The icy morning wind whipped past Peter's face, carrying the bitter, choking scent of burning asphalt and ozone. He swung high above the concrete canyons of Manhattan, his newly forged red-and-blue symbiote suit cutting a vibrant, undeniable streak of color against the ash-choked sky.
Below him, the city was a war zone.
Sleek, silver Ultron Mark III drones—deployed from the automated fabrication bays of Avengers Tower—streaked through the smoke. The robots were executing a desperate search-and-rescue grid, physically ripping terrified civilians out of shattered office windows and flying them toward the heavily fortified shelters at the Baxter Building and Avengers Tower.
But the rescue operation was agonizingly slow. The Ultron optics were struggling to differentiate between a genuinely terrified human and a feral symbiote drone wearing a human host like a meat-suit.
In just one night, Knull had been incredibly busy.
Through the white, expressive lenses of his mask, Peter surveyed the creeping alien army. The King in Black had categorized his forces. There were hulking, yellow brutes tearing up fire hydrants—the strength class. Sleek, purple monstrosities scaling glass skyscrapers on all fours—the agility class. Dark green snipers perched on gargoyles, their spines bristling with razor-whips.
Then, there were the pale, grayish-white elites. They marched through the burning intersections completely unbothered by the flames. Riot's localized clones. Because Riot was the only commander to successfully forge a Codex, Knull had used his genetic blueprint to spawn these fire-and-sound-immune shock troops.
And finally, flooding the avenues like a plague of stray dogs, were the basic infantry. Thousands of pitch-black, muscular monsters bearing jagged white spider-emblems. They looked exactly like Venom.
HE IS MOCKING US, Venom growled, the heavy bass of his voice vibrating against Peter's ribs.
"Don't take it personally, buddy," Peter muttered, firing a web-line to swing around a smoking water tower. "We're trendsetters. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."
Peter's spider-sense flared with a sharp, localized sting.
He instantly contorted his body mid-swing. Three wickedly sharp green tendrils sliced through the empty air where his chest had been a millisecond before. Peter released his web, flipped into a controlled dive, and landed lightly on the vertical brick face of an apartment building.
The bricks directly beside him suddenly liquefied.
Pitch-black sludge bled out of the mortar, pooling and rising with terrifying speed until it took the tall, emaciated, pale-faced shape of Knull's psychic avatar.
"Sorry, man, but we don't acknowledge you as the family patriarch," Peter quipped, instantly firing a thick barrage of webbing directly at the god's face. "I don't do cults. The robes are always itchy."
Knull didn't even blink. The webbing disintegrated into dust inches from his pale skin, repelled by an invisible, localized void-shield.
"You amuse me, arachnid," Knull's voice grated, the sound echoing in the spaces between Peter's thoughts. "You and your self-proclaimed guardians are confused. You wonder why I have simply expanded my army. Why I have not yet moved to slaughter."
"I mean, I wasn't going to ask, but since you brought it up," Peter shot back, shifting his weight into a crouch. "What exactly is the holdup?"
Knull's lipless mouth stretched into a horrifying smile. "I am testing your psychological limits. I am waiting to see exactly how much of a threat I must present before you willingly choose to destroy yourselves."
Peter's muscles tensed. "We already know the rules. If we kill that frozen dragon, your consciousness uploads. We aren't going to kill Grendel."
"Yes," Knull laughed, a dry, hollow sound. "You know the rules. But it will not matter."
The cold, absolute horror of the trap finally clicked in Peter's brain.
If Knull grew strong enough, he would simply conquer the planet. If the heroes fought back and began to lose, their only tactical option to save the Earth would be to destroy Grendel. It was a perfect, inescapable checkmate.
"Surrender to me," Knull offered, stepping away from the wall to hover in the air. "I have rarely seen a lesser being so perfectly integrated with my Living Abyss. Kneel, and I will preserve your consciousness. You will stand by my side until this world returns to the quiet dark."
"Yeah, there's a serious downside to fighting supervillains," Peter sighed, the muscles in his thighs coiling like steel springs.
He launched himself off the brick wall, throwing his entire body weight into a devastating flying kick aimed squarely at Knull's chest.
"You guys always monologue!" Peter yelled.
Knull didn't even raise his hand. A wave of telekinetic force slammed into Peter mid-air, swatting him away like a gnat. Peter plummeted toward the street below, the wind rushing past his ears. He effortlessly fired a web-line, anchoring it to a streetlight, snapped his trajectory into a tight arc, and slingshotted himself straight back up toward the god.
"You truly are pathetically stupid," Knull sneered, watching the vigilante hurl himself into another useless physical attack.
Peter didn't punch. He didn't kick.
As he closed the distance, Peter tapped the silver bracer on his left wrist.
A blinding, pearlescent white light erupted from his forearm. The mystical Dragonfang sword materialized in his grip. Peter drove his arm forward, putting all of his enhanced momentum behind the blade.
The ancient, magic-forged steel sliced effortlessly through Knull's invisible void-shield.
SCHLUCK.
The glowing blade buried itself deep into the center of Knull's chest.
The King in Black froze. Genuine, unfiltered surprise widened his void-like eyes. He looked down at the glowing sword protruding from his torso, then up at the teenager holding the hilt.
"Clever," Knull murmured, a dark amusement bleeding into his tone. He realized the boy wasn't afraid of killing the avatar. The boy understood the avatar meant nothing.
Knull raised a pale hand and backhanded Peter with the force of a wrecking ball.
Peter tumbled backward, ripping the sword out as he landed in a crouch on a fire escape.
Knull's avatar began to violently dissolve, the magical wound destabilizing his physical form. But before the black sludge melted away completely, Knull delivered his final, terrifying promise.
"I waited for your heroes to gather all the fragile, helpless civilians into your fortified shelters," Knull's voice faded into the wind. "Because now, I have a single target. A target you will sacrifice everything to protect."
A deafening, earth-shattering roar erupted from the Hudson River docks.
The shockwave rattled the glass of every skyscraper in Manhattan. From the burning wreckage of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, Grendel rose. The colossal black symbiote dragon spread its fifty-meter wingspan, blocking out the morning sun. It didn't hunt the streets. It banked hard, locking its trajectory dead onto the two packed civilian shelters: Avengers Tower and the Baxter Building.
Peter tapped his earpiece, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Cap! It's Spider-Man! Knull played us! He waited for us to pack the shelters. The dragon is airborne and heading straight for you. He's forcing our hand. You have to decide right now if you're going to kill it!"
Static hissed in Peter's ear. Before Steve Rogers could reply, a blaring, distorted voice echoed from the street directly beneath Peter's fire escape.
"I am currently being hunted by these despicable, shameless alien parasites! But do not worry, New York! Old Jonah will fight these freaks to the bitter end!"
Peter looked over the railing.
Careening down the debris-choked avenue was a beat-up, vintage yellow convertible. J. Jonah Jameson was behind the wheel, aggressively swerving around abandoned taxis. He held a massive police megaphone in one hand, screaming into a dashboard-mounted camera.
Sprint-crawling down the sides of the buildings on either side of the convertible was a massive pack of grayish-white elite symbiotes. They were immune to the megaphone's noise, and they were closing in fast.
"You gotta admit, even alien hive-minds can't stand Jonah's voice," Peter muttered to himself.
He dove off the fire escape.
A gray elite lunged off a storefront awning, aiming directly for Jonah's exposed neck. Peter dropped from the sky, intercepting the monster mid-air. He drove both boots squarely into the symbiote's chest, using the impact to kick off and land flawlessly in the back seat of Jonah's speeding convertible. The gray monster smashed into a fire hydrant and tumbled away.
Peter casually rested his arm on the back of the leather seat. "Morning, Jonah. Mind if I hitch a ride?"
Jonah slammed on the brakes, the convertible fishtailing wildly before screeching to a halt. He whipped his head around, his cigar nearly falling out of his mouth.
"Spider-Man?!" Jonah yelled, his eyes bulging. "You're alive?! And... wait. You changed your suit?"
"Classic red and blue," Peter grinned beneath the mask, easily backhanding another leaping gray grunt out of the air without even looking. "The black was a little too 'alien invasion' for my taste. Besides, the new design really pops on camera."
"Where the hell are the Avengers?!" Jonah demanded, waving his megaphone at the sky.
"They're holed up, discussing countermeasures," Peter explained, his spider-sense humming as he scanned the surrounding rooftops. "Only the heavy-hitters who are immune to possession can step outside, otherwise we're just handing Knull an army of super-soldiers."
Before Peter could finish the sentence, the trunk of the convertible violently buckled inward.
A massive, hulking figure clad in dense, dark gray biological armor ripped through the metal chassis, towering over the backseat. Riot's milky white eyes locked onto Peter.
"SPIDER-MAN!" Riot roared, molding his right arm into a massive, jagged warhammer. "DIE!"