AN: Back! Been busy. I'll keep this intro brief. If you're reading and enjoying, please review Ibeg.

Disclaimer: As usual, I've included a lot of undiluted prose (i.e. most dialogue) directly written by Peter David himself, since paraphrasing some of these sentences would be doing his talent as a storyteller an injustice. ^^

Also, this chapter/issue#3 ends where the first began.

Back to the Beginning

En route to Alchemax…

Miguel couldn't remember the last time he'd been in so tight a spot. His head ached worse than the monster of all hangovers. That wasn't helped by the sound of Tyler Stone's oily, professional voice oozing through Venture's audio-visual communicator. It was hard to get his muscles to respond, not accounting for the fact that he was thoroughly restrained. Every second, the silhouette of Alchemax HQ grew bigger and more imposing on the horizon. He was, truly and perfectly, shocked.

"Good work, Venture. I knew you were the 'borg for the job."

Venture didn't answer to Stone's praise. It was probably meaningless to him. Money, tangible materialism, now that had meaning. The bounty hunter had Miguel on the end of his pole, casually slung over his shoulder like a bindle-sack. His eyes were at his wrist, on the communicator screen and mic. Miguel once caught a glimpse of Stone's face on it whilst he swayed back and forth from the flight.

"You have him secured?"

Scoffing at Stone's insulting unsurety, Venture answered him simply, "Molecularly dense body wrap."

"Excellent. That should hold him. I have a number of questions about him... Although in some instances, they're really not questions so much as confirmations."

Feeling was finally flowing back into Miguel's trussed limbs. A faint flicker of faith entered him like an arrow to the heart. With a quiet wheeze, Miguel bent his legs and lifted his torso to draw himself up. His hands and feet fumbled with his bonds, claws clipping on their edges. It took a bit of tugging and sawing motions, but the bands around his body started to come apart.

Tyler Stone went on talking, "What I'm particularly interested by is his ability to scale walls. Any clue as to how he does it, Venture? You observed him up close."

He's not looking, if I can just... He held his breath. The bonds were becoming ribbons at the rate Miguel was working on them. He felt himself start to fall from their new flimsiness, but Venture was unaware. Got it!

"He moved too quick for me to be sure," drawled Venture disinterestedly. "I presume it was some sort of suction mechanism. You'll have your answer soon enough."

With a satisfied snarl, Miguel grasped the cut ends of the body wrap with a fist. A great yank tore them free from his torso, and pulling apart his legs untangled the rest of him. The molecularly dense body wrap was lost to the wind soon after. He crowed, "Maybe even sooner than you think!"

The startled cyborg started to say something, but Miguel never heard him. Before gravity could fully take hold, Spider-Man latched onto his former-captor's waist. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so helpless and angry at the same time. Hell, being helpless made him angry. Escape was still Spider-Man's main goal, but now he knew that in order to accomplish that he needed to put Venture out of commission.

"Here's your answer, asshole. I have talons on my fingers and toes. They're handy for climbing walls and shredding things - like bonds, and jet mechanisms," snarled Spider-Man. He leaned over, still gripping Venture, and slashed at the metal boots keeping them both aloft. A contained explosion ensued, like a firecracker, before it puttered out. The boot started to trail smoke and fuel from the bottom. Venture grappled with Spider-Man all the while as they lost altitude.

"What's the matter, Venture?" Spider-Man dug his talons deep into one of Venture's upraised arms, the other one holding the staff. No way was Miguel letting him use that again, thank you very much. His other arm wrapped around Venture's neck. He couldn't resist deriding the cocky cyborg, not after he'd been forced to endure his disdainful words earlier in their fight. "Run out of smart remarks?"

"No... just patience." With that Venture removed the hand that had formerly been scrabbling at the choking arm at his neck and instead latched it on to Spider-Man's wrist. Then, the cyborg clutched for almost all he was worth. It paid off; something cracked, Spider-Man let out a satisfying scream near his mechanical ear. The bones didn't break, but they were about to. Spider-Man tried to tug himself free, though his attempts only added to the agony. Venture's grip was resolute and mechanical. That coupled with the uncomfortably-full, piercing feeling in his forearms, made Miguel certain that his arm was about to fall off.

"You've blown it, Spider-Man. You've made me consider you a threat." Now that the metahuman was so desperate for flight once more, Venture yanked Spider-Man's hand free of his throat with ease. Spider-Man yelled and yelped the whole while, slashing at every part of Venture that he could reach without falling off him. "I'll do Alchemax a favour. 'Be easier to examine those talons...-" With the calm deliberateness of a surgeon, Venture brought Spider-Man's hand up to his face. "-...If I rip off your arms." Suddenly, he squeezed again. Instead of having the chance to do as he'd promised, Venture found himself unexpectedly blinded by a strange, silky substance. Spider-Man was just as taken aback as his foe.

"What in-?!" they screamed simultaneously. Venture's face and the scanning lenses that served in conjunction with his regular machine eyes were encrusted in the sticky stuff. It'd happened in a split second, so Venture never saw it coming. It was quite a different story for Spider-Man. He'd seen it all. In fact, there were still some loose threads of it hanging from the top of his wrist.

That... that came right out of my forearms, when he put pressure on them. Oh, god. That's what the itching was! I've... I've grown spinnerets on my arms, generating some sort of web! Miguel realized. They continued to fall, but now with Venture flying blind with his remaining jet boot. Of course. It seemed the spinnerets had survived the transferring process when Delgato had inputted pieces of the spider program. The UMF must've selectively allowed the webbing to pass through from the inside, like how it did the same for air, or else the seam where the red part connected with the black must've enabled its passage. Absurd as it was, it made a sort of twisted sense in hindsight. Naturally! NATURALLY! Any minute now, I'll start to get hungry for flies!

Miguel's incredulousness bubbled out in a loud, hysterical laugh, before he noticed how close to the ground they were. He could effortlessly make out people's faces, peering at them from open levels of some outdoor shopping centre, and an active roadway coming up with frightening rapidness. Miguel's laugher quickly trailed off, his heart dropping. "HAHAHAHA! ...Ha... aww, shock."

Venture's impact was loud and destructive. His metallic behind created a crater in the sidewalk. Still, the cyborg kept a grip on his gun and shock staff. Miguel had managed to leap from him just in time to avoid a similar fate, since he saw the street coming earlier. Clumsily, the spider-human grabbed onto a billboard overhang over the busy road. He swung off the bottom of it and barely missed a vehicle driving swiftly by beneath him. His talons had come in handy for that. The bustling streets became a scene of pandemonium. Some people ran, others gathered around in bemused, mindless preoccupation.

Roaring with anger, Venture jumped to his feet and tore his web-pasted tracking implants straight from his eye sockets with sickening callousness. Underneath the shadow cast by Venture's hat, Miguel could make out unobscured pinpricks of red light surrounded by naked circuity. Venture's actual eyes were far more frightening in their simplicity and raw, inhuman emotion. Despite their chilling appearance, the basic machine orbs did not seem to work as well without Venture's heat-tracking implements to filter stimuli. They were probably quite primitive, actually. Miguel could imagine that replacements would be quite painful.

"Awright, boy! I see you over there! You are dead Spider-Man! Dead!" Venture bellowed, waved his gun around, and otherwise put on a good show, but Spider-Man could call his bluff immediately.

The hell he sees me. He's aiming to my left, Miguel realized. Venture's new navigational handicap was another advantage, but if he started to shoot indiscriminately, then people were going to get killed. Spider-Man would have to give him what he wanted: a target to focus his fire on. Unless... Spider-Man's gaze drifted to the blurred blobs in the foreground that made up the hover traffic. Venture was on the opposite side, probably seconds away from shooting like a madman. Thinking fast, Miguel grabbed one of the floating maglev cards as it whipped by. It metaphorically screeched to a halt, though no sound was made. Inside the driver's head hit his wheel from the inertial force exerted at the abrupt stop. Spider-Man could hear the guy's muffled yelling: "HEY! STOP IT!"

Miguel knew that the magnets built into the undercarriage of the cars generated current through the guideway coils to create like-polarity. If he could create a like-polarity in Venture, it would repel him into the next county. ...Hyperbolically, of course. More likely it would just immobilize him, thereby taking him out of the fight. Straining, Spider-Man flipped the car onto its side and held it in front of Venture. The maglev fought him the whole time, so Miguel could hardly believe he was doing this at all. The strength required was beyond anything human, that was for sure.

In a near-equal show of strength, Venture resisted the magnetic push, much to Spider-Man's dismay. The cyborg was blown backwards as though by a strong wind. His arms flailed back over his head. Before he could regain his balance, Venture had lost his gun, the metal in it propelling it far away and out of sight. At the very least Miguel counted that as a small victory. Now he wouldn't be shooting up the place.

"Nice trick! That'll buy you maybe another five seconds of life! Use it wisely! Run away again! It's what you do best!" Venture jeered at him. For now, they were at an impasse. Venture was stuck in place, but only for as long as Spider-Man held the car in place. At this rate, whoever's strength gave out first would decide the victor.

Spider-Man didn't rise to Venture's heckling. It was all he could do to struggle to keep the car in place. He may be strong now, but he wasn't eager to test his endurance against that of a half-man-half-machine. Instead, he would exploit the magnetism once more for himself. Clutching the car close, Spider-Man lifted his legs off the ground to let himself float. Just as he expected, the freed, sideways car immediately started to spin in the other direction in order to right itself again. Spider-Man used that momentum to catapult himself over the car and towards Venture.

"Not this time!" he growled. No more running. This was going to end, here and now.

As he launched himself, Venture's visual sensors finally picked up on a clear picture of him. That picture only got clearer as he came ever closer. So, the Spider-Man wasn't going to scarper after all. In preparation, Venture pulled his staff over his shoulder like a hammer.

"You finally tired of running, boy? Ready to give it up? Ready t'die?" asked the cyborg, stabbing his staff downwards with enough strength to break off chunks of sidewalk. The strike was sure and swift, but Spider-Man avoided it all the same. Upon landing Spider-Man had ducked under the rod by invading the cyborg's personal space as much as possible. While the rod was still being dislodged, he sprang up and grabbed onto it.

"No! Ready to live!" Miguel gasped.

Enraged, Venture pushed against the staff to force Spider-Man backwards. The metahuman did indeed bend, but didn't break. He used his toe talons as traction, scrabbling in place before they got a good grip. The two combatants were mask-to-face now. Venture's eyes sent a spike of fear through Spider-Man, a sort of primal fear that was not shared in those dead, red orbs of whirring machinery. Desperate, Spider-Man lifted a single foot and lashed out with it, slicing open Venture's leg. He was rewarded with a pained yell from Venture. Bits of sizzling circuits, metal, and cloth from his pants flew onto the street. The damage was severe even if the leg wasn't yet crippled.

Bolstered, Spider-Man struggled to haul himself upwards. He and Venture labored in place against one another, the staff being the only thing between them. Sweat ran down Spider-Man's masked face, but he knew he was gaining ground. He could see it in Venture's face, too. At long last the bounty hunter was starting to look worried, less cocky.

"Surprised, asshat? I'll full of surprises, Venture. Sometimes, just sometimes... I even surprise myself," grunted Spider-Man. The smirk on his face was audible in his voice, even through the mask, but buried beneath was that same unbridled terror that came with conflict.

"Nice lip, boy! But you're still just a jerk in a costume! Me... I'm Venture! I eat guys like you for breakfast!"

From behind Venture Spider-Man could see a distinct shape quickly come into view. It was the gun, arcing like a boomerang around awestruck pedestrians to their location. The gun itself must've been magnetized to his metal back for convenience. The absence of magnetic interference had allowed it to return, locked on like a missile to its owner. Best of all, Venture didn't see it coming back. Now was his chance.

"Then choke on this, cowboy!" Miguel cried. Just as the gun slammed with a vengeance onto its traditional place on Venture's back, Spider-Man shoved forward against the staff with all his strength. Venture lost his breath and let out an audible "oooof!". It sounded pretty painful. Spider-Man was easily able to tear the staff from his hands. Venture stumbled backwards, still stunned by the devastating blow to both his front and back. Still holding the shock stick, Spider-Man laid his sights on Venture's left leg. Specifically, the exposed, damaged incisions and puncture marks on the boot that he'd inflicted with his talons earlier. In a split second, he lined the staff up, and speared it inside.

It was contact-activated, so as soon as Spider-Man jammed it inside, it electrified. At first Venture just made eye contact with Miguel, red eyes filled with dread and hate. Then, the leg exploded. Spider-Man was blown back, the severed and dislodged boot section following him. A high, metallic screeching sound accompanied a smaller, ensuing explosion. The screams of a dying machine. It was worse than nails on chalkboard.

"eeEEEEAAAAHH-"

It continued and continued until Venture's artificial voice box gave out. Spider-Man pulled himself to his hands and knees, lifting a taloned hand and trembling like a leaf. What was left of Venture had caught fire; a twitching, spasming heap of half-intact parts containing broken human biology. Occasionally the half of his left leg that remained sparked and sizzled. The rod was still embedded inside the exposed wiring, having shorted out all his systems. His synthetic skin had burned away, revealing a grisly, metallic skull. The red eyes glowed out from their ports, though they seemed far away, offline. The air stank of burning circuitry.

For a moment, Miguel just stood there, staring at him... not really believing that he was still standing and Venture was down. Then, the crowd started converging. Some six-year old darted in to snap a picture of the wreckage. A distant Thorite cheered and whooped all by his lonesome. People were slowly closing in, cautious in their approach. Miguel felt a surge of panic. He had to get the hell out of here. Spinning on his heels, he staggered under an elevated bridge, found a wall, and clambered straight up it. By the time the first onlooker had followed, he was long gone.

…

"For the next couple of days I criss-crossed the city, sometimes in costume, sometimes out," Miguel sighed.

Lyla nodded to herself, dutifully scribbling in her holographic notepad. It was just a playful little illusion, though. In reality she was taking down the record in an audio-to-textual form. Miguel was in his own little world, not seeing her, just venting. He'd probably have to purge the journal later, anyway. Private files didn't always stay private when you worked for a megacorp.

Saying everything aloud just cemented the reality of it. It was of little comfort, but at the same time he relished in the chance to speak to someone, to have a semblance of a human interaction again, no matter how small. It didn't even matter that Lyla wasn't human, couldn't comprehend his distress. The important thing was that she could pretend, and do a damn good job of it too. That's all most people could do, in any case.

Miguel continued, "That way, if any other heat trackers like Venture tried to trace me, all they'd find was a random mess of tracking and backtracking all over the city. Couldn't stay anywhere in one place for too long. The public eye cams are everywhere uptown. Stole food for the first time in my life. All during that time I ran through every possible course of action in my mind... all of them conflicting. My whole life there's never been a time when I didn't know what to do. Everything was always laid out and clear, right in front of me. And now... now it's all this big, endless void."

Shuddering, Miguel stood and started to pull his sleeves up his arms. The action revealed the faint bulge of his silk glands. It was subtle, as subtle as the openings behind his hands, but Miguel knew they were there, could feel them. An invisible itch only he could sense, but never scratch. He looked away, gritting his teeth. Lyla quirked her head to the side, patiently curious at his period of silence.

"But I finally decided to come home. If I'm going to try and continue this game, I have to go back to square one. Besides... I figure, I've got talons, fangs, accelerated vision, web spinners all over my forearms... which beats shooting webbing out my ass, I suppose... Plus my fiancé is terrified of me, or for me, or both; my brother thinks I've sold my soul to Alchemax, and maybe I have; Venture may be back on line by now for all I know, the Public Eye's out to get me... With all that going for me, how could things possibly get worse-?"

Two brisk knocks pierced through the apartment. Miguel froze in place, sharing an alarmed look with Lyla. The sophisticated, serpent-like voice that Miguel knew all too well filtered through his front door, sending chills down Miguel's spine.

"Mike, this is Tyler Stone. I think we should talk... about Spider-Man."

Next Chapter: In the words of P.D., "things get worse".

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