The gale scraped wildly at Lynn's cheeks like countless blunt knives. Weightlessness seized his stomach in an instant, his organs churning violently inside his chest.
He wore no high-tech armor, only a thin S.H.I.E.L.D. field coat.
Below him lay the bottomless shaft of the Clock Tower, where enormous, intricately arranged gears meshed and turned in the darkness like the fangs of some giant beast.
Boom!
A dazzling orange-red fireball erupted overhead. The Pumpkin Bomb's shock wave slammed into Lynn's back, mixed with the acrid stench of gunpowder.
The blast hurled Gwen Stacy through the air. Ghost-Spider's white suit was covered in scorch marks, and the web-shooters she took such pride in had jammed during the fierce fight. Now she could only flail her arms in desperation, trying to grab anything she could use for leverage.
But there was nothing. Only ruined brick walls rushing past.
Just as Gwen Stacy thought she was about to be smashed to a pulp, a black figure hurtled down like a meteor from above and to one side.
Lynn forcibly twisted his torso in midair, his agent-level muscle control allowing him to wrench his falling trajectory off course amid the gale.
Smack!
Lynn's hand clamped tightly around Gwen Stacy's wrist.
The immense pull made Lynn's shoulder joint pop dully. Agony instantly shot up the nerves in his arm to his brain. Yet rather than let go, he hauled her into his arms.
Behind her mask, Gwen Stacy's eyes widened as she stared in disbelief at the man who had suddenly appeared.
"Who... who are you?!" The gale tore her voice to shreds. "You don't even have a parachute! Are you insane?!"
An ordinary person had jumped straight down from hundreds of meters up just to save her?
Lynn did not answer that stupid question. He wrapped one arm around Gwen Stacy's slender waist and swiftly drew the tactical dagger strapped to the outside of his thigh with his other hand.
"S.H.I.E.L.D. field agent, number 734." Lynn's voice was cold and hard as iron, without a trace of fear in the face of death. "Keep it short, Spider-Girl. Do your shooters still work?"
His thoroughly professional composure stunned Gwen Stacy. She instinctively glanced down at her wrist. "The slot's warped... I need three seconds to reset it!"
"I'll buy you five." Lynn's gaze was icy as he looked past Gwen Stacy's shoulder and stared fixedly upward.
"Heh heh heh heh! What a touching rescue! Then go to hell together!"
Riding his Goblin Glider with a ghostly green exhaust trailing behind him, Green Goblin swooped down like an enormous bat. The rotary machine gun at the front of the glider had already locked onto the falling pair.
"He's catching up!" Gwen Stacy cried.
Lynn's face remained expressionless, his brain working rapidly like a precision computer.
He had only a mortal's constitution now. Taking machine-gun fire head-on meant certain death. But if there was one thing he had in abundance, it was the ability to control a situation through information gaps and tactical deception.
"Head down!" Lynn barked, abruptly pressing Gwen Stacy against his chest.
An instant before Green Goblin opened fire, Lynn undid his coat's fastener with one hand and flung it upward.
The loose black coat instantly billowed in the gale, blocking Green Goblin's view like a shield.
In agent tactics, this was called a "Visual Substitute."
Rat-tat-tat-tat!
The hail of bullets instantly shredded the coat. But Lynn had already used the reaction force to glide three meters sideways toward a load-bearing pillar, holding Gwen Stacy in his arms.
In the fraction of a second when Green Goblin lost sight of them, Lynn drew a flashbang from his waist, flicked the pin free with his thumb, and hurled it precisely at the glider's air intake.
Bang!
Blinding white light exploded through the narrow shaft. Green Goblin screamed and covered his eyes. His glider lost its balance and crashed headfirst into an enormous gear nearby, bursting into dazzling sparks.
"Now!" Lynn roared as they hung weightless.
Gwen Stacy reacted swiftly. The instant the flashbang exploded, she had already forced the slot back into place.
Whoosh!
A white web shot from her wrist and stuck precisely to a thick steel beam spanning the shaft above.
Their plunge abruptly stopped.
The immense gravitational acceleration traveled through the web into their bodies. Lynn felt as though the force was about to crush all his organs, and a sweet, bloody taste rose in his throat.
Yet he kept his arm locked around Gwen Stacy's waist, not loosening his grip in the slightest.
The two swung violently through the air like a pendulum. Beneath their feet lay a bottomless black abyss.
"We... we stopped!" Gwen Stacy panted, a flicker of relief at surviving flashing through her eyes beneath her mask. She looked down at Lynn, who was holding her tightly, and her heart began pounding uncontrollably.
This man, with nothing but a mortal body, had wrested her life back from Green Goblin.
"Nice work, Mr. Agent." A barely perceptible tremor entered Gwen Stacy's voice.
Lynn said nothing.
He raised his head, his gaze deep as he stared at the taut strand of web above them.
As a top-tier "player," he knew perfectly well that the system would never give him a scenario so easy to clear.
The SSS rating for "Till Death Do Us Part" demanded the ultimate aesthetic of tragedy, a tearing apart deep within the soul.
Sure enough.
Rrrip-
An extremely faint sound of snapping fibers rang especially harshly through the howling wind.
Gwen Stacy's body abruptly stiffened.
She followed Lynn's gaze upward, and her pupils instantly shrank to pinpoints.
A stray bullet from Green Goblin's earlier machine-gun fire had grazed the web near its anchor point. The specially formulated web, which could normally support several tons, was now halfway severed.
And now it was bearing the weight of two adults, along with the pulling force from their violent swinging.
Rrrip... rrrip...
The snapping grew more frequent. White fibers broke one after another, as though counting down to death.
"No... no!" Gwen Stacy frantically raised her other hand, trying to shoot another web.
Click.
The shooter gave a sharp, empty click. The web fluid had run out.
Despair instantly engulfed Ghost-Spider like a rising tide.
"The web... can't hold both of us." Gwen Stacy's voice took on a sobbing edge. She clutched Lynn's shoulders tightly in return, her nails almost digging into his flesh. "Don't let go! I can think of something! I know I can!"
Lynn watched her quietly.
The gale tousled his short hair. His cold, stern face held not the slightest fear of death.
In his mind, the system panel flickered with cold blue light.
[Fatal crisis detected.] [Current target emotional fluctuation value: 85%.]
Still not enough.
Lynn assessed it coldly to himself. This bond was nowhere near enough to make this obsessive Spider-Girl cross universes to find him in reality.
He had to shatter this "vessel" completely, then reshape it with the most extreme pain.
An almost imperceptible curve touched Lynn's lips-the smile of a chess player preparing to close the net.
He slowly released the arm wrapped around Gwen Stacy's waist.
"What... what are you doing?!" Gwen Stacy noticed his movement, and her eyes beneath her mask instantly became bloodshot with terror.
Lynn did not answer.
Holding the sharp tactical dagger in a reverse grip in his right hand, he slowly raised it and laid the blade against the web that was about to snap.
Above that immense abyss, he looked into Gwen Stacy's eyes.
His wrist was poised to jerk with force.
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