(One) Morlun grabbed Peter out of the elevator and quickly frogmarched him down a corridor on the seventh floor of the Stoddard Institute. "You're coming with me!" Somewhat oddly nobody in the busy hospital seemed to care about the literally unearthly figure's aggressive conduct.

To the Death

(Two) Morlun reached a door and quickly opened it. He shoved Peter inside. "Change here." It was yet another supply room, the kind that Peter had used countless times to quickly change into his secret identity.

Peter took off his winter jacket. "Stop!" Morlun exclaimed. "Is that your phone?"

It was indeed. "Toss it to me." Peter reluctantly did so. Morlun examined it. Several ideas crossed his mind. Should he crush it immediately? Should he keep it as a souvenir of victory? What if Peter had sent a message to someone?

As it happened, Morlun did have a way of using his interdimensional technology to answer the last question. A sickly green hologrammatic "skeleton" arose over the phone as Morlun quickly perused its contents and apps. Correctly realizing that Peter had not sent anyone a message about the Inheritor's presence, he turned it off.

He tossed it back to Peter. "Put it on the top shelf there. If you turn it on again, I'll rip your arms off." Peter obeyed. "Now listen very carefully. We are going to fight. We are going to fight to the death. Your death. As long as I am alive I will not rest until you die. You can run from me, and I will chase you. But if you run too far, or I get bored with chasing you, I will stop running and come back here. Your aunt is going to die this afternoon. I very much assure you that notwithstanding the agonies of her cancer, I can make sure her that her last few hours are infinitely more painful than you can imagine."

"I think I can imagine it all too well."

(Three) "Smart boy." Spider-Man was now in his costume. "You can't imagine how much I want to see you dead. Everything ends today. That you won't be able to say goodbye makes it even better."

"Really?"

"You doubt me?"

"When we first fought, you said it wasn't personal."

"Did I?" Morlun thought back to that event. And for an instant he remembered a slightly different Morlun who was not so vindictive. Or so defeated. "So I did. Well after repeated defeats, not to mention the death of most if not all of my family, it's definitely personal now. I think once I rip your corpse to shreds I'll get over it."

The two were back in the corridor. "So when does this great battle begin?" Spider-Man wondered.

Morlun punched Spider-Man so hard he flew down the corridor and right outside the window over the streets below.

"Now," he said smugly.

(Four) Spider-Man found himself embedded in the building opposite the Stoddard Institute. "Damn, that hurt! So Morlun still knows how to hit." A thought occurred to him. "Just a minute, why didn't my spider-sense alert me to that punch? Has he found some way to block it?"

But he had little time to answer that question, since Morlun was leaping out of the Stoddard Institute to attack him. At the last possible instant Spider-Man leaped away back towards it. "Wait, that's a bad idea! At the very least I have to get Morlun away from Aunt May!" So the moment he landed, he immediately webbed another skyscraper and swung away from the hospital."

"Get back here!" Morlun shouted.

(Five) It was a couple of skyscrapers away and on the sixteenth floor when Spider-Man crashed through the window. "Sorry! Coming through!"

"What's going on?" asked one of several workers. Spider-Man was now in a corridor.

"Uh…run. And use the stairs, not the elevators. Go down." Spider-Man quickly hopped along the corridor, finding a secretary talking on the phone. "I'm sorry. Let me just borrow that for a minute." He hung up the phone, then quickly dialed the Institute. "Listen to me quickly. May Parker, May Parker-Jameson is in mortal peril. You have to protect her! Or move her away from the building. Listen there's a super-villain…"

Just then, his spider-sense kicked in, and he was just able to duck and take the secretary with him just before a large desk would have hit the two of them. Quickly regaining his senses, only to realize…

"Oh great, now I don't have a phone," he thought. Then he had to duck one filing cabinet, and then another that Morlun threw at him. "Well, I hope they got the message," he thought as he dashed out through a window on the opposite side of the skyscraper. "I can't risk putting more people in danger."

(Six) 13:25

Norman Osborn was still in his office. The remains of a light lunch were on his desk as he stared at the cell phone that had mysteriously arrived less than an hour ago. Just then Ms. Kozak, his secretary, knocked on the door. There were circumstances when she didn't need to ask him to enter, and this was one of them.

"Sir, we've just received news that Spider-Man is under attack. Apparently his enemy is named Morlun…"

"Thank you, Ms. Kozak. Please take all appropriate measures. Shut the door behind you."

Ms. Kozak did so. And almost immediately after, the cell phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Oh good, Mr. Osborn, you're obeying instructions." It was not apparent whether the voice was male or female. Indeed it was not clear if the voice might not be mechanical, alien or even, as was sometimes the case in the Marvel Universe, an abstract moral concept.

"Who the hell is this? Do I know you?"

"Now that's an interesting question, Mr. Osborn. Because your memory can be so convenient. The way you keep and kept forgetting that you were or are the Green Goblin for a start. So very useful for a man in your position."

(Seven) "I am not a man to be trifled with. Who are you?"

"Oh, we have met, though my voice altering technology hides the fact. I wouldn't worry about it too much. After all, I'm not that important. At the time I was just another accomplice in your schemes when everyone thought you were dead. Very low on the totem pole. Still, I always had friends in high places. And they have long run out of patience with you."

"Mysterious conspiracies are a dime a dozen. I am not threatened by vague threats."

"Nor should you be, Mr. Osborn. Perhaps we should change the topic to… Jackie Onassis?"

"Jackie Onassis? What are you talking about?"

"I was just remembering that when JFK died, she told sympathetic journalists how much her late husband had liked a particular musical… Camelot, wasn't it?"

"What?" Osborn was clearly unnerved by this.

"Oh yes, sometimes your memories come and go. And sometimes particular memories go and don't come back for the longest time. But then they do…"

And with that, whoever was on the other end hung up.

(Eight) Meanwhile on Flight 616 from Boston, Mary Jane Watson had just received an alert on her phone about Spider-Man's situation. "Who is he fighting? They appear to be fighting around skyscrapers."

A closer look revealed Morlun's identity. "Oh hell. Let's see, the flight lands in twenty minutes, we get to the gate ten minutes later at two. Plenty of time for Morlun to rip him to shreds."

At that very moment Spider-Man was swinging away from another skyscraper. "At least we're several blocks away from Aunt May. But we must be at least thirty stories up and Morlun is dashing from tower to tower as if he were skipping through a field of flowers. I mean he's always been super strong, but now he's almost flying."

Spider-Man landed on the side of another skyscraper and saw Morlun land a few floors below him. He immediately leaped to another skyscraper and Morlun jumped after him.

"Wait his trajectory is all wrong, he's not going to catch me." Then out of the corner of his eye he realized Morlun's real target, a window-washer platform with two workers on it.

(Nine) "Of course, he's going to threaten them! Or just kill them out of fun." Spider-Man reached the skyscraper. And then immediately jumped downward to reach the platform.

What happened only took a few seconds. Morlun had reached the platform and grabbed the two workers. One of them had earbuds and didn't realize Morlun's threat until then. Spider-Man managed to twist in the air that he was able to kick Morlun to the other end of the platform. But Morlun was able to slash the rope and damage the gears connecting the platform to the building. "Oh, no" Spider-Man thought. He had barely enough time to grab the two workers and swing away while Morlun and the platform fell to the ground.

"Stop struggling! I can't hold you if you keep squirming! You'll be safe in a couple of seconds!"

(Ten) Spider-Man crashed through the window of another building. "Sorry! This is an emergency!" He quickly put the two workers down and looked outside. Fortunately the crowd below had run away so no one was hurt when the platform crashed on the ground.

Morlun was taking a little longer to fall. "Wait… is he decelerating?" Spider-Man wondered. Indeed he was. And about four floors above the ground Morlun stopped completely. He managed to adjust his center of gravity so that he was now standing upright. Though he wasn't actually standing on anything. And then he jumped upwards.

"What the hell? It's like he's jumping on invisible stairs three stories at a time? Or was that one four?" Spider-Man leaped out of his current skyscraper. "I'll have to watch the instant-replay later," he thought. "Terrific, now he's found a way to beat gravity."

(Eleven) Back at the Stoddard Institute security was arguing with medical personnel over the fate of Aunt May. "We have to move her now! Someone has threatened her."

"We can't move her!" said the leading physician. "She's literally on death's door!"

"Why would someone want to kill a dying woman?" an intern asked.

"Well, she's an ex-mayor's stepmother," another guard said. "Someone killed the mayor's wife just a few years ago. Since his actual mother's been dead for decades, some terrorist decided this will have to do."

"The police are coming. They'll have two squads here in less than ten minutes!" said another doctor.

"What good would that do?" said the first security man. "From what I've heard, this guy can run through them like mincemeat."

All this time, Aunt May was in her dying agony. "Peter, Peter…" she gasped almost inaudibly.

Just then nurse Grey appeared. "Look, we can take care of Mrs. Parker perfectly well. Just take up your positions, don't alarm the other patients, and everything will be all right."

One could notice a considerable malevolence in her smile. But for some reason everyone obeyed her.

(Twelve) Meanwhile Spider-Man had just dashed out of another skyscraper window, dozens of stories above the ground. He was immediately followed by a large oak desk that Morlun had thrown at him.

"OK," Spider-Man thought. "I have to catch the desk before it hits the ground. But let me just think…" The desk was not reaching Spider-Man as he reached yet another skyscraper and it had begun to fall. Meanwhile Morlun had just leaped from the previous skyscraper.

"But with just a little twist of my wrist and an old little trick…" and that was enough to both abort the desk's fall and to fling it towards Morlun.

And the desk did hit Morlun. It even pushed him back a couple of feet. But then Morlun stopped and with a move of his arms smashed the desk into kindling. There he stood hundreds of feet in the air and sneered. "Now just where is your juvenile mocking? Your jejune sense of humor? You don't seem very confident."

Then Spider-Man noticed a billboard about three hundred feet below. He jumped down and soon swung to take a better look.

(Thirteen) As he swung by the billboard his intuition was confirmed. Bellow the images there was a brief chyron that alerted Spider-Man to call a phone number. He then swung down towards the ground.

"Hey, does anyone have a cell phone I could use?" he yelled to the crowd.

"Here's mine!" And an obliging police officer tossed him one. Spider-Man quickly swung away. Fortunately he was moving quick enough that yet another desk Morlun had thrown at him didn't hit him and gave enough time for people to run away from it.

"Hello, Spider-Man," Osborn said back in his office.

"Listen, Morlun has some electro-magnetic device that allows him to walk on air."

"I've confirmed it. It also prevents you from touching him. Obviously this is a problem since it prevents any offensive action."

"How about the rather major problem that he's so much stronger than me I'm no match for him?"

(Fourteen) "Listen very carefully. The device is very powerful. Its extra-dimensional nature makes it difficult to analyze it. And it will cut off this cell phone communication in 12 seconds. Two things: the device's power is finite. It will run out at exactly 2:54 PM. Second, can you reach the Chrysler Building?"

"In a few minutes, yeah."

"Don't get into the tower itself. Try to concentrate on the buildings around it…" Spider-Man quickly swung back to the police officer who gave him the phone. This momentarily confused Morlun who hadn't expected the change. "Stand still, damn it!"

As it happened, at that very instant Paul Rabin was at the very Chrysler Building and leaving a meeting when he saw an alert about the Morlun/Spider-Man fight. "Is that Morlun?" he wondered. "Didn't Mary Jane say something about how especially dangerous he was? Let me check."

He looked up his smartphone and what he saw confirmed his fears. "That's awful! What can I do to stop him?"

(Fifteen) Norman Osborn was still in his office when the mysterious cell phone rang again. "I know you're busy trying to save Spider-Man, but I would like your undivided attention. Don't worry. You'll only be interrupted in your attempt to save him for a few minutes. Now where we?"

"How could you possibly know what I recently remembered? I haven't told anyone about it."

"Come come, Mr. Osborn. You're an intelligent person. I'm sure you can guess."

"You're able to read my mind. But I'm aware of telepathic surveillance, and I've taken measures to prevent that."

"And are they working properly? If you can create a technological solution, then one can always create a technological way to get around that."

"I don't believe you."

"Maybe it's just magic. The important point is that I do know your secret, one your convenient amnesia has hidden from you for so many years. What are we going to do about it?"

"You want to blackmail me?"

"And why would I want to blackmail you? There's only a strictly limited number of people who care about it. Perhaps I need to be more concrete about what I can do." And once again the voice hung up.

(Sixteen) 13:38

Spider-Man had reached the Chrysler building and was swinging around it. A few seconds later Morlun also reached the building, arriving at the 40th floor. But now, clearly annoyed at the time this was taking, he decided on a different strategy. Instead of leaping at Spider-Man he crashed his way onto the floor. Then he threw the first person he met, a young business executive, right out the hole he had made entering the building.

Spider-Man, of course had to catch the terrified young man, and swing him to the nearest building. He also had to do this for pretty young secretary Morlun also threw out. A security guard shot Morlun, and the bullet bounced off Morlun's force field. It hit a bystander in the arm but harmed Morlun not at all. Morlun casually tossed the guard out the window. And also tossed assorted furniture to hamper Spider-Man's task even more.

"How much longer do you think you can do this! How long do you have before I start tossing corpses out!" he screamed.

(Seventeen) As it happened, in one of the very top floors two men disguised in painters' uniforms were watching the situation. They were, in fact, Osborn's men and the senior one quickly pulled out a high-powered rifle, while the other one analyzed some data and was in communication with Ms. Kozak.

"Now would be a really good time to have a dum-dum bullet. And a way of getting through that force field," the junior "painter" said.

"Fortunately, bullets filled with pure selenium can get around that."

"Because… Morlun will appreciate the Ghostbusters reference, and because he's cool he'll stop threatening people?"

"No. Morlun is an inter-dimensional creature, hopping between alternate universes. The selenium bullets, along with what special technology Oscorp has learned from the Clairvoyant Project, will be enough to activate an inter-dimensional 'jump' popping him into another universe and out of ours."

"Gee, if only Spider-Man and the rest of New York had the five or six hours it would take for us to leave the Chrysler Building, get those rare bullets, and come back here."

Just then a dimensional "hole" appeared and a masked arm provided the superior with a box of relevant ammunition. "Thank you, Mr. Spot," the superior said as he took the ammunition and quickly loaded his rifle.

(Eighteen) The two men quickly moved to a window, with the superior taking aim. "What's going on?" Ms. Kozak asked.

"Morlun is still inside the building. I need him to be outside."

By a striking coincidence, Paul Rabin was on the very floor that Morlun was using as a temporary base. "We have to stop him!" he declared to two people near him.

"Do we really? Because I think running down the stairs is a great idea!" one responded.

Rabin noticed an office chair, one of those that had wheels on them for easy movement. "How much do you think we can put on that chair?"

Against their better judgement, the other two people helped Rabin put a medium sized filing cabinet on the chair. "Now what?" one of them asked.

Finding that it was possible for him to move the chair, he moved it outside of the room the three were all in. At the other side of the building Morlun was about to toss another woman outside the building, who was clinging to a doorknob for dear life.

(Nineteen) Effortlessly Morlun tossed the woman's coat outside, and only then realized that the woman was not attached to it and was desperately scrambling away. Paul took the momentary distraction to push the heavy chair as fast as he could.

"That guy has more cojones than brains," one of his now ex-companions said.

"Hey, they're not mutually exclusive!" said the other, as the two dashed down the stairwell.

"Let's see how Spider-Man reacts when I start throwing your limbs out," Morlun sneered to the terrified woman.

"How's that Morly?" as Spider-Man swung by and covered his eyes with a dash of webbing. That was just enough distraction for Paul to hit Morlun with his chair and force him out of Chrysler Building.

"He's outside!" said the senior Osborn man several floors above.

"Take the shot!" Ms. Kozak ordered.

(Twenty) But then a funny thing happened. Had Paul been just five seconds earlier Morlun would have been expelled from this particular universe. But instead nothing happened. Still defying gravity Morlun leaped up to Spider-Man above him. "I'm getting tired of this!" With surprising speed, he not only caught up to Spider-Man but was able to toss him further up the Chrysler Building.

Somewhat confused by this Spider-Man was just able to see the two Osborn men lying unconscious on the floor before he crashed into a floor a couple of stories above them. "Damndamndamn," he muttered as he rolled along the floor in the fortunately unoccupied room.

Morlun immediately joined him. "Now that we're close together, I'm going to show you something I made specially just for you."

And with that the room was filled with a lilac-colored gas. "What kind of gas is this? It smells vaguely familiar, I don't think it's poisonous. What is…"

(Twenty One) Just then Morlun leaped through the gas and sideswiped Spider-Man. "Did he just cut me? No, I'm unhurt. Then why did he do that…"

Then Morlun kicked him from behind, and Spider-Man found himself forced outside the Chrysler Building. "That hurt!" he thought. "Though to be fair, not as hard as Morlun has done in the past."

Spider-Man instinctively tried to web something and swing himself to safety. And then he realized something very bad indeed. "Oh no! That gas! I recognize it! Part of it is the gas Mysterio used to dissolve my webbing! I've smelt the gas when testing my webbing. And it causes my web fluid to congeal in my shooters!"

Could he possibly remove the congealed fluid from his shooters and replace it with other fluid? And then Spider-Man realized that when Morlun had sideswiped him, he had taken his extra fluid.

(Twenty-Two) "So I'm eight hundred feet above the ground, and have no way to stop my fall. Swell."