Astoria. 1:43 a.m.
The silence of the night barely stirred in the damp alleys and flickering streetlights. Peter perched on the edge of a rusted ledge, clad in his black suit. It felt like a second skin. The fabric, treated with his polymer formula and coated with flexible resin, could withstand blades, bites, and even the friction of sliding between buildings. It wasn't perfect. But it was his.
An anonymous tip had reported an unusual transaction near the elevated train's freight depot. Neighborhood cameras revealed a pattern: empty trucks arriving, leaving full, and vanishing without a trace. What intrigued Peter most was the symbol discreetly painted on one of the containers: a mechanical seagull. The same icon he'd found on a stolen backpack weeks earlier.
Adrian Toomes.
Peter didn't have solid evidence yet, but all the clues pointed to a network of theft and trafficking in modified weapons. He'd already intercepted a few—tools originally designed for heavy construction, like hydraulic claws, torsion grips, and pulse generators, all converted into assault weapons.
Tonight, he was going in through the front door.
He took a deep breath. His fingers tensed. From the ledge, he could see three armed men escorting a pallet covered with a black tarp. One of them wore a lightweight exosuit, clearly stolen. It wasn't designed for combat… but now it had cannons adapted to both arms.
Peter couldn't let that technology spread further.
"Time to cut the threads."
He leaped.
Peter landed in complete silence, his legs absorbing the impact on a rusted metal walkway. The sound barely mingled with the distant roar of a train. From the shadows, he aimed his web-shooters and fired two reinforced webbing lines—one at the exosuit's support frame, the other at the container's edge.
He pulled hard. The exosuit lost balance, stumbling backward like a poorly calibrated insect, and the container crashed down, revealing its contents: military-grade lithium cylinders, armored and marked with the Stark Industries logo.
"We've got company!" one of the men shouted.
There was no turning back.
Peter launched himself at them like a whip. He dodged the first plasma blast by rolling across the ground, bounced off a crate, and kicked the man who'd fallen with the container. His body spun through the air with mathematical precision. Every strike was meant to neutralize, not kill. Still, he was relentless.
One of the thugs pulled out an electric lance—a modified mining tool. He aimed it at Peter, who spun and fired a web that completely covered the weapon before it could activate. Peter delivered a kick to the man's chest, sending him crashing into a concrete wall.
Two remained.
The exosuit wearer recovered and activated his cannons. Peter barely ducked behind a container as the shots began to rain down. The metal vibrated, ringing like a bell about to shatter.
"This is different. These aren't common gangsters. These guys are trained."
A burning sensation flared in his left arm. He glanced down: a graze burn. A second longer, and he'd have lost the arm.
"Alright. My turn."
He leaped forward again, using the cover for momentum. He bounced off the side of a truck and spun like a human spiral, firing reinforced webs at the exosuit's joints. The connections gave way.
Peter landed behind the man and struck the back of the machine with both feet. A spark erupted, and the hydraulic system collapsed. The man screamed, crushed under the machine's weight.
Silence returned.
But it didn't last long.
From the shadows of the warehouse, three more figures emerged, one dragging a black briefcase with blinking red lights.
Peter knew this night wasn't ending anytime soon.
He took a step back, assessing the situation. The new figures wore featureless black masks. No words. No threats. Just trained, clean, efficient movement.
One connected the briefcase to an improvised terminal. Another raised a heavy rifle with recoil stabilizers. The third pulled out a spherical grenade with blue lights.
"This isn't just a robbery. It's a planned criminal operation."
Peter activated his web-shooters with a dull click. The straps of his suit tightened against his back. A deep breath.
One by one. Fast and clean.
He leaped.
The grenade wielder went first. He threw the device into the air, but Peter was already on him. He kicked the sphere, redirecting it toward the ceiling, where it exploded in a sonic pulse. The vibration shattered some industrial lamps, raining glass and sparks. Peter rolled to the ground, half-dazed, but got back up.
The second opened fire.
Peter used his webbing to propel himself toward a stack of barrels. He didn't stop. He kept firing webs while zigzagging forward until he managed to clog the rifle's barrel. The mercenary tried to shoot anyway.
Bad idea.
The recoil misfired. The weapon exploded backward, throwing the man against a metal wall.
Peter turned to the third… but it was too late.
The briefcase emitted a bright light and a steady beep. It was downloading data. Or copying. Or hacking. Peter didn't know what, but he knew he had to stop it.
"You're not stealing another byte!"
He rushed forward, but the man with the briefcase pressed a side button. An invisible shockwave threw Peter several meters back, like a giant hand slamming him into the concrete. He rolled across the ground, his body numb from the kinetic blast.
The man disconnected the briefcase, secured it to his back, and started running. But Peter staggered to his feet.
"Not so fast."
With effort, he fired a web from his left shooter. The line caught the fugitive's ankle. Peter pulled with all his strength, and the man fell face-first to the ground, briefcase and all.
Peter approached. Fast. Furious.
The man raised a pistol.
Peter stepped on the weapon before he could aim and knocked him out with a single punch.
Silence returned.
Peter was breathing heavily. The warehouse was filled with unconscious bodies, twisted metal, smoke, and scattered webs like severed veins.
His suit was torn.
His arm was bleeding.
And the briefcase kept blinking.
Too clean. Too coordinated. These weren't thieves. They were collectors. And they knew exactly what they were after.
Peter knew it for certain: Toomes was behind this.
And this was only the beginning.
No longer just a weapons trafficker. Something more sophisticated. More dangerous. He had trained soldiers, stolen technology, access to classified information… and now, clearly, the resources to intercept digital shipments under the radar.
Peter looked up. Through the warehouse's broken windows, he could see Manhattan's distant buildings, their lights like artificial constellations. The world slept, unaware of how close it was to the abyss. And he… he was right on the edge. A tingle crept up his neck. Something more than his spider-sense. A primal chill. Instinctive. As if someone were watching him from a corner he couldn't see. He spun around. Nothing. But something inside him… vibrated. Something he couldn't name.
Y él... estaba justo al borde. Un cosquilleo le subió por la nuca. Algo más que su sentido arácnido. Un escalofrío primario. Instintivo. Como si alguien lo observara desde un rincón que no podía ver.
Se dio la vuelta. Nada. Pero algo dentro de él... vibró. Algo que no podía nombrar.
He secured the briefcase in an improvised web sack. Before leaving, he approached one of the fallen men and removed his mask.
Nothing. No familiar face. No tattoos. No dog tags. No clues.
But on the neck, almost imperceptible, was a scar shaped like a "V." A symbol, almost surgically etched. Peter frowned.
¿What the hell is this?
He leaped through an open window and vanished into the shadows, heading toward Queens.
The night embraced him like a dirty, damp blanket, carrying guilt, doubt, pain… and a growing determination.
Peter moved quickly, but not fast enough to stop thinking. Every leap between buildings was an unspoken thought.
Every web shot was an unanswered question. Toomes. The briefcase. The V-shaped scar.
It all seemed part of a web he hadn't woven but was trapped in.
When he finally reached the makeshift lab in his room, the sky was beginning to turn a deep blue, that strange hue that only appears just before dawn.
The first birds chirped reluctantly, as if they, too, had had a rough night. He set the briefcase on the table carefully, as if it were a bomb.
"I have to open it. I need to know what's inside," he muttered, though his voice sounded hollow, tired.
But he didn't open it yet. Instead, he collapsed into the swivel chair he'd fixed himself, slowly removing his mask, as if it were a burning skin.
The face staring back from the mirror no longer looked 17. There was something hardened.
A shadow in his eyes he hadn't seen before. Not even the dried blood on his brow or the cut on his lip troubled him as much as that empty gaze.
The gaze of someone who'd crossed a line. His suit was intact… at least on the outside. But Peter knew something was broken inside. Something had cracked tonight, something he could no longer ignore. It wasn't just the violence. It wasn't just the blood.
It was that, for a moment, he'd enjoyed it. The fight, the control, the superiority.
And that scared him.
He rested his elbows on the table, covering his face with his hands.
"I won't lose myself," he whispered, as if saying it aloud could make it true.
But then… he felt it. A flicker. Not in his eyes. In reality.
For a second, it was as if the world slid half a millimeter to the left. The briefcase's electric hum paused for a heartbeat.
The wind outside stopped. Everything froze.
And in that dead second, a whisper distant, deep, heavy with impossible sadness slipped through the folds of his mind:
"What are you doing?"
Peter snapped his head up, his heart pounding like a war drum. He looked around. No one. No voice. Nothing tangible.
But the air felt denser. Almost… inhabited.
"Hello?" he asked, not knowing why. Nothing. Just the steady beep of the briefcase rebooting.
He shook his head, rubbed his eyes. "I must be exhausted. I haven't eaten or slept properly." He clung to those excuses like a lifeline. But that whisper didn't sound like a hallucination.
As the first light of dawn crept through the window, Peter took a deep breath and, with a sigh, opened the briefcase.
The screen flickered. Codes. Blueprints. Names. Locations. And at the bottom, a single word highlighted in red.
"STARK."