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Marvel: King of The Swarm Chapter 42: In Sheep's Clothing
🕑 Added 2025-06-24 01:20:23 +0000 UTC"S-so," Gwen said, her voice uncertain, eyes fixed on the glowing scan still pulsing on the monitor, "what's the next step? Do you need to open me up—cut it out?"
Harry didn't answer right away. His eyes were locked on the image, his expression suspended somewhere between scientific awe and quiet dread. He zoomed in again, revealing the delicate lattice of golden tendrils that wrapped her anatomy like a second nervous system.
"I thought we were dealing with a parasite," he muttered, tapping the screen. "A suit. Something added on. But it's not. It's a part of you now. Symbiotic. Integrated. I doubt any scalpel on Earth could remove it without killing you."
Gwen groaned and threw up her hands. "So that's it? I just live with it? Hope it doesn't snap and kill me in my sleep? Or worse—hope Genesis doesn't use me like a puppet to level a city block?"
Harry finally turned from the console. "If things go badly—yes. But that's not our only path forward." He walked briskly toward a sealed set of reinforced doors, which slid open at his approach with a hiss.
"The goal was never surgery," he added as Gwen followed, "at least not in the traditional sense."
They stepped into a room that made Gwen's stomach turn.
It was an operating theater—but not the sterile, high-tech suite she'd expected. This place felt... wrong. The lighting was soft and golden, almost warm, but it only served to highlight the grotesque majesty of the room's centerpiece: a surgical platform surrounded by six sprawling mechanical arms, each one grown from white, porous bone, with ligament-like cables acting as tendons. Veins of faintly glowing gold pulsed just beneath the surface of the organic machinery.
Each arm ended in a grotesque variation of a surgical tool—bone-formed claws, hook-like instruments, and delicate needling appendages that looked like they had grown into precision.
Gwen stopped in her tracks. Her stomach flipped.
"Oh my god," she whispered. "What the hell is that? A-are those...are those bones?"
Harry nodded, as though discussing something mundane. "Grown in nutrient baths and templated using symbiotic coding. More flexible than steel. More precise than any robotic limb. And they respond directly to my neural impulses through these—" he held up a pair of gloves, each laced with sinewy cables that led into the ceiling. As he flexed his fingers, the bone-arms mirrored his movements in fluid synchronicity.
Gwen took a slow step back. "Harry, this is—this is seriously messed up. It's like something out of a Cronenberg horror movie."
"I told you," he said, slipping on the gloves and wiggling his fingers with eerie calm. "The conventional doesn't work in this scenario. And this system's sensitivity allows me to perform at a level no human hand could manage, hopefully this will be the only time I have to use this one you, but who knows where we'll end up."
He gestured to the table, which was polished and flat—at least that part looked familiar. But even it bore faint fibrous patterns beneath the surface like it had grown into its shape.
"You're going to lie down," he continued, voice even. "When I say so, summon the suit. I'll try to extract a sample—one strand, one structure—something I can study without triggering a full immune response."
Gwen hesitated, staring at the splayed limbs above. "And you're going to cut into me with that?"
"Yes," Harry said plainly. "I've grown a blade from calcified material interlaced with my own energy signature. It's the only thing I believe the suit will register as 'native' enough not to reject on contact."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then it reacts defensively. And depending on how violently it does that..." He paused, eyes serious now. "You could die."
She inhaled through her nose, then muttered bitterly, "I really don't have a choice, do I?"
"You always have a choice," Harry said, suddenly sharp. His amber gaze locked onto hers like a heat-seeking missile. "Even if your only option is to choose how you face the end."
Gwen scoffed and looked away. "Who chooses destruction?"
Harry's voice was quieter now. "Someone who's experienced worse things than death."
The silence between them was heavy—echoing with unspoken histories. Gwen looked at him for a long beat and realized just how much pain was buried under Harry's sardonic shell—how deeply the experiments, the betrayal, and the loss had carved into him.
"Alright," she exhaled. "Let's get it over with."
She climbed onto the table. The restraints rose and sealed her in—grown restraints, Gwen now realized, ribbed with organic patterns that felt like the interior of a ribcage. Cold dread prickled her skin.
"If this goes wrong," she muttered, her throat tight, "kill me before the suit does."
"I'd prefer not to," Harry replied, but his focus was elsewhere—on the flickering interface lighting up around him.
He lifted his hands. The bone-arms above her began to twitch, then unfurled in slow, surgical grace.
"Now," he said. "Call it out."
Gwen closed her eyes. That familiar tingle rippled across her body—bio-material surging from her pores, swirling into place in glowing white and gold. The suit hardened, and for a moment, and despite everything Harry had told her Gwen felt safe inside it and the strength she knew it provided.
Then the blade descended.
One arm lowered—a scalpel grown from polished bone glowing faintly with Harry's energy. It hovered over her collarbone, paused—and touched down.
The moment it made contact, Gwen's body convulsed.
Agony. Unfiltered. Pure. It wasn't just pain—it was invasion. The suit felt the intrusion and responded with electrical fire across every nerve. The pain didn't stay in her skin—it burrowed deeper, into muscle, marrow, memory.
Her back arched against the restraints as she screamed through clenched teeth. Her vision blurred. She could feel the tendrils inside her recoiling, writhing, resisting.
"Hold still!" Harry barked, maneuvering another limb to clamp down on a thread of golden tissue rising from the incision.
The pain doubled—tripled—as if the suit had reached inside her spine and yanked. Gwen tasted blood.
Focus, she told herself through the firestorm. You've survived worse. Don't let this beat you.
Another second passed—an eternity.
Then Harry stepped back. In his hand was a sealed vial glowing with the captured strand, gently coiling inside like a slumbering snake.
The pain ebbed. The suit began to calm. The incision sealed itself with a golden shimmer, the fire fading to a dull ache.
The restraints were released.
Gwen gasped and sat up slowly, trembling, sweat matting her hair to her forehead. Harry stood silently, cradling the vial in both hands as though it were a newborn.
"You okay?" he asked finally.
"I think... yeah," she rasped. "No thanks to your butcher-shop-from-hell."
Harry's eyes didn't leave the vial. "This... this could change everything."
Gwen nodded weakly and shifted herself upright, trying to swing her legs off the table.
“G-great,” she murmured, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow. “Now I’ll just… get going and—”
The sentence collapsed along with her.
Her legs buckled beneath her the moment she tried to stand. Her knees gave out, muscles jelly beneath the skin. She pitched forward with no way to brace the fall.
But she never hit the floor.
Instead, a firm arm wrapped around her waist mid-collapse, scooping her up with disconcerting ease. Gwen let out a startled breath as Harry hoisted her onto one shoulder in one fluid motion—like she weighed nothing.
“Whoa there,” he said, sounding almost amused. “You’re not going anywhere tonight. I need to monitor you for any residual effects. The neural pain transfer alone could have caused serious disruption.”
“I-I’m fine,” Gwen mumbled, trying to push away from him, but her arms just flailed—useless, weightless. Her fingers barely curled, her muscles not responding.
“Uh-huh,” Harry replied, clearly unconvinced. “Sure you are. Just call whoever you need to and tell them you're not making it home. I’ve got a cot upstairs.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” she slurred. Her words were jumbled now, half-blurred by a sudden, crushing wave of fatigue that hit her like tranquilizer gas. Her eyelids fluttered, heavy and hot.
Harry adjusted her position slightly and started walking, the weight of her body no more effort than carrying a medical bag.
“Tell you what,” he said lightly. “If you can keep your eyes open to the count of three, I’ll let you leave.”
“Ha. Easy…” Gwen said through a fog, trying to blink him into focus. “One… t-two…”
The word trailed off into the soft rhythm of snoring as her head dropped against his back and her body went limp.
Harry shook his head with a low chuckle.
“She fell for that faster than I expected,” he muttered.
A voice slithered into his thoughts like velvet over a blade—soft, feminine, and ancient.
'She did. Impressive, really. Almost more impressive than building an entire religion around yourself.'
Harry smirked, his pace steady as he carried Gwen toward the living quarters above the lab.
‘Well, she didn’t exactly stand a chance. It’s hard to connect dots when the truth is so far outside the bounds of what the human brain can accept.’
His eyes glowed faintly as he entered the stairwell, his voice now mental, shared within the endless echo of their Hive.
‘Besides, ever since we created the Hive Mind, splitting my consciousness across my bodies has made things... elegant. Efficient. I guide Genesis and Scourge with one voice, orchestrate Osborn with another. And here I am, helping the enemy sleep peacefully in my arms.’
He reached the top of the steps and opened the door to the quiet loft, dimly lit and filled with soft humming from the monitors monitoring Gwen’s vitals remotely.
‘No one will piece it together in time. Not before I’ve converted, absorbed, or rewritten every lifeform on this planet. One mind at a time.’
He lowered Gwen gently onto the cot, brushing a strand of hair away from her face.
“Sleep well,” Harry whispered, a predatory smile fixed on his face.
