The fourth-cup holder was mistake in hindsight.
Not because of the weight—his superhuman body made that a non issue—but balancing two bags of chilli fries on the other hand while also fishing for his keys in his back pocket had Ben genuinely consider some of his life choices on the front step.
With a bit of thinking—and holding the chilli fries bags by his teeth—he'd managed to get the door open eventually while vowing to get a smart lock.
The house was quiet, which considering that he lived alone? Wasn't exactly surprising. Even with his enhanced senses—not really enhanced as he'd lived with them for a lifetime—all he was really picking up was the hum of the refrigerator and sound of cars passing by ever so often.
He put two smoothies in the fridge while plating himself the fires, he grabbed the remaining smoothies and headed upstairs.
Ben set the smoothies down, dropped into the chair, and opened his now newly improved laptop. Seems like having smart transformations does help a guy out.
The screen came to life faster than the blink of an eye with a custom OS built in. While the screen had barebones of the basics, four different tabs were opened in the background.
He pulled up the first program.
The crime sorting VI wasn't exactly pretty but it did what was asked off it. Pulling from police band frequencies, 911 dispatch logs, and whatever public camera feeds he'd managed to tap into across New York and a couple neighboring cities.
Every incident that got flagged was categorised into one of two columns.
Left column: things that needed him right now. Robberies in progress. Assault. Anything where someone was about to get seriously hurt. Stuff where the cops weren't always going to cut it.
The right column, on the other hand, had everything else. Stolen cars, break ins, vandalism. Things where no active crime was being performed. Things where an anonymous tip routed through a couple different proxies and dropped into the NYPD's system did the job without him having to leave the chair.
He scrolled through last night's right column. Fourteen tips sent. Eleven already acted based on the follow up scan.
Not bad.
He pulled up the second program. Mutant monitoring—forum scrapes, news aggregation, anything that looked like it could be a powered individual making themselves known. It had been running for eleven days.
Zero confirmed pings.
He wasn't surprised. Xavier had Cerebro. The professor wasn't going to let a new mutant spiral into something public if he could help it and based on everything Ben knew, he could help it just fine right now. The program was there for edge cases. The one that slipped through the net. He'd rather avoid mutants becoming public yet.
Still, he was glad that it hadn't been needed yet.
The third program. Now this got interesting. Individual monitoring—a list of people he'd built over a week of cross referencing everything he knew about this universe against what public records, news archives and street cameras could actually tell him without tripping any wires.
Names like Peter Parker, Tony Stark, Stephen Strange, and Matt Murdock to name a few. The list itself went on and on with names of multiple people of interest.
He pulled up the fourth program.
This one was newer. Three days old. It ran continuously through criminal financial networks—offshore accounts, shell companies, the kind of money that existed specifically to not be found. It found it anyway and skimmed. Small amounts. Nothing that would register as missing. Spread across enough accounts that no single source would notice a pattern.
It was a start.
The problem was legitimising it. The money existed in a form he couldn't exactly deposit into a checking account without questions he wasn't ready to answer. He'd been cycling through options for a week. Something that made sense for 2002, something that fit the tech landscape, something that wouldn't require him to explain where a twenty one year old with a dead end laptop had suddenly found a business empire.
While he had ideas, he wasn't in a hurry to act on them just yet.
His phone buzzed on the desk. Not an urgent notification—just the alarm he'd set to remind himself to eat, because apparently that was something he needed reminding of now.
He dipped his hand into the bowl of chilli fries as he opened a tab on Sumo-Restling.
He too had to unwind every now and then.
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The notification came in at 11:47pm.
Ben looked at the sumo match still playing on his screen, looked at the notification, and looked back at the match.
With a heavy sigh, he closed the tab.
The left column had flagged a convenience store four blocks east. Two individuals, one weapon confirmed, situation active. The store owner had hit the silent alarm thirty seconds ago which meant he had maybe four minutes before this got complicated.
He'd arrived near the store in three.
Ghostfreak was his current go-to for these kinds of things. Invisible, intangible and silent. He'd drifted through the streets at heights no one bothered to look at just in case some random person with powers could spot him—not that anyone would see him, but old habits.
The convenience store came into view. Lights still on inside, which meant the owner hadn't been stupid enough to fight back. Good.
Ben phased through the wall.
Two guys. Both masked, one gun between them, the other holding a bag open across the counter while the owner—fifties, heavyset, hands up—stared at a fixed point on the wall the way people do when they're trying very hard not to make eye contact with the thing that might kill them.
Ben had seen worse. Much worse.
He drifted behind the one with the gun first. Ghostfreak's intangibility made jamming it simple. Then he moved to the one with the bag, phased a hand into his ankle and pulled.
The guy went down hard. While he was dropping, Ben phased a finger into his skull to knock him out. The noise made the partner spin around to look at nothing, that half second of confusion was all Ben needed.
He made sure to push the guy just a bit—while invisible—to make it look like he'd tripped on air and knocked him out the same way as his partner.
By the time the store owner had built up enough courage to turn around. Ben was already out through the ceiling, drifting back the way he came, making sure to look around from a bird's eye view in case he could spot a crime.
Routine, really.
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He was back in the chair by 12:04am, smoothie in hand, sumo match re-opened.
The VI had already done its job. Two names, pulled from whatever public record, camera feed and database cross reference it could manage in seventeen minutes. Ben minimised the match and pulled up the profiles without thinking much about it.
First one. Twenty three, three priors, two of them assault. He didn't need to think much about that.
He scrolled to the second.
Seventeen.
He stopped.
The profile wasn't long. No priors. School attendance that had dropped off sharply about eight months ago. A name Ben didn't recognise. And attached to a separate thread the VI had pulled — a hospital record, not the kid's, a woman with the same last name, admission date seven months ago, the kind of condition that had a long treatment timeline and a longer bill.
Ben sat back.
He looked at the chilli fries going cold on the desk. Looked back at the screen.
Seventeen. No record. Sick mother. A bag held open across a convenience store counter at midnight because somewhere between eight months ago and now the options had run out.
He closed the profile, his hand moving just a tad bit slower than usual.
Sometimes, he really hated his job.
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It was the next day and yet Ben was staring at the ceiling since forever. The kid's profile still running through his mind.
The mother's bill was still there. The kid was probably still in processing. Ben had stopped the robbery and changed nothing that actually mattered.
He thought about what he would have done had he been in that situation. Honestly, without powers, without money, without any of it. Just a seventeen year old with a sick parent and a bill that kept growing.
He wasn't sure the answer was different.
The ceiling didn't have anything useful to say about that so he sat up.
The VI's were still running, four windows ticking away in the background. He pulled the laptop closer without really looking at it, mind still turning over the same thought.
Physical intervention was one lane. He could stop robberies. He could trip criminals and tip off police and make sure the immediate situation was resolved without casualties. He'd been doing it for ages and yet the left column kept filling up every night because the conditions that put people in that column hadn't changed at all.
His mind drifted to a blonde-haired, blue eyed spandex wearing hero, he thought of All Might.
A man from an anime from his old world—nothing super realistic, not that he had expected it to—but it had gotten one thing scarily right. The Symbol of Peace. The greatest hero, the one whose mere presence dropped crime rates to five percent wherever he went.
Five percent.
Not zero. Five. Even with All Might standing there, even with the most powerful hero in the world making it clear that crime was a losing proposition—people still did it. Because All Might could not arrest poverty. He could not transform the conditions that made someone desperate enough to try their luck anyway.
Below five percent were still people. People like that seventeen year old kid, and situations that looked like choices but weren't really.
Ben sat with that for a moment.
Two lane road. He'd been driving one of them.
Stopping crime by force could only do so much. He needed to attack the underlying cause of it. He wasn't a God—Alien X aside—he couldn't do everything but he could try.
He pulled up the laptop properly and opened a couple of things. The first was a welfare database—he found the mother's file, nudged her priority rating up through three different administrative systems that weren't technically connected but practically were. It wouldn't fix everything. But it moved her up the list.
The second was the public defender assignment for the kid's case. He cross referenced the available lawyers against their case histories until he found one with a decent record on juvenile cases and made sure the assignment landed there. First offence, sympathetic circumstances. It wasn't a guarantee but it was better odds than random chance.
He closed both tabs.
The rest wasn't his to decide. There were consequences to actions that he couldn't and shouldn't erase entirely. He wasn't a judge. He wasn't supposed to be.
A new notification pinged from the third program.
He pulled it up.
Peter Parker. Midtown Junior High scholarship application. Status—submitted, currently in the first screening pool.
Ben looked at the application for a moment. The grades were exceptional, genuinely exceptional, the kind that should have made the decision straightforward. But the application itself was bare. Just grades. No extracurriculars that stood out, no legacy connection, no letter from someone whose name carried weight. In a pool of exceptional kids with exceptional grades and everything else stacked on top, the odds weren't great.
He clicked on the tab and another screen popped up.
Peter's aunt and uncle. May and Ben Parker. Not struggling exactly but not comfortable enough that tuition wouldn't quietly press on things. Good people, ordinary people, the kind that existed in every city in every world Ben had ever been in.
He looked at the application, then nudged it.
As he closed the tab his mind snagged on something.
Ben Parker was going to die.
Not today. Not soon. But eventually, on a night that hadn't happened yet, because of a choice Peter hadn't made yet, in a sequence of events that this universe seemed to have written into its narrative.
Unless someone did something about it.
He'd been turning that over for two weeks too. The destiny question. The butterfly effect question. Who was he to interfere with that situation?
He was done turning it over.
Fuck destiny.
Ben Parker lived. That was the end of that particular debate. Whatever came out of it—whatever didn't happen because of it—he'd deal with. He'd dealt with worse than a disrupted timeline. He had the power in his hands, he was not going to sit on his hands while a good man died because some cosmic narrative had decided it was necessary.
But there was one thing he wasn't going to touch. Free will.
He wasn't going to stop Banner's research. Wasn't going to stand in front of Doom's path or redirect Strange away from his accident or prevent any of the thousand choices that were going to lead to the world he knew was coming. People made choices. He didn't have the right to take that from them.
What he had was the ability to fix what came after. He could do things this world's science couldn't dream of yet. Corrupted DNA, fractured minds, accidents that left people permanently altered—fixable. That was his lane on that side of the road.
Still, he couldn't help but think of the other lane.
He looked at the laptop screen. Peter's application was approved in its first screening. The mother's priority rating quietly bumped up three positions. Small things. Invisible things.
Ben Tennyson as a hero, he could stop the immediate situation.
Ben Tennyson as a person? He could tackle the underlying problems.
His eyes flashed back to program four. The criminal account skimming, slow and steady, building something that currently had nowhere legitimate to go.
He didn't have much use of it… until now.
His hands reached the keyboard as green light filled the room.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Yo, how's it going guys? Good? Neat. So—how did you like this chapter?
Anyway, how was the chapter? Good I hope? Drop a comment, let me know what you think, ask whatever you want—I genuinely read them all.
On the release schedule, I've decided to commit to a minimum of three chapters ahead on Patreon going forward with making sure two get uploaded every week. If you want to stay ahead of the free releases that's where to be.
As for the story itself, I still have quite a bit of research to do on certain characters and plot threads before I write them, so bear with me while I get that right rather than rush it. As always I'd rather take the time and do it properly.
More content available on my Patr - eon . com / st_scarface: INTER 5, FCO Fuyuki Arc(Completed) and INTER 1, 4 chapters of A Pragmatist's Guide to a Prophecy (HP SI AS HARRY) and Chapter 2 ahead of this as of now.
PS: Got a Ko - Fi now, so come say Hi — no need to pay anything, a message is enough: https :// ko-fi .com / stscarface
As Always, grateful for the support.
See you in the next one.
Ciao!