Stephen Strange swallowed hard.
Looking into Schiller’s gray eyes, he realized he didn’t have the courage to refuse.
After all, unless he was an idiot, anyone could see that Schiller was no ordinary man.
Strange was dragged into the car, but he still protested, “I have to tell you first, I’m a doctor, not God.
If your friend is already dead, no matter how much you threaten me, I can’t bring him back to life.”
Schiller drove with an expressionless face.
“We’re both doctors,” he said.
“I know that better than you do.
The only reason I came for you is because I’m certain you can save him.”
Strange breathed a sigh of relief but still frowned, stubbornly muttering, “You’re just a psychologist.
When it comes to neurosurgery, you’d better not jump to conclusions so hastily.”
Before he could finish, he saw a ballpoint pen pressing against his forehead again.
Schiller’s hands were on the steering wheel, yet the pen was floating there silently.
Strange mimed zipping his lips, signaling that he wouldn’t say another word.
***
On the other side of town, young Peter stood outside the operating room, consumed by immense guilt and self-blame.
He wouldn’t let so much as a fly pass him.
Yet, of all people, Matt’s ex-girlfriend, Elektra, had quietly slipped up to the operating room doors.
Elektra hadn’t come to kill Matt.
On the contrary, she had learned of the syndicate’s plan even before Peter did.
She had been trying to find a chance to warn Matt, but Matt had left too quickly, and she only arrived after the tragedy had already unfolded.
Her feelings for Matt were complicated.
They had been classmates and lovers, but they had parted ways due to irreconcilable differences.
This time, Elektra had accepted Kingpin’s contract to assassinate Matt, but she had held back at every turn, never intending to actually kill him.
Yet, the moment she took her eyes off him, Matt had been ambushed.
How could she not be frantic?
Coming from a wealthy background, Elektra was well-acquainted with the wider world.
She knew Matt’s injuries were exceptionally severe and his condition critical.
Without invoking some mystical forces, it would be impossible to save him.
She had to act.
Perhaps only the power of the Beast could keep Matt alive.
Using her ninja stealth techniques, Elektra approached the operating room.
She paid no heed to the high schooler standing guard.
After observing him for several days, she knew Peter was just an ordinary kid with zero martial arts training.
She planned to slip past him and go straight inside.
Coincidentally, Peter possessed spider-like abilities, the most important of which was his Spider-Sense.
Under extreme mental tension, his Spider-Sense was many times sharper than usual.
The moment Elektra drew close, Peter whipped his head around and glared at the empty air in the corner.
Sensing someone’s presence, he threw a fist directly at Elektra.
Knowing Peter possessed superhuman strength, Elektra didn’t dare block the blow head-on.
However, Peter’s movements were full of openings.
Lacking professional training, he leaned his upper body too far forward when throwing the punch, failing to spread his legs and stabilize his center of gravity.
Elektra wrapped her arm around Peter’s wrist and pulled him forward.
Instantly losing his balance, Peter tumbled forward.
With a swift sweep of her foot, Elektra tripped him to the ground.
Yet, perhaps driven by his intense anxiety, Peter’s reflexes kicked in.
The instant he hit the floor, he sprang back up, wrapping his arms tightly around Elektra’s lower back.
Elektra was frantic herself, and both of them were highly agitated.
But Elektra was, after all, an assassin trained by The Hand.
The moment Peter grabbed her, her other hand, holding a dagger, slashed violently backward.
The dagger, enveloped in a blade of qi, sliced Peter from his shoulder down to his lowest rib, nearly severing his torso in half.
Instantly, an unbearable, overwhelming pain consumed Peter.
It pushed his body to its absolute limit.
With a desperate burst of strength, he flung Elektra away.
She crashed down at the far end of the hallway, unable to get up for a long while.
Peter collapsed to the floor, feeling as if he were dying of pain.
The dagger had not only torn open half his back, but the blade’s qi had sliced into his lungs.
Now, with every breath he took, blood welled up in his windpipe.
Peter had never felt such excruciating pain.
The sheer agony of his torn back muscles nearly made him black out.
The worst pain he had ever experienced in his life was getting beaten up a few days ago, which paled in comparison to a wound like this.
His entire back was nearly sliced open, and his damaged lungs filled his breaths with the taste of copper.
Every inhalation brought a wave of agony.
Tears welled up in Peter’s eyes as a physiological response, and a low, pained whimper escaped his throat.
Suddenly, he realized that heroes got hurt and bled too.
And when heroes got hurt, it hurt like hell.
There was no miraculous relief, and they weren’t spared just because they had special abilities.
His healing factor brought him some relief after a few breaths.
Through his blurred peripheral vision, he looked toward the operating room.
Through the frosted glass, he could see Daredevil lying prone inside.
Daredevil’s head was turned to the side, his eyes open.
He was conscious, but he couldn’t move.
Peter knew that Daredevil didn’t have a healing factor.
He was dying.
He was just a blind man who knew martial arts.
Now, with his entire spine shattered, he had to be in agonizing pain—far worse than Peter’s—yet he couldn’t make a sound.
Terrified and despairing, Peter felt a bitter grief and anger at how fragile a hero’s life could be.
More than that, an ocean of guilt and self-blame engulfed him.
An ordinary man without superpowers had stood up to an underground fight ring to save him.
Yet, when Peter heard those criminals plotting, he had walked away, thinking it was none of his business, leaving his friend—a true hero—to suffer such immense agony, now teetering on the brink of death.
Matt was a true hero.
He was not.
These intense emotions set his Spider-Sense buzzing.
In an instant, Peter’s spider abilities were amplified to their absolute peak.
As the turbulent emotions surged in his chest, the entire world shifted before his eyes.
Elektra immediately activated her stealth technique to hide herself, but Peter’s eyes, bloodshot and fierce, locked onto her position in a split second.
The boy who had seemed so clumsy just moments before practically vanished.
In the next breath, a massive force slammed Elektra into the wall.
Spitting up blood, she used the last of her strength to flee using her stealth technique.
When Schiller returned to the hospital, he found Peter sitting there dazed in front of a cracked, crumbling wall, his eyes bloodshot.
Stephen Strange entered the operating room.
By now, night had fallen completely.
Schiller stood across from Spider-Man.
“Peter.
I really didn’t expect our first meeting to be under these circumstances,” Schiller said.
Peter’s reactions were sluggish; he didn’t quite understand what Schiller meant.
Schiller knelt down, looking into Peter’s eyes, and said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to accompany you during your physical exam.
As you can see, I no longer work at this hospital.”
Peter’s mind cleared slightly.
“It’s you.
You’re that doctor.”
He had clearly remembered the doctor he had been chatting with online.
“Yes, it’s me,” Schiller said.
Peter lowered his head in silence.
“I must have disappointed you.
I’m not nearly as good as I seemed when we chatted.
I’ve made so many mistakes…
I almost got my friend killed.”
Schiller said, “I think you have realized a few things by now.”
“Yes, yes…” Peter said hoarsely.
“The most important thing I realized is that getting hurt really, really hurts.”
“It hurts so much, and yet he still went out and did it,” Peter whispered.
“He’s a hero, and I’m not.
Maybe I can never be a hero…”
Schiller’s voice remained calm, without a trace of blame.
He simply said in a gentle tone, “Perhaps you’ve realized that if those with power in this world refuse to save others, then no one will be left to save you.”
“Maybe you feel that your life right now is terrible, but even this terrible life was built for you by those willing to sacrifice.”
“Even the meager lives of those beggars on the street are only possible because Daredevil cleaned the thugs out of those alleys.”
“Peter, perhaps I shouldn’t be the one to say this, but I’m afraid I’m the only one here who can,” Schiller said.
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
Spider-Man silently closed his eyes.
“Congratulations,” he said.
“The surgery was a success.
There’s an eighty percent chance his nerves will fully recover.”
Hearing this, Peter finally let out a loud roar, as if to release all the pent-up emotions in his chest.
He leaped straight out of the window, scrambled up the building wall, and began leaping across the rooftops of New York.
Just then, he spotted the gold-and-red armor again.
It circled around him as if trying to lead him somewhere.
Peter followed the armor, leaping and running all the way to the top of the New York Television Tower.
The two of them stood at the highest peak of the tower.
Peter desperately wanted to scream, but he couldn’t make a sound.
With all his emotions bottled up inside, he felt like he was losing his mind.
Stark’s faceplate retracted, revealing his face.
Peter gasped in surprise, “You’re Stark!
Iron Man is Stark!”
“It’s nothing to be surprised about, kid.
Who else besides the owner of Stark Industries could develop armor like this?” Stark said.
“But the news said you were kidnapped and taken to Afghanistan.”
“I was.
But do you want to know how I escaped?”
Peter stared at him.
Stark said, “I built a power core and installed it right here.” Stark pointed to his chest.
“There’s still an Arc reactor in there now.”
“In a cave in Afghanistan, I cut open my own chest and shoved a metal foreign object inside.
My pants were completely soaked through with my own blood.”
Just imagining the scene made Peter’s own chest throb in sympathy.
“That…
must have been terrible, right?”
“Of course it was.
It hurt like hell,” Stark said, trying to sound casual, but Peter could hear a slight tremor in his voice, as if he too was reluctant to recall that day.
“You have to slice open your chest cavity with a blunt bone saw, and then sew wires directly into your flesh.”
A cold chill ran down Peter’s spine as he listened.
He truly hadn’t expected that Stark—who always appeared in the news as a carefree, playboy billionaire living a life of absolute luxury—had survived such a traumatic past.
Stark had bled, and he had endured pain that ordinary people could scarcely survive.
“Even though I like to call myself a genius, I’m very realistic,” Stark said.
“I know that if a bullet hits me, I’ll bleed just like anyone else.
If shrapnel shreds my heart, I will die.
If I lose a leg, I won’t be able to walk.”
“Yet I do a lot of work that carries those exact risks.
Do you think I do it for cheap thrills?” Stark asked.
“I am the richest man in the world, with power that most people can only dream of.
I have absolutely no obligation to put on this multi-million-dollar armor and risk my life to save ordinary people who couldn’t afford a single screw on this suit with a month’s salary.”
Spider-Man closed his eyes.
After a long silence, he whispered, “…With great power comes great responsibility, right?”
Stark didn’t answer.
He simply tapped his chest, over his heart.
But Peter understood.
He knew he had already found the answer in his own heart.
Facing the rising sun over New York City, Peter and Stark stood at the highest peak of the tower, watching the golden light break through the clouds, painting every building in the city with a brilliant, radiant hue.
From this day on, Peter Parker, Spider-Man, understood a fundamental truth:
Heroes, after all, are only human.
They feel pain, they get hurt, they bleed, and they experience loneliness and doubt.
Their only difference from the ordinary, mundane souls on the ground is that they bear a sense of responsibility others lack, and a grand, unyielding resolve to uphold justice until death.
No one is born able to withstand such agonizing pain.
As they march through the dark, they mold their pain-wrought bones and flesh into a hardened armor around their souls.
And when dawn breaks, they use those very bones to save the world.
For the first time, Spider-Man stood tall upon the steel scaffolding of the television tower.
He had not yet put on his suit, nor was he particularly tall or imposing.
But his soul had stood up, straight and unbending, as the turbulent emotions in his chest transformed into a power that flowed from his wounds to fill his entire body.
Facing the first rays of the morning sun, he thought: *The dawn has broken.*
*It’s time to save the world.*