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"Three days?" Dr. Curt Connors whispered to himself, eyes hard. "No, Norman you have three days."
He'd made his choice. Between Oscorp's deadlines and his own missing arm, the calculus wasn't close. Survival is personal.
After the gecko's tail-drop revelation, Connors buried himself in journals on saurian autotomy and tissue regeneration.
Many lizards could shed a tail, some even consumed it for nutrients, and most importantly the stump could regrow in two to three months.
The insight clicked: splice reptile regenerative pathways into a human-compatible vector, stabilize the inflammatory response, match it to his own genome, and finally inject.
What Connors didn't know was that Norman Osborn's patience had already run out.
---
Oscorp, Sub-Basement Lab
"I knew he'd choke," Norman said evenly, though the anger behind his eyes burned like a fuse.
"What are your orders?" his lieutenant asked.
"We no longer require Dr. Connors," Norman said, gaze resting on a humming culture tank. "And I don't want this program walking out with him."
"Understood." The man left with the kind of efficiency that never bodes well.
Norman laid a palm against the glass. "When the trial ends, we all leave." A promise, or a threat it was hard to tell.
---
That Night — Connors' Private Lab
"It worked!" Connors trembled, staring at the readouts. In a mouse model, the revised serum had finally shown viable regeneration markers.
Not victory yet. But finally, the line on the graph had bent up.
"This version used murine DNA scaffolding," he said, moving quickly. "Time to swap for my personal sequence."
One-handed, he pipetted, logged, labeled then wrote his final formula into a notebook with guarded care.
Upstairs, his house's front door opened. Five men slipped inside.
"Kill the target, Clean exit," said their leader, The team fanned out.
---
Connors paused as a sprinkle of dust drifted from the basement ceiling. He narrowed his eyes, powered up a monitor bank, and activated his hidden cameras.
He'd never trusted Norman mutual use wasn't the same as trust. He'd wired four corners of the house.
There they were, Oscar-grade subtlety. The hit squad swept the first floor with silencers drawn.
"Not now," Connors muttered, glancing between the finished vial calibrated to his genome and the microscope where one drop of serum mingled with a drop of his blood.
If the fusion held, he could inject within minutes, If not… there'd be no time for a second try.
He grabbed a case, slid in the vial and a loaded autoinjector, and reached for his notebook—
BOOM.
The basement door kicked inward. Boots pounded the stairs.
Connors clutched the case, shot one last look through the microscope, and froze. Perfect coalescence, no agglutination, Full compatibility.
"Thank God," he breathed and bolted through the back hatch.
The hit team stormed in, shredding the lab with suppressive fire. Glass screamed, Tanks blew, Green-lit cages went dark.
"Back door!" the leader snarled, flipping a bench with a kick.
Connors cleared a narrow service tunnel and tumbled into his ground-floor bathroom, then shouldered the window open and spilled into the alley.
He didn't get far.
"Going somewhere, Doctor?" Two men blocked the sidewalk ahead. Two more stepped out behind him, guns low and steady.
They'd boxed him in.
"Evening!" a bright voice chimed from above.
A lanky figure crouched on the streetlight crossbar, wearing a red hoodie and a cheap toy Iron Man mask. It looked ridiculous right until he flipped down and the movement rang as something else entirely.
"Unless you're here to escort the nice scientist to a safety seminar, I'm gonna have to be a pain," the kid said.
"Not your business," the lead man snapped. "Walk away."
"Can't," the kid said. "Bad for my brand." He flicked his wrist. "Name's Spider-Man."
"Kill him."
Gunfire erupted.
The world slowed. The kid's body rolled with pure instinct, Spider-Sense screaming a beat before each shot, Bullets cut air where he'd been, not where he was.
"You guys shoot like toddlers at the arcade," he said cheerfully, webbing their pistols out of their hands with thwip-thwip-thwip. He landed, slid, pivoted two chops, a sweep, a vault four men down.
He strung them like ornaments off the streetlight, then turned to Connors. "You good, Doc?"
Connors stared. "You're… Spider-Man."
"Guilty," he said, producing a folded slip. "Autograph? 'Your friendly neighborhood Spider—'"
Crash!
Five more thugs poured out of the house.
"Ah. Fellas, thank you for respecting my no-slow-evenings policy." Spider-Man tucked the autograph away and dove back in.
Connor didn't wait. He ran. If the serum matched, and it did, then the only way he lived through tonight was by injecting it. He would fix himself, He would finish the work.
When Spider-Man finally webbed the last man and realized his rescued scientist had vanished, he sighed. "I was this close to a selfie and a police report."
He ferried the nine trussed-up mercs, batch by batch, to the nearest precinct door, leaving a neat, confusing gift for the night desk.
"Bedtime," he said, dusting his hands. "Big day tomorrow. Probably algebra."
---
Elsewhere — A Storage Nook Two Blocks Over
Breathing hard, Connors burrowed into a pile of flattened boxes. He clutched the case to his chest, heart banging against the latch.
"Please let the kid be as good as the headlines," he whispered. He cracked the case and touched the autoinjector.
The microscope fusion had been perfect. The serum and his blood had integrated cleanly.
No more delays.
"I'll lay low at a friend's," he panted, planning aloud. "Inject. Stabilize. Then call—"
He didn't finish the thought. He didn't see the microscope slide two floors below, where the once-placid droplet had begun to boil at the edges, devouring the blood fraction like an apex predator learning its name.
Connors snapped the case shut and crawled deeper into the shadows.
He couldn't know Peter couldn't know that tonight's heroics had just cleared the path for tomorrow's monster.
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