"Hey, Peter."
The morning sun streamed through the gaps in the kitchen curtains, casting warm slats of light across the linoleum. Aunt May and Uncle Ben were at the table unusually early. A platter of fried eggs, crispy bacon, and golden toast sat between them. Peter rubbed the sleep from his eyes, his spider-sense humming with a very low, non-lethal frequency. It wasn't danger, just... atmosphere. Uncle Ben was looking at him with the specific tightness around the eyes of a man who had bad news to deliver.
Uncle Ben cleared his throat. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. "Peter, listen. We need to talk to you about something."
"What? What happened?" The last traces of sleep vanished instantly. Peter's fingers clamped onto the edge of the kitchen counter.
"Oh, don't listen to your Uncle Ben's dramatic pauses," Aunt May interrupted, reaching over to pat Ben's arm with a laugh. "An old friend of ours invited us upstate for a few days. Considering your school schedule, we decided not to drag you along. You'll have the house to yourself until Sunday."
Uncle Ben grinned, the tension breaking completely. He reached over and ruffled Peter's hair. "Just wanted to see if you'd panic! A fifteen-year-old boy should be able to manage the thermostat and change a lightbulb without burning the place down, right?"
"Of course I can." Peter let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding and eyed the bacon. "So... can we eat now?"
Laughter echoed around the kitchen.
After breakfast, Aunt May hugged Peter tightly. Uncle Ben grabbed him by the shoulder, his thumb pressing firmly against Peter's collarbone—their unspoken code for stay sharp. "Sorry I can't drive you to school for the start of Homecoming Week," Ben said, lowering his voice. "I wonder which girl you'll end up asking to the dance?"
"You'll find out next year," Peter winked.
He watched their car pull out of the driveway and disappear down the street. The moment they were gone, Peter bolted upstairs. He pulled the collapsed spider-disc from under his bed, tapped the center, and let the Mk. 2 suit expand over him. He slipped out the second-floor window, caught the edge of the roof, and vaulted into the morning air, his backpack webbed securely to his chest.
It was going to be a strange few days. No Avengers in the Tower. No Uncle Ben and Aunt May in the house. It felt as though the only people left in New York were Spider-Man and Peter Parker—and nobody cared about Peter Parker.
"Spider-Man loves this hot dog! This is the hot dog Spider-Man loves! The only officially endorsed Spider-Man hot dog in New York City!"
Peter dropped down onto the pavement right in front of the cart. He struck a deliberate pose, waiting for the vendor to notice the massive upgrade in his wardrobe. But the street corner was unusually quiet. There were barely any customers.
"Hey, Miller," Peter said, standing up straight. "Business slow today?"
"Your usual is under the umbrella, Spider-Man," Miller grunted, not looking up from the grill. "You don't check the internet much, do you? There's a video circulating. Shows you beating up some street thugs and stealing their wallets. Half the city thinks it's real."
The mechanical white lenses on Peter's mask whirred, snapping from wide ovals to narrow, confused slits.
"Yesterday afternoon?" Peter asked. "I spent the entire afternoon inside building my new suit."
Miller finally looked up. He stared at the moving lenses. "I see. So your eyes do that now. Neat."
Peter realized talking to Miller about the suit upgrades was a lost cause. He flicked a web, snagging his hot dog and dropping exact change into the tip jar. "It sounds like someone is impersonating me to ruin my reputation. That's weird. Where was the video shot?"
"Hell's Kitchen."
"Hell's Kitchen?" Peter frowned. "I practically never go there. I'm going to check it out. Maybe I can catch this guy in the act."
"Hey! Spider-Man? Is that Spider-Man?!"
A voice bellowed from the sidewalk, cutting off Peter's exit. Peter turned. A teenager was jogging toward him. He was huge—easily pushing six-foot-two, broad-shouldered, and wearing a cheap, discount-rack Spider-Man Halloween costume underneath an open varsity jacket.
"Oh my god, it's really you! I actually met you!" The massive kid was practically vibrating, his words tumbling out in an incoherent rush. "You... you changed your uniform! Oh man, the primary colors are so much brighter. The fabric texture is completely different. You scaled up the webbing grid, and the chest emblem is way sharper..."
Peter stared at him. This kid he had just met was paying more attention to his equipment specs than Tony Stark did. For the first time in his life, Spider-Man felt that maybe talking too much was a bad thing. "Hey, man. Deep breaths. Calm down?"
"What? Oh. Right. Okay."
The giant kid took a massive breath, visibly forcing himself to stop vibrating.
Then he opened his mouth again.
"My name is Eugene Thompson. I'm a freshman at Midtown High. I'm your biggest fan. Look at this—it's your suit! Today is the first day of Homecoming Week, and the theme is superheroes, so I bought this immediately..."
"Okay, Eugene, I'm gonna stop you right there. Is it cool if I call you Eugene?" Peter backed up toward the edge of the roofline, desperate to escape. "Thank you. Truly. But I have a scheduling conflict. I need to go to Hell's Kitchen and catch the guy pretending to be me. Bye!"
Peter fired a web and launched himself into the sky.
"I know you didn't do those things, Spider-Man!" Thompson roared from the sidewalk, his voice echoing off the buildings. "Go beat the shit out of the fake!"
Peter swung away, shaking his head at Eugene Thompson's terrifying level of enthusiasm. He banked hard, adjusting his trajectory toward Hell's Kitchen. It was a neighborhood with one of the highest violent crime rates in the city, but one of the lowest police reporting rates. There were almost no municipal cameras. The dispatch-monitoring program he had written yesterday was functionally useless here.
But sometimes, you didn't need a sophisticated algorithm. Sometimes, you just needed altitude.
"Is that another Spider, or is it Mysterio?"
Peter clung to the side of a brick tenement. Down in the street below, a figure wearing a perfect replica of his old suit was dropping onto a group of apparent muggers. Peter tapped the side of his mask. The tactical HUD cycled to infrared.
There was only one thermal signature in the alley. The muggers didn't exist. They were holograms.
Peter dropped from the wall, flipping silently into the center of the alley. The moment he crossed an invisible threshold, his own body vanished, perfectly overwritten by the ambient light-particle projection field.
The field manipulates light reflection, Peter calculated. It's painting over me with the pre-programmed background. To the guy running the illusion, I'm completely invisible.
A few feet away, the Chameleon threw a fake punch at a non-existent mugger. He paused, tapping his earpiece. "What was that noise?"
"What happened is you owe me royalty fees on the costume!"
Peter stepped forward, entirely invisible to the naked eye, and drove a fist directly into the Chameleon's chest.
The Chameleon flew backward, tumbling out of the projection radius. The moment he crossed the boundary, the light-particle field stopped covering him. He crashed into a stack of pallets, visible once more.
But inside Peter's mask, the thermal overlay had never lost him.
"What happened?!" the Chameleon gasped, scrambling to his feet. He stared wildly into the empty alley.
"I don't know!" Quentin Beck's panicked voice shrieked over the Chameleon's earpiece. "It looks like Spider-Man arrived, but he entered the reflection field!"
"How can he see me?!" the Chameleon roared at the empty air.
"I have no idea!"
"You'd think a professional impersonator would do a little more research before stealing someone's brand," Peter's disembodied voice echoed from the projection field.
A strand of web shot out of thin air, latching onto the Chameleon's chest. Peter yanked hard, pulling the spy forward before delivering a spinning back kick that sent him crashing into the brick wall.
"So, Quentin Beck," Peter said, still invisible. "Care to tell me who signed the checks for this little off-Broadway production?"
"He knows my name?!" Beck's horrified scream bled out of the Chameleon's earpiece.
The Chameleon gritted his teeth, panic finally breaking through his training. "Turn off the projection!"
"But he knows—"
"I said turn it off!"
The alley snapped back to reality. The fake muggers vanished. The shadows reasserted themselves. Peter stood in the center of the pavement, hands on his hips. The Chameleon took one look at Peter's new Mk. 2 suit, then looked down at his own outdated replica, and let out a vicious Russian curse.
Peter tilted his head. "So, you're not Quentin. He's just your tech support."
Peter spotted the small, metallic projection sphere resting on the asphalt. He webbed it into his hand and dropped it into one of his new waist pockets.
The Chameleon pulled a tactical combat knife from his boot. "Do not speak of Quentin Beck."
"Right. So, what's your intro? Master of Disguise? Master of Spies? Frustrated community theater actor?"
"Shut up, you insect." The Chameleon lunged. He slashed with brutal, blinding speed. Peter swayed back, letting the blade miss his throat by a millimeter. The Chameleon instantly dropped the knife, caught it with his other hand mid-air, and drove an elbow toward Peter's jaw in a seamless, lethal combination.
"I was trained by the KGB!" the Chameleon snarled, pressing the attack. "I am an ace operative of the Foreign Intelligence Service! I have killed more men than you have—"
Peter planted a foot in the Chameleon's abdomen and kicked. Hard.
The spy flew ten feet through the air, slammed into the brick wall, and collapsed to the pavement, entirely devoid of breath. Before he could move, a rapid-fire barrage of webbing pinned him to the ground like a cocooned caterpillar.
"And you're fighting a guy who held up an elevated train platform for two minutes," Peter said, walking over to the webbed bundle. "Sorry, man. Nothing personal, but you were out of your weight class."
Peter hoisted the cocooned Chameleon over his shoulder. He needed to drop this guy at an official NYPD precinct. Calling the local Hell's Kitchen cops was a coin toss on whether they worked for the city or the Kingpin.
"Alright, Mr. Impersonator," Peter said, firing a web line toward the roof. "If you're feeling chatty, we can talk about your boss on the flight over. Sound good?"