Peter felt like he had gone all the way back to the day his parents left him with Ben and May.
That day, they had brought him to Uncle Ben's house. After talking with his aunt and uncle for a while, they still hadn't told him why they were leaving. They had only said, "Listen to your uncle and aunt, okay?"
He remembered telling them that he had found something, that he knew they were in danger, and that he wanted to help.
"I know you're smart. Sometimes you don't seem like a twelve-year-old at all. But this isn't something a kid can help us with. Listen to Uncle Ben and Aunt May, all right?"
Peter couldn't quite remember how he had answered back then. He tried to think harder, but the blare of his alarm cut through the memory and pulled him back to the present.
Still groggy, he lifted a hand and hesitated for a second.
Then Ben's voice came from outside the door.
"Day five of successfully resisting morning grumpiness, Peter."
"Day six, Uncle Ben."
Peter lightly hit the alarm and sprang upright in bed. By then, Ben had already opened the door.
Ben Parker was a man in his early forties, a little broad around the middle, but still solidly built. He looked nothing like the elderly Uncle Ben from other universes.
"You got home too late last night. Your Aunt May does not want you turning bad right before high school starts, wandering around outside like some street punk."
"Did you tell her I got held up doing something?"
"Forgot the time again at the library? You're gonna need a better excuse next time."
Ben chuckled and closed the door, then added, "Move it. We've still got our morning run."
No matter what Spider-Man was like out there, Peter Parker was still just a fifteen-year-old high school kid.
Well, almost a high school kid.
"You guys do know high school here lasts four years, right? Fifteen to eighteen."
Used to talking to himself by now, Peter muttered as he got dressed, then hurried into the bathroom to wash up. He shoved the toothbrush into his mouth and kept talking around it.
"But you probably also don't know that Uncle Ben served in the military. He was in the Marine Corps. Did overseas deployments too. Pretty cool, right? I mean, wow."
Once he finished washing up, Peter started his morning workout.
He and Ben jogged five kilometers together, then came back for breakfast made by May.
The point of the run wasn't endurance training. It was to help Peter fake being normal. Otherwise, he could casually shatter world records.
Ben did more than help him practice acting like an ordinary person. As a retired Marine, he had taught Peter all kinds of useful things: battlefield observation, hand-to-hand combat, planning retreat routes, avoiding cameras, staying out of sight. Without all that training, Peter probably wouldn't have become what he considered a decent Spider-Man in just five months.
"So what happened yesterday?" Ben asked.
"You know. Swinging around the ruins in New York, finding criminals, wrapping them up, delivering them to the cops."
Ben's face was already reddening from the run, but Peter looked completely relaxed, barely even breathing hard while he talked.
"But smugglers like that are getting rarer now, Uncle Ben. It's already been over three months since the Battle of New York, and September's almost here. I might not have to keep checking those places much longer."
Ben let out a sigh. It was hard to tell whether he was frustrated that Damage Control still hadn't finished clearing the ruins after more than three months, or relieved that they finally seemed close.
His thoughts drifted back over everything that had happened lately.
More than five months ago, his nephew had gone to a science expo. When he came back, he started acting mysterious and constantly working on something in secret, keeping it from both him and May and making them worry for a long time.
Then one day, Peter had finally confessed the truth in an anxious rush. At the expo, a mutated radioactive spider had bitten him. He had gained spider-like powers: wall-crawling, enhanced jumping, danger sense, and physical abilities far beyond those of a normal person.
But no natural webs.
"I... I want to do something with it. Maybe I could be some kind of hero. Or maybe I could make money with it or something. What should I do, Uncle Ben?"
Ben had wanted to tell Peter, with great power comes great responsibility.
But he didn't.
Because Peter was still only fifteen. And Ben knew that being a superhero wasn't nearly as glamorous as the news made it sound. Just look at the monsters those people had to fight. It was dangerous beyond words.
And for a man without children of his own, Peter was his son in everything but name.
He didn't want to push him into danger.
So in the end, this was all he said:
"As long as you don't use that power to hurt people, Peter, I'll support whatever choice you make. And I believe May will too."
Some time later, there had been a fire near their neighborhood. Ben had gone with the neighbors to help put it out, and there he saw something he still could not forget.
Peter, all by himself, had jumped from a second-floor window carrying a child in his arms and brought her out alive.
"I... I was really scared, Uncle Ben."
Ben still remembered Peter trembling in the car afterward as he said it.
"There was fire everywhere. A beam collapsed and hit my arm. It still hurts. I... I didn't want to go in, Uncle Ben. But I heard that little girl crying. She wanted someone to save her."
"I could save her. I wasn't helpless. I was scared that if I went in, I might not make it back out... but if I could have saved her, and I didn't go, then what if she never made it out at all?"
Peter had lowered his head then, his voice shaking.
"I think that scared me even more. The idea of lying awake at night dreaming about all the people I could've saved, asking me why I didn't reach out."
Peter hadn't chosen to become Spider-Man because he simply wanted to help people.
He had chosen it because he was terrified of turning away from someone he had the power to save.
What drove him wasn't power.
It wasn't some savior complex.
It was the fear of facing the disappointment of those pleading for help while knowing he had done nothing.
In that moment, Ben Parker understood something.
His nephew could become the greatest hero in the world.
He worried that one day Peter might collapse under that weight, but he still chose to support him. So he pulled out every skill he still had from his days in the Marine Corps and started training his nephew, all the way up to the present.
Peter had shown his talent too.
He was brilliant, just like his late parents. He had even found clues in some of his father Richard's scattered notes, synthesized web fluid, and built his own web-shooters.
Yeah. The spider obsession definitely ran in the family.
"Maybe once the ruins are finally cleaned up, the smugglers will just disappear on their own. Then all I'll need to do is stop the occasional thief on the way to school and back, rescue a cat from a tree, that kind of thing..."
Running backward now, Peter glanced at his uncle, who seemed lost in thought.
"Uncle Ben?"
"Oh. Yeah, that'd be good. Then your Aunt May wouldn't have to worry about whether you're hanging around with some bad crowd."
"She knows I wouldn't."
Peter and Ben both laughed. Then Peter turned back around and ran alongside him.
"Once Grand Central is cleared out, how about we go get Turkish kebabs?"
Somewhere in a New York basement.
A man in his twenties with dreadlocks carried a bag into an unfinished building. It was his base of operations. Inside were a few thin mattresses, a desk lamp, and seven or eight associates.
"Here's today's take."
He split up the cash from the bag and handed it out. One of the guys asked, "Herman, how come there's less money every day?"
"Because there's less and less stuff left to pull out of the ruins, and fewer buyers too. Those A.I.M. guys pulled out last week, and even the people in Hell's Kitchen aren't buying much anymore. I've gotta find somebody else willing to take alien junk while risking a beating from Iron Man. And on top of that, we've got some freak in a web mask and spandex making trouble for us lately."
As soon as Herman finished, another one of his men complained, "You never should've held back part of the stash. Now we've got nowhere to sell it."
Instead of getting angry, Herman grinned.
"Listen up, boys. What's left in New York is valuable, but it isn't endless. We have to think ahead. I used to be the best safecracker in New York. Built the finest lock-breaking tools around."
"But now, thanks to our alien friends, I used the stock I held back to make something even better."
As he spoke, he pulled out a device shaped a bit like a gun. It wasn't too complicated. It had a blue energy chamber hooked up to a Chitauri power cell, along with a dial and a trigger.
"What is that thing?"
"A breach device. A shockwave generator. This dial controls the output. At setting one, it can knock a man off his feet."
Herman fired it at a concrete support nearby. An invisible burst of force slammed into it and made the pillar shudder.
"But if I turn it up to setting two..."
A harsh shriek rang out, and the concrete column shattered on the spot.
The room instantly lit up with excitement.
"What's the max setting?!"
"Never tested it. But if my math is right, blowing apart a whole building shouldn't be a problem. So I put in a safety limit. Highest it'll go is setting three."
The guys around him all let out impressed noises.
The best part was that Herman hadn't made just one.
He passed them out one by one until everyone was armed.
There were plenty of concrete pillars in the unfinished building. They could test the power of the new toys all they wanted.
And this was Herman's creation.
A breach device capable of opening any safe or vault door.
"Herman!" One of the men, fresh off testing the weapon, couldn't help laughing. "What's it called? Got a name?"
"Of course it does. It's the Shocker. Herman Schultz's Shocker."
Herman lifted one of the weapons, confidence written all over his face.
"Spider-freak, Avengers, doesn't matter. None of them are going to stop us. Soon all of New York, no, all of America, is going to know something."
He looked around at the men surrounding him, his voice growing sharper.
"The best engineer isn't always some decorated name from a university lab. Talent doesn't belong to one background, one school, or one kind of person."
"I, Herman Schultz, built something they can never copy."
"The Shocker."
(End of Chapter)
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