Hammerhead’s call came in just after six, Norman’s burner phone lighting up on the nightstand before he’d even had his coffee.
“I have something,” Hammerhead said, without preamble.
“Go on.” “The hit on Oscorp.
The mercenaries were contracted through an intermediary — Wilson Fisk supplied the crew and moved your servers afterward.
He’s not the client.
He’s the middleman.
But he’s the one who knows who ordered it.” Norman sat up slowly, absorbing that.
“Fisk.” “That’s the trail,” Hammerhead said.
“If you want the name behind it, it runs through him.” Norman said nothing for a long moment, turning the name over in his head.
The missing symbiote — the vanished spider, the mystery that had haunted every thought since the breach — would have to wait.
He’d been circling that dead end for days without a single lead.
This, at least, was solid ground.
“Focus on Fisk,” Norman said.
“Find out who he’s protecting.” The line went dead.
Norman sat alone at the edge of his bed a while longer, setting aside one mystery in favor of one that finally had a shape to it.
What Norman didn’t know — what Hammerhead didn’t know either — was that the trail leading to Fisk hadn’t been an accident at all.
Fisk had made sure of that.
He’d left just enough behind at the docks and just enough in the paper trail from the Oscorp job to be findable, if someone dug hard enough and had the right resources to dig with.
Not obvious.
Not careless.
Just findable — a controlled leak, aimed carefully at Norman Osborn, designed to keep him occupied chasing a middleman instead of ever getting close to Fisk’s actual client.
Let Norman burn time and money hunting him.
By the time anyone got close enough to matter, the real transaction would already be finished, and Fisk would already be three steps removed from all of it, same as always.
He sat in his dim office, watching the feed of Norman’s building on a monitor, and allowed himself the smallest, most private of smiles.
Chase the middleman, Norman.
That’s exactly what middlemen are for.
At the Life Foundation’s private research campus, Dr.
Carlton Drake stood in front of an empty containment chamber that had, until recently, held the single most valuable asset his company possessed.
There was only one symbiote in existence — recovered years ago from a meteorite fragment his team had spent a fortune securing — and it had vanished the same night Oscorp’s building went up in chaos.
“We had one,” Drake said, pacing.
“And it’s gone.” His assistant pulled up grainy footage from the docks incident — a masked figure, described by witnesses only in fragments.
Solid black.
Head to toe.
No visible seams.
Drake leaned toward the screen, studying it hard.
“That’s our symbiote,” he said.
“It has to be.” “Sir, there’s no actual proof of that,” his assistant said carefully.
“Witness descriptions of a dark costume aren’t exactly conclusive.” “I’m aware it’s not conclusive,” Drake snapped, though he didn’t look away from the screen.
He knew, rationally, that he was reaching — that a handful of secondhand accounts of someone in black didn’t remotely prove alien biology was involved.
But he’d spent a fortune and years chasing this thing, and it had disappeared into the middle of an unrelated attack on the one night his security had a gap in it.
He wasn’t in the mood to entertain coincidence.
“Sir—” “I know what I’m doing,” Drake said, quieter now, though the words sounded more like he was convincing himself than his assistant.
“It’s the only lead we have.
I intend to follow it.” He turned fully to face his assistant.
“Send word to the mercenary team.
Cause a disturbance — something loud, something public.
If there’s a person out there wearing a symbiote and playing hero, he won’t be able to help himself.
He’ll come running.” “And if you’re wrong about what he is?” Drake’s expression didn’t change.
“Then we’ve at least confirmed there’s a masked lunatic in this city with a hero complex, and dealt with him regardless.
Either way, I want him found.” Peter lay in the dark for a long while after the dream faded, staring at his ceiling, not moving.
He’d never had anything like it before.
Not once in sixteen years of ordinary, forgettable dreams — and then, out of nowhere, this: pulsing walls, countless shifting black shapes circling something caged at the center, and the unmistakable feeling of being looked at by every single one of them at once.
It still sat behind his eyes even now, vivid in a way dreams never usually stayed after waking.
That wasn’t just a dream, he thought.
That felt like something real.
Like a memory.
But not mine.
He didn’t have an explanation, and lying there turning it over wasn’t going to give him one.
He thought about the whiteboard and decided against adding anything to it yet.
Some things felt too big for a marker scrawl.
He’d been circling the idea of going back to Oscorp for days now, ever since the tour, ever since the attack — some instinct telling him the answers to all of this started there and nowhere else.
He’d almost asked Harry to get him proper access to the biotech wing.
He decided against it somewhere between his alarm going off and getting dressed.
Bringing Harry meant explaining things he wasn’t ready to explain, and dragging his best friend into whatever danger came with digging at Oscorp’s secrets.
Tonight, he decided.
I go in myself.
Nobody else has to know.
It felt like the right call.
Simpler.
Safer for everyone but him.
He got dressed, grabbed something quick for breakfast, and headed out, mind still half-tangled in the dream as he walked.
He was three blocks from school when he hit a line of stopped cars and a police barricade cutting across the road, officers waving traffic away, radios crackling.
Peter’s stomach dropped before he even understood why.
A woman nearby was on her phone, voice high with panic.
“—said it’s the school bus, the one from Midtown, there’s men with guns on it—” Peter’s blood went cold.
Midtown.
That was Gwen’s route.
That was half their grade’s route.
He didn’t hesitate.
He ducked into the nearest alley, feeling the warmth spread from his wrists the moment he willed it, sweeping over him in a wave of familiar black.
As it climbed up over his chest, he willed a spider symbol to appear on his chest , the same deliberate way he’d first made the black suit appear back on that beam overlooking the warehouse.
He’d already figured out, somewhere in the days since, that this thing responded to him more than he’d first realized — that whatever it was, some part of it took its shape from what he wanted, not just what he needed.
He knew it would work before he even finished the thought.
He felt something shift against his sternum, a faint prickling warmth, and when he glanced down mid-run, there it was — a spider drawn in stark white against the black, legs sharp and reaching, exactly the shape he’d sketched two nights ago, staring back up at him like it had always been part of the suit.
This will have to do until the suit is ready.
He thought to himself He didn’t have time to marvel at it.
He cut into the nearest building’s side alley, planted a foot against the brick, and climbed ,hauling himself up four stories in seconds until he reached the rooftop overlooking the whole standoff below.
He didn’t give himself time to hesitate.
He ran the length of the roof and jumped.
For one weightless second the whole street spread out beneath him, officers and gunmen alike shrinking into small, still shapes far below — and then the ground rushed up fast, and he dropped straight down into the open space between them, landing hard in a low crouch.
The impact cracked the asphalt beneath his feet in a rough, radiating pattern, thin fractures branching outward from the point of impact in a shape that looked, unmistakably, like a spider’s web spun into the pavement itself.
Every gun in the street swung toward him at once — officers and mercenaries alike, none of them sure yet which side he belonged to.
Peter straightened up slowly from his crouch, doing his best to sound far calmer than he felt.
“Did someone call for me?” CREATORS’ THOUGHTS Crown_of_thorn Super hero landing !!!