The next week turned into the busiest stretch of Peter’s life so far.
Days belonged to research at oscorp and school final exams, last assignments, the slow countdown to graduation.
Nights belonged to something else entirely.
He’d sit at his laptop for hours after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep, quietly working his way into NYPD case databases, searching for anything related to Walter Hardy.
He didn’t feel much guilt about it.
He wasn’t stealing anything, wasn’t hurting anyone just looking for a man nobody else seemed able to find.
The official investigation, as far as he could tell, had gone nowhere.
No leads, no suspects, no theories beyond a missing persons report gathering dust in an overworked precinct’s queue.
He spent several sleepless nights chasing dead ends before an old side project finally paid off.
He’d been quietly building a facial recognition tool for weeks something to help him identify criminals on sight during patrols, cross-reference outstanding warrants, avoid accidentally roughing up someone who’d already served their time or been wrongly accused.
After Felicia’s father went missing, he’d modified it further, routing it carefully, quietly through Oscorp’s satellite network and every publicly accessible camera node he could find across the city, letting it triangulate a person’s location from almost any partial sighting.
After a week of refining it, it was finally ready to actually use.
He ran a search using the photo Felicia had given him, and after several tense minutes of processing, got his first real hit.
Walter Hardy had last been picked up on camera somewhere near Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Peter frowned at the sparse handful of results.
The cameras had barely caught him at all ,a few partial frames here and there, nothing continuous, like the man had been deliberately avoiding every lens he passed.
That’s oddly skilled for a guy who just went missing on his own, Peter thought.
Who’s good at avoiding cameras like that?
He suited up and swung out from his bedroom window a little after midnight.
Tomorrow was graduation.
He wanted, more than almost anything else right now, to see Felicia actually smile through it.
“Don’t worry,” he murmured to himself, picking up speed over the rooftops.
“I’ll bring him back.” He reached the area his search had flagged and spotted a cluster of vans and cars moving with purpose through the otherwise quiet streets.
He followed at a distance, sticking to rooftops, until they led him to a large mansion at the edge of the district the whole property lit up and clearly packed with people, despite the hour.
He pulled out his phone, quietly routing around the property’s security feed, and got a clean look inside.
Some kind of gathering was underway extravagant dress, catering staff moving through the crowd, more than a few faces he recognized from news segments about city politics and old money.
A party.
At midnight.
That’s…
a choice.
But if he wanted any lead on Walter Hardy, this was clearly the place to start.
He looked down at himself and grimaced.
I don’t exactly have an invitation.
Or a suit.
An idea occurred to him almost immediately.
He focused inward, willing the black material to shift, reshaping itself the same deliberate way he’d learned to call up the spider symbol days earlier.
He felt it move across him in a slow wave, and when he opened his eyes again, he was standing in a sharply tailored three-piece suit, his mask folded away somewhere beneath the fabric entirely.
He looked down at himself, genuinely startled.
Well.
That’s new.
I like it.
No time to marvel.
Focus.
He swung down into a nearby alley, slipped through a dark window with no heat signature on the other side, and stepped out into a quiet hallway before seamlessly joining the crowd drifting through the mansion’s main floor.
Everyone around him was dressed like they belonged on a magazine cover.
Peter tuned his hearing carefully, sifting through dozens of overlapping conversations at once , deals being struck in low voices, thinly veiled threats disguised as pleasantries, more than a few names he made a private note to look into later.
He kept moving, searching for anything that might connect to Walter Hardy, coming up with nothing so far.
He turned a corner and nearly walked straight into someone.
“Oh…
sorry,” Peter said quickly, catching himself.
The woman he’d bumped into was tall and striking, platinum-blonde hair catching the light, pale blue eyes studying him with open curiosity.
A flicker of genuine surprise passed behind them.
“No harm done, sugar,” she said, a faint, knowing smile curling at her mouth.
“If I have to bump into someone tonight, I don’t mind it being you.” Peter felt a strange, sudden pull settle over him — an odd, almost magnetic urge to simply stay exactly where he was, close to her.
He shook his head slightly, unsettled by his own reaction, and managed something polite and forgettable in response.
She slipped a small card into his hand before he’d fully recovered, and was gone again just as quickly as she’d appeared.
Peter stood there a moment, faintly shell-shocked, and turned the card over.
A name, and nothing else.
Emma Frost.
He had no idea why, but some instinct told him this wasn’t going to be the last time he heard that name.
He tucked the card away and kept moving.
He was halfway across the room, still listening, when a fragment of conversation cut cleanly through the noise.
“Have you dealt with him yet?” Peter’s attention snapped toward the voice — a man speaking quietly to someone with unusual, almost unnaturally orange-tinted hair, half turned away from the light.
“What do you want me to do?” the second man replied.
“He’s contained.
We’re still working on figuring out who sent him.” “And what have you learned?” “Nothing much.
Except he’s stubborn.
Some kind of code-of-honor thing, apparently.
Been nothing but trouble the whole week.” Peter went very still.
A week.
That lines up exactly with when Walter disappeared.
The first man made a short, dismissive gesture.
“Finish him.” Peter followed at a careful distance as the second man peeled away toward another wing of the mansion, sticking to shadow, until he spotted a guarded door ahead.
He slipped out through a nearby window before anyone could clock him, and continued tailing the man from outside instead, clinging to the mansion’s exterior wall.
The man entered a room; Peter watched through the window as he moved a book on a shelf, revealing a hidden door behind it, and punched in a four-digit code.
Peter caught the sequence easily even from this distance, his eyes tracking the man’s fingers without effort.
Once the man had descended, Peter dropped down, webbed the corridor’s camera into uselessness, and let himself in through the same hidden door, entering the code from memory.
He found another camera inside and dealt with it the same way before spotting the elevator the man had taken.
He popped the hatch on top of the car, climbed the shaft instead of waiting, and pressed himself flat against the wall of the elevator corridor as the empty car rose past him a moment later.
Down below, a guard glanced into the empty elevator, found nothing, and visibly relaxed.
Good.
Nobody’s looking up.
Peter dropped down through an open duct further along the shaft and followed the heat signature of the man he’d been tailing, until he reached a room at the very end of a narrow corridor.
Through a gap in the door, he saw a man tied to a chair, badly beaten, slumped forward.
Two men stood over him, one gesturing sharply, mouths moving in words Peter couldn’t quite make out from this angle.
He crept closer, as fast as he dared, and finally caught the words clearly.
“If you’re not going to talk, you’re no use to us.” The gesture that followed left no room for interpretation.
Peter’s stomach dropped as he got a clear look at the bound man’s face beneath the bruising.
Walter Hardy.
He didn’t wait another second.
He burst through the door, webbing the nearest man to the wall before either of them could react.
The second man’s head snapped toward him, and Peter felt something shift in the room .
A strange sudden heaviness pressing down on his own limbs, gravity itself seeming to double against him, every movement suddenly sluggish and labored.
Peter gritted his teeth against it.
“Cute trick.” He forced his hands together anyway, fighting through the pressure, and fired a line that caught the man square in the chest, yanking him hard into the nearest wall and pinning him there.
He turned immediately to Walter, checking for a pulse which was thankfully steady, though the man was clearly unconscious from the beating.
Something hot and furious surged through Peter at the sight of it, and he moved without fully deciding to, closing the distance to the first man in a blur and driving a single, controlled punch into his jaw that put him down instantly.
Rescue first.
I’ll come back for the rest of this later.
He gathered Walter carefully and burst back out through the door — only for several more figures to emerge from the shadows around him, weapons already raised.
One shot something that struck the wall beside him and turned it instantly to solid stone.
Another fired what looked like a crackling arc of electricity.
Peter dodged both, moving on instinct, and closed the gap on the first attacker, yanking him forward and driving him bodily into the second with enough force to put them both down in a tangle.
The last one got a burst of electricity off before Peter reached him , Peter simply webbed both his hands together and stuck him flat against the wall before he could try again.
He carried Walter to the elevator shaft, tore the top hatch open, and fired a line up through the gap, hauling them both up to ground level before bursting out through a window and swinging clear of the property entirely.
He got Walter to the nearest hospital, made sure he was admitted, and stepped outside to make a call — Felicia’s number, still saved from the card she’d given him a week earlier as Spider-Man.
His own number was untraceable on her end, so there was no risk in it.
Half an hour later, he heard footsteps, and looked up to see Felicia hurrying in, an older woman beside her who could only be her mother — the resemblance was unmistakable.
“He’s stable,” Peter told them both.
“Took a bad beating, but he’s going to be okay.” Felicia’s mother sharp-eyed, composed even through visible relief and thanked him warmly, and pressed a card of her own into his hand.
“I’m an attorney,” she said.
“If you ever need legal help, for anything at all, you call me.
No questions asked.” Peter thanked her, and slipped away not long after, leaving them to Walter’s side.
He found a quiet spot outside, let the suit recede beneath his skin, and changed back into his regular clothes before making his way properly into the hospital through the front entrance.
He found the right floor and knocked gently before stepping inside.
“Felicia.” She turned, and the moment she saw him, she crossed the room in a rush and threw herself into his arms.