"Let's not expose the Shadow Eater Army for now; we'll save them for a surprise later." Silas didn't plan to reveal the Shadow Eater Army to the public yet.
Little Black nodded, reset the chessboard, and began to play. Master, I plan to try and create an Artificial Intelligence now.
"Hmm, that's a great idea. You can go ahead and try. We're certainly not short on time or energy," Silas agreed with Little Black's idea. If Little Black succeeded in creating an AI, it would be a huge step forward for the Shadowkhan Army.
Currently, Silas and Peter were both relatively idle. Peter was busy being Spider-Man every day, but unfortunately, all he encountered were trivial matters. The most frequent thing he did was help people with directions.
Silas was fully resting at home, and the small tasks of gaining Justice Points and Evil Points were entirely handled by the Shadowkhan Army.
The Shadowkhan Army was now split into two main factions: one faction specialized in crime to gain Evil Points, and the other specialized in saving people to gain Justice Points. When the two factions met, they would even fight, as the show had to be convincing, though no casualties ever occurred.
It's worth noting that the leader of the Justice Point faction was Big Black, and the leader of the Evil Point faction was Little Black. Little Black often used this pretext to openly challenge Big Black to a fight. In a pure fight, Big Black wasn't afraid of Little Black. Although Big Black's intelligence was inferior to Little Black's, their combat ability was evenly matched—it was just that Little Black was too sneaky.
Whenever the fight reached a stalemate, Little Black would pull out his technological weapon, the laser sword, which was Little Black's proud creation. The laser energy currently only lasted for one minute, but Little Black was planning to replace it with Palladium, which would make the laser sword last longer. However, what Little Black truly wanted was the newest energy source held by Tony, but getting that energy was not simple.
Life had been quite comfortable recently. The only thing Silas had to do was consistently trounce Little Black in their daily chess games. Little Black was careful not to lose all the time, occasionally winning one to keep things interesting.
This peaceful life continued until the start of the new school semester.
"School's finally starting. I actually miss school life," Peter said, returning to Silas's room after walking around outside and finding nothing going on.
"You miss it? By the way, is the school rebuilt?" Silas asked. Construction workers in the Marvel universe were usually much faster. Maybe some minor damage took a long time to fix, but if a building was destroyed, they could fix it quickly. Especially for a crucial place like a school, Silas heard they even specifically invited people to help with the reconstruction.
Peter sat up and said, "I went and looked near the school. It's completely fixed; it doesn't look like it was ever destroyed."
"Is that so?" Silas wondered if he should send a Shadowkhan to blow up the school to prolong their vacation. This was something Silas had dreamed of doing in his past life, but it was just a fantasy. Now, he could actually do it.
The main concern now was Liz. Silas wondered if she had the courage to face her classmates after this break. Silas often went out with Liz during the vacation, but he noticed that Liz no longer had her former confidence. She often kept her head down, trying to avoid people's gaze.
"Oh, and Silas, I have something to tell you," Peter said, suddenly remembering something.
Silas asked, "What is it?"
"I ran into a group of Shadowkhan today, the ones who seemed to belong to the person who stole Vanko last time. I was about to capture them, but they all retreated into the Shadow Realm," Peter said regrettably.
Silas's eyebrow twitched upon hearing this. "Oh? You ran into them?"
"Yeah, they seemed to have just finished something when I caught them red-handed. If they hadn't hidden in the Shadow Realm, they wouldn't have escaped." Peter was confident he could take down those Shadowkhan. He had sparred with Silas's Shadowkhan and easily handled them.
"Those should be Tarakudo's subordinates," Silas explained. During this time, Silas had told Peter about his relationship with Tarakudo, explaining how evil Tarakudo was. He also explained that the reason he didn't pursue Tarakudo then was that everyone's Shadow Realm space was different. He couldn't enter Tarakudo's Shadow Realm unless Tarakudo allowed him to, and everyone's time spent in the Shadow Realm was limited. This time depended on the user's constitution; the better the constitution, the longer they could stay.
With just a few sentences, Silas had completely fooled Peter.
"I really envy your ability, Silas. That way, you can change clothes anytime, anywhere," Peter said enviously. Every time Peter went out and saw bad guys mid-way, he had to run into an alley to change clothes. By the time he came back out, some of the bad guys had already run far away, making it difficult to catch them.
"Isn't your spider ability good? Climbing walls, shooting webs," Silas laughed.
Peter shook his head and sighed. "Climbing walls, you can do that too, Silas. As for the webbing, that's thanks to the web-shooters." Thinking about it this way, Peter felt that if he just gave Silas the web-shooters, Silas could completely replace him.
"Wait, I still have Spider-Sense," Peter said happily.
"Spider-Sense?" Silas pretended not to know. Although he hadn't hidden his abilities, he hadn't exposed all of them. For instance, he hadn't mentioned that he was also bitten by a spider.
"It's a special sense. I don't know why, but whenever there's danger, my body twitches," Peter said.
Silas immediately threw a punch at Peter, but Peter didn't react at all.
"Why didn't you twitch?" Silas asked.
Peter playfully swatted away Silas's right hand. "It only targets people who are hostile toward me."
"Then you should call it the 'Parker Tingle'," Silas joked.
"Wait, why didn't you say the 'Peter Tingle'?" Peter focused on the key point.
Silas didn't answer Peter. After all, what he wanted to say was, I can do that too. But since he had already spun the lie, he couldn't expose himself now; he could only continue to deceive the kind and innocent Peter.
"Hey, you still haven't answered me," Peter pressed.
Silas ignored him completely and continued his game of chess with Little Black. Little Black was not wearing his mask at the moment, so Peter didn't realize that Little Black was Tarakudo.
"You guys are playing chess? I want to play too!" Peter wasn't an expert, but he figured he could easily beat these two.
Silas and Little Black were playing chess.
"Alright, you play against him." Silas moved over to make room for Peter.
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