The storage room was exactly what it needed to be.
Rusty in places, solid in others, heavy objects distributed throughout in a way that suggested decades of accumulation rather than any particular plan.
He put his phone on and found a song for the occasion, dropped his bag near the wall, and stood in the center of the space.
"First," he said to no one in particular, "we work with what we know. Starting with the things that are probably already functioning well."
The spider-sense was the reason for that assumption.
The sixth sense — the ability that operated through the subconscious and processed threat information faster than conscious thought could manage.
In the comics it was something that could be developed through extreme training, the kind of training that Batman and the Punisher had put themselves through to operate at the edge of human capability. In his case it had arrived through genetic modification rather than years of discipline. The principle was the same. The result was the same. The implementation had just been faster and considerably more painful.
"Strength test," he said. "This one matters the most."
He walked to a concrete column near the center of the room. It was structural in the most minimal sense possible, supporting nothing that could not be supported by the walls alone.
He got into a standard boxing stance, measured the distance, and threw a punch.
The column cracked from the point of contact downward and split cleanly in half, both pieces hitting the floor in opposite directions.
Peter stepped back and looked at what he had done.
Then he crouched down and picked up half of the column. He lifted it without strain, held it at shoulder height, and threw it behind him. It traveled several meters before the far end dipped and the whole thing rolled to a stop against a large iron beam.
He looked at the beam. It was H-shaped and vertical, supporting nothing essential. He walked to it, measured up, and hit it with genuine force.
The beam bent into a rough C shape from the point of impact. He hit it again and the section came away from its mounting.
He picked it up and rested it across his shoulders.
It was heavier than the column. Not prohibitively heavier.
He stood with it for a moment, noted the difference in load, and set it down.
"Good," he said. "Tobey's version and Andrew's version were each capable of lifting in the range of ten tons. Tom's ceiling was somewhat lower, around five. The 616 version at his standard level sits around ten tons as well, though that ceiling has been exceeded considerably under emergency conditions — the classic example being the Master Planner incident, where he lifted machinery estimated at around twenty tons off himself with a cracked rib and near-complete exhaustion." He paused. "I cannot confirm my upper range without proper equipment. The abandoned train station visit goes on the agenda."
He rolled his shoulders. "Next. Wall-crawling."
He walked to the nearest wall and placed both hands flat against it.
Then he placed both feet.
He climbed. Slowly at first, then with increasing confidence as the sensation resolved itself into something his body understood without being told how. He stopped at the midpoint of the wall, roughly three meters up, and paused.
He had a hypothesis he wanted to test.
He shifted his weight, rotated his body, and began to move horizontally — not with his hands and feet on the wall, but with his entire body parallel to the floor, perpendicular to the wall's surface, walking along it as though gravity had simply decided to cooperate.
He made it to the far corner and stopped.
"Right," he said, from the ceiling and entirely comfortable about it.
"So that is the 616 version of the ability. Full-body adhesion rather than hands and feet only."
He considered this from the ceiling. "Tobey's wall-crawling works through a mental mutation — his brain can consciously control the flow of interatomic attraction between molecular boundaries, overriding the normal electron repulsion between surfaces. It is entirely neurological, no physical change to the skin itself. Andrew's version is different — he developed microscopic barbed spinnerets across his fingertips and the soles of his feet, a physical structural change that creates mechanical adhesion, similar to how a gecko's setae work but at a greater scale. Tom's version functions similarly to Tobey's, neural in origin, though less precisely documented."
He looked at his palm.
"The 616 version, after years of development, extended full-body adhesion to any surface on the body simultaneously. The working theory for why I have that version is the combination — Tobey's neurological control mechanism merged with Andrew's physical restructuring at the molecular boundary layer. The result is adhesion across any body surface with conscious override. Neither version alone produces this. Together they do."
He let go.
He dropped from the ceiling and landed in a low crouch that absorbed the impact without any particular effort, both hands touching the floor, the exact shape of a position that certain photographs of a certain Marvel character had made famous.
"Good," he said. "Durability confirmed. Anyone without conditioning would have fractured multiple bones in that fall and torn at least three muscle groups."
He stood. "Last test for today."
He went to his backpack, found a rubber ball, and positioned himself under a section of the ceiling that had several loose beams and hanging metal objects suspended from it by old chains of varying reliability. He found a lever attached to one of the chains and looked at it.
He threw the ball at the lever, closed his eyes, and listened.
The chains moved. Metal shifted. Something heavy began to fall, and then several somethings, in rapid succession.
He moved.
Not consciously. That was the thing about it. His body moved before his mind had issued any instruction to move, stepping and turning and leaning in patterns that were not planned but were completely correct, and the beams and hanging objects came down around him without touching him, each one passing through a space he had already vacated by the time it arrived.
He caught the ball before it hit him in the face.
He opened his eyes.
"Interesting," he said. "The spider-sense is operating on two distinct levels. The first is the involuntary physical response — the body moves before the conscious mind has processed the threat, which matches what Peter 1 and Peter 3 both demonstrated in their respective versions. It is not a decision. It is closer to a reflex that bypasses the normal neural pathway entirely and acts on its own authority." He paused. "The second layer is informational — a tingling at the base of the skull that functions as a directional warning, telling me where a threat is coming from without moving my body automatically. That layer is more like a tool I can choose to act on. The 616 version has both, and so, it seems, do I."
He looked at the scattered debris around him.
"I also heard the vibrations. The same sounds from the films, the ones that seemed strange until you understood what they were representing — the sense translating threat data into something the conscious mind could register. With the hearing range I appear to have inherited from Peter 3, the sensory input from all of this combined is going to require management. Daredevil built a lifetime of discipline around a lesser version of the same problem. I should start thinking about that sooner rather than later."
His alarm went off.
One hour to Baxter.
"Enough for today," he said. "Time to change."
He went to his bag, retrieved the clothes he had packed for the appointment, and got changed in the corner of the storage room. Before leaving he arranged the debris into something that looked less like the aftermath of a structural stress test.
....