The wind bit at his face as Morbius soared above the skyline, his figure carving a silent path between steel and shadow. Lights blurred beneath him, but tonight his eyes weren't on the chaos below. He was heading towards a quieter part of town, a forgotten hub of what was intended to become a thriving sector of industry and now sat as a constant reminder of the failure of those who had dared to stake their claim here.
He touched down on the roof of an old five-story concrete slab near the river. Once, the place had been branded in sleek Helvetica: 'CuraGen Research Solutions'. A biotech firm that promised gene therapies and medical breakthroughs to whoever had the money to burn. The funding dried up a few years ago and the company dissolved. But Jacob's preliminary data scrape of the syringe label had flagged CuraGen's name deep in the metadata. A chemical signature tied to one of their long discontinued clinical trials.
Morbius moved across the rooftop like a shadow. He found the rooftop access door rusted with an old padlock holding it shut, easily broken with a quick chop from Morbius. The interior was a mausoleum of modern science: desks covered in plastic, sample fridges unplugged, and half-dismantled centrifuges gathering dust under emergency lighting that still flickered on motion sensors.
The place was a mess, but not in the way he'd expected. It was clearly abandoned, but not untouched. As he ran a finger along a nearby worktop, the thin layer of dust that clung to his skin was far too light. This lab might have been shuttered, but it hadn't been forgotten. Someone had been here recently.
Morbius moved deeper into the building, boots silent on the concrete floor, the motion activated lights flickering on one by one in his wake. The sterile glow painted the corridors in ghostly white, but beneath the light, the details betrayed the recent use; track marks on the floor where equipment had been dragged, a chair pushed slightly out from a desk, a half-filled mug fossilized in dried coffee. He kneeled down and touched his finger to a smear of red leading through the lab, feeling that familiar electricity shimmer through him as his body confirmed what it was. Blood.
He followed the trail, finally reaching what looked like a former operations room, its wide glass panels once designed to overlook lab procedures now cracked and fogged with time. Inside, dusty folders lay scattered like fallen leaves, but one corner of the room caught his eye: a corkboard still pinned with yellowing memos and photographs.
He approached, eyes scanning the board. Most of the paperwork was irrelevant. Procurement lists, trial schedules, security rosters, but one photograph near the bottom had been carefully pinned, protected behind a plastic sleeve. It showed a group of researchers, six in total, gathered in front of a microscope rig. Most had their faces crossed out with red crosses. Only a few remained visible.
But one man stood apart. Morbius felt like he recognised him, he was pale even in the faded picture, with eyes that seemed sunken long before the camera caught him. A thin mouth, tight smile, and surgical gloves that looked too deliberate. No name tag. But someone had scribbled in the margins, as though adding it after the fact.
'Paine'
Morbius narrowed his eyes. He tried to stuff down his worst fear. He'd dealt with a Dr. Paine years before. Some cruel mad scientist obsessed with torturing others in the name of progress. It couldn't be him surely.
A loud click, followed by a sucking noise broke the silence. Like a huge ventilator had just been turned on. It came from beneath the floor. Morbius felt the ground vibrate as he stood in place.
He followed the sound, down two flights of stairs to a lower level marked 'Authorized Personnel Only'. The door had been forced recently. Its lock was pried clean off, the metal buckled inward, not out. Someone, or something had gone in from this side.
The air changed as he stepped in. Not only did it feel colder, more recycled and medical. But something just felt off. The smell of copper engulfed him as he found himself stalking towards the scent of blood once more. The hallway was lined with curtained rooms, many doors warped or broken off the hinges. At the far end, a red light blinked slowly above a threshold. Morbius entered the room, the sound of the ventilator only getting louder as he stepped in.
The stench hit him first, an unbearable mix of antiseptic, decay, and burned plastic. In the center of the room, surrounded by old machinery stitched together with scavenged tech, lay what once had been a man.
Now, only the upper torso and head remained. Tubes ran from the stump of his body into machines that hissed and blinked with a rhythmic, mechanical cruelty. His mouth was held open by a retractor, but his eyes were still lucid. They widened when they saw Morbius.
"P…please." the thing croaked, voice ragged from disuse and agony. "Kill...kill me."
Morbius stepped closer, keeping his distance ut of a mixture of fear and shock at the sight of the man. "Who did this to you?"
The head trembled, the expression flickering with something like gratitude and horror all at once. "D-Doctor... P...Paine…"
Morbius felt anger rise up in him. He clenched his fist, glancing around the room. "What did he do to you?"
The man's jaw twitched against the retractor, eyes fluttering from the pain. "Didn't... start this way..." he rasped. "Said...we'd help. Said we'd be part of a cure."
"A cure for what?"
"A cure." the man rasped again, breath hitching beneath the ventilator's pulse. "For Alzheimer's."
Morbius narrowed his eyes. "What?"
The man's jaw twitched against the retractor. "That's what he told us. That's how it started. Neuroregeneration research. Clinical trials for memory loss. Said he had...a source."
Morbius stepped closer, voice low. "Me."
The man's eyes flickered. "Said your condition...was proof that the brain could rebuild itself. That decay could be reversed, if the hunger could be separated from the healing."
Morbius stared at the blinking machines, at the tubes feeding this husk of a man. "He used your bodies to test fragments of my DNA."
"Not just test..." The man swallowed with effort, the muscles of his face twitching. "He copied it. Built synthetic strains. Grafted them into us. To see if the brain could be… reactivated.”
Morbius' voice dropped to a sad drone. "Did it work?"
A horrible silence. Morbius' jaw clenched. His claws flexed at his sides. "Where is he now?" he asked.
The man's eyes widened. "I don't know. He comes every few days to check on the progress. But he, he left a failsafe. A watchdog. Something to clear the experiments when they failed-"
The wall to Morbius' left exploded.
The force launched him across the lab, crashing through a wheeled cart and into a bank of monitors. Sparks showered the floor as he staggered up, glass embedded in his costume.
From the smoke, something moved. It wasn't a man. More like a golem.
It was gaunt and crooked, bones elongated, as if stretched too far during some terrible transformation. Patches of skin clung to a sinewy frame, pallid and veined with dark lines of corrupted blood. Metal braces jutted from its limbs, crude reinforcements bolted into tendon and bone to hold a collapsing body together.
Its face was a nightmare, one half still hauntingly human, the other fused with surgical mesh and exposed musculature. Wires pulsed beneath the surface like veins. The jaw was broken and pinned in place with external rods. Its mouth hung open, revealing jagged teeth not unlike Morbius's own, only rotten and uneven, as if they'd been decaying for centuries.
Its eyes were the worst part. One was still organic, jaundiced and trembling in its socket. The other was red and mechanical, blinking erratically, embedded deep in the ruined skull.
Morbius rose to his feet slowly. "I take it you’re the watchdog."
The thing lunged with terrifying speed. Morbius rolled beneath its strike, claws slicing up, sparks and blood flew as he caught its side. But it didn't stop. It skidded sideways, recalibrated, then straightened with a whir of motors and a shrill metallic howl. The thing hissed a wet, gurgling sound that became a voice, filtered through a shredded voicebox and modulator.
"Target: Subject Morbius. Priority specimen. Immobilize. Extract neuro-healing matrix."
"Ah. A fan."
The creature charged again, metal feet crunching through debris, arms wide like jagged blades ready to cleave. Morbius met the lunge head-on, driving a palm into its chest. He was strong, inhumanly so, but this thing had weight and momentum, and it buckled him into the wall behind cracking the concrete.
The watchdog's clawed hydraulic hand locked around his throat. Pain flared across Morbius' neck as servos screamed and gears twisted. He snarled and sank his claws into its forearm, bloodless but thick with black fluid. It didn't flinch. Its other hand raised slowly, the flesh giving way to cold metal syringes that pierced through the fingers and slowly inched their way towards Morbius' face.
Morbius hissed between clenched teeth, the familiar hunger rising. The watchdog lifted him higher. "Subject unstable. Termination authorized."
Then Morbius headbutted it, hard. The creature reeled, staggering half a step, and that was all he needed. Morbius twisted in midair, flipped behind it, and drove both claws into the back of its neck. Sparks exploded. It let out a mechanical shriek and spun, catching him mid-swing with an elbow like a battering ram. He flew again, this time slamming into the ceiling and crashing down through a rusted gurney.
Morbius groaned, pulling himself from the twisted frame. "They never go down easy do they?" he muttered, flexing one dislocated shoulder back into place with a crack. The watchdog advanced, more measured now, almost studying him.
"Vital signs: erratic. Subject demonstrates regenerative instability. Confirm hypothesis: consume tissue sample."
It leapt. The floor shattered beneath its launch, arms outstretched like scythes. Morbius vanished in a blur of movement, then reappeared above it, wings flared in the flickering red light. He dropped fast and smashed both feet into its back, driving it into the floor. The sheer weight combined with the intertia of the torpedo sent them both crashing through floor after floor of the building until they finally slammed into something hard enough to stop their descent.
"You want a piece of me huh?" Morbius said coldly. "Here, take a sample"
He drove a claw straight into the back of its head. The thing spasmed violently, screeched like a modem caught in a meat grinder, then swung around, catching him with its jaw. It bit down. Hard.
Morbius screamed as teeth sank into his arm, not just biting but draining, leeching his blood with built-in syringes hidden in the gums. "You bastard." he growled, eyes blazing red as the hunger finally snapped its leash.
He didn't hold back. In a blur, he tore free, slashing open the watchdog's mouth with one arm and driving his other claw up through its lower jaw and out the top of its skull. The machine let out one last gurgling shriek, body seizing violently, and then collapsed in a heap, twitching and sparking, still steaming with the scent of burnt flesh and silver alloy. Morbius stood over it, panting, blood trickling from his wounds.
A few floors up, the man in the machine coughed violently, red froth spilling from his mouth. Morbius returned too late. The damage from the fight had knocked one of the stabilizers loose; the machinery had begun to fail, vital systems crashing. Morbius rushed to the man's side, but the look in his eyes already said it all. There wasn't enough left to save.
"Thank...you." he wheezed. "Better...than being his puppet." Then he went still.
Morbius bowed his head. His heart was conflicted. Had this not happened by accident part of him felt like he'd have had to do it for the man anyway. This was no life to live. No hope of recovery, chained to a machine for the rest of his life. For a moment he thought of the hippocratic oath he'd taken all those years ago. He wouldn't have even considered taking a life back then.
He moved back down towards where the fight had ended, taking a last look at the zombified husk he'd battled. The watchdog's wrecked frame still twitched beside him, wires sparking faintly, the last flickers of its unholy life finally giving out. Morbius exhaled slowly, the metallic scent of blood still thick in the air. He stood in the quiet for a long moment, letting the weight of the night settle. Then, came a noise from below. Not a voice. Not a machine whine. A digital tone. Repeating.
The watchdog's broken body was still, but beneath the warped plating of its chest, a small panel blinked with soft, intermittent blue light. He moved cautiously, tearing away metal plating with his claws until the panel was fully exposed. Embedded inside was a rugged microdata unit, still operational. Somehow, it had survived the fight.
He reached down and plucked it out. The screen flickered to life.
>>> ACCESSING REMOTE NODE [DR-P]
>>> DATA SYNC: PARTIALLY FAILED
>>> LAST KNOWN FULL SYNC: 11 HOURS AGO
>>> LAST UPLINK LOCATION: REDHOOK TRANSIT YARD – SECTOR 14
Morbius stared at the coordinates. It wasn't much, but it was something. The start of the breadcrumb trail that would lead him to Dr. Pain. The bastard must have already began uploading Morbius' biometric data as soon as he'd sunk his teeth into his arm.
"Redhook..." he muttered. That section of Brooklyn had been mostly gutted over the past few years, what hadn't been lost to gentrification had become a dumping ground for corporate off-books testing and black market shipping. If Pain was using it as a relay point, it meant he was mobile. Paranoid. Smart.
Morbius tucked the device into his coat. He took one last look at the Watchdog and hoped this was the newest model Pain had come up with. He'd barely escaped this scuffle with his life, his pride was a different story. Morbius' wasn't exactly the type to have allies either, he'd crossed just about every minor hero in this city one time or another. His encounter with Luke Cage was a step in the right direction, but he didn't exactly have the money to pay the hero for hire to fight undead abominations with him.
He moved to a nearby window and slid it open, perching on the windowsill. Outside, the wind was howling stronger now. The city stretched out before him, glittering like the stars in the sky. He leapt, gliding out into the black.
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