The attic was quiet, save for the faint clinking of Bruce’s teeth against the rim of the bowl as he munched on his dog food.
The puppy’s hind leg was still wrapped in Spider-Web.
Every few bites, he would look up at Leon, his tail rustling against the cardboard box.
Leon sat on the floor, leaning against a worn-out sofa, without turning on the lights.
A bit of orange light from the streetlamp filtered through the window, illuminating the pile of crumpled bills in front of him.
He smoothed out the bills one by one and arranged them by denomination, his movements slow, as if he were counting clothes he wasn’t ready to wear.
“This one is for titanium alloy patches.” He placed a twenty-dollar bill on the left.
“This one is for ballistic nylon fabric.” Another bill went to the left.
“This one is for a sewing machine. This one is for your dog food.” He pointed at Bruce, who was lying in the cardboard box.
Hearing the words “dog food,” the puppy’s ears twitched and his tail wagged faster.
“This one is for your anti-inflammatories. This one is for your gauze.” Two more bills; the stack on the left was getting higher.
“This one is for bedsheets. This one is for a duvet cover. This one is for the shirt on my back. This one is for frozen chicken breasts.”
He laid out the last few bills in order, then looked down at the right side.
Only a few lonely bills remained on the right, as thin as the last leaves clinging to a branch in the autumn wind.
“One thousand four hundred and eighty-two.” He gathered the stack on the right and weighed it in his hand.
A single meal for Bruce Wayne would cost more than this.
Bruce tilted his head and looked at him, letting out a very soft whimper, as if he understood—or perhaps because Leon was taking too long and dinner was being delayed.
“You’re being picky now?”
Leon looked down at him.
“Do you know that bag of puppy food cost me fifteen bucks? The compressed biscuits I eat are only ten bucks a box. You eat more expensive food than me, live in a warmer place than me, and when your leg breaks, someone applies medicine for you. I have a cracked rib and I had to apply the povidone-iodine myself. Who do you think looks more like a stray?”
Bruce rested his chin on the edge of the cardboard box.
Actually, why wouldn’t they both be considered strays?
Someone here was even still under the protection of the Minor Protection Law.
Leon rolled up the bills and stuffed them into a crack in the sofa.
The movement pulled at his ribs; he hissed and held onto the sofa for a few seconds to recover.
His mind was still replaying last night’s battle.
The sound of that tail whipping through the air was like an iron rod hitting a clothesline.
The dull pain that vibrated back when his fist hit the crocodile’s chest traveled from his knuckles all the way to his shoulder.
The tear in the shoulder of his suit—the titanium alloy patch was deformed, the nylon fabric was curled, and the loose threads from the burst stitches looked like exploding fireworks.
It had to be mended, which meant spending more money.
How did Batman, as a non-mutant normal human, go back and forth with this thing?
Peter Parker’s learning ability was breaking down every frame of the battle into data: Killer Croc’s wingspan, the micro-expressions of his shoulders before an attack, the habitual angle of his foot grinding into the ground before a tail sweep.
Data streams surged through his mind like a faucet that couldn’t be turned off.
Leon shook his head, trying to shake out the pile of data.
It was useless.
The learning ability wasn’t something he could control; once it was given, it wouldn’t stop.
This was the new system reward Leon had obtained—it belonged to Peter Parker’s brain, Intelligence attribute +10086.
Had he recorded this ability in his diary when he got it?
He had forgotten a bit.
Leon, who had never scored above the passing line in high school math, had not yet fully adapted to this kind of genius thinking.
Speaking of which, if he weren’t biased toward certain subjects, why would he have studied art?
Was it out of pure passion?
“Fine then,” Leon said to the air.
The system ignored him, and Bruce let out a couple of whimpers in response.
Peter Parker’s learning ability: hand-making Spider-Web shooters, creating his own chemical formulas—he could make Tony Stark question his life before even graduating high school.
I’m impressed.
I have to be.
He was an artist, yet now his head was filled with the skeletal structure and muscle patterns of crocodiles, even dismantling Killer Croc’s bite force data in his dreams.
The bruises on his ribs were turning from purple to yellow; the spider genes were repairing them, but repair didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
He gritted his teeth and stood straight, scooping Bruce out of the cardboard box and tucking him into his arms.
The puppy burrowed into his shirt, found a comfortable spot, and poked out the tip of his nose.
“Behave,” Leon said, pressing down on the puppy through the shirt.
“I’m taking you out to see the world. In Gotham, a dog that hasn’t been to the library doesn’t deserve to be called Bruce.”
“Ying!”
Leon changed into the white shirt he had found at a second-hand market.
It was washed out and the collar was frayed, but it was clean.
In Gotham, clean clothes were a ticket to the civilized world.
The way a librarian looked at a homeless person compared to a regular citizen was as if they were two different species.
It was probably like the difference between seeing a goblin and a human.
When a group’s appearance, behavior, and lifespan were completely different from yours, it was hard to recognize them as the same kind.
Leon looked at himself in a barely reflective shard of mirror; he was handsome, thin, with a small face, looking even younger than his actual age.
Although well-defined muscles were hidden under his clothes, Leon looked thin when dressed.
Wearing this shirt, he looked like a poor student receiving relief meals at a church school.
That was good; the less he looked like Spider-Man, the safer he was.
…
Diamond District.
Gotham Public Library.
Massive stone pillars supported the dome, and the air was filled with the dry scent of old paper and wood.
Leon stood at the entrance for a few seconds, looking up at the two heavy oak doors.
He used to think libraries were always free, but now he knew that in a place like Gotham, if Wayne Enterprises hadn’t invested money, this place would actually charge a fee.
Isn’t this public?
Leon pushed the door and entered.
The reading room was huge, with bookshelves reaching from the floor to the ceiling and rolling ladders hanging on tracks.
The space between the shelves was so narrow that only one person could pass through sideways.
Light fell from the high arched windows, cutting dusty pillars of light through the air.
He found the biology section, scanned the labels on the shelves, and pulled out a copy of Anatomy of Reptiles, which was thick enough to be used as a dumbbell.
He flipped to the title page, where a line of small text was printed: Funded by the Wayne Enterprises Special Fund.
Leon stared at that line for a moment.
Bruce moved in his arms, and he quickly pressed him down.
“Don’t bark, we haven’t gotten a library card yet. Strictly speaking, this is freeloading. Your dad is undocumented, and an undocumented person’s dog is also undocumented. Undocumented people can’t get cards.”
The puppy seemed to understand, or maybe he didn’t care at all, just burying the tip of his nose into Leon’s palm.
Leon sat down in a corner by the window and spread the book open.
From the structure of a crocodile’s masseter muscle to the thickness of the temporal bone, he flipped through page after page.
Peter Parker’s learning ability kicked in, and those complex vascular distributions, skeletal structures, and muscle patterns were no longer a pile of dry Latin terms.
They were like living architectural blueprints, automatically assembling into a 3D model in his mind.
Temporal region, both sides of the skull, where the temporal muscle attaches.
The bone is relatively weak; a solid punch could cause the opponent’s nervous system to crash instantly.
Foramen magnum, the passage for the spinal cord into the cranial cavity.
If he used Spider-Web to wrap around Killer Croc’s neck and used gravity to pull back instantly—no, his current Spider-Web strength wasn’t enough.
It could only bear his own weight plus some extra load; a forced pull would break it.
Change of plan.
Temporomandibular joint: extremely strong bite force, but weak lateral strength.
Wrap the upper jaw with Spider-Web, don’t pull hard, pull to the side—the pain of a dislocated joint would make any creature lose its will to attack.
Leon pulled another book from the shelf, Metabolic Research of Mutant Organisms, and flipped to the chapter on scale structures.
Killer Croc’s back armor was too thick, making a frontal attack too inefficient, but the belly was relatively soft.
Force it to stand upright, then attack the lower body. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Or make it fall and attack the joints.
The librarian was an old lady wearing reading glasses; she scrutinized the youth sitting in the corner from over her lenses.
He had been reading for four consecutive hours, not drinking water, not making a sound, and flipping pages as fast as if he were shuffling cards.
In the middle, he only pulled a compressed biscuit from his pocket, took a cup of free tap water from the cooler, and quietly finished eating.
The old lady shook her head and looked away.
In Gotham, there were many poor kids who wanted to change their fate through self-study, but most of them eventually realized the knowledge they had learned was useless and gave up halfway.
And these children, in all probability, would not live past forty, just like their parents.
At least this one looked clean, not like those junkies on the street.
She hesitated for a moment and ultimately did not go over to disturb him.
When Leon closed the last book, it was almost dark outside.
He stood up and put the books back one by one, his movements as swift as a spider spinning silk.
Learn from this, citizens of Gotham; this is called morals and manners.
Bruce, in his arms, finally couldn’t help but let out a yip, very soft, like a cat’s hiccup.
He quickly covered the puppy’s mouth and walked quickly out of the library doors.
Back at the attic.
By the orange light of the streetlamp filtering through the window, Leon knelt on the floor and drew a sketch of The Docks with chalk.
Container yards, cranes, abandoned warehouses—every exit was marked with an arrow.
He treated himself as a blue dot and Killer Croc as a red square.
“Set a tension point here.”
He drew an arc on the floor and slid his finger along the side.
“Use the crane’s counterweight to change the tilting angle of the containers. His tail is too long; it will actually get stuck in narrow passages. If I can lure him into the gap between containers and his tail gets stuck, I’ve won half the battle.”
He threw the chalk onto the floor.
It wasn’t a battle; it was physics.
Spider-Man’s brain was turning The Docks into a mechanics problem.
Leon slumped on the sofa, pulled the sewing machine over, and began mending the tear in the shoulder of his suit.
The stitches were crooked, like a centipede crawling across.
He looked up and saw a black figure gliding past the top of the clock tower in the distance.
A cape unfurled in the night wind, like a silent giant bat, disappearing toward The Docks.
“Oh right, this city still has a legitimate vigilante.”
Leon lowered his head and changed the direction of the sewing machine’s bobbin.
“How about leaving this big lizard for Batman to handle? He has an armored car, a grapple gun, and a bunch of high-tech gear I can’t afford. Why should a broke guy like me, who sews his own suit, get involved? Let whoever’s villain it is fight them. I’ll show up when there’s an actual Lizard Man…”
The system’s notification sound popped up in his mind.
“I’m joking!” Leon said to the air.
“System, how can you have no sense of humor at all?”
He looked down at the mended suit in his hand.
The crooked stitches on the shoulder sat there, one side high and the other low, forming a sharp contrast with the intact shoulder on the other side.
“…”
Actually, the stitches on the other side weren’t that clean either.
“If I don’t punch that big crocodile myself, I’ll be letting down my three hundred and sixty dollars, letting down the six hours I spent in the library flipping through three crappy books, and even more, letting down these stitches that look like a centipede.”
He gently moved Bruce into the cardboard box with the thickened padding.
The puppy yawned, rolled over, and continued to sleep, his tail twitching in his dream and hitting the wall of the box with a soft thwack.
“Watch the house.”
Leon put on his suit.
Before putting on the mask, he looked down at the box again.
The Spider-Web on the broken leg was starting to loosen; Spider-Web degrades, so it had to be replaced.
He crouched down and wrapped a new layer of web, his finger movements much more skillful than last time.
After wrapping it, he gently flicked the tip of the puppy’s ear.
“I’ll change it again when I get back, don’t move around.”
Leon put on the mask, pushed open the iron grate of the ventilation duct, and leaped into the Gotham night.