I'm releasing extra chapters because I have commitments until Tuesday. I hope you understand.
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The days following my raid on the Flushing docks flew by, turning into a perfect exercise in patience and acting. In the hallways of Midtown High, I made sure the transition of my personality was subtle, almost imperceptible. Not much changed, since instead of turning into an arrogant jerk overnight like it usually happened to Peter after getting his powers, I played the "good boy" role to perfection. I was the ideal nephew at home, the model student who always had the right answer in class, and a great friend to Gwen, Ned, and Harry.
The only real difference was that nobody pushed me around anymore. Flash Thompson kept a safe distance, throwing hateful glances my way whenever we crossed paths. The school hallways, which used to be a minefield for the original Peter, were now just school hallways, the way they always should have been.
"Peter, are you ready for the biochemistry lab today?" Gwen stopped beside me in front of my locker, adjusting her glasses with that bright smile that used to trigger a brain short-circuit in Peter's memories.
"Always ready to beat me in grades, right, Gwen?" I joked, closing the locker door gently and giving her a calm smile.
Walking alongside her toward the classroom had become an interesting routine. Gwen was brilliant, fun, and thanks to her resemblance to Emma Stone, absurdly attractive. I get you, Andrew's Spider-Man, I'd move to England for her too, I thought. I thoroughly enjoyed her company and the complicity we shared, but I stood firm in my decision. I wasn't going to rush things. She was fourteen at the moment and I had the mind of an eighteen-year-old; crossing that line right now clashed directly with my own morality. It just wasn't right, so I kept a safe distance to avoid getting busted by the multiversal FBI.
As we walked, Liz Allan passed by us, surrounded by the cheerleader crowd. She was the popular girl at Midtown, Flash's girlfriend, and someone who normally wouldn't even bother looking at the Peter Parker of the past. But as our eyes met, Liz subtly slowed her pace and gave me a flirtatious smile before moving along with her friends.
"Hey, Petey." she murmured as she passed, using that tone I remembered hearing in The Spectacular Spider-Man animated series.
Gwen noticed the greeting instantly and frowned slightly, clutching her books against her chest while throwing a sidelong glance loaded with frustration toward where Liz was walking away. It was no surprise, for the past couple of days, the most popular girl in school wouldn't leave my side, greeting me every day and looking for any excuse to be near me.
Remembering how it had all started brought a massive internal grin to my face. It was all thanks to the biochemistry teacher, a guy named Miles Warren, formally assigning me as her tutor to save her failing grade. It was a complete irony, my memories reminded me exactly what kind of monster this professor would become in the future, forcing me to keep an eye on him, and primarily, his relationship with Gwen.
But going back to Liz's grades, she had taken it as a personal insult. "Studying with Petey? I'd rather fail..." she had scoffed in front of her friends, treating me like a plague. In my past life, such an immature response would have annoyed me, but now I only felt contempt.
Our very first session had taken place that afternoon in a local Queens diner. Liz sat across from me, sighing and staring at the textbook with a disgust that bordered on the ridiculous.
"Everything about biological systems is boring," she had scoffed back then, crossing her arms and pushing the book away with disdain. "Who wants to waste their time with a book? This is a total waste of time, Petey. I'd a thousand times rather be on the phone talking to Flash."
On the outside, I kept my Peter Parker facade perfectly intact: a meek smile, a relaxed posture, and an understanding nod. But on the inside, my mind was a slaughterhouse. "Who wants to waste their time with a book? I don't know, maybe someone who aspires to have more than two functional brain cells, you superficial illiterate," I insulted her mentally, savoring the venom of my own thoughts.
Instantly, my animated alter egos appeared floating above the diner table in a corner of my head. The original chibi Peter, dressed as a little angel in his lab coat, covered his face in pure embarrassment. "Don't be so hard on her! She just needs us to teach her how to see nature with different eyes!" the brat shrieked. Beside him, the college chibi devil unzipped his hoodie with a scowl and smacked him across the back of the head. "Shut up, you piece of an idiot! She's an idiot who doesn't even know what a cell is. I feel like slamming the book right into her forehead. Stop drooling over her, you're making us look like a complete moron!" Mini Peter grabbed his head, outraged, and tackled the college student, starting a fistfight right over the biology notes.
The fight between them caught my attention for a second, but I quickly ignored them, locking my gaze onto Liz's eyes. Right at that exact second, before she could even open her mouth to answer me, a subtle, sharp tingle at the base of my skull forced me to glance out of the corner of my eye toward the diner's large glass window.
Across the street, taking advantage of the heavy dusk shadows, I caught a suspicious movement inside a dead-end alley. Two burly, rough-looking men were forcing a terrified woman into the darkness, covering her mouth to muffle her screams. My mind was already savoring the satisfaction of beating them up and the dollars waiting in their wallets.
I slammed the textbook shut with a sharp thud that echoed on the table, making her jump and drop her phone out of pure surprise, and calmly stood up from my chair as I swung my backpack over my shoulder.
"Look, this tutoring thing is something you need, not me. So when you're ready to learn, let me know." I said as I stood up and walked out of the diner, heading briskly toward the rear service hallway that connected to the building's side alley, leaving the cheerleader speechlessly staring after me, completely stunned because the supposed "nerd" of the class had just stood her up.
The moment the door closed behind me, I pulled the black hoodie, the gloves, and my dark mask from my backpack with swift movements, getting dressed in seconds to launch myself toward the alley.
Back in the present, the Midtown High bell rang, breaking me out of my memories as Gwen cleared her throat impatiently beside me, waiting for us to enter the biochemistry room. I smiled calmly. School was getting fun by my standards.
By night, I didn't go out patrolling every day like a slave to duty. My time was too valuable to waste saving cats from trees. I went out to hunt criminals every now and then to satisfy something inside me that begged for blood. I didn't know what it was, but it gave me an enormous satisfaction to see criminals bleed. Queens had become my personal playground. I knocked out criminals with a sadistic and mocking strength, messing with them thanks to my enhanced senses before breaking whatever bones were necessary so they wouldn't forget the message.
Even though the loot from my raids was increasing, I still hadn't gathered enough money to fund the first suit I had in mind. My short-term financial priorities lay elsewhere. I focused primarily on designing a pair of web-shooters, a task that turned out to be a real headache. The fluid from my organic webbing shot out with so much pressure and density that the initial web-shooters ended up glued to the wall, forcing me to spend hours reinforcing them just to withstand the firing.
At the same time, I dedicated myself to building a compact voice modulator that I could hide beneath the fabric, an urgent necessity to mask my squeaky fourteen-year-old teenage voice behind a distorted, menacing filter. In the meantime, I settled for sewing a pair of opaque black lenses onto my Spider-Man suit mask. In my mind, the final design was already completely visualized: an exact replica of the suit from my Earth-8351 counterpart, Assassin Spider-Man. The black and dark red would instill terror into the streets, but for that, I still had to keep harvesting funds.