The Horizon Futureworks server room hummed with quiet life, low pulses of light reflecting off rows of sleek drives and data towers. Gwen stood in the cool air, fingers moving over her tablet, her face pale with tension.
"There," she whispered.
Luffy, standing beside her in a black hoodie and joggers, leaned in. "Found something?"
Gwen tapped a line of code that glowed faint blue against the dark interface.
"That encryption signature… it's not ours. And it's not from any authorized partner. I cross-referenced the keyframe. It's Oscorp. Old Oscorp. From one of their archived cloud stacks." She looked up, eyes narrowed. "Someone embedded this into our last software update."
Luffy's shoulders stiffened. "So they're not just watching. They're inside."
"Or trying to be," Gwen said. "But this isn't a full breach. It's more like a beacon. A quiet ping, waiting to be triggered."
"Like a trap we're carrying around."
She nodded grimly. "We need to find out where it's calling to. Tonight."
Fog rolled across the Hudson as Gwen and Luffy glided through the city sky, their suits active beneath dark overcloaks. They followed the signal bounce to a decommissioned Oscorp communications relay perched above an old warehouse near the East River.
Gwen perched on the ledge of the relay tower, visor scanning.
"Still active," she whispered. "Low-frequency transmitter — hardwired to an underground hub two blocks west. Definitely off-grid."
Luffy stretched an arm forward and retracted, slingshotting to the rooftop of the warehouse. He moved in total silence, barely more than a blur. Gwen followed seconds later, dropping beside him.
She knelt and inserted a fiber-cable into the access hatch. Her wrist screen flared to life.
"It's pulling data — but not from Horizon. From us."
Luffy blinked. "What do you mean?"
"I mean this relay is logging every mission we've run for the past two months. Patrol routes. Flight patterns. Combat telemetry."
Luffy clenched his fists. "They're trying to map us."
"No," Gwen whispered, eyes wide. "They already have."
Back at Field Alpha, Gwen tore off her mask and paced the room while Luffy scanned the retrieved files.
"Everything we've uploaded to STRAW's blackbox — someone mirrored it," she said. "Encrypted reflections of every recorded moment. It's not just our suits, it's the journal too. They had access to ghost protocols, decryption layers... Luffy, this wasn't passive. It was surgical."
He looked up, voice quiet. "Do you think someone at Horizon did this?"
Gwen stopped pacing.
"I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe it was left in the source code from the start — planted back when we were building this place on borrowed tech."
Silence.
Then Luffy said, "We have to shut everything down. Wipe the server clean. Disconnect STRAW from Horizon's mainframe."
Gwen nodded slowly. "I'll do it. Tonight."
He stood, crossed the room, and gently touched her shoulder.
"Hey."
She looked up.
"This isn't your fault. We used the tools we had. We made something good. If they used that to hurt people, then we end them — and we make sure they never touch what we build again."
Her voice was barely a whisper. "I just wanted to help people."
"You still do. Every day."
Gwen sat alone later that night, pen hovering over the Power Journal. The hum of Field Alpha's backup systems faded behind her.
She wrote:
Power Journal – Year Five, Entry Three
We built our wings from pieces of our past — Oscorp pieces, broken tech, fractured files. I thought we'd shed their shadow when we erased their name from our records. I was wrong. They were always watching. Waiting. And now the ghosts have found our pulse.
But they'll regret it.
Across town, George Stacy sat in his living room, folders scattered across his desk. He flipped through pages — recent attack reports, intercepted drone logs, and finally a single blurry image.
A mark left at the scene of the convoy strike: a spider curling around a straw hat.
He opened an old sketchbook Gwen had once left on the kitchen table years ago. Inside, barely visible on a corner page, was a familiar doodle — a small spider curled around a sunhat.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then, quietly, he whispered, "Just tell me before it breaks you."