Capítulo 15: Bloodless Carcinoma
Gwen's lower powerlevel will be explained. she will grow stronger.
***
"Wait! Ru—"
BOOOOM!!!
The superhuman donning a Rhino costume slammed into the barricade, pushing through it like paper.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
"HAHAHAHA!!! I'm gonna run through the big wall!" the Rhino roared, shrugging off the bullets as though they were fly bites before running through the security, pulverizing their very bodies.
Gwen looked on in horror as the blood of officers and civilians painted the avenue red. Screams of horror, pain, and fear rang out as a stampede ensued—people ran over each other to get away from the muscled monstrosity that was beelining straight toward the stage.
Outrage rose in her eyes as she grit her teeth and dashed back toward the green room, using the chaos as a cover. She'd previously made sure that the room had no cameras, using the excuse of privacy as she never knew when trouble may sprout. She'd never known that what she feared would actually happen.
Grabbing her bag, she quickly changed into her now easily recognizable Spider-woman outfit: the ski mask, hoodie, goggles, and so on. But the moment she slapped on her web shooters, a resounding BOOM! shook the room.
She easily stabilized herself but realized that she would've been sent to the floor if she didn't have her powers.
'MJ! Betty! Glory!' she panicked and burst through the door, coming across a horrifying scene.
Corpses littered the avenue, blood coated the concrete, and bones were crushed to splinters. People had stomped others to death. Many teenagers' skulls were cracked open while their parent's bloodless bodies lay wrapped around them—still attempting to protect their progeny in death.
Her friends were nowhere to be seen.
Pure unadulterated rage flowed through her as she saw the perpetrator of the unneeded massacre repeatedly smashing into the stage, laughing in ecstasy.
"HAHAHAHAHA! I'm gonna RUN through this fucking thing. Big fucking box is gonna get SMASHED!"
THWIP!
Web exploded from her web-shooters and landed on the rampaging Rhino who was in the process of reducing the stage she was standing on into rubble.
"YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!" She growled, unable to come up with a witty quote while consumed by anger, and pulled herself toward him, making a small rip in his hide.
The sheer force of Gwen's punch cut through the air akin to a missile, landing on his hide with the sound of a gunshot.
BANG!
"Urgh," Rhino stumbled back a few steps back before looking at a flabbergasted Gwen, who was still stuck to his shoulder.
"Pest!" he spat and attempted to swat which failed miserably.
Gwen flipped out of the way before landing smoothly, her ballet training leaking through. She could easily break the jaw of a common thug when barely using a quarter of her strength. After seeing that the Rhino was superhuman, she used half her strength which barely did any damage.
She steeled her heart and dashed forward, her fist cracking through the air with the full force of twelve tons, but just before she could connect, her spidey-sense flared up, making her convert the punch into a roll which made her barely miss Rhino's punch.
She immediately looked at the spot where she previously was and found a tranquillizer dart lodged in the ground. She looked behind her and saw twelve men in black suits, face masks, and gloves holding tranquillizer guns aimed at her. They all had badges on their right breast with the letters 'KP' and eight tentacles extending from behind them.
Before she could begin comprehending the situation, an armored punch with enough strength to match flew toward her head. She smoothly dodged it, but her spidey sense flared up once more as it sensed a projectile flying right towards her. With inhuman flexibility and speed, she twisted her lithe body to dodge the dart.
'This is not looking good', she thought as Rhino threw yet another haymaker and the men shot three more darts which she barely managed to dodge.
No matter how fast she was, she wasn't faster than a bullet. She had the precognition to sense the dart's trajectory, but when there are multiple darts and you throw in a superpowered muscled monstrosity, her spidey-sense was starting to get overwhelmed. Her body could not keep up with her mind.
"Ooof! Hey Rhino, is this a one-on-one brawl or did you invite your fan club? Don't worry, I've got enough web to go around for everyone!" she tried to joke, but her heart was speeding up. The men were shooting at the perfect time and angle to make it practically impossible to dodge. If they continued with more darts, she may not be able to continue. It was as if they had specifically prepared this situation to take her down.
"I have no fan club! I smash walls!" Rhino roared, cutting off Gwen's attempt to fight the men instead of Rhino.
"Looks like someone skipped the 'villainous monologues 101' class," she snorted, punching Rhino in the face with the entirety of her strength, making him stagger back.
She then dashed toward the men who simultaneously released twelve shots at incredibly difficult angles to dodge.
'Shit!' Gwen groaned as two darts lodged into her thigh.
She immediately removed them and pushed on, knowing that she had far more resistance to drugs but almost immediately, her vision blurred at the edges.
"Wha—," she spluttered, taken by surprise. Just how much of a dose did one dart contain? Or was it just another drug?
She jerked back to action and slammed her fist into a man's suit before he could reload.
SLAM!
Another four men collapsed like bowling pins as she ran through them easily before the rest completed their reload and shot once more—their hands never trembling even for a second. Their fingers closed in on the trigger and unleashed another hail of tranquillizer darts point-blank.
"Fuck!" Gwen growled, as a dart sank into her shoulder, injecting her with more of the sedative.
Her vision blurred once more, but she powered through, pulling the last dregs of her willpower from her very soul, before ploughing through the rest of the men, leaving broken bones and dislocated jaws in her wake.
"Hah...didn't you know, doing drugs is hazardous to your health?... Haah!" she panted, standing over her assaulters' unconscious bodies, her fists covered in their blood.
"RRAAAAGHH!!! Spider smash friends! I smash the spider!" Rhino roared from a distance, a small bruise forming above his right eye.
"Wow, Rhino, you really have a way with words. But sorry, I'm not really into the whole 'getting smashed' thing, unless it's from a certain someone. Let's stick to a more civilized dance, shall we?" Gwen snapped back, growing a little delirious from the sedatives.
Rhino leaned down and aimed his horn at her, digging his feet into the ground, preparing to bullrush, and Gwen snapped back to alertness.
She could already deduce that Rhino had a hard time slowing down or changing direction given his large size and slow intelligence, but that wasn't enough to truly take him down. After a full two seconds of introspection, she came to a conclusion.
'I can't beat him. Not in my current state,' she sighed to herself, somehow managing to balance on her wobbly feet among the numerous corpses. Her feet were covered in the blood of innocents who had come to watch her play the drums, and she had three large doses of superhuman-incapacitating sedatives in her.
Things weren't looking good for her.
'I need to damage him enough to get away in time.'
"I gonna smash Spider and then I'm gonna run through that wall," Rhino growled, taking large thunderous steps while slowly speeding up.
"Running through walls? How original. But sorry, I've got a strict 'No Rhino-shaped holes in the neighborhood' policy. Let's find a better way to channel that energy, shall we?"
"RAAARGHH!!! I LIKE HOLES!" the giant Russian spat, approaching Gwen with the speed of a speeding car.
"No wonder your wife left you. Wait, do you even have a wife?" Gwen further incensed him, her eyes locking on the tear in his hide.
"SHUT UPPP!!!"
THWIP!
Gwen somersaulted over the Rhino while webbing onto the tear in the hide and landing behind him, while the dumbass kept running forward.
She held onto the webrope for her dear life, using Rhino's own momentum and her strength to pull against the hide effectively making him rip off his skin.
"AAAARRGHH!" Rhino roared in pain as a large part of his back cleanly came off, making him skid off the ground and smash his head into the concrete at an incredible speed temporarily knocking him out for a few seconds.
"Ah!" Gwen cried out in pain as she landed, clutching her now bleeding hip. Her sedated reflexes failed to keep her from getting grazed by Rhino's horn—which meant that a large part of her skin along with small pieces of flesh was gone. Waves of pain racked her already weakening body, but her willpower never faltered, making her get to her feet, grab a black coat from one of the men, and disappear into the night.
"Spider!!!" Rhino roared in pain and stood up the moment he snapped back to reality, looking down at the crater he'd formed. His back burned and bled due to his suit skin being torn off, covering him in immense agony.
He looked behind him with bloodshot eyes, hoping to tear the Spider apart with his bare hands, but he found absolutely nothing.
There was nothing he could run through.
But just before he could succumb to his madness, he spotted the half-wrecked stage.
"FUCK YOU!" he roared at the inanimate object before charging it headfirst.
***
"This can't possibly exist. The Psi bond over here will not be able to support the structure—the protein will not be stable," Connors pointed out a point in the 3D projection of the theoretical RPX with a long stick.
"Look at the omega bond next to it," said Peter with a mouth full of a burrito.
"I did take that into account. Although it could counter the Psi partially, it would still destabilize it. You can't fix the angle either, that would make RPX unable to resonate," Connor frowned, looking back at the only person in the cafeteria. They had come here for lunch but decided to point out the inconsistencies in RPX after eating.
"It won't destabilize instantly. We actually don't need it to be stable," Peter pointed out. "We only need it to do its job."
"It would destabilize in an hour, will it do the job by then?"
"We'll have to find out," Peter shrugged, inhaling another bite of the giant burrito.
"You're right," Connor sighed. "We'll do an experiment in the session next week. Let's move on to the main problem of your solution. How would you solve the problem of the RPX attacking healthy cells? I do not want another fiasco like the adverse events."
"Yeah, that would not be pleasant," Peter said, finishing his meal. "I thought that we could exploit the Enhanced Permeability and Retention (EPR) Effect that tumor cells show where substances can passively accumulate in them due to their leaky vasculature and impaired lymphatic drainage."
"How would you do that? Make molecules that could bind to the molecule receptors on the endothelial cells?"
"Exactly!" said Peter excitedly. There was nothing that got him more passionate than biology. "We could design ligands more specifically. They could even inhibit the VEGF pathways to mess with cancer even more!"
"That's..." Connor's eyebrows disappeared into his messy hair. "...ingenious and a tall order. Do you think you could really design something like that?"
"I think I ca—"
RING! RING!
Peter's phone vibrated in his pocket.
"I'm sorry, but could you excuse me for a moment?"
"Oh, of course, of course," Connor waved his hand, motioning him to continue.
'Gwen,' he thought to himself, confused.
It was 4:15 pm, and the concert should've started by now. Why was she calling him? Did something happen?
He picked up the call, and his eyes immediately reduced to pinpricks when he heard Gwen's pained, slurring voice.
[ twent...twenty fou- no, twenty third street. Alley between 23rd and 24th. ]
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***
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