The Black Spider quickly spun a long thread of silk, detached it, and watch the free end float upward, then hung on as the thread lifted into the air and pulled him with it. He only had limited electrostatic control over the direction it would pull him, not nearly enough to overcome the stiff breeze, so he was blown back towards Fawcett City. As soon as he was out of sight of the abandoned warehouse headquarters he'd taken over after murdering Joe Hack and several of his lieutenants, he released the line and sort of fluttered to the ground like a piece of paper rather than a normal human body. There was a car approaching him at high speed; he stepped out into the road, preparing to leap onto it as he passed - and then he changed his plans as the car squealed to a stop and one of his new lieutenants hopped out.
"Boss, there's a couple'a..." was all he got out before the Spider pounced on him, bit him, and then climbed into the running car, squealed through a turn and started racing back toward Fawcett City.
The moving tracking token Carol was following suddenly stopped. She sped up her flight, and was close enough to see the Black Spider bite his minion and then toss the body aside, then jump into the convertible. She was horrified at the sight, and when the car squealed through a 180 and started racing toward her, she was raging at his apparent callous murder. A giant glowing red railroad spike, perhaps 15' tall, appeared and the air and was driven down, through the hood and engine of the car, crushing the front end to the road, and the car bent in the middle and threw the Black Spider into the air. While she was ordering her yellow energy to wrap him up, he spit at her, and a large glob of sticky, gooey goop spattered on the front of her own aura, blocking her vision. She instantly felt as if something was 'scratching' her mind and she realized that somehow this goop was starting to eat through her energy field!
She dissolved that field instantly and formed another one, slightly smaller, and sighed as she saw the glob of goop fall to the road below. In that same instant, the energy that had begun to wrap around the Black Spider also dissolved, and instead of falling heavily to the street, he sort of 'fluttered' downward and rotated to land lightly on his feet. The spike dissolved as well, and he grabbed the wrecked car and threw it at her!
Carol had practiced intensely on how to protect herself in situations where she didn't have time to think, when she needed to react instantly and instinctively to an immediate danger. "UP" she commanded her energy, as powerfully as she could, and once again her ingrained reaction saved her from possible damage, as she rocketed skyward and the car passed underneath her. She spun in the air as quickly as possible, and suddenly there was a giant glowing yellow catcher's mitt in front of the car. The car thumped into the mitt, and then Carol ordered the mitt to set it down on the street, and the mitt vanished and Carol once again looked around for the Black Spider.
He spat at her again, but she knew that trick now. An almost transparent 'outer' aura blocked the goop and then dissolved, at she quickly ordered him trapped in a glowing yellow sphere, and started shaking the sphere violently to prevent him from concentrating, and he was battered from side to side. She wasn't sure what to do next, but she instantly stopped the sphere when he started to scream in pained agony! She had never heard such awful noises from a human and she'd seen some horrible deaths during her career, but nothing like this!
The Black Spider was furious as he was bounced around inside the sphere, and in tremendous pain; some bones were breaking as he bounced, and the combination of fury and agony triggered _something_ in his already mutated body, and he started to change again! His sides began writhing and twisting, and 4 new limbs, covered in black chitin and ending in claws, tore through his shredded clothing. His rear end started to expand and a chitinous, pointed abdomen tore through the back of his pants. His shredded clothes fell away, revealing... the Black Spider, no longer just a super villain code name. Not quite a normal spider, either - a 6 foot long wasp with 8 limbs - the front limbs were human arms, the head was fully human, the rear limbs were human legs, no wings, and a dangerous looking stinger on the end of the abdomen.
Carol was so horrified, the spherical shell dissolved. The monster instantly jumped and clung to the face of a building next to the street, an astonishing 3 stories high. "Can't let that monster escape!" Carol thought the herself, and instantly created a giant 'bug zapper (As Seen on TV
TM)', a long tube with a giant exhaust fan at one end, and the vacuum created by the fan instantly pulled the spider into the tube, ripping some chunks out of the wall as it did. She instantly sealed both ends of the tube and blasted skyward with the tube in tow as fast as she could.
She remembered that when she had been supercharged by the volcano in Lemuria, she'd been able to reach orbit in a matter of minutes (see
Crown Quest). She wasn't currently that fast, but she didn't need to go that high - from years of airplane flying experience with Dan, she remembered that a little above 3 miles high, the air temperature was around zero degrees Fahrenheit, which should be enough to either kill the Black Spider or force him into spider suspended animation. She had to keep reinforcing the shell as he spat some more of that gooey goop inside, but he didn't seem to have an infinite supply, and after awhile, the strange twitching in her mind stopped. She risked making the shell thinner and more transparent so she could see her captive... and he wasn't moving. She hoped she hadn't killed him... but she'd grown up in a different era, when heroes killing the bad guys was pretty much acceptable behavior, and the Black Spider had already proved he was deadly dangerous.
But what should she do now? She didn't know if he was dead or only unconscious, and she didn't want to take a risk of letting him escape by going back down where it was warmer - but she couldn't stay up her indefinitely either! And she finally remembered she had another option... her Squadron of Justice beacon! Last year she'd gone into space with a lot of other super heroes and battled a planet-sized battleship of space (see
Crisis over Earth S), and while she hadn't been offered membership in the prestigious Squadron of Justice ("Yet!"), they had given her a signaling device to call for aid if she needed it. She had never used it before, she and Dan had always been able to handle anything they encountered in their cases, but this certainly seemed like an appropriate occasion!