Enjoying the story? Support it with Power Stones for more chapters!
***
It would be the understatement of the century if Peter said he wasn't lost after his fight against the Green Goblin. And, being honest with himself, it hadn't started that night. It had been going on for months, since the moment he became Spider-Man.
Damn it, he had lost Eddie. Eddie Brock. His brother in everything but blood, the guy who had stood by him in his worst moments, sharing dreams of a better future. Eddie, who knew Peter better than almost anyone in the world. Eddie, who was now locked up in Ravencroft, in a cold cell, paying for choices that weren't entirely his.
Peter still hadn't gone to visit him. Not even once.
The guilt weighed like lead every time he thought about it. Yes, Eddie had crossed the line. Yes, Eddie had put his identity at risk and threatened Aunt May and Gwen. But that had been the symbiote — that disgusting alien goo that fed on his anger, twisting his thoughts and amplifying every hurt until it turned into a destructive obsession.
And Eddie's anger… it was justified. He had legitimate reasons to be furious. After all, it was because of Peter's actions that Eddie lost his job at ESU and, by extension, college, stripping away the prospects and the future he had fought so hard to build.
What a great "bro" Peter was, huh?...
There was also Liz Allan, his first girlfriend. Peter had always been impulsive, but breaking up with her in the middle of the cafeteria? In front of everyone? Right after she had seen her brother get arrested again, reliving a trauma?
He had outdone himself.
There was no other word for it. He had outdone himself in the art of being insensitive, of choosing the worst possible moment, of turning an already painful situation into something completely devastating. Peter obviously wanted to be with Gwen as soon as possible, but couldn't he at least have waited until Liz was in a better place? The way Gwen herself was doing now with Harry?
Liz didn't deserve that. She didn't deserve anything he did — or failed to do. She didn't deserve the late dates (when they happened). She didn't deserve the last-minute cancellations (when he simply didn't show up). She didn't deserve spending Valentine's Day alone while he was too busy drooling over Gwen right in front of her, as if Liz were invisible.
If there were a "Worst Boyfriend in the Country" contest — or in the world, since it was good to think big — the prize would undoubtedly be his. Complete with sash, trophy, and speech.
Those were just two examples of people he loved and deeply hurt. But the list was longer. Much longer. Like the Connors, who had now been forced to leave the city after several crises in the lab they ran, many of them directly caused by Peter.
And why?
Because he was trying to balance two lives. Because he wanted to keep being a normal teenager. Because he wanted to go to parties, have a girlfriend, build friendships, live the "best years of his life" like everyone said, in the best way possible.
Peter told himself he could keep things separate, that he just needed to organize his time better, lie a little more, improvise a better excuse. But there was only one truth: there couldn't be two lives. There was one, chaotic, hastily stitched together, where every thread pulled on one side tore the other.
And by trying to be just a normal teenager, he brought the people he loved closer to the eye of a hurricane. Dating Peter Parker meant being pushed aside because the city spoke louder. Being friends with Peter Parker meant being one step away from being used as bait by psychopaths. Trusting Peter Parker was accepting that, at some point, you would be disappointed.
Maybe that had been one of his biggest mistakes from the beginning: believing he could keep being Peter the same way. That he could maintain bonds, keep promises, nurture romances, and still run across rooftops as if the world wouldn't collapse on whoever stood beside him.
Because it always did.
And in the end, it didn't matter how much he fought, how much he got beaten, how much he saved — the people he loved were the ones who paid the price.
But now, after hearing Sister Anne's advice, Peter believed he had found an answer to this whole dilemma.
***
[8 days later]
Peter swung between the buildings at high speed, turning the city into a blur of lights while the night wind crashed hard against his suit. The sensation was liberating, even comforting — the rhythm, the swing, the freedom of moving between skyscrapers as if the air were his natural element. He knew every angle, every push, the exact moment to release the web to gain more speed or shift direction abruptly.
But unlike the last few times — when swinging brought only a temporary relief to his almost constant anxiety, serving as an escape from the thoughts that tormented him during the day — now there was something different in his chest. Something he hadn't felt in a very, very long time.
Excitement.
He was excited. Truly excited, in the kind of way that made his heart beat faster and a genuine smile form beneath the mask.
It was the excitement of someone who had discovered something extraordinary about himself.
All thanks to the fight he had just had with Kraven. Well, it wasn't exactly a fight.
The word "fight" implied some kind of equivalence, a minimal level of exchange, a moment when both sides truly faced each other under even remotely equal conditions.
What happened on that rooftop was none of that. There was no battle, no real confrontation, not even a flicker of uncertainty about the outcome. It was a pure, simple, and absolute demonstration of superiority.
Peter had been completely in control throughout the entire "encounter" — from the first seconds to the final minute — displaying such an absurd difference in strength that it all lasted less than two minutes.
Less than two minutes.
Kraven, the great hunter, the man who crossed oceans and faced the most dangerous beasts on the planet to prove his superiority — reduced to just another man in under one hundred and twenty seconds.
And with the ease with which he dominated one of his most persistent supervillains, Peter understood a fundamental truth about himself: he had no idea how strong he truly was.
Funny, isn't it? But it was true. He had never tested himself—No, he had never allowed himself to test his limits. Peter had always fought holding back, restraining every punch and kick. Throughout all those months facing villains, taking hits, being thrown against walls — he always struck back with the same controlled, measured, safe force. As if there were an invisible ceiling he could never surpass. A self-imposed limit he had never thought to question.
Why? Simple, fear.
Peter was afraid. Very afraid, in fact. I mean, how easy would it be for him to break a bone? Crush a skull? Punch straight through a chest? The answer was: extremely easy. Terrifyingly easy. As macabre as the thought was, he needed to acknowledge his own capacity for destruction.
So the best way to prevent a catastrophic mistake like that from happening was to limit himself as much as possible. To create invisible reins for himself, always fighting with clenched fists, but never truly unleashing them.
But now things had changed.
Not completely, of course. He wasn't going to go around throwing full-force punches at ordinary muggers. But against biologically modified humans, as he had told Kraven, the situation was different. Those people were different. They had enhanced endurance, superhuman strength, regenerative abilities, or at least durability far beyond normal.
Rhino was literally a war tank. Electro was pure electricity. Hammerhead had a head harder than steel. Even Norman Osborn himself was more resilient than any normal human being.
So why did Peter keep fighting them while holding back? What if he stopped?
The implication of that was immense. All those fights that lasted for hours, all those moments when he was on the brink of death, all those times the Sinister Six almost defeated him — everything could have been different.
But to reach that point, Peter knew brute force alone wouldn't be enough. He needed training. Technique. An understanding of his own body.
Because of that, he delayed the return of Spider-Man, focusing his attention over the past few days entirely on finding a dojo he could afford the lessons and on reading fighting manuals he borrowed from the library. Boxing manuals, Muay Thai guides, jiu-jitsu handbooks. Articles about impact angles, force distribution, and pressure points.
For the first time in his life, Peter was learning how to fight. Obviously, that wouldn't turn him into the next incarnation of Bruce Lee. But knowing the basics of how those techniques worked and having even a minimal sense of how to move his body was a thousand times better than just relying on his powers.
Dodge, web, punch, repeat. It had worked so far, but it was primitive. And stopping to think about it now, Peter understood that what he had been doing was like being given a supercar and driving it only in first gear because he had never learned how to shift.
Now he was learning how to shift, and the fight with Kraven had been the first practical test of that new knowledge.
Needless to say, the result had been more than satisfactory.
'If I had done this from the beginning, how many fights would have been easier?' Peter thought, swinging in a wide arc over a building. 'How many people would have gotten hurt less? How many times would I have made it home in time not to scare May?'
He knew the answer to all those questions.
CRASH!
The sound of shattering glass made Peter adjust his trajectory in one fluid motion, firing a web in the opposite direction to make the turn and gain speed.
Seconds later, he was in front of a small electronics store on the ground floor of a building. The display window was destroyed, shards of glass scattered across the sidewalk. Inside, three figures moved quickly, stuffing tablets, smartphones, and laptops into large backpacks.
Peter moved closer to get a better look, landing silently outside. They were three men. One was dark-haired and big, clearly the designated muscle — he must have weighed around two hundred pounds of pure fat. The second was skinny, jittery, with eyes that never stopped darting around. The third, apparently the leader, was older, gray-haired, with a scar on his eyebrow that gave him an air of experience.
Three normal criminals.
Peter smiled beneath the mask. It seemed like the perfect moment to test his new web-shooters.
Bringing his hand to his right wrist, Peter pressed the small button embedded on the side of a discreet silver bracelet. This was the new model of his web-shooters — so compact they looked more like a simple fashion accessory than crime-fighting equipment, no longer protruding like bulky mechanisms.
That was precisely the plan: to make the web-shooters so discreet that he could wear them at all times, without having to remove them to protect his secret identity. After all, who would suspect a simple bracelet?
But discretion wasn't the only change Peter had made. He had also optimized the web cartridges, which now held nearly twice the capacity of the previous ones. Running out of webbing in the middle of a fight? Not anymore! At least, that was the hope...
On top of that, he had added a few new features. Small upgrades his now efficiency-obsessed mind couldn't resist adding.
Like the one he was about to test now.
THWIP! THWIP! THWIP!
Three strands of webbing cut through the air in fractions of a second, each finding its target with the precision of someone who had done this thousands of times. The big guy was hit in the shoulder, the nervous one took it to the chest, and the leader was struck in the hand that was trying to reach for something in his pocket.
And then, at the exact moment the webs touched their targets—
BZZZT!
BZZZT!
BZZZT!
An electric charge shot from the webs into their targets, hitting all three thieves simultaneously. The entire store seemed to vibrate with the sharp buzz of electricity as the criminals' bodies trembled in an involuntary choreography, eyes wide and hair standing on end for a brief instant before—
Nothing.
The electric surge passed, and all three were still standing.
Peter blinked beneath the mask.
The big guy, who had taken the shock straight to the shoulder, shook his head like someone waking from a nap. The nervous one looked at his own chest, then at Spider-Man, then at his chest again, wearing an expression of complete confusion. The leader simply dropped the object he had been trying to grab — a cellphone, apparently — and stared at his own hand, where small residual sparks still crackled before fading out.
An awkward silence settled over the store.
"...Okay." Peter muttered to himself, his voice muffled by the mask. "That was... anticlimactic."
The big guy was the first to regain his composure. Maybe because his body fat acted as insulation, interfering with the distribution of electricity, something that would have to be taken into account. He charged toward Peter, seemingly under the illusion that it would be a good idea to try and take on Spider-Man with nothing but his fists.
Needless to say, Peter dealt with him quickly, taking him down with a spinning leg sweep before finishing with a punch to the face that sent him straight to dreamland.
"GET HIM!" the leader shouted to the nervous thug, who hesitated before pulling a knife from his waistband and running toward Peter, having learned nothing from what had happened to his partner.
Peter grabbed the wrist holding the knife with ease and squeezed until the thug dropped the weapon with a pained groan. "Thinking isn't really your thing, is it?" the hero commented, knocking the thug down with a punch to the face.
"Now, that just leaves..." Peter turned to where the leader had been seconds earlier. "...you." The space was empty. His eyes swept across the store in an instant and found the back door wide open, swaying slightly. The last thug had fled. "Oh, one of you is a little smart." Shooting a web at the ceiling, he pulled himself toward the back door in a single motion, vaulting over several counters.
But the moment he stepped outside...
!!!
His spider-sense screamed inside his skull.
Peter didn't have time to think. His body simply moved on its own, driven by a reflex that had saved his life countless times. He leapt upward in an acrobatic motion, his body twisting through the air as—
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
A hail of gunfire tore toward him.
Bullets whizzed around him, passing so close that Peter felt the air displacement against his skin. One ricocheted off the brick wall to his left, shattering fragments that scraped across his mask. Another skimmed past his leg, close enough to tear his suit. A third pierced the air where his head had been a microsecond earlier.
They didn't stop.
Peter was forced to spin in midair, a human top dodging bullets as his brain processed the scene in slow motion: three men stationed at the back of a black van, rifles raised. The gray-haired leader hovered by the open rear doors, half inside the vehicle.
'Hmm, so they're not just simple thieves,' Peter thought as his feet touched the ground for a second—long enough to propel himself again, throwing himself sideways into a roll as more bullets spat fire in his direction. The concrete behind him shattered into clouds of dust, each impact sounding like a hammer striking the pavement.
Peter didn't stop. He couldn't stop. His body became a blur of red and blue in the dark alley, moving in unpredictable patterns, leaping, twisting, evading—always one step ahead of the bullets, always an inch outside death's reach.
And then, at the peak of a jump, suspended in the air for an instant, Peter found the right moment.
Time slowed.
Down below, the three men with rifles kept firing, the barrels of their rifles flashing as they fired toward him. Peter could see the bullets rising—not literally, not with his eyes, but with something deeper: the heightened awareness his spider-sense granted him in moments of danger. Because of it, he knew every trajectory the bullets would take, and he also knew that none of them would hit him.
Peter extended his arms.
THWIP!
THWIP!
THWIP!
Three webs shot from the launchers on his wrists, each traveling in a straight line and striking the men's faces simultaneously.
The gunfire stopped, replaced by muffled screams as the shooters desperately tried to rip the sticky mass from their eyes, noses, and mouths. But before any of them had the chance to do so, Peter was already in front of them, moving like a ghost.
The first took a blow to the solar plexus that folded him like a sheet of paper, the air escaping his lungs in an audible whoosh. The second was struck at the temple, his eyes rolling back before he crumpled to the ground. The third, who had managed to free one eye, tried to fire again, but Peter was already expecting it — a precise kick disarmed him, followed by a right cross that knocked him out cold.
But Peter had no time to rest.
Because the van's driver, seeing in the rearview mirror his partners being taken down in the blink of an eye, made the only decision that made sense: run. He slammed the accelerator, making the engine roar and the tires screech before the van shot forward.
"No, you don't!" Determined to end it quickly, Peter fired a web at the back of the van, the strand sticking to the metal with a sharp thwip. He bent his knees, bracing for the impact.
The web stretched.
Peter's arm was yanked forward with it.
And then the brute force of the fleeing vehicle hit, dragging the hero a few inches, his feet scraping across the asphalt before he managed to dig in. Peter's muscles hardened with effort, the fibers contracting beyond human limits as he threw all his body weight backward, his torso nearly parallel to the ground.
The van lurched to a halt, its tires skidding on the asphalt, creating thick clouds of smoke, the smell of burnt rubber filling the air.
The vehicle was fighting against Peter. And he was winning.
"Come on. This is a great time for the engine to blow—"
CRASH!
For a moment, Peter actually believed his request had been granted. But it hadn't. The sound had come from the back of the van, metallic and violent.
One of the rear doors — exactly where the web was attached — simply came loose.
The metal was torn from its hinges by the force of the pull, flying backward like a spinning disc, cutting through the air toward Peter with lethal speed. The hero reacted by releasing the web and dropping to the ground in a swift motion, feeling the rush of wind from the door passing inches above his body before it crashed into the alley wall with a thunderous bang.
And the van, free of any resistance, sped away.
Peter remained still for a moment, lying on the asphalt, staring at the night sky as he processed what had just happened. "Tsk. It always ends in a chase."
His arms rose, hands pointing toward the adjacent buildings of the alley.
THWIP! THWIP!
Two webs flew, attaching to the ledges. He tensed his arms, felt the familiar vibration of the strands stretching, and pulled himself upward with force, launching himself into the air in a powerful surge.
He quickly adjusted midair and fired another web, his eyes locked on the van ahead. "I've got twenty minutes to finish this."
***
Disclaimer: This story and its characters belong to Sony Pictures and Marvel Comics (Disney). This is merely a fanfiction written by a fan, with no intention of infringement.