Venom's eyes remained glued to the screen, the symbiote covering the distress on its human host's face. Sending Elektra at Spider-Man hadn't been Venom'stheir idea. Bringing in the Vulture, Smythe's Spider-Slayers, and now Kraven, had been.
There was a severe lack of Alistair Smythe in the room.
"I'm not liking this." Mr. X extinguished his cigarette with ease. He gestured at Kraven on the screen, lying unconscious. "You told me this Kraven guy was primo. The best of the best."
Both men sat stewing in silence, save for Venom's own low growl, until they decided to speak up.
"We've seen him in action. We can assure you that-"
"I'm not looking for assurances, Brock. I want results!"
Venom found themselves flinching at Mr. X. He may have been looking at them, but they preferred not to turn around.
Mr. X coughed and tried to put on an air of dismissiveness. "Not to worry," he said. "We've still got a few stops to pull out. Axel and his do-gooder friends may have gotten this far, but they won't get to us."
Venom growled encouragingly. Truth be told, they had little faith in Mr. X. No doubt they could have snapped him in half at any time of their choosing. But, needing the man alive, they chose to play by his game. So long as that worked in their favour.
"Yes, we wholeheartedly agree," they hissed, lying through jagged teeth.
...
Led by Axel, the group trod lightly through the foyer – not wanting to risk falling into any trapdoors lying in wait. Doing so was much easier said than done. The walls were all the same, all covered in gold, all boxing them in.
Relics from bygone eras passed them by; a suit of knight's armour, a bonafide original of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and more.
Spider-Man noted the eras of history they passed by with an impressed hmm. Axel said nothing. If any group had the power to steal a piece of history, it was the Syndicate.
Blaze followed behind at a slower pace. No one else had Axel's attention. She could have, was gnawing at the chance to, talk with him. Confide in him. If only her pride would allow it. Spider-Man and Eddie took no notice of her, not vocally, not in any way that mattered.
The one singular path led them to an elevator. Axel stopped in his tracks, Spider-Man and Eddie on either side. "I don't know, guys," he said after a while. "Feels too easy."
"Yeah," Eddie said. "If Mr. X knew we were coming, he'd have, like, sent a hundred bad guys down already." Eddie placed his hands on his hips, proud of his judgement.
"You're saying he doesn't?" Spider-Man asked.
"Dunno. Maybe they're waiting in there for us."
"Great," he groaned, dragging his hand along his face. "I just had to ask."
Blaze's voice rose up from the back. "Doesn't matter if it's a setup or not. We don't have any other options."
The elevator seemed to agree and its door slid open with a chime.
To say it had a lack of room would be an understatement; Eddie couldn't move without rubbing against someone, and Axel had to squeeze in next to Spider-Man. While Eddie squirmed, Axel noticed Blaze motion for a button to go up – only for him to sense hesitation.
"Blaze? What's wrong?"
"It's a blank wall. They know," she whispered, and a chill settled over.
GOING DOWN, the elevator announced before descending. Slowly. Far too slowly.
"That's it?" Spider-Man asked. "Kinda expected us to rocket up and shoot through the roof."
"And I thought my imagination was crazy," Eddie muttered.
A few minutes passed. Breathing on its own was hard enough, and so no one spoke.
Dropping in on their silence, quite literally, the elevator chimed in to inform them that they had reached FLOOR ZERO.
Blaze was the first out. Axel followed, finally getting some air, and joined the others in swallowing down gulps of oxygen.
Even then, abandonment, and the stench that came with it, was inescapable. All around were assembly lines for robots that most likely never would become finished products.
"Stay behind me," Axel said, and the others stepped with him onto a conveyor belt.
"What's that? Scrap metal?"
"Looks like robot parts," Spider-Man said, replying to Blaze." "Obviously that didn't work out. Explains why he sent someone else's killer mech after us." And I think I know just the guy.
The conveyor belt was no less stubborn than the elevator, only moving a few inches at a time, sometimes not moving at all. Eddie had the idea that they could have run. Realising the end destination was the same, he cast that idea aside.
Axel thought Spider-Man sounded as if he knew the person responsible for the attack Funland. Knowing him, though, any answer would have been as long-winded and slow as the conveyor belt.
"How come you're walking fine now, Spidey?"
Embarrassment was written across both Axel and Blaze's faces as they turned away. Eddie's childhood innocence, as he had just demonstrated, trumped his ability to read the room.
"Made a cure of sorts. A knife here, some aloe vera there-"
"You got a knife? Cool."
Blaze shot Spider-Man one of her please don't encourage him looks, which stopped any further discussion about how he had crafted said knife.
A series of stops and starts followed before the conveyor belt reached its end, taking them to…yet another set of elevator doors. Markings slashed across the gold, revealing it to be a paint job, bronze underneath and rusting.
Axel stiffened involuntarily. People waited in the wings. He felt their presence. Heard their noise bleed through thin walls and echo into silence.
Spider-Man, his vision more acute than most, was the first to notice. "You look a little tense, buddy. Need some caffeine?" He laughed. No one else joined him in laughing.
The doors opened and, though Axel wished otherwise, he was proven right. An entire pack of Y-Signals, in their brightly-coloured jackets that did more to offend the eye than intimidate, waited for them, armed with baseball bats, studded whips and menacing smiles.
"Oh no." Eddie's heart dropped.
"Wait a second." Spider-Man's finger wandered through the crowd before settling on the woman in sky-high stilettos holding a whip. "Electra?" Talk about your deja vu's.
"No. I'm her sister."
If Eddie's heart could have sunk any further down, it would have dropped onto the floor.
"Oh hell no."
...
Mr. X lit a proud cigar. Venom declined his offer of their own Cuban, waving it away. Events continued to unfold on the central monitor, sounds of a roaring battle as Axel and his cohorts met the ambush head-on.
"That'll slow their thunder for a while," Mr. X said. He leaned back in his chair, blowing out smoke in rings. "Yep, things are moving along pretty smoothly."
Venom wagered otherwise. With his injuries fading, and a healing factor that rivalled their own, Spider-Man would soon be back to top condition. Nora was motivated by anger, and they knew first-hand the power of that, but she still was only human and so stood no chance against Spider-Man. None of those poor men walking into death did.
A muffled noise broke Venom's attention and directed it to Mary Jane below. She had made her presence known over the past few hours, squirming around in her rope prison and screaming muted vexations. When Venom looked up back up, deciding she no longer earned their notice, half the tape covering her mouth had slipped off. That gave Mary Jane the freedom to speak her mind.
Really speak her mind.
Mary Jane released her ball of anger into the world. Multiple obscenities were flung out, the high frequencies especially displeasing to Venom. Even Mr. X's was so taken aback that his cigar slipped, a precious cigar almost going to waste.
A proper sentence did follow, soon enough.
"And you, Venom! When my husband gets here, he's gonna kick your ass so hard you'll have to talk through his foot!"
The reaction was, from their perspective, quite appropriate. Both Mr. X and Venom laughed their heads off. Adam had stayed quiet, virtually invisible, but Mary Jane was the one to swear up a sailor-worthy storm.
"What's so funny?"
"You, my dear! You!" Mr. X choked, banging his fist against the desk, in so much pain from laughing that he had to bend forward and clutch his stomach.
Venom still had a massive grin on their face, while Mr. X gasped for breath, in stitches, when Blaze knocked out one of the thugs from the Galsia district.
...
Axel and the others resented the change of scenery and pace. Instead of fighting out in the open, on the streets or on a bridge, they were squeezed into an elevator that had far exceeded maximum capacity. Like he had done in the jungle, Eddie removed himself from the action, except this time it was a conscious decision. Legs were ducked under and became shields. It wasn't as if the others needed his help, anyway. Axel handled himself fine, while Blaze ploughed through five men who looked suspiciously like Mad Jack with one cartwheel kick.
The elevator kept going up. More bodies dropped. There was a certain raw energy to the action, a frenzy spurred on by a horde that seemed to be endless. Spider-Man smashed two Y-Signals together (or one Y-Signal and one G-Signal, the latter wearing light green) like a child would do with toys and threw them both into the air, out of the elevator.
"Happy travels!" He called out as he waved.
"Stay focused, Spider-Man. It sounds like you're taking this all a little too lightly." Axel had his hands full with three Galsias forming a barrier around Electra's sister.
"You want me to take these guys seriously?" Spider-Senses buzzing, he ducked a swing from a baseball bat. "Be realistic."
The Y-Signal holding the baseball bat had snuck behind Eddie, ready to deliver the blow while he thought himself hidden. Spider-Man tackled the man to the ground, separating him from his weapon of choice.
He brought himself back up, weak-kneed, a throbbing in his head. Just as he was getting his bearings a boy seemed to appear out of nowhere; the very same boy who he had made a target, whose brother his boss held captive. Unarmed, and with no strong will of his own, he turned away, only to remember they were fighting in the moving equivalent of a broom closet.
Before the oh no left his lips, Eddie skated up to him and, like a cannonball, smashed into him head-on.
Having to hold back from screaming as pain shot through his legs made him decide it was best to stay down. A shadow appeared just above him with its arms in a confident fold. Having won another battle at Eddie's age didn't necessitate being humble about it, especially against someone double his age and twice as tall.
Blaze and Spider-Man made light work of several men much bigger than them. Even while holding back his strength a good deal, Spider-Man threw the last Mad Jack lookalike over his head and out of the elevator, crossing his fingers that one of his brethren broke the fall.
Axel was further whittling down his chosen targets. In a series of explosive punches and blows to the jaw that the three Galsias would be complaining about for weeks, he had cleared through the barrier. Enemies turned into enemy, with only Nora left standing. Thanks to him, and her own overconfidence, she backed herself into a corner, but still shuffled about in her stilettos without rhyme or common reason. Rational thinking was a foreign concept when she had Axel standing her down and dominating her vision.
"C-come now." Nora, like she did with her feet, stumbled over words. "You're not a brute like that Spider-Man. You, you wouldn't hit a lady. Would you?"
Axel wasn't hindered by her plea, on the same course as he had been before, fist flying towards a whimpering Nora.
For whatever reason, he stopped himself just short of her face. Nora did have a point. He hadn't knocked out any female fighters or swung them off a bridge. Electra and the Hand leader of a similar name had both been Spider-Man's to fight.
A conflict of equality presented itself to him. While he debated with himself on what was worse, not fighting a woman at all or fighting one to prove a point, Nora curled out of her self-imposed ball. His eyes were distant, looking everywhere but at her. She grinned.
Blaze's first thoughts were of the ridiculousness of Axel now pulling back his punches. In reality, what she came out with was:
"Axel! Look out!"
Her apprehension made her warning come too late. With a crack that sliced the air, and stung Axel just as bad, Nora struck him. The studded whip may not have been glowing with electricity, but left its mark all the same.
Wherever Axel's soul went, it had left his body behind as a hunk of flesh. A very impressive hunk, but a hunk nonetheless.
"Axel?" Blaze asked a more emotionally vacant than usual Axel, and that was really saying something, to no response.
He formed the shape of a cross with his arms.
"Step aside, Axel. I don't know what you're pulling but it isn't funny."
"Yeah," Spider-Man chimed in after Blaze. "Humor's my thing, anyway."
Axel showed no awareness of them. Even as Blaze pushed against him, struggling with strained muscles, he was still an immovable object and oblivious to her existence.
"I won't..."
"You won't what, Axel?"
"I won't let you hurt her!"
If there had been space to do it, Blaze would have fallen over. Seeing his eyes turn into hearts was the icing on the confusion cake.
Spider-Man and Eddie looked at each other, then at Blaze, then at Axel, confirming it wasn't a hallucination. Their friend really had turned, for lack of better term, lovesick.
Nora's voice gave life to a haughty cackle; for her own pleasure and, though she didn't know it, her own detriment.
"It's like the lyric says. The power of love is a curious thing indeed." Nora kept laughing, not able and not aware of the anger broiling in Blaze. "How could you ever be happy with such a dolt for a boyfriend?"
Blaze's "boyfriend" drawled on about his Nora, and how he had to protect her. She was aware of her left eye twitching, but oblivious to how loud her teeth were as she ground them together.
Understanding the woman's scorn, the others made the conscious decision to step back.
Nora had not received the memo yet and even as her demise neared, faced Blaze with a smile.
"So, maybe he doesn't fight back when it comes to girls. Maybe he is a dolt."
She stopped laughing, the obvious finally dawning, but by then Blaze had already grabbed her and set her up for a suplex.
"But I do. And that dolt is NOT my boyfriend."
Nora met unconsciousness the instant her head connected with what was now a dent in the floor. Concussion? Certainly. A visit to the ED? Another possibility.
But Blaze dismissed any damage she'd done, clearing her hands of the deed by running them through her hair; it was someone else's problem. Nora's, specifically.
Eddie's jaw hung open as if in suspended animation. Suplexes the likes of which Blaze just performed only appeared on the Wrestling Channel, when Adam allowed him to watch.
"Hell hath no fury..."
Despite only understanding half of it, Eddie nodded along to what Spider-Man had said.
"Remind me not to make Blaze angry," Eddie whispered. "Ever."
Nora's hypnosis over Axel had vanished, only active as long as she stayed conscious. He wiggled his fingers to make certain they were indeed his, then blinked through new eyes, looking at Nora on the floor.
"What in the- how did she get there?"
Spider-Man opened his mouth to speak but was persuaded otherwise by the death glare Blaze shot at him.
"Don't think about it too much." After some hesitation she threw an arm over his shoulder. His eyes were no longer hearts, back to their usual blue. He was a dolt, no doubt about that.
A dreamy dolt.
"You owe me a sparring match after all this is over." She smiled.
"Deal!" He thought better of his initial excitement, dialling it back. "Wait, uhh…I mean, are you sure? Is it bad if I want to fight you? That's wrong, right?"
Fortunately for Axel, and Blaze's waning patience with him, the elevator chose that time to ding.
The group left Nora and the other slumped bodies behind. That argument about equal opportunity ass-kicking would have to wait for another time, if Blaze ever cared to remember it.
More art pieces adorned the walls; illusions of grandeur and sophistication. Potted palm trees sat in front of glass windows and looked out at their counterparts in the wild. Not unlike Mr. X's old base, the man's passion for straightforward design showed – as in, the corridor was a tunnel with no rooms in sight.
Axel and Blaze's shared recollection of the past, how only a year ago they'd been with Adam down a similar corridor, filled it with an almost sentimental energy. They were walking through their own shadows.
Finality set in. It took them running, biking, sprinting, swimming, and in Spider-Man's case thwip ping across Wood Oak to reach the Syndicate. Now they weren't sure if they were even in Wood Oak, and the Syndicate's boss, and the endgame of their journey, was no more than five minutes away.
Spider-Man, holding no familiarity, considered the top floor of the Syndicate building underwhelming. The Kingpin had Mr. X beat when it came to interior design, that much was for sure. He also had him beat when it came to surveillance technology, as Spider-Man was aware of all the cameras flicking to one side as he walked past and even stared into one of them.
"Ever get the feeling you're being watched, guys?" He made a point to roll his eyes, selling the heaviness of them in their sockets. "Like, really obviously?"
What Spider-Man did not know about, however, was the panel watching on the other side, faces new and old.
Elektra.
Rocky Bear.
Jet.
Electra, her makeup readjusted to cover a bruise on her right cheek.
And Mad Jack, in a full-face cast.
A pack of buzzards, ready to swarm their prey.
NEXT: All the villains, all at once, in...Boss Rush!