44 The Silver Steward

Have a long chapter cause, why not?

****

"Hmmm?"

Peter's grey irises flicked toward the heart of the city, his eyebrow faintly raising in interest. His Danger Sense had gone off ever so slightly just now. It was for the briefest of moments, and if it wasn't for his evolved brain, he may not have noticed it.

[Pete, my Spidey Sense went off just now - toward the heart of the city], Gwen's worried, modified voice came through a miniature earpiece that she'd personally designed.

{Yeah, my sense went off too...}, he frowned. Gwen's Spidey sense was much more well-developed and accurate than his Danger Sense. It was connected to the Web of Destiny after all. If she sensed it, it was all the more credible.

It was enviable, really.

Spidey Sense was easily one of, if not THE core ability of Spider-people. If used correctly, it could serve so many functions. Unfortunately, his own watered-down, budget version of it wasn't all that versatile.

'Patience', he chastised himself as he tore his eyes from the skyscrapers to the dark, mass of buildings before him. 'Just a week more, and I'll have something similar.'

To say that he was excited for next week was a drastic understatement.

He and Gwen had taken the modified Extremis back then, but due to it being akin to a retrovirus and the fact that it was highly modified, it needed some time. Two months of waiting for it to propagate in his body was excruciating, but the time he'd sacrificed would directly translate into a much safer and better serum.

A longer wait time to not go BOOM. He'd make that deal.

[Should we worry?], Gwen's voice interrupted his thoughts once more.

{I doubt it. Your sense isn't telling you anything right now, is it?}

[Nope. It's all good on my side.]

{Then, it's best we focus on what's ahead of us}, he growled, examining the aggregation of buildings before him once more. He was near the city outskirts, but the expected suburban landscape was nowhere to be seen. Instead, it was a former industrial zone with a few abandoned factories.

At least, that's what it was supposed to be.

It looked to be revamped, with newer buildings and structures that had even somewhat extended underground. On paper, this was a place to store raw materials akin to aluminium, copper, iron, nickel, and so on and so forth, but Peter thought otherwise.

'You took so long to track', he chuckled in his head. 'Kingpin really is a paranoid son of a bitch.'

Two months back, he'd shown Gwen the token he'd taken from Tombstone, proving that Wilson Fisk, the head of Obsidian Nexus, was somehow connected to the very same organisation that attacked the concert. After all, Tombstone had clearly been heard screaming the words 'Fat Bastard' at the black building, and Mr. Fisk was notorious for being 'big'.

He'd proposed the theory that Fisk had taken care of his partner in crime, the other head of the company, and wished to consolidate its power. Thus, they didn't dare waste the last two months as Kingpin was currently both at his strongest and at his weakest.

Gwen was immediately open to the idea of dragging the company into hell if it truly was involved. It was evident that the night of the concert hadn't stopped haunting her. So many people had needlessly died before her while she was helpless.

But before they could act, they needed some proof. It was supposed to be easy - after all, a mercenary organisation needed a lot of resources that a manufacturing company wasn't supposed to be buying, an example being guns. The problem was that he was going against an absolute genius in the criminal world who probably had years of experience under his large belt.

The goddamn Kingpin.

After investigating the Obsidian Nexus company, he finally understood why Fisk earned his title.

On paper, the Obsidian Nexus Company was a seemingly legitimate manufacturing company, specializing in heavy machinery, construction equipment, and industrial tools. The front company was registered under various aliases and operated globally, making it difficult to trace back to him.

He employed a complex corporate structure with multiple subsidiaries and shell companies, with each layer serving a distinct purpose - the aforementioned complexity to obfuscate the true nature of the operation.

Luckily, consolidating all that power and the requirement to stabilise the previously divided mercenary organisation was a tall task, even for a criminal mastermind such as Fisk. It was inevitable that he would have to reveal something sooner or later.

It took one month to get some semblance of proof, that was after discreetly infiltrating almost every 'official' warehouse of the Obsidian Nexus company in New York. He and Gwen had found a list of contractors for the company in one of the warehouses, and thus, they began investigating them too, refusing to leave any stone unturned.

The problem was that key weapon manufacturing was outsourced to offshore facilities that were strategically located in countries with lax regulatory environments and were most probably shielded under different corporate entities. He couldn't do anything about that, but the contractors he'd found were most probably ways for Fisk to transport goods to his headquarters from said facilities.

'And you're the biggest one, aren't you?', he thought while examining the layout of the buildings. Gwen was infiltrating another facility in Lexington Avenue, Manhattan, while he was currently in the infamous Hell's Kitchen.

'Is growing older making you sloppy, Matt?', Peter grinned. 'How'd you miss this?'

CLICK!

He pressed an inconspicuous button on his chest, which immediately expanded into a small disk and grew eight thin legs before scuttling onto his arm.

He looked at it with a mixture of pride and amusement. It was his first non-biological creation that he could truly call ingenious. It was a product of all the Engineering and Coding classes he'd sneaked in between Gwen's schooling and their occasional nightly escapades in the past two months.

She had been shocked at the sheer speed at which he gobbled up and applied the concepts which he'd been taught, but if he was really being honest, what he truly excelled in was Biology and Biotechnology. Passion can truly affect how you study and use knowledge.

The aforementioned arachnid machine consisted of a Bifrequency Scanner, an Omnisense Audiovisual Beacon, and a Bandwidth Blocker, but he just called it 'B.O.B'.

B.O.B. the mechanical spider.

It had waveform analysis algorithms that detected frequencies of communication equipment and even had a sensitivity control to manually scan for specific frequencies. It could then emit electromagnetic signals to interfere with and disrupt various communication frequencies along with those that distort and affect digital cameras and displays by messing with their refresh rate and inducing blurring. It had added cameras and audiovisual equipment for the collection of evidence and a small sonar device that could slowly map its surroundings.

Of course, it wasn't completely his work, far from it. Gwen was the one who engineered it and made it functional, but he was the one who made the algorithms and built its main components, much to her surprise and shock. It was decent work by his standard after 60 hours of engineering and coding classes.

{I'm going in, Gwen.}, he growled into the earpiece.

[Me too. Good luck, and please come back to me in one piece.]

{When have I not?}

[There's a first time for everything, Pete. Just...be careful.]

{I'll try. You too.}

CLICK!

He muted his earpiece to not distract Gwen, and she did the same.

{You ready?}, he grinned looking at B.O.B.. Gwen had inserted a highly simplified AI into its miniature computer system that could respond to voice commands, so it wasn't that he'd gone insane, talking to a machine.

It wiggled on its spindly legs before giving him a backflip.

{I'll take that as a yes.}, he snarled, his grey eyes shifting to blood-red and his pupils turning into reptilian slits.

RIP!

His back expanded, ripping through his suit that promptly dissociated into microparticles as his fingers extended into claw-like appendages. B.O.B. and Shaw's Syringe, something he now always brought with him, held on for dear life as his sinuous tail whipped through the wind while the chromatophores on his armour blended it into the darkness.

{Let's see what you're hiding}, his chest rumbled as his red irises dimmed, the darkness swallowing them.

***

Ethan gripped his M4 Carbine tight as he robotically patrolled the section he was assigned.

Large boxes and crates lined the building he was in, while the only sound and light were the soft footsteps of his colleagues. Night vision goggles helped him see where he was walking, but it didn't make the job any less intimidating.

He spotted one of his only friends walk by him on his patrol, and they each gave each other friendly nods.

'Liam', he mentally acknowledged due to the clause in the contract that forbid talking while on duty. Understandable, but annoying.

He hated the job, but it paid well. The crime boss ran this place was totally loaded, and he really needed the money. 'They' needed the money.

'Don't we all...', he sighed before turning around for another round of the patrol, the scenery of looming crates exponentially increasing his boredom. 'Well, I'll be able to finally fund the wedding at the very leas-

CRACK!

His head suddenly twisted backwards, his neck instantly snapping. He caught a tiny glimpse of a monstrous figure before he unwillingly sank into darkness, his fiancée's face flashing before his eyes and his thoughts filled with regret.

***

'Damn, nothing once more', Peter sighed to himself as B.O.B. finished scanning all the boxes.

It was extremely odd. He'd first taken care of the communication hub in the complex that B.O.B. had detected, and shut down or disrupted all communication and video devices. Then, he'd systematically infiltrated the rest of the buildings, first taking out the guards, sensing them using his psionic powers before letting B.O.B. scan the crates.

This was the biggest and the last building in the complex, and he hadn't found a damn thing.

The guards were armed to the teeth, but the contents of the crates were completely legitimate. He would've thought he'd infiltrated the wrong place if it weren't for the Obsidian Nexus tokens he'd found among some of the guards.

They were different now. The tentacles were removed, and the large K and P letters were painted a dark purple.

He sighed as his eyes flicked to the lifeless bodies of the guards that lay spread-eagled on the floor. He felt no remorse for them.

'Live by the sword, die by the sword.'

Those that are willing to kill, must be prepared to be killed. If they weren't, then too bad.

'But am I prepared, though?', the thought popped up in his head. He'd killed tens of people today, and if anybody had to follow the saying, it was him. Hell, he could sense no other human mind in the vicinity, which meant that he'd killed all sapient life other than himself.

He'd felt no remorse when snapping someone's neck, so was he prepared to get his snapped, too? Of course, this was merely a metaphorical question as he would regenerate; the real question is whether he was prepared to die.

His reptilian slits narrowed further. He didn't have an answer.

And that scared him.

CHIRP!

B.O.B.'s electronic chirp saved him from that line of thought.

With a light jump, he leapt 10 meters, landing on an inconspicuous black crate that B.O.B. was ramming his tiny head into.

[What do we have here...], Peter muttered as he used one of his claws to cleanly slice open a large hole in the equally large crate.

CREAK!

B.O.B. jumped on his large shoulders as he landed in the crate, his weight making it creak. It was pitch dark in it, but his eyes could almost see as clear as day. B.O.B. immediately jumped down before ramming his head into a particular part of the bottom of the crate.

'Is there something underneath there?', he thought in confusion. He did remember Gwen programming B.O.B. to lead him to hidden rooms or paths underground, but a crate that was stacked over others didn't look like one of them.

He shrugged before placing his claws over the section.

KRRR!

He ripped it apart using his Adhesive touch, revealing, to his surprise, a long, metallic tunnel that led to darkness.

'Well, I'll be damned', he thought in surprise. Did it run through all the crates that this one was stacked over?

'Couldn't it have been a bit bigger?', he sighed to himself, looking at the opening that most definitely could not fit his giant figure. It was definitely human-friendly; it could probably fit Kingpin himself, but he wasn't exactly...human.

{Well, the good comes with the bad}, he chuckled as his figure began to shrink, growing smaller and smaller and gaining more human features before turning back into his Base Form. His suit grew out of his skin and layered over his mouth, forming his half-mask. His skin turned deathly pale, his hair white, and his irises grey.

[Hope I don't meet a Basilisk down here], he muttered, and he jumped down the tunnel, B.O.B. firmly latched onto his shoulder.

***

BANG!

Peter's feet slammed into the metallic floor, denting it slightly. There were indeed mechanisms to slow down the fall, but he'd shot past most of them.

He looked up, scanning his surroundings, but what he saw, he did not expect.

Before him was a long, narrow corridor that extended for about fifty feet; well, it was narrow for Form II with a height of 7 feet and a width of 6 feet. His nine-foot hulking form would not fit in here whatsoever. It was probably designed in such a way that only one person could walk through at a time, which unintentionally handicapped him.

It was sparsely lit with artificial lighting, and everything was grey, shiny metal. He could see a large vault door at the end, lightly gleaming as though beckoning him to come forward but the thing that caught his attention wasn't the vault door, which was the very reason he came here, but the man sitting before it.

The first thought that would pop up in one's head when laying their eyes on him was, 'Samurai'.

He was covered from head to toe in what seemed to be a blend of traditional and futuristic Samurai armour. It looked almost Techno-Organic - His sleek, stylized Samurai helmet covered the back and either side of his head while his faceplate and T-shaped visor obscured the top half of his face.

His shoulders were covered with pads and pauldrons that had angular edges, while his armoured chest had a large, red Kanji Symbol painted on it. An armoured skirt shrouded his legs and boots that were covered in metallic coverings.

If his armour wasn't intimidating enough, his posture most definitely was.

He sat cross-legged with his gauntleted hands on his armoured knees. His spine was ramrod straight while an unusually long Katana sat in his lap. The scabbard was beautifully decorated with mountains, waves, a dragon and, oddly, a half-grown cherry blossom tree while the handle was silky black.

His calm, tranquil brown eyes stared into his baffled grey ones.

"Please leave. I do not wish to fight you."

***