Four days had passed since the Oscorp infiltration.
Peter had spent all of them in the lab.
He had also, at some point during the second day, decided to stop attending school entirely for the duration, citing illness to May because May was the only person whose reaction to the decision actually required management.
Everyone else would assume what they assumed and he would deal with the consequences later.
May had not been happy about it.
She had also understood, because she had spent enough weeks watching him work to know the difference between avoidance and necessity, and she had ended up supporting him in the specific way of someone who disagrees with a decision but respects the person making it.
Cortana had made him take a break on the fifth day.
Not suggested. Made.
She had locked the primary research interfaces and informed him that the human brain required periodic rest to consolidate information effectively and that she would unlock them again in six hours, and that was the end of the discussion.
He had spent those six hours with May, which had been good for both of them, and then gone back to work.
The research on all three fronts, nanotechnology, the modified spiders, and the serum, had reached the point where Cortana could advance the procedural elements independently while he slept, which was how the word independently was supposed to be used in the context of AI development rather than as a euphemism for unsupervised.
He monitored everything.
He simply no longer needed to be physically present for every step.
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Wednesday. Around midnight.
Somewhere near a dock on the industrial side of Queens.
The warehouse was the kind of building that had been useful for legitimate purposes at some point in the past and had been repurposed for less legitimate ones gradually enough that the transition had never required any single dramatic decision.
Peter had found it after arresting a gang involved in illegal substance distribution four days earlier, during which he had extracted the location from one of the members through a conversation that had been persuasive in proportion to how much the member in question wanted to keep his fingers in their current configuration.
The cleaner members of that gang were in a hospital.
The less clean ones had not made it to a hospital.
He was inside the warehouse now, on a beam above the main floor, watching two sets of people move in two different directions.
The larger group was loading boxes into vehicles near the main doors.
The smaller group, dressed differently, was heading toward a secondary section of the building with noticeably more security than the primary area.
He followed the second group.
The ventilation system gave him access to the section they were heading to without announcing his presence.
He moved through it and opened a hatch slowly to look down at what was below, and what was below made something cold and precise settle into place behind his eyes.
Girls. Several of them.
Locked in cages with the specific worn-down quality of people who have been in those cages long enough to have stopped believing anything was coming.
He closed the hatch and moved along the duct toward the nearest guard position, stopping when he was directly above two men in conversation.
"It is a shame they have to leave the country tomorrow," the first one said. "Good merchandise."
"Direct orders from the Kingpin," the second said.
"You saw what happened to the man who almost talked to the police."
'Of course,' Peter thought. 'The Kingpin's operation. If it were not for Murdock eventually and me right now, a great many people in this city would have no recourse at all.'
"They killed his entire family in front of him," the first one said. "Raped his wife while he watched."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I was the one who did it." A laugh. "very throughly."
Peter waited exactly long enough to confirm there was nothing more relevant coming, then dropped.
The first man's neck broke before he finished falling.
The second one opened his mouth and Peter put a metal rod through his chest with the precision of someone who had studied anatomy for exactly this kind of situation, driving it through the sternum and into the cardiac muscle.
A third man rounding the corner witnessed this and had approximately two seconds to process it before the rod came back and he suffered the same fate.
Three fewer.
He moved the bodies into an empty crate, noted the bloodstains on the floor with the calm recognition that concealment was now partial at best, and began working through the building systematically.
He left the girls where they were.
Allowing them out now would introduce variables he could not control, specifically people making noise, and the priority was clearing the facility before extraction.
The police would handle the rest.
He worked through the criminal population of the warehouse the way a person works through a to-do list, methodically and without wasted motion, and when the last one was done he moved to the other side of the building to address the smuggling operation.
From a beam above the main floor he activated the mask's zoom function and watched a man open one of the boxes.
The man produced a stuffed rabbit, opened it, and removed a small bag of white powder which he put in his own pocket.
Drugs.
Concealed in children's toys, which was a specific kind of choice that said something clear about the people making it.
He was about to move when the approach of headlights through the warehouse's side windows stopped him.
A patrol car.
He watched the officer get out and approach the operation with the specific body language of someone who was not there to make arrests.
The officer looked into an open box, saw the stuffed animals, and smiled.
"Continue," the officer said.
Peter settled back into the shadows and revised his approach.