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Peter didn't even wait for the hallway lights to stop buzzing. As soon as Aunt May shuffled back toward her room, he slipped out the front door and jogged to the mailbox, heart banging against his ribs.
Click.
There it was: a thick, heavy envelope with his name on it Peter Parker inked in sharp block letters.
Back in his room, he shut the door, turned on the lamp, and slid a thumb under the seal. The glow hit a neat stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills. His breath hitched.
"Four thousand five…" he counted fast, hands trembling. He set his earlier five hundred on top. "Five thousand."
"Hahahaha..."
A laugh burst out of him quiet, disbelieving.
"Yes!"
He'd pictured this a dozen times: Uncle Ben's car finally replaced with something that didn't rattle; a game console for Sylas, the one he'd pretended not to want; a vacuum for Aunt May so she didn't have to fight the house with a broom every weekend, Small things, Good things, their things.
"June tenth," Peter whispered. Sylas's birthday. "Cutting it close, but… I might actually pull it off."
He tucked the envelope into the drawer beneath his bed, slid it shut, and flopped back onto the mattress.
Sleep refused to come. He stared at the ceiling, grinning into the dark, listening to the night spin past.
---
Morning
"Rise and shine, Sylas!" Peter knocked on his brother's door with a little too much enthusiasm.
The door cracked open. Sylas squinted from a nest of blankets. "My alarm hasn't even—"
"Early bird, worms, etcetera," Peter said, practically bouncing. "New policy: I'm supervising your mornings. Zero tardies."
Sylas clocked the happiness he couldn't hide and smirked. "Copy that, Sergeant Parker, Give me two minutes."
"Downstairs in three," Peter said, retreating.
Sylas shut the door, rolled his eyes at the ceiling, and considered going back to sleep out of spite.
Instead, he glanced at the clock, grunted, and headed for the sink. If Peter were this chipper, the mailbox miracle had landed.
They ate together toast, eggs, something approximating bacon, and headed out. The day had that fresh, too-bright quality Queens sometimes got after a long night.
---
Midtown High
"You're early?" Missy appeared behind Sylas like a magic trick. "Okay, what did he bribe you with?"
"Peer pressure," Sylas said, dropping his bag. "Also, apparently I live under a new punctuality regime."
Missy tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Tomorrow's Saturday. I'm still taking you somewhere fun."
"Am I supposed to guess where?"
"Nope." The smile tipped slyly. "And no, it's not a theme park."
"Then I'm curious." He folded his arms onto the desk and let his face sink into them. "Wake me when it starts."
The bell hadn't even rung, and he was already half asleep.
Across the building, Peter walked into chemistry like a pilgrim entering a cathedral.
He barely heard the assignment before he was setting up his own glassware, running calculations in a pocket notebook dense with formulas and yes-no boxes.
His first mixture hissed and burped out a sour string of bubbles.
"Mr. Parker?" the teacher called, drifting over.
"All good," Peter said quickly, killing the heat and sweeping the failure into the disposal. "Just… calibrating."
"Kindly calibrate with my assignment," the teacher replied, tapping the handout with a knuckle.
"Right, sorry." Peter knocked it out in under a minute, measured, stirred, filtered, done, and lifted a hand. "Finished!"
The teacher peered at the beaker, baffled. "Correct… somehow." A sigh.
"Fine. You can… explore, within reason. Only with the reagents provided."
"Scout's honor," Peter said, already flipping his notebook to a page labeled WEB FORMULA v4. He crossed out a line. "Not that, too acidic."
By lunch, he'd joined the chemistry club solely to secure after-hours access. They welcomed him like he was a rare element.
By four-thirty, everyone else had gone home, Peter stayed, The lab hummed with a tired glow.
At five-oh-two, he held up a viscous line of translucent silk between two gloved fingers. It stretched, didn't snap, and recoiled back into itself like a heartbeat.
Peter whooped. "Yes! Yes, yes, yes!"
He grabbed the 3D-printed casing from his backpack and snapped the cartridge into place on the compact wrist rig he'd designed. The thing looked like a watch had a baby with a grappling hook.
"Web-shooter," he said, trying out the name. It tasted perfect.
Then he looked up. A camera glared at him from the corner.
He tugged his sleeve over the device, killed the lights, and hustled out like he'd never been there.
---
In a back alley, Peter wriggled into his stitched-by-teenager suit, the "sleepers" Stark would later roast if he ever met him, and slid his backpack into a hidden nook.
He flexed his fingers, breathed once, and aimed at the brick above.
"Don't jam, don't jam, don't jam—"
Thwip.
A silver line shot from his wrist and stuck high on the wall. He tugged. It held. Solid.
Peter grinned inside the mask. "Okay, New York, let's dance."
He vaulted upward, let the line catch, swung across the alley mouth into open air, and fired another thread toward a billboard.
The city unspooled beneath him streets blurring into ribbons, rooftops leaping to meet him, the wind a cool palm against his face.
He laughed. He couldn't help it. "Woooo!"
A twist, a flip, a clean arc between two towers momentum translated into weightlessness and back again.
The world obeyed him in a way it never had in the cage, never had in gym class or hallways or anywhere, Up here, he was built for it.
He stuck the landing on a window ledge, crouched, fired again, and rolled the swing into a perfect backflip because of course he did.
"Spider-Man," he said to the empty sky, trying on the name. "Thanks for the rebrand, mystery emcee."
The city answered with a honk, a siren, a thousand stories happening at once. One of them reached him exactly when it needed to.
An elderly man stepped off the curb, misreading a light.
A delivery truck roared through the intersection, horn screaming, the driver late and not looking.
Peter didn't think. He released a line, dove, braced, and scooped the old man safely onto the opposite sidewalk.
They skidded into a trash bin and came to a breathless stop.
The truck, brakes slammed too late, jackknifed, missed a lamppost by inches, and plowed through the glass front of a closed corner restaurant.
The explosion of sound punched the block. A flock of pigeons took off like confetti.
Peter's stomach lurched. "Oh no—"
The old man tapped his shin with a cane. "Thank you, kid. But the driver."
"Right. Right!"
Peter sprinted to the crumpled cab. The door was twisted into a modern sculpture.
He planted his feet, gripped the seam, and pulled. Metal wailed. The door ripped free and clanged to the asphalt.
The driver was slumped over the wheel, airbag deflated. Pulse yes. Breathing shallow but steady.
"Hey, sir? Sir!" Peter tapped his cheek gently through the mask. No response, but alive.
He turned, calling to the cluster of bystanders now filming and hovering. "Somebody call an ambulance! Tell them it's a collision, driver breathing but non-responsive!"
Phones were already up. Sirens, faint but coming, A woman nodded and spoke rapidly into hers.
Peter looked back at the old man, who gave a tiny salute with his cane.
"You bought him time," he said. "That'll do."
Peter nodded, exhaled, and felt the weight of two truths settle on his shoulders at once: he'd saved a life, and he'd caused the crash by changing the pattern.
He fired a line, launched into the growing canyon of sirens, and was gone before the first cruiser swung onto the block.
---
The Day After
Seven a.m. Peter rapped on Sylas's door again. "Up, we are not late today."
Sylas opened it, hair a rebel nation. "You do realize it's Saturday tomorrow, right?"
"Routine builds character," Peter said solemnly.
"Web-shooters build character," Sylas shot back, reading his brother's entire soul with one lazy glance. "Try not to glue yourself to a city bus."
Peter blinked. "I—what?"
"Your sleeves are uneven." Sylas broadened his eyes innocently. "And you smell like ethanol and latex."
Peter flushed under the sarcasm and changed the subject at lightspeed. "Breakfast?"
"Lead on, Captain Chemistry."
At school, Missy slid into her chair beside Sylas and tapped her phone. "Reminder set. Tomorrow. Ten a.m. Dress for movement."
"What counts as movement?"
"If you can't climb in it, don't wear it."
"Terrifying," he said. "I'm in."
Across the hall, Peter was a tornado of purposeful nerd energy. He turned in extra lab notes, asked for more reagents, and then remembered he was supposed to look normal and spent an hour forcing himself to do normal student things like "write with a pen" and "answer history questions" without building a web equation in the margins.
By the last bell, he'd managed both: the mask of a regular kid and the secret of a swinging one.
"Club tonight?" Sylas asked at the lockers.
"Yeah," Peter said, casual now. "Won't be late."
"Try not to rebrand Midtown as 'Webtown,'" Sylas said, shutting his locker. "People get weird about change."
Peter smirked. "Got it."
---
Nightfall — Another Lap
He didn't mean to patrol. He just meant to swing to feel the air again, nail a cleaner flip, see if he could thread a line through the skeleton of a billboard at speed.
But swinging has a way of putting you where you're needed.
A bike messenger veered around a delivery van too fast; Peter snagged his bag and steadied him before he ate the street. A kid lost a balloon; Peter webbed it gently back.
A purse snatch turned into a chase; Peter hung the thief from a streetlight with a tidy bowline knot of webbing and left the cops a note that said, "You're welcome. P.S. Sorry about the knot, I'm new."
He was starting to get the balance, the momentum, the way a city talked if you listened for the right kind of trouble.
He also kept glancing at restaurant storefronts, at intersections, measuring distances he hadn't measured yesterday.
The truck's shattered glass kept flickering across his brain like sunlight on water.
"Learn fast," he told himself, perched on the edge of a water tower. "Make it count."
A breeze skimmed across the rooftops, sliding past the place where, somewhere out there in the dark, a different shadow moved a brother with a blade called Shadeblade and an empire of ink at his heels.
Some nights belonged to heroes.
Some nights belonged to the Shadow Dominion.
Tonight felt like both.
Peter fired a line, stepped off the edge, and let the city catch him.
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
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