There are villains you almost look forward to fighting, because they take you back to the happy days of super hero ignorance when you thought, yeah, being trapped under a ton of rubble fighting for air to grab an isotope that might save a loved one from radiation poisoning induced by your blood as your archnemesis' base floods and crumbles around you was the worst it was going to get. Seriously. Venom's got nothing on that.

Then there are villains who make everything into a Michael Bay movie. Not in the cosmic sense like Galactus or Thanos, although they count on the scale of the high and mighty cosmic smucks. I'm talking guys like the Juggernaut, Magneto, Graviton, or Electro after he got that insane power up. Seriously, you know you're desperate to take a guy down when you're dressed in about six layers of dark red and blue rubber insulation and calling in a mutant you've known for about the better part of a month to help take him down. Speaking of which I should probably write Nate sometime, see if he's not to busy playing X Man to get a beer (in a world of about a hundred who aren't Wolverine, running with Magneto or dead, calling yourself X Man singular when not actually a member of the three or so teams running around now probably wasn't a good idea).

Metallo seems to be one of those villains. Stuff flips over when he brushes against it, asphalt cracks under his foot and smoke, dust and flames pour down around him as rubble dances off his shoulders with a constant plink plink sound I'm surprised I can hear over everything else. Oh, and he's a roarer to. Not a Hulk roarer, just one of those angry guys who need loud noises to show they're angry.

The big guy braces as I tense, springing up, into and over the path of the psycho's charge. In the freeze frame of hang time I watch an intricate ballet of movement as iron hard muscle meets muscle hard iron, flexing like shattering rock, locking together like earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, whirlpools, typhoons, black holes and exploding supernovas meeting in that one second long space.

It breaks as I fire two web lines, the last two bursts of my one still full shooter and pried apart by both hands, at each of Metallo's shoulders, pulling them with me with muscle and gravity as the big guy pushes. I've been toying with the idea of using Ben Reilly's old impact webbing, his stingers too for that matter. They'd help amp up my web shooters with a couple of extra offensive features (he used them to bring down Venom for Christ sake!) but it wouldn't have worked out as beautifully as this if I had used them. Metallo buckles, giving the big guy enough time to break out of the lock and grab him by one of those adorable metal love handles and send him on a one way trip to Painful Landingville. Thank God I had the sense to let go of the lines (Common, but Spider played a part to) or I'd be riding second class. Got enough of that on the ride over here.

"Everybody back!"

Yeah, the big guy can roar when he wants to. Like a lion in a Central Park zoo cage. And everyone actually listens. Even Jameson. Jameson for crying out loud. Hell, I almost back up. I'd like to, but yeah, the whole superhero guest star thing…

Metallo's screaming again, but not in pain. Maybe it is, but there's this inhuman sound of pieces of metal doing nasty things to one another as he sags into himself, jaw snapping and cracking back into place as his skull sinks between his make-do shoulders, vanishing into the mass of shifting miss matched metal, a Rubik's cube turtle shell. Apparently standing up is too good for him now, so he's just going to pull himself apart and see what happens when he puts himself back together…with a twist.

Something shoving itself through the snake charmer dancing wires, bursting out of where his left lung would be, has a distinctive barrel quality. I'm half way through wondering what it's made out of, since I don't need to be the amateur physicist I am to know what it's for, when he's suddenly not there anymore. Super speed…real super speed, not Speed Demon super speed is like that, a gaping black hole of nothing your brain says is something, the realization of the multi colored comet streak of a hyper accelerating body swimming it's way in drunkenly amongst the confusion.

Okay, what the hell was that? As far as I knew, this guy was Robot, Kryptonite heart and Angry Guy only. Where the hell did the Magneto rip off come from? Magnetism? Nanobots? Telekinesis? An upgrade the S.H.I.E.L.D database I looked at years ago neglected to mention?

Whatever it is must be what makes the thunder clap 300 feet overhead, clouds rippling in it's wake. Tinged with green. Not good.

I click both shooters closed after making sure the cartridges are totally secure, but I don't fire off any lines, not yet. Got a feeling I'll need a lot more in a couple of seconds. Another green thunder storm, and I'm scaling the still cooling hollows of floors and remaining layers of slightly hot concrete as fast as most humans can run, getting faster at each floor. People don't think I can crawl all that fast, but if I can shift my muscles into positions most vertebrates aren't supposed to why can't I do it quickly? Ever seen a fly crawl across a coffee table? And I have how many more muscles along with being an arachnid?

Clouds part by the time I reach the damp wood smelling roof, an elevated train track sagging in a cascade of metal and rubble as something whistles out and down into the street, ploughing through the track and sending a geyser of dust and asphalt bursting up as it hits the streets.

The clanging has died away as I reach it, perched on a roof ledge, sirens far off behind me. Another column of dust fountains out of the shadows of distant tower buildings about five blocks away. It dosen't do much for my confidence when the power flickers out in the distance, various street lights and windows dulling and flickering as I bounce off an over turned cab and into the street. Even in lower level mutant/meta human confrontations something powerful enough to black out an entire city block is usually a bad thing. Calm before the storm and all that, only in terms of mass panic before complete and utter panic. An earthquake before the hurricane.

At least I don't get strangled as I stupidly poke my head into the support beam strewn, almost perfectly circular hole punched into the street.

Even superheroes never get used to this, the sight of a crater actually made in solid asphalt, as if someone poked a pin through wet paper. We take it in stride, act like it's part of the job, and it is, but the fact humans, us, shouldn't be able to do things like that never quite goes away. No one knows what it's like to take your powers with you every step you take, out into the streets, your office, your favourite restaurant and back into your home at whatever too early hour of the morning you get back at. Not even the normal street level heroes or the non powered Avengers.

Not like all life suddenly stops, you adapt because (in most cases) your legs and brain still work, so you have to, but they don't exactly go away, like you just switch them off when your done and shove them in a kitchen draw. It's mainly the additions to the little things, like what my Spider Sense is doing now. Not warning, hence my head peering over the side like a red balloon with a giant phantom bull's-eye printed on it, but flickering, bunching a section of brain tissue up inside my head like paper and then letting go so it unfolds again. I recognise this, one of the oddities of the Sense that comes with me not being one hundred percent sure how it actually works. Sometimes I inadvertently track the neighbour's movements in the apartment above and below us, I can even push it out into the corridors as though filling the place with an invisible delta brainwave foam. It does this with radiation to, a subconscious Geiger counter reaching out and calling in any radiation above standard background level.

It's doing that now.

Maybe it's the left over charge in my blood stream from all those years ago, maybe whatever level my Spider Sense works on also includes radiation levels , or maybe once a scientist always a scientist and I'm nerdy enough to pick it up, but I know pretty much the second I look down there that it's not Metallo. I just feel stupid for doing it.

Something as subtle as a radiation signal would be lost in the natural, absolute amount of expected danger pouring off him, and I think it's him causing the sounds pouring up the street behind me, like far off carpentry. Something red flutters in the shadows like a bird flexing an un bandaged limb. I offer the big guy a hand as he floats towards me, shaking slightly as he brushes a stray pipe bigger and longer than my forearm, more by not noticing his shoulder bump into it than trying to clear his way. He takes it, breathing hard as I help him find his feet. The cape drapes around his shoulders as he finally reaches solid ground, his hands resting against his knees. I can feel the slight charge in the air clinging to him, a thin strand of cotton popping away invisibly through the air that I can trace with my finger. Not that I do.

"So…"

"Fine," he says, straightening up so he looks less like a red and blue sack that's just had the potatoes mashed out of it "Fine. Just need a second. A minute. Just a couple."

And I believe him.

It's got to be the strangest case of radiation poisoning you'll ever see. Not for the suddenness of a being theoretically capable of flying through the sun and out the other end reduced to the soft, fumbling gate of a two minute old kitten, but how you can actually see the improvement leaking back into his face and arms, like a rock steadily growing out of the sea, until that's all that's left, sheer rock, smooth as marble and water drained under it.

"No problem."

The next explosion is considerably nearer.

"Of course, in a general sense…"

The night flashes red and blue as a mismatched convoy of SCU vans, ambulances and fire trucks flood from practically every street corner, filling every square inch, forming a barricade. I doubt it'll help, but I can appreciate it. What people are left on the streets vanish, startled by the roar of chopper blades overhead if not the sirens. Sawyer has an even larger rifle, more a cannon than anything else, as she strides towards me and the big guy. Turpin's voice carries over the whole thing, and it's hard to believe this was actually a street about twenty seconds ago.

"Standard procedure?"

"Of course Maggie. We'll try and keep him confined to wherever we intercept him if you can get the area around it cordoned off."

I probably shouldn't have waited until we were in the air to ask this, but…

"Standard procedure?"

He dosen't turn around as he flies just ahead of me, arms fully extended dead ahead, fists balled, bobbing in and out of my field of vision as I swing from line to line behind him.

"Isolate the area, like trying to stamp out a fire. In most metahuman instances the perpetrators are tough or fast enough for conventional fire arms not to matter. Not once civilians are behind cover."

His face appears behind a fluttering corner of cape.

"You may need to jump a lot."

"So what else is new?"

I remember that slight laugh sound that reaches me as we reach a block of uptown buildings, glass and steel glittering in what's left of the light like night time marble. Against the horizon, almost at the exact centre of Metropolis, moonlight streams around a black hole silhouette in the skyline, perfectly curved and outlined. Even though we're facing it head on as opposed to the side it's clear what it is: an initial. The initial. Lexcorp Tower. I know from experience it's the first thing the tourists see when they touch down.

How far will a man go to mark his territory?

I say that, because out of the daylight, and from this angle it looks…sinister. Alien. Wrong. Too tall, too unreal. It's not that it isn't supposed to be here, it's that you are not supposed to be here with it. And it's supposed to belong to the greatest good guy on the planet.

I've never really looked into the big guy's relationship with the Double L, but some general rumours suddenly make a lot more sense. I guess the atmosphere is appropriate because it's then that Metallo crash lands a mile ahead of us.

He's acquired two massive people carrier arms from somewhere, hydraulic pumps and whirring turbines hissing and clanking away as new ankles to handle the weight. There's a strange beauty to it, but Corbin's power reflects his mind: it's a brutal mess, unsubtle and uninspired beyond utter destruction. Much like the average online gamer.

"Smash yaaaaAAAGGGHHHHHH!"

"Subtle, ain't he?"

The big guy dosen't do the laugh thing. If he dose, I don't notice, my Spider Sense is too loud. A blast of Kryptonite radiation narrowly avoids removing my upside down genitals as it lances past, obliterating my webline seconds after I let go of it to flip down to street level. The big guy vanishes in a blast of red cape, arcing up, up and away from what was probably the equivalent of a LAW rocket to him. If I find out I'm sterile after this I'm going to be really annoyed.

Metallo's eyes glint as I bounce off a parked truck and cling to a nearby street light. Somewhere people are screaming, probably pointing at me, though I can't see them.

"Hey bright eyes. Miss me?"

"Not this time!"

"Good one. Make sure you write that down."

The big guy comes down on top of him seconds after he's picked up a chunk of road he was presumably going to throw at me. I manage to snag it with a webline and whirl it over my head like a mooring star without tearing my left arm off. Got the feeling I'm gonna need it. I'm right.

A rush of red and blue hurtles out off the crater faster than the multiple beams of sizzling green, Metallo's right arm juddering from multiple shots as he clambers out, clawing at the asphalt with his gigantic left. My make shift weapon sends him bouncing out and across the street, leaving a jagged liver shaped hole of broken bricks and smashed storefront window in the face of a building on the other side of the street. An old man in a green apron bolts out the door, and I feel a liver sized pang of guilt. Going up against this class of metahuman, you sometimes can't help but cause this kind of damage to someone's office or home while trying to make sure it dosen't happen to their kids or dog or grandparents.

At least it's done some good. Metallo's missing his left arm when he comes out, his original, smaller arm flailing and looking smaller than it actually is in the gap. Glass has smashed it's way into most of it and sparks flash off them as damaged wires pull themselves loose from it. The problem is there's not a lot someone of my physical strenght level can actually do to someone like Metallo. I'm strong enough to bend steel, all the way round into two circles if I really try, but Metallo is a sentient frame wrapped in warped and fused shells of different shapes and sizes. There's a lot of steel to work through, and he can probably replace what I remove.

Better get a move on then.

Metallo lets out a startled boom box sound as I cannon into him, rocking almost fully backwards under my sudden, scrambling weight. I ram a foot into what passes for a solar plexus, since all I can really do is try and keep him off balance, using the leverage to wrench a collar bone shaped fender out off his chest. He dosen't fall apart quite like I'd kinda hoped he would, but my Spider Sense does go off as my legs slowly involuntarily part along with what turns out to be a set of plates making up Metallo's chests, bathing the immediate world green.

"Thanks. Downright hospitable of you."

I drive the thing into the glow, arms and spine juddering as it connects with something hard sooner than I'd expected. Metallo lets out the first genuine human sound I've heard him make all night, a sharp gasp of anger and fear, only missing something.

Lungs, I realise, he hasn't got any lungs to actually gasp with.

He does have a heart though, something he's wired up to, feeding off of constantly. And I almost ploughed a stake clean through it. Probably not a good idea to still be on his chest when the shock wares off.

I don't quite make it. His right arm either connects with my back slightly, or the wind blows in the wrong direction and I'm rolling across the asphalt with the occasional bounce to almost rattle my spine out. I slip into a better landing position, and that's a good thing in the next seven seconds as his fist crashed down an inch from my toe. It dosen't come back up for a second go. A hand nowhere near the size of Metallo's smallest finger (their made out of pipes and joints and aren't all the proper size or length they should be) grips into his wrist, denting metal with out shattering finger nails. Something whirrs in protest deep inside it.

"Corbin…let's use our inside voice, please."

It's not a punch. It's a palm first explosion, Metallo suddenly wrapped around an abandoned truck. The skull head rattles like a tin can dropped down a sewer pipe.

"We have guests here."

"Oh."

He waits until the banging fades away after he drives a fist through the cab, the grin looking a lot more genuine. The big guy's eyes narrow dangerously, and I stand up quickly. My spine vibrates slightly as the semi engine revs. There's an undertone there, a stretching, snapping sound.

"They picked a lousy time to take a vacation."

"Hey, tell me about it. You come for the comic con, and the Klingon wedding ends in divorce."

My worst joke ever, but my back is killing me, so screw you and your tastes.

"Welcome to Metropolis! We're all mad here!" Metallo howls, and the entire front section of the truck cab is swinging around in a trail of maimed engine parts and shattered windscreen glass. What's left of the engine bursts out from under the bonnet, snapping like a machine gun magazine slotting into place, bolts and coils and twisted clumps of hot metal booming out like cannon fire head on towards us.

I'm thinking we're going to want to move pretty soon.

Or rather, I'm going to want to move, the big guy just plants his feet, thrusts out his chest and takes it. I'm already in the air as he vanishes into a billowing cape in the middle of a frothing orange cloud. I come down hard, feet banging on top of the make shift cannon. I'm well out of range of the projectiles, and Metallo's stopped out of sheer surprise, but I can still feel the shaking and heat beneath my sock thin boots. That gives me one of those insane adrenaline ideas, like sticking your hand in a lava pool so it won't snap off from a blast of liquid nitrogen. I thrust my hand into the darkness between the semi cab and his hand cannon.

It's a pretty simple, if mildly suicidal, theory. If he's carrying the front, he's carrying the dash, and if it belonged to one of those old fashioned ten four good buddy rednecks the dash is carrying…

Something the size of a quarter is suddenly between my thumb and forefinger, a faint heat floating through my fingers and vanishing into the back of my hand inches from where the spider bit me oh so many years ago.

Bingo.

"Hot potato!"

His socket bulges with a muddy brown light as I toss the cigarette lighter into his left eye.

I topple off his arm as his hands clamp over the skull face, grinning like a masochist as his clenched teeth almost explode out of his mouth from the scream. I wonder for a split second if he can actually perceive physical pain or it's just so much of a reflex he dosen't know how not to react to it.

Then the big guy is there, a sonic boom clothesline from an American flag blue arm.

Metallo looses his legs this time.

"Okay…okay, that's it…that is it!"

Street lights and cars bend and scream over the hurricane of my Spider Sense. I actually have to spring over a tilde wave of cars wrenched out of underground parking and up through the street, and when I land Metallo has two brand new legs.

Here we go again.

That cape snaps into reality in front of me, a dull but insistent thundering pinging billowing it back and forth like a tree caught in a storm. Metallo's trying the chain gun trick again. I love repetitive villains, someone you can really depend on, y'know?

The sound continues underground, the asphalt heating up as he lumbers into the pothole from hell he dredged up to put himself back together again, and the bad news is it's moving in the direction of all the king's men. God knows what it'll be like once he reaches the all the king's horses.

I shouldn't be joking should I?

The big guy armpits me ( I hate it when fliers do that. Every non flying hero does. I have webs. I can't break the sound barrier but I can move in the air, damn it. And the annoying thing is I don't think they realise they're doing it.) and I suddenly have absolutely no idea what to think other than I'm flying in his arms. The sound of the barricade a good five miles behind us smashing apart like a rotted wooden fence brings me back to reality. Three vans have caught fire, two cop cars have been overturned, and Metallo is laughing off a wave of gunfire and laser blasts as he looms out of the exit he smashed through the street, his right hand clenched around a fourth van and wrapping it around his exposed original left arm as the cab writhes it's way into something approaching a usable hand.

I slip out of the firm grip, freefalling in total control towards the armour plates making up his back. Gunfire sprays over the metal shoulders, the light of useless slugs illuminating something I never noticed before, a small space between twisted slivers where Metallo's neck dosen't quite reach his torso. He must have had to telescope his neck up out of it's housing to see over his replacement chest. Either way…well, I always did have a predilection for shiny things.

Note to self: Find more ways to slip the word 'Predilection' into conversation. It'll make me look smart.

Note to self: Find out how to pronounce the word 'Predilection'.

Note to self: Find out what the word 'Predilection' actually means

Anyway.

I claw out a couple of times, finally managing to grasp the wire strewn column of metal that makes up Metallo's neck and spinal cord, and pull. The hulk of metal I'm cowboy riding spasms, arms flailing and components tumbling loose. Any and all gunfire still coming stops, Metallo vomiting sparks as his jaw unhinges and lets out a scream like a dying turbine. I slip my second hand into the gap and brace, pulling harder. It won't quite give…

A hollow snapping sound, like rigging ropes pulling apart, echoes deep down inside

Metallo and into my feet, the jerking getting worse. He must have woven an entire secondary nervious system out of jumper cables and power lines to compensate for the weight of the new body, and now I'm wrenching his exoskeleton free of what technically passes for his skin.

Sounds fun.

The chest and shoulders seem to sag suddenly, bending over and taking me further up. I can see the remains of Metallo's original body in the middle of it all. That fire really wasn't good for him. But it's coming loose, slowing him down as he panics. The Hulk sized arms loom up for me, twitching and snapping, but suddenly vanish in a flash of blue, the big guy pulling them down and forcing them up in the same breath, forcing Metallo back regardless of the Kryptonite danger. Metallo hisses at him either out of hate or pain.

The big guy's brought me more leverage though, and my struggling becomes more strained, cables and wires snapping and looping out of Metallo's solar plexus as I finally hoist his screaming body free. Feels like I just gave birth to the Scorpion. Who I know for a fact is twice my full body weight.

Metallo's elbow smacks into my chest, sending me slamming off the back plates and into the growing heap of metal that's all that's left of his hydraulic feet. I'm just lucky Metallo's body, now about a foot taller from the neck upwards, slumps forward out of the now useless cocoon. He'd crush me if he fell on me and I'm too busy cringing from pin pricks of metal not quite digging into my back to roll aside if I have to.

I forgot; the original's stronger than me too. It did give me something though, other than probable internal haemorrhaging. He didn't just go nuts from the pain when I pulled that stunt with his neck. He flat out panicked.

Decapitate him and this is all over.

There's a sound like a slinky spring being pulled backwards until it breaks and Metallo blurs across my field of view before crashing into a building a few stories up. My world is suddenly filled with the greatest flag for a utopian nation that never existed and the big guy is helping me up.

"Nice work. This turns things around."

"No problem."

I'm either wheezing from having a big metal elbow smack the wind out of me or smoke from one of the random fires that always start in things like this, but my New York accent sounds pathetically feeble against his Adam Baldwin breeze.

The revolving doors of the office building or hotel or whatever explode outwards, a blast of pure neon green slamming into the big guy and burying him in the remains of an over turned squad car.

So much for turning things around.

I can feel the heat coming off Metallo before my Spider Sense goes off, tossing myself down onto the asphalt and sliding into his assault rather than avoiding it. It pays off, he's startled by the offensive play. I throw myself up with the rather neat if painful trick of bouncing my spine off the ground, stretching my fingers as forward as they'll go. His skull is hot, like touching a radiator and that's why stage two isn't a complete success.

I don't have a stage three, but I don't have to come up with one. The enormous tank…car…jet…thing with it's big scary cannon clearly overcompensating for the some anatomical insufficiency in the driver blasts Metallo with this headache inducing pink beam of light, and he's suddenly resembling a skeleton even more, metal shavings and dust sparkling like glass as it falls off his shoulders like sand.

I remember this one adventure I had about four years back where I wound up in, supposedly, the year 2099. While this thing is probably a footnote (Or is going to be a footnote), a high tech horse and cart, that's the kind of thing we imagine when we hear that date. The stuff S.H..I.E.L.D scientists spend all night conceiving in underground bunkers and adamantaium soundproofed helicarrier labs.

"ATTENTION CITIZENS."

Oh yeah, anything that starts with those words always ends well…

"PLEASE VACATE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY! THIS SITUATION IS OFFICIALLY UNDER DULY DEPUTIZED CONTROL THANKS TO LUTHOR CORPS ™ E.N.FORCER UNIT, A SUBSIDIARY OF THE SPECIAL CRIME'S UNIT."

Gotta be a computer, no pilot or driver or whatever the hell kind of person would willingly climb inside that thing (Okay I admit it, I want a go) talks like that. I'm also not buying it. Sawyer look's too pissed for this thing to have been taken off a blueprint and translated on a million dollar assembly line.

The bad dialogue is the one reason we're all standing around like idiots, Metallo included. The big guy breaks out of the spell first, suddenly directly in "Eee-ehn-forsar's" path like a mountain jogging across an interstate highway. I'm expecting pretty much the same effect.

"Luthor, I don't…"

ALERT! ALERT! HOSTILE EXTRATERRESTRIAL SUSPECT IDENTIFIED! E.N.FORCER CHECKING RECOMMENDED SOLUTION. SOLUTION REACHED. EXECUTING!"

The air goes pink and then red in a blur of cape as the big guy leaps sideways.

"Nice."

I'm going to regret turning around, aren't I?

Metallo hoists Sawyer a foot of the ground, her combat boots jerking, teeth gritted and clawing like a panther at the skeletal hand clamped around her neck.

"I want one. This one dosen't work anymore. Here."

I'm already pounding towards him as he pulls his arm back and hurls Sawyer into the air, resisting the urge to boot him in the head as I leap past. There's a trick to catching people at this speed. This isn't like the bridge and Gwen, this is the fact that despite probably weighing less than Sawyer I've got thicker muscles than her and am moving at near bullet speed. If I hit her wrong I won't crush her but I'll break something at best, if I'm going faster than her (faster than I need to) the sudden stop of me catching her in mid air and landing with her may be too much. So I twist myself as much as possible in the slowed hyper seconds of speed perception and Spider Sense slow down, reducing and compacting as much momentum as I can. I'm beside her now as gravity catches up, bringing my arms around to circle her and closing the gap, squeezing tight as it closes. I complete the last rotation and bring my feet down, spreading my legs and bouncing as we come down. Three more and we come to a stop. She's winded but intact, so my work is done.

Who am I trying to kid?

Whatever that thing was in the transition between Metallo…interfacing with it, it's a Tim Burton parody of itself now, ragged tank treds, Corbin's naval and everything above it jutting out of a trash can pile of armour plates and circuitry. Megaton would puke.

"Mmmm…roomy."

"And too large to miss."

The burst of heat vision evaporates the sweat it's causing. Metallo just makes a hillbilly chuckle over the buzz of superheating air molecules. Part of me would kill to know what that plating's made of. It might just get the rest of me killed if I don't back up, the big guy's digging his heels into the asphalt, trying to angle a weak spot into his infra red rimmed line of vision even as he increases it's intensity.

"Cute."

Metallo grins in the after glow. He brings up a shifting arm.

"My turn."

I can tell the world goes white even with my eyes closed and my head turned away because with a sound that awful it just has to. Smoke pours from near molten asphalt, a few red rags drifting on the breeze, burning rapidly. I realise I can still hear the sound of an invincible body going clean through a brick wall as I notice dust pouring out of the hole pounded across two floors of apartment building. Metallo rounds on me, and my Spider Sense drags out his every syllable as my eyes dart everywhere faster than most fingers can move, looking for something, a rock, a hammer, a Superman Robot, anything…

"You got anything to say, Bug?"

And then I notice rubble, tires, pipes, metal, stone, glass…

And I get a really stupid idea.

"You're really fat."

I bounce off the front of his tank housing before he can blink, spring board off that and handspring off his skull to get myself airborne, firing twin bursts of webbing behind me, starting with the smaller stuff, shards pebbles, bundling it up and trailing a line to the next one, firing off another, attaching that to another bundle, jumping from wall to wall, running for my life from a roaring Metallo as he spins his new tires and streaks after me.

I'm doing this for two reasons: (A) It gets him away from the civilians and (B)…well, it's slightly selfish, but my camera's back this way. That last part is important because of reason (C), the reason Metallo can't see because he's trying to catch me like I'm the long lost childhood balloon he never had.

Five streets, and my arms are blurring with each bound, reaching, firing.

Four streets, I spin head over heels at one point, catch sight of Metallo, charging, roaring, and I think: This is Metropolis. This is what people in cafes and taxis and office blocks stare into every day.

Three blocks, I almost loose my stride but gain more altitude. For a second I'm worried (scared) he'll realise what I'm doing, but the fact he actually throws a parking meter at me says different. He's too stupid to figure it out, which will make this all the sweeter.

Two blocks, I'm running along the rooftops now, the sound and smell of that particle weapon thundering behind me, the full weight of all ten web lines in my hands straining against me, pinching and grabbing at my spine, seconds away from yanking it out for me if Metallo doesn't do it first.

Finally we're here, where I need to be. Which is good because my arms feel like they're getting run through an industrial size cheese grater. I leap left, the right, finally landing on a building angled away from the camera

See, I don't really have ten web lines, I have ten handfuls of webs, strands making large shapes out of thin lines, full of stuff I laced and bundled together from block to block, crisscrossed to make a gigantic slingshot looping from building to building behind him and bulging right in front of him.

Rubble, tires, pipes, metal, stone, glass…

All pulled together, all straining for release…

All pointed at him.

Pretty damn photogenic if I do say so myself.

"Say cheese, asshole…"

Then I let go.

The first thing to hit him is a stone the size of an eye ball, bouncing off his chest and clanging away inside his arm. He blinks. And then a piece of concrete the size of a door slams into his upper body, more rubble and metal crashing down on him. A steel pole stabs through the tank, upending him into the full force of the maelstrom, his cannon arm vanishing in a trail of glass, stone and sparks, and then another pole smacks his head off his shoulders like a golf ball. His body disintegrates in a rush of piling rubble vomiting a dust cloud the size of the surrounding apartment buildings. The only sound in the aftermath are the tinkling of broken windows and distant car alarms.

My breath echoes in my mask. My eyes are wider than the lenses.

Holy crap.

We won.

I leave his skull swaying and cursing from a street light just a few seconds away from what's left of the S.C.U convoy. Upside down of course. I figure Sawyer has a few choice words for him and Turpin needs something for target practice. That makes a great picture to.

I notice the crowd gathering around the crash site, feet blotting out the skid marks from Metallo's pursuit as people huddle together like dogs before feeding time. I hop over staring heads, hoist myself around a streetlight and land to a few startled gasps. There's a broad shouldered shadow coming out of the front entrance, hunched, almost like it's carrying something.

Figures the man of the hour would miss all the action.

"Hey Supes, nice work. When we're posing for the papers can…"

Then I see it. The small form in his iron hard arms. The look on his face like everything that held him together just melted.

Oh no…