The rest of the school day passed without major incident. I made sure to keep Peter Parker's facade completely intact during classes by paying attention to the teachers, helping Ned with an algebra problem, and chatting normally with Gwen in advanced science lab. She seemed relieved to see that the "usual Peter" was back after the tense hallway incident with Flash that morning.
At three in the afternoon, I said goodbye to my friends at the school entrance with a warm smile and walked back to Forest Hills. I stopped by the house just long enough to greet Aunt May, inhale a massive sandwich to quiet the ravenous hunger of my mutated metabolism, and stuff a couple of dark clothing items into my backpack before leaving under the excuse of spending the afternoon studying at the library.
Instead of going to the library, I caught the subway heading toward the industrial zone of Long Island City in Queens.
I found an abandoned print shop, tucked away at the end of a dead-end alley, its metal shutters covered in graffiti. Forcing the rusted lock on the back door was ridiculously easy; with just a bit of strength, the steel snapped in two.
I stepped inside and closed it behind me, plunging into the shadows of the massive, empty space, barely lit by the shafts of light cutting through the broken skylights in the ceiling.
I dropped my backpack on the floor and let out a long breath. I pulled off my hoodie, stripping down to my t-shirt, and locked my eyes onto a heavy structural iron beam lying on the floor, detached from the collapsed ceiling of the old factory. It easily weighed half a ton. I walked over, planted my feet firmly on the ground, and grabbed it by one end.
With a single fluid motion of my arms, I lifted the beam and held it over my head as if I were holding a cardboard wrapping-paper tube. A laugh, dripping with pure irony, escaped my lips as I held the massive weight in my hands.
"This definitely beats any gym routine I've ever seen on TikTok." I muttered.
I tossed the beam aside, causing a dull crash that shook the ground and kicked up a cloud of dust. I stared at my hands, fascinated by the power of this body.
"Let's see how the reflexes are." I murmured, waving my arms in the air as if swatting at flies.
I snapped my right hand forward, extending my fingers in an instinctive motion, mimicking Spider-Man's classic pose. I didn't expect anything to happen; in my head, I was already calculating how much money I would need to buy chemical compounds and build my own mechanical web-shooters.
THWIP!
A thick stream of white, sticky fluid shot from my wrists at high speed, slamming against the opposite wall.I stood completely frozen, staring intently at the web and then at my own wrists. I pressed them slightly and felt the subtle twitch of the internal biological tendons.
"How arachnid..." I let out in a whisper, bursting into a clean laugh as I remembered a meme from my past life.
What a surprise. I had hit the Tobey Maguire genetic lottery. Organic webbing, infinite ammo shooting straight out of my body without spending a single cent on cartridges. However, after examining the consistency of the fluid, it didn't take long for my mind to find its limits. Organic webs were perfect for swinging and subduing, but if I wanted variety in combat, I would need to design web-shooters in the future. I wanted electrified webs, web grenades, and things of that nature. The web-shooters would give me that versatility; the organic webbing would be my inexhaustible backup.
I messed around for a bit longer until I decided to stop wasting time. Night had begun to fall over Queens, and the criminal scum were surely starting to crawl out of their caves.
I pulled on black pants, gloves, and a black hoodie. Finally, I put on a dark mask that covered the lower half of my face. The next second, I slipped out through the warehouse window, leaping onto the rooftops of the city.
I moved exclusively by doing parkour at super-speed, clearing fifteen-meter gaps between the buildings of Queens.
Damn it, I need a more efficient way to find these idiots, I thought as I ran across a roof, listening to the distant echo of the city. I need to hack into the NYPD radio frequencies and install a receiver in my mask. Looking for crimes at random is a waste of time.But Parker luck played in my favor when I caught a flash in a dark alley, three blocks ahead. A dead-end alley behind a dingy liquor store.
I slid down the brick wall with the grace of a shadow and hung from a fire escape, taking in the scene. Two guys in leather jackets with switchblades had a middle-aged man cornered, who was trembling as he handed over his wallet. One of the criminals was aiming a cheap, low-caliber handgun directly at his forehead.
In that split second, the dim light of the alley vanished from my mind.
The cold metal of a gun barrel struck the very depths of my memories. When I was nine years old in my past life. I was on the street corner near my house with my aunt when two guys came to rob us. I remember perfectly one of them pointing the barrel of a gun at my head, that was the absolute most I could remember about that day. That trauma, that feeling of utter helplessness and absolute fury, turned the blood in my veins to ice.
I was no longer that defenseless nine-year-old kid. And these people were about to find out.
"You know... back in my day, robbers at least had the decency to wear ski masks." I said, disguising my voice to sound deeper, echoing mockingly off the alley walls. I really should have made a voice modulator first, I thought, but I put it off for when I got back home.
The two criminals jumped in terror, spinning upward with desperation.
"Who's up there?!" shouted the one with the gun, aiming at the empty air with trembling hands.
I let go of the railing and landed on my feet right in the middle of them, without making the slightest sound. The twenty-foot free fall didn't even tickle. I stood up slowly, letting the alley light illuminate my entirely black silhouette.
"The health inspector" I replied, a smirk playing beneath my mask that they couldn't see. "And I'm sorry to report that this alley is closed due to a trash overflow"
The guy with the gun pulled the trigger in sheer panic. To my spider-sense, the flash of the firing pin and the bullet leaving the barrel moved in slow motion. I simply tilted my head a couple of inches to the left. The projectile zipped right past me, hitting the wall.
"Is that it? My grandma has better aim, and she's dead." I mocked, taking a step forward.
Before he could aim again, I neutralized the threat with a swift movement to his arm. The gun clattered to the ground as the man collapsed, incapacitated by the force of the intervention.
The second mugger, utterly terrified, tried to attack me from behind with his switchblade. I didn't even turn around. I reached back, caught him by his jacket collar, and pinned him against the brick wall, quickly overwhelming him until he was no longer a threat.
"Thought it was your lucky day, didn't you?" I whispered an inch from his face, letting my intense tone bleed through the humor. "Bad news, moron."
I released him, and he slumped onto the trash bags, unconscious. I turned toward the first one, who was still on the ground, defeated. I knelt with absolute calmness, picked up the victim's wallet that had fallen to the ground, and used the dense darkness of the alley to search both criminals. I took the cash they had on them, about two hundred dollars, which I stuffed directly into my backpack. My first paycheck of the night.
"Consider this a fine for eyesore pollution." I whispered to the man, patting his cheek with a coldness that made him visibly shiver. "If I catch you in Queens again, the consequences will be far more permanent."
I stood up and walked over to the victim, who was pressed against the wall, staring at me with wide eyes full of fear and utter confusion. I handed his wallet back with a polite gesture, shifting my cold tone into a gentle one.
"Come on, let's get out of here. I'll walk you to the street." I suggested, guiding him smoothly toward the lit entrance of the alley. "Call the authorities, and wait in a well-lit area with people around until they arrive to handle this situation."
I walked with him along the sidewalk for a bit, keeping up a casual conversation to steady his nerves. I obviously kept my guard up, measuring every word without revealing absolutely anything about my identity or motives, cracking a few light jokes to ease the tension while he couldn't stop thanking me. It didn't take long before the sharp echo of sirens began to wail a few blocks away. The moment I heard the sound, I gave the man a final pat on the shoulder and vanished in a blink, scaling the facade of a building before the authorities arrived.
But I didn't stop there. I patrolled across the Queens rooftops, stopping a couple more muggings, a carjacking, and a careless pickpocket. Shortly before dinner time, I knew it was time to head back. I couldn't ruin my "good boy" facade by showing up late for dinner. I rushed back to the abandoned warehouse at top speed, took off the improvised suit, and stowed it away in my backpack.
Minutes later, I walked through the door of the Forest Hills house as Peter Parker with an innocent smile, greeting Aunt May with a kiss on the cheek and sitting down for dinner as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I inhaled the food while listening to Uncle Ben talk about his work day.
Once dinner was over and I made sure my aunt and uncle were watching TV in the living room, I went up to my bedroom and locked the door. I pulled out the hidden backpack and emptied its contents onto the bed.
I began counting the crumpled bills one by one, adding up to four hundred dollars. A satisfied smirk spread across my face as I straightened out the money. For my very first evening as a vigilante, it had been a pretty good run.
I stowed the four hundred dollars into a false compartment beneath the loose floorboard of my closet. For 2006 New York, that was a solid small fortune to hit the ground running. I sat in front of the desk, staring at the old desktop computer the original Peter had pieced together from cheap parts, its bulky CRT monitor humming with an annoying flicker. To someone coming from 2026, an era of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, looking at this junk running a prehistoric operating system was almost insulting.
But my mind didn't complain. On the contrary, an arrogant smirk spread across my face. A true tech god, like Peter Parker, doesn't need future technology to dominate the present.
I pulled out my phone, a flip Motorola, and a screwdriver. Using extreme gentleness to avoid crushing the components, I disassembled the phone's casing, leaving the motherboard completely exposed. I hooked the phone up to the computer using a crude data cable, and my fingers began flying across the keyboard, creating a rhythmic, sharp clicking noise in the dead of night.
I hammered out lines of raw code into a modified Linux terminal, injecting an exploit I had mentally mapped out during dinner. My goal was simple: the NYPD radio repeaters used low-security encrypted analog frequencies back then. To the 2006 Pentagon, it might have been secure, but to a tech geek from the future, cracking the encryption was as easy as solving a toddler's puzzle.
As the software processed the decryption on the screen, I leaned back in my chair, interlacing my hands behind my neck. I listened to the quiet of the house, broken only by Uncle Ben's distant snoring down the hall. Staring fixedly at the ceiling, I lost myself in my own thoughts.
This world is steeped in a foul criminality where fear only preys on ordinary citizens. The weak are always left with the crumbs, while those with real power are fated to be on top. I am on top. It is 2006. The Fantastic Four haven't even touched space radiation yet. Banner is rotting away, hiding as a monster in some Brazilian slum, and the Ancient One stays locked in Kamar-Taj, ignoring the streets. There are no gods, no aliens, no metal suits. At this exact moment in history, I am the goddamn alpha predator of this country, and I am not going to use this power to be a martyr weeping in the shadows like the original Peter. The original Spider-Man was a saint, a pure ideal I had idolized since childhood, a hero who carried the weight of the world with a humble smile. I am no saint. But if I am going to carry his name and his mask, I have to earn the right. I have to be worthy of the hero I worship. I will purge this city with an efficiency so cold and destructive that evil will have nowhere left to hide. I will destroy the scum to make myself feel worthy of wearing the goddamn spider on my chest.
However, I have to draw strict boundaries in my own head. I´m not going to be like the Spider-Man from the comics, a slave to duty who jumps out the window at every single police siren or petty theft. I´m not going to ruin my life as Peter Parker or waste my valuable time chasing pickpockets every single night. I have to be rigid with the dual identity. By day, Peter Parker will maintain the facade of the model student and the harmless good boy. By night, Spider-Man will only step out under my own terms: whenever I need to collect funds from the mobs for my financial empire, or when the city faces a true, large-scale threat.
A sharp beep from the computer snapped me back to reality. The software was done.
I installed a micro-receiver I had salvaged from an old walkie-talkie at the warehouse, soldering it directly to the flip phone's antenna. I snapped the casing back together and powered the mobile on. The LCD screen glowed, and after a couple of static flickers, the phone's speaker sparked to life with a metallic, heavily distorted voice:
"All units in Queens, reporting a ten-thirty in progress on Woodside Avenue..."
I smirked, snapping the phone shut with a sharp click. The integration was flawless. Now, the police scanner was right in my pocket, ready for whenever I decided it was the opportune moment to go hunting. The board was set, and New York was about to find out who really owned its streets.