By the time Ryan Quinn returned to his place, it was nearly three in the morning.
He didn’t turn on the lights.
He was too lazy for that.
While navigating the living room in the dark, his knee clipped the corner of the coffee table.
Ryan Quinn paused for a moment, then kept walking, mumbling a groggy, “Ow…
that hurts.” In the bathroom, moonlight filtered through the slats of the blinds, casting silver-white streaks across the floor.
Ryan Quinn leaned over the sink, head bowed, standing with a slouch so profound he looked ready to collapse into sleep at any second.
His insides were a bit restless.
The things he’d taken from Ava Starr hadn’t been fully digested yet.
The quantum energy left behind by the woman codenamed Ghost was simmering in his cells.
It wasn’t exactly painful, nor was it comfortable—it was just…
bloating.
His stomach felt overstuffed, leaving him with nothing to do but lie down and wait for it to process.
“…What a pain.” Ryan Quinn looked up, catching his reflection in the mirror.
His hair was an unmanageable mess and his face was pale, but his eyes were bright.
Within his pupils, swirls of silver-blue light were rotating, rippling outward in concentric circles.
Ryan Quinn watched himself, blinked, and then tilted his head to the side.
“Not bad.
Not too ugly.” He reached out, palm up.
Black biomass seeped out from under his skin, coalescing into a small spider in the center of his hand.
The spider crouched in his palm, its eight legs slightly spread, its red eyes reflecting the moonlight.
Ryan Quinn looked at it, and it looked back at him.
He could feel its presence—its eyes were his eyes, its legs were his hands.
It was an extension of his own body.
Karl King’s ability.
Clones.
“…Oh.
It works.” Ryan Quinn gave his wrist a light flick.
The little spider hopped from his palm to the sink, landing on the ceramic rim with a soft *click*.
Its eight legs scurried across the smooth surface before it vanished into the shadows of the blinds.
He closed his eyes, shifting his consciousness over to the spider.
In the darkness, Ryan Quinn saw a different world.
The slats of the blinds became massive silver walls.
He could sense the flow of the air, the warmth of the water in the pipes, and the heat of a car engine several blocks away that hadn’t quite cooled yet.
All this information flowed back to his brain through the spider’s senses, proving more effective than his own eyes and ears combined.
“…Quite convenient.” Ryan Quinn opened his eyes and recalled the spider.
The little thing crawled out from the shadows, scurried up his finger into his palm, and dissolved into black threads that retracted beneath his skin.
Alright, next.
Ryan Quinn began testing the other things he’d acquired.
Phasing.
Ava’s ability.
He sank his consciousness into the silver-blue energy within his body, and then—his forearm began to flicker.
It became translucent.
Muscle, blood vessels, and bone flickered intermittently for a moment before returning to normal.
Ryan Quinn tilted his head, watched it, and made it flicker again.
“…Oh, I see.” He walked to the wall and reached out toward the bathroom tiles.
The ceramic was cold, the concrete was hard—and then his hand passed through.
There was a slight prickling sensation, a numbness that traveled from his fingertips to his wrist.
He could feel everything inside the wall: the grit of the concrete against his “skin,” the hot water flowing through the pipes, the weak current running through the wires.
Ava’s phasing ability had been reprocessed by the Blacklight virus.
For her, this power had been a source of agony, something she could barely control even with her suit.
But the Blacklight virus didn’t need to be that complicated.
It could recompile the ability, turning passive into active, and pain into control.
Furthermore, he could hide anywhere while phased—inside walls, under floors, within the steel plating of a car—and stay there as long as he wanted without needing to come up for air.
The Blacklight virus didn’t need to breathe.
“…This is pretty handy.
I can hide in a wall the next time I don’t want to go to class.” Ryan Quinn paused, thought about it, and then lazily dismissed the idea.
“…Never mind.
It’s too cold in the walls.” He pulled his hand back, deactivated the phasing, and looked at his fingertips.
Faint silver-blue quantum energy was still bleeding out from the edges of his nails, flickering.
It would likely stabilize after a while.
He tried cloaking as well.
Using quantum energy to coat his entire body, he altered the way light interacted with matter.
In the mirror, Ryan Quinn’s body flickered a few times and then—vanished.
The bathroom looked empty.
He was still standing there; he couldn’t see his fingers when he raised his hand, but he could feel the temperature of the air and the pull of gravity.
It lasted for about thirty seconds before his energy ran low, and he slowly faded back into view in the mirror.
“…The duration is a bit short.
Whatever, I’ll take it slow.” Then there was the sharpness.
Ryan Quinn phased one hand and thrust it into the inner rim of the ceramic sink, then deactivated the phasing while inside the solid material.
With a *crack*, the ceramic split from the inside out.
The break was clean and sharp, without a single jagged edge.
Phase Cut.
Using the physical destruction caused by de-phasing inside a solid to tear a target apart.
Ava had never used this in actual combat, but he’d figured it out.
“…Yeah.
That works.” Ryan Quinn let out a breath and leaned against the sink, his posture returning to its usual slumping state.
He needed to develop his abilities systematically.
He couldn’t keep relying on last-minute improvisations.
The people he’d have to deal with in the future would only get more troublesome—first Kingpin’s men, then Red Room agents, and later, maybe even supervillains or The Avengers.
He couldn’t just transform into a bald middle-aged man and stab people in the back every single time.
“…So much trouble.” But what had to be done, had to be done.
Ryan Quinn walked into the living room and collapsed onto the sofa, legs draped over the armrest and head resting on the other side.
He closed his eyes and began leafing through his genetic library.
Thompson’s genes.
A normal human template.
Mostly useless, but if he needed to fully disguise himself as an ordinary person later, he could use this to mask any abnormalities.
Ava Starr’s genes.
Labeled as a Quantum Energy Field Mutation.
Her ability wasn’t a genetic mutation; quantum energy had performed a deep-seated reconstruction of her cells, binding itself to her.
When the Blacklight virus consumed her, it had dismantled that mechanism as well.
Ryan Quinn now possessed her combat skills—everything from infiltration to close-quarters combat, from stealth to silent takedowns—all hardwired into his muscle memory.
Phasing and cloaking were also his, though his energy pool was still too small; for now, they were only for utility.
He needed time to expand it.
Karl King’s genes.
The radioactive spider genes were tangled with his human ones.
The Blacklight virus was slowly unravelling and analyzing them, extracting the spider-physiology and the clones.
However, that guy had eaten over twenty people, and all their genes were mixed in.
It was a chaotic mess that had to be picked apart strand by strand.
Ryan Quinn opened one eye and looked at the ceiling.
“…No rush.
I’ve got time.” He pulled himself off the sofa, walked to the window, and drew the curtains.
Outside was the night scenery of Queens.
The moon was sinking toward the west, its light blanketing the rooftops, and the city had fallen silent.
It was after four in the morning; the horizon was beginning to pale.
Ryan Quinn yawned.
He sat on the edge of the bed, watching the sky slowly brighten.
His phone screen lit up—nothing important, just the time: 4:47 AM.
Ryan Quinn tossed the phone aside and fell back onto the bed.
The Blacklight virus didn’t actually need much sleep, but he was used to it.
The human part of him remained, and his brain needed to stop and rest.
Ava’s memory fragments were still swirling in the depths of his consciousness—the quantum tunnel explosion when she was ten, the Red Room picking her up to use as a weapon, her molecules tearing apart and recombining every day.
That lifelong pain kept grinding through his mind over and over.
Ryan Quinn closed his eyes and mumbled.
“…Maybe I’ll just skip class tomorrow.” Then he sank into a pocket of quiet darkness, where there were no dreams at all.