100YoP Chapter Twenty-three "El que tenga miedo de morir, que no nazca." (Patreon)

Sam Reyes/Spider:

The sound of the explosion rocked the building, but thankfully nothing came down on my head as I sat back in the kitchen, the lower half of my mask hanging around my neck as I smoked a cigarette.

I leaned back on the chair I’d dragged in, watching the door. Every so often I caught myself tapping my foot on the floor, or my fingers against my arm, but every time I forced the nervous ticks to stop.

To keep myself busy, I counted the tools that would be available to me in the coming fight.

One machete. One revolver with six bullets, plus another twelve with six in each of my front pockets. A couple grenades hanging from the front of my bulletproof vest by a bandolier that Billy had improvised. Two steel knuckledusters in my inside pocket. A zippo lighter and some cigarettes in my opposite inside pocket. And the last resort, tied to the back of my belt.

If I wanted to win the fight against Namond without using my last resort, I was gonna have to get inside his head. And part of that was going to be fucking with him by looking unconcerned and petty.

I eyed the bucket balanced over the door. Spidey Sense only warned against obvious, immediate danger, so that... should work. Maybe. Probably.

Man. I was really betting my life on a ‘probably’, huh? I had to get better at this ‘crime lord mastermind’ shit.

I took another drag of my cigarette, and upon realizing I was burning filter, I tossed it away and pulled out another one.

I put the tip over the lit gas stove next to me, which was under a pot of oil. I had to lean in to do it, because the little fucking drops of oil that jumped out always fucking landed on skin despite me wearing like three fucking layers of clothing.

In fact, I found myself drawing back my arm and hissing in pain when some oil got on my wrist. Oil was easily my least favourite thing to cook with.

Though I wasn’t a fan of cooking wines either...

I sighed with boredom.

Goddamn it, he was taking his time coming here.

{[X]}

Yua Saito/Golden:

The explosion made the floor under Golden’s feet quake, but her balance didn’t sway the slightest bit.

The tiniest inkling of power, not even enough to cause her to glow, flowed into her ears and let hear how metal scraped against metal and people stepped around, before some hurried steps and someone screaming then falling to the floor.

“Reed, you alright?” asked a voice like two people speaking at once, a baritone and a tenor.

“Do I look okay?!” a nasal voice replied, before a sharp breath was taken. “I... I feel someone peeking through the cameras... it’s coming from the building Candy went to and this one.”

“One of Reyes’?”

“Most likely,” the voice panted, hissing as movement rang out. “I’ll deal with him... just fucking end Reyes already.”

“Don’t boss me around, old timer,” the baritone spat out, but footsteps still rang out, going towards the stairwell Golden was standing on, hand on the tomahawk at her side.

She let the flow of energy fade back into the thrumming of her meridians, and she unsheathed the throwing axe as she gripped it, her hands steady as stone and sure as zealotry.

It took a while, they probably tried the elevator that Weaver should have turned off behind them first, but eventually the door opened.

Namond Little was wreathed in his power, a black silhouette writhing with vaguely biological tendrils of mass and meat-like substance. Only single white eye shone, bigger than a human’s and seeming to shine on the right side of his face. It felt hypocritical to make the judgement when everything about Yua was so wrong on a fundamental level, but he truly looked like a monster.

She found herself hating him on sight.

Still, her attention was meant for another. Satya Kamal. She was wearing a sleeveless shirt that showed her arms were covered with golden flower tattoos that stood out against her dark brown skin. Upon laying eyes on Yua, one of those arms unfolded like a flower, turning to steel and blooming into a collections of sharp edges, needle points and hooks.

“Another of Reyes’ pets?” Little asked, distaste coming across even with his unnatural voice.

“One of Spider’s, actually,” Golden corrected, as instructed. Her usual monotone made it hard to tell when she was lying, so at least that played to her advantage.

Little scoffed, while Kamal took a step forward to be in front of Little and let the metal that used to be her arm twist together, extend and flatten into a curved sharp end, similar to a scythe.

“You gonna stop me?” asked Little. “Because it doesn’t matter who I find—Sammy, Spider, the fuckin’ Queen of England—I’m gonna shove my fist up his ass, grab the top of his spine and tear it back out through his dick. And if I gotta do it to you first, I will.”

“... if it’s the Queen of England, would she have a dick for you to tear her spine out through?” asked Golden, genuinely confused. “Because I for one definitely don’t have one of those.”

Little glared at her. Kamal remained impassive.

“... in any case,” she said, recognizing she’d gotten derailed. “Spider is waiting for you in the kitchen. Floor level, back past the lobby and the dining area. Can’t miss it.”

“Oh? And what are you here for, then?”

“I’ve been asked to take care of Ms. Kamal,” said Golden, the glow of her Ki encompassing her as Kamal’s eyes narrowed. “Still, Huntsman has suggested I make the following fight easier on Spider.”

Faster than most eyes could track, Golden reached into the bandolier across her chest, grabbed three throwing knives and tossed them with expert aim.

Little was dodging before she finished launching the first one, but that was why she sent the second and third ones with a small boost of Ki, making them race forward a bit faster in the direction he dodged in.

The second missed by a hair and the third scraped along his shoulderblades, but it didn’t stop him from diving straight over the side of the stairs.

Yua’s training urged her to seek out the leader, remove his head and mount it on the wall in the name of her leader and caretaker. But Kamal was jumping at her, scythe arm winding back, and she was forced to jump through the doors into a hallway.

Just in time to see her enemy slash the space she’d just been standing in, leaving her arm embedded deep in the concrete floor.

Her last throwing knife was removed and thrown, but a tendril of steel unfolded from the scythe and speared through the blade, freezing it in place before flicking out and tossing it to the side.

Golden’s free hand reached back and pulled a bowie knife, which she grabbed in a reverse grip.

“You don’t fight like a soldier,” Kamal noted, removing her scythe arm from the floor and tilting her head as she looked Golden over. “Where’d Reyes find a fuckin’ ninja?”

“I’m not much for banter,” Golden said apologetically. “It’ll have to be a silent fight, I’m afraid.”

Kamal shrugged, then dove forward.

{[X]}

Sam Reyes/Spider:

Upon opening the door, a bucket’s worth of clear liquid fell on Namond.

The man froze for a moment, bucket on his head, and his breathing got heavier and faster as he slowly took it off and let it drop on the ground. He stared at me with his one eye, shoulders tense and hands curled into fists so tight that without the symbiote on him they would’ve been white-knuckled.

“If nothing else,” he ground out, “I respect your dedication to royally pissing me off despite the consequences.”

This is good, I thought, He’s completely focused on me.

The problem was that he was completely focused on me and, if he chose not to indulge in sadism, could explode my head in his grip.

Look casual, it’ll piss him off.

“El que tenga miedo de morir, que no nazca,” I said, calmly shrugging. I flicked the ash off the tip of my almost-consumed cigarette into the bubbling pot of oil next to me. “What’s poppin’, Namond? Have you been keeping up with your prison wife?”

“Keep talking, asshole. It’s just going to make me enjoy this all the more,” he growled, stomping forward.

“Honestly, I’m surprised you haven’t noti—ugkh!” I barely managed to get out before he got to me and lifted me by the neck, squeezing down and shutting off the airway.

Pressure on front of throat, airflow mostly interrupted, still can breathe and maybe talk, the thoughts raced in my head. Then, a more distant part of my brain noted, This is really gonna ruin that daydream of Cass choking me with her thighs.

“What did I not notice?” Namond asked, lifting me up as high as he could (which, considering the height difference, only had me a bit above the ground). “I’m dying to know.”

“... bu-cket... wasn’... full’o... wa’er...” I struggled to say, before pressing the cigarette to his head.

Before he could realize what had happened, the grain alcohol all over him ignited, and the black symbiote reacted just as I hoped.

A high pitched squealing joined Namond’s desperate screaming as the black mass of his suit writhed and fell off his body in tendrils and strips, making him drop me in shock. To my disgust, I could see that the tendrils were coming from inside his body, at times causing blood to erupt from the separation as the symbiote tried to get away from the fire.

Weaver had theorized that, to afford Namond my powers, the symbiote would’ve had to bond with him on a cellular level. Anything else would have eventually lead to damage as a fragile human body got carried around in gooey power armor, which we all agreed was beneath Luthor’s ego to allow.

The symbiote was, to the best of my knowledge, essentially a part of Namond’s body. And it was violently and desperately trying to get itself away from him to make the hurting stop. It could only be comparable to your limbs coming alive and trying to forcefully rip themselves away from your body. The pain must’ve been imaginable.

For a brief moment, I felt empathy for him.

Just not enough to keep me from grabbing the pot of boiling oil by the handle and tossing it in his already on-fire face, making Namond’s screaming grow shriller and stronger than the symbiote’s.

As he fell to his knees, I wound back and smashed the pot across his face, knocking him to the floor.

Still on fire, still screaming, and now with a growing amount of boils on his face and neck as well as a bleeding gash on the side of his head, I was pretty certain that this fight wasn’t going the way Namond thought it would.

I spared him no mercy beyond leaving him alive. I walked around him, mindful of the fire that had yet to fully burn out thanks to his clothes under the symbiote and, apparently, the symbiote itself, which was turning the flames grey for some reason. I kneeled by his face, raised the pot over my head, and brought it down, smashing his nose to a pulp.

Then I raised it again and brought it down harder. Then again. And again.

Still, eventually my advantage had to run out. The sprinkler system finally realized Namond was on fire and turned on, just as his clothes were mostly consumed.

Seeing the sign that I ought to be on my way, I whacked him one more time on the temple, hoping for a concussion, and bravely got up and ran the fuck away.

I slammed the door to the kitchen open and ran into the lobby, pulling out my machete and making gouges on the walls and tables near me as I made for the stairways. This fight was only winnable if it remained on my terms, and that involved keeping Namond guessing and chasing.

Someday,I promised myself, I’m gonna come up with a plan that doesn’t involve great personal risk, and then everyone’s gonna fucking pay.

I was introspective enough to figure out that it was probably a remnant of the gangbanger mentality making me see as a discardable tool, and that I should probably go to a therapist about it, but, like, fuck that Tony Soprano bullshit.

I should probably stop thinking about HBO shows and focus on the supervillain about to come tear me a new asshole, I thought as I marked the door to a room with a big X and kicked in the door before using the master key I’d gotten through renting the building to enter the room across the hall from it.

{[X]}

Yua Saito/Golden:

For someone that had apparently been little more than a gangster with a little training in Muay Thai, Kamal was a skilled fighter. More so than what the investigations had predicted.

With a small grunt of effort, Yua bent back at the knees to dodge a roiling mass of hooks that swung across the room, trashing and thrashing through everything at height with where her body had been.

The power flowing across her body enabled her to jump back from her compromised position into a handstand, which then launched her to stand on the wall as Kamal’s other hand shifted into a mass of needles that stabbed the places she’d just been.

The metal shrank back into arm-like forms, still metal, and Kamal ran forward towards Golden.

One tomahawk in each hand, Golden parried a couple needle-point punches down to the sides, her back to the wall. When one headed for her head, she ducked under it, flipped the hatchet in her grip and slammed the flat backside of it against Kamal’s face, breaking her nose and making her stumble back.

She pressed her advantage, her body a constant flow of movement. Not necessarily hard or fast, but constant and smooth. Years of practice from the moment she could walk, thrown into the action of fighting someone with supernatural abilities. It was almost like being home.

Kamal responded much more clumsily, trying to bring her arms up as guard, but turning one tomahawk in her grip helped her hook the spike on the arm to move it out of the way before punching her face, the same motion on the other arm allowed for an elbow strike to the neck.

In one moment, as Golden threw out her hand and made the metallic arm she’d grabbed extend out, her empowered senses caught a whisper of metal brushing against metal and bending harshly, and she threw her head to the side, against the elongated arm, just to dodge as it grew, curved behind her and stabbed forward, almost catching Kamal in her own face.

While she flinched from her own attack almost skewering her eye, Golden took a step forward, putting her forward leg between Kamal’s, and threw her whole weight behind an empowered headbutt, right on Kamal’s mouth.

Namond’s assassin fell backwards, landing on her ass on the floor and spat out a few shards of teeth as she lashed out with an arm that extended again in a whirl of saws, hooks and blades.

Golden jumped forward and turned, getting out of the way of the attack as she lashed out downward with the hatchet, aiming to give a deep cut to Kamal’s shoulder.

Before she could, the other arm extended out and moved the assassin out of the way, leaving Golden with a hatchet buried on the floor. As she rolled out, one of Kamal’s metal appendages shrunk back, then stuck itself on the floor.

Trusting her instincts, Golden abandoned her tomahawk, flipping back through the air and out the room into the hallway. Just as she put both feet on the floor, dozens of metal spikes jutted out off the floor of the bedroom, knee-height.

Kamal turned her head, staring with a hateful glimmer at Golden before the spikes sunk a bit. Not missing a beat, Golden jumped onto the door, burst open and laying on its narrow side, and from it jumped outward just as the part of the hallway she’d been standing on became covered in spikes.

She jumped off of the wall, spun in the air and landed with both feet on Kamal’s back, smashing her into the ground. Golden stomped on her head once, to make sure she was dazed, then jumped off of her just as the metal extended off of the floor and spun in the air in her direction, smashing and brushing against each other, shooting off sparks.

But Golden was already halfway through the window, arms crossed in front of her head to protect her from glass. The hand that was still holding a hatchet lashed out, sticking into the side of the building and worked as an anchor as she swung down vertically, smashing both boots into the window a level down from Kamal.

She broke through and landed in a crouch, scowling under her gas mask at having lost both her tomahawks. She was very fond of them.

At least Sam would probably be fine giving her more tomahawks as a business expense. Used to be she had to use her pay for them.

Her ruminations were interrupted by a small burrowing sound coming from atop her.

A little to the left of her, close enough to feel the displaced wind but not close enough to be brushed by it, a strand of Kamal’s bothersome power fell through the ceiling and into the floor, creating a thin pillar of grey iron next to Golden.

She looked at it. Then tilted her eyes slightly upwards as she heard a lotof burrowing sounds.

Ki acting as a dampner for sound on instinct, she took a step back just another strand of iron fell right where she’d just been standing, then another one in front of the first strand, then another one behind the first, then another one behind the second that made Golden take another step away.

Soon enough, strands of iron fell like rain.

Golden briefly considered running for the door, but instead she chose to walk calmly to the center of the room and wait there. Soon after, iron strands fell in front of the door, effectively boxing her in, before the assault truly began.

Methodically, starting from near the door, rows upon rows of metal strands fell like a guilliotine’s blade.

As she waited, Golden noticed with a mixture of relief and sneering condescencion that the technique was sloppy. The strands weren’t perfectly vertical, uniformely sized or even tidily next to each other. Her tutors would have lashed her until her back was without skin, then had her heal herself for bringing such a technique into combat.

Still, her enemy’s sloppiness was her gain. As the metal strands reached her position, she let the energy course through her limbs, into her tendons, until her stance was upright yet fluid.

Her spine bent around the space a strand fell in just before it did, her arm bent upwards and to the side, narrowly dodging another strand while her leg bend between that one and the one almost brushing her spine, letting her raise the other leg in a perfect vertical split, dodging a third spine.

Not touching the metal, inhabiting the barest free spaces, she breathed tiny puffs of breath in an effort to not expand her chest too much. The strands continued falling, filling the room bit by bit until the only inhabitable spaces remaining were only available to people with Golden’s skills.

For a moment, she dreaded that her opponent might develop some common sense and remain unsatisfied until every square millimeter was filled with iron, but either foolishness or a physical inability stopped her, and instead the irons started rising all at once.

Some more discrete shuffling had to happen to let the strands shoot up without touching her, but eventually the room was free, and Golden was able to discreetly run next to the window she’d entered through, pulling out a bowie knife on the way and waiting.

Seconds passed... and then the burrowing sound came back, much louder.

That was all the warning Golden received before the roof tore open and Kamal fell into the room, standing on a whirling barbed drill made from her arms, from which metal tendrils lashed out and went straight for Golden.

Her life had gotten very strange recently, she thought.

The thought was not distracting enough to keep her from flipping the knife in her grip to grab it by the blade and toss it at her enemy.

{[X]}

Sam Reyes/Spider:

There came a point where I had to admit to myself that I might’ve been better off just killing someone and facing the social consequences, instead of trying to have my cake and eat it too.

I wasn’t going to do it, but I still thought it.

Anyway, the point came to me when a mini fridge, tossed as hard as a whipcord of symbiote muscle could toss, shot through a wall a meter and change from my head. This was accompanied by the sound of two bonded beings screaming with unspeakable wrath after the second time I tricked them into running out a window and into the street.

It probably would’ve had greater effect if we’d gotten past the second floor, but he wasn’t totally brain damaged (despite my best efforts) so there were limits to how far I could drag him.

At the moment, I was hiding in one of the hotel rooms, one with a single bed. My breathing was coming out in ragged pants, my chest strained as it expanded against the kevlar vest wrapped around it. My hands weren’t trembling, but they were starting to feel heavy and clumsy as I reloaded for the second time in as many minutes, having used my bullets to herd Namond in certain directions.

I only had so many bullets left, so I was gonna have to move on from pissing him off to make him commit mistakes, and pass on to actually attacking him.

I did not look forward to it.

The sound of stomping feet made me swallow a curse and flick my wrist to close the revolver, all while I jumped forward and turned around.

As expected, Namond crashed through the wall, a bit to the right of where I was going to aim.

He’d lost some of the humanity of his shape, with the symbiote writhing and whirling around him in a mass of black pseudo-muscle tendrils that kinda looked like a Ghibli monster. His only eye managed to shine with an obsessive kind of hatred, despite being covered in white fleshstuff.

That and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth and a long tongue were the only recognizably human parts left. Everything else looked like a bunch of worms tied together in a barely-anthropomorphic form. His arms seemed stretched out, his legs were thick and seemingly without ankles, with tendrils that dug into the ground under the feet.

And all of that was headed straight for me, a bit to the right of where I was aiming.

A last second correction of my aim proved insufficient, as he immediately jumped to the side as I pulled the trigger, landing just out of arm’s reach while my hand was still pushing back against the recoil.

While my higher thought was busy cussing up a storm about the situation, muscle memory and something that passed for instinct made me rush forward, past arm’s reach and inside his guard.

Surprised, Namond barely flinched back, but that was opening enough to lash out with a left elbow strike.

It bounced off harmlessly off his face, of course. But it probably made him think that that was what his Spidey Sense was warning him about, instead of the gun that I was leveling at his gut with my right hand.

Two shots from a rather large hand cannon were enough to send him staggering back before he could think of lashing out against him, and that gave me enough time to take aim again.

Against his crotch.

Now, as far as I’d seen, while the symbiote was working as rather powerful armor for Namond, it wasn’t really totally protecting him. I hadn’t really had the time to stop and think about it, but a quick guess told me that it was probably related to how it was connected to his nervous system.

Maybe tossing him out of a few windows and shooting at him wasn’t doing permanent damage, but he was feeling it. And besides, no armor can totally negate an impact, just ask any american football player.

What I’m getting at is that he howled like a maimed dog when I unloaded three bullets into his dick and dick-adjacent parts.

He fell to his knees, howling, and I took the opportunity to take a last shot at his head before running away.

Or that was the plan. As I was squeezing the trigger, his body advanced without moving a limb, half the tendrils launching him forward while the other half lunged for me.

They wrapped around my chest and stomach before I could react, and I found myself dragged with Namond’s forward momentum. He slammed me into the wall behind me, finally moving to stand to his full height and lifting me up by the neck as he curled his warped hand around it.

“Gkht,” I choked behind my mask, hands desperately and ineffectually trying to scratch his arm through my gloves. “Kkt!”

“You... piece... of shit...” Namond panted, squeezing me tighter and tighter as he pressed my back against the wall. “I am going... to break you... as thoroughly... as I can... before... I let you die.”

I would have really liked to get off some smartass comment then, but my windpipe was kinda obstructed. So I just flipped him off.

He responded by rearing back and slamming me into the wall. He held me there, grinding me in place, before rearing back and slamming me again.

I could feel my ribcage creaking between the force of impact and the wall. The back of my head had slammed against the wall, and it felt like my brain was going to burst and leak out of my ears if he hit me like that again.

Loose thoughts floated in my skull, bits of knowledge bouncing against the wall like a DVD screensaver, changing color when they hit something hard.

I had to get out of Namond’s grip. Was Steph okay? Namond like showing off, could I use that? Would Cass be sad if she found me dead? Would mom be okay without the money I sent her way? Would she be sad if she never heard from me again? I had to think of a way to trick Namond into letting me go. Unless I could force it? How could I force it? Billy would definitely be sad if I died, maybe Yua and Farah too.  I still had my machete—

Namond reared back with me still in his grip and slammed me against the wall again, harder than the last time.

Spots danced in my vision, bile rose to my mouth despite the obstruction in the way, and everything from the back of my head to the back of my waist felt like it was rubbed raw.

Pain filled my brain with buzzing like an old television tuned to a dead channel for an uncountable eternity of seconds, before the torn scraps of my previous thoughts reappeared. With focus unimitable without the influence of adrenaline, I picked up what was useful and tied it together.

Namond was prideful. Namond wanted me humilliated before dead. Namond liked to show his superior strength. I was making things too easy for him.

(Granted, I felt like I could be excused a bit considering he’d been choking me for a while and had slammed me so hard into a wall that he almost put me through it.

(On an unrelated note, the edges of my vision were starting to go a bit black.))

Shifting my attention, I realized my hands had instinctively grabbed on to the wrist of the hand choking me. I forced myself to move past my monkey brain to let go and do something useful with my stupid hands.

I wrapped the left one around the back of Namond’s neck, then turned the right one into a fist and crashed it as hard as I could into his face.

Predictably, this did no damage whatsoever. But it wasn’t about causing damage. It was about pissing off Namond.

And indeed, I could hear his teeth grit as I slammed my fist over and over, making more damage to my knuckles than to anything else.

“Pissant little—” he cursed, before pulling back to slam me a third time. Before he could react, I leaned into the movement, pushing against the wall with one leg and wrapping the other around his waist. He was halfway to pushing against me before I slammed my forehead into his face.

This only made my brain feel more like a slushy, but it also made him growl with irritation as he turned and flung out his arm, sending me hurling through the hotel room. I would have landed against the opposite room’s door, but being horizontal made me crash into the door sill, again jostling my neck.

Through all the pain, the thought that I better not wind up paraplegic from this fucking fight made its way to the forefront of my mind.

It arrived there just as I hit the floor, and I realized my body was slightly contorted awkwardly because of what felt like a ball against my side.

I fumbled blindly for it, lead by a thought too abstract to be expressed while Namond stomped over to me, and when I felt the familiar shape of it I pulled it victoriously.

It took me two seconds to realize that Namond had stopped walking because, in the movement, I’d accidentally pulled free the grenade’s ring.

It took me another second to toss it at his feet and stand up, which I am very proud of and glad for, because two seconds later the wall behind me and to my side shook as sharpnel went straight through it.

Namond’s screaming of rage and maybe some pain rang out behind me.

I stopped running, and as quietly as I could, I snuck into another room.

It was only going to buy me a few seconds, but I’d already decided that I was shit out of options.

Reaching behind my waist, I pulled out a wooden box and opened it, revealing a padded interior and three syringes that had miraculously not broken when I’d gotten tossed around, complete with similarly unsnapped extra-long stainless steel needle tips.

My fingers felt like useless sausages as I reached under my jacket and desperately tore at the straps holding my vest in place. Eventually, pure brute force managed to get them off, though the process tore off my holsters.

Whatever. I wasn’t going to reload fast enough in my shaking state, and I could just hold the damn machete. If I needed it to stay in place to free my hands, a wall or Namond would suffice to hold it.

Wait, shaking hands. How the hell was I going to manage this?

The sound of a door being torn off its hinges near me told me that the answer was ‘somehow, and quickly’.

I struggled to put the needle on the hub, eventually biting off my gloves to make it easier to grip it. It took a while, but I managed, and in a rare show of common sense I didn’t immediately use it, instead moving on to the next.

As soon as the third needle was done, I grabbed one with one hand, tore open my shirt with the other, took all of two seconds to make sure I’d aimed between the two correct ribs, and stabbed through, paradoxically trying to keep my muscles as loose as possible.

I managed to push the plunger all the way through, filling my heart with adrenaline, before I tore it off and went for the next syringe before the shaking could set in.

Already, sensations felt sharpened and I struggled to aim the needle on the right path, instead of off to the side of my heart, or into a lung. Catching the hole I’d made with the previous one helped a bit, but not much. I plunged it in before it could get worse, and pushed the plunger in once more.

Alice had warned me that you’re supposed to apply adrenaline to... where, anywhere except the cardiovascular system, basically. What I was doing was basically a very odd, convoluted and grotesque form of suicide.

But the leading theory in what was giving me my powers back was adrenaline. So if I wanted this fight over with fast, I needed as much of it in my body as soon as possible.

Alice was a woman of limited means. She’d only managed to sneak three syringes out of the hospital she worked at. But I also suspect that she limited herself to an amount she thought I’d survive if it failed.

I realized my hands had stopped, and that the trembling was worse. I pulled out the syringe, tossed it out and grabbed the third and final one.

The shaking was much worse now. The needle’s point scratched the paling skin around the hole before it caught in and I managed to stab myself in the heart.

Thinking about it like that made the true depths of how stupid I was being hit me halfway through emptying the damned syringe into my heart, so I just shrugged and carried on.

Well, less ‘shrugged’ and more ‘twitched with resignation’, but the point is that I emptied the last of the adrenaline into my heart.

The door behind me was torn off just as I threw away the syringe, and I turned to find Namond standing there, writhing and smiling with a maw full of teeth.

“There you... are?” he blinked and looked around as I barely managed to stand up on wobbling legs. “... why the fuck did you take off your vest? ... And your shirt? And are those—?”

In lieu of answering, I reared back and made to punch him. He didn’t bother to dodge until the last second, when his widening eye told me his Spidey Sense had warned him about it. But it was just a hair too late.

My fist slammed into his eye just as he was dodging, and I heard something crack as he fell backwards and dropped on his ass.

I would’ve glared down at him, but I realized—with some detatchment—that the cracking sound had come from my hand. I looked down at my fist and the bottom knuckles of my middle, ring and pinky fingers were split and cracked, forcing those fingers to stay shut.

Okay, so no powers. But hysteric strength was pulling its weight, so it was progress. Progress that might kill me.

Oh God, I was going to die.

My chest tigthened up. It was like my lungs wanted to hyperventilate, but breathing had become almost impossible all of a sudden. My vision swam and I had to swallow to avoid vomiting. My hands shook, my knees knocked together from tremors and the anxiety that was forcing its way into my brain.

But I still managed a half-decent boxer’s stance.

Once more, Namond’s tendrils did most of the movement for him, attatching to the floor under him and the wall behind him, moving like a millipede’s legs as they dragged his body upright. They adjusted his legs and stance for him before letting go of the wall and rejoining the main mass around his body.

“... So you... what?” he asked, gesturing vaguely at my trembling ass. “You pumped yourself full of steroids or something so you could throw one good punch? Was that your plan? ‘Cause honestly at this point I think it would’ve been easier to die.”

“Th-The easy w-way...” I barely managed, “... Is f-for l-little b-bitches named N-N-Namond.”

Because no amount of adrenaline overdose can keep me from being a dick.

With a growl echoed by another voice, Namond rushed forward and threw a wild haymaker.

And that’s when I realized something that I’d missed in all the chaos.

For all his stolen powers, for all the help he was getting from the symbiote... Namond was a sloppy fighter.

Even nauseous and at the edge of throwing up inside my mask to choke and die as I was, even with my heartbeat pounding inside my ears to the point that there was almost no space for my thoughts, even with the cold sweat covering my trembling body, I still managed to weave around the punch and hit him again with my fractured right hand.

His head threw back, and it felt like everything came into focus.

All the shapes around me that had blurred more and more with each injection, all the noises that had become deafening, it all faded as the person in front of me gained painful clarity, and all the adrenaline in my body gained a target that I could break my body against.

I stepped forward and to Namond’s left, hooking my lead leg  around his foot and stepping back sharply, dragging his leg forward as mine went back, fucking up his stance just as I slammed a cross into his temple, knocking him once more to the ground.

He’d barely had time to react as I moved. Actually, he’d had plenty of time to react, but he was... slow.

If we were on even footing, he was slow.

A hysteric chuckle left me. Of course.

(Something Cass told me once is that she could divide fighters into three types. Those that leaned into their strength, those that leaned into their technique, and those that struck a balance between the two.

She defined herself as the third type, and said that I fought like I used to be the second type and then turned into the first without stopping at the third.

At the time, desperate for an excuse that wouldn’t leave her too unimpressed, I’d told her that the change to being meta had been too sudden for me to adjust right, and with time I’d been shocked to realize I hadn’t been completely pulling it out of my ass.

Being depowered had been a favour in that regard. I’d found myself paying a little more attention, being a bit more technical with where I punched. And now that the switch in my head was flipped and I wasn’t letting myself get dragged down by petty concerns such as ‘will this cripple me’... maybe it was time to find that sweet middle point.)

I threw myself at Namond’s downed figure, pinning his arms at the wrists by landing on them with my full weight behind my knees and then transferring that weight to my arm as that fell next, spinning into a punch that I felt strain my shoulder in its socket.

This didn’t stop me from supporting myself with my off hand and rearing my fist back to throw it down, over and over, making that same pain flare up with every millimeter of movement.

(The pain was miles away. The pain was a thousand burning suns, flaring on every square picometer of my nervous system. My sweat was freezing me. I was burning up with an impossible fever. My tongue was dead in my mouth, like a sack of wet cement. It felt like it was covered in acid, and I was intimately aware of the taste of bile mixing with the flavour of my teeth.

I felt like I’d been strapped to the bottom of a pool. But it also felt like my body was moving with a freedom I’d missed since becoming depowered.

My attention was being pulled by a million thing. Killing Beating Killing BEATING Namond was the only thing on my mind.

My body had become an oxymoron. A walking paradox, and I was turning every able inch of it to the task of kicking Namond’s ass.)

A tendril snaked out to the side of me, where I couldn’t see it, and I wasn’t able to move out of the way before it wrapped around my waist and threw me off of Namond, sending me hurling through the air for the nth time that fight.

I landed in a roll, making stars swim in my vision, and I barely managed to put myself as upright as a crouch when Namond ran in and football-kicked me backwards, making me fall on my back gasping before he stomped down with his full weight on my stomach.

I finally lost the battle against my own digestive system and I felt my mouth fill with vomit, which quickly flooded my gas mask and left me incapable of breathing.

Namond ground his foot in, smiling once more despite the light swaying of his stance.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling his horrible smile once more. “Torture sounded good, but this? Watching you drown in your own sick under my foot? This might just be good enough for me.”

I tried to knock his foot off of me, but he’d clung to my stomach with my own powers and I was completely failing to do anything more than bruising his leg as I broke my hands against it.

With all else failing, I grabbed on to his leg and started trying to lift it off of me, the fingers of my ungloved hand feeling the very gross synthetic flesh of the symbiote squirming under my grip and coiling around them. My other hand was struggling to wrap around the leg with three fingers stuck curled due to broken knuckles, so I just made a full fist again and kept smashing it against the leg, figuring it was better than nothing.

I squirmed, I punched, I thrashed, I kicked and pushed, I tried to contort my body to kick out the back of the knee of the leg pinning me and failed to bend all the way.

Anything I could think of, I tried. The corners of my vision were quickly being flooded with blackness once more, and my thrashing got more and more desperate. The enhanced sensations of the adrenaline seemed to only get worse and I was drowning on dry land.

I was sitting at the edge of death when I felt something that took me a second to recognize. Something like an itch and a warmth throughout the nerves of the hand gripping the leg.

Running on pure instinct and what hadn’t had enough time to become habit, I pushed the energy forward, making lines of blue energy run up my arm and explode against his leg, weaker than it used to be but hot and powerful enough to make him jump back, cursing as he clutched his leg and the symbiote writhed and squealed in pain.

I paid them no mind as I turned over and tore off the bottom half of my mask as fast as possible, letting all the vomit out and pushing out the bits that went down my airpipe.

It took me a moment of coughing to realize that I’d curled the hand holding the gas mask part of my outfit into a fist, completely crushing it.

Despite everything, despite the millisecond’s worth of warning I got before another tendril of Namond’s slammed me through a room’s door, despite the fact that I was still losing the fight, I smiled.

Because I’d had the millisecond’s worth of warning. And crashing through the door hadn’t hurt as much. And I had just the tinsiest bit of Venom Sting once more. And, despite the fact that it still felt like I had my head inside the world’s largest speaker while strobe lights had been surgically attatched to my retinae, my senses were slowly shifting into focus.

It almost felt like my body admitting defeat. Like admitting that, if I was going to put it through all that crap, it might as well regain the superpowers so it didn’t completely shatter in the process of this fight.

I smiled. I smiled, I chuckled, and then I laughed as I stumbled to my feet, shaking my head as my ears popped while they adjusted and my awareness of the room grew at a slow yet steady pace.

Namond was also standing. And he looked afraid.

I had half a mask, no shirt or bulletproof vest, a jacket that had seen better days, half a face covered in vomit, what felt like multiple cracked or outright broken bones, and no small amount of symptoms of adrenaline overdose.

But I also had a hope of winning the fight.

And as I’d learned a long time ago, that was all I needed to carry me through any given day in Gotham.

I fell into a battle-ready stance once more, gave Namond a grin that was all teeth, and charged forward.

{[X]}

Yua Saito/Golden:

The fight wasn’t going well for Golden.

Upon realizing that she couldn’t beat Yua in a normal fight, Kamal had adopted the tactic of completely controlling the enviroment to better box in Golden for the kill. A tactic that, to Golden’s eternal shame, was working rather wondrously.

The floor, the ceiling and the hallway’s walls had all been consumed by Kamal’s steel. More spears could come from any direction, shooting out with speed that was a challenge to dodge even for Golden’s enhanced speed. Sometimes they stayed in place and became obstacles for her to dodge around, which could sprout their own spikes at any time.

(That was how she’d gained a number of cuts on her hand, after foolishly using one such spear as a handhold while dodging other attacks.)

Still, Kamal hadn’t come out of the battle unscathed. A broken nose, a black eye, a few missing teeth on her hanging jaw, cuts here and there...

It wasn’t Golden’s best work, but considering the ‘no murder’ limitation, she felt she was doing alright.

Mostly.

Kinda.

Not really.

Her body really hurt. She had multiple large cuts on every limb, a few holes that went from side to side, she was down quite a few knives—though not so many that she wouldn’t get to the end of this fight unarmed, no matter who won—and it felt like every uncut inch of her had been bruised at least.

Shaking her head slightly to focus, the slightest tilting of the floor under her let her know to throw her weight backwards, avoiding a rising metal spike coming from between her feet.

The spike halted it’s acceleration in an instant and immediately curved towards her, regaining its previous speed without so much as a second of acceleration. Golden threw her head to the side to avoid it, then ran around it, headed for Kamal.

Namond’s assassin started walking backwards, creating more than a few obstacles in front of herself. A few poles going from wall-to-wall, a small wall, spikes on the floor, etcetera. The threads from her arms had to extend to allow her the movement.

Nothing that could block her vision, but enough to slow down Golden so that the iron spikes could catch her.

In theory.

Weaving around the poles was easy enough, even when more spears came from them aimed at her body. Jumping over the wall was a bit of a challenge when it suddenly shot up while she was over it, but she managed to push herself off of it before Kamal could alter it to be too sharp to do so.

The spikes on the floor, she jumped over, until more poles emerged from the walls to stop her, all covered in too many spikes for her to touch.

In theory.

Using her emergency kukri, she hooked it around a high one and swung her weight around to spin and, with a burst of ki, threw herself at the wall, on which she ran before Kamal could alter it.

Not that she could have, as her broken jaw hung even lower and she struggled to moan something to the effect of ‘what the fuck’, probably.

It was a moot point, as Yua landed on her with her foot extended, sending her flying back.

Her arms, which were transformed up to the shoulder and shooting into the walls in web-like tendrils, barely acted as a safety belt as another pulse of ki sent her flying back.

While she didn’t lose her concentration enough that the walls were freed of her influence, she was too stunned to make more defenses against Golden’s relentless charge.

Choosing to tenderize before imparting more cuts onto her, she ran up until she was a leg’s length from her and spun over one foot, adding momentum to a roundhouse kick into Kamal’s jaw.

(After all the blunt force trauma and the ocassional cuts she’d given the thing, Yua had a small suspicion that Kamal would never fully recovered. Thankfully, Sam had specified that permanent damage was on the table, since they weren’t ‘running for Jesus’.

Yua hadn’t understood the expression, but the others had chuckled so she’d tried to look amused.)

The impact sent Kamal stumbling down, barely held up by her arms while her eyes turned unfocused. Yua reared back her leg and pressed the advantage, launching a barrage of enhanced kicks at her body.

It couldn’t have been a conscious decision, but Kamal brought up a defense regardless. A few strands left the walls, making the iron cover on everything thin slightly as it was redirected to be a wall right in front of her, which dented repeatedly under Golden’s assault.

Before she could stop herself, the barrier became covered in spikes, leading to Golden slamming her foot with full force into a collection of spikes, making her cry out in pain.

She pulled her foot back and the iron went with it, penetrating deeper into her flesh and becoming barbed to better grip it. Tears didn’t gather in Yua’s eyes, she’d gone far past that point a long time ago, but her cries of pain did become a tad higher as the steel wrapped around her foot inside and out.

Using that point of leverage, Satya Kamal swung the metal tendril upwards like a whip and slammed her into the ceiling, then down to the floor.

Golden coughed under her mask, covering her lower face with spittle. She gasped for air just before she was slammed up again, cracking her mask on the metal ceiling, then to the sides.

It felt like her foot was going to be torn off, like it would be shreded to pieces and the only thing holding it together was the very thing that was ripping it apart. She felt her bones quake and her brain smash against the inner walls of her skull with every impact. Dizzying agony ran through her nerves with every movement.

The pain was unbearable. Or it would’ve been, had she been anyone else.

As it was, Golden had managed to reach for another knife that she was going to toss at Kamal, when she was rudely interrupted by the floor exploding.

Kamal had just grown some spikes on the floor that she was about to toss Yua into when a body crashed out through it. A shirtless, bleeding, bile-smelling body.

In the seconds before Spider crashed into her, Golden lamented that her boss’ fight didn’t seem to be going much better than hers.

Then he slammed into her and they both crashed onto the ceiling. They were about to fall again, but his hands shot out and clung onto the ceiling, holding them both in place.

There was a moment of silence and confusion as they both just ‘stood’ there, for a value of the word. A tense second before recognition from him, a moment of relief at seeing a friendly face from both of them, then worry at seeing each other’s wounds.

“Shit, Golden are you—?!” was as far as he got before Kamal pulled her back by the foot, making her cry out as she was spun around and flung to the floor. “Fuck!”

He looked like he was about to jump after her, but black tendrils emerged from under him and he just barely had time to jump to the side before Namond appeared, shooting out from the floor below to smash into the ceiling, muscles bulging with his stolen power.

Spider landed on the wall, and to Golden’s surprise, slowly slid down it. It looked like whatever he’d done to get his powers back wasn’t fully working?

Namond was breathing hard, glaring hatefully at Spider, but when he saw that Golden’s boss was distracted by her and Kamal, he snorted.

Spider seemed to realize something in a second, because he turned towards her at the same time as Namond did and they both spoke in unison.

“Forget about her—!” they both shouted, but then they diverged, as Namond shouted, “— and help me kill this fucker!” at the same time as Sam shouted, “— and get to safety!”

There was a moment of silence and, in Yua’s case, realization.

In eighteen years of living, she’d never had someone ask her to get to safety because a fight was going bad. In some level she’d understood that Sam was foolish enough to do so, but this was... a singular moment of clarity in regards to the nature of her employer.

No. In regards to the nature of her friend.

That’s what it was, wasn’t it? Sam really was her friend.

She’d never actually had one of those.

And in that moment, the greater conflict against Satya Kamal was lost as the Glass Eyes assassin proved herself the better soldier. In a moment, all the iron strands left Yua’s body and rejoined the walls, about to create an enviroment completely hostile to Sam.

Golden, on the other hand, ignored orders and stood up.

Her body ached and bled. Her foot might never work against unless she used some serious techniques to fix it, the type that would seal her doom.

But her fate was already made, the moment she realized that she wanted to be worthy of Sam’s loyalty.

She took a step on broken flesh and called on an amount of ki that she hadn’t touched in three years. The shining aura around her disappeared, the energy completely focused into strands that ran through her veins, nerves, tendons, muscles and meridians.

It was... terrifying to be doing it again. What she’d used on Sam after Namond had kidnapped him, that was mostly just pushing ki into another body to speed things along, a process too crude to be called a proper technique.

What she was doing now though, moving the energy in the most efficient way through her body and into the kukri she gripped with both hands...

That was, for the first time since her brother forbid it, a proper technique from the Golden Lion School of Cultivation.

And it would be what started the countdown until her family hunted her down and killed her.

So be it.

「First Step of the Sunset Blade 」

As always, the invocation of a technique—which, though not strictly necessary, always seemed to make things go easier—seemed to make the room reverberate with power.

Everyone turned to look at her. But by then it was too late.

「Lesser Divisions」

She charged forward, completely ignoring the pain, and swung the kukri.

Faster than anyone could track, she swung her hands down, then to the side, then across, and so on. The knife was a cruder weapon than what she’d been trained to use, but anything with an edge would work with her expertise.

Golden qi flowed through meridians, snaked up the handle into the blade and out through the thinnest possible edge, even thinner than what the actual material had, flowing out in opposite directions to better separate the target.

This was the foundation of the Sunset Blade, the weapon techniques of the Golden Sunrise Sect, founded untold ages ago before her ancestors even left China. It was the building block upon which thousands of attacks were built, a technique she’d practiced until her palms were shredded open.

And when her movement was finished, the sound of each thing struck splitting open was like the ringing of a gigantic bell.

The walls split open perfectly, intersecting lines going out and ending just as they became thin lines on the drywall, to Yua’s dissatisfaction. She really had gotten rusty.

The strands that had been connecting to Kamal’s shoulders followed, splitting in many parts, before finally being completely separated from the assassin by the cleaving of her shoulders at the collar, the split so clean that blood failed to flow out for a moment.

The divisions continued past Kamal, fraying the iron walls, skirting around Sam, and heading for Namond.

His stolen sixth sense served him well. He almost dodged everything.

Almost.

The remains of Kamal’s transformed arms hit the floor half a second before Namond’s right forearm did, but their screams were eerily synchronized.

Spider didn’t hesitate to act longer than the time it took him to look around and realize the area around him was free of cuts. In a second, he’d rushed forward and kicked out with the full force of his acceleration, putting it all and his weight into an empowered kick that sent Namond flying backwards, still screaming.

Then he used the recoil from the kick to turn around, run up to Kamal, grab her by the back of the head, and throw her into the floor.

“Golden, you good?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at where Namond laid, still screaming.

“I—I am... operational,” she said, blinking a bit. For some reason, her hands shook. “I can help you.”

He looked down at her hands, then said, “That was a technique, wasn’t it?”

“... it was.”

“I thought you were forbidden from using those.”

“... I am.”

He looked her in the eye, put a hand behind her head and made to kiss her forehead, but stopped when he remembered his mouth was covered in vomit. Instead, he pressed his forehead to hers and said, “I’ve got this.”

“You need help—”

“He’s down an arm, and I know you don’t go against orders easy. As I can tell, you just went against two,” said Spider. Despite her usual reluctance to make eye contact, Yua found herself drawn to look into his green eyes as he said, “Goldie, I’ve gotthis. Stop her bleeding, then get to the base. I’ll be right behind you.”

She hesitated, breathing speeding up for a moment, before she forced out the words, “P-Promise?”

“I promise.”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded.

“Okay,” she opened her eyes and found him looking over his shoulder towards where Namond was still screaming, but standing up in a writhing mass of tar-like tentacles. “I’ll just deal with him real quick and go to you all.”

“... okay,” she said, letting it all out in a big sigh. “Thank you, sir.”

“No problem,” he said, slowly letting go of her. “By the way, can I borrow a couple knives?”

She pulled two from her back and handed them over, and he placed one under the back of his belt and gripped the other firmly, giving her a nod of thanks. Without another word, he rushed forward, and Yua went to remove her opponent from the battleground.

She had a feeling things were going to get messy, even considering how she’d already made things considerably chaotic.

{[X]}

Sam Reyes/Spider:

I wasted no time on technique or sophistry. As soon as the knife was under my belt and the other was in my hand, I rushed forward as fast as my recently regained super strength would let me and threw my full weight into a charging tackle, throwing Namond as I took the knife in a reverse grip and tried to drive it into his stomach, confident that enhanced healing would keep him alive.

The blade only went slightly into the writhing mass of the symbiote, which stopped the knife by wrapping tendrils around it and pushing back even as my whole weight fell behind the knife as we both hit the floor.

“Get... the fuck... OFF ME!” Namond roared, pushing against me as hard as he could.

But, unlike him, I still had both hands. So I let one release the knife and go to the floor next to Namond’s body, using my Stick ‘Em Powers to grip it so I could pull myself down, pushing the knife deeper into the symbiote’s flesh and hopefully into Namond.

I was making decent progress, but to my surprise my fingers came unnatattched from the floor before I could finish driving the damng thing into him. In my surprise, I wasn’t able to avoid him tossing me ass-over-teakettle down the hallway, towards the elevators at the end of it.

I rolled and barely managed to use the enhanced kinesthesia I had from my Spidey Sense to end up with both feet on the ground, turning around to find Namond already turned around and running for me.

I waited until the last second to take a step to the side and lash out with the knife as hard as I could, forcefully carving a wound across his side, actually making Namond’s blood spill instead of just wounding the symbiote again.

He screeched with pain, and I pressed the advantage to turn and put the full weight and momentum of my body behind a knee strike to his stomach, making him stumble back a little. I turned the extended knee into a kick to the side of his head as he started to charge forward, throwing him sideways and giving me enough time to remake my stance and drive a right cross into his face, aimed straight to his temple.

“Gkh,” he choked, dazed, as he took a few unwilling steps backwards.

Blood was leaking from his fried, bruised, battered face and through the writhing of the symbiote, dying his remaining eye red.

It ocurred to me that, even if I didn’t kill him and even if I died and he won, he would probably rather die than continue after how I left him.

I counted that as a victory.

I pressed my advantage, rushing forward and smashing a fist into his stomach, then dragging it up with the knife’s edge aimed at his body, carving a thick line through the symbiote, before pulling back and slamming the point into his shoulder as hard as I could, stopped again by the symbiote. But a bit of red splurted out of the wound, and I grinned like a savage.

He lashed out with a haymaker that I dodged, then cut his arm from the shoulder to the elbow. He made to punch me again, and I kneed him in the groin before grabbing the back of his head, pulling it back and headbutting him with the full weight of my body behind the move.

He stumbled back and I followed, keeping up the attack. We kept up like this for a few moments, with both of us slowly progressing towards the end of hallway. Every few attacks from me he lashed out with a counterattack, and some of them actually connected and made me give a bit of ground to him, but for the most part I controlled the rythmn of the fight, pushing us forward.

The symbiote kept putting itself back together after a cut, but its constant shifting meant that I got a pretty good look at all the wounds that I’d scored on Namond himself. The symbiote was keeping them closed, but it couldn’t completely stop the bleeding, and it definitely couldn’t negate the pain if Namond’s grunts and choked screams meant anything.

Once we were close enough to the wall, I lashed out with a 300-style “Sparta” kick and sent Namond stumbling backwards, making him crash into the elevator doors.

With the small bit of distance between us gained, I used it to run forward and slam another Sparta kick into his stomach, heavily denting the metal elevator doors, then letting the foot drop and using it to drag my body forward into a knee strike to his groin, making him wheeze in pain.

Before I could regain distance, his arm lashed out and grabbed onto the back of my neck, bringing me in for a headbutt. I met it with equal force and we stood there for a moment, heads grinding against each other’s, before I grabbed onto his remaining arm and took advantage of his lack of another one to slam my fist into his stomach, over and over.

When he finally tried to let go of me to hit me, I punched him in the stump, making him scream with pain and clutch the wound. I took a step back, grabbed the knife and turned my whole body with a stab, putting the full weight into it. Again, the Symbiote tried to stop it, but I let go before it could react and left the knife there, stuck on it.

With my hands free, I used the left one to hold back his head by the forehead and the right one to punch him in his one remaining eye. Once, twice, three times, then a punch to the throat, one to the stomach, another one to the face. When I judged him distracted enough, I grabbed the knife and dragged it across his chest.

Once a line was clear across the chest, I pulled back my arm and made to stab through his collarbone.

Honestly, at this point the adrenaline was running so high that I don’t think I was thinking about sparing Namond’s miserable life. I just wanted him in the ground, and if he lived through it then that was his own luck saving his ass, not my giving of a fuck.

Lucky for him, he chose that moment to get his shit together.

His remaining hand lashed out and grabbed the wrist of my knife hand, which he used to pull me forward and turn us around. With how dazed and overdosed on adrenaline I was, the quick motion turned my stomach enough that I wasn’t able to move away from his own Sparta kick, which unfortunately proved strong enough to send me through the doors and into the elevator shaft.

I fell about half a floor before I got close enough to the wall to grab it and use my Spider Cling to stay in place. I looked up and found Namond backing up before running forward to jump towards me.

I rolled to the left and jumped a little to grab the wall next to the one I was clinging to, but to my surprise I slid down a bit before I truly focused and stopped in place. And even then, I could feel myself slowly sliding down.

Okay, Stick ‘Em Powers also not a hundred percent back. That’s a bitch.I thought. Then I looked up and I found Namond, holding the knife I just now realized I’d dropped, grinning his toothy fucking grin as he stood sideways and walked towards me. Speaking of bitches...

I also stood sideways, and immediately had to crouch and used my hands because my boots were too thick and were fucking up my grip. I crawled backward as I desperately kicked them off, slightly tearing them with my enhanced strength before letting them drop under the elevator shaft.

“Look at you,” Namond said, his voice thick with pain, blood and grim satisfaction. I could barely see him even with the slight light coming from the torn-open doors. “You’re pathetic, Sam. Covered in vomit, blood, sweat and bruises, barely able to use your powers, overdosed on... whatever that was, and you’re still too fucking stupid to lay down and die with some dignity.”

“I don’t do anything with dignity,” I said, reaching back and being thankful that my reserve knife hadn’t fallen in all the commotion. I pulled it out and grabbed it. “After I beat your ass, I’m going to do the lamest, cringiest victory dance I can think of just to drive the point home.”

Honestly, I hadn’t thought I could make him hate me more, but the way his eye narrowed at that made me certain that he was going to eat my fucking heart just so he could cover part of me in shit.

We stood there, sideways and with knives at the ready, measuring each other. My stance was unstable and wide to compensate, my weight threatening to throw me down the shaft if I wasn’t careful. His own was sloppy, with pain and martial inexperience leaving him standing awkwardly.

To this day I don’t know what signal told us to rush forward, but we did so at the exact same moment, knives lashing out and meeting in the middle, creating a burst of sparks that briefly illuminated us before I had to stumble back under his superior strength, lashing out again with the knife to stop his next attack, creating another shower of sparks.

I kept going back until my back hit the wall, upon which I remembered I was fighting in a 3D space, and let my grip on the wall leave a little, letting me slide down the wall to avoid a stab from Namond.

I anchored one foot, making me swing sideways as I flipped the knife in my hand, then re-anchored the other foot so that I could drive forward the movement into a stab into his back, which actually went in and through the symbiote, making him bend back and scream in pain.

My feeling of success was short-lived, as I immediately had to wrench out my knife and stumble back down to avoid a horizontal cut from Namond. In doing so, my concentration slipped for a moment, and I lost my grip on the wall.

There’s that moment of weightless panic when you begin to fall, a truly bowel-loosening instant where gravity doesn’t seem to be there and your mind goes blank except for the certainty that you are fucked.

Luckily, I hadn’t completely forgotten the reaction I’d trained into myself to that feeling.

A hand lashed out and pressed my middle and ring fingers to the center of my palm. A weak, skinny string of grey fluid lashed out and immediately hardened into a brittle line. But it was enough to pull me towards the wall I’d originally been attatched to, where I managed to catch myself by the feet, even if the soles got rubbed a bit raw.

In doing so, I noticed the cables to the elevator “under” me. I looked at them, then up to Namond as he crawled down towards me, getting ready to leap.

As fast as I could, I put myself upright relative to the floor and pushed the cables forward, getting me behind them. When Namond jumped towards me, I threw the cables forward to act as a sort of brake to him and give me enough time to put the knife in my mouth.

When he was almost at me, I took a cable he was dragging back to me, grabbed it as far down as I could and dragged it up to wrap it around his remaining arm, which I then dragged forward and to the side, leaving him incapable of attacking as I lashed out with a headbutt, stunning him enough that I could use my spare hand to wind back and punch him in the face, over and over.

As I expected, he got sick of that pretty quick and the Symbiote expanded around his arm so that he could pull it back, use his actual hand and the tendrils to grab both cables, and tear them out of the way, ripping them apart in the process.

He would have continued to attack me, but then he saw the way I was smirking.

I pointed up, then let go of the wall to fall down.

As soon as I was sure that he wasn’t watching so that it wouldn’t ruin my exit, I looked up to find him looking up. I couldn’t see his face, but I’m sure his expression when he saw the elevator careening down towards us was priceless.

The principle of free fall means that all objects fall more or less at the same rate. As I was lower down while the elevator had been at the top floor from when Namond and company used it, that meant that I had plenty of time to get out of the way before the elevator fell down and hit us.

Namond, on the other hand, was too busy gaping to react in time, even when I’m sure his Spidey Sense must’ve been screaming in his ear like nothing else.

Eventually he made to dodge, but by then the elevator had passed the open doors, covering the shaft in darkness, and Namond didn’t have enough time to open the door before the elevator hit his ass.

Or at least, that’s what I was pretty sure the meaty ‘THWACK!’ sound was.

I let myself fall a bit more before I started to hear the sound of the elevator’s grinding against the walls slowing down. Then, I repeated my trick of pulling myself back to a wall and started running forward/up, fist cocked back.

I couldn’t see jack, shit or jackshit, but my Spidey Sense gave me a general sense of the surrounding area, and that was enough to know when I was approaching the big metal box in front of me.

And it was enough to guess where the big asshole holding the big metal box in place with a web of tendrils was.

I rushed forward and slammed a fist into his face, finally remembering that I did not, in fact, want him dead, before slamming the knife as hard as I could into his leg.

With the Symbiote spread so thin, it was easy to get the knife to pierce through and dig itself into his thigh, making Namond scream and the elevator go down slightly before he focused back on keeping it in place.

I left the knife there, done with having so much lethality at hand, and I started slamming punch after punch into anywhere of him I could reach.

A jab, a cross, an uppercut, anything. Sometimes I missed and cracked my knuckles further by denting the metal bottom of the elevator, but more than anything I could feel Namond’s body giving under my attacks.

He lashed out how he could, but every time his focus shifted, the elevator groaned and threatened to fall further.

“Y—You f—Gah! You fucking maniac!” he screamed between punches. “If I let go we both die!”

“I’ll figure something out... as soon as you’re knocked out...” I panted, before putting a hand on his neck to get a feel of where his jaw was and punching him there.

I would’ve continued hitting him, but we were both distracted by the sound of the elevator door right next to us opening, flooding the shaft with light.

Eyes narrowed and tearing up, I barely managed to spot a silhouette flinging something forward before that forward burst in a flash of thunderous noise and light.

I don’t think I’d ever thought as fast as I did in that moment. My brain made the connection between that being a flashbang, the Symbiote being weak to loud noise and a Symbiote holding the elevator in place almost instantly. I jumped as hard as I could as fast as I could and was caught by the sillhouette, which pulled me forward just as the elevator started falling down.

Blinking the spots out of my eyes and shaking my head to clear the ringing in my ears, I looked up and found that I was in Nightwing’s arms.

He was giving me something of a pitying smile, and he said something that I was pretty sure was ‘Rough day?’. But I was mostly guessing from what I knew of his personality.

I groaned something affirmative and looked around, finding Batman, Robin and Bats standing behind him, each one looking at me with varying amounts of concern.

“... y’should see the oth’r guy,” I mumbled, using Nightwing as a support to stand as the ringing slowly faded. “He got shafted.”

“Hah!” said Nightwing, who had a great sense of humor.

“Okay?” asked Bats, taking a step forward but stopping with a look towards her dad.

“Been better, been worse,” I groaned. Once I was more or less steady on my feet, I looked at Batman, who was looking at me with an unreadable expression. “You guys here to take over the fight?”

He nodded.

“Sure, after I did the hard part. Typical,” I grumbled. “I’m guessing you wanna have a chat when you’re done?”

He nodded again, drawing looks of worry from his kids.

“Cool,” I said. “How about I just... sit down here and you do that, and then we talk?”

“Fine by me,” said Batman. Then, in a move that surprised me, laid a hand on my shoulder on his way forward. “You did well, Reyes.”

“... okay?” I said, blinking. “Uh, thanks?”

He didn’t say anything else, instead heading for the shaft, shooting his grappling hook upwards, then starting to slide down.

Nightwing gave me a smile and followed suit, while Robin gave me a light punch on the shoulder on his way.

Cass, on the other hand, stayed in place long enough to remove the bottom of her mask and come forward, but I flinched back.

“C—Bats, c’mon. I’m covered in sick.”

She looked at me, lips pressed in a tight line, before huffing through her nose, grabbing my face before I could react, and pressing a tight kiss on my lips.

She let me go, smiled, and re-adjusted her mask before following her family. Already, I could hear the noises of the elevator being torn open and the pair screeching down there.

I watched her go, realized I was completely in love, and let myself drop on my ass, completely exhausted.