The bell ending lunch period was a mercy. Aarav watched as Peter Parker jolted, pulled from his intense fixation on the news report. He hadn't touched his food. The look on his face was one Aarav recognized from his own past life—the frustrated furrow of a brilliant engineer presented with a problem that defied all logical parameters. It was the look of someone who knew the official story was a lie painted over a truth so bizarre it was terrifying.
He knows, Aarav thought, gathering his own tray. Not the details, but he feels the wrongness in his bones. The hero's curse.
The afternoon classes were a study in surreal normalcy. Whispers of the "Queens Boom" echoed in every hallway, theories getting wilder with each passing period. Aarav played his part, the quiet, observant transfer student, but his mind was a supercomputer running threat assessments. In physics, Mr. Dell, perhaps hoping to recapture yesterday's spark, called on him.
"Mr. Sharma, since you have such a firm grasp on practical applications, can you explain the photoelectric effect?"
Aarav gave a simplified, textbook-perfect answer. Not a dazzling display of graduate-level knowledge, just enough to be top of the class without being otherworldly. Peter, however, watched him the entire time, not with admiration, but with a keen, analytical curiosity. His Spider-Sense might not have been screaming danger, but it was humming a constant, low-level tune of anomaly.
The final bell was a release. Aarav didn't head home. A gnawing sense of dread and responsibility pulled him toward the industrial yard. He had to see. He had to know what he'd unleashed.
The scene that greeted him made his blood turn to ice.
The area was swarming, but not with cops or news vans. Men and women in sleek, black tactical gear, devoid of any insignia, moved with a silent, lethal efficiency. They had erected portable barriers that glowed with a faint blue light, humming with contained energy. The air crackled with purpose. Figures in full environmental hazmat suits were meticulously vacuuming the ground, scrubbing the few remaining walls, and sealing every speck of collected material into heavy, lead-lined canisters.
This wasn't an investigation. This was an eradication.
Aarav melted into the shadows of a half-collapsed warehouse across the street, his new instincts making him a ghost. He focused, and the chatter from the agents' radios sharpened in his hearing.
"—thermal scarring suggests instantaneous sublimation of the steel alloy. No residue. This wasn't an explosive, it was targeted matter deletion—" "—energy signature is non-terrestrial, but doesn't match any known Chitauri or Asgardian profiles. It's purer. Almost solar. Readings are off the chart—" "Coulson wants this wrapped up before 1900. I want this site looking pre-colonial. No traces. He's not happy."
Coulson.
The name was a punch to the gut. So, it was true. The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division wasn't just a myth. And they were here, cleaning up his mess. The sheer, terrifying scale of the organization he'd inadvertently alerted was staggering. He was nearly an immortal with the power of a star, and he was being hunted by the most resourceful, well-equipped spies on the planet.
A flicker of movement on a nearby rooftop caught his eye. A red and blue figure landed with practiced silence, crouching low to survey the professional operation below.
Spider-Man.
Even from this distance, Aarav could read the confusion in his posture. Peter tilted his head, the white lenses of his mask wide as he took in the high-tech, military-grade cleanup. This was so far beyond the police. He took a few cautious steps along the roof's edge, his movements curious, investigative. He was looking for clues, just as Aarav was, but from a different angle.
Aarav watched, a silent spectator to the two worlds now colliding because of him. Below, the shadowy government agency systematically erased his mistake. Above, the friendly neighborhood hero tried to piece it together.
He saw Spider-Man pause, one hand going to the side of his mask—adjusting a lens, enhancing his view. He was scanning the perimeter, looking for anything the professionals had missed.
Aarav didn't wait to see if he found anything. The message was received, loud and clear. The pond had been still. He had thrown a stone, and now the ripples were spreading, reaching the shores of both S.H.I.E.L.D. and Spider-Man.
He retreated into the deepening shadows, the hum of the Divya Kavacha(Divine Armor) under his skin feeling less like a gift and more like a beacon.
The next day at school, a new kind of tension thrummed in the air. The buzz about the explosion was now mingled with whispers about a crazy ATM robbery with "laser guns." Aarav's mind was racing. The world was getting stranger, faster.
He needed data. Not on the bow's catastrophic power, but on his passive durability. He needed to understand his everyday invincibility in a controlled setting.
He devised a simple, social experiment.
In the crowded hallway between periods, he calculated Flash Thompson's trajectory perfectly. He positioned himself, a rock in a river of students. Right on cue, Flash, holding court with his friends, shoved backwards without looking.
"Move it, OOF!"
The impact was solid. Flash slammed into Aarav's side with his full weight. There was a loud, dull THWUMP, like a sack of meat hitting a concrete pillar.
Aarav didn't budge. Not an inch.
Flash, however, rebounded, stumbling into his own friends, clutching his shoulder with a wince of genuine pain. "What the hell, Sharma?" he grunted, his face a mixture of anger and utter bewilderment. "You got a brick wall in your backpack or something?"
The crowd around them laughed, writing it off as Flash being an idiot who'd hurt himself showing off. But from a nearby locker, Michelle "MJ" Jones watched, her sharp eyes missing nothing. She didn't laugh. She simply observed the scene—Flash's pained expression, Aarav's utter, complete lack of reaction, the faint dent in the metal locker behind him that perfectly matched the point of impact. She raised a single, thoughtful eyebrow, filing the anomaly away in her keen mind.
The experiment was a success. The data was clear: he was a fixed point. An immovable object.
That evening
On a rooftop not far from the now-spotless industrial yard, Spider-Man examined the only piece of evidence he'd managed to scavenge: a tiny, dark piece of fused concrete he'd pried from a crack. It was still faintly warm to the touch, humming with a strange, deep energy that made the fine hairs on his arms stand up. It felt… clean, yet immensely powerful.
"What are you?" he muttered to the tiny rock.
His question was interrupted by the crackle of his police scanner app. "—all units, reports of an armed robbery in progress at 7th and Main, suspects reported to be using… ah… advanced energy weapons—"
Energy weapons. Again.
Spider-Man stuffed the strange piece of concrete into a pouch on his belt and swung into action, the mystery of the solar flare temporarily shelved for a more immediate threat.
The fight was chaotic. Toomes's thugs, driving a van modified with a scavenged Chitauri core, unleashed a wild blast from a mounted cannon to cover their escape. The energy was violent, unstable, and blue—the opposite of the precise, golden power Aarav had wielded. It tore up the street, leaving scorch marks and molten asphalt.
Spider-Man webbed up the lower-level guys but was forced to dive for cover as the van screeched away, its cannon glowing for another shot.
In a sleek command van parked in a nondescript garage, Agent Phil Coulson watched both events unfold on separate monitors. On one screen, satellite data from the industrial yard. On the other, a live feed from a drone showing the aftermath of the ATM robbery, the chaotic energy signature still flickering on sensors.
He sipped his coffee, his face a mask of calm analysis.
"A precise, solar-based energy event that vaporizes steel with no fallout," he said aloud to the agent beside him. "And now, hours later, a messy, uncontrolled display of repurposed Chitauri tech."
He turned, his eyes sharp.
"That's not a coincidence. That's a pattern. Two different energy signatures, two different methodologies. But in the same city, in the same 48-hour window." He placed his cup down. "I think we have a new player in the tech game. Someone advanced enough to make Toomes's toys look like firecrackers. And they're testing their merchandise."