That left Alex alone in the tunnel, watching Peter fight for real for the first time since the enhancement. He'd seen footage, analyzed data, calculated probabilities. Watching it happen live, close enough to feel the spray of displaced water with each impact, was different entirely.
The Lizard caught Peter with a glancing blow, sending him skidding across wet concrete. Peter rolled up fast, favoring his right arm slightly.
"Getting tired of this," Peter called out, breathing hard. "Curt! Come on, man, fight it! I know you're stronger than whatever this thing wants!"
The creature roared and charged again.
This time Peter didn't dodge fully. He let the Lizard's momentum carry them both into a rolling tangle of limbs, using the close contact exactly the way he and Alex had planned. His hand found the injector at his belt.
"Sorry about this," Peter muttered, and jammed the device against the exposed scaled skin of the creature's neck.
Click!
The injector fired its full payload directly into the Lizard's bloodstream.
The reaction was immediate and violent. The creature reared back, throwing Peter clear with a spasming convulsion that sent both of them tumbling in opposite directions.
ROOOAAAAAGH!
The roar tore through the tunnels, echoing off brick and concrete, more pain than rage now. The Lizard's massive form thrashed against the tunnel walls, scales rippling like something underneath was fighting to break free.
Alex watched, calculating, praying his seventy percent held true.
The transformation reversed in stages, not smooth or gentle but violent and wrenching. Scales receded in patches, revealing pale human skin underneath stretched taut over muscles still contracting with residual mutation. The elongated skull shortened, reptilian features collapsing inward toward something recognizably human.
Curt Connors collapsed onto the wet tunnel floor, naked and shaking, human once more.
Except.
His right arm, the one that had regrown fully formed and scaled during the transformation, was gone again. Vanished with the reversal, leaving only the familiar stump Alex remembered from before any of this started.
And along his shoulder and neck, where the arm used to connect, dark green scaling remained. Not the full transformation. Just patches, like scar tissue that had never quite reverted, a permanent mark of whatever had happened to his cellular structure.
'Partial reversion,' Alex thought, moving quickly toward the fallen man. 'The mutation isn't gone. Just suppressed. Contained rather than cured.'
Peter limped over, breathing hard, cradling his right arm where he'd clearly wrenched something during the fall. "Is he... is that him? Is he okay?"
"He's breathing. Unconscious, probably shock and exhaustion." Alex knelt beside Connors, checking his pulse, examining the remaining scaled patches with clinical focus even as urgency pushed at him. "We need to move him. Now, before Torres regroups and comes back down here with reinforcements."
"Where?"
"The old subway maintenance tunnel off Essex Street. We scouted it two weeks ago, remember? Sealed off from the active system, nobody checks it."
Peter nodded, wincing as he shifted his weight. "Right. I remember."
Together they got Connors upright, Peter taking most of the weight despite his own injuries, enhanced strength making the unconscious man's dead weight manageable. Alex grabbed a discarded tarp from the unit's abandoned equipment, wrapping it around Connors both for warmth and modesty as they moved.
The journey through connecting tunnels took twenty minutes, careful and quiet, Alex leading the way using his mental map of the sewer system while Peter carried their unconscious burden. They reached the sealed maintenance tunnel, an old subway construction remnant that predated the current system, dry and forgotten by everyone except the two of them who'd prepared it as exactly this kind of contingency weeks earlier.
Alex had stocked it with basic supplies during his enhanced planning phase. A cot. Blankets. Emergency medical kit. Bottled water. Enough to keep someone stable for a day or two while decisions got made about what came next.
They laid Connors on the cot, and Alex checked his vitals again. Pulse steady. Breathing regular. The green scaling along his shoulder pulsed faintly, almost like it was still alive in some way separate from the rest of him.
"Is he going to be okay?" Peter asked, finally sitting down hard against the tunnel wall, cradling his injured arm.
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