Venom was already in a frantic sprint, but no matter how desperately he pushed himself, he couldn't shake off his pursuer. Shazam remained hot on his tail, steadily closing the distance with every passing second. If not for Venom's ability to liquefy his body and shift between different states, Shazam would have caught him already. His speed and shapeshifting were his greatest advantages—and at this point, his only real ace if he wanted to get away.
"What's up with that guy?" Eddie asked, his voice strained as they continued their mad dash through the streets.
"I don't know, Edd," Venom replied, his voice carrying an unusual edge of caution. "Everything about him doesn't feel right. I absolutely do not want to get caught by him. From that lightning attack earlier, I'm sure you felt it too. His power is certainly something we do not want to cross paths with."
Venom suddenly veered toward a nearby pastry shop, hoping the narrow entrance and cluttered interior might give him just enough of an advantage to lose Shazam. As luck would have it, an elderly woman happened to be stepping out at that exact moment, pushing the glass door open with one hand while carrying a neatly packed box of cake in the other.
The moment she looked up and saw the massive black figure charging straight toward her, her eyes widened in pure terror. The box slipped from her fingers as she instinctively braced her frail, aging body for the impact, her face going pale at the sight of Venom's monstrous grin and rows of jagged teeth.
But instead of crashing into her, Venom's entire body suddenly lost its solid shape. His muscular frame collapsed into a mass of black, gooey slime resembling thick, living tar. The amorphous substance flowed around the elderly woman, slipping past her with barely an inch to spare before squeezing through the narrowing gap of the doorway. By the time the door swung shut behind him, Venom was already inside the pastry shop.
He didn't slow down for even a second. The black slime rapidly pulled itself back together, reforming Venom's towering muscular frame as he continued sprinting toward the back of the shop. For all his versatility, he was still faster when running on two legs, and right now, every fraction of a second mattered.
Behind the counter, the lone worker stood completely frozen, staring at the scene with wide, bewildered eyes. With his lanky frame, messy hair, and perpetually dazed expression, he looked almost like a real-life version of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. His mouth hung slightly open as he watched the massive black alien charge straight through the pastry shop.
"Maybe I should quit the shroom," he muttered under his breath.
He remained rooted to the spot, unsure whether what he had just witnessed had actually happened. His gaze slowly shifted toward the glass entrance, where the doors remained completely intact. There wasn't a single crack in the glass, nor any sign that something that large had forced its way through. As far as he could tell, the creature had simply appeared inside the shop out of nowhere.
Meanwhile, Shazam had been doing everything he could to keep Venom contained during the chase. He wasn't merely trying to catch him or dragging behind to delay the chase for as long as he has done so far, he was actively scanning their surroundings for anything that could serve as a temporary container, something he could use to trap Venom before the symbiote could simply liquefy its way out again.
Shazam, who had spotted Venom during his sudden dash into the shop, zapped ahead with a flash of lightning. Shazam shot toward the glass doors at speed that made the world around him seem to blur.
At the last possible moment, Shazam adjusted his trajectory and shot right in without damaging the glass door, his boots touching down inside the pastry shop as his eyes immediately swept across the interior, searching for the black symbiote that had disappeared somewhere toward the back.
The worker behind the counter was still staring toward the entrance, his mind stuck on the strange events that had just unfolded. He couldn't stop wondering where exactly that massive, black, muscle-bound freak had come from. More importantly, he found himself wondering whether the shop's bathroom was going to survive whatever that thing had planned to do in there. He was still lost in those thoughts when Shazam suddenly came to a brief stop directly in front of the counter.
The worker hadn't even seen the door open or close when Shazam entered. To his eyes, there had been nothing more than a sudden blur before the buffed-up man in the red suit and white cape was simply standing there, staring back at him. The glowing lightning bolt emblazoned across Shazam's chest seemed almost painfully bright under the shop's lights, but the worker was too stunned to react.
"Might want to put 911 on speed dial for the lady outside. She might be having a stroke, or a heart attack," Shazam said casually.
The worker continued staring at him, completely frozen.
"Maybe both. I really can't tell," Shazam added with a small shrug before his body vanished in another crackle of speed.
The entire encounter had lasted barely a couple of seconds. The worker slowly blinked several times, trying to process what had just happened before his gaze drifted toward the entrance again.
"Shit... I really should quit the shrooms," he muttered as he reached into the chest pocket of his shirt and felt the remaining stash inside, staring down at it with a mixture of dread and resignation. At this point, he wasn't even sure whether he was hallucinating anymore. For all he knew, the drugs had finally pushed him over the edge and whatever was happening in the bathroom was simply the final stage of his descent into madness.
Then again, he really didn't want to find out.
Whatever those two were about to do in the shop's bathroom, he wanted absolutely no part in it. He had a growing suspicion that walking in there to investigate would only lead to a much bigger problem, so he decided it was probably best to mind his own business and pretend none of this had happened.
Meanwhile, Venom had already made it through the bathroom door. His eyes immediately locked onto the toilet as he considered his last and perhaps only reliable means of escape. If he could liquefy himself and slip down the pipes, he could reach the sewer system and disappear beneath the city. It wasn't exactly a glamorous escape route, but with a pursuer as fast and persistent as Shazam, Venom wasn't exactly in a position to be picky.
He was just about to dive into the toilet when a violent crack of lightning suddenly tore through the cramped bathroom.
BOOM!
Shazam's lightning struck the toilet directly, blasting water violently out of the pipe and sending it spraying across the bathroom. Venom recoiled, his body twisting away from the sudden burst as his only escape route was effectively ruined.
"Careful now," Venom said, his jagged grin spreading across his face as he slowly straightened himself. "Your obsession with me is starting to get alarming."
"Well, you keep running," Shazam replied, stepping farther into the bathroom. "How else am I supposed to find you if I were to lose you now?"
His tone remained surprisingly casual, but his eyes were anything but. While speaking, Shazam subtly glanced around the cramped bathroom, taking in the walls, the damaged toilet, the narrow space, and every possible exit. His eyes moved so quickly that Venom barely had time to notice what he was doing, let alone understand the purpose behind it.
"Since we're already here, why don't you tell me what the fuck you want with me?" Venom asked, his voice losing some of its playful edge. "Clearly, you aren't one of them."
The two slowly began moving sideways, circling one another within the cramped bathroom. Venom's shoulders remained tense, his body poised to strike at the first opportunity, while Shazam kept his stance relaxed but ready to act. Neither took his eyes off the other for more than a moment as they silently sized each other up.
'Since we've got our backs against a wall here, we'll distract him with a conversation. Then, once there's an opening, we bite his head off,' Venom told Eddie internally.
'I know it's a last resort, but you'd be crazy to think we'd be fast enough to get the jump on this guy,' Eddie replied. After a brief pause, however, his tone shifted as another thought occurred to him. 'Then again, maybe crazy is the Hail Mary we need to get us out of this mess.'
'Good. Then it's agreed—'
Venom's thought was cut short when Shazam finally answered his earlier question.
"What do you know about Klyntar?"
The question came so suddenly that Venom actually stopped moving for a fraction of a second. Shazam stared directly into his twisted, unsettling eyes, his expression becoming noticeably more serious. There was no curiosity in his gaze, no uncertainty, and certainly no hint that he was throwing the name out at random. The look in his eyes made one thing painfully clear: there was no point in pretending he didn't know what Shazam was talking about.
Venom's enormous white eyes widened more than usual, his grin fading slightly as genuine surprise flashed across his face.
For once, the symbiote had been completely caught off guard.
'Oh shit, Edd… We are so fucked. I'm talking hardcore, Edd. Hardcore.'
Venom's voice rang through Eddie's mind with an unusual level of panic, so frantic that it immediately put him on edge. Whatever that name meant, whatever Shazam knew about Klyntar, it had clearly struck a nerve.
'What? Why? What's that he's asking about?' Eddie asked, growing increasingly confused. He knew practically nothing about the symbiotes beyond what he had experienced since becoming Venom. Their origins, their homeworld, where they had come from—none of it meant anything to him. But if this Klyntar thing was the reason Shazam had been chasing them across the city, then Eddie certainly wanted answers too.
"Are you gonna speak up, or do I need to drag you out of that gooey meat suit myself?"
Shazam's voice came through their internal exchange, and his gaze remained fixed directly on Venom's enormous white eyes as though he were addressing someone hiding behind them. He had already noticed that Venom's situation was different from Carnage's.
The crimson symbiote seemed completely consumed by madness, driven almost entirely by the desire to live up to its name and cause as much carnage as possible. Venom, however, was different. There was a sense of rationality in his actions as though the man in there had some level of control and not consumed by the monster, and Shazam was almost certain of it.
'Is he talking to me?' Eddie asked his parasitic roommate.
'Yes, Edd. I think he is talking to you,' Venom replied.
"That's right. I know there's a human in there," Shazam continued. "Whether this was imposed on you like the other one or not, you're coming with me, and I'm getting answers out of you."
Shazam had a feeling that capturing Venom could tell them far more about whatever was going on. More importantly, it might finally give them some answers about exactly what had happened to Officer Suarez. There was still the possibility that Venom and Eddie were victims just like Suarez had been, but Shazam wasn't about to let that possibility make him careless.
Even if Venom was innocent, the symbiote itself was still dangerous. Shazam had already seen enough from Carnage to understand that these creatures possessed a distinctly parasitic nature. The brief moment when Carnage had detached itself from its host and after Spider-Man's tell about how a man he met in the sewers suddenly turned into Carnage had given that suspicion, and Shazam had no intention of lowering his guard around something that could potentially abandon one body and take control of another.
Venom, meanwhile, had found himself on the losing end of this ridiculous little game of tag. Shazam had been hot on his ass from the beginning, and now the guy had somehow cornered him in a bathroom while casually throwing around words like 'Klyntar'. To make matters worse, Shazam's lightning tasted far too saucy to be regular lightning.
Venom didn't know exactly what made it different, but every instinct in his body told him there was something unnatural behind it. Divine magic was the secret sauce, though he obviously had no way of knowing that.
Deciding that talking wasn't going to get them out of this situation, Venom made the first move.
A thick black tentacle suddenly erupted from his torso, its tip rapidly sharpening into something resembling a living spear before it shot toward Shazam's chest. The attack struck with enough force to pierce straight through an ordinary human body, but the moment it connected, Venom felt nothing but resistance.
The sharpened symbiotic flesh failed to pierce Shazam's costume.
It didn't even manage to leave a mark.
Shazam barely reacted, standing there as though someone had poked him with a finger rather than stabbed him with a living spear.
'Now that's some abs,' Eddie commented internally, staring at Shazam's impressively defined physique with a mixture of disbelief and envy. 'What's he made of, titanium?'
While Eddie continued his internal commentary, Venom immediately withdrew the extended symbiotic flesh and pulled it back into his body.
'Drain,' Venom thought.
Having maneuvered close enough to the restroom sink, Venom's massive body suddenly lost its shape. His black muscular frame liquefied into a thick mass of living slime before rushing across the porcelain and slipping directly toward the drain. In the blink of an eye, he was making another desperate escape attempt, intending to force his way through the narrow drainage pipe.
Unfortunately for them, Venom's escape attempt was once again cut short.
Before the symbiote could fully disappear down the drain, Shazam's hand shot forward and caught hold of the thick black mass. There was no conventional grip, no fist wrapped around a solid body, but Shazam didn't need one for the moment his palm came into contact with the symbiote, a carefully controlled current of electricity began flowing through his hand and directly into Venom.
Venom's entire mass spasmed with immediate effects as every cell in his body was overwhelmed by the controlled electrical charge. It wasn't powerful enough to violently blast him apart, but it was precisely strong enough to interfere with his reactions. His cells began to numb, their ability to respond slowing as though each individual part of his body had suddenly been struck by a wave of exhaustion.
Eddie felt it too, for himself and Venom are one.
His thoughts began to drag, becoming slow and heavy as though his mind had been submerged in thick mud. Venom experienced the same thing, and before either of them could properly react, both host and symbiote were slipping into a groggy, disoriented state.
Venom remained a thick, shapeless mass of black goo, but he could no longer properly reform himself.
Shazam had been careful with the amount of electricity he used. Rather than simply shocking Venom with enough power to incapacitate him through brute force, he had deliberately targeted the symbiote at a cellular level, slowing its responses so severely that the individual symbiotic cells couldn't properly recognize what was happening.
Under normal circumstances, such a sudden disruption might have caused the symbiote to instinctively abandon its host and separate, behaving much like the parasite Shazam suspected it to be. But the abnormal state he had induced slowed those reactions before they could even fully register.
As a result, Venom remained bonded to Eddie.
For now, Shazam had successfully prevented the symbiote from escaping while keeping both the parasite and its host together in the same incapacitated state.
'Good. Looks like it works.'
Shazam couldn't help but feel a small sense of satisfaction as he watched the sluggish mass of Venom in his grasp. Ever since he had learned what happened to Officer Suarez—and the fact that he had ultimately been forced to eliminate him before the situation could escalate into something far worse—Shazam had been thinking about how exactly he was supposed to capture one of these things without killing it.
The problem was that he still didn't fully understand what these creatures were. Solomon's vision had shown him something that looked remarkably similar to what he had encountered here, but he still hadn't managed to put a proper name to them. Whatever they were, they were slippery, shapeshifting anomalies with enough mobility to make capturing one feel like trying to grab an eel coated in oil.
The continuous channel of low, controlled current of living lightning constantly disrupted the symbiote's ability to reorganize its biomass.
Now that he had finally managed to restrain one, Shazam wasn't about to waste the opportunity.
"Thank goodness you're not green," he muttered, glancing down at the thick, shapeless mass in his hand. "Otherwise, it'd look like I'm holding a moist giant booger."
His eyes wandered around the bathroom as he searched for anything that could serve as a makeshift containment vessel. A bucket, a metal container, anything sturdy enough to keep Venom from simply squeezing through the smallest opening and making another escape attempt.
In fact, Shazam had already come up with a plan while chasing Venom through the city.
His original idea had been to find a steel water tank, shove Venom inside, seal it shut while he maintain a steady electrical current through the metal walls, effectively turning the tank into a giant electrified cage. The constant current would keep the symbiote weakened and docile while preventing it from liquefying its way out as he carries the entire thing back to Avengers Tower.
It wasn't exactly the most elegant containment strategy, but considering he was dealing with a shapeshifting alien parasite that could turn itself into living goo and slip through plumbing, Shazam wasn't particularly concerned with elegance.
Right now, he just needed to find something that could hold it.