Respawned in Marvel: The Ultimate Hunter System - Chapter 14

Chapter 14 — Predator and Prey

The air in the subterranean labyrinth beneath Manhattan was thick, humid, and heavy with the suffocating stench of decaying organic matter and stagnant water. It was a world entirely divorced from the glittering skyline above, a dark, echoing void where the city’s refuse went to be forgotten.

Peter Parker clung to the slick brickwork of the ceiling, completely still.

He was fully suited in his makeshift red-and-blue armor, the fabric damp from the condensation dripping down the curved walls. His breathing was shallow, controlled, as his large, white, mirrored lenses pierced the gloom, scanning the shadows below.

The guilt was a physical weight in his chest, far heavier than the humid air. Every echoing drop of water sounded like a ticking clock. It was his fault. That was the inescapable, agonizing truth that had driven him down into the darkness. Dr. Curt Connors, a brilliant man who had just wanted to heal the world, was gone, replaced by a nine-foot-tall reptilian monstrosity. And Peter had handed him the keys to his own destruction.

The Decay Rate Algorithm.

Peter closed his eyes behind the mask. He had solved the equation. He had written it on that whiteboard at Oscorp, eager to impress, eager to prove his intellect. He hadn’t stopped to consider the volatile nature of cross-species genetics. He hadn’t thought about what would happen if a desperate man injected untested, aggressive reptilian DNA into his own veins.

Now, a giant lizard was tearing New York apart, and the blood of every victim—including the people on the Williamsburg Bridge last night—was on Peter’s hands.

He shifted slightly, his specialized fingertips adhering to the slime-coated bricks. He had to find Connors. He had to stop him before the death toll climbed any higher.

But as Peter moved deeper into the tunnel junction, something strange began to happen.

A cold, primal chill washed over him. It wasn’t his usual ‘Spider-Sense’—the sharp, electric buzzing that warned him of a flying fist or an incoming bullet. This was different. This was deeper. It was a cold, paralyzing dread that seemed to seep directly into his DNA, a biological whisper echoing from millions of years of evolution.

Prey.

Spiders were predators to flies, to insects, to the small things caught in their webs. But to a reptile? To a lizard? A spider was nothing but a meal. It was an ingrained, biological enmity. The spider venom in Peter’s blood was suddenly recoiling in the presence of an apex predator.

Peter swallowed hard, trying to shake the irrational terror gripping his limbs. He reached into his belt and pulled out his camera. If he couldn’t reason with Connors, he needed proof. He needed photographs of the lair, of the equipment, something he could give to Captain Stacy anonymously. He carefully adhered the camera to a high pipe, setting the interval timer to flash every ten seconds.

Click. A burst of white light illuminated the cavernous sewer.

Empty.

Click.

Empty.

Peter dropped down to a catwalk, his boots splashing silently into a puddle. He strained his ears. He was hunting a monster.

He didn’t realize the monster had been hunting him.

The Spider-Sense didn’t buzz; it screamed. It felt like an ice pick driven directly into the base of his skull.

Peter threw himself forward just as the darkness above him exploded.

Two massive, scaled feet slammed into the steel catwalk where Peter had been standing a fraction of a second prior. The steel didn’t just bend; it sheared completely off its concrete moorings with a deafening screech, plunging into the rushing grey water below.

Peter twisted mid-air, firing a webline to the opposite wall, but before the webbing could even attach, a massive, thick green tail whipped through the air with the speed of a striking cobra.

The impact was like being hit by a freight train.

The tail slammed into Peter’s ribs, launching him across the thirty-foot span of the tunnel. He crashed into the brick wall with a sickening crack, the impact cratering the ancient masonry. Dust and mortar rained down on him as he fell onto the narrow concrete walkway beside the water.

Peter gasped, the wind completely knocked out of his lungs. He looked up, his vision swimming.

Standing in the center of the tunnel, illuminated by the dim, flickering emergency lights, was Dr. Curt Connors. But the doctor was buried deep beneath layers of impenetrable dark green scales. The Lizard stood nine feet tall, his jaw unhinged in a low, vibrating hiss that rattled the water in the channel.

“You are a long way from the sky, little bug,” the Lizard rumbled, the voice a grotesque, distorted echo of the brilliant scientist Peter knew. The creature hadn’t recognized him. To the Lizard, this was just the masked nuisance from the bridge.

“Dr. Connors, please!” Peter yelled, forcing himself up to his feet, ignoring the throbbing pain in his side. “This isn’t you! The serum is altering your brain chemistry! It’s making you aggressive!”

The Lizard laughed—a terrifying, barking sound. “Aggressive? No, I am finally thinking clearly. You swing around trying to save a broken city, playing the hero. But humanity doesn’t need a hero to catch them when they fall. They need to be cured of their frailty so they never fall again!”

The Lizard lunged.

The sheer speed of the massive creature defied physics. Peter’s danger sense flared, and he backflipped off the wall just as the Lizard’s razor-sharp claws carved three deep trenches into the solid concrete where his head had been.

Peter landed, his muscles coiled, and launched himself back like a fired cannonball. His strength was phenomenal—thirty-two tons of raw kinetic force compressed into a teenage frame. He drove a right hook directly into the Lizard’s jaw.

The shockwave of the blow rippled the stagnant water. It was a punch that would have turned a normal man’s skull into powder.

The Lizard’s head snapped to the side. For a split second, Peter thought he had staggered him.

Then, the creature slowly turned his head back, his yellow, slit-pupil eyes locking onto Peter’s lenses. The jaw clicked back into place instantly, the bruised tissue under the scales regenerating in the blink of an eye. His healing factor was at least a hundred times faster than Peter’s.

“My turn,” the Lizard hissed.

A massive, clawed hand shot out, grabbing Peter by the throat. Peter choked, desperately grabbing the creature’s wrist, his super-strength fighting against the Lizard’s grip. But the biological math was brutal. Thirty-two tons of force was fighting against forty tons of evolved reptilian muscle. Peter’s boots scraped backward across the concrete as he was lifted off his feet entirely.

The Lizard slammed him into the ceiling, dragging him across the brickwork before hurling him down the tunnel. Peter skipped across the surface of the rushing water like a stone, crashing into a heavy iron maintenance grate.

Every alarm bell in Peter’s nervous system was blaring. He was outmatched in raw power, and his enemy couldn’t be broken by blunt force.

Agility, Peter thought frantically, spitting blood into the mask. Keep moving. Don’t let him grab you.

The Lizard charged down the tunnel, splashing through the water like a terrifying torpedo. Peter fired two web-shooters, blinding the creature’s yellow eyes, then vaulted over the massive head, planting both feet on the Lizard’s shoulders and launching himself toward the maintenance shaft leading upward.

“You can’t run, insect!” the Lizard roared, tearing the webbing from his face.

“Spiders are arachnids, Doc!” Peter yelled back, firing a web line up the vertical shaft. “And I’m not running, I’m just changing the venue!”

Peter rocketed up the narrow concrete pipe, the Lizard right behind him. The sound of the creature’s claws tearing into the concrete as he climbed was deafening. Peter reached the top, planting his back against the iron manhole cover, and kicked upward with every ounce of strength he had left.

—

On the streets of midtown Manhattan, the evening traffic was heavy. Taxis honked, pedestrians hurried along the sidewalks with umbrellas, completely unaware of the war raging beneath their feet.

Suddenly, a three-hundred-pound cast-iron manhole cover erupted from the asphalt like a mortar shell, soaring fifty feet into the night sky.

A geyser of water and shattered concrete followed, and Spider-Man vaulted out of the hole, landing heavily on the hood of a yellow taxi. The driver screamed, slamming on the brakes.

Before the pedestrians could even process the masked vigilante, the street exploded outward.

The Lizard burst from the asphalt, roaring into the rainy night. The sheer size of the creature in the city lights was terrifying. A woman on the sidewalk screamed, dropping her groceries. Drivers abandoned their cars, sprinting away in sheer panic.

“Leave them alone, Connors!” Peter yelled, leaping off the taxi and firing a barrage of web bullets at the creature’s chest.

The Lizard ignored the webbing, his massive tail sweeping out and catching the side of a parked delivery van. The van flipped over completely, skidding across the wet pavement directly toward a group of fleeing civilians.

“No!” Peter didn’t think. He dove, putting himself between the sliding three-ton van and the terrified pedestrians. He planted his feet, caught the sliding metal frame with his bare hands, and roared as the tires ground against the asphalt. He stopped the van inches from a screaming family.

But the heroic distraction cost him dearly.

The Lizard was on him instantly. The creature tackled Peter into the side of the van, the metal buckling inward around them. Before Peter could react, the Lizard’s claws raked violently across Peter’s chest.

The reinforced fabric of the suit tore like wet paper. Four deep, bloody lacerations opened across Peter’s torso.

Peter screamed in agony, his vision flashing white. He kicked out wildly, catching the Lizard in the chest and pushing him back just enough to create space. Peter scrambled backward, clutching his bleeding chest, his breath coming in ragged, wet gasps.

The Lizard advanced slowly, his yellow eyes filled with cold, predatory triumph. He tasted the blood in the air.

“Fragile,” the Lizard hissed, savoring the word. “You are just as breakable as the rest of them. Let me end your suffering.”

Peter’s danger sense was going dark, his body going into shock from the blood loss. He looked at the creature, then at the terrified civilians scrambling into alleys. He couldn’t win this. If he stayed, he would die right here on the asphalt. And if he died, there was no one left to stop Connors.

Desperation, raw and bitter, flooded his veins.

“Not today,” Peter choked out.

He fired a webline blindly into the rainy sky, catching the corner of a high-rise office building. He pulled himself up with a violent jerk, his wounded chest screaming in protest. He didn’t swing gracefully. He moved erratically, desperately, hauling his battered body higher and higher into the storm, vanishing into the mist and shadows of the skyscrapers.

The Lizard let out a deafening, frustrated roar that shattered the glass of the nearby street lamps. He jumped, his claws digging into the brickwork of a building, attempting to pursue. But the spider was too fast in the air, his silhouette already lost in the low-hanging clouds.

The sirens were growing louder now. Red and blue police lights were approaching from every intersection.

The Lizard sneered at the approaching vehicles. His work was not done. He dropped back down to the street, slipping seamlessly back into the shattered crater in the asphalt, descending once more into his dark kingdom.

—

The sewers were quiet again, save for the rush of water.

The Lizard waded through the destruction he and the spider had caused. Bent steel, shattered brick, floating debris. His mind, heavily influenced by the reptilian serum, felt a strange sense of clarity. The spider was a threat, yes. But a fragile one. A wound like that would take the mammal weeks to heal, if he survived the night at all.

As the Lizard walked past a large, dented drainage pipe, his massive foot stepped on something that crunched sharply.

He paused, looking down.

Sitting in the shallow water, its lens shattered and its flash mechanism destroyed, was a silver camera.

The Lizard reached down with a scaled, talon-tipped hand, delicately picking up the broken device. He brought it up to his eyes, the vertical pupils narrowing as they focused on the small, scratched metal plate riveted to the bottom casing.

PROPERTY OF PETER PARKER.

The Lizard stood perfectly still. The ambient sound of the water seemed to fade away.

Inside the monster’s mind, the brilliant, fragmented intellect of Dr. Curt Connors suddenly surged forward.

Peter.

The quiet, brilliant boy who had sat in his office. The boy who had carried his father’s briefcase. The boy who had looked at the incomplete Decay Rate Algorithm on the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and flawlessly finished a genetic equation that had stumped Oscorp’s finest minds for a decade.

The boy who had given him the formula.

The Lizard let out a low, vibrating hiss that was half-amusement, half-tragedy. It made perfect sense. The agility, the strength, the intellect required to build those web-shooters. It wasn’t some random vigilante. It was the son of Richard Parker.

The brilliant boy had created the monster, and the monster had almost killed the boy. It was poetry, in a sick, twisted, reptilian way.

The Lizard crushed the camera into dust within his massive fist, letting the silver fragments fall into the rushing water.

“We will have to talk, Peter,” the Lizard whispered to the darkness. “We have so much work to do.”

—

The rain was falling heavily over Queens, drumming against the roof of the Stacy residence.

Gwen Stacy paced the length of her bedroom, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. The television in the corner was muted, the screen flashing the breaking news ticker: MONSTER ATTACKS MIDTOWN – VIGILANTE SPIDER-MAN INVOLVED – MASSIVE DAMAGE.

She chewed on her lower lip, glancing at her phone lying on the bed. No new messages.

“Where are you, Peter?” she whispered to the empty room.

He had missed her birthday party entirely. He hadn’t been in school for two days. Every time they were supposed to meet, he had an excuse, or he simply vanished. The sweet, stuttering boy she had fallen for was slipping through her fingers like sand, hiding behind a wall of secrets she couldn’t break through.

First the bridge. Now midtown. The city felt like it was falling apart, and the person she wanted to talk to the most was completely unreachable. She sat down on the edge of her bed, burying her face in her hands. The stress of the last twenty-four hours was finally catching up to her.

Thump.

Gwen froze.

It was a wet, heavy sound, coming from her bedroom window.

She stood up slowly, her heart suddenly hammering against her ribs. She approached the window, the rain blurring the glass. Outside, clinging to the brick siding of her house, was a dark silhouette.

Gwen gasped, taking a step back. But then, a trembling hand reached up, pressing against the wet glass.

She rushed forward and unlocked the latch, throwing the window upward.

Spider-Man practically fell into the room.

He collapsed onto her carpeted floor, shivering violently. He was soaked in rain and sewer water, but that wasn’t what made Gwen scream. The front of his red-and-blue suit was shredded. Four massive, horrifying gashes ran across his torso, the fabric soaked in dark, heavy blood.

“Oh my god,” Gwen breathed, dropping to her knees beside him, her hands hovering over his wounds, terrified to touch him. “Oh my god. Stay still. I’m calling my dad, I’m calling an ambulance—”

“No,” a weak, raspy voice groaned from beneath the mask.

A gloved hand, shaking violently, reached out and caught her wrist. The grip was weak, but the plea in the touch was desperate.

“No hospitals,” the vigilante choked out. “No cops. Please.”

Gwen stared at the mirrored white lenses. Her mind was spinning. Why was he here? Out of all the houses in Queens, why had the city’s mysterious vigilante crashed through her window?

The vigilante slowly, agonizingly, reached up with both hands. He grabbed the fabric at the base of his neck, and with a wet tearing sound, he pulled the mask off his head.

The mask fell to the floor.

Gwen’s breath hitched in her throat. The world completely stopped.

Lying on her floor, his face bruised, pale, and slick with sweat and rain, his brown hair matted to his forehead, was Peter Parker.

“Peter?” Gwen whispered. The name felt foreign on her tongue in this context. Her brain simply refused to process the image. The shy, brilliant boy who sat next to her in chemistry… was the masked vigilante fighting monsters on the evening news?

Peter looked up at her, his brown eyes filled with an agonizing mixture of physical pain and profound, vulnerable sorrow.

“I’m sorry,” Peter whispered, a single tear mixing with the rain on his bruised cheek. “I… I didn’t know where else to go.”

Gwen didn’t speak. She couldn’t. The pieces of the puzzle that had been driving her insane for weeks suddenly slammed together with deafening clarity.

I’m so sorry I’m late, Gwen. Traffic was crazy.
I can’t make it to dinner, my aunt needs me.
I forgot about the party.

He hadn’t been ignoring her. He hadn’t been losing interest. While she had been sitting in the cafeteria worrying about his distance, he had been out in the night, throwing himself in front of sliding vans. He had been bleeding for the city.

The anger she had felt earlier completely evaporated, replaced by a crushing wave of awe and terror. The boy she loved was carrying the weight of the entire world on his shoulders, and it was literally tearing him apart.

“You…” Gwen started, her voice breaking. She looked at his chest, at the horrific claw marks, then back to his face. “Peter, you’re… you’re Spider-Man.”

Peter managed a weak, painful, self-deprecating smile. “Surprise.”

He let out a sharp gasp, his eyes rolling back slightly as another wave of pain washed over him. He slumped against the floor, his breathing turning shallow and ragged.

“Hey! Hey, stay with me!” Gwen panicked, the shock fading into pure, adrenaline-fueled medical necessity. Her father was a police captain; she knew basic trauma care.

She jumped up, rushing to her bathroom and returning seconds later with a massive first-aid kit, towels, and rubbing alcohol.

“This is going to hurt,” Gwen said, her voice shaking but determined as she kneeled beside him, pressing a clean towel firmly against the deepest laceration on his chest to staunch the bleeding.

Peter cried out, his back arching off the floor, his hand gripping the leg of her bedframe so hard the wood splintered.

“I know, I know,” Gwen hushed him, tears finally spilling over her cheeks, mixing with the rain on his suit. “I’m sorry. I’ve got you. Just focus on me, Peter. Look at me.”

Peter forced his eyes open, locking onto her tear-streaked face.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered, working quickly, her hands stained with his blood. “Why did you carry this alone?”

“Because,” Peter grunted, his teeth gritted in agony. “Because if I told you… the monster comes for you. And I… I couldn’t live in a world where you got hurt because of me.”

Gwen stopped for a fraction of a second, looking down into his eyes. The sheer depth of his sacrifice, the terrifying reality of the life he had chosen, settled over her. She wasn’t just dating a smart boy anymore. She was holding a soldier bleeding out on her bedroom floor.

“Well,” Gwen said softly, wiping a smear of blood off his cheek with her thumb. “You’re not alone anymore, Peter Parker. Not ever again.”