Frostbite

With Great Power

Warning: This chapter contains Minor Character Death.

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"Are your bones hollow?"

Peter looked up from his second check of his rubber bullets as the elevator they rode rose up another level. "Why would my bones be hollow?"

"Don't spiders have hollow bones?"

"... No. But I hate to say I know where you're coming from."

"Boo," Wade booed.

"You boo. Spiders have exoskeletons and despite 'skeleton' being in the name, it's still an outer shell. Like with crabs and stuff. You should've asked me if my skin was crunchy instead."

Wade slowly reached out to poke at a part of his face that wasn't covered by a mask and goggles. Peter slapped his hand away.

"Dude, you think I could've hidden the fact that I've had an exoskeleton this whole time? I've literally bled out on Dom's couch!"

"You can be a slippery, slimery, wriggly worm when you want to be, living your life composting like you've got all the time in the world."

"Worms are non-arthropod invertebrates."

"Gesundheit."

"They've got no exoskeletons or bones."

"Pick a fucking struggle."

The red, pixelated number above the sleek panel of buttons steadily climbed higher. It wasn't often he saw missions where contractors waltzed into high-rises in the daytime, but this building had recently sold under bankruptcy with floors barren from the probable liquidation of all their tech—

"But you're so light and flippy," Wade told him, the tinted windows at their backs shining with the early afternoon sun. "Are you sure you aren't built like a bendy straw?"

"The way my bones break? Full of marrow."

A thirty-seven lit up as their elevator slowed to a stop on their floor. Except the stop was more like a pause and after a moment it shook back to life; the digital screen sputtered and glitched, and the elevator continued to rise.

Peter stared. "Pool?"

"Yeah?"

"That was our floor."

"Yeah." Wade smacked his lips, which was pretty impressive under his mask, and planted both hands on his hips. "Is it just me or—"

"No, the elevator's definitely going faster."

"Goodie! I've always wanted to be shot out through a roof in a contraption built by a man who's obsessed with chocolate and has dentist daddy issues."

Peter scoured around the floor first at all the corners, any divots, maybe cracks anyone wouldn't care to miss. There was no carpeting to lift up or any strange marks in plain gray epoxy and his eyes raked up the walls—forty-one, forty-two, forty-three—and checked the walling, maybe cracks, any divots, all the corners, here.

A lens bubble the size of a dime.

Two things happened at once.

As he reached for one of his friend's guns to nail the back right corner with a metal bullet, a katana tore into the panel and jolted the elevator to a screeching stop on the fifty-sixth floor.

They whipped around in tandem and pointed at each other with twin shouts— "What did you do?!"

"I shot a camera," Peter said as he moved his finger towards the new hole in the ominously still death box. "What did you do?"