205. When the Lights Come Back On. (Patreon)

Gwen POV:

Power always has a sound.

Most people think it’s the crack of thunder or the hiss of a live wire but when you live long enough around it, when you fight inside it and when you use it fight you learn the truth. Power hums. It vibrates in your bones. It whispers what it can do if you let it.

Thousands of volts coursed through me, threading along the Archangel Mk. II like rain across glass. My armor drank it all in without complaint. The regulators purred. The dispersal mesh glowed faintly.

It still made my hair stand on end. “You and this city took everything from me!!!!”

Electro jumped from grid tower to grid tower like a living curse, slinging lightning that forked across the sky. Each bolt hit me and diffused into the armor, shattering into harmless sparks.

I answered by throwing hardlight flechettes, each one precise, each one angled to avoid structural damage. Destroying the grid would be easy. Too easy.

Rebuilding it would take a day and a day New York didn’t have. So, I fought with restraint.

Funny how being a hero is mostly choosing how not to fight.

I kept steering him away from critical relays, herding him like a storm into emptier sectors. Plan A was simple, box him in using non-conductive God-alloy flechettes and hardlight webs. A cage even lightning couldn’t slip through.

If that failed... then we do it the hard way. Miguel’s face flickered through my mind.

The weight of his death never really left. It just learned to sit quietly in the background. I learned something from that day about myself, about destiny, about how some universes were roots and others were branches.

Earth-65M.

Earth-65B.

And the template and the origin, Earth-65 Prime.

Prime was a two-dimensionally 3D universe, paradoxical and foundational. Peter monitored it sometimes. Observed. Never interfered.

“We have bigger fishes to fry, roast and sauté,” he once told me. “Messing with the roots invites consequences. Consequences that I don't plan to confront just yet.”

He was right.

Didn’t make it hurt less.

“You can’t save everyone.” That lesson had been carved into me the day I killed Miguel O’Hara.

“Give up, Spider-Woman!!! You can’t defeat me!! I’M FUCKING INVINCIBLE!!!!”

His voice boomed across the grid, echoing through transformers and substations.

I checked my wrist interface.

100%.

A small smirk tugged at my lips.

“Quite the ingenious grid you designed here, Max.”

He puffed up instantly.

“Alistair Smythe stole them!!! My grid, my power, my money, my respect everything this city denied me, I’m taking back!!”

A mind broken due to losing what is rightfully his.

My mind issued silent commands. Towers on the periphery began shutting down in a slow cascade, power rerouting inward.

A shrinking arena.

“Max,” I called, softer now, “there are other ways… most of the time.”

Because that was my job. To try. Even when I knew the odds. Even when the person didn’t deserve the effort.

He laughed, forming a distorted lightning-face in the air.

“I move near the speed of light! You can’t catch me!”

“Did you know,” I said casually, “these pillars mimic semiconductor properties for security? And with a flip of a switch they become non-conductive?”

A sneer.

“Of course I do. I fucking designed it.”

“Good,” I said. “Then you know what happens next.”

All towers except one shut down.

His tower.

He tried to jump.

Too late.

I plunged my armored hands into the grid and activated the Universal Power Siphon. Energy flooded into me. It was wild, roaring, oceanic. The siphon drank it all.

From the grid.

From Max.

From the air itself.

Peter built it from vacuum siphon tech. I didn’t know what future he feared enough to invent it.

But I trusted his fear.

Max’s lightning form collapsed. Blue glow faded. Black eyes cleared. He fell to the platform. His form human, shaking, naked, curled in on himself.

My bioscanner ran diagnostics.

Dormant X-gene.

Electro-absorption capability.

Mutated by Oscorp GMO electric eel venom.

Preventable. Containable.

I injected the nanobots into his cerebrum.

“What… did you do?” He rasped.

“You don’t have the mentality for great responsibility,” I said tiredly. “So I cut the fuse of your little bulb.”

He went limp. His eyes hollow.

I wish that was the end but life likes encores.

Donald Menken now the Green Goblin crash-landed nearby, armor stripped, body decaying. The incomplete Araneus Oscorpeus venom healed and killed him simultaneously. Cancerous mitosis and telomere decay.

Six months left. Maybe less.

Harry landed beside me.

“This has been one hell of a Christmas Eve.”

I nodded.

No warmth. Not yet. Maybe someday.

I climbed the control tower and restarted the grid. My earlier command already queued NY-001 to power back on.

New York flickered.

Then the city blazed back to life. Neon, noise, chaos, life.

A city breathing again and for a second, I allowed myself a tiny smile.

Because I liked it when the lights came back on.

Peter POV:

There’s a moment in every battle where the outcome is already decided.

People just don’t know it yet and Aldrich Killian was living in that moment.

Spartans in Aestus Pattern MJOLNIR MK. VIII and YGGDRASIL MK. I heavy armor tore through Extremis soldiers with disciplined brutality. Tony’s suits painted the sky with precision strikes while my Wasp gunships erased clusters before they could regroup.

Extremis regeneration meant nothing when you were flash-frozen or atomized.

Killian kept shouting orders like volume could change reality. News flash, it couldn’t.

Pepper descended like judgment itself, dragging a half-mangled Killian by the hair. Maya Hansen was in her other hand, struggling weakly. Pepper's fiery grief was cooking the flesh of her arm.

Tony hovered down. “I shouldn’t have stood you up on that roof in Bern,” he said calmly. “But you touched my gal. So you die.”

Killian spat flaming saliva at his feet.

Tony didn’t blink.

A palm repulsor erased Killian’s head.

Maya looked at me. “My Extremis wasn’t unique, huh?”

“No,” I said honestly. “It wasn’t.”

I struck her cervical plexus. Her death was painless and precise. Then I disintegrated the remains with a cryo blast.

Mercy isn’t always kindness. Sometimes it’s efficiency.

Then the system spoke in its cold, omnipresent voice inside my mind:

REWARD PACKAGE GRANTED.

Temporal Armour (Iron Man Earth-616)

Allows true time travel.

Azmuth’s Remote Teleportation Device (Ben 10 Omniverse) Allows instant travel anywhere in the galaxy and instant retrieval of anyone or anything.

Purifying Flame of Mankind (Warhammer 40k) The Emperor’s psychic flame. Can kill conceptual entities and extinguish souls.

Knowledge flooded in.

Understanding followed instantly. Celestial Forge perks. No manuals or months of guesswork. Just comprehension.

The Purifying Flame fascinated me most. A fusion of willpower and technology. Faith weaponized into physics.

Terrifying.

Useful for another day.

It was two hours until Christmas.

I assimilated Azmuth’s device into my armor.

“Let’s go home, fellas.”

Tony started to reply but before he could say anything green light swallowed us.

And then we were gone.

Christmas was waiting and so was peace.