The last thing Marcus Chen remembered before dying was the absolute stupidity of it all.
Not the truck that came barreling through the red light at forty-seven miles per hour while he was crossing the street with his nose buried in his phone, reading yet another heated Reddit argument about why the MCU's interpretation of Spider-Man was a fundamental betrayal of everything the character stood for. Not the screaming of pedestrians or the desperate screech of brakes that came approximately three seconds too late to matter. Not even the peculiar sensation of his body becoming briefly airborne before gravity remembered its job and introduced him violently to the unforgiving concrete of West 42nd Street.
No, the last thing Marcus Chen remembered was the singular, crystalline thought that pierced through the shock and the pain and the rapidly dimming awareness of his own mortality:
I was in the middle of typing a really good point about how Peter Parker would never need a billionaire mentor to validate his heroism.
And then darkness.
Complete, absolute, all-encompassing darkness that stretched on for what felt like an eternity and no time at all simultaneously, a paradox of existence that Marcus's rapidly failing consciousness couldn't quite parse before it stopped trying altogether.
Marcus Chen, aged twenty-eight, comic book enthusiast, part-time employee of Midtown Comics, full-time defender of Spider-Man's legacy on the internet, died on a Tuesday afternoon in late September, and the universe, in its infinite wisdom and occasional cruelty, decided that this particular death was not going to be the end of his story.
It was going to be the beginning of someone else's.
Consciousness returned like a tsunami, sudden and overwhelming and absolutely unwelcome.
Marcus gasped, bolting upright with the kind of full-body jerk that suggested his nervous system had just received a factory reset, and immediately regretted every single decision that had led to this moment because his head was pounding with the intensity of a thousand migraines condensed into a single point of agony directly behind his eyes.
"What the f—" he started, and then stopped, because his voice was wrong.
Not wrong in the "I've been unconscious for a while and my throat is dry" kind of way. Wrong in the "this is fundamentally not the voice I've been speaking with for twenty-eight years" kind of way. Higher. Younger. With an accent that was distinctly more Queens than his native Chicago.
Marcus blinked.
He looked down at his hands.
They were not his hands.
His hands—his real hands, the ones attached to the body of Marcus Chen—had been the hands of a man who spent too much time at a keyboard and not enough time doing literally anything physical. Soft. Pale from lack of sun exposure. With a small scar on the left index finger from that time he'd cut himself opening a particularly stubborn action figure package when he was nineteen.
These hands were different. Younger. The hands of a teenager, still carrying the last vestiges of adolescent growth, but with a wiry strength that Marcus could feel thrumming beneath the skin like a current of electricity waiting to be unleashed. And there was something else, something he couldn't quite identify, a sensation of potential coiled in every muscle fiber, every tendon, every cell of this body that was definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent not his own.
"Okay," Marcus said, in a voice that was not his voice, speaking to a room that was not his room, in a body that was not his body. "Okay. This is fine. This is completely fine. I'm fine. Everything is fine."
Everything was not fine.
He scrambled out of bed—a small bed, a teenager's bed, in a small room that screamed "lower-middle-class Queens apartment" with every inch of its modest square footage—and promptly tripped over a pile of textbooks that had been stacked haphazardly near the door, sending himself careening into a dresser with a crash that probably woke up everyone in a three-block radius.
"Peter?" A woman's voice, muffled by the door, thick with concern and the particular exhaustion of someone who hadn't slept properly in days. "Peter, honey, are you okay?"
Peter.
The name hit Marcus like a second truck, and for a moment, he couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything except stand there, pressed against the dresser of a dead teenager's room, staring at the door with an expression of dawning horror that he could feel stretching across features that were not his own.
Peter.
He turned, slowly, mechanically, like a robot running on corrupted programming, and looked at the mirror hanging on the back of the closet door.
Peter Parker looked back at him.
Not the Tom Holland Peter Parker, with his puppy-dog eyes and his desperate need for adult approval and his complete inability to exist as a character without being defined by his relationship to Tony goddamn Stark. Not the Andrew Garfield Peter Parker, all brooding intensity and skateboarding and parental conspiracy theories. Not even the Tobey Maguire Peter Parker, though that one was closer, that one had the right energy at least.
No, this was something else. Something more. A Peter Parker that looked like he'd been drawn by the collaborative efforts of every great Spider-Man artist who had ever put pencil to paper, rendered in flesh and blood and standing in a cramped Queens bedroom with an expression of absolute existential crisis plastered across his admittedly handsome features.
Young. Maybe sixteen, seventeen at the most. Brown hair that couldn't decide if it wanted to be neat or messy and had apparently settled on "artistic dishevelment" as a compromise. Brown eyes that held a depth of intelligence and—Marcus realized with a sinking feeling—a weight of recent grief that hadn't been there before the universe decided to play cosmic musical chairs with his soul. A face that was caught in that awkward transition between boyhood and manhood, still soft in some places, but with a jawline that promised to be absolutely devastating in a few years.
And beneath the skin, threaded through every molecule of this new body like webbing woven into the very fabric of his being, Marcus could feel them.
The powers.
They hummed. They sang. They whispered promises of impossible things—of walls that could be climbed like floors, of danger that could be sensed before it arrived, of strength that could lift cars and bend steel and catch falling civilians with casual ease. Every nerve ending was alight with sensation, processing information at a rate that made his old human brain feel like a dial-up connection compared to this biological supercomputer he now inhabited.
He could hear the woman—Aunt May, his mind supplied, because of course it was Aunt May, of course it was—shuffling around in the hallway outside his door, her footsteps heavy with worry, her heartbeat elevated by the concern of a guardian who had just lost her husband and was terrified of losing her nephew too.
He could smell the coffee she'd been making downstairs, could identify the specific brand by the particular aroma compounds reaching his enhanced olfactory system. Folgers. Classic Roast. Probably purchased in bulk because money was tight, because money was always tight for the Parkers, because Ben Parker was dead and his pension wasn't going to stretch as far as it should.
Ben Parker was dead.
Marcus closed his eyes and took a deep breath, forcing himself to process the situation with something approaching rationality despite every instinct screaming at him to panic.
He was Peter Parker. He was Spider-Man. Or he would be Spider-Man, if the timeline he'd landed in followed anything close to the established canon. A couple of days after Uncle Ben's death, which meant the spider bite had already happened, which meant the powers were already his, which meant that somewhere out there, the wrestling promoter was counting his money and the burglar who killed Ben was either still running free or already caught depending on which version of events he was living through.
And Aunt May was standing outside his door, waiting for a response from a nephew who no longer existed except as a passenger in Marcus's head, a ghost of memories and emotions that pressed against his consciousness like fingerprints on glass.
"Peter?" Aunt May asked again, and the love in her voice, the worry, was enough to make Marcus's new heart clench painfully in his chest.
He cleared his throat. Tried to find Peter's voice, the cadence and rhythm of speech patterns that belonged to a teenager from Queens, not a twenty-eight-year-old comic nerd from Chicago.
"I'm fine, Aunt May," he called back, and the words came out surprisingly naturally, like his mouth remembered how to form them even if his brain was still playing catch-up. "Just... had a nightmare. I'm okay. Really."
A pause. The sound of Aunt May's hand resting against the door, probably debating whether to come in anyway, to check on him with her own eyes because words weren't enough reassurance for a woman who had just watched her husband die.
"Okay, sweetheart," she said finally, and the effort it took her to respect his privacy was audible in every syllable. "I'm making breakfast. Come down when you're ready. And Peter?"
"Yeah?"
"I love you. You know that, right? No matter what happens, no matter how hard things get, I love you. Ben loved you. That's never going to change."
Marcus had to press his hand against his mouth to stop the sound that wanted to escape, something between a sob and a laugh, because this woman didn't know. She didn't know that the nephew she loved, the Peter Parker she had raised from childhood, was gone, replaced by a stranger from another universe who had strong opinions about Marvel's editorial decisions and no idea how to be a superhero despite having spent his entire life reading about them.
"I love you too, Aunt May," he managed, and the words were true, even if the love was borrowed, inherited from the boy whose body he now wore like the world's most complicated costume.
He heard her footsteps retreat down the hallway, down the stairs, back to the kitchen where she would make breakfast and pretend that everything was normal, that their world hadn't just ended three days ago in a dark parking lot with the crack of a gunshot and the thud of a body hitting pavement.
Marcus waited until he could no longer hear her heartbeat—and wasn't that a trip, being able to hear heartbeats, being able to track the biological rhythms of another human being from two floors away—before he let himself sink to the floor, back pressed against the dresser, hands trembling with the effort of processing everything that had happened in the last five minutes.
He was Peter Parker.
He was Spider-Man.
Uncle Ben was dead, and the weight of that death, the responsibility of it, pressed down on Marcus's shoulders like a physical force, like the entire universe was reminding him of the words that defined this character, this legacy, this tremendous burden that had just been placed upon him without his consent.
With great power comes great responsibility.
"Okay," Marcus whispered to himself, to the empty room, to the ghost of Peter Parker who might or might not still be watching from somewhere in the depths of his own subconscious. "Okay. I can do this. I have to do this. Because someone has to, and apparently that someone is me now, and I'll be damned if I'm going to waste this opportunity by being anything less than the best Spider-Man I can possibly be."
He pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the slight tremor in his legs, and began to take stock of his situation with the methodical precision of a man who had spent his entire adult life cataloging fictional scenarios and was now, against all odds, living inside one.
First things first: he needed to figure out exactly where he was in the timeline. The bedroom around him provided some clues—the textbooks were high school level, suggesting he was still a student, probably at Midtown High if the universe had any respect for tradition. The technology visible in the room was modern but not cutting-edge, smartphones existed but didn't seem to dominate every surface, which placed him somewhere in the contemporary era rather than the distant past of the original Stan Lee and Steve Ditko comics.
Second: he needed to assess his powers. He knew, intellectually, what Spider-Man could do. He'd read hundreds of comics, watched countless episodes of animated series, sat through every movie regardless of quality because he was a completionist, damn it, and Spider-Man deserved his loyalty even when the people writing him didn't understand the character. But knowing what the powers could do and actually having them were two very different things, and Marcus was acutely aware that overconfidence had killed more fictional characters than actual villains ever had.
Third: he needed to figure out what had happened to Peter Parker's consciousness. Was he gone entirely, absorbed into the void that had claimed Marcus before dumping him in this body? Was he still in here somewhere, a passenger in his own mind, watching helplessly as a stranger piloted his flesh? Or had they merged somehow, combined into a gestalt entity that was neither fully Marcus nor fully Peter but something new, something unprecedented?
The memories were... confusing. He could feel them, Peter's memories, pressing against the edges of his awareness like a crowd of people trying to get through a door that was too small to admit them all at once. Fragments of sensation—the spider bite, a burning pain in his hand, the terrifying ecstasy of awakening to find his body transformed overnight. Glimpses of faces—Aunt May, younger and happier, baking cookies in the kitchen while Uncle Ben told terrible jokes that made everyone groan even as they laughed. Emotions—love, grief, guilt, so much guilt, crushing and absolute and inescapable.
But the narrative thread, the continuous stream of consciousness that would have been Peter Parker's inner monologue, his sense of self, his identity as a person rather than a collection of experiences... that was absent. That was Marcus. All Marcus, for better or worse, wearing a dead boy's skin and trying to figure out how to honor a legacy that shouldn't have been his responsibility but absolutely, definitely was now.
"Right," Marcus said, rolling his shoulders and feeling the impossible strength coiled within them, the enhanced musculature that could benchpress a car without breaking a sweat. "Step one: don't freak out. Step two: eat breakfast, because I'm starving and enhanced metabolism is probably a thing I need to account for. Step three: start figuring out how to be Spider-Man. Step four: save the world, probably. Step five: try not to die again, because once was enough and I really don't want to find out what happens if you die while already reincarnated."
It was a terrible plan. Vague, poorly structured, lacking in specific actionable items and measurable outcomes. If he'd submitted it as a project proposal at his old job, his manager would have rejected it immediately and asked him to come back with something more concrete.
But it was a plan, and right now, that was enough.
Marcus Chen, in the body of Peter Parker, squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and opened the door to face his new life.
Breakfast was an exercise in emotional endurance that Marcus was absolutely not prepared for.
Aunt May had made pancakes. Not particularly good pancakes—she was clearly operating on autopilot, going through the motions of domestic normalcy while her mind was elsewhere, probably still in that parking lot, still hearing the gunshot, still watching her husband fall—but pancakes nonetheless, stacked on a plate in front of the seat that Peter usually occupied, accompanied by a glass of orange juice and a look of such desperate, hopeful love that Marcus wanted to cry.
He ate mechanically, shoveling food into a body that demanded fuel with the insistence of a furnace that had been running on fumes, and tried to make conversation without revealing that he had no idea what he was doing.
"So," he said, between bites of pancake, "I was thinking I might go for a walk today. Clear my head. Get some fresh air."
Aunt May looked up from the coffee she wasn't drinking, and Marcus could see the calculations happening behind her eyes, the worry warring with the understanding that Peter needed space, needed time, needed to process his grief in whatever way worked for him.
"Just... be careful, okay?" she said finally, and the weight behind those words was immense, loaded with unspoken fears about what might happen to the last family she had left if he walked out that door and didn't come back. "The city can be dangerous. Especially these days."
You have no idea, Marcus thought, but what he said was: "I will, Aunt May. I promise. I'll be back before dark."
It was a lie. He had no idea when he'd be back, or what he'd be doing before he returned, or whether "before dark" was a timeline he could realistically commit to given that he was planning to test out superhuman abilities in a city full of potential witnesses. But it was the lie Aunt May needed to hear, the lie that would let her release her grip on him just enough to allow him out the door, and Marcus was learning very quickly that sometimes love meant telling lies that protected the people you cared about from truths they weren't ready to face.
He finished breakfast, helped with the dishes despite Aunt May's protests that he didn't need to, that he should rest, that she could handle it, and then retreated to Peter's room to prepare for his first day as a superhero.
Preparation, as it turned out, was complicated.
Marcus stood in front of Peter's closet—a disorganized mess of clothes that suggested a teenager who had better things to do than maintain sartorial organization—and tried to figure out what the hell he was supposed to wear for his inaugural outing as Spider-Man.
The classic costume wasn't an option yet. Peter hadn't made it—or if he had, Marcus couldn't find it anywhere in the room, which meant it either didn't exist yet or was hidden so well that his enhanced senses couldn't locate it. Which left him with the unenviable task of improvising something that would hide his identity without making him look like a complete idiot.
"Okay," Marcus muttered, rifling through drawers and pulling out anything that might be useful. "Red hoodie. That's a start. Gives the right color scheme, at least. Sweatpants... no, too casual, I'll look like I'm going for a jog. Jeans. Jeans are fine. Dark jeans, to minimize visibility. What else?"
He found a ski mask in the back of the closet, black and basic but functional, probably left over from some winter trip that Peter had taken years ago. It would do for now, even if it made him look less like a superhero and more like someone about to rob a convenience store. The gloves were harder—he needed something that would allow his fingers to stick to surfaces, which meant anything too thick was out of the question—but eventually he settled on a pair of thin athletic gloves that Aunt May had probably bought for Peter's half-hearted attempts at joining the track team.
The final result, when he examined himself in the mirror, was... not great. A teenager in a red hoodie, dark jeans, thin gloves, and a ski mask, looking more like a nervous bank robber than the spectacular superhero he was supposed to become. But it would have to do. He didn't have the resources or the time to make anything better, and every minute he spent worrying about aesthetics was a minute he wasn't spending learning how to actually use these powers.
"Fashion can wait," Marcus told his reflection. "Right now, I just need to not die."
He opened the window.
The fire escape waited outside, a lattice of rusty metal that descended into the alley below, and Marcus felt his heart rate spike as he contemplated what he was about to do. This wasn't a video game. This wasn't a comic book. This was real life, or as real as life could get when you were an isekai protagonist inhabiting the body of a fictional character, and if he fell, if he misjudged the powers he'd never actually used before, he would die. Again. For real this time, probably, without the convenient cosmic intervention that had saved him from the truck.
But he was Spider-Man now. And Spider-Man didn't let fear stop him from doing what needed to be done.
Marcus climbed out the window, balanced on the fire escape railing with an ease that should have been impossible for someone with his—or rather, Peter's—previous level of athletic ability, and looked up at the building's rooftop three stories above.
"Okay, wall-crawling," he said to himself, pressing his palm against the brick. "This is supposed to be instinctive. Peter did it by accident the first time, right? So I just need to... want it. Engage whatever biological mechanism makes this work. Tell my body that gravity is a suggestion rather than a rule."
For a long moment, nothing happened. His palm pressed against cold brick, the texture rough against his enhanced touch, and Marcus felt a surge of panic that maybe the powers didn't transfer, maybe he was just a normal teenager in a ski mask about to embarrass himself on a Queens fire escape.
And then—
Stick.
It was like a switch had been flipped somewhere in his nervous system, a fundamental reordering of the relationship between his body and the surface he was touching. Suddenly the wall wasn't just a wall anymore. It was a floor, rotated ninety degrees from the conventional orientation, and his hand wasn't pressing against it so much as standing on it, supported by forces that physics had no business allowing but was apparently letting happen anyway.
Marcus laughed, a sound of pure delighted disbelief, and before he could second-guess himself, he was climbing.
Not climbing the way a normal person climbed, with hands and feet searching for holds, muscles straining against the pull of gravity. Climbing the way a spider climbed, each limb finding purchase with casual ease, his body flowing up the wall like water running uphill, defying every law of nature that had governed his existence for twenty-eight years.
He reached the rooftop in seconds, pulling himself over the edge with a motion that was halfway between a pull-up and a dance move, and stood there, breathing heavily but not from exertion—from pure, unadulterated joy—as he surveyed the Queens skyline spread out before him.
"Holy shit," Marcus breathed. "Holy shit. I'm Spider-Man. I'm actually Spider-Man. This is actually happening."
The city glittered in the morning light, a concrete jungle of possibilities stretching out in every direction, and Marcus felt something shift in his chest, some fundamental realignment of purpose that had nothing to do with Peter Parker's inherited memories and everything to do with the man he'd chosen to become.
He was going to be the best Spider-Man the world had ever seen. Not because the universe demanded it, not because some cosmic force had given him a mission, but because he wanted to. Because he understood, in a way that the writers of the MCU had apparently never grasped, that Spider-Man wasn't about suffering. Wasn't about tragedy. Wasn't about being defined by the people you'd lost or the mentors you'd failed.
Spider-Man was about hope. About using the gifts you'd been given to help people who couldn't help themselves. About facing impossible odds with a joke on your lips and a determination in your heart that no amount of punishment could break.
Spider-Man was about being the hero that Peter Parker had always deserved to be, and Marcus was going to make sure that this version of the story, his version, got it right.
But first, he needed to learn how to web-swing.
Learning to web-swing without web-shooters was, as Marcus quickly discovered, a significant logistical problem.
He spent the first hour on the rooftop experimenting with his other abilities—the strength (he could do one-handed push-ups with casual ease, could lift air conditioning units that should have been bolted down, could jump vertically at least fifteen feet without really trying), the agility (his body moved in ways that his mind struggled to keep up with, bending and twisting and contorting with a flexibility that would have made Olympic gymnasts weep with envy), and the spider-sense (a persistent hum at the base of his skull that intensified whenever he thought about potential dangers, a biological early warning system that promised to be invaluable once he learned to interpret its signals).
But web-swinging required webs. And webs, in Peter Parker's case, required technology that didn't exist yet.
"Okay," Marcus said, sitting cross-legged on the rooftop and staring at his wrists as if he could will web-shooters into existence through sheer force of desire. "Think about this logically. In the comics, Peter designed the web-shooters himself. He was a genius, a prodigy, someone who could whip up revolutionary technology in his basement workshop. And I'm..."
He trailed off, considering his own skill set. Marcus Chen had been an English major with a minor in communications. His understanding of chemistry and mechanical engineering was limited to what he'd absorbed through osmosis from decades of reading superhero comics, which was to say, functionally useless for actually building anything.
But Peter Parker's brain was different. Peter Parker's brain had been enhanced by the spider bite, upgraded to process information faster, to see connections that normal humans couldn't perceive, to understand complex systems with an intuitive grasp that bordered on precognition. And if the memories pressing against the edges of Marcus's consciousness were any indication, Peter had been well on his way to developing the web-shooter formula before... before everything had happened.
Marcus closed his eyes and reached for those memories, not forcing them but inviting them, creating space in his mind for Peter's knowledge to surface.
It came in fragments, like pieces of a puzzle scattered across a table, but slowly, gradually, the picture began to form. Chemical compounds. Polymer structures. Tensile strength calculations. A formula that Peter had scribbled in a notebook somewhere, probably hidden in his room, a prototype that he'd been working on in secret because he hadn't yet figured out what he was going to do with these impossible abilities.
"The notebook," Marcus said, eyes snapping open. "I need to find the notebook."
He swung back down to the fire escape—not literally swung, more like climbed in reverse with the kind of casual disregard for gravity that was going to take some getting used to—and slipped back through Peter's window with the urgency of someone who had just discovered a treasure map.
The notebook was exactly where Peter's fragmented memories suggested it would be: taped to the underside of the desk drawer, hidden in a spot that would only be discovered by someone who was specifically looking for secrets. Marcus pulled it out with trembling fingers and flipped through pages of handwritten notes, diagrams, chemical formulas that his borrowed brain could now interpret with startling clarity.
Peter Parker had been brilliant. Not just smart, not just gifted, but genuinely, profoundly brilliant, the kind of mind that came along once in a generation and was usually either celebrated or exploited by the world depending on its mood. The web-shooter design was elegant in its simplicity, a compact mechanism that could be worn beneath long sleeves, triggered by pressure on a specific point in the palm, capable of projecting a synthetic webbing compound that would dissolve after approximately one hour of exposure to air.
The formula for the webbing itself was even more impressive. A polymer matrix that combined the tensile strength of steel cables with the elasticity of rubber bands, capable of supporting thousands of pounds of weight while remaining flexible enough to serve as everything from binding restraints to swingable ropes. Peter had calculated the optimal viscosity, the ideal projection speed, the necessary pressure for different types of web configurations—nets, lines, impact webs, the works.
All Marcus had to do was build it.
"Okay," he said, setting the notebook down on the desk and taking a deep breath. "Okay. I can do this. I have the formula. I have the design. I have access to Peter's chemistry set, which is apparently in the closet behind the winter coats. All I need is time and concentration and probably a lot of trial and error."
He paused, considering.
"And money. I'm going to need money. Because some of these chemical compounds are not exactly available at your local CVS, and I'm pretty sure Aunt May's grocery budget doesn't include 'experimental polymer precursors' as a line item."
The money problem was, ironically, one that Marcus knew exactly how to solve. In the original story—in every version of the original story—Peter had used his powers to make money through wrestling, through public appearances, through all sorts of morally questionable entrepreneurial ventures before the death of Uncle Ben had taught him the true meaning of responsibility.
But Ben was already dead. The lesson had already been learned, even if Marcus was the one learning it secondhand through inherited guilt and borrowed grief. Which meant that using his powers for personal profit was no longer an option, not without betraying everything that Spider-Man was supposed to stand for.
"I'll figure it out," Marcus muttered, already beginning to inventory the chemistry supplies hidden in Peter's closet. "There's got to be a way to get what I need without compromising my principles. Maybe I can... I don't know, offer tutoring services? Sell some of Peter's old stuff? Find a legitimate part-time job that doesn't conflict with the whole 'fighting crime' thing I'm supposed to be doing?"
Those were problems for later. Right now, Marcus had a more immediate concern: he'd promised Aunt May he'd be back before dark, which gave him approximately eight hours to build functional web-shooters from scratch using a dead teenager's chemistry set and the knowledge he'd inherited from a mind that no longer existed.
Challenge accepted.
Building the web-shooters took six hours, fourteen failed attempts, three minor explosions, two significant burns that healed with uncomfortable speed thanks to his enhanced healing factor, and one frantic window-opening session to clear the smoke before Aunt May came upstairs to investigate the smell.
But at the end of it, Marcus sat at Peter's desk with a pair of sleek, compact devices strapped to his wrists, loaded with cartridges of synthetic webbing that his borrowed genius had somehow managed to synthesize from household chemicals and carefully rationed specialty compounds that Peter had apparently been stockpiling for months.
They weren't perfect. The trigger mechanism was slightly stiff, requiring more pressure than the design called for, and the webbing formula was probably operating at about eighty percent of its optimal performance due to material substitutions Marcus had been forced to make when the exact chemicals weren't available. But they worked. They worked, and that was all that mattered right now.
Marcus pointed his right wrist at the far wall of Peter's room and pressed his middle and ring fingers against the trigger point on his palm.
THWIP.
A line of webbing shot across the room and adhered to the wall with a satisfying splat, the impact point spreading out into a small disc of white synthetic polymer that looked almost exactly like it did in the comics, in the movies, in every piece of Spider-Man media Marcus had consumed over the course of his obsessive fandom.
"Oh my God," he whispered. "I did it. I actually did it. I made web-shooters. Functional, working, actually-shoot-webs web-shooters. Peter Parker would be so proud. I'm so proud. This is the best day of my life, and I say that as someone who literally died this morning."
He spent the next thirty minutes testing the shooters, adjusting the pressure, learning the subtle variations in finger positioning that produced different web configurations. Standard line for swinging. Wide spread for nets. Rapid-fire pellets for impact webbing. The device was even more versatile than he'd expected, Peter's original design apparently accounting for use cases that Marcus hadn't even considered yet.
But there was still one thing he needed to test. One crucial ability that would determine whether he could actually function as a superhero or if he was just a kid with fancy wrist accessories and delusions of grandeur.
He needed to swing.
The sun was starting to descend toward the horizon, painting the Queens skyline in shades of orange and gold, when Marcus climbed back out Peter's window and made his way to the rooftop for the second time that day. His makeshift costume—the red hoodie, the ski mask, the thin gloves—suddenly felt impossibly inadequate for what he was about to attempt, but there was no time to worry about that now.
He stood at the edge of the building and looked out at the city, at the gap between this rooftop and the next one over, at the absolutely terrifying drop that waited below if he miscalculated the physics of this by even a small amount.
"Okay," Marcus said, his voice steady despite the fact that his heart was trying to escape his chest through his throat. "Okay. This is it. This is the moment. Either I can do this, or I fall twenty stories and discover whether spider-healing extends to 'hitting the ground at terminal velocity.' No pressure. No pressure at all."
He raised his right arm, aimed at a water tower two buildings over, and—
THWIP.
The webline shot out, arced through the air, and connected with the side of the water tower with a force that he felt transmitted back through the line like a physical handshake. The web held. The anchor point was secure. All he had to do now was jump.
Just jump, Marcus told himself. You've done this a million times in your imagination. You've watched Peter do it in dozens of movies and shows and games. The physics are sound—the web will hold your weight, the swing arc will carry you to the next building, and your enhanced reflexes will handle any adjustments that need to be made mid-flight. All you have to do is trust the process.
He jumped.
For one heart-stopping moment, Marcus was falling, his body plummeting toward the street below with the implacable certainty of gravity doing its job, and every survival instinct he possessed was screaming at him that he'd made a terrible mistake, that he was going to die, that the web-shooters were going to fail and he was going to hit the ground and all of this would have been for nothing—
And then the webline snapped taut, and he was swinging.
The sensation was indescribable. Not falling anymore but flying, his body tracing a perfect arc through the air, the wind rushing past his face with a force that should have been terrifying but was instead exhilarating, the most pure and absolute joy he had ever experienced in either of his lives.
He released the first web at the apex of his swing, exactly when his spider-sense told him to, and shot out a second line to an adjacent building without even thinking about it, his body operating on instincts he hadn't known he possessed but which apparently came standard with the spider-powers package.
THWIP. THWIP. THWIP.
Building to building, arc to arc, a continuous flow of motion that felt less like travel and more like dancing, every swing a beat in a rhythm that his enhanced reflexes conducted with casual perfection. He was moving faster now, gaining confidence with every successful connection, learning the subtle variations in angle and timing that optimized his trajectory and speed.
This was what Spider-Man was supposed to feel like. Not the burden of responsibility, not the weight of tragedy, not the endless cycle of suffering and sacrifice that the character had been subjected to for decades. This—this joy, this freedom, this impossible gift of flight through a concrete canyon—this was the reward. The reason why Peter Parker had never given up, why he had kept putting on the costume night after night despite everything the universe had thrown at him.
Because being Spider-Man was amazing.
Marcus was laughing now, the sound whipped away by the wind as soon as it left his lips, and he didn't care if anyone heard him, didn't care if he looked ridiculous in his ski mask and red hoodie, didn't care about anything except the pure, primal thrill of doing something that no human being should be able to do but which he was doing anyway, because he was Spider-Man, because he was spectacular.
He swung past apartment buildings full of people going about their evening routines, past office towers emptying of workers heading home for the day, past construction sites and parking garages and all the mundane infrastructure of urban existence that suddenly looked completely different from this angle, from this height, from this perspective of impossible possibility.
And then his spider-sense screamed.
The warning hit him like a physical blow, a burst of urgent danger-awareness that was so intense it almost caused him to miss his next webline. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong, and it was happening nearby, close enough that his enhanced senses could pick up details even at this distance.
Screaming. Human screaming, the kind that was pure terror rather than the casual drama of city living. Multiple voices, overlapping, coming from...
There.
Three blocks ahead, on the ground floor of a building that looked like some kind of warehouse or industrial facility, Marcus could see movement through the windows. Figures in motion, some running, some fallen, and among them, one figure that stood out from the rest because it was bigger, because it moved with a fluidity that suggested something fundamentally inhuman.
He changed course without conscious thought, angling his next swing toward the source of the disturbance, and as he got closer, the details became clearer with each passing second.
The warehouse was some kind of shipping facility, probably connected to the docks a few blocks away. Workers—dock workers, warehouse employees, people in reflective vests and hard hats who had presumably been going about their normal jobs until approximately two minutes ago—were fleeing in every direction, streaming out of exits and windows with the single-minded desperation of prey animals escaping a predator.
And the predator...
Oh no, Marcus thought, as he landed on a lamp post across the street and got his first clear look at what was happening inside. Oh no oh no oh no.
The figure inside the warehouse wasn't human. It had been human once, probably—the general shape was right, bipedal, two arms, one head—but whatever had happened to it since then had transformed it into something else entirely. Something covered in gray-green scales that gleamed wetly under the fluorescent lights. Something with a tail, a tail, thick and muscular and currently wrapped around the leg of a fallen worker who was screaming with an intensity that suggested he didn't expect to survive the next thirty seconds.
Something with a mouth full of teeth that definitely didn't belong on any mammal that had ever evolved on this planet.
The Lizard, Marcus realized, and the recognition sent a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the evening air. That's the Lizard. That's Doctor Curtis Connors after his formula went wrong. That's one of Spider-Man's most dangerous enemies, and I've been Spider-Man for approximately seven hours.
This was too much. This was way too much. He wasn't ready for this, wasn't trained for this, had literally just learned to web-swing an hour ago and was now expected to fight a giant lizard monster that could probably tear him in half without breaking a sweat.
But the man on the floor was still screaming. The workers who hadn't escaped yet were trapped in corners, hiding behind shipping crates, praying for someone—anyone—to save them. And Marcus's spider-sense was still pulsing with danger-awareness, not for himself, but for them, for the innocent people who were about to die if he didn't do something.
With great power comes great responsibility.
"Okay," Marcus said quietly, already moving toward the warehouse with a speed that would have been impossible for any normal human. "Okay. This is happening. This is actually happening. Time to find out if I can be a hero, or if I'm just some guy in a ski mask who's about to make a really stupid decision."
He crashed through the window with a flying kick that sent glass exploding inward like a glittering halo of danger, and landed in a crouch on top of a shipping crate with a grace that surprised even him.
The Lizard turned. The Lizard looked at him. The Lizard's yellow, reptilian eyes focused on his position with the cold calculation of an apex predator sizing up unexpected prey.
"Hey there, Scaley!" Marcus shouted, and even as the words left his mouth, he felt something click into place, some fundamental aspect of being Spider-Man that he'd been missing until this exact moment. "I don't know what your deal is, but I'm pretty sure the employee handbook doesn't cover 'terrorizing coworkers with your tail.' Have you considered filing a formal complaint with HR instead?"
The Lizard roared—an actual roar, like something out of a dinosaur movie, the kind of sound that was designed by evolution to trigger fight-or-flight responses in every creature that heard it—and charged.
Marcus moved.
It wasn't conscious. It wasn't planned. It was pure reflex, pure spider-instinct, his body reacting to the danger with a speed and precision that his conscious mind couldn't have matched if it tried. He flipped backward off the shipping crate as the Lizard's claws swiped through the space where his head had been, landed on the wall behind him in a crouch that defied gravity, and shot a webline at the creature's face before it could complete its follow-up attack.
THWIP.
The web splattered across the Lizard's eyes, temporarily blinding it, and Marcus used the opening to fire two more lines at the creature's feet, anchoring them to the floor in an attempt to restrict its movement.
"Wow, you're fast," Marcus said, bouncing off the wall and landing on another shipping crate as the Lizard tore the webbing off its face with a snarl of rage. "Like, really fast. Faster than I was expecting. Which is saying something, because I was expecting you to be pretty fast. Have you considered a career in track and field? I hear the Olympics are always looking for—"
The Lizard's tail whipped around with a speed that his spider-sense barely managed to warn him about, and Marcus had to twist his body in mid-air to avoid being batted across the warehouse like a tennis ball.
"Okay, the tail is a problem," he muttered, landing on the ceiling and scuttling sideways to avoid the follow-up swipe. "Note to self: the tail is definitely a problem. Need to find a way to—"
DANGER DANGER DANGER
His spider-sense exploded with warning as the Lizard did something Marcus hadn't expected: it jumped. Launched itself upward with leg muscles that were apparently much more powerful than he'd given them credit for, closing the distance between floor and ceiling in less than a second, claws extended, jaws gaping, ready to tear him apart.
Marcus twisted, dodged, felt claws graze the fabric of his hoodie close enough to tear it, and shot a desperate webline at the far wall.
THWIP.
He swung out of the way just as the Lizard's jaws snapped closed on the space where his torso had been, and the momentum of his escape carried him in a wide arc across the warehouse, past the terrified workers who were still frozen in their hiding spots, past the fallen man who was crawling toward an exit with what appeared to be a badly injured leg.
"Get out!" Marcus shouted to the workers as he swung past. "Everyone get out now! I'll keep ugly distracted!"
The Lizard landed on the ceiling with a sound like meat hitting concrete, its claws digging into the surface as it oriented itself toward Marcus with the single-minded focus of a creature that had identified its prey and was not planning to let it escape.
"Right," Marcus said, trying to ignore the way his hands were shaking inside the thin gloves. "Right. So you're way stronger than me, way more durable than me, and apparently just as agile as me. Which means fighting you directly would be suicide. Good thing I have absolutely no intention of fighting you directly."
He started moving before he finished speaking, web-swinging in a complex pattern around the warehouse that used the ceiling, the walls, the shipping crates, and every other available surface as anchor points and platforms. The goal wasn't to attack—not yet, not directly. The goal was to think, to use the mobility his powers gave him to create space and time for strategy.
The Lizard is Curt Connors, Marcus reminded himself as he dodged another lunging attack and responded with a spray of web pellets that splattered across the creature's left arm. He's not a monster. He's a scientist who was trying to regenerate his arm and accidentally turned himself into a giant lizard. Which means somewhere in there, the human mind is still fighting for control. I need to find a way to reach that mind, or at least to incapacitate the body long enough for the human side to reassert itself.
But how? The webbing was useful for temporary restraint, but the Lizard was strong enough to tear through it in seconds. Direct confrontation was suicide. And Marcus didn't have access to any of the scientific resources that might be needed to synthesize an antidote—not yet, not without more time and more materials than he currently possessed.
Think. THINK. You've read a hundred stories about Spider-Man fighting the Lizard. What works? What doesn't? What's the key to beating this guy without killing him?
The answer came to him in a flash, pulled from some half-remembered comic panel or cartoon episode: cold.
Reptiles were cold-blooded. Their metabolism was dependent on external temperature. And while the Lizard was clearly more advanced than any normal reptile, more resistant to environmental factors, the fundamental biology should still apply. Get him cold enough, and his movements would slow. His strength would decrease. His enhanced healing would be impaired.
But where was Marcus supposed to find enough cold to—
His eyes locked on the back corner of the warehouse, where a set of heavy doors marked with frost and warning signs indicated exactly what he was hoping to find.
Industrial freezer. Cold storage for perishable goods. It's not perfect, but it might be enough.
"Hey, Godzilla!" Marcus shouted, landing on a shipping crate directly in front of the freezer entrance. "You know what your problem is? Besides the whole 'turning into a giant monster and attacking innocent people' thing, I mean. You're way too predictable!"
The Lizard roared and charged, exactly as Marcus had hoped it would.
THWIP. THWIP.
He shot two weblines at the corners of the freezer door, pulled them taut, and then—at the exact moment his spider-sense told him the Lizard was committed to its attack vector—yanked the door open and threw himself to the side.
The Lizard barreled through the opening with all the momentum of a freight train, carried by its own charge into the frozen depths of the cold storage unit, and Marcus was already moving, grabbing the door and slamming it closed with all the enhanced strength his body could muster.
THWIP. THWIP. THWIP. THWIP. THWIP.
He webbed the door shut with layer after layer of synthetic polymer, creating a seal that would take even the Lizard precious seconds to break through. Then he webbed the frame. Then the walls around the frame. Then, for good measure, he webbed some nearby shipping crates to the door, adding their mass to the barrier.
The sound of the Lizard's roars from inside the freezer was muffled but audible, accompanied by the thudding of impacts as it threw itself against the door. But the webbing held. The cold was doing its work. And with each passing second, the intensity of the attacks seemed to decrease, the creature's enhanced metabolism struggling against temperatures that its reptilian biology wasn't designed to handle.
Marcus stood in front of the freezer, breathing heavily, his ski mask damp with sweat despite the coolness of the evening air that was flowing in through the broken window. Every muscle in his body was trembling with the aftereffects of adrenaline, the comedown from a fight that had tested his abilities in ways he hadn't been prepared for.
But he'd done it. He'd actually done it. He'd faced one of Spider-Man's most dangerous villains on his very first day and managed to incapacitate him without killing him, without letting any civilians die, without losing himself in the process.
"Holy crap," Marcus whispered, and then, louder, to the empty warehouse: "Holy crap! I just beat the Lizard! I actually just beat the Lizard! On my first day! With a ski mask and a hoodie and web-shooters I built from scratch! I'm amazing!"
His spider-sense pulsed, and Marcus spun around, hands raised in a defensive posture—
Only to find that the source of the warning wasn't a threat at all. It was a small crowd of people gathered at the broken window, civilians and workers who had watched the fight from a safe distance and were now staring at him with expressions that ranged from awe to confusion to something that looked suspiciously like gratitude.
Among them was the man who had been grabbed by the Lizard's tail, now supported by two of his coworkers, his injured leg wrapped in what looked like a makeshift bandage. He was staring at Marcus with an intensity that was almost uncomfortable.
"Who... who are you?" the man asked, his voice raw from screaming but steady with something like hope.
Marcus opened his mouth to answer, and for a moment, nothing came out. He hadn't thought about this part. Hadn't planned what to say, what name to give, how to present himself to the world as a superhero rather than just some kid in a mask who happened to have spider powers.
But then, almost without conscious thought, the words came.
"I'm Spider-Man," he said, and the name felt right in a way that nothing else had since he'd woken up in this body. "I'm just your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. And I'm here to help."
The crowd erupted in cheers—actual cheers, the kind of spontaneous outpouring of gratitude that Marcus had only ever seen in movies—and he felt something warm bloom in his chest, something that had nothing to do with pride and everything to do with purpose.
This was what being a hero was supposed to feel like. Not the burden, not the sacrifice, not the endless cycle of tragedy and loss. But this—this moment of connection, of hope, of proving that one person could make a difference when they chose to stand up and fight for what was right.
He was going to do this right. He was going to be the Spider-Man that Peter Parker had always deserved to be—quipping in the face of danger, creative in his use of powers, unwavering in his commitment to protecting the innocent.
And maybe, just maybe, he was going to find a way to be happy while doing it.
"Now if you'll excuse me," Marcus said, shooting a webline at a nearby building and preparing to swing away, "I need to go call the police about the giant lizard in your freezer. And maybe get a better costume. Because, I don't know if you've noticed, but the ski mask and hoodie look is really not working for me."
He swung off into the evening sky, the sounds of cheers and laughter following him as he went, and for the first time since waking up in Peter Parker's body, Marcus Chen felt like everything was going to be okay.
He was wrong, of course. Things were about to get much more complicated than he could possibly imagine.
But that's a story for another chapter.
End of Chapter 1
[Author's Note: And so begins the journey of Marcus Chen, the Spider-Man fan who became Spider-Man. Will he be able to live up to the legacy he's inherited? Will he find the resources to build a proper costume? Will he ever notice the absolutely ridiculous number of attractive women who are about to start paying attention to him? Find out in future chapters of "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility (And Apparently a Harem I Didn't Ask For)"!]