Max Dillon broke the cloud cover over the Hudson River, his plasma body burning like a blue comet in the night sky. He looked down, desperately anticipating the ultimate all-you-can-eat buffet of Manhattan's power grid.
Instead, he witnessed a tragedy. The grid died.
From the glowing torch of the Statue of Liberty all the way to the dense, glittering heart of Midtown, the lights simply vanished. A rolling wave of absolute black swallowed the five boroughs in a fraction of a second. Tony Stark and Janet Van Dyne had literally pulled the plug on the city.
The silence was deafening. But the starvation was infinitely worse.
It wasn't an empty stomach; it was a violent, agonizing cellular vacuum. Every inch of his unstable plasma form shrieked for voltage. The residual current keeping his consciousness intact flared and sputtered. It felt like millions of microscopic fire ants were aggressively chewing on his skeletal structure. He was made entirely of electricity, yet a cold, phantom sweat dripped down his back.
I need a hit, Max thought, his mind fracturing. I need juice!
He dove toward Queens. He skimmed the rooftops of dense apartment blocks, desperately leeching the pathetic, microscopic trickles of lithium-ion energy from dead smartphones, sleeping laptops, and portable power banks. Down below in the streets, a few stubborn bodega owners ignored the emergency broadcasts and fired up illegal, gas-guzzling diesel generators. Max swooped down, aggressively inhaling the meager alternating current, and accidentally blew the machines into sparking shrapnel.
It was barely a snack. It wasn't enough.
Outside a private clinic in Brooklyn, four men in ski masks decided a total metropolitan blackout was the perfect excuse for a pharmacy raid. Flashlights clicked on. Heavy steel crowbars were raised to shatter the glass doors.
Before the first pane broke, the flashlight bulbs flared with a sharp blue spark and violently popped. The alley plunged into pitch darkness.
"What the hell?" one robber muttered.
A heavy wooden bo staff swept out of the shadows. It cracked wetly against the speaker's jaw, sending him spinning into the brick wall. The remaining three men swung wildly in the dark. Crack. Thud. Groan. In less than ten seconds, all four men were unconscious on the pavement.
Gwen Stacy stepped out of the shadows, leaning heavily on her splintered staff. She wiped a layer of grime and cold sweat from her forehead, her chest heaving. She didn't have superhuman strength or radioactive spider blood. Knocking out four grown men with pure martial arts was an exhausting, bruising chore.
"Playing vigilante is a serious workout," Gwen muttered, rubbing a fresh bruise on her shoulder.
She reached into her jacket pocket, pulling out her smartphone to call the NYPD tip line. The screen was dead. The battery was entirely drained. Gwen looked up, squinting at the faint, crackling blue anomaly streaking across the starless sky.
"Well, that explains the dead battery," she sighed. "I guess saving the city is just awful for your data plan."
High above the East River, Max writhed.
"Where is it?!" he shrieked, his voice warping into a blast of electromagnetic static. "Where's my electricity?!"
Brooklyn and Queens were dry. He was running on fumes. Then, he felt it. A massive, concentrated spike of pure bio-electricity pulsed from the dead center of Manhattan. Max's glowing white eyes widened. His jaw unhinged in a manic, ecstatic grin. He banked hard, rocketing toward the signal.
Spider-Man was the one generating the surge.
He stood on the absolute highest spire of the darkened Avengers Tower. He wasn't wearing his standard red and blues symbiote sute. The Anti-Electro armor was a masterpiece of Stark engineering and Pym particle weaving. Thick, insulated ceramic-polymer plating shielded his chest, shoulders, wrists, and calves. The base fabric was a sleek, midnight blue, offset by stark white paneling.
As Peter pushed his natural bio-electricity to the surface of his skin, the suit came alive. The large white spider emblem on his chest ignited with a brilliant, neon-blue glow. The light traced down the geometric webbing patterns, illuminating his arms and legs like a TRON circuit board. Inside the mask, a customized Stark-tech heads-up display blinked to life.
Peter took a deep breath, rolling his shoulders and stretching his calves like an Olympic sprinter on the starting blocks.
"I heard that rig can push supersonic speeds," Pietro Maximoff said, leaning casually against a nearby gargoyle. The silver-haired speedster chewed loudly on a piece of gum. "Maybe even hypersonic. Wanna race, web-head?"
"Pass. I'll stick to the tactical playbook," Peter replied, adjusting his glowing gauntlets. "It's entirely up to us to wrangle the walking spark-plug, Quicksilver. Get into position."
Pietro smirked, popped a bubble, and vanished in a silent blur of silver.
A split-second later, Max Dillon crested the skyscraper. He didn't care that it was the Spider-Man who had previously beaten him to a pulp. He didn't care about the fancy new glowing armor. He just saw food.
"Mine!" Max roared.
He dove, tackling Peter directly onto the concrete roof. Max's glowing hands clamped down on Peter's armored shoulders. He immediately began siphoning the bio-electricity. Peter gritted his teeth as his internal battery rapidly drained. The magnetic adhesion in his boots flickered and failed.
But right before Peter hit empty, he executed Tony's trap.
Peter grabbed Max's wrists. He didn't punch; he squeezed. The insulated gauntlets engaged their reverse-polarity capacitors. The suit violently ripped the electrical current straight back out of Max's plasma body.
Max's eyes widened in sheer terror as his vital energy was sucked into the spider emblem on Peter's chest. The suit's capacitors whined, glowing a blinding, incandescent blue. Max tore himself free, howling in absolute agony.
It's a trap, Max's panicked mind screamed. He's a sponge! He's draining me! Max spun around and bolted into the night sky, desperate to escape the leech.
"Hey! Where are you going?!" Peter yelled, springing to his feet. "Usually people are way less eager to leave their electroshock therapy sessions!"
Peter broke into a sprint. The stolen kinetic energy flooded his muscles. The world smeared into a blue streak. With a deafening crack, Peter shattered the sound barrier on foot. He vaulted off the edge of Avengers Tower and shot a web-line. The insulated webbing held. He swung through the dark city canyons at supersonic velocity, his glowing suit leaving a brilliant blue tracer in the air.
He hit the sheer glass face of an Oscorp skyscraper and ran horizontally across the windows. Thanks to the localized bio-field dampeners integrated into his boots, the glass didn't shatter beneath his Mach-1 footsteps.
Inside his helmet, a familiar voice cut through the static.
"Alright, comms are finally back online," Tony Stark's voice panted, the billionaire clearly relieved to be off the bench. "Listen to me, kid. The suit burns through that stolen voltage extremely fast to maintain those speeds. You need to catch Dillon again immediately to top off your battery, or you're going to drop out of the sky." "That entirely depends on how good the bait is, Mr. Stark," Peter replied, pushing his legs harder.
High above the gridlocked streets, the injured, terrified Electro was desperately searching for a lifeline. In the distance, the iconic silhouette of the Baxter Building suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree.
Max didn't care if it was another trap. He was starving.
"I'm pure energy now!" Max shrieked, rocketing toward the Fantastic Four's headquarters. "I'll be fine! If anyone tries to stop me, I'll fry their organs!"
Max smashed through the rooftop access door, flying directly into the main power generator room. He froze. Dominating the center of the room was a massive, industrial-sized hamster wheel. Pietro Maximoff was running casually inside it, powering a massive, jury-rigged kinetic dynamo.
"Hey buddy! How's my form?!" Pietro laughed, his legs an absolute blur.
The dynamo hummed, pumping out massive amounts of localized alternating current. Max lunged forward, desperately extending his hands to absorb the flowing electricity.
A blue-and-white blur slammed into his back.
Peter Parker tackled him to the floor. Peter's glowing gauntlets locked onto Max's shoulders. The suit's capacitors violently engaged again. Peter ripped another massive surge of voltage straight out of Electro's core.
Max Dillon threw his head back and unleashed a horrifying, static-laced scream of pure agony.
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