Harvey Harmon roared like a madman, his one remaining eye fixed on Ethan with a mixture of hatred and grim realization. Then he paused, as if something had just clicked in his bloodied mind.
A twisted, crimson smile curled on his lips.
"Oh… I see it now," he said, voice hoarse but triumphant. "That's why you're so angry."
"You've got nothing left, do you? You're empty. But that old man he meant something to you, didn't he?"
Ethan's body tensed, the air growing heavy with rage.
Harvey leaned forward as far as his mutilated torso would allow, spitting venom with every word. "Let me guess… Paul Mark sent a hit squad. Not to kill you no, they thought they were smarter than that. But it didn't go the way they planned. You survived, didn't you?"
He bared bloodied teeth in a grin.
"But the old man didn't."
"WHAT!!!"
A sickening crack echoed through the warehouse as Ethan severed one of Harvey's legs with a black-bladed tentacle.
Blood gushed from the stump, splattering against the concrete and painting the wall behind them in streaks of red.
Harvey screamed once just once then clenched his teeth and stared upward, eyes wild with sadistic joy.
"Ahahaha… I was right, wasn't I?" he cackled, lips twitching. "That hit a nerve, huh?"
The next moment, black tendrils flashed through the air.
Slice Slice Slice!
Ethan's tentacles moved with surgical precision, removing Harvey's remaining limbs in a blur of motion. In seconds, only his torso and head remained. The ruined shell of a man was tossed like garbage to the bloodstained floor.
Harvey's face was drenched in blood, his jaw twitching as he kept grinning like a lunatic. "You're furious," he wheezed, laughing through the agony. "You're so angry. That means I was right!"
"That old man what was he to you? A mentor? A father figure?" Harvey spat out blood. "You'd have rather died than see him harmed, huh? But in the end, you lived… and he died."
"HA! HAHAHAHA!"
His shrieking laughter echoed like broken glass across the warehouse walls.
That was all Harvey had left. His body was gone. His blood was leaking out by the second. But if he could die knowing he'd gouged open the heart of the devil before him, it was enough.
"You wanna kill me for him? For that poor old bastard?" Harvey rasped. "DO IT! DO IT!"
"I already told you everything! I ordered the hit! Paul Mark thought you'd go off the rails become a liability. So I planned an accident. I didn't expect the geez hah the 'insignificant' one to die! But that's how it played out, huh?"
Harvey choked on blood, coughing hard as he jerked on the floor.
"You survived. And now you walk around, wearing his ghost like a badge! You think you're righteous?! You think this makes you any different from me?!"
More blood flowed from his ruined limbs. The body was beginning to fail, but his brain his mouth kept moving, feeding on Ethan's fury.
"You shouldn't be alive! YOU SHOULDN'T BE THE ONE LEFT BEHIND!" he screamed. "Hahahahaha!"
The laughter became crazed and guttural, not even words anymore just a stream of manic sound.
And for Ethan, it all crashed down at once.
The blood. The voice. The mutilated face twisted in ecstasy.
It all blurred.
Harvey's words weren't just cruel they were true. Or at least they touched a truth Ethan didn't want to face. He had lived. Old York had died. The man who taught him how to hide, how to blend in, how to survive in this world when he first crossed over dead because of him.
Something inside Ethan cracked.
His knees buckled, and he dropped to the floor.
Harvey's bloodstained grin loomed in his vision, huge and distorted. The echoes of laughter fused with the booming of his own breath, magnified a hundredfold.
Each inhale felt like a hurricane. Each exhale like a scream inside his skull.
The symbiote stirred violently.
In his mind, Venom was already shouting, panicked.
"CALM DOWN! ETHAN, CALM DOWN! YOU'RE LOSING IT! Your brain is spiking heart rate off the charts! If you snap now, I won't be able to hold you back!"
Ethan clutched his skull, body trembling, eyes red. He could feel his own mental defenses breaking like glass beneath a hammer. The pain, the guilt, the trauma they were rising together like a tsunami.
Harvey's madness, the blood, Old York's face in his last moments… it was all colliding in one overwhelming, suffocating wave.
Venom's voice echoed again, louder this time, shaking the very framework of Ethan's consciousness.
"BREATHE! CENTER YOURSELF! You're not him! You are NOT Harvey Harmon!"
But it was hard. So damn hard.
Because right now, staring at the twitching, limbless husk on the floor…
Ethan couldn't tell the difference.
But no matter how loudly Venom shouted in his mind, urging him to calm down, Ethan couldn't hear it. Harvey Harmon's maddened laughter echoed endlessly in his skull, as if it had carved itself into the very marrow of his bones.
"Shut up… shut up!" Ethan roared, his voice hoarse and broken as he clutched at his skull, fingers digging into his scalp.
The laughter swirled in his ears like a storm of blades, each peal pressing harder against his temples. The intense throbbing, the sharp stings his head felt like it was being crushed in a vice.
"SHUT UP!!!"
His scream tore through the air, laced with pure agony.
And then, as if his will had been made manifest, a violent pulse of energy burst out from him an invisible mental shockwave that rippled across the room.
Harvey Harmon's deranged laughter came to an abrupt halt.
Ethan stood frozen for a split second, then his knees gave out beneath him. The world spun violently. Colors and sounds melted into static. He crumpled to the blood-slick floor, his consciousness swallowed whole.
A moment later, silence consumed the living room.
Where there had once been two, now there was only one. Harvey Harmon's dismembered body was gone not intact, not buried, not hidden. He had been obliterated, his remains atomized by the uncontrolled psychic eruption, his blood and tissue dispersed like mist, coating every corner of the room in a grotesque, even layer of red.
Several seconds passed before a ripple of movement stirred.
A thick, black liquid oozed slowly out of Ethan's collapsed body, congealing into the form of Venom. The symbiote gritted its jagged teeth in strain as it wrapped itself around Ethan's unconscious form, trying to support him.
Venom dragged Ethan step by step toward the window, each movement labored and unsteady. What would normally have taken seconds now felt like miles.
Ethan's mental energy unleashed like a tsunami still lingered, crackling in the air like unstable static. The psychic discharge was interfering with Venom's control, like a broken transmission signal caught in a loop.
He's never lashed out like that, Venom thought grimly. Even when we faced Paul Mark, it wasn't this unstable…
The energy was different. Wilder. Deeper. As if something in Ethan had cracked completely open.
Inside the void of unconsciousness, Ethan felt like he was falling.
It was endless no light, no direction. Just black, pressure, and the sensation of being submerged in something thick and inescapable. He thrashed, but there was no water, no ground. Just suffocating darkness.
It felt like drowning in a sealed coffin, thrown to the bottom of the ocean.
He couldn't scream. He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe.
Only despair.
Only helplessness.
Only
"Hehh !"
A desperate gasp tore through Ethan's lungs as he jolted awake.
His chest heaved. His eyes snapped open. He inhaled like a drowning man breaking the surface, as if this breath might be his last.
It took nearly a dozen ragged breaths before he started to stabilize.
"You're finally awake," Venom's voice echoed beside him.
The massive, grotesque maw of the symbiote loomed into view sharp-toothed, fierce, otherworldly.
But Ethan… felt safe.
He blinked and looked around, registering familiar surroundings. The familiar mattress beneath him. The smell of home. The soft glow of the desk lamp in the corner. It was his bedroom.
Only now did he realize he was no longer in that blood-soaked warehouse.
"How did I get back?" Ethan asked, voice still shaking.
Venom's head tilted slightly. "Feeling calm again, I see."
Ethan looked at the creature this terrifying alien and for the first time, felt something almost like comfort. Relief.
Venom gave a toothy grin. "Strange, isn't it? One minute you're slaughtering Harvey Harmon… the next, you're safe at home."
Ethan's brow furrowed.
Yes that was right. Harvey Harmon. He had been interrogating him. The laughter. The madness. The rage. The slicing tentacles. The collapse. He remembered all of it now… or at least fragments, sharp as glass.
He winced, pressing a hand to his forehead as the pain spiked again.
"Hisss " A gasp escaped his lips as memories began to rush back in a flood. Blood. Screams. A severed torso. That mocking, shrieking laugh. And then blackness.
He remembered losing control.
Harvey's words had pushed him over the edge, and then…
Then everything had gone dark.