Chapter 83: Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man — and the Enemies Taking Notice
On a warm, clear afternoon, an alarm split the air over one of Manhattan's busier streets.
People stopped. Looked up. A column of black smoke was already climbing above the rooftops to the north, lit orange from beneath, the kind of fire that announced itself from blocks away.
By the time the engines arrived, the building was well gone. The firefighters came off their trucks fast, pulling hose lines, reading the structure — but the fire had the upper hand. The heat pushed back hard, kept them at the perimeter, working the edges while the interior roared.
Then someone in the crowd pointed.
A red-and-blue figure came swinging out of the sky, moving faster than anyone had a right to move, and hit the building's face like he belonged there.
The crowd noise changed completely.
Peter had been at this for three days.
Ever since Ethan's instructions — go be a hero, the rest we'll handle — he'd thrown himself into it with the kind of energy that only works when you're young enough not to calculate the odds. He'd stopped a mugging on the first night. A car chase the morning after. A convenience store robbery that afternoon.
Today was a fire.
He shot a line to the third floor, swung himself sideways along the building's face, and punched through a window. The smoke hit him immediately — thick and hot and personal. His spider-sense was already mapping the space without him having to think about it, flagging the sagging ceiling beam to his left, the flashover risk in the far room, the human shape behind the door at the end of the hall.
He moved.
The woman was crouched in the corner of what had been an office, both hands over her face, making sounds that weren't quite words anymore. Peter got her up, got an arm around her, shielded her head with his free hand as a section of ceiling came down behind them. He fired a web-line through the window he'd come in through, felt it catch, and they were out — descending in a long controlled arc to the street below.
She grabbed his arms the moment her feet touched the ground and held on for a moment that had nothing to do with words.
He patted her hand once, then went back up.
Three more trips. A man who'd gotten disoriented trying to find the stairs. Two kids who'd been trapped on the top floor when the stairwell filled. By the fourth run, the firefighters had gotten the hose lines closer, the pressure of the fire dropping, and the rescue became a collaboration — Peter moving fast through the interior while the crews worked the exterior, something settling between them that felt, even in the chaos, like a working relationship.
When the last of it was out and the smoke was thinning to gray, Peter landed on the sidewalk and found himself surrounded.
The cameras had arrived sometime in the middle of it. He hadn't noticed. Now there were a dozen of them, plus phones, plus two separate news vans, all pointed at him.
He was seventeen years old, and everyone was looking at him like he'd hung the moon.
Okay, he thought. This part is also pretty great.
He struck a pose — he couldn't entirely help it — and the shutters went absolutely berserk.
The questions came in a wave.
"Spider-Man, why have you been showing up so much lately—"
"Are those powers real or is it a suit—"
"Taylor Swift said she's a fan, what's your response—"
"Do you think spiders are actually gross—"
Peter thought about that last one for a moment longer than the others.
He pointed at the reporter. "Bold question. Respect."
He knew he couldn't give them anything real. He was Peter Parker underneath this mask and his Aunt May watched the news. But he also knew that walking away without a word would read wrong — too cold, too mysterious, not what this city needed right now.
He spread his hands, easy and unhurried.
"Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man," he said. "That's all you need. Take care of yourselves."
A web-line fired. He caught the corner of a building thirty feet up, felt the familiar lurch of his weight transferring to the line, and swung himself out over the street and up into the canyon of buildings above the crowd.
The cheering followed him for half a block.
Being a hero, he thought, riding the swing's peak and letting himself glide for a moment before the next line. Is genuinely the best thing in the world.
He didn't see the man at the edge of the crowd who didn't cheer.
Eddie Brock stood with his press lanyard around his neck and watched Spider-Man disappear between the buildings.
He'd been a journalist once. A good one, he'd always believed — until a certain Peter Parker in his own universe had pulled the thread on a fabricated photo and unraveled everything Eddie had built. Career. Reputation. The story he'd been telling himself about who he was.
He'd lost it all in an afternoon.
And now here was another one. Another Peter Parker, in another universe, already getting his face on the front page — except this one hadn't even done anything to Eddie yet and somehow that made it worse.
I thought this universe would be clean, Eddie thought. The symbiote stirred at the back of his mind, agreeing with him in its own particular way. I thought I'd have a fresh start.
He watched the empty space where Spider-Man had been.
I'll let you have your little moment, he thought. And then I'll show this city exactly what you really are.
High above Midtown, in the top floor of the Oscorp building, a man in a green suit was reading the newspaper.
The headline took up most of the front page.
CITY'S HERO: WHO IS SPIDER-MAN?
Below it, three separate photos from three separate incidents over the past seventy-two hours.
Green Goblin set the paper down with the careful deliberation of a man who had decided something.
"Time to go find our little spider," he said.
The tea in his cup was still steaming. He didn't touch it.
He'd been surprised, initially — this universe had an Oscorp but no Spider-Man on the books, and then one had simply appeared, as if the city had been waiting for an excuse to produce one. But the more he thought about it, the less surprising it became. Some things, it seemed, were consistent across realities. Norman Osborn built weapons. Peter Parker got bitten by a spider. And sooner or later, they found each other.
He was happy to keep the tradition alive.
Vulture stepped forward from the window where he'd been watching the skyline.
"I've been waiting for this," he said. There was a particular quality to his patience — the patience of an engineer who had spent time with the problem and was confident in his solution. "The new hardware's been tested. If that kid is anything like the last one I fought, I can handle ten of him."
He meant it, mostly. He also kept his awareness on Goblin as he said it, measuring the response.
Working with Norman Osborn was an arrangement of convenience, and Vulture had no illusions about what it was worth. Oscorp's resources had bought him a significant upgrade. But alliances with men like this had a shelf life — they lasted exactly as long as there was a shared enemy. The moment Spider-Man was gone, Vulture fully expected the question of what next to require its own answer.
He'd prepared one.
For now, though, they had the same problem.
"What's the plan?" Vulture asked. "And what about the Kamen Rider? He's been quiet."
Goblin reached into his jacket and produced two photographs. He placed them on the table between them.
"We don't go looking for Spider-Man," he said. "We make him come to us."
He tapped the first photo.
"The best friend."
The second.
"The girl."
If Peter had been in that room, he would have recognized both faces immediately.
Harry Osborn. Mary Jane Watson.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you