On the edge of Queens, in an abandoned chemical park.
Rusting iron scaffolding jabbed into the dreary gray sky like the skeleton of some giant beast.
The air was thick with the stench of sulfur and stale motor oil—a pungent smell to an ordinary person, but amplified a hundredfold in Peter Parker’s nostrils.
He could even smell the fermented sour decay of a dead rat in a sewer a hundred meters away.
Peter stood before a mottled red-brick wall.
The memory of crushing his doorknob that morning stuck in his mind like a thorn.
He looked down at his palms.
Clear fingerprints, pale palms—still the same hands that couldn’t throw a shot put worth a damn in gym class.
“Just static electricity…
or metal fatigue?”
Peter tried to rationalize it with science, tentatively pressing his right hand against the rough brick surface.
The moment his skin touched it—
An impossibly bizarre sensation erupted along his nerve endings.
It felt as if his fingertips dissolved, transforming into countless microscopic hooks invisible to the naked eye that greedily locked into every micron-sized crevice in the brickwork.
Clamping down with absolute tenacity.
The stickiness felt impossibly solid.
Peter swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
He lifted his left foot and planted it against the vertical wall.
Solid as a rock.
Gravity had become a mere suggestion; Isaac Newton was practically rolling in his grave.
His heart hammered violently against his ribs, his blood rushing so fast his eardrums thrummed with static.
Peter hesitated no longer.
Using hands and feet in unison, he darted up the vertical wall like a giant, spooked gecko.
Five meters.
Ten meters.
Thirty meters.
The wind whipped past his ears in sharp whistles, and the abandoned cars below shrank to the size of fingernails.
No safety line, no net.
Adrenaline surged through his veins like molten magma.
The terrifying thrill of dancing on the edge of life and death set his scalp tingling, sending shivers of pure exhilaration through every limb.
Scrambling onto the roof platform, Peter gasped, greedily sucking in air.
The world had changed.
Five hundred meters away, the sound of a fly rubbing its forelegs together thrummed like a drumbeat right in his ear.
A block over, the rumble of car engines pulsed through the reinforced concrete into the soles of his feet, mapping out a holographic layout in his mind.
A torrent of sensory data flooded in, yet instead of overloading his brain, it gave him absolute awareness of his surroundings.
“Power…”
“Is this…
Spider-Sense?” Peter clenched his fist, joints popping.
Strength overflowed every muscle fiber.
He felt as though he could flip a truck with his bare hands.
He looked toward a towering cooling tower fifty meters away.
An apex predator instinct deep within his genes woke up.
He lowered his center of gravity, the muscles in his thighs winding tight like compressed springs.
“Here goes nothing!”
BOOM!
The concrete beneath his feet cracked instantaneously, spider-webbing outward in a crater.
Peter shot into the air like a cannonball, ripping through the atmosphere in a breathtaking arc.
He was flying.
The sheer freedom of soaring above the city made him want to scream at the top of his lungs.
But physics is fair.
It gives you the thrill of takeoff, only to pay you back with the despair of impact.
Peter miscalculated his airtime.
Reaching his apex, his body plunged downward at accelerating speed.
His trajectory wasn’t taking him to the tower platform.
It was carrying him straight into a forest of sharp, jagged rebar jutting from the debris below.
“Oh, crap!”
The sudden weightlessness turned his stomach upside down.
Peter flailed wildly in midair, trying to grab onto anything.
A sharp, bulging sensation throbbed beneath the skin of his wrists.
As if something were bursting to break free.
Instinctively, he curled his middle and ring fingers inward, snapping his wrist back.
Thwip—!
A jet of white fluid shot forth, adhering precisely to the edge of the cooling tower before instantly hardening into a tough strand of webbing.
The web line pulled taut.
The sudden yank nearly dislocated his shoulder, but it successfully arrested his fall.
“Ha!
I’m a genius!”
Dangling in midair, Peter stared at the web line—stronger than a steel cable—his brain buzzing with adrenaline.
“Biological web generation?
That’s completely unscientific, but it is awesome!”
If he could swing, why not swing farther?
A crazy idea blossomed.
He was going to conquer this jungle of steel like Tarzan.
“Web-swinging time!” Peter let out a dorky yell and raised his arm again.
“Check this out!”
Peter let go of the line, launching into the air again, pointing his wrist toward a nearby water tower.
However.
Reality isn’t a movie; there are no cuts or special effects.
He forgot about angular momentum, and worse, he completely ignored inertia.
His web shot was off by half a second.
That fatal half-second turned what should have been a graceful swing into an out-of-control wrecking ball.
Though the web hit its mark, the immense centrifugal force slammed him sideways, sending him spinning out of control toward the pile of razor-sharp scrap metal on the ground.
“Oh no!
Crap, crap, crap!”
Peter’s eyes dilated in sheer terror as the world slowed into agonizing motion.
He could see the exact texture of rust on the rebar rushing toward his face.
Was he going to die?
Was he really going to get turned into a human shish kebab right after getting superpowers?
BOOM—!!
The air violently compressed, producing a dull sonic boom.
A massive red shadow smashed into the lethal trajectory with unstoppable momentum.
Peter felt as if he had slammed into a speeding wall of displaced air before two pairs of terrifically thick arms caught him securely.
Gale-force wind buffeted his face, stinging his cheeks.
The expected impalement never came.
He felt as though he had hit a mobile fortress, held fast by four massively thick arms that defied every law of biology.
THUD!
The massive figure slammed onto the ground.
The earth trembled as a tidal wave of dust erupted.
Tons of surrounding scrap metal were blasted aside by the shockwave, clattering violently to the dirt.
Peter’s heart skipped a beat.
He opened his eyes, rigid with shock.
His vision filled with skin like red bedrock—ferocious, bulging cords of muscle radiating suffocating heat.
He looked up.
It was a wild, imposing face with four eyes.
Over three meters tall.
Four arms.
The red giant was scruffing him by the back of his collar with one hand, like holding a chick that had tried to walk and nearly tumbled off a cliff.
*Gulp.*
Peter swallowed with great difficulty, his mind going completely blank.
An alien?
A monster?
Or some secret lab experiment?
The prideful hubris he had felt moments ago shattered into dust before this red behemoth.
The overwhelming aura radiating from the titan made every instinct scream at him to run.
“U-Uh…” Peter’s voice trembled, his teeth chattering.
“Th-Thanks?”
The red giant—Leon, transformed into Four Arms—tilted his head down slightly.
All four eyes shifted in unison, locking onto the hoodie-wearing kid in his grip.
The Omnitrix’s genetic synchronization allowed him to clearly feel the restless power inside Peter’s body.
But the kid’s technique was an absolute eyesore.
If Leon hadn’t stepped in, Peter’s family would be identifying a “spider kebab” at the morgue tomorrow.
“Ten out of ten on the takeoff.”
Leon’s altered vocal cords gave his voice a deep, booming resonance with a metallic raspy edge that echoed through the ruins.
“Zero out of ten on the landing.”
Peter blinked, stunned.
Before he could process it, Leon tossed him aside.
Peter landed on a flat patch of open ground, stumbling a few paces before finding his balance.
“Listen up, Spider-Kid.”
Leon crossed his four thick arms, towering over Peter as his massive red form blocked out the sun, casting a long shadow.
“America doesn’t lack dead bodies—especially not dead bodies that don’t respect physics.”
“Until you learn how to control your inertia, stop playing suicide games.”
Peter’s eyes went wide as saucers.
The fear inside him began to give way to a feverish curiosity.
The monster’s tone…
didn’t sound like he wanted to eat him?
“Whoa!
Dude, you are insanely cool!”
Peter’s mouth ran faster than his brain, his motor-mouth habit bursting out all at once.
“You’ve got four arms!
Is that natural?
Or radiation mutation?
How dense are your muscles?
Can you take an anti-tank missile?!”
Leon’s mouth twitched slightly.
The kid’s chatterbox tendency really was a passive skill.
“I’m a Tetramand, not one of those inferior radiation mutants.”
Leon grunted coldly, having no intention of elaborating.
Maintaining an air of mystery was the cardinal rule of being a mentor from the shadows.
“And one more thing.”
Leon turned around, the muscles on his back rippling like mountain ranges.
“Get rid of that hoodie.
It makes you look like an idiot who just crawled out of bed.”
Before the words had even settled—
BOOM!
Leon bent his knees slightly, and the ground instantly fractured into a crater.
His massive red frame catapulted tens of meters into the air as if defying gravity, vanishing beyond the edge of the abandoned factory in a few quick bounds.
Leaving behind a cloud of swirling dust and a dumbfounded Peter.
“A Tetramand…”
Peter mumbled to himself, his heart still hammering.
With his fear washed away, an unprecedented surge of excitement took its place.
It turned out he really wasn’t the only “freak” in this world.
Though the big red guy looked menacing, the way he had caught Peter had been surprisingly gentle, even absorbing the impact with his arms.
“So cool!”
Peter looked at his wrists, his gaze slowly hardening with resolve.
“He’s right.”
Looking down at the spinnerets on his wrists, his unfocused eyes sharpened into firm determination.
“I’m too weak.”
“And…
I really do need a suit.
A suit worthy of this kind of power.”
The wind whipped up dust from the ruins.
The boy’s shadow stretched long under the setting sun.
…
A few kilometers away.
Oscorp Tower, top-floor biolab.
A massive holographic screen bathed the dim room in a sickly green light.
Norman Osborn stood wearing a white lab coat, gripping a whiskey glass so tightly his knuckles turned white.
His bloodshot eyes glared intently at the wildly fluctuating red waveform on the screen.
It was an abnormal energy signature captured by their bio-tracking system.
The peak readings were terrifyingly high.
“Have you located it?”
Norman’s voice was hoarse, laced with suppressed madness.
Beside him, an assistant’s fingers flew across the keyboard, cold sweat beading on his forehead.
“Doctor, the signal source is in an abandoned industrial park in Queens.
This bio-frequency…
matches Sample 15 that went missing.”
“Sample 15…”
Norman threw back his head, gulping down the burning alcohol.
The green ambient light hit his face, throwing a twisted, menacing smile into sharp relief.
It was a cross-species gene fusion specimen into which he had poured half his life’s work to cure his family’s genetic disease.
It was his lifeline.
“Find him.
That boy…
he’s the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.”
*Crack.*
The crystal glass shattered in his fist.
Blood mixed with liquor, dripping through his fingers.
To Norman Osborn, however, it felt like the nectar of eternal life.