The Lizard's jaws snapped shut where Spider-Man's femur had been milliseconds prior, fangs shredding concrete instead. Peter rolled through the spray of debris, his suit's biometrics screaming scarlet warnings across his HUD.

"Doc, c'mon!" he barked, voice raw beneath the modulator. Blood trickled from a gash above his brow, diluting the stench of chlorine and reptilian musk. "Your alter ego literally gave us PowerPoints about impulse control last Tuesday!"

Across the lab, Connors' human eye twitched behind cracked glasses—a flicker of the professor still shackled inside the monster. His claws spasmed, shredding a bank of monitors.

"Don't..." the Lizard growled, the word mangled by a tongue too thick, too wrong. "...patronize me, insect."

Miles backflipped onto an overturned gurney, his lenses flaring as he aimed at Simmons—now elbow-deep in a sparking control panel. "Not to side with the giant iguana, but you're the one who said he was stable!"

The web hit her square in the face.

"Stable-ish!" Simmons spat, peeling the adhesive off with a surgeon's precision. "And for God's sake, Morales, that was prototype graphene!"

Peter's spider-sense detonated a half-second too late.

The Lizard's tail whipped out, smashing Miles into a refrigeration unit. Vials of Connors' "cure" shattered, their cerulean serum pooling with the boy's blood.

"Kid? Kid!" Peter lunged, but Scarlet Spider was already there, yanking Miles upright.

Ben grimaced at the shards embedded in Miles' forearm. "Walk it off, rookie. Last week, I got degloved by a—"

Miles convulsed.

Not a seizure—a metamorphosis.

Tendons squelched as his bones elongated, skin erupting into emerald scales. His final scream gurgled into a hiss, pupils slitting into reptilian daggers.

Scarlet Spider recoiled, scarlet energy crackling defensively. "Oh, you've got to be shitting me—"

The new Lizard—Miles—lunged.

But it wasn't Peter he targeted.

It was Connors.

The air reeked of bile and scorched keratin—the Lizard virus's calling card. Peter's lenses auto-zoomed on the horde blocking the skylight, their mutations grotesquely unique: a janitor's spine erupting into a spiked tail, a nurse's fingers fused into scythe-like claws. Their collective hiss vibrated in his molars.

Scarlet didn't wait. His impact webbing plowed a tunnel through the ceiling's asbestos, but Peter grabbed his wrist mid-swing. "Wait."

"For what?" Ben snarled, yanking free. "Hallmark cards?"

Peter's spider-sense prickled—not a threat, but a pattern. The infected weren't attacking. They were... circling. A macabre waltz guided by some unseen hive pulse.

Amadeus descended like a falling star, repulsor beams slicing through the swarm. Charred scales rained down, sizzling where they landed. "Temporary reprieve!" Cho barked, his Iron Spider armor's neural interface flickering—a tell. He was scared. "The cure requires a retroviral catalyst. Specifically, Y/N's blood."

Peter's stomach dropped.

Ben lunged first, pinning Cho against a shattered cryotube. "You promised that vault was sealed," he hissed, his scarlet lenses inches from Amadeus's gold-plated face. "Swore it was over."

"It was." Cho's voice cracked, the genius who'd outwitted Dormammu now trembling. "But the Lizard strain hybridized with the Oz formula. It's cannibalizing every enhanced cell in the city."

Peter's mask peeled back, revealing the bruise-dark circles under his eyes. "Y/N's dead, Cho."

A beat. The infected began to croon—a mangled Gregorian chant.

Amadeus activated a hologram: DNA helixes spiraling into a double-helix of StarkTech and Knull's symbiote code. "No. They're evolution. And their blood... it's the only thing the virus fears."

Scarlet recoiled. "You want to turn their corpse into a vaccine factory."

"No." Cho's optics glowed cyan, projecting a live feed from the abandoned Horizon Labs. "I want to ask them."

The screen flickered.

There, chained in a containment field thrumming with gamma radiation and Catholic guilt, was Y/N.

Alive.

Changed.

The Indominus's roar wasn't sound—it was pressure, a subsonic detonation that cracked the concrete beneath her talons. The lizard mutants answered in a cacophony of shrieks, their chorus faltering as she moved. Not with the clunky brutality of a therapod, but the liquid grace of something older, hungrier. Her jaws closed on the alpha mutant's skull.

Tendons snapped like overstrung cello wires.

She shook the corpse once, twice, arterial spray painting the walls in Rorschach streaks of blackened ichor. The remaining pack froze, nostrils flaring as they inhaled the pheromones of butchered kin. One by one, their spined backs arched—not in threat, but obeisance. A grotesque pantomime of wolves yielding to a winter-starved bear.

Spider-Man's spider-sense flatlined.

Not silence. Submission.

The Indominus pivoted, her musculature rippling beneath scales that shimmered like oil-slicked obsidian. Crimson eyes—too human, too calculating—narrowed. Her vocal cords vibrated with a sound that shouldn't exist: a growl woven through with the cadence of speech, tectonic plates grinding out a haiku.

"Petwer-Man," she purred, talons clicking against the floor in a mockery of applause. "How... darwinian. You've brought me a congregation."

Scarlet's gauntlet whined as he charged his impact webbing, the sound slicing through the stench of musk and iron. "Still think she's on our side?" he spat, gesturing to the Indominus below. Her tail swayed like a conductor's baton, orchestrating the mutants' grotesque ballet of obedience.

Peter's mask hid the twitch in his jaw, but not the tremor in his voice. "I don't know, Ben. But that's Connors she's got on a leash. Maybe there's—"

The Indominus flicked her tail—a whip-crack of finality.

Dr. Curt Connors lurched forward, his Lizard form hunched in parody of reverence. Bone spurs jutted from his spine like broken cathedral pillars, and his claws, once savage tools of chaos, now scraped the floor in deference. "Vials... secured," he rasped, the scientist's cadence buried beneath guttural sycophancy. "Mistress."

The horde followed suit, collapsing into a sea of scaled bellies, their throats vibrating with submissive keening.

Spider-Man dropped silently behind Sable, his lenses wide. The air tasted metallic, charged with the ozone of her presence. "Y/N," he whispered, the name a plea and a prayer.

She turned.

Her eyes weren't red anymore—they were voids, event horizons rimmed with dying stars. Her voice emerged layered: the growl of a Cretaceous predator fused with the chilling, algorithmic precision of a broken AI. "Y/N is... disassembled."

A scaled hand rose, talons glinting with traces of webbing and human blood.

"Now? I am Sable."