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Ryan made his move.
The taxi driver only heard the sound of a gust of wind passing by. When he turned his head again, he found that the passenger who had just opened the car door had already vanished without a trace.
The driver was stunned, thinking he had encountered some YouTube prank, and couldn't help but curse:
"Motherfucker! If you're not taking a cab, why the hell did you flag one down? Don't let me run into you again, or I'll blow your damn head off!"
After all, America, besides daily gunfights, you never know what kind of weirdos you'll encounter!
So the driver didn't think much of it. After closing the door, he stepped on the gas and drove away.
What the driver didn't know was that in a dark alley nearby, a shadow descended from the sky, landing gracefully in the deepest part of the alley.
This was none other than Ryan, dressed in his all-black suit, and the male secretary whose head the driver had just threatened to blow off.
At this moment, the male secretary was being held in mid-air by Ryan, who was pinching his cheeks. Other than making terrified muffled sounds, he couldn't even cry out for help!
Ryan didn't bother wasting words with him. Grabbing the man's head, he slammed it violently against the adjacent wall!
Bang!
With a sound like a watermelon exploding, Ryan crushed the male secretary's head against the wall!
Ryan casually shook the flesh and blood off his hands. Using what was available, he wiped his hands on the secretary's fancy suit before picking up the case containing the regeneration serum at his feet.
As for whether Ryan was being too cruel by killing the male secretary like that?
Ryan could only say, quit joking, buddy.
Never mind that he didn't care if the guy was innocent or not; the mere fact that he was Norman Osborn's secretary meant he couldn't be innocent at all!
When an avalanche occurs, no single snowflake is innocent!
Especially when this male secretary was the snowflake closest to the source of the avalanche?
This guy had undoubtedly done plenty of dirty work for Norman Osborn. No matter how miserably he died, he wasn't innocent!
After taking out Norman's secretary, Ryan opened the case and took out the regeneration serum inside.
After wrapping the serum in spider silk, he casually tossed the case aside.
The first rule of intercepting goods: don't be stupid enough to take the intercepted case home with you.
God knows if there's a tracking chip in the case.
Especially since this case belonged to a high-tech company like Osborn Enterprises.
This was a lesson he learned when he first started out, from the time Kingpin hid a cell phone in a money case.
Back then, he relied quite heavily on his Spider-Sense, so when he didn't sense any danger inside the case, he planned to just take the money and leave.
But he forgot that some dangers are hidden and don't manifest on the surface; Spider-Sense won't react to them.
Since then, he never took away any case that didn't belong to him, only taking the contents inside.
From killing the secretary to obtaining the regeneration serum and then leaving, the total time Ryan took was less than a minute.
When he left, Peter and the Lizard Man were still fighting on the Manhattan Bridge.
However, the initial struggle had turned into a game of catch.
The Lizard Man kept throwing cars off the bridge, and Peter kept using his webs to catch each vehicle the Lizard Man tossed.
Honestly, the scene was quite heartwarming and looked almost fun.
If you ignored the screaming passengers inside the cars...
Ryan took one look and shook his head.
As expected, although he and Peter were quite similar in terms of abilities, they were worlds apart in their codes of conduct—two extremes, even.
Peter's first priority was saving people; his own first priority was completing the objective.
For instance, if the Lizard Man were his target, he wouldn't care at all about the lives of the passengers in the cars being thrown off the bridge; he would only focus on killing the Lizard Man as quickly as possible.
Saving people? It was already a sign of his good mood today that he wasn't using the cars on the road as weapons to smash into the Lizard Man.
So, seeing Peter busy saving people, Ryan didn't have the slightest intention of going over to help.
His primary task now was to take the lizard regeneration serum he just acquired back to the underground lab at home for safekeeping.
Thus, Ryan merely glanced at them as he passed by and left without any lingering attachment.
After stowing the lizard regeneration serum, Ryan even had the leisure to return to the living room to continue watching the news with the old couple.
The news was broadcasting the entire process of the 'Dinosaur Man' versus the 'Spandex Hero' battle.
When Ben and May asked where Peter was, Ryan simply remarked that he had comforted the 'heartbroken' Peter, and now Peter had cheered up and climbed out the window to find the 'girl' and ask for a reconciliation.
Despite Ryan making it up on the fly, the old couple, Ben and May, believed him implicitly.
Ben even joked that a man needs to be thick-skinned like that, saying that was how he had won over Ryan's mother, May, back in the day.
Furthermore, Ben complained that Peter was all grown up, so why was he still climbing out the window? Couldn't he have just said something to them?
That way, he could have lent Peter his new Ford Raptor pickup truck; with the Raptor's boost, Peter would surely be able to win her over.
To this, Ryan suggested that it would be better to drive his audi r8.
Compared to a 'real man's' car like the Raptor, a sports coupe like the R8 was the kind of car most young women would prefer.
May agreed that Ryan was right.
However, May also told Ben and Ryan to stop giving Peter bad advice.
Campus romance at Peter's age was the purest stage; it shouldn't be influenced by worldly issues like what kind of car one drives.
If she truly liked Peter, she would like him even if he went on a skateboard.
But if she didn't like Peter, even if he successfully won her over by driving a luxury car, she would only like Peter's car, not the person himself.
Just like when she almost went astray and was brought back to the right path by Ben, she fell for Ben's kind nature, not his old beat-up car.
At this, the father and son, Ben and Ryan, nodded solemnly in agreement with May's grand philosophy.
But in reality, it went in one ear and out the other; they didn't take in a single word.
It wasn't that they thought May's words were baseless.
It was because they had heard May tell this story more than once over the years, to the point where they had grown calluses on their ears.
May naturally saw that the two of them weren't listening seriously, but there was nothing she could do. She just reached out and pinched each of their ears before continuing to watch the news on TV with interest.
During this, May joked, "Hey, have you noticed? That masked hero saving people on the Manhattan Bridge has a build quite similar to our Peter!"
Hearing this, Ryan couldn't help but fall silent.
Was it really that obvious?
He knew that in the comics and movies, the May of many Universes actually discovered Peter's identity as Spider-Man.
But he didn't expect that the May in his Universe would subconsciously think it was Peter at the very first sight of Spider-Man!
What did his and Peter's Spider-Sense even count for? May was the one who truly had a Spider-Sense!