The Spider Assassin #41.
The severed arm lay on the bathroom floor like evidence of a crime Jake had committed against himself.
🕷️
Time Bank: 00:11:47
🕸️
Eleven hours. Forty-seven minutes. The numbers burned in his peripheral vision -- persistent, patient, inevitable.
He'd been staring at the arm for thirteen minutes.
Thirteen minutes of his remaining life spent looking at blackened flesh that gleamed wrong under fluorescent light, surfaces catching illumination in ways that organic tissue had no business catching.
The skin stretched impossibly tight over the crystalline structures visible beneath translucent epidermis, arranged in patterns that suggested intentional design rather than biological chaos.
It was still growing.
Not dramatically. Not visibly. But Jake's enhanced perception tracked the minute expansion -- the way the fingers curled incrementally tighter, the way the elbow joint pulsed with something that wasn't quite heartbeat.
It had transformed into something that existed independent of his body, sustained by chemical processes that had nothing to do with blood flow or neural signals.
The second voice slithered up from somewhere chemical and permanent:
'Magnificent, isn't it? Look how the toxins crystallized. How they transformed weakness into something... harder. Stronger. Better.' A pause that felt like a smile. 'She knew what she was doing. The soup. The rose. She was making you PERFECT, and you cut it away like a tumor.'
"Shut up," Jake said aloud. His voice scraped his throat.
Jake's right hand pressed against his stump. The scarred flesh was warm, sealed completely by his healing factor. No bleeding. No exposed bone. Just smooth termination where his upper arm ended.
Gone. Actually gone. He'd cut off part of himself and there was no putting it back.
'Could try,' the second voice suggested. 'Press it against the stump. Maybe the healing factor reconnects it. Maybe--'
"It's dead tissue." Jake's voice was flat. "Corrupted. Poisoned. Even if my healing factor could reattach it, the infection would spread."
He was rationalizing. Had to be. Because the alternative -- that he'd cut off a perfectly functional limb in panic -- was too horrific to acknowledge.
But looking at the blackened flesh, at the way it moved independently, at the crystalline structures that had replaced anatomy with something alien: he'd made the right choice.
Small comfort.
Jake's eyes found the interface still shimmering in his peripheral vision. The bonus reward selection. Three options waiting with patient digital inevitability.
🕷️
[Totem redeemed!]
Select one Bonus Reward:
1. Bundle of Cash
2. Totem Icon
3. Mystery Reward
🕸️
His jaw tightened. The system. The thing that had given him powers. That had dropped him in Gotham with a ticking clock. That had sent the Reaper when his time expired.
The thing that wanted him to collect or die.
Maybe it could fix this. Maybe the Mystery Reward would be a replacement limb. Enhanced cybernetics. Magic regeneration. Something. Anything.
Hope was pathetic. But he had it anyway.
"Mystery Reward."
The selection confirmed. The interface pulsed once, processing, then--
🕷️
[Mystery Reward obtained!]
Classic Spider Suit - Repaired
🕸️
The tattered remains of his suit began glowing. Not the golden consumption of totems. This was different -- white light spreading across torn fabric, chemical burns, blood stains. Wherever the light touched, material reconstructed itself. Threads rewove. Colors restored to their original red and blue vibrancy. The spider emblem on his chest reformed, edges crisp and defined.
Jake watched the repair spread across his torso, down his legs, restoring what had been destroyed. The light reached his shoulders and--
Stopped.
The right side completed perfectly. The left terminated at his stump. No hanging sleeve. No phantom fabric. Just clean ending where his elbow ended, the suit adapting in real-time to his new anatomy.
The light faded. His suit was pristine. Perfect. Mocking him with its completeness except for that one glaring absence.
"Of course." Jake's laugh was bitter. Chemical. "Of course that's what I get."
'The system gave you exactly what you asked for,' the second voice observed. 'A mystery. Not a solution. Not a hand. Just cleaned fabric.'
He'd been stupid to hope. The system didn't care about his problems. Didn't care about his missing arm or the fact that he was one bad fight away from the Reaper returning.
It just wanted him to collect. To survive. To entertain whatever cosmic force had designed this nightmare.
Fine.
Jake's right hand found the severed arm. Lifted it. The weight was staggering -- easily forty pounds of crystallized tissue and concentrated toxin. His fingers found purchase on the blackened arm, and the flesh was solid. Unyielding. Like gripping stone.
He couldn't just leave it here. DNA evidence. His DNA evidence. Enhanced biology mixed with toxins and God knew what else. The kind of sample that could be reverse-engineered, studied, weaponized.
Or cloned.
The thought made his skin crawl. Imagine copies of himself walking around. Mindless weapons manufactured from his corrupted tissue. The League of Assassins would kill for a sample like this. So would Wayne Enterprises' competitors. Half of Gotham's underworld.
No. He was taking it with him.
Jake's right hand gripped the arm's joint. Found a carrying position that distributed the weight. Not comfortable. Not practical. But manageable.
He moved to the window. The broken glass crunched under his boots -- still intact, somehow, despite everything else that had been destroyed. His reflection caught in the remaining shards: one-armed figure in a pristine suit carrying his own blackened limb like some grotesque trophy.
Gotham waited beyond the window.
Jake pushed it open and--
Smoke.
The smell hit him first. Not the ambient decay he'd grown accustomed to. This was active burning. Chemical fires mixed with wood and plastic and whatever else fed Gotham's newest crisis.
He pulled himself onto the fire escape. Stood. The city spread before him in shades of orange and red.
Gotham was burning.
Not metaphorically. Actually burning. Fires dotted the landscape like infected wounds -- some small and contained, others spreading with the hunger of something that had found unlimited fuel. Smoke columns rose from at least a dozen locations, merging overhead into a toxic cloud that turned the afternoon sun into a dim red suggestion.
A building collapsed eastward. Just folded inward like something had removed its spine. The sound arrived seconds later -- a deep groaning crunch that Jake felt in his chest.
People were dying down there. Right now. While he watched.
His spider-sense painted them in his awareness -- heat signatures, movement patterns, panic vibrations traveling through concrete. Civilians. Trapped. Burning. Screaming for help that wasn't coming.
His right hand tightened on the rail.
He could help. Drop down. Pull people from rubble. Web escape routes. Buy them minutes. Maybe hours.
🕷️
Time Bank: 00:11:25
🕸️
Eleven hours. Twenty-five minutes.
Jake's hand relaxed.
The city was eating itself.
Whatever gang war or villain scheme had ignited this particular crisis wasn't his problem. He had no time to waste. He had a target. He had a promise to keep.
The Chemical Factory. That's where Bane would be. That's where Harley would be.
That's where this ended.
Jake's right hand shot webbing at the opposite building. The strand caught. Held. He tested the line's tension, then looked at the severed arm.
It clenched involuntarily. Or tried to. The neurons fired. The signals transmitted. But there was nothing to receive them. Just absence translating into electric ghost pain that ran up his stump like ants marching under skin.
How was he supposed to swing one-handed while carrying forty pounds of dead weight?
'Figure it out,' his analytical mind demanded. 'Or die trying.'
He wrapped webbing around the blackened arm. Created a crude harness that secured it against his torso, freeing his hand. The weight pulled at his shoulder, threw off his center of balance, but it was manageable.
Jake jumped.
The swing felt wrong immediately -- his right side pulling hard while his left contributed nothing but dead weight. The rotation was off. The arc too shallow. His spider-sense guided him but his body couldn't keep up.
The compromised adrenal system barely responded. No adrenaline surge. No fight-or-flight. Just awareness that he was falling wrong and muscles that moved through thick syrup trying to correct.
He fired another web mid-swing. Caught a fire escape. The line jerked him sideways, corrected his trajectory. He released, fell, caught himself on a lower rooftop.
His right shoulder screamed. The joint ground. His grip threatened to fail.
Not graceful. Not efficient. Not the swinging he'd grown accustomed to.
But functional. Barely.
'Again.'
He fired. Swung. The weight of the severed arm made everything harder -- each motion required compensation, each landing threatened to overbalance him. But his enhanced strength and spider-sense kept him vertical.
The smoke helped, perversely. It obscured sight lines. Made him harder to track. The fires created thermal updrafts that gave his webs unexpected lift. He used the chaos, let it carry him north through a city that had stopped pretending civility mattered.
Below, gangs fought over territory using the fires as cover. GCPD was overwhelmed -- Jake spotted three squad cars abandoned, doors open, officers nowhere visible. Civilians ran or hid or took advantage of the breakdown to loot whatever hadn't been claimed yet.
Gotham's social contract had dissolved. Whatever thin veneer of order Falcone's ring had maintained was gone.
In an alley Jake swung over without noticing:
Maria Delgado pressed herself against brick that radiated heat from fires blocks away. Her son -- eight years old, asthmatic, wheezing -- clung to her side. They'd been trying to reach St. Eligius Medical when the shooting started.
Now they hid. Waited. Prayed.
Something moved overhead.
Not a helicopter. Not a drone. Something that swung through smoke on silver threads that caught orange firelight. A figure. One-armed. Carrying something that looked like--
Maria's breath caught.
The figure swung past without slowing. Didn't look down. Didn't pause. Just used the chaos as cover, treating their suffering as convenient camouflage.
But in the half-second of visibility before smoke obscured everything again, Maria saw it clearly:
A man in a pristine red and blue suit, one arm missing, carrying his own severed limb like trophy or burden -- the blackened flesh unmistakable even at distance. The limb glowed faintly, pulsing with something that had no business existing in human anatomy.
Her son whimpered.
"What was that, Mama?"
Maria pulled him closer. Her hand found his inhaler. Pressed it to his lips.
"Nothing, mi hijo. Nothing."
Above, Jake's spider-sense painted her as irrelevant.
He didn't care.
These people had lived in Gotham by choice. Had accepted the corruption and violence and decay as normal. They'd made their beds. Let them burn in them.
He swung past a building fully engulfed. The heat was intense even at distance, the flames consuming everything with the efficiency of something that had been starving. People screamed from upper windows. Fire escapes collapsed under their weight.
Not his problem. Not his responsibility. He had eleven hours and a target. Anything else was just noise.
Another swing. Another building. His right arm was burning now -- not injury, just the sustained effort of doing work meant for two limbs. His shoulder joint ground with each motion. His grip threatened to fail.
But he kept moving.
The Chemical Factory should be north. Maybe two miles. He could make it. Had to make it. The timer was counting down and--
A rooftop. Flat. Stable. His web caught the edge and pulled him up. He landed hard, the severed arm's weight making him stumble forward before catching himself.
Jake straightened. Oriented himself. North. The factory was--
His spider-sense exploded.
Instantaneous shrieking that his compromised adrenal system barely responded to. No adrenaline surge. No fight-or-flight. Just awareness that death was arriving with precision.
Jake bent sideways.
Fast.
Something cut the air where his head had been. The displacement was violent -- a projectile moving faster than sound, the crack arriving after it passed. The concrete behind him exploded. Not cracked. Exploded. Whatever had just missed him carried enough kinetic energy to pulverize stone.
A bullet.
Jake's eyes tracked the trajectory. Reversed it. Found the source.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
Three buildings over, elevated position, perfect sight lines:
Deadshot didn't believe in hesitation.
His finger rested on the trigger with the patient certainty of someone who'd made this shot ten thousand times. The rifle -- custom built, scope enhanced with electromagnetic and thermal overlays -- tracked the target with mechanical precision.
One-armed Spider. Moving north. Carrying something.
His eyepiece analyzed:
Movement pattern: Erratic. Compensating for weight imbalance. Speed: 40% below baseline (rough estimate from gathered records). Trajectory: Predictable within 2.3° variance. Threat Assessment: MODERATE (compromised)
The scope's crosshair settled on center mass.
Easy shot. Clean kill. Three million from Falcone delivered within the hour.
Deadshot's breathing slowed. Three heartbeats. Two. One--
The target twitched.
A fractional shift in shoulder position that placed his head exactly where center mass had been.
His finger squeezed through the trigger pull. The rifle spoke: crack-BOOM that rattled windows three blocks over.
The bullet was already traveling.
1,800 feet per second. Supersonic. Faster than sound, faster than reaction time, faster than anything biological should be able to process.
The target bent sideways.
Fast, but simple. Casual.
The round passed through space where his head had been microseconds before. Continued on. Hit concrete. Obliterated it.
The eyepiece updated:
ANALYSIS: Target demonstrated pre-cognitive awareness. Movement initiated 0.03 seconds before trigger pull. Probability of random chance: 0.00001%
CONCLUSION: Enhanced perception. Possibly precognitive. Adjust strategy.
Deadshot's jaw tightened behind his mask.
In seventeen years, he'd made 1,247 kills. Perfect accuracy. No misses. No survivors when he decided otherwise.
This was his first miss.
'Not acceptable.'
His finger found the trigger again. The rifle tracked left, compensating for the target's new position. The scope's crosshair painted the one-armed figure with clinical precision.
But something had changed.
The target wasn't running. Wasn't taking cover. Just standing on that rooftop three buildings away, turned toward Deadshot despite smoke and distance and every reason not to know where the shot originated.
Looking directly at him.
The eyepiece zoomed. Enhanced. Clarified.
The target's face was masked. But the eyes were clear. Focused. Locked on Deadshot's position with the certainty of someone who knew exactly where their hunter waited.
And in those eyes: recognition.
Not surprise. Not fear. Just cold acknowledgment that this confrontation was inevitable, and all that remained was deciding whether it happened now or later.
The target's right hand twitched toward his wrist.
Deadshot's finger tightened on the trigger--
Smoke shifted. Some thermal updraft from fires below. The sight line broke for half a second.
When it cleared, the target was gone.
Deadshot's scope swept the rooftop. Empty. The eyepiece tracked movement patterns, predicted trajectories, calculated escape vectors--
His combat instincts screamed.
Not the rational kind. Not the "enemy at three o'clock" kind. The primal kind. The lizard brain recognizing apex predator before conscious thought could process why.
He spun.
The one-armed Spider stood three feet behind him.
Impossible. The target had been three buildings away. Three buildings. Through smoke and chaos and--
'How--'
The thought didn't finish.
The Spider's right hand was already moving. Not throwing a punch. Not reaching for a weapon.
Just moving.
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