The attic bedroom was pitch black. Only the faint, sickly yellow glow of the streetlamps outside bled through the windowpane.
Peter Parker collapsed heavily onto the floorboards. His consciousness felt like it had been thrown into an industrial centrifuge, spinning violently out of control. Every single bone in his body felt like it was being shattered and aggressively reassembled. Every inch of muscle fiber was tearing and healing at a terrifying, unnatural speed. A scalding, radioactive heat surged from his bone marrow, making his vision go dark and burning his throat with every breath.
He gritted his teeth and tried to push himself up. But the mont his palms pressed flat against the floor, a strange, powerful adhesion locked them in place.
When he instinctively tried to lift his arm, he actually pulled himself up a few inches—his palm was still fused perfectly to the hardwood floor, acting like industrial-grade superglue.
"What..."
Peter stared in a daze. He yanked his arm violently upward. His palm finally tore free, but the sheer kinetic force ripped a massive splinter of wood straight out of the floorboards. He looked at his hand. It was completely clean. There was no sap, no glue, no residue. Only his fingertips were trembling uncontrollably.
Before his brain could process the impossibility of what had just happened, the sensory overload hit him.
His hearing violently amplified. It was as if soone had wired a high-gain microphone directly into his cerebral cortex.
He could hear Aunt May anxiously pacing the living room downstairs. He could hear the soft, microscopic rustle of Uncle Ben turning a page of the newspaper. He could hear the muffled broadcast of the neighbor's television through the drywall. He could hear the heavy rumble of a car engine idling three blocks away.
The auditory data flooded his brain like consecutive thunderclaps, as clear as if they were happening directly inside his head.
Then ca his vision. Even though the room was completely dark, his retinas suddenly adjusted. He could clearly track the movents of a single ant crawling along the baseboards. He could see every microscopic hairline fracture in the ceiling plaster. He could perfectly trace the intricate, powdery patterns on the wings of a moth fluttering outside his window.
It felt like an apex predator had just violently awakened inside his body.
He could literally feel the raw, terrifying kinetic strength expanding in his muscles. He could feel his five senses stretching to infinite capacity. The modified retrovirus injected by the spider was actively ripping apart his genetic sequence and rebuilding it from the ground up.
He wasn't just exhausted. He didn't just have a fever.
He was mutating into a monster he didn't even recognize.
Peter curled into a tight ball against his bedfra. His entire body shook violently. Cold sweat soaked through his t-shirt, sticking it to his spine. He desperately wanted to call out for Uncle Ben and Aunt May, but he bit his lip so hard it bled, refusing to make a single sound.
He was terrified of them seeing him like this. He was terrified they would look at him and realize he had beco an unnatural freak.
Downstairs in the living room, Aunt May was clutching Uncle Ben's hand tightly. Her eyes hadn't left the attic staircase for the last twenty minutes. Her voice trembled with irrepressible anxiety.
"Ben, do you really think we shouldn't call an ambulance? Peter has a massive fever, his face is completely pale, and he literally collapsed when he walked through the door..."
Uncle Ben patted the back of her hand, his own brow knotted with deep worry. His eyes were also locked on the stairs, but he forced his tone to remain steady.
"Let's just give it a little ti, May. The boy has always been stubborn. If it's just a twenty-four-hour bug, he's going to hate sitting in a crowded ergency room. I'll go up and check on him in thirty minutes. If his temperature hasn't broken, or if anything seems wrong, I will personally carry him to the car and drive him to the hospital. It's going to be fine."
Despite his reassuring words, Ben's free hand had already quietly grabbed the car keys off the coffee table. Decades of intuition told him that Peter's condition was deeply wrong. It wasn't just a simple flu or physical exhaustion. But he also knew that teenagers had their secrets, and forcing his nephew into an interrogation right now would only backfire.
All he could do was sit in the living room, ready to move the exact second the boy needed him.
Up in the freezing attic, Peter listened to their conversation with his enhanced hearing. A sudden, sharp ache hit the back of his throat.
Gritting his teeth, he braced his hands against the floorboards and agonizingly pushed himself upright. He stumbled toward his desk, clicked on the small halogen lamp, and picked up his magnifying glass with a trembling hand.
He focused the lens on the back of his right hand.
The swollen red bite mark from earlier that afternoon was completely gone. The skin was perfectly smooth, without a single trace of trauma.
But the violent biological mutation tearing through his cells hadn't slowed down for a single second.
Peter looked at his reflection in the desk mirror. His face was deathly pale. His eyes were heavily bloodshot, but they carried a terrifying, hyper-focused clarity.
He finally rembered the spider that had bitten him in the Columbia University genetics lab. And he clearly rembered Mira crouching on the floor to trap it in a glass tube.
He was beginning to understand exactly what was happening to him.
anwhile, on the other side of Queens, a massive chain supermarket was bathed in bright fluorescent light. Soft, generic pop music filtered through the ceiling speakers.
I pushed a tal shopping cart leisurely down the fresh produce aisle. The cart was already overflowing.
I had loaded it with premium pork belly, spareribs, fresh prawns, leafy greens, shiitake mushrooms, and a massive bag of imported Chinese seasonings. I had also grabbed several cartons of organic milk, free-range eggs, premium butter, two loaves of artisan bread, and artisanal jam for breakfast.
As it turns out, the mont you secure absolute financial freedom, your quality of life undergoes a massive paradigm shift.
A month ago, I was surviving on cheap ran, furiously coding freelance jobs to make rent, and calculating the exact cost-to-calorie ratio of every grocery trip. Now, I had ten million dollars of untraceable Stark Industries bounty money sitting cleanly in a decentralized offshore account. I wasn't just buying the premium at cuts—I wouldn't blink if I bought the entire produce section of the supermarket.
Even though I was currently operating a biochanical Siren vessel that didn't technically require organic sustenance to survive—I could theoretically go decades without eating or drinking—twenty years of human habit were hard to break. More importantly, in a tiline as violently stressful as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, cooking a hot, incredibly flavorful Chinese al was one of the few things that made feel genuinely human.
I picked up a plastic carton of fresh strawberries, verified the expiration date, and tossed them into the cart with a satisfied nod.
I was already structuring the dinner nu in my head. Braised pork belly was non-negotiable. I would pair it with garlic braised prawns, stir-fried greens, and stead rice. Tomorrow morning, I could sear a premium steak and use my matter reconstruction ability to generate an air fryer for Portuguese egg tarts. I could probably bring a few extra tarts to school for Peter and Gwen to thank them for the AP Chemistry notes.
I was pushing the cart toward the international spice aisle, still ntally debating the optimal soy sauce ratio, when my peripheral vision caught a familiar silhouette standing near the endcap.
Dark, fitted leather jacket. Distinctive reddish-brown hair.
She was holding a plastic container of pre-packaged salad. As I approached, she turned her head, fixing with a perfectly tid, pleasantly surprised smile.
Natasha Romanoff.
The Black Widow.
My hands instantly froze on the handle of the shopping cart. A highly explicit curse word detonated in my cybernetic brain.
Are you actually kidding ?
What kind of absurd, narrative-driven fate was this?!
Bumping into her randomly in a massive Manhattan financial firm was a statistical anomaly. Running into her in a generic supermarket in Queens was an active insult to probability! I had intentionally relocated to a quiet, boring neighborhood specifically to avoid the Avengers! Why the hell was the apex wet-work operative of S.H.I.E.L.D. buying pre-packaged salad in my local grocery store instead of sleeping in her safehouse?!
My internal monitors were screaming with complaints, but my physical expression remained utterly impassive. I gave Natasha a brief, polite nod of acknowledgnt and attempted to smoothly push my cart past her, treating it like a complete coincidence.
Natasha, predictably, had absolutely no intention of letting walk away.
She smiled, holding her salad container, and smoothly intercepted my path. Her sharp green eyes quickly swept over the massive pile of fresh Chinese ingredients in my cart.
"What an incredible coincidence, Miss Vale," Natasha said, her tone perfectly mimicking the casual warmth of a friendly neighbor. "I really didn't expect to run into you here. Do you live in the area?"
"I do. Not far from here," I replied, bringing the cart to a halt. My voice was entirely flat. My face betrayed absolutely zero panic, surprise, or hidden emotion. "Just doing my weekly grocery run."
I knew exactly how the Black Widow operated. This seemingly casual small talk was actually a highly sophisticated interrogation tactic. Every single word was a psychological probe. Every casual glance was actively analyzing my micro-expressions, my heart rate, and my pupil dilation. One microscopic slip-up, and she would instantly know I was hiding sothing.
A few months ago, this interaction would have triggered a massive panic attack. I would have been sweating through my hoodie, desperately trying to escape.
But I was no longer a terrified human transmigrator hiding in the dark. I currently held the apex authority of the Antikythera sequence. Even if Natasha Romanoff called in a S.H.I.E.L.D. strike team to surround the supermarket, I could effortlessly vaporize the entire block and walk away without a scratch.
When you possess that level of overwhelming cosmic violence, social anxiety tends to disappear entirely.
Natasha clearly hadn't expected to be this remarkably calm.
Following the incident at the Manhattan server farm, S.H.I.E.L.D. had officially flagged . Nick Fury had ordered a 24-hour physical surveillance detail on the "anomalous Asian girl" who possessed cyber-warfare capabilities that vastly exceeded current global standards.
But after a month of intense stalking, the field agents found absolutely nothing. My routine was completely sterile. I went to high school. I went to my apartnt. I went to the supermarket. Aside from taking the occasional, highly legal freelance coding contract, I never contacted suspicious individuals, I never used burner phones, and I never displayed any combat training. I was as clean as bleach.
With the physical surveillance yielding zero actionable intelligence, Fury had pulled the field agents and relegated to passive network monitoring. But even S.H.I.E.L.D.'s cyber division hit a brick wall. My internet traffic was completely normal. My freelance contracts were paid in cash, and my bank accounts were pristine enough to survive a federal audit.
As far as S.H.I.E.L.D. was concerned, I was exactly what my forged passport claid: an incredibly gifted, slightly introverted international student.
But Natasha Romanoff didn't survive the Red Room by trusting paperwork. She knew damn well that a teenager who could flawlessly rewrite a military-grade encrypted database in twenty-five minutes was not an "ordinary student."
"You're buying an impressive amount of ingredients. You must be quite the chef," Natasha noted, her smile warming slightly as she looked at my cart. "I thought most kids your age survived exclusively on pizza and drive-thru burgers."
"I'm not used to the local diet," I replied, raising an eyebrow with a hint of genuine, teenage exasperation. "Eating Arican fast food every day makes feel like my soul is actively leaving my body. I strongly prefer to cook my own als."
Natasha let out a quiet laugh. The amusent in her eyes felt slightly more genuine. "I can't argue with that. I've lived in New York for years, and I still can't stomach the deli sandwiches. Actually, I'm glad I ran into you. I never got the chance to properly thank you for your work at the financial firm last month. That database repair saved us from a catastrophic data leak."
And there it is.
The casual banter was over. We were finally at the tactical center of the conversation.
I looked up, eting the Black Widow's gaze directly. My face was a mask of perfect apathy.
"There is no need to thank ," I said, my voice cold and precise. "I was a freelance contractor. Your employer paid a significant amount of money to do a job, and I executed the job to the required specifications. It was a purely transactional exchange."
I heavily emphasized the phrase freelance contractor. It was a polite, incredibly firm way of telling S.H.I.E.L.D.'s top assassin that I was just a programr looking for cash, and I had absolutely zero interest in their shadow war.
Natasha registered the distinct boundary in my tone imdiately, but she didn't push it. She simply nodded.
"Regardless, I appreciate the efficiency. Speaking of which, my firm is actually looking to retain a part-ti cybersecurity consultant. The compensation package is extrely generous, the hours are entirely flexible, and it's strictly remote work. Your technical skills are exactly what we need. Would you be interested in discussing a contract?"
Here we go again. The exact sa S.H.I.E.L.D. recruitnt pitch.
I rolled my eyes internally, but kept my physical expression polite. I shook my head.
"Thank you for the offer, but I'm an AP student with a massive academic workload. I simply don't have the bandwidth for a corporate retainer. Furthermore, I have absolutely no interest in long-term corporate security."
The rejection was sharp, imdiate, and left absolutely no room for negotiation.
Natasha didn't look surprised. She just shrugged her shoulders, accepting the decline with practiced grace.
"I completely understand. But if you ever find yourself needing the work, or if you simply change your mind, my line is always open."
She reached into her leather jacket, pulled out a sleek, minimalist business card, and held it out to . The card was completely sterile—just a na and a private phone number. No company logo. No job title.
I stared at the card for two seconds before sighing internally and taking it. I shoved it into the pocket of my hoodie.
If I refused the card, she would just find a more invasive way to slip her contact info. There was no tactical advantage in fighting her over a piece of paper.
"Well, I won't keep your dinner waiting," Natasha smiled, lifting her plastic salad container. "I need to get back to the office and finish a massive incident report anyway. Have a good evening, Mira. Maybe we can grab a coffee soti."
"We'll see," I replied, offering a completely non-committal answer.
Natasha didn't seem to mind. She gave a brief wave and turned, walking smoothly toward the checkout registers.
I watched her figure disappear down the aisle, finally exhaling a quiet breath.
God, S.H.I.E.L.D. is annoying.
My internal sensors confird that Natasha hadn't physically planted any micro-transmitters on during the exchange, nor had she signaled a surveillance team to tail . Against all astronomical odds, this actually was just a random encounter in the grocery store.
But I also knew the tactical reality. Because of this conversation, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s threat assessnt of was going to significantly increase.
I didn't particularly care.
As long as Nick Fury didn't send a strike team to kick down my apartnt door, I couldn't be bothered to care about their passive surveillance.
I finished my grocery run, checked out at the register, and walked out into the cool evening air carrying two massive paper bags.
The New York autumn wind whipped down the street, kicking up dry leaves. I reached up and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head. With a microscopic flex of willpower, the two heavy grocery bags vanished directly into my rigging's spatial storage.
As I walked down the sidewalk toward my apartnt, my cyberpathic consciousness instinctively expanded. The Fire Control Radar swept over the dark streets of Queens like a sonar pulse.
Almost instantly, the radar pinged a massive, chaotic biological anomaly a few blocks away.
It was the apartnt belonging to Ben and May Parker. The biological reading was radiating from the attic bedroom.
I stopped walking. I looked up at the distant roof of the Parker residence. A complex, heavy emotion flickered through my blue eyes.
The agonizing birth of Spider-Man was occurring at this exact second.
And resting heavily in the pocket of my hoodie was the radioactive spider that had started it all.
I stood silently in the wind for a few seconds before breaking my gaze and continuing down the street.
The wind blew my hood back, exposing my silver-white hair and my clear, sea-blue eyes. In the distance, the Manhattan skyline blazed with electric light. The massive, glowing arc reactor of Stark Tower dominated the night sky.
I looked down at the crumpled grocery receipt in my hand. A very faint, genuine smile touched my lips.
To hell with the Avengers. To hell with S.H.I.E.L.D. To hell with HYDRA.
Right now, making the perfect braised pork belly was my absolute highest priority.
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