Mechanical-Arm Spider #60
A water tower creaked from Jake's swing, his body heavy with exhaustion but still moving through sheer will and the symbiote's assistance.
Somehow, Gotham looked worse in the night light. The fires, the smoke, the escalated gang wars. The city was devouring itself while he swung through its death throes, and part of him wondered if leaving now made him complicit in what he'd started.
The thought died before it could fully form. Guilt required the luxury of time he didn't have.
Another swing. His webbing caught a charred billboard. The structure groaned under his weight, buckled, but held long enough for him to launch toward the next building. His landing was graceless, boots skidding across the rooftop before he caught himself against a ventilation unit.
His chest heaved. Sleeper's surface rippled with each breath, orange-red veins pulsing in patterns that suggested the symbiote was working overtime to keep him functional. The suit was feeding off his enhanced biology, burning through energy to maintain the bond, and Jake could feel the cost accumulating in his bones.
He needed distance. Needed to put miles between himself and the intersection where Batman had collapsed after the Batmobile's consumption. Needed to reach somewhere that wasn't actively trying to kill him.
Jake fired again. Swung. Landed. Repeated the motion with mechanical efficiency until the rhythm became meditation, his conscious mind shutting down everything except the immediate task of moving forward.
That's when he noticed.
Weight distribution was wrong. His left side felt lighter than it should, and not just from missing his original arm. Something else was absent, something that had become part of his inventory through hours of carrying it like penance made physical.
The crystallized arm.
Jake's momentum faltered mid-swing. His webline went slack as his concentration fractured, and he dropped the last three feet onto a rooftop that groaned but held. His right hand moved instinctively to where the harness should have been, found only Sleeper's smooth surface where the makeshift straps had dissolved during the transformation.
He'd left it behind. Dropped it during the chaos of Batman's assault and never thought to retrieve it before fleeing. Forty pounds of his own corrupted tissue that had served as weapon and reminder of everything Harley had cost him, just abandoned in an intersection where anyone could find it.
His analytical mind assembled the implications with cold precision. DNA evidence. Enhanced biology crystallized into portable sample they could be weaponized against him.
Jake turned. Mind burning through the fatigue to map his route back to the intersection. Twenty minutes of swinging. Maybe less if he pushed Sleeper harder, burned through reserves that were already depleted.
His hand moved toward the nearest building's edge, ready to fire webbing that would carry him back.
Stopped.
Going back was suicide. There was no telling what could be waiting for him back there. Batman, Two Face. The intersection could be swarming with disaster waiting to deliver violence in search for answers.
And even if he could retrieve the arm, even if he could fight his way through whatever waited there, what then? He'd still be trapped in a city that was collapsing around him, still hunted by forces that would never stop until he was dead or captured.
The arm was gone. He needed to accept that and move forward before Gotham claimed what remained of him.
Jake turned away from the intersection's direction and resumed swinging. Each arc carried him south, toward Gotham's edge, toward the bridges that connected this diseased organism to the outside world. His spider-sense tracked the path with precision born from desperation.
Because Gotham had taken everything it could from him already. Had drowned him in chemicals, forced him to kill thirty people, turned him into something that made Death herself revoke mercy. The city had stripped away every piece of Jake Cross that had believed in heroes and justice and the fundamental goodness of trying to do right.
What remained was survival instinct wrapped in black material that fed off his pain.
He couldn't stay here. Couldn't risk Gotham finding new ways to break him when it had already done such thorough work. The city would find a way to extract payment for what he'd done.
Better to run. Better to leave before Batman recovered and came after him with the desire for vengeance burning deep in his veins. Better to put distance between himself and a city where he'd made enemies of everyone who mattered.
The interface pulsed in his peripheral vision. The bonus rewards listed, waiting with patient digital insistence.
🕷️
Select one Bonus Reward:
1. Bundle of Cash
2. Totem Icon
3. Mystery Reward
4. KILL MILESTONE: 30/60
🕸️
Jake's swing faltered again. His webline caught a balcony that shrieked under sudden stress, metal groaning as rust-weakened bolts strained to hold his weight. He pulled himself onto the balcony while his mind processed what the interface was showing him.
The milestone had updated. Thirty kills out of sixty required for whatever reward came next.
The progress Tab had also been updated, constituting of some new elements:
🕷️
[Progress Tab]
Completion: 9.5%
Totems redeemed: 7
Time Bank: 02:27:42
Kill Milestone: 00:46:49
System Tools: Symbolic Extraction? Enabled.
🕸️
He stared at the Progress Tab. Read the last two entries. Kill Milestone represented his remaining time with Sleeper. Symbolic Extraction was a mystery reward -- the second bonus reward he'd received from consuming Scarecrow's totem.
He'd barely had the time to read what it was about. Had a feeling it wasn't something that would improve his situation. But Jake pressed the question mark at the end anyway.
🕷️
Symbolic Extraction: When enabled, consuming Rare totems extracts their symbolic meaning from the original owner, upgrading the totem's value. [Disable] to stop this effect.
🕸️
Jake re-read the description, letting the implication settle in his mind while he reviewed the Batman fight. The moment after he'd just consumed the Batmobile. It had been wrong.
Harley had threatened him after he'd taken her mallet. Penguin and the Riddler had wrestled him. Falcone had antagonized him to the very end. But Batman-- he'd just collapsed.
Like something in his chest had been ripped apart. And now, Jake was beginning to understand why. As if taking objects of value from people wasn't cruel enough, the system had unlocked something worse. Brought crashing their spirits into the game. And added an incentive to ensure Jake would follow through.
Why wouldn't he? Ninety-six hours was better than seventy-two. Redeeming a rare totem as epic added three entire steps to his one-hundred percentage completion. And crashing an opponent's spirit meant having someone less difficult to deal with.
So why didn't he feel exactly satisfied by this? Jake's eyes lingered on the Enable/Disable option. It had been enabled by default, which meant Batman's fate hadn't exactly been his doing. But deciding whether to alter the setting or leave as is required time to to think.
As for the Bonus reward, the choice was obvious. Mostly.
Jake's left hand went to his ribs, claws sinking into Sleeper in a motion that suggested he was searching more than certain. He found it, pulled it free of the web that had fastened it to the classic suit and held the piece of metal before him.
Two Face's totem -- the coin that he'd used countless times to make decisions with before Jake snatched it midair. He could only consume it after selecting a bonus reward. But that's not what bothered him as he stared at it.
The coin was glowing. Not exactly -- it had a flickering radiance about it that kept dimming and coming back like a dying light bulb. Ordinary coins didn't glow, or flicker, or dim. But this was a totem, by the system's classification. Which meant something was happening to it and Jake didn't understand what exactly. Was something happening to Two Face?
Having two totems meant he could select two Bonus Rewards. His best choices were totem icon and the mystery reward. A mystery reward from an Epic totem, and a totem icon from consuming the coin. But something was happening to the coin. And if it was ceasing to being a totem--
It didn't matter. Not right now anyway. Jake wasn't making any decisions yet. Not until he was out of Gotham and established enough distance to ensure that his next totem icon didn't return him to this burning city.
His next step was clear an his most important. Leaving Gotham first, then he'd figure everything else out later.
Jake leaped, let himself drop to the alley below with impact that sent pain spiking through his entire body. Sleeper had barely absorbed any of the impact, his depleted reserves exhausted, barely leaving it with anything to work with. He needed energy to keep moving. Required it to continue surviving.
Jake started walking, searching for something to eat. But even as he thought about conventional food, he already knew what his body actually craved. What would quickly replenish his reserves.
What symbiotes consumed to continue functioning.
He weighed the thought in his mind as his legs carried him through alleys that stank of garbage and desperation. Salivated while he moved past homeless encampments where people huddled around barrel fires and pretended not to see the figure in black material moving through their territory.
The imagery of how quickly he could rip their skulls apart to get to their brain matter felt casual and numb. But he kept going -- not from resisting the urge to kill them, only from the choice of believing that he hadn't sunk that deep in the rabbit hole yet.
The walking helped. Gave his body time to process damage without the constant stress of swinging through a city that wanted him dead. Calmed his cravings and enabled Sleeper to optimize usage of his remaining, insufficient energy.
Jake's legs carried him toward Gotham's southern edge. Toward the bridge that connected the city to its outskirts.
The residential areas here looked abandoned. Windows boarded up, doors hanging open, entire blocks evacuated by people who'd decided Gotham's collapse wasn't worth surviving.
Jake rounded a corner and came into view of the bridge.
It rose before him like a broken promise. One of the old suspension spans that had connected Gotham to the mainland before the city had metastasized into something that required isolation. The roadway was intact but empty, and Jake's enhanced vision tracked the reason immediately.
The bridge was raised. Drawbridge mechanisms had lifted the center span forty-five degrees, creating a gap too wide to cross without equipment or enhanced abilities. And beyond the gap, on the far side where Gotham ended and everywhere-else began, military vehicles clustered like antibodies around infection.
Dozens of them. APCs and mobile command units, soldiers in tactical gear positioned with the casual efficiency of people who'd been here long enough for this to become routine. Weapon emplacements faced the bridge with fields of fire that would turn anyone attempting to cross into a fine red mist.
Jake's spider-sense painted them in his awareness. Two hundred personnel. Maybe more. Heavy weapons. Organized under command structure that suggested active orders rather than emergency response. They weren't here to help Gotham. They were here to contain it.
Make sure the chaos didn't spread beyond the bridges. Make sure whatever was consuming the city stayed contained until someone higher up the chain decided whether Gotham was worth saving or whether cleaner solutions were required.
And Jake had a feeling about what those cleaner solutions might involve. The kind of weapons that turned cities into cautionary tales. The kind that made sure problems were solved permanently even if the cost measured in hundreds of thousands of lives.
He needed to leave. Needed to cross that bridge before someone decided Gotham's containment required more permanent measures. But his only route out was through two hundred soldiers with orders to shoot anything that tried.
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