Ethan prepared to capitalize on the Lizard's devastating injury. The severed arm had left the mutated scientist staggering and bellowing in pain this was the perfect moment to strike and put an end to the creature's rampage once and for all.
But just as Ethan leapt forward, he froze in his tracks. His eyes widened in disbelief at what he was witnessing.
The Lizard's shoulder where his left arm had been violently torn away was already beginning to regenerate. Not slowly, not subtly, but rapidly. In mere seconds, a bulbous mass of tissue had formed over the stump, pulsing and stretching like accelerated embryonic growth.
"What the hell?" Ethan muttered, a storm of disbelief crashing through his mind. "I just ripped that arm off!"
Though Marvel's Curt Connors, the original Lizard, had always possessed regenerative abilities due to his self-injected reptilian DNA, this level of accelerated healing was beyond anything Ethan had read or seen. Even real lizards while capable of regrowing tails or limbs took weeks or months, not seconds.
"This… this isn't just cross-species regeneration," Venom's voice hissed in Ethan's mind. "This is unnatural. He's rewriting his body in real time."
Ethan refocused just as the Lizard glanced up his eyes flickering with a brief flash of fear and hesitation. His left arm remained mid-regeneration, but now the right arm the one untouched began to rapidly swell and shift in form. Within moments, new tendons, skin, and claws formed at an accelerated pace.
The arm wasn't fully mature yet it was visibly smaller, sinewy and malformed but functional. The creature flexed his half-regrown right hand and reached awkwardly into the inner lining of his coat.
"What's he ?" Ethan's eyes narrowed.
From the coat's pocket, the Lizard retrieved a small, reinforced glass vial. Inside swirled a translucent dark green serum, glowing faintly under the low-hanging bulbs of the underground lab chamber. The liquid shimmered like toxic emerald fire.
Crash!
Without hesitation, the Lizard hurled the vial at the ground between himself and Ethan. It shattered on impact, and the serum inside hissed as it mixed with the air, instantly vaporizing into a thick, swirling cloud of green mist.
Ethan skidded to a halt just in time, instinctively activating his mask filters. He didn't want to take any chances especially not with a compound engineered by a man like Curt Connors.
Holding his breath, he surged forward, diving through the expanding fog bank. Even with Venom shielding his lungs, his eyes stung slightly. But by the time he reached the other side
The Lizard was gone.
"Damn it!" Ethan growled, scanning the chamber. There were no footprints, no scent trail, not even a heat signature. The creature had vanished deep into the subterranean maze probably through one of the countless hidden tunnels he likely knew better than anyone.
Venom's voice broke the silence, sounding almost… intrigued. "This Lizard… is he truly beast or man? I felt rage and instinct in him but also strategy. Intelligence."
"I felt it too," Ethan said grimly. "That wasn't just some wild animal lashing out. That was a person a person making choices. And from the look of it, he didn't want to die."
Ethan turned to glance back toward the remnants of the destroyed lab chamber. The green mist had mostly dissipated, revealing overturned machines, shattered monitors, and broken test tubes scattered across the stone floor.
He retrieved the Lizard's severed arm, now bound in layers of reinforced webbing, and examined it more closely. Scales, skin tissue, partially formed muscle it was an unnatural hybrid of man and beast.
"He used to be human," Ethan said, holding the limb in his hands. "You could tell from the way he moved, the coat he wore. The fear in his eyes before he ran. He wasn't always like this."
Venom pulsed along his forearms. "Which means someone made him like this. Or… he made himself."
Ethan's gaze turned back toward the smashed lab. "Let's see what he left behind."
They returned to the site, stepping cautiously through rubble and sludge. The room had been battered by thrown debris and their earlier fight, but some of the equipment old lab tech, insulated storage units, half-melted shelves was still intact.
Amidst the mess, Ethan found a cracked terminal and a stack of old lab notebooks stuffed in a drawer beneath it. Most were water-damaged, but several pages remained legible.
He flipped through quickly. Handwritten logs. DNA charts. Experiment diagrams. One of the notes caught his attention:
"Gene Splicing: Trial No. 153 (Mouse) Failed. Trial No. 154 Marginal Response."
Another page was labeled:
"Human Cross-Species Genetic Grafting: Phase 2."
Further down, he found a more complete entry:
"Objective: Utilize reptilian DNA (Iguana, Gecko, Monitor) to regenerate human limb loss. Primary subject: Self."
Ethan stared at the text in silence. "So it's true… This guy didn't just experiment on animals. He tested on himself. Classic Connors playbook but taken further."
Venom hissed thoughtfully. "Then that lab, the equipment… it all belonged to him. That monster was the scientist."
The realization settled over them like the dust on the broken monitors. This wasn't just a mutation.
It was a transformation.
A man driven by obsession. By grief. Or by something darker.
"He wasn't just a lizard man," Ethan said slowly. "He was the lizard man."
Although the final conclusions of the joint research between reptilian DNA and human subjects weren't directly written in the scattered lab notes, Ethan already understood that the experiments had ultimately failed if they hadn't, the monstrous creature he just fought wouldn't exist in that form.
Looking over the mangled equipment and data, Venom muttered with a rare tone of disgust, "Humans really are terrifying. They'll keep pushing until they create monsters… and call it progress."
"No argument here," Ethan replied, shaking his head as he set aside another broken monitor.
Just then, his instincts flared. Without hesitation, he fired a strand of spider silk toward a shadow near the far end of the corridor.
Thwip!
A figure suddenly rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding the web line.
"Whoa! Easy, it's me Spider-Man," said Peter Parker as he emerged from the shadows, hands up in surrender.
He had quietly followed the flickering lights from deeper in the tunnel network, curious about the activity in this part of the underground. He hadn't expected to be caught so fast.
"Peter?" Ethan lowered his hands. "What are you doing down here?"
Peter held up a folded photograph as he approached. "You've heard the rumors, right? A giant lizard sighting in the city. I've been tracking it."
He handed Ethan the photo. "I found this just a few blocks away on my way here. It's a footprint massive. Looks like our mystery lizard isn't just a myth."
Ethan examined the image. Sure enough, the footprint embedded in the cement floor was massive nearly twice the size of a human foot, with deep claw impressions and a widened heel pad.
"I studied the print a bit before heading down here," Peter continued. "The heel's deeper than the toes, meaning whatever made it is seriously heavy or moves bipedally. Definitely not your average croc."
Ethan nodded. "You're right on the money. There's definitely a lizard creature down here and yeah, it walks upright. That footprint's his."
Peter raised a brow. "Wait. So you've already seen it?"
"We fought," Ethan said. "Did some real damage too tore his arm clean off. But he regenerated. Then vanished."
Peter froze, clearly caught off guard. He had only just begun to verify the creature's existence, and Venom had already battled it.
"I would've caught him myself," Peter said, sighing, "but I lost time studying that footprint. Guess I was one step too slow."
His eyes wandered to the broken machines and cracked monitors strewn across the lab. "This place… It looks like a makeshift genetics lab. Is it what I think it is?"
Ethan handed him one of the damp but intact reports. "It's the Lizard's lab. His personal research base. He was performing experimental grafts splicing lizard genes with other organisms. Possibly himself."
Peter scanned the pages, his eyes widening. "No way… These aren't just random notes. This format this is Connors' methodology."
"What?" Ethan blinked.
"I helped Dr. Curt Connors back when he was still at Midtown University," Peter said, flipping through the documents. "He was trying to use reptile DNA to regrow lost limbs. This… this looks exactly like his old data formats. But why would it be here?"
He stared down at the data, his thoughts racing. "Did someone steal his research? Or… is it possible that this Lizard guy is Connors?"
Peter had heard rumors before. He remembered how Connors lost his arm in a lab accident and how he'd once confessed his desperation to restore it.
"I need to talk to him," Peter muttered, half to himself. "I need to know if he's okay. And if he's behind this."
While Peter spiraled into thought, Ethan remained quiet, continuing his survey of the room. Scattered vials, chemical residues, even the DNA strands scribbled on the whiteboards they all seemed to tie back to advanced knowledge of genetics and reptilian biology.
Venom stirred again in his mind. "This feels calculated. Not a mutation by accident. A transformation… by design."
Ethan nodded slowly. "If this really was Connors, he didn't just mutate. He chose this. He used himself as the subject."
The pieces were beginning to come together.
And none of them pointed toward a simple accident.
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