Chapter 130 - 130

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….

"I dispatched a phantom," I announced breezily, waving a hand to dismiss the impending panic. "It strolled quite leisurely up to the Kingpin and reduced him to a rather pungent barbecue. Along with his armored vehicle. A tragic, unavoidable accident, really. A stray spark in the gas tank…"

I cast a sidelong glance at the heavily armed uncle still standing perfectly still under my magical crosshairs. "And now that the criminal underworld has violently lost its reigning monarch, the power vacuum will undoubtedly make the streets vastly more dangerous. There must always be a Kingpin!" I declared, perfectly mimicking the booming, tragic cadence of a certain cursed, icy monarch, offering the mercenary a rather heavy-handed career suggestion.

"Plagiarist…" Gwen muttered under her breath.

"Oh, really?!" I pivoted toward her, my eyes lighting up with genuine delight. "Are you initiated?"

"Hey, I might be a masked vigilante, but I am still technically a teenager!" she defended, crossing her arms. "So yes, I know about Warcraft."

"You have just ascended to an even higher plane of perfection in my eyes," I confessed earnestly.

"Let's… let's just leave that topic alone," the blonde sighed, desperately massaging her temples. "I believe we actually had an itinerary to follow. Something about saving the multiverse?"

"Ah, yes. Quite right. Interrogate the captive, detonate the super-machine. Meanwhile, I suspect Miles and his uncle have a great deal of familial catching up to do," I decreed, cleanly dividing our tactical responsibilities.

The interrogation itself did not consume much of my precious time. When good, old-fashioned psychological pressure is elegantly paired with divine telepathy, mortal tongues loosen remarkably fast, and secrets become entirely impossible to harbor. One simply cannot employ the 'do not think of a white elephant' defense against a god; the very act of trying to hide a thought immediately forces it to the surface of the mind.

While Miles and his uncle had their heartfelt, deeply uncomfortable reunion in the corner, I extracted the truth.

During the psychic inquisition, I unearthed a rather fascinating, and deeply pathetic, revelation regarding Wilson Fisk's grand motivations. Why build a reality-tearing collider? To resurrect his dead family, naturally. Apparently, his beloved wife had recently discovered that her "respectable businessman" of a husband was actually the absolute sovereign of New York's criminal underbelly. She succumbed to a bout of hysterical panic, grabbed their young son, and blindly fled into the night. It ended in a tragic car crash. Two corpses, and one grief-maddened Kingpin obsessed with the idea of replacing his family.

He was so deeply, violently obsessed that he genuinely believed he could simply reach into a parallel dimension and pluck a fresh wife and son to replace the broken ones. The sheer logistical nightmare of stealing a family from an alternate version of himself didn't even factor into the brute's calculations.

The truly magnificent twist, however, belonged to our captive, Madame Octavius.

She was fully aware that any biological entity violently ripped from its native reality would suffer cellular decay and disintegrate into cosmic dust within a week. Did she inform her grieving, homicidal benefactor of this minor detail? Absolutely not. Because she required the Kingpin's bottomless financial resources to construct her miraculous machine. Why? Merely to see if she could! Science! Progress! The grand mysteries of the cosmos! It was just terribly interesting, you see.

"Well," I breathed, slowly pulling my fingertips away from Olivia's temple. I had primarily dove into her mind to harvest the engineering schematics for her mechanical limbs and the collider itself, but verifying her motives had been a delightfully cynical bonus. "I am forced to conclude that all evil stems directly from women."

"Hey!" Gwen protested instantly.

"Fantastic. He's effortlessly pivoted from racism to sexism," the older, tired Peter Parker sighed, rubbing his face.

"No, I am entirely serious! Look at the empirical data!" I argued, gesturing grandly toward the tied-up scientist. "One fool falls into a hysterical panic upon discovering her impossibly wealthy husband acquires his funds through less-than-legal means, as if there is any other kind of wealthy businessman in America! The second woman decides to exploit a grieving widower to construct a reality-shattering doomsday device simply because she thought it would be a neat little physics experiment! Sexism has nothing to do with it. You, Mary Jane, Peni, and Aunt May are magnificent creatures, the absolute, radiant delights of my immortal soul. It is for women like you that men eagerly move mountains and conquer empires. But in this highly specific, localized incident? The women are entirely at fault."

I paused, tapping my cane thoughtfully. "Well. Fisk is also a spectacular imbecile. How does one hide his entire criminal empire from the woman bearing his child for years? What exactly was the man thinking?"

"That doesn't mean Fisk's wife was stupid!" Gwen fired back valiantly. "She might have just married him because she loved him, and…"

"Pfft…" I clapped a hand over my mouth, genuinely struggling to contain my amusement.

"What?!" she demanded indignantly.

"Nothing, nothing. I could almost force myself to believe that," I chuckled. "But Gwen, my dear, look at the man. He is a steroid-infused meatball. Yes, life is strange, and perhaps he occasionally stood beneath her balcony reciting poetry and performing grand acts of charity... but one must acknowledge the undeniable allure of expensive jewelry, elite social status, and a bank account that rivals the GDP of a small European nation."

"You still don't know that for sure!"

"Fine, fine, I concede the point," I placated, holding up my hands. "But you absolutely cannot deny that this profoundly immoral creature…" I poked Doc Ock's shoulder with the tip of my cane, "...harbored absolutely zero noble intentions!"

"Hmm," the seasoned Parker interjected. "What about the whole 'doing it for the sake of science' defense?"

"Oh, brilliant. Another devil's advocate to plague my existence," I sighed heavily. "Listen to me carefully: you must accept as a universal truth that possessing a staggering intellect combined with absolutely zero wisdom is a cardinal sin all on its own. I speak as the divine patron of inventors! Let us drop the matter for the sake of clarity. Our primary objective is complete. Let us proceed to the facility and orchestrate a spectacularly colorful fireworks display."

"Sounds like a plan to me," Spider-Ham nodded sagely.

"Fine. Let's go," Miss Stacy sighed. She made a highly concerted, deliberate effort not to ask what I intended to do with Olivia Octavius.

And so, we departed.

…

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