding War Machine and partially disabling his armor’s functionality.
Callisto moved to Cuayin’s side immediately. “Cuayin . . . is it over?”
“Not for us, dear girl,” Cuayin answered. “Not just yet . . .”
One week later, Bobby Stephens was resting in his bed, watching the news on his television set. “While there was considerable collateral damage in the form of civilian casualties and damaged or destroyed property, the former was far lesser than the latter,” the news anchor reported. “Many of the civilian survivors report being rescued in the heat of the conflict between the invading posthumans and the Avengers by costumed posthumans unidentifiable as being registered with the Initiative. President Nathaniel Cooper had this to say at his press conference three days ago.”
The screen cut to an image of President Cooper speaking in his press chamber. “I came to realize something those few days ago. There is justice and there is injustice, and sometimes one can masquerade as the other. The invaders believed that what they were doing was just, yet it led to undue suffering on the part of innocent people. At the same time, many within my government, myself included, believed that what we were doing was just, yet I came to understand that that not every lawbreaker is a villain and not every law enforcer is a hero. The law is nothing without the spirit of justice behind it, and we must never assume that they are automatically linked. . . .”
“Hi, Bobby,” Cara greeted from the door.
“Mind if we come in?” Toshiro asked, standing beside Cara.
“Come in,” Bobby answered.
Toshiro and Cara entered the room, taking up a perch on either side of Bobby. “Penny for your thoughts?” Cara asked.
“I keep thinking, we’re not so different,” Bobby mused. “All of us, in one way or another, were trying to do what we felt was the right thing. The Redeemers had a right to seek justice after what was done to them, the hells that were made of their lives.”
“But innocent people got caught in the crossfire,” Toshiro interjected. “That’s not right.”
“No, but would they have been caught in the crossfire if we didn’t have such an aggressive attitude toward regulating people with powers?” Bobby wondered. “If we weren’t treating anyone who wouldn’t sign the dotted line like they were Public Enemy Number One?”
“We’re all human, in the end,” Cara mused. “And in the end, we’ll all have to answer to the same god. Or gods, depending on your particular take.”
“Maybe things will change,” Toshiro remarked. “Those unlicensed heroes we’re so hard on? They were saving lives.”
“Yeah,” Bobby mumbled. “Like we should be doing. Like all of us who have any power in this world should be doing.” It rather surprised him when Toshiro suddenly hugged him, quickly followed by Cara embracing them both. “What are you doing?”
“Just . . . reminding you we care,” Cara replied.
“Thanks,” Bobby said.
Arachne had finally come back to New York City, web-swinging toward her house. She was going to come clean to her parents and sister, tell them everything. If they hated her, if they were scared of her, it was just something she would have to deal with. They deserved better from her than to live without knowing what had become of her. As she approached her house, she couldn’t help but get the feeling something was terribly wrong.
She landed on the roof and crawled down to the door, flipping onto the ground. She rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. She rang again, but there was still no response. She rang one more time, but there was yet to be any kind of reaction. She placed her hand on the doorknob and twisted, surprised to find the knob giving way without any application of her super-strength. She stepped inside, her symbiote shifting into a shoulder-less black shirt and black slacks with torn knees. Flipping on the light, she got an unpleasant surprise.
The furniture was in various states of disrepair and upheaval, as though there had been a struggle or someone had just trashed everything for the fun of it. Painted onto the walls, in a deep red shade resembling freshly spilled blood, was a message: “WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE, SPIDER-C#%&.”
Audrey Hopkins could do nothing except scream.
To be continued . . .