34 The Green Threat

For the past few days, Gwen had not been able to find her place. No matter what she tried to do, it didn't work out. The growing migraine and the nervousness that followed on her heels were the cause of her problems. Gwen had learned to trust her senses and knew they warned her of impending danger. She'd felt something similar before Connors had turned into a Reptile, only now it had clearly taken on a larger scale.

Because of this, she spent most of her free time as Spiderwoman, patrolling the streets incessantly, hoping to see what her intuition was trying to warn her about. It wasn't doing much good.

But then help came from the unexpected. Gwen received a text message indicating the location and time of the alleged terrorist attack. There was even an indication of exactly who the intruders were supposed to be targeting. As soon as she read the message from an unknown number with the caption: "an old friend," her headache began to subside, once again confirming that it was the premonition of disaster that caused it.

While the girl pondered the message, speculating on how the guy could have known about the supposed terrorist attack, another message arrived.

"P.S. If you see Venom, don't rush into a fight, there's a completely different person behind the mask now."

She remembered Parker texting her that he had solved the tentacle problem. She didn't go into detail then, but damn, how the hell had he managed to deal with that creepy thing?

"P.P.S. A old friend? Really?"

Gwen smiled. Despite the myriad of questions surrounding Parker, she no longer felt threatened by him. Or rather, it hadn't been there in the first place, it was just that the girl wasn't yet well aware of the signals her gut was giving her and didn't immediately understand what was going on. In fact, she still had no idea what her supernatural intuition was signaling when she saw Peter. It was something she hadn't yet encountered, but it certainly wasn't a warning about a threat.

At the appointed time, Gwen was already on the roof of the building next door to OzCorp. From here she had an excellent view of the balcony, where the top brass had gathered to celebrate the successful completion of the most important deal in the company's history. After all, OzCorp, as an independent company, would cease to exist. The merger of multibillion-dollar corporations is by no means an ordinary event. Such deals always have many consequences, and resistance in one form or another is to be expected. Not everyone at OzCorp was happy about this turn of events. In particular, the former president of the company, Norma Osborne, was vehemently opposed to this. And because of that, she was suspended.

And that gave her a good reason not to attend the party. Which was certainly fortunate for her: to ignore an event where Peter said a terrorist attack was going to take place. Not to mention the fact that Parker speculated that Norma's opponents would be the first victims of the attackers.

And how does he know all this in such detail? Gwen couldn't help but ask herself that question. And then there's the warning about the symbiote's appearance. How many secrets is this boy hiding? The girl's gaze fell on her own wrists, where perhaps her most useful and valuable acquisition as a superheroine was located. It was wearing the web-shooters that first made her feel so... the girl still could hardly find the words to describe her feelings, but one thing she knew for sure. Her life was once again divided into before and after. And the new milestone of acquiring the web was even more significant than the previous one: the bite itself.

"These web shooters are designed especially for me!" Gwen thought, looking at Parker's invention. Could an outsider have come up with something so exactly right for her? Who but herself, the Spiderwoman, could have ever come up with the idea of flying around town on a spider web? Unanswered questions.

Her musings were interrupted by a reminder of her spidey sense. Gwen jumped up, searching for a possible threat. But, at first glance, it looked the same. Downstairs on the open-air stage, a black-robed singer continued to sing her disgusting songs. The adults relaxed, letting their children have fun on the trampolines and scurry around the huge, colorful inflatable figures. In the privileged box some secret disputes were held, temporary alliances were made, sealed with fake smiles. Nothing had changed.

"What if Peter was mistaken, and the intruders had simply planted a bomb under the box?" an unsettling thought pounded in my temples. That's a favorite method of terrorists.

Then a strange sound, foreign to this time and place, reached the girl's keen ear: the distant roar of a jet engine. No aspect of the city's infrastructure uses jet engines. Too dangerous and expensive, not to mention too much power.

Soon after the sound came its source-a green dot in the sky, emitting a trail of smoke. With her keen eyesight, the girl saw faster than anyone else that the dot was none other than a woman flying a strange device. A lean woman, dressed in a high-tech suit of green colors. The unknown head was crowned by an ugly helmet-mask. She grinned like a monster from nightmares, who had come to this world to gather a bloody harvest.

And it was obvious that this woman was not an ordinary person. For it is not within the capabilities of the human body to so balance on such an uncomfortable flying machine.

Except that the people assembled were unaware of this. Taking the new guest as part of the show, they welcomed her with applause and cheers, expecting a great show with a demonstration of new technology. It never occurred to anyone that the unknown flyer would attack humans.

Already anticipating her triumph, the woman flew to the balcony where her former colleagues were gathered and threw several pumpkin-shaped grenades in their direction.

"Who's out of business now?" She laughed angrily, assuming that nothing would save her abusers.

But the Spiderwoman had a different opinion. To intervene, Gwen had to leap into danger and intercept both bombs in flight with two precise shots from the web.

"It's too early for Halloween!" shouted Stacy, flinging the explosive devices upward so that when they exploded they would be as far away from people as possible. Luckily for her, this version of the pumpkin bombs had no fragmentation effect and had an extremely low kill radius. When activated, they didn't explode like conventional grenades, but instantly scorched everything organic within a few meters of themselves.

"Who the hell are you?" Goblin roared when she saw that she hadn't succeeded.

"You'll find out soon enough!" With marvelous dexterity, Gwen managed to shoot the web again, hooking onto the outlaw's glider, using it as a fulcrum to stop her fall.

"What the..." The jolt nearly caused Norma to fall from her flying device.

While the villainess thought about what had happened, the Spiderwoman, accelerating on a web, tried to knock her off her glider, hitting her with both feet.

"Get off me!" Goblin, who had managed to hold on to her glider thanks to the powerful bindings on her boots, roared, desperately fighting off her nimble and astonishingly strong opponent.

Stacy had a clear advantage in leeway, because Goblin had her feet practically chained to the glider so she wouldn't fall in the heat of battle. And Gwen took full advantage of the opportunity, using the villain's flying machine as a fulcrum for her web and showering her herself with blows from different directions. Missing a very hard blow to the stomach, Goblin suddenly saw a tightly drawn string of web right in front of her face.

"Take that," she roared, and cut the web with the blade embedded in her suit's elbow pads.

Gwen had to cling to the wall of the building to keep from falling down, and Osborne used the time she'd gained to do what she'd come here to do. This time, she decided not to be a tinkerer and shot at the panicked people on the balcony with the rocket launchers hidden in the glider.

"No!" Gwen shrieked, but it was too late.