Clark got the call from his mother and learned that the Green Goblin had bombed their house.
He vanished from where he stood and crossed the distance at top speed.
By the time he arrived, half the living room was gone. And in the ruined center of it all, the Goblin had his father lifted off the ground.
Clark's anger surged so hard he could barely hold it back.
He realized he had shown this man far too much mercy.
The Goblin still had no idea Clark was there, but suddenly every hair on the back of his neck stood up. It felt like something had locked onto him. Like if he moved even a little, he would die.
"What the hell is go-"
The thought barely formed in his mind.
Before he could even turn around, breathing became difficult. His body lifted into the air, and somewhere in that same instant Ben Parker had been torn from his grip.
"You really enjoy dangling people in the air, don't you?" Clark's voice came low and tightly controlled.
The second that voice reached the Goblin's ears, his eyes widened beneath the mask.
He knew that voice.
He knew it too well.
That was the voice of the monster from Manhattan, the one who had swatted him aside like his entire life's work was a joke. The voice of Ben Parker's son who had hidden in plain sight all along.
Clark Parker.
How could he possibly be back this fast?
From the school to New York, even a fighter jet would need time. How could he appear here in less than a second?
The Goblin tried to reach for the smoke bombs on his belt, but his body had no strength left. He was already starting to suffocate.
"I remember warning you, Norman Osborn."
"I intended to let you live. I intended to spare your son Harry the pain of losing his father. I intended to leave this to the law and let the rules of this world judge you."
"But you should never have turned your attention to my family. You should never have used your hands to touch the one line I do not let anyone cross."
"And since you believe you possess godlike power, enough to decide who lives and who dies..."
"Then I'm going to show you where real gods live."
With that, Clark seized Norman by the throat and shot upward into the sky.
He broke the sound barrier almost instantly, a sonic boom rolling out behind them.
Three thousand feet. Fifteen thousand. Thirty thousand.
Clark kept climbing with Norman in one hand, never slowing, ripping straight toward the edge of Earth's sky.
The world below became a blur in Norman's eyes. The pressure and friction were so intense that his Goblin armor started glowing red-hot. If not for the suit's exceptional insulation, the air resistance alone would already have cooked him alive.
He struggled desperately, pounding on Clark's arm.
His fists might as well have been hitting steel. They produced nothing but metallic impacts. He could not leave so much as a mark on Clark's skin.
Sixty thousand feet. The stratosphere.
The air thinned to almost nothing, and the temperature plummeted far below freezing. Norman's lungs felt ready to burst. Breathing became agony.
And that was before you factored in the damage Ben had already done to him. He had never even gotten the chance to treat his injuries.
"You think this is high enough? No. Not even close."
Clark's voice reached him again.
To Norman, it sounded like a demon whispering in his ear while hell stretched out its hand.
Then the speed spiked again.
Mach thirty. Mach forty.
One hundred and sixty thousand feet. The mesosphere.
Three hundred thousand feet. The edge of the thermosphere.
Now they were nearly in vacuum. No air. No sound. Only deep cold and endless silence.
Clark finally stopped.
He hovered in near-Earth orbit with the blue world beneath his feet and the vast universe above his head.
And still held Norman by the throat.
At this point Norman was a breath away from death.
Clark decided to see whether he had any last trick left in him, so he let him breathe again and fed him the smallest thread of power, just enough to keep him from dying on the spot.
Norman stared at the man before him, a man who floated in vacuum as casually as if he were standing in a backyard, without a single strand of hair out of place.
And in that moment, the Green Goblin persona, that manic, cruel, arrogant thing, was crushed flat by something far beyond it.
Fear remained.
The oldest fear.
The deepest fear.
The fear of death embedded in every human being.
"No... don't kill me..."
The Goblin vanished, and Norman Osborn surfaced again. Faced with real death, his core personality returned.
"Clark... please... I'm Harry's father! If I die, Harry will break! Peter will be crushed too! You can't kill me. You're a superhero. Superheroes don't kill. You have to follow the law!"
Norman tried to hide behind morality, to bind Clark with it.
Clark looked at him and nearly laughed.
"Norman, I think you've misunderstood something."
"We've already left Earth. Do you think I care about the law up here? Do you think I refrain from killing because I'm bound by the same rules and morals as those costumed street vigilantes?"
Clark's eyes glowed red. He was beyond tired of this.
Heat vision flashed out and burned through Norman's mask, exposing the face beneath, warped by absolute terror.
"No, Norman. I followed human law. I hid as an ordinary person. I let myself be mocked by idiots at school. I did that because I wanted to. Because Ben and May taught me how to be human. Because I wanted to become one. Because I never wanted my parents to fear me."
"But look at all of you. Every last one of you keeps trying to strip that choice away from me."
"So law, restraint, heroic codes, all of that means less to me than a used napkin. In this universe, there is no rule that can truly bind me."
"You could have kept coming after me. You could have kept coming after Peter and the others. Back then, maybe I would have kept playing your little street-level hero game with you."
"But now, I'm going to erase you so completely that even your soul won't have anything left to cling to."
Clark released the remaining strength holding Norman together.
The armor in his grip disintegrated into dust.
Norman drifted naked in space, helpless.
His mouth opened wide, but no sound came out. His mind had already collapsed. His sanity was gone. Blood was beginning to force its way out under the pressure.
But Clark did not want a quick end.
He wanted to make an example of him. A warning to anyone who ever thought about going after his parents.
He gathered chunks of nearby rock, melted them with heat vision, and fused them around Norman's body. Then he gave him just enough power to survive in space without dying.
Norman's entire body was sealed away except for his eyes.
He became, effectively, a tiny satellite of Earth.
Left with nothing but solitude, left to drift for years, maybe decades, maybe longer, until the day Clark might finally decide to let him die.
A few seconds later, a file appeared in the hands of the New York Police Department.
Inside was everything.
Oscorp's criminal evidence.
Its illegal human experimentation.
And all the proof needed to bury the Osborn empire for good.