Under the combined pull of Peter and Gwen, Fangtooth Harrison was dragged flying backward and crashed into a large bus hard enough to leave it completely wrecked.
"You keep him busy for a bit. I'm going to check on them!"
Peter was in a terrible mood.
His best friend had been hurt.
And worse, it was because of him.
If he had not blasted Fangtooth Harrison over here with the electromagnetic pulse cannon, Harry would not have been injured. If he had listened to MJ, gotten them out first, and then sneaked back alone, Harry would not have been injured either.
At that moment, something called guilt rose in Peter's heart.
He had sworn that no one around him would be hurt because of him.
And yet in the end, he had still broken that promise.
"Harry, are you okay?!"
The moment Peter got a good look at Harry's wound, he sucked in a sharp breath.
Half of Harry's arm had turned dark, and it was already starting to shrivel. Blackened flesh had curled outward, and even the bone seemed to be discoloring.
Peter fired two strands of webbing around the wound and wrapped it tightly. The web fluid had a mild numbing effect, which could temporarily slow the spread of the toxin.
Right now, Peter was furious.
Mostly at himself.
MJ was crying so hard she was barely holding herself together. A moment ago, she had thought she was done for.
Harry had saved her.
"Ah... damn... Wraith Spider-Man, I didn't expect you to actually know me. I... ah... I'm your number one fan!"
Harry forced those words out through the pain with a strained smile.
And somehow, those words hit Peter even harder than the slap Gwen had given him earlier.
Gwen's slap had hit his face.
Harry's words hit straight at his heart.
Were Peter and Harry friends in every universe?
And in every universe, did Harry become Spider-Man's fan too?
"M.J., I told you I'm Harry Totally Reliable, didn't I? Pretty reassuring, right? Hey... don't cry..."
Even though he was clearly in agony, Harry still could not resist trying to look cool in front of a pretty girl.
But at least it made MJ laugh through her tears.
"Hey, MJ, right? That's what I heard him call you. Take Harry to the hospital right now. We've got this here."
Peter spoke firmly.
"No way. My friend Peter and his girl are still in there."
Harry twitched at the corner of his mouth.
Seeing him still able to joke at a time like this let Peter relax just a little.
"You two go first. Treating the wound is the priority. If that guy named Peter comes out, I'll tell them where to find you."
In the end, after Peter insisted, Harry and MJ finally headed off toward the hospital.
...
Just as Peter expected, the earlier electromagnetic pulse blast had already left Fangtooth seriously injured. The only reason he had flared back up just now was because the water had boosted him.
Now that he was away from the water, his condition was dropping fast.
At this point, Gwen could handle him on her own without much trouble.
And Fangtooth Harrison's state clearly was not stable anymore. It looked like his two personalities were alternating back and forth, and he had started talking to himself.
"You hurt Harry?! Why did you go after my classmate?!"
"Flash, is that any way to speak to your father?!"
"You're dead already! You're not my father!"
"Didn't you always believe your father was a righteous police officer..."
"But even when he was a bastard, he never would have gone after ordinary people, even if he was a violent cop!!!"
One voice was calm.
The other was furious.
The two personalities kept switching back and forth.
"That guy snapped from the pressure?" Peter asked as he came over to Gwen.
Gwen shook her head and said nothing.
From what he had just heard, she had already figured out who the monster in front of them really was.
It was their classmate.
Flash.
Because Flash's father, Harrison, had once been her father's colleague. But due to repeated complaints about the way he handled law enforcement, he had lost his position long ago.
And just now, the monster had called himself Flash.
That was Flash's real name.
Looking at Fangtooth punching himself in the face, Peter could not even tell which personality was in control anymore.
But he had already figured out the monster's identity a long time ago. Bare feet, torn pants... if he still could not tell this was Flash, then he honestly needed glasses.
That was why Peter had held back from using lethal force.
But once that other personality took over, the attacks had gotten far too brutal.
So Peter had no choice except to respond with the same kind of force.
It seemed that Flash's own personality had taken control again. He looked toward Peter and Gwen.
"Subdue me. Hurry. I don't want to hurt anyone else. I don't want to hurt anyone..."
Peter could see the pain on his face.
Flash always acted like a school bully, but Peter knew that was just one way he protected himself. A kind of self-defense mechanism.
Peter nodded.
He fired two electric web lines directly into Fangtooth's wounds and discharged the current, finally sending him crashing unconscious to the ground.
And as soon as Fangtooth fully blacked out, the monstrous body began to disappear, slowly reverting back to a human form.
His body was covered in wounds.
Some were fresh.
Some were old.
The old scars came from when his father had cut him with broken beer bottles as a child.
The new ones came from the fight just now.
Peter drew in a slow breath.
He could not even imagine everything Flash must have gone through before this. Still, he fired out two more strands of webbing to temporarily stop the bleeding from the newer wounds, then turned to Gwen.
"I'm leaving him to you. Please explain it clearly to the police. This boy looks like he was used in some kind of human experiment and lost control of himself. That should reduce his charges at least a little."
"Yeah. Got it..."
Gwen nodded.
Peter swung all the way home, climbed up to the second floor, slipped back into his room through the window, and locked the door behind him.
Right now, he really needed quiet.
Everything was already developing in a way completely different from what he knew.
In the Spider-Gwen comics he had read before, Flash never turned into something like this, and Harry definitely never got hurt.
Could all of this really be nothing more than the butterfly effect caused by him changing his own fate?
Peter took off his suit, stood in front of the mirror, and let out a long sigh.
There was barely a patch of him left that was not injured.
The right side of his face was swollen high. His left eye was bruised. There was blood at the corner of his mouth and beneath his nose. His body was marked all over with tiny embedded fragments of metal.
Those were from when he had been smashed into the car and the broken pieces had punched into his skin.
For an ordinary person, injuries like this could have been fatal.
But for a mutant, they were not enough to be life-threatening.
Luckily, the shards had only gone into the skin and had not reached the muscle. Otherwise, who knew what kind of lasting damage he might have been left with?
Using his powers carefully, Peter made the muscles under his skin expand outward, forcing the bits of metal out one by one.
The scene looked like a lesser version of Wolverine.
Of course, Peter's healing factor was nowhere near Wolverine's. Small wounds were one thing, but he absolutely did not believe he could recover from having his head chopped off or being cut in half.
Not everyone was like Deadpool, able to regenerate from practically anything after being carved to pieces and unable to die even if he wanted to.
Peter valued his life very much.
To him, throwing away your life for heroism in some grand noble gesture was idiotic.
It was not that he was unwilling to give something up.
It was that he wanted to choose who he would give it up for.
Peter opened the first-aid kit on the desk, disinfected his wounds with alcohol, and wrapped a few bandages around them.
Then he looked at his suit, now battered beyond repair, and tossed it straight into the trash.
There was no special reason.
He just still had three more identical suits hanging in his closet.
Peter always planned ahead.
[Ding. Host has successfully stopped an antihero from falling into criminal ruin. Reward: Level 3 Treasure Chest! Additional one-fifth Tobey Spider-Man abilities!]
The system reward did not excite Peter much.
His mind was already racing ahead.
Which meant that in the future, Flash would probably become someone aligned with the antihero camp.
So... could he bring him onto his side?
(End of Chapter)
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