So I had spent the last week using the network of people I had built. I had small businesses in the area that were part of my Thorn Circle, earning my protection by treating their employees decently. Honestly the ones that offered to pay me for protection were usually treating their employees like slaves you didn’t have to feed our house, so they could pound sand. The employees were still under my protection, but the business and its goods were not my issue. New York can be a bad place, and I am a goblin. While territorial as fuck, we aren’t any sort of Paladin driven to protect everyone, even people who are as nasty as they feel they can get away with. I had the streets wired. If anyone was doing anything shady in my neighborhoods, I heard about it.

There were enough strings passing through the neighborhood to make a pot of spaghetti for an Italian wedding feast look untangled. Honestly, the comics always make it seem like having the information from the streets allows you to know what is going on behind at the criminal mastermind level. I am willing to bet none of the superheroes or supervillains have a secret identity as a comic writer because the idea is bollocks. I mean there was a lot of nasty stuff going about, and if you tracked the players not the plays, you could more or less get a sense of which bits connected to something bigger. Vaguely, mostly.

I could not find Green Goblin fencing anything that he stole. I could not find Green Goblin ever hiring muscle. He didn’t hire transport. He didn’t hire weapons producers, he didn’t hire armourers. He had no contact with the street doctors to get patched up after fights. He didn’t seem to need ANYTHING from the city itself. No one lives in a vacuum. Everyone leaves tracks, but Green Goblin didn’t leave any in public. How do you exist, use technological expendables and never have to resupply? He chucks pumpkin bombs like they are promotional items, rides a sled that I have seen pictures of Spiderman trashing at least six times, and yet he always has another. You don’t just go on Amazon and order one. Plus, no one else has ever used one. Not once. If it was out there, someone would be using it. Even modified enough to somewhat hide its origin, you would be able to spot its basics, but no one had one.

I set dad on the trail, he was a cyber security expert and he looked at the targets of the Goblin’s attacks. There were a lot of random attacks that just seemed to be ‘hurt a lot of innocent people to make Spiderman come out an play’ attacks. Seriously, the dude is giving goblins a bad name. I mean, we are walking nightmare fuel, but we are predators, not the freaking Spanish Inquisition. The other attacks were not random. They were on seriously high level military research projects, or corporate R&D on ground breaking, sometimes game changing, technologies in fields from biotech through drones, along with space propulsion, alternatives to lithium ion batteries for long term low loss electrical storage, and even one on plastic recycling enzymatic tweaks to common bacteria. It isn’t exactly the list you would expect for a lone wolf operator. I mean, I had never heard of most of the projects. Some dad had to dig up through more technical articles that I hope to ever have to read in my life, and the rest not even the industry or the scientific community knew about. It was hush hush, total corporate down low, and yet the freaking Goblin knew about it. I was a goblin, I couldn’t even figure out how crypto currency worked. This was not a goblin thing. Trust me.

I decided to go back to doing what I do best. I took all the articles about where Green Goblin had been sighted when just flying about doing goblin things, the random sightings. Then I plotted them on a big street map of New York, and came up with two circles. One was in the high class residential areas, and if I went that route it would be hard to hide, and drawing fire from security forces and police would not be an indicator of being close to Green Goblin, it would be just a case of the truly rich in a place with superpowered bad guys had security that was ready to handle the same. The other one was in the industrial sections of Brooklyn by the old Navy Yard. I decided to go hunting.

There was a gang shootout going on that threatened to bring police and shut down the area. That was my excuse. I mean, I might also not have thought a bunch of kids not old enough to shave shouldn’t be killing each other over whatever bullshit their testosterone fueled egos had latched on to. It took about ten minutes, and no one was killed. One of them would have to go to the emergency room to get his second pistol removed from his rectum, but that was on him. I took the first one away and told them to run along home unless they wanted to get fucked up. He then told me to stick it where the sun wouldn’t shine and drew a hold out .22. I let him empty it into my chest, then rammed it up his ass. Don’t wear your pants half off if you aren’t flirting. I hope that pistol wasn’t still hot, but that would be his problem. Still, no one killed, and their chances of wanting to redo that probably got lowered when they saw me ram that Saturday Night Special up homie’s poop chute. No young man wants to admit being afraid of dying, but a pistol up the tail pipe is a legitimate reason to not go play drive by shooting tonight.

I was feeling pretty good about myself, and I had a good feeling that I would find my goblin tonight.

For the record, goblin intuition sucks.

I found my goblin. I mean, sort of. I caught the reflection of a figure hunched over flying on a bat shaped glider that frankly needed to have its emissions checked. It was rolling coal like a redneck at a redlight. I can’t fly, but you know, I can run about eighty kph, and have reflexes that make that seem like slow motion. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop, or even wall to wall, I could cut the corner on this bozo and get ahead of him for a good ambush, as he kept looking left as he crossed the blocks. I figure he was going to go up to a bigger street to get some flying room, and then cut over. I made better time in tight quarters so went to cut across.

Twip.

Fuck, I would grow to hate that sound. I was in mid leap, jumping from building to building, when that wall crawling idiot nailed me with his webbing. Fun fact about tigers, the reason they scream before they leap is that they need their prey to freeze. Once they leap, they can’t do shit about their direction or landing point because there is nothing to push off of in mid air. I didn’t scream before I leaped, because I was being stealthy and I didn’t want the wall on the other side of the street to dodge, I was needing it to bounce off of for my next jump. When a certain friendly neighborhood spider man caught me in the side with his webbing, my clean power leap to the building directly in front of me turned into an uncontrolled spiral into the brick wall to my left.

I hit at speed, with zero control, and I felt the bricks shatter under me. I lost all my breath, but it saved my ribs from breaking.

I turned to try to grab the side of the wall with my claws to bleed off my speed, when some JACKHOLE in a red and blue spandex suit kicked me off the wall and back into free space.

“Uh uh uh goblin, wall crawling is for spider’s only!” The little shit joked, like ambushing a perfectly innocent young goblin out to ambush a less than perfectly innocent goblin was somehow comedic gold.

I hit the streets in a perfect airborne roll that would have been better without twelve floors of acceleration.

I rolled to my feet, only to hear that damned sound, doubled up.

“Thwip, thwip” and felt two bands of spider silk wrap my legs together as the little shit dove in with both feet to put the boots to my chin.

I was stunned, out of breath, in pain, and with my legs tied together, but you know what? I was also better at this than he was.

I grabbed both his feet and used both of our momentum to fall backwards, HARD. I played crack the whip, with his head as the whip and we both hit the ground together.

Now we were both stunned, out of breath, in pain, and with bits of pavement stuck in places that would hurt to dig out of again. I bent in half to start clawing at the spider thread to free my legs. That stuff is nasty. It gives more than you think. If it was just steel cable, I could snap it easily. I can dead lift about eight tons, and my grip strength is actually my best feature. Goblin claws are evolutions greatest gift to the goblin. This shit though gives like the worst resistance band you ever used in a gym. It is hard to cut, hard to break, and sticky besides. I never had much respect for web using spiders, I mean, learn to hunt like a real predator! I may have to rethink this position. This stuff is freaking dangerous!

Distraction kills, or in this case, gets us both killed. I had just freed my legs when I heard a voice behind me screaming “Not this time Goblin!”

Then the world went sideways. Spiderman grabbed me, swung me overhead and was prepared to slam me straight back down. This put me rotating above his head when I saw the Green Goblin I had been looking for swooping down at us. There were four, count them, one, two, three, four pumpkin bombs, arching towards us in a spread from his man purse. Flaming freaking jack o lanterns. I don’t know how much of what explosive they held, but the way the Green Goblin was banking away and pulling heavy G to get away, I am thinking, a lot. Maybe more than we can survive.

I was in mid air, nothing to push off of. I couldn’t move, and Spiderman was in the middle of hammering me into the ground, right at ground zero. I couldn’t get out of the way, couldn’t survive being hit.

Drawing my left hand Desert Eagle as my right was out of position, I tracked the lead pumpkin bomb and fired the shot of my life.

CRACK! A .50 caliber Action Express hard point left the ten inch barrel at 1650 feet per second, with about 2400 joules or 244 kilogram/meters of force. Why is this important? Well whatever the threshold was to set off a pumpkin bombs internal explosives, it was below 2400 Joules.

BOOM! [B O O M !!!!!] One little boom of a pumpkin bomb exploding mid air preceded the larger triple boom as the other three bombs were blasted away from us about 15 meters before they each detonated.

One goblin and one spider got slapped by four pressure waves, each strong enough to flip a car like a tiddly wink rolled over us. We got bitch slapped by Sir Issaac Newton’s laws of physics a bunch of different ways, then fell back to earth to groan and do a pretty good impression of Magic Carp, the fish Pokemon used for comic relief in that series. Like Magic Carp, all either one of us superhumans could do was lie there with our eyes bugged out making desperate fish faces as we tried to get collapsed lungs to reinflate because Oxygen was an actual addiction, and since the explosions, neither of us had any in a while.

When we both rolled onto all fours to pant and glare at each others like two strange dogs too pissed off to bark and too tired to fight, Spiderman actually decided to do something other than comedy. Specifically communication.

“You aren’t the Green Goblin!” Spider man said, as if accusing me. He sounded fucking twelve. Like I had just told him there is no Santa Claus.

I started to laugh. Not a mature response, and my ribs hurt so bad my vision actually faded around the edges into white fire. “Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha, what was your first clue? When he dive bombed us with enough explosives to flatten Bagdad? Kid, you didn’t just get out of school to fight crime, you got out of special ed!”

He rolled to his feet, ready to fight again. Fine. If he wants to fight, I will rip his arms off. Maybe they can split in half when he heals and he can get enough to be a real spider. It’s almost helping his career growth when I put it that way. Until then, I am just going to lie here and let the world be concussed for a little bit, because I have been slammed too hard too often to feel like giving gravity a chance at me just now.

“You want to fight me?” He demanded.

I sighed, he was too young, and I suddenly felt a thousand years old.

“No kid. You are a hero. He is a villain. I want to fight him. You help people, he hurts people. I want to stop HIM. Instead, some teenager uses me to wreck a few buildings and then decides to reward me for saving both our lives from death by high explosives by picking unnecessary fight number two.”

The kid clutches his head and begins to groan, then kick some broken pavement as the degree of our collective fail begins to hammer home.

“So, um, sorry about that. I got to go, the Green Goblin just hit Stane Industries and got some sort of military project data that would be super dangerous if it got out there.”

Thwip!

He shot a building across the street, and with a combination of thread elasticity and jump got himself airborne enough to nail a building across the way and boost both speed and altitude. He is stronger than I am. He is faster than I am. He recovers faster than I do, and he has some sort of danger sense that lets him know an attack is inbound even if he sucks at picking out what that danger is. Objectively, he is more superhuman than I am. On the other hand, he fights stupid. If I ambushed him like that, he would have been incapacitated or killed before he knew I was there. He gave me way too many chances, it is almost like he as all this power and either no training in how to kill with his hands, or no intention of actually hurting someone. How the hell do you superhero like that against guys who are chucking around bombs that can take out a light armoured vehicle like they are tic-tacs and not get yourself and everyone you are trying to protect, dead?

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I wrapped myself in glamour and pulled out my cell phone. I took a cab to Stane Industries and talked to the cops on the ground. The Green Goblin hit the place, went through their security, including some brutes in heavy power armour that seemed to be the losing design in a bid to deal with the Hulk for the US Army. Well, they got their ass handed to them on their corporate head office turf by the Green Goblin, who then went off to make their main data farms his little green bitch for all their R&D, so maybe they aren’t ready for the Hulk just yet. Cops don’t like to talk to insurance guys or PI’s and with what my cover identity was, I was a bit of both, but the one thing they love more than life itself is when rent a cops who make more in a week than they do in a year get made to look like chumps.

They showed me a bootlegged copy of the internal security footage that was going around the police back channels (secrets and social media, not a good combo). Our Green Goblin is maybe as strong as I am. Not as strong as Spiderman. He is not skilled either, but holy shit is he ruthless. He does not care who he hurts and he really knows how to use fear in a fight. I swear he isn’t one of us, but something about his laughter, something about late in the fight when the guys in the armour actually landed one of those punches with the electric taser augments. When he got hurt, he fought better. A lot better. He fought wrong though, like how he fought didn’t quite match the body he was fighting with. Freaking weird. It was almost like I was watching a goblin trying to fight using a human body.

Something to think about. Still, Stane was a robbery of just information. What good would that do? I mean you have technical R&D data, so what? Scientists work for big corporations because you need a lot of resources do DO anything with data like that. A lone lunatic isn’t exactly in a position to play mad scientist and put in all the work to take what he stole from theory to actual functional product. That takes lots of attempts, lots of failures, lots of skull sweat and lots of different people’s input on ways to get around the things that kept failing. You can’t mad scientist a bunch of different fields all at once, I don’t care if you are a mutant genius, it is just a matter of man hours, one man doesn’t have the freaking HOURS to get it all done.

I had some thinking to do. I do my best thinking while I hunt. It was time to make sure my neighborhood was safe.

I dodged the crossbow bolts. A half dozen this time. This was getting tiresome.

When the Yakuza got warned off, they stayed warned off. It seems the one who sent them wasn’t happy with this and sent some no shit Ninja to talk with Nick Condon, and leave his body as a warning to the Goblin King.

Since Nick Condon is pretty much a Jimmy Cagney shaped glamour that I wear like a suit in the daytime, this didn’t go so well. There are legends that the first Ninja were taught by the Tengu, the forest goblins. That may be true, they have a little of the subtle magic that is goblin magic, but it is filtered through so much ritual that I am pretty sure it is magic done to them, not by them. Also, there is something in them that makes me itch. I don’t know what, but it sets me off and makes me cranky. One thing the legends never mention, we didn’t teach it all to them, and they never got half as good as us.

I beat up the first one, left him tied wrist to ankles with his arse naked and a happy face drawn around his bare bum in front of the local police precinct with his collection of poisoned weapons in a pile beneath the street lamp.

I guess they didn’t think it was funny, because they started coming in teams after that. I killed one of them for a final warning. You would think that was the end of it, but no. Here we are, dodging poisoned crossbow bolts in my own neighborhood.

I left a glamour image of myself in the shadows of the rooftop, as if I was mistaken about where they were hiding, then went over the side and raced around the buildings edge with my goblin claws making structural damage magic as I raced around to flank my ambushers. I was getting better at using the elven magic to keep my goblin glamours sustained, or even throw them to locations I wasn’t. I was no where close to being able to do actual elf magic, but I was at least to the level of being able to use elven magic to sustain, boost, and project my goblin magic. It really helps to mess with these freaking Hand ninja.

They sprung their ambush on my illusionary form. A wave of throwing stars sparked off the brickwork as two different chains crossed through where my legs and my arms looked to be. When they failed to hit or wrap onto anything, the ninja who were prepared to yank me off my feet instead unbalanced and fell back. I took that moment to grab one of the falling ones and drag him over the edge and down ten floors to the alley behind.

“If I could have a moment of your time. I thought I had been clear. This neighborhood is off limits to you Hand assholes. I killed the last one and I thought that was warning enough.” I said, determined to get these guys properly intimidated.

He laughed at me. Worse, I recognized the laugh. I went cold.

“You think prison can hold us, you think death can hold us? I am the one you killed last time, but my Master brought me back. We cannot die, but you can. No matter how many of us you hurt, how many of us you kill, in the end, one of us will succeed and you will die. Our masters made us immortal, and your actions make you our enemy.”

I admit, shock got the better of me for a second, because he throat punched me and opened the distance. I moved to close, and another wave of pointy things, this time heavy spikes mixed with shuriken made me weave between them. I was immune to lots of poisons, resistant to more, but not everything and these guys were backed by someone who knew how magic worked and that meant that at least their masters knew how to kill creatures like me.

I danced into their punches and kicks. I took a sword blow to the forearm, it notched into the bone of my arm, so I used that leverage to put him between the swinging sickle axes and myself. Then tossed the dying ninja into the one jumping at me from behind. I traded punches and kicks, but where theirs hurt, mine broke people It was a pretty intense thirty seconds, but at the end, a group of Hand Ninja lay broken in the alley, and one pissed off goblin.

I knelt in front of the one I killed before.

“You know, telling me you are immortal was a mistake. Did you know that my people, the goblins, taught the first of your kind how to hunt? How to assassinate? How to rule the shadows and bring death to those who thought themselves safe?” I said conversationally as I opened up his robes to expose his chest, and note the ritual marks on it, magics my goblin self didn’t understand but which deeply offended the semi dormant elf lord in the back of my brain.

“This is known, it is why you should not stand against us. Serve us as your people once served our master, and you need not die.” The Hand minion said, still unclear about his place in the food chain.

“Did you ever wonder what my people were created for? What we were created to hunt? There are so many things that are stronger than us in fairy. The elven lords with magic to reshape the world itself, so much that half the ancient peoples worshipped them as gods. There are the dragons before whose magic time and space bow in reverence, who can part dimensions like we brush aside curtains. All these things exist, yet they needed us, needed goblins to do one thing. The one thing they could not. Do you know what that is?” I asked

The Hand minion started to get ideas, because his eyes opened in fear the first time. I had beaten them before, killed this one even, but they never once seemed scared. This one did.

“We hunt immortals. That is our gift. Immortalities end.” I spoke to him, drove my fingers into his chest, and ripped out his heart.

There was something foul in it. Something magic. Demonic energy, the energy of The Beast the voice of the sleeping elf in my head whispered. The magic was strong, potent. I don’t know if I could contain it all, but that wasn’t the point. Digesting it broke it down, made it mine. No power on this earth, no power that had ever walked it, could bring back something a goblin had eaten. I left one that was trying to crawl away alive. I shattered both his legs, and propped him where he could see as I ate the hearts of the rest of his friends.

“You tell your masters, from this day forth, any one of your kind enters my neighborhood dies the final death. I don’t mind killing you, it costs me nothing. If they don’t care about you at all, they can continue to use me to dispose of their weaklings, their unwanted, their garbage, and I will continue to give them to the final death. Don’t send anyone that you care for, don’t send anyone you can’t replace, because they won’t be coming back. I will not seek you out elsewhere, but if you enter my territory, you will not leave it.”

The Hand minion crawled out of there. I may think they are evil psychotic morons for getting involved with demons, but I will say this; their training is first rate, their discipline is commendable, and their operatives are individually brave. Their cause is batshit crazy. I don’t know what it is, but choosing to bind yourself to a demon known as The Beast as a strategy has a lot in common with choosing to stick your dick in a food processor as a dating option. Whatever they thought they were gaining, they were wrong, and it not end pretty.

I was feeling pretty good about myself when my night went the way of my day, and I got jumped.

I never saw him coming. I saw a stick flying at my head, and pivoted my body mid leap to avoid getting brained with a flying club. I had to flatten out of my tuck to miss the return bounce, as whoever chucked it played bank shots like a master pool shark, and that left me mid air flat like a Superman pose. I could never understand Superman or the whole DC comics thing. The world was full of real superheroes and supervillains, why read about fake ones? This thought was going through my mind when a pair of red jackboots drove me crotch first into the ground.

I had been swung into the side of a building, pile driven into the ground head first, slapped around by Halloween themed hand grenades, and those didn’t feel good. Being driven balls first into the pavement with about two hundred pounds of pissed off Daredevil stomping on your goblin junk felt worse.

“You killed those men, tore out their hearts!” He rasped, his voice shaking with rage, with fury. His voice actually sounded pretty smooth. He would be a quiet persuasive guy if he calmed down, right now, he was channeling intimidation like the Punisher on a bad hair day.

I went to throw him off me, but he leaped above my swing, and shot a punch straight to my jaw as I swung past him. I swept his feet, but he jumped onto my leg and used it to climb me like a monkey and kick my jaw hard enough to bite my own tongue.

I went into a rage and went after him with all my speed and fury. It was a mistake.

Spiderman was faster than I was, stronger than I was, and had senses I do not. Yet I could own him in a physical fight because I knew what I was doing, and he was a kid who still thought this was a game. Well it sucks being on the other side of the equation. Daredevil was weaker than I was, slower than I was, and way more fragile than I was. You would think that would be his problem. This is how human’s think. It isn’t now nature works. A stag is faster, stronger, and tougher than a wolf or a cougar, and yet each hunts deer. Daredevil was a better fighter than I was. I was a competitive martial artist before I even joined the army. I was a trained airborne elite soldier, a certified ass kicker, a fucking commando. Now I felt like a school ground bully getting his ass handed to him by a teacher with a yard stick.

Those little sticks of his hit me everywhere. I hit him nowhere.

“What gives you the right to murder people!” He raged as he hit me.

“I told them to leave my neighborhood alone. I tried turning them over to police, I tried just hurting them. Hell, I even tried just killing one of them as a warning. It turns out, they can’t even be killed normally. They made it clear they would kill whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and there was nothing I could do about it. I taught them otherwise.” I snarled as I finally caught one of his kicks that over extended and threw him into the wall.

I closed to follow up, caught six punches from bread basket to a nerve shot under the arm that cost me the use of my left arm for critical seconds required for him to beat the clinch I was trying for. In return, I got a shot through to the side of his head that snapped his around and flung him where I wanted, not where he intended.

He hit the pile of loose garbage, and the lack of footing reduced his speed. I don’t care how strong, fast, or trained you are, shitty footing slows you down. When you are the better fighter, you want a fair fight. When you are the garbage fighter in the match, you want blind sided ugly, and I was the garbage fighter here.

“If you kill a killer, you are no better than them.” He swore as he caught me coming in and trying to grapple. He caught my arm in a bar, that left was still slow from his nerve punch, and he got the lock on me behind my back as he sought to drive me face first into the wall.

“Bullshit.” I grunted as I dislocated my own shoulder as I spun my body around, driving my good elbow into the back of his head.

“I kill murdering undead ninja assassins, they kill simple merchants just trying to make a living, reporters trying to undercover corruption ruining regular peoples lives, honest cops just trying to enforce the laws, athletes that won’t fix a title match, and judges who won’t take bribes to let their corporate sponsors get away with screwing everyone. I don’t mind getting my claws a little dirty to keep the innocent people from being prey. At least the people I defend get to keep breathing.” I said.

I don’t know which of those was his personal demon, but the careful canny fighter who had been kicking my ass went away, and the Devil in Daredevil took over.

I can lift about eight tons on a good day, I can and have been hit by cars and got up again. Daredevil isn’t actually super strong, not on the scale I am talking about. This is important to understand because the beating that he gave me in the next two minutes of solid rage was one that I would be having flashbacks about for months. He beat me like I was the speed bag at the boxing gym. It isn’t like I just sat and took it, I hit back hard enough to kill a human being, but could never land anything square, and the entire time he was screaming at me in rage and hammering me like I was every crime in humanities dark history and he was personally going to blot them out with his fists.

He was only human, so eventually his muscles failed, and I got my clinch.

I grabbed him from behind, locked both his arms, wrapped my legs around to pin his. I moved to a rear naked choke and moved to choke him out. I didn’t get him unconscious, but I got him at least thinking again. Right before he faded, he took one of those damned stick of his and threw it at the opposite wall so hard it bounced and hit me right in the forehead. It would have got my eye if I didn’t duck down, but to duck a little bit, I had to loosen my grip a bit and the bastard wiggled free like his suit was made of grease not armour.

We rolled standing and glared at each other. The funny thing is, looking closely, I don’t think his mask has eye holes. There is no tech in it. No sensors, I can feel the damned things, and this guy is just that. A guy. A more or less human. They call him Daredevil, the man without fear. I am starting to wonder if it should be the man without eyes. No wonder none of my tricks with glamour seemed to work on him. I doubt he even noticed them. I could feel his glare though, his hatred.

“No more killing, or I will come for you again.” He demanded.

“If they bring death into my neighborhood, they die.” I retorted.

“You have been warned.” He said, and leaped away like the pounding we just exchanged was nothing. He was just human, or mostly human, I swear. Why is it that guy worried me more than freaking Spiderman.

I am Goblin King, New York’s newest superhero. So far today I have been beaten up by a school kid who wears his pajamas to work, a Spirit Halloween spokesmodel with an explosives filled gift bag, and then beaten up by the handicapped in my own back alley.

I have had enough superheroing for one night. I am going to buy some ice cream and go watch chick flicks with Sugar and the working girls (and boys and a few others).

I don’t think my ego is up for another ass-whipping just yet.

I will hunt down that other goblin another night.