- Black Tarantula - Male Reader x Marvel

Chapter 67: Harlem

(AN: I wanted to drop a quick question about chapter lengths, and wanted to gauge opinions. What do we think? This chapter is a little shorter. The last few chapters have been a lot longer, ranging from around seven-thousand, to ten-thousand. I've moved towards six-thousand as an acceptable minimum word count for each chapter, but is that too little? Is eight-thousand every chapter too much? Let me know your thoughts...)

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[Queens, New York City]

The faint, cold light of the early morning slipped in through the half-drawn blinds, casting a pale glow over a still room, where not a single thing stirred. The relentless tap of rain against the window gave the scene a sombre tone, one that perfectly matched [Y/N]'s mood. It pelted the glass, one volley at a time, forcing him from out his slumber, a restless daze. He hadn't slept properly, maybe not at all, yet, his body had eventually capitulated. He was exhausted, but his mind refused to settle, constantly running over the events of the previous night like an old film on an endless loop...

[Y/N] sat on the edge of his bed, staring blankly at the mess that had overtaken his small room. He massaged his brow, his eyes stinging once again, it seemed a few hours of sleep had done nothing to ease the pain. Clothes were strewn across the floor, papers and books piled haphazardly on the desk, and jagged remnants of last night's fury still littered the place. He had found little time for cleaning in his tired state. A chair was knocked over, laying flat against the floor. However, it was the wall in front of him that held his attention. The makeshift board he had patched together in a frantic haze, covered with scrawled notes, sketches, and maps, all pinned and connected by string, like some crude web.

Months ago, he had stolen a detailed map from one of Big C's outposts, a carefully constructed layout of their operations across the city. It may have not looked professional but it supplied him with everything he would have needed. It had been a lifeline, guiding his progress into Manhattan's criminal underbelly. That map was lost to him now, and he had been forced to reconstruct what little he remembered from memory alone. The result was frustratingly incomplete, a patchwork of guesswork and assumptions of details that gnawed at him every time he looked at it...

[Y/N] let out a long, weary breath, while running a heavy hand through his dishevelled hair. The Harlem gangs' leaders, Diamondback, Black Mariah, Cottonmouth, and Tombstone, were all marked on the map, their territories loosely outlined in red marker. He knew these names well from his countless raids into the northernmost part of Manhattan. They were each key players in the region, ruthless and powerful, and they were all involved in something far more sinister than their usual criminal activities.

He had heard the whispers, followed the leads that pointed towards them, rounding up lost children, homeless kids, those down on their luck and looking for another opportunity in a world that tried its best to ignore them in totality. The Harlem gangs would hand them over to the Maggia for their twisted experimentation, like some sick, twisted horror story, but the real world could never be so nice as fiction, and this tale was unfolding right before their very eyes, within New York City's shadows. [Y/N] was determined to put an end to it.

However, despite his efforts, he had found absolutely nothing. No leads, no locations, no tangible evidence to tie them to the missing children. It was as if they were ghosts, slipping through his fingers every time he got close. The frustration was quickly starting to eat away at him, biting at his resolve. How many more children would vanish before he could stop it? How many more families would be irrevocably torn apart? The thought made his blood boil, but beneath the seeping rage, there was a creeping sense of helplessness, a fear that he was in over his head, fighting an enemy too vast and too well-hidden to defeat alone...