He pushed open the heavy bulletproof glass door leading to the terrace, and the cold November wind of suburban New York instantly rushed down his collar.
"Don't stay outside too long. It's windy." Wanda's cheerful voice came from the kitchen, accompanied by the splash of tap water rinsing bone china plates.
"Just long enough for one cigarette." Lynn looked back and gave her an exceptionally gentle, reassuring smile.
The glass door slowly closed behind him, completely shutting out the warm light inside and the unfamiliar tune Wanda was softly humming.
The instant the lock clicked into place, the mask of warmth on Lynn's face receded like the tide, replaced by absolute calm and coldness.
"Bzzz-"
Every hair on the back of his neck stood on end, as though a high-voltage microcurrent had suddenly coursed through the depths of his brainstem. The sensation wasn't painful, but it was intensely clear. The [Top-tier Spider-Sense] he had just integrated took complete control of his nerve endings at that moment.
Lynn neither turned his head nor made any unnecessary defensive movements. Maintaining an utterly relaxed posture, he simply walked to the stone railing at the terrace's edge and pulled a pack of special-issue cigarettes he had swiped from S.H.I.E.L.D. out of his pocket.
"Clink."
The Zippo lighter's flint wheel struck an orange flame, briefly illuminating Lynn's sharply defined face. He took a deep drag, the pungent taste of tobacco rushing down his windpipe into his lungs and giving his taut nerves a moment's relief.
Under cover of the drifting smoke, Lynn closed his eyes.
The power of Spider-Sense was on full display at that moment. It wasn't merely a passive warning against mortal danger; it was more like an enormous, invisible web centered on Lynn and extending endlessly outward. Every minute movement within two hundred meters constructed an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional model in his mind.
The rustling of branches and needles as wind swept through the pine grove, the paths of crickets leaping through the grass, even the sound of water flowing through drainage pipes five meters underground... every detail stood out with perfect clarity.
And at the very heart of this sensory web, behind a carved stone pillar on the second-floor balcony less than five meters diagonally above his head, an exceptionally powerful, severely distorted biomagnetic field lay dormant like a bomb that could detonate at any moment.
The fingers holding Lynn's cigarette paused slightly.
He "saw" it.
It was a pure white strand of spider silk stuck to the back of the stone pillar. Its material far surpassed any polymer known on Earth, stretched perfectly taut in the night wind and even emitting an extremely faint hum.
Farther up the strand, a slender figure brimming with explosive power hung upside down in the shadows, defying everything one knew about gravity.
There was no killing intent whatsoever.
If she wanted him dead, Spider-Sense would undoubtedly have delivered a needlelike sting. But what Lynn sensed now was a gaze as thick and clammy as deep-sea sludge, cold and filled with an utterly pathological possessiveness.
That gaze was like a lone wolf that had starved for half a month staring at a bloody piece of fatty meat, or an obsessive staring at an incomparable treasure lost and found again. It pierced the darkness and Lynn's shirt, licking his back inch by inch, as though she wanted to crush his entire body and swallow him whole.
This cheat really is so useful it makes my scalp crawl. Lynn sneered silently to himself and exhaled a perfect smoke ring.
He was now one hundred percent certain that the person watching him in secret was Ghost-Spider-Gwen Stacy-who had pursued him across universes.
In the simulated spacetime, to earn the highest rating, "Till Death Do Us Part," he had smiled and kissed Gwen's forehead in the desperate circumstances of their fall from the Clock Tower, then personally severed the spider silk and plunged into the bottomless abyss.
With his own life, he had carved a bloody brand into the depths of that girl's soul that would never heal. And now, the side effects had arrived. That girl, filled with despair and a darkened obsession, had torn through the barriers of the Multiverse and forced her way to his door.
Lynn tapped the ash off his cigarette, his mind racing like a supercomputer.
The situation was clear, but also lethally dangerous.
Inside, just one wall away, was Wanda, a newly awakened, fiercely territorial, Skyfather-level yandere who could twist several Helicarriers into scrap metal at any moment. If Lynn showed even the slightest panic at being attacked right now, or simply called out Gwen's name, Wanda would absolutely go berserk in an instant and use Chaos Magic to crush the entire second floor, Gwen included, into pulp.
Meanwhile, Gwen overhead was clearly on the verge of losing her reason as well. Most likely, she hadn't pounced immediately because she feared the terrifying Scarlet Energy inside, but even more because she was observing-observing whether Lynn was being "controlled" by Wanda or staying here willingly.
This was a battle of information and psychology pushed to the limit.
Lynn took a deep breath and decided to take the initiative and control the pace.
He deliberately rested his right hand, cigarette between his fingers, on the stone railing and turned his wrist slightly, using the dim lawn lights to precisely expose its inner side to the second-floor balcony.
There was a very faint red mark there. It was the scar left when Green Goblin's miniature bomb had grazed him while he was saving Gwen in the simulated spacetime. When reconstructing his body, the system had retained these "medals of love" with a particularly nasty sense of humor.
This tiny gesture was a performance intended exclusively for Gwen.
Sure enough.
The instant Lynn exposed the scar on his wrist, Spider-Sense detected violent fluctuations in the biomagnetic field overhead.
Hanging upside down in the shadows, Gwen's breath abruptly caught. Beneath her white suit, her muscles instantly tightened, and her nails dug deep into the hard stone pillar. Flakes of stone fell soundlessly onto the grass.
She was trembling.
That scar was like a rusty knife driven viciously into her already ravaged memories. She recognized it. It was proof of the injury Lynn had sustained to protect her.
"He hasn't forgotten... he's still my Lynn..." In the darkness, Gwen's eyes beneath her mask were bloodshot, tears spilling uncontrollably from them and sliding down her inverted cheeks. But then, when she saw the loose shirt Lynn wore, so clearly bearing Wanda's scent, that surge of emotion was instantly devoured by extreme jealousy and madness.
"That old woman... how dare she make him wear her clothes!"
The pressure conveyed by Spider-Sense abruptly soared, and a faint sting shot through the back of Lynn's head.
He knew he had pushed things far enough. If he provoked her any further, this Ghost-Spider would tear her prey apart with her teeth, regardless of the consequences.
"Whew-"
Lynn exhaled his final mouthful of smoke into the night wind and naturally stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the stone railing. He straightened, brushed the hem of his shirt, and prepared to turn back inside.
At the very instant he turned.
"Plip."
A drop of cold liquid landed squarely on the back of the hand where Lynn had just exposed his scar.
Lynn's pupils abruptly contracted.
That wasn't night dew. It was a tear carrying the warmth of a body.
Immediately afterward, Spider-Sense's warning shot to its limit in an instant!
Lynn didn't look up, but he clearly sensed the taut strand of spider silk overhead being silently severed. Like a female leopard locked onto her prey, a white blur abandoned all concealment and lunged straight down at his back, carrying suffocating obsession and madness!
At the same time, inside, just one door away, the porcelain plate being rinsed in the sink shattered with a crack, crushed to powder by a sudden outpouring of Scarlet Energy.
A clash of romantic rivals capable of destroying half of New York erupted in full at the very moment Lynn turned!
Before you continue