“HAHAHA!
Celebrate, everyone!
IT’S CARNIVAL!” The park’s whole roar stopped at once, and every face, performer and civilian alike, tilted up toward the voice.
A figure in deep green armor hung in the sky, riding a flying machine with four splayed limbs like a bat’s wings, wheeling in slow circles overhead, and against the backdrop of drifting balloons and bright streamers, the sight of it read as something profoundly, fundamentally wrong.
The gleaming helmet hid the face completely.
Only the eyes showed through, pale green and running over with cruelty, sweeping the crowds below from on high, and when that gaze found a particular cluster of men, the voice went up into a full hysterical howl.
“ALL of you can die!
THIS is my gift!!” Several pumpkin-shaped bombs dropped out of the satchel on the machine’s flank, and the explosions arrived in a string of enormous concussions, fire climbing into the air.
A terror attack.
Only now did the crowd’s understanding catch up to its eyes, and the park dissolved into headless panic, thousands of people running in every direction at once with no idea which direction was safe.
RUMBLE.
The blasts came without pause.
Under the pressure waves, the park’s structures began shedding themselves, stages folding, facades collapsing, broken stone rattling down like a sudden hail, and a smothering dread settled over the whole carnival ground.
Screams tore up out of the crush in bursts; the streamers and the stage alike went down under the stampede.
Trist looked up at the green figure methodically seeding the sky with bombs, and his first coherent thought was almost a complaint.
*I managed to miss Iron Man’s storyline completely, and walked face-first into Spider-Man’s instead.* His eyes were already working the crowd, and they confirmed two things fast.
First, Peter had vanished from where he’d been standing, which meant he’d gone somewhere to change.
Second, and considerably more pressing: where had that little menace Gali gotten to?
“Trist, we have to go, NOW.” Gwen’s hands had locked onto his arm, her whole face white.
The Goblin, who was Norman Osborn, though nobody in this park knew it, had made his entrance over the center of the grounds, because the men he’d come to kill were there.
Trist and Gwen stood near the entrance, which bought them time the people in the middle didn’t have.
“Mm.
Let me find someone first.” He swept the area, and found her, and for a moment simply stared.
Gali was still sitting at a food table, not far away at all, eating.
And the genuinely eerie part was the crowd.
Thousands of panicking people were stampeding through that exact stretch of ground, and every last one of them flowed *around* her table without ever once looking at it, as if the spot didn’t exist, and even the rolling dust of the explosions stopped at an invisible line a few feet out, pressing against something it could not pass.
*So that’s another face of it,* Trist thought, with genuine respect.
*That vast energy of hers bends to whatever she needs.
Multi-purpose.* “Stop this!” Spider-Man had finally arrived, swinging in between the buildings at the park’s edge, webs flashing out line after line to haul civilians clear of falling debris.
The Goblin answered with a delighted, broken shriek and threw the flying machine straight at him, flinging pumpkin bombs as he came, and the mid-air detonations caught Spider-Man at the top of his swing and slapped him backward faster than he’d been moving forward, hammering him deep into the face of a building.
“Spider-Man!
Come, accept my GIFT properly!” A hatch opened at the machine’s nose, and the mounted gun beneath it began to pour, an unending stream of rounds sheeting into the building like a rainstorm, and inside seconds the whole floor was a fog of dust and a field of craters.
But Peter had already webbed himself up and out through the smoke, and now he came around under the cover of the drifting balloons and streamers, and a webline snapped taut against the bat-glider and *dragged*.
From there the fight found its shape.
Peter ran on inhuman senses and a body that moved like water; the Goblin ran on his machines and whatever the serum had made of him; and the two of them went at it back and forth, trading falls and recoveries, dead even.
Trist used the chaos of it to cut straight across to the food table, and hoisted Gali up off her chair without one word of preamble.
“It’s come to *this*, and you’re still eating.” “A little more!
Just a little more.
They’re all so weak, it’s not like they can do anything to *me*.” Dangling from his grip, Gali kicked her small legs in protest.
*What, is eating illegal now?* The two of them had a standing pact, three rules deep: no using abilities in front of people, and act like an ordinary person, always.
It was, frankly, the only reason he was physically capable of lifting her right now.
“Keep eating and I don’t bring you next time.” That one landed.
Gali, mid-stuff, went still, and stopped.
Because she was, he had to admit, *catastrophically* out of key with the scene.
Every other person in this park was running and crying.
She was having the best meal of her week and treating the explosions as dinner theater.
Gwen, for reasons she could not have explained herself, had not run for the exits.
She’d followed Trist instead, and now she stood catching her breath and studying the exquisite little glutton in his grip.
“Who is she?” “My little sister.
Picked her up.” “Hmph.” Gali turned her small head away and delivered the cold huff of the deeply wronged.
The three of them were just turning for the exit when a familiar voice cut through the noise behind them.
“TRIST!
Trist, save us!
*Please!*” He turned toward it, and found Harry and Mary Jane trapped on a balcony above the wreckage, both of them waving at him with everything they had.
Spider-Man had seen them too, and tried to break that way, and paid for the moment’s divided attention immediately: the Goblin fell on him with blow after blow, and inside seconds Peter was fighting from underneath.
Because Harry’s building was no accident.
It was one of the Goblin’s primary targets; he hadn’t come to kill his son, he’d come to kill two shareholders, and Harry had simply been standing inside the blast radius of his father’s business.
Behind the balcony the detonations kept walking closer, sealing off any retreat, and the floor under the two of them had begun to crack, spidering wider with every concussion, a countdown nobody needed explained.
They wedged themselves into the corner to keep the load off the failing slab, shaking, screaming down at the passing crowds for help.
And the passing crowds could not even save themselves.