There was a strange sense of finality in the way the four heroes walked, the glow of death seeming to envelop them as they crossed another identical hallway. No one jumped out to stop them this time. They marched onwards, Axel leading at a soldier's pace.
The thought occurred to Eddie that he might not come back in one piece. Or come back at all. But these thoughts were hindrances to the mission and were swallowed down, kept beneath the surface.
They reached a room at the end of the very last hallway. A placard on its double doors read MR. X, and then below that, SYNDICATE CEO.
Axel tried to calm down. Tried not to imagine all the pain Mr. X had caused him, his friends, and the ordinary people of Wood Oak. Rage coursed through his veins, rage that threatened to erupt and explode in the only way he knew how: violence.
A hand touched his shoulder. Axel turned to see that it was Blaze's hand, with Spider-Man and Eddie stood beside.
"Easy, big guy. We need you thinking clearly now more than ever," Blaze said.
"I've never been much of a thinker."
"You are." Blaze smiled. "In your own way."
Before their exchange had the chance to conclude proper, the bass of a speaker cut them off.
"Axel Stone. Blaze Fielding. Eddie Hunter. Spider-Man. Welcome," the voice boomed.
That voice, like the hallways it echoed through, was also familiar. Not to Spider-Man, however, despite recognising the name.
Eddie scoped out the scenery but to his dismay there were no speakers in sight, much less a Mr. X.
"Where's he coming from?"
"I don't know." Spider-Man pressed an ear to the door. "I'm not getting anything from in here."
"We don't have time for your games," Axel barked. "Show yourself."
Disembodied laughter spread across the entirety of the top floor.
"Congratulations on makin' this far. I thought I employed the best of the best but it turns out I didn't give your bunch enough credit. Vulture should've learned that earlier…but oh well. That's the price of failure."
The mention of the Vulture piqued Eddie's interest, and his eyes squinted with suspicion.
"What happened with Vulture?"
A pause hung in the air. Then, Mr. X answered with:
"I had one of my guys kill him, at the same bridge where your web-wielding friend tied him up."
Blaze gasped. Eddie shivered, at a halfway point between relief and fear. Spider-Man stared a hole in the ground. Axel squeezed his knuckles until the veins turned pale white. Not that long ago, as cynical of a belief as it was to hold, he hadn't thought it possible to care about a death on their side.
Now he wanted to punch a hole through Mr. X's face because of it, as he had done to the television set yesterday.
"Hey, business is business, y'know? Anyway, I have one last surprise for you all just beyond those double doors. Be seeing you."
Axel shook his fist at the sky as Mr. X faded into white noise, and then disappeared into nothing. Spider-Man still had an ear pressed to the doors.
"What's that Spider-Sense saying?" Eddie asked, now that he knew what a Spider-Sense was. He chose to stay behind with Blaze.
"Not much, for the most part. I'm picking up some growling…sort of sounds like…"
The already huge eyes on his mask widened further.
"Oh no!"
"What is it?" Blaze asked, flinching back at Spider-Man's outburst. He looked her dead in the eyes, and said:
"Not what, who! And the answer is Venom!"
"Good. We're the antidote to crime."
"Blaze, believe me when I say that this is no laughing matter, and you should be very, very worried! Venom is one of the strongest opponents you could ever face! They aren't even from this planet!"
Instead of sharing in his worries, Blaze chuckled. Never before had he looked so dire, and she had trouble taking him seriously.
"We'll manage. The four of us, we can take on anything. Isn't that right, Eddie?"
"Yeah." Eddie nodded a tad too quickly. "Sure."
"Just," Spider-Man sighed with exasperation, "let me be the first one in. I know their tricks."
Axel and Spider-Man nodded a signal and traded places. While Axel stayed at the rear, he led in front.
He waited until the others were behind him, safe and secure as could be. Once he was sure, Spider-Man let them in with a tentative hand.
The layout of the room was rather simple. A compact square with a panel of windows for light to stream through, and the kind of carpeted flooring a more reputable establishment deserved. A dozen monitors broadcasted footage from every other room and showed the damage they had made earlier in high-definition detail.
The most surprising thing about Mr. X's room was him not being there. Instead a human, or an imitation of one with sludge for skin that seemed to ripple like a thing alive had shown up to greet them.
Blaze did not move. She did not step back, but also did not step up to the creature in a literal sense.
"Spider-Man." They licked their lips – or where lips should have been, replaced by a drooling maw. "How lovely it is to see you again."
"We can skip the formalities. Just tell me where Mary Jane is."
Axel also shirked approaching Venom. He began to think there may have been some truth to the Spider's claims, about them being an alien. No human he ever laid eyes on had such a layer to their speech, like two voices melding into one.
"She is going through quite the ordeal," Venom said, with deep, unflinching cruelty as they laughed.
The drive to act burned in Eddie, but he decided against risking the group's lives as well as his own. Venom's muscles had to be at least twelve times the size of his. And that was at the very least.
"Ordeal?" Spider-Man's blood boiled. "What ordeal? If something's happened to her I swear I'll-"
"Relax." Venom mocked a soothing voice. "Your precious is fine, we can assure you. In fact, you should be able to hear her now."
Spider-Man shut out all other thoughts, of Venom, of how he was going to get home, of Vulture.
Mary Jane screamed. Water splashed either above or beneath her.
Boiling blood ran cold.
Adam's fate was still a mystery and, being the first to recognise that fact, Axel's eyes fell dark under his blue headband.
"Mr. X has her suspended," Venom began to explain, "above a vat of piranhas. And these are special piranhas, you see. We enjoy the taste of spiders…they have a hankering for human flesh."
"Is Adam down there too?" Axel asked.
Venom nodded, a crooked smile on their face unlike anything human or ape or otherwise; no nose, no hair, only a mouth and a pair of eyes. They pointed with one long, black finger to the desk, where a timer indicated twenty minutes.
"Clock's ticking."
Axel, Blaze and Eddie all huddled close. Any sense of a unified front evaporated when Spider-Man sprinted across and slugged with his whole arm, all of his frustrations into punching Venom.
Venom muted the blow and ate Spider-Man's fist with his palm. For his part, the Spider tried his best to push back, but the end result was the same. Venom swung and, with one hand, sent him flying back to the other side of the room. Blaze and Axel's instinctual ducking saved them from being caught in Spider-Man's momentum before he slammed at full speed, with all of his weight, into a wall.
If they had been put off by their friend's removal from the fight so soon, Axel and Blaze had no time to show it. They ran with steeled exteriors towards Venom, head-on, the same as Spider-Man. Venom shook their head.
"I don't know what planet you're from," Axel yelled, "but you're going down, monster!"
When Axel and Blaze entered Venom's territory, the area where they had enough reach for a grab, the two diverted. Axel sprang up to the left while Blaze leapt to the right. He prepared a left cross, fist reared back, while Blaze readied herself to flip for a cartwheel kick.
It turned out to be Venom who took them by surprise when he grabbed them by their necks, holding them both up as trophies. The bottom half of Axel's face turned red. Blaze gasped for air in a strained breath.
"No. But you are."
Venom let go, slamming them both head-first into the ground.
"Axel! Blaze!" Eddie yelled. Miniature craters had formed under the space they landed.
Blaze groaned. If only it had made her numb, but instead the pain made her aware of every aching bone and the unbearable weight of her own body. She dragged herself along one hand, the one good hand, and managed while the muscles screamed for a rest to pull herself back up. With new bruises added to a face caked in dirt and grit, she spat on a square inch of ruined ground. Venom growled, amused.
When Axel tried to lift with both arms, neither good, his body refused outright and forced him back down. Time and time again, he tried, only to have the same result.
Blaze took her attention away from Venom – just for a second – and went over to Axel's side.
"Hey." She poked him, the flesh not hard but spongy and earning a wince from him.
"He's pretty tough, huh?" Axel slurred his speech.
"Yes, they are," Blaze agreed.
"Think we can beat him? Them?"
"We have to. If we don't…"
Some things were better left unsaid, and so Blaze left the horrible fate that would befall Wood Oak as something for Axel to conjure up. She grabbed his arm and, after some stumbling and dizziness on both their parts, had him on his feet again.
Venom looked up from staring at their wrist to see Axel and Blaze, side by side.
"So you do not wish to go quietly. Very well. Take that stubbornness to your graves!"
Rather than let the pair rush them again, Venom moved to charge them as a one-man stampede.
Spider-Man, after peeling himself off the wall and experiencing the burning sensation of that, batted back and forth between their spar with Venom. A frenzy of blows and kicks that to anyone else would be shocks to the system were parried by them, one hand stopping Alex while the other stopped Blaze. They were, at the very least, forcing Venom into a corner and pushing back.
The three of them came a few inches shy of the desk. Venom, roaring their indignation, beat them both back with a swinging hook to the face.
"You didn't really think you had me on the ropes, did you?"
More blows wrecked Axel and Blaze. Venom laughed – laughed as they made a game out of punching them, Axel's head twisting whenever their fist came down upon him. Blaze's attempts to defend herself only proved futile and he broke through her blockades every time.
Deciding that they tired of toying with the pair, Venom punched them both in the gut and forced the wind out of both their stomachs. Axel and Blaze lacked any control over the momentum that carried them away from Venom and flung them back to the other side of the room, flying without weight.
Where their friends waited, they landed with the dull thud of sagging limbs. There was no effort to get back up. Not this time.
Spider-Man, as the only combatant with any hope of subduing Venom, took the first chance to avenge his allies. He made no bid to trick or confuse them, recognising there would be a struggle regardless, and instead met them head-on.
With everything he had, his hatred for Eddie Brock and what he became, his love for his wife, Spider-Man rocketed an uppercut to their jaw. If it didn't send him through the roof, then it would stun them and give his group a window of opportunity.
It did neither. Spider-Man, straining his neck, looked up at Venom in horror.
A smiling, drooling Venom grabbed his fist and forced out each finger. One by one, he twisted them back until he heard the crack of broken bones and Spider-Man's shrieks of agony.
The act disturbed Eddie as much as it did Spider-Man himself, hardly able to believe, as Venom drained that belief away, he was capable of making such sounds. He watched as Axel and Blaze, two of the strongest people he knew, were brutalised and thrown around. He watched the same happen to Spider-Man, a superhero who swung on webs and could do anything short of fly.
Now, the time for watching had passed. Now was the time to act.
Prying his eyes away from Venom as they moved to break the other hand, Eddie glanced to his side. There, in the corner, sat a weapon he had heard of but seldom seen himself.
Eddie crawled over, on his hands and knees, the pain from Spider-Man tuned out the best he could but still clear in his mind.
He picked it up. A grenade.
He pulled back the pin in shaking movements and, eyeing Venom, both hearing and feeling Spider-Man's screams, threw the grenade.
"Spider-Man!" Eddie belted at the top of his lungs. "Get out of the way!"
Venom, giving a confused grunt, let him go with one finger intact. Spider-Man rolled from the blast radius moments before the grenade hit Venom and they disappeared in a plume of smoke and ignition.
"That was for my friends!"
"Alright!" Blaze cheered, as weak a cheer as it was.
"Good job, Eddie." Axel groaned, putting together the strength to both speak and give Eddie a thumbs-up. "Sucker didn't even see it coming."
NEXT: The End of VENOM...and Mr. X?