Darkness.
Not the soft darkness of sleep, but something thicker—viscous, suffocating, alive. It pressed against his skin like a second membrane, filling his lungs with each shallow breath.
His eyes snapped open.
Red emergency lights pulsed beyond curved glass, painting the viscous fluid around him in shades of blood. The containment pod hummed with a failing, irregular rhythm—a heartbeat skipping toward death.
For a moment, he floated, suspended between existence and oblivion. Then awareness struck like lightning.
I'm not supposed to be here.
The thought wasn't his—or rather, it was three thoughts at once, layering over each other like poorly shuffled cards. A teenager's voice, bright with scientific curiosity: *Where am I? What is this place?* An older presence, calm and measured, assessing threat levels with military precision: Containment. Restraint. Danger.And beneath both, something new, raw, and furious: I will not die in a glass cage.
His hand moved before conscious thought could stop it.
CRACK.
The reinforced glass spider-webbed instantly, fractures racing outward like frozen lightning. He stared at his fist—pale, trembling, stronger than it had any right to be. The strength wasn't just muscle. It was *more*. Something cellular, fundamental, like his bones were singing a frequency the universe couldn't ignore.
He pulled back and struck again.
BOOM.
The containment pod exploded outward in a cascade of reinforced glass and amniotic fluid. He tumbled forward onto cold steel plating, gasping, choking, lungs burning as they dragged in their first real breath of recycled air. The taste was chemical—bitter, antiseptic, wrong.
His hands splayed against the floor, and he felt it: the faint tremor of old metal, the microscopic vibrations of footsteps three corridors away, the distant hum of failing generators. The sensory information was overwhelming, precise, intimate in a way that made his head spin.
Spider-sense, one part of him whispered. No—chakra perception, another corrected. No. Both. You're both.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to contain the flood. Three lifetimes crashed against each other like competing tides:
- Peter Parker, age seventeen, orphaned twice, carrying guilt like a second skeleton.
- Hashirama Senju, the First Hokage, who'd buried brothers and built a village on their graves.
- And him—whoever he was now, born in a glass tube with a designation instead of a name.
His vision swam. For a moment, he thought he might drown in the memories alone.
Then something crinkled in his clenched fist.
He opened his palm slowly, confused. A piece of paper, somehow dry despite the fluid still dripping from his body, somehow there despite having been nowhere a moment ago. The handwriting was elegant, almost mocking in its neatness:
***
"You died in your world before your time by my mistake.
So, I've transferred your soul to a failed clone of Spider-Man.
Don't worry—as compensation for my mistake, I've spliced your DNA with Hashirama Senju. Your body won't deteriorate like the others. You now have access to both their memories.
Consider it an apology.
— G."
***
The moment his eyes left the last letter, the paper ignited. Not with heat, but with light—a soft, golden glow that consumed the page without smoke or ash, leaving only the faint scent of ozone.
He stared at his empty palm.
God killed me by accident.
The thought should have been terrifying. Instead, a laugh bubbled up from somewhere deep in his chest—short, sharp, edged with hysteria.
"Compensation," he muttered, voice hoarse and unfamiliar. "Right."
Before the laugh could turn into something darker, a new sound cut through the ambient hum of the facility:
Footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. Close.
"—hell was that noise?"
A man's voice, rough with irritation and the flat affect of someone who'd done this job too long. The scrape of boots on metal grating. The mechanical click of a safety being disengaged.
Instinct took over—not thought, not planning, just the raw imperative of survival.
He moved.
His body responded with a fluid efficiency that shocked him. In three heartbeats, he'd pressed himself against the wall beside the doorway, muscles coiled, breathing silent. The strength in his limbs felt wrong—too much, too easy, like he'd borrowed someone else's body and forgotten to adjust the settings.
The guard's silhouette appeared in the doorway, backlit by emergency lighting.
Time crystallized.
Peter's voice screamed in his head: Don't kill him! There has to be another way!
Hashirama's presence remained calm, almost sorrowful: A warrior who hesitates dies. So do those he means to protect.
The new voice—his voice—said nothing. It simply acted.
His palm pressed flat against the floor. Without understanding how, he pushed—not with muscle, but with something deeper. Chakra flooded through concrete and rebar, searching, reshaping, growing.
A spike of hardened wood erupted from the floor at a forty-five-degree angle, silent and sudden as an ambush predator.
It punched through the guard's lower back and emerged from his abdomen in a spray of red.
The man's eyes went wide. His mouth opened, but the only sound was a wet, rattling gasp. The rifle clattered to the floor. He slumped forward, held upright only by the wooden stake growing through his torso like a grotesque sculpture.
The clone stared.
The guard twitched once, then went still.
The silence that followed was deafening.
He stood there, chest heaving, staring at what he'd done. The wood was part of him—he could still feel it, warm and alive, connected to his palm by threads of chakra too subtle to see. With a thought, he could make it grow further, branch out, consume—
No.
He pulled back. The wood withdrew like a living thing, retracting into his hand until only smooth, pale skin remained. The guard collapsed in a heap.
The smell hit him then: copper and bowel, the ugly reality of sudden death.
Peter's horror crashed over him in waves: You killed him. You didn't even try to—
Hashirama's sorrow was quieter but no less heavy: The first kill is always the hardest. The second is easier. The thousandth becomes routine. Remember that weight. Let it keep you human.
He knelt beside the body, hands shaking now that the adrenaline was fading. The guard's name tag read CHEN, M.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. He didn't know if he meant it. Part of him did. Part of him had stopped caring the moment the stake grew from his hand.
The radio on Chen's belt crackled:
"Sector C, this is Control. Report status. What was that noise?"
He stared at the device. Then at the uniform. Then at his own bare, fluid-slicked skin.
A decision crystallized with the cold clarity of survival instinct.
He stripped the body efficiently, tugging the black tactical uniform over his own damp frame. It was too large in the shoulders, too tight in the chest—Chen had been a smaller man. But it would do.
The radio crackled again, more insistent:
"Sector C, respond. Chen, do you copy?"
He picked up the device, closed his eyes, and listened—not just to the voice, but to the memory of Chen's throat, his vocal cords, the particular rasp of a man who smoked too much and slept too little.
When he spoke, the voice that emerged was not his own:
"Control, this is Chen. Sorry—dropped my radio. Sector C is clear. Just some pipes rattling."
A pause. Then:
"Copy that. Maintenance has been notified. Return to your post."
He exhaled slowly. "Roger. Returning now."
The line went dead.
He stood there in the stolen uniform, staring at his reflection in a shard of broken glass: a stranger's face, sharp and angular, with eyes that held too much knowledge for someone who'd been born minutes ago.
Subject-#SP07 ,he thought. That's what the pod said.
But he wasn't a subject. He wasn't a number.
He didn't have a name yet, but he had something more important:
He had power. He had memories of two lives that had mattered. And he had time.
The facility groaned around him, ancient and dying. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear more footsteps, more voices, the machinery of control and containment grinding forward.
They thought this place was abandoned.
They thought the asset was contained.
They were wrong.
Subject-#SP07 dragged Chen's body behind a collapsed console, covered it with a tarp, and stepped into the corridor.
The hunt had begun.
End Chapter 1