The Center for Disease Control had a satellite lab in New York City for studying anomalous or superhuman-related diseases. A little while back, when the Sin-Eater came back to life and was running some kind of cult, he'd broken into it and stole a sample of the Spider-Flu though I hadn't been able to find out what exactly he'd ended up using it for before Carnage's attack ruined my life.

So, naturally they... did absolutely nothing to beef up security. That was just how it went, whenever a superhuman did something majorly bad either we got an overzealous backlash against superhumans that didn't affect the actual perpetrators one bit or nobody did anything and everyone forgot about it a week later.

Anyway, it was easy enough to pick a few locks and guess a few passcodes based on the residue my superhuman senses picked up on the keypads and I was in.

You see, while I was going through everything that I could now sense through my symbiote I discovered billions upon billions of tiny microscopic symbiote-derived organisms in an absurdly small area in this part of the city, and investigating it led me here. I wasn't sure exactly what I would find, but...

Seriously, not a single security guard? Someone could just break in here and grab a bioweapon and... We live in a world where vampires, werewolves, and zombies exist. There are probably samples of all of that in here. Some anti-social pseudo-nihilist could have broken in here, stolen them, and chucked them into the municipal water supply to cause a werevambie outbreak. I should burn this place down when I'm done here.

Eventually, I found myself drawn to a large vault in a subbasement. Old school, analog combination lock. Or well, eight of them. And testing it with my claws made it clear that the door was made of or at least plated with adamantium or osmium steel or some shit. At least they took some of this seriously. The walls looked to be made of just ordinary concrete but it was probably reinforced with rods of the same metals, nobody would be dumb enough to make it easier to rip the vault door out than to brute force through it.

Nothing to do but hold my ear to the door and twist the thing until I heard something click. Took me maybe an hour to get the door open. Inside was a walk-in situation with metal drawers in metal cabinets affixed to metal walls, each with an alphanumeric code printed on it and locked by a key. Okay, I misjudged this place. Either this was installed after the Sin-Eater thing or what they dealt with here was so dangerous on average that spider-flu was deemed low security.

What I was looking for was in a drawer labeled V3N0M-VRS-87K... Yeah, I don't think these codes were randomly generated. Picking locks was easy when you had a symbiote. Just stick your finger up to the keyhole and let the symbiote mass squeeze in and mess with the tumblers. The drawer pops open, and inside is a glass sphere filled with black goo.

Now, it'd be easy enough to just assume that this was a piece of Venom or maybe one of those symbiotes who invaded back in the 90s but... that wouldn't explain what I was feeling from it. I had to know what this was.

It took me thirty minutes to find a computer, and another hour of scouring the building to find a sticky note with a password on it, but pretty soon I was into their database searching "V3N0M-VRS-87K" and...

Just after the superhuman civil war, a Latvarian satellite dropped a bioweapon derived from the DNA of the Venom symbiote on Manhattan after the satellite in question was jostled unexpectedly. It spreads through the air and infects people through their pores, causing their cells to produce symbiote bio-matter which then drives them berserk. Iron Man eventually synthesized a cure, and some superpowered individuals were immune or resistant to it due to their powers or altered physiology, but... then he flew up to the satellite and seized two more payloads. This was one of them... Where was the other?

And more importantly, you can't just keep a virus inert. They need cells to live in, and this is still alive. So... Thre are cells in this mixture. The Venom virus has been infecting and reinfecting those cells, which must be reproducing, and reproducing itself as well, so... Mutations, probably a few different ones, with genetic material being spread.

Checking the entry, they never experimented with it. It was here mostly for safekeeping. This means that... This thing is probably leagues more dangerous than they have noted here. Viruses evolve fast and thing has had nearly a decade and a half.

This was useless to me, but I was taking it anyway. One of these capsules was enough to affect an entire city if it was released at the right place and if I could get it then in theory so could someone else. It needed to be destroyed and it would be as soon as I figured out how.

I covered up the signs that I was here as best as I could and made my way to the exit when I noticed the scents of three people who weren't here before.

The scents of three people I recognized. Taskmaster, Bullseye, and Underworld.

Straining my ears, so to speak, I could hear them talking from the next hall over.

"So the job is simple enough. Fisk doesn't seem to think that the girl is gonna be a good long-term investment, so our job is to take her out. If we can capture the symbiote alive, we get a bonus." There was Taskmaster.

"Seems like a waste... But I did warn the kid." Underworld.

"That's the business though. If you feel bad about it, you've got the best odds of putting her down clean out of—stop playing with those! Those are loaded with thermite-magnesium charges."

Yeah, that sounded bad. How did they know I was here? "Oh fuck," I realized. The phone. I'd searched it to make sure it wasn't sharing my location but it must have had a tracking device or a hidden spy app.

My first instinct was symbiote camo but the sphere didn't become invisible with me and... Something about the way my symbiote reacted when I tried to store it in... I was just gonna call it hammer-space. Something about the reaction made me feel that having this thing in my symbiote, even sealed in glass, was a bad idea.

The front door was the only way out of here, by design. If I wanted out, I had to get past the three experienced, lethal criminals.

I held the sphere containing the venom virus close with one pair of arms and folded another pair over it protectively. One of two things would happen. either they'd believe me when I told them about the city-wrecking bio-weapon I was holding and let me pass for fear of it getting released during the fight or I'd have to fight my way past them and hope like hell that the sphere didn't break.

Either way, I marched to meet them.

"Okay," I began, "I know what you're here for and I've just got to say that I'm holding—"

I was forced to dodge when Bullseye tossed a dart at me. It impacted the wall and immediately ignited with what I could feel in my symbiote's proverbial bones was really fucking hot.

I leaped forward and kicked Bullseye back, which prompted Taskmaster to shout "Wait, that was one of Deadpool's moves."

"Yeah, I'm just full of surprises. Now seriously—"

I was forced to dodge back again when Taskmaster responded by drawing a rather intimidating western-style longsword from his back and clicking a switch in the hilt, which made the blade start vibrating at a frequency that... Have you ever had a mild ear infection in both ears? Where it doesn't hurt super bad but it still hurts and you can barely think straight? Imagine that, but your entire body and you get a vague idea of how my symbiote was reacting to the hum of Taskmaster's vibro-blade.

Luckily, between my enhancements and my symbiote's powers, my reflexes were sharper and my movements faster than Taskmaster's, but I couldn't really get in close to try and knock him out or knock him back. "Okay, seriously, you need to listen to me this thing I'm holding is..."

It was then that I noticed Underworld was T-posing with his guns held in either outstretched hand and that he was looking at me quite intently. And I remembered how the bullets had changed directions in mid-air when he killed The Consultant.

"No don't, seriously—" bang. Two bullets flew out and began curving around to strike at me. I ducked under Taskmaster and began running back up the hallway hoping that either they run out of momentum before they hit me or they'd hit a wall when I dodged around a corner. I was pretty fast, but the bullets were faster. Two dense, heavy rounds tore through my symbiote and my back and momentum carried me forward to the ground, shattering the glass sphere as I made contact. The pain tolerance that came with my healing factor meant that I didn't pass out, but things did seem to slow down a bit. And I had a choice. I could let the venom virus spread through the city and god knows how many people get hurt... Or I could use my symbiote to smother it and take the whole payload myself and damn the consequences.

Doing the right thing sucked, you know?

So what I want to know is... When you're having a seizure, are you aware that you're having a seizure or do you have to figure it out when it's over? Because what happened next was... The hallway, the whole damn lab really, faded away and I was standing in a black void washed out in red light, looking down at my own body as it went through the kind of fits that people who are having seizures in medical dramas go through. And even though this was some kind of out-of-body experience, I was... Intimately aware of what was going on. My healing factor couldn't push back against enough virus to infect over a million and a half people, every single cell of my body and a good chunk of my symbiote were saturated with the stuff. mechanisms meant for replacing my body's proteins were churning out more of the virus, more of the Abyss. DNA was rewritten, cells burst apart and reformed, flesh and bone became abyss, abyss became flesh and bone. My symbiote adapted, assimilated, and the abyss that was it and the abyss that was me could no longer be distinguished. I was aware of everything. I felt everything. An eternity of agony passed in an instant.

All the while, I could hear a high-pitched man's voice just laughing his ass off in the distance.

When all was said and done I pushed myself up from the floor as Underworld was walking up to doubletap. I could not describe how weird everything felt now. Now that my body was... now that my senses were...

All I could do was laugh. The most demented laugh, like, like... There was this old cartoon from the 90s, about a costumed vigilante. One of the bad guys was an insane clown, voiced by the guy who played Luke Skywalker of all people. I swear to god I sounded like him.

Underworld wasn't perturbed. He just raised one of his guns to my head as I looked up. "Nothing personal, kid."

He wasn't prepared for a dozen bladed tendrils to erupt from my back, tear into his chest, and throw him into a wall. He had the same healing factor I did, er, that I did before. He'd live, but it'd hurt like hell.

"Nothing personal, sir," I mocked back. Then I spit his bullets back at him.

I stalked back toward Taskmaster and Bullseye. As I did, I dissolved and reabsorbed my extra pairs of arms. I could always resmmon them later if I needed to, but they felt too weird for walking around now that they were real arms. My main pair, meanwhile, expanded out into a pair of massive, curved, serrated blades. The kind that you'd see in a fantasy anime that just had no fucks to give about physics or functional weapons design.

That was what the two mercenaries saw as I approached them. That, and the tendrils I'd impaled Underworld with writhing wildly behind me.

"I'll give you a five-minute head start," I said in my harshest tone. "I recommend that you use them well."

I couldn't quite read their expressions through their masks, especially Taskmaster since he covered his whole face, but body language made it clear that they now understood the full implications of picking a fight with someone with the powers of Carnage when you pushed her too far. They bolted.

I had no intent of actually chasing them, mind you. I had much larger prey in mind.

CMM

I didn't bother stopping to ask the man at the door to let me in, I just pressed past him and forced open the doors of the Hellfire Club myself. I cut my way straight through the drunken revelry of far too many bored rich people with a fetish for the Victorian era and marched up the stairs. Someone followed me, shouting "You can't go up there," but I ignored them.

Whatever Fisk was expecting to happen tonight, it was not me kicking down the door to his office. That was evident in his eyes, even as the rest of him maintained his composure. I transformed as I slowly stalked up to him, and gently I set the phone he'd used to contact me, that he'd used to track me, on his desk. "Consider this my formal resignation," I said with venomously fake politeness. "After tonight I don't think this is going to work out."

"I assure you Maria that I have no idea—"

I shot my arm out, expanding it as I grabbed him by the throat, lifting him up from his seat even as I slithered up to stand on his desk and look him in the eye. "You tried to have me killed. After implicating me in how many murders to keep me under your thumb, you tried to have me killed. And you wanted my Symbiote, for... What? There's no way your fat ass was gonna use it."

"Maria, please... I can explain."

I laughed. "You don't get it, Fisk... After tonight... There is no Maria Marshal anymore. And there's no symbiote either. Now and forever, the only thing left... Is Massacre. So here is what is gonna happen, Fisk. You're gonna take care of the crimes you had me implicated in, got it? If the authorities come after me for those murders, I'll come after you. If anyone I even suspect works for you comes after me, I'll come after you. In fact, if anyone who I know works for or has worked for you in the past so much as looks at me funny, I'll come after you."

"And then I'll feed you your own heart. Capiche?"

I slammed Fisk to the floor without waiting for his answer, then calmly shifted back into my Hellfire outfit and left back through the front door. I had work to do.