Rain. Sideways rain, the kind that finds every gap in your collar and runs down your back.
The alley behind the Regal Cinema smelled like rust and wet garbage. One streetlamp at the far end, flickering on and off, on and off. Oil puddles on the cracked asphalt. A movie ticket stub in the gutter, already turning to mush.
And blood. My father's blood, spreading across the ground, bright red, steaming in the cold air.
Dad was slumped against a dumpster. Both hands clamped over his right shoulder, blood pumping between his fingers every time his heart beat. His gray jacket was turning black with it. His face was gray. Ten seconds ago he was laughing about how terrible the movie was — the alien spaceship looked like a tin can, he kept saying, elbowing me, grinning — and now he was sitting in his own blood trying to breathe.
There was no slow motion. No sad music. Just a bang, a spray of red, and then everything was wrong.
I couldn't move.
Something warm hit my eye. I blinked. Wiped my face. My hand came away red.
Dad's blood. On my face.
"Leon—"
His hand grabbed my ankle. He was shaking so bad I could feel it through my shoe. He was trying to pull me behind him — trying to drag himself between me and them, with a bullet in his shoulder and no strength left in his legs.
"Run. Just — run —"
I looked up.
Three of them. Coming out of the dark part of the alley where the streetlamp couldn't reach, spreading out to block both sides. No rush. They already knew how this was going to go.
The front one had a revolver. Snub-nosed, cheap, still smoking. He was skinny, mid-thirties, hollowed-out face, wearing a stained hoodie two sizes too big. His eyes — I'll never forget his eyes. Yellow, glassy, completely flat. No anger. No excitement. Nothing. Just empty. A dog that had gone rabid so long ago it forgot what being normal felt like.
"Damn old man." He spat on the ground next to Dad's knee. Then the gun came up and pointed at my forehead. "Hey, kid. That watch on your wrist. And your wallet. Hurry up."
The two behind him spread wider. Big one had a fixed-blade knife, tapping it against his thigh. Skinny one had a switchblade — click-click, click-click — flicking it open and shut, grinning at me.
My knees buckled. I locked them straight but they kept trying to fold. My hands were shaking so hard I couldn't have grabbed anything even if I wanted to. My heart was going so fast it hurt. Every breath felt too short, too hot, not enough air.
Move. Do something. Grab Dad and run.
My legs wouldn't listen. My whole body had locked up. Sixteen years old and I was standing there shaking while my father bled out three feet away.
This is Marvel.
The thought cut through the panic, cold and clear. No Spider-Man swinging down to save us. Peter was three blocks away, headphones on, studying for his chemistry exam. He had no idea. Nobody had any idea. Nobody was coming.
Nobody ever comes for people like us.
"I said hurry up!"
The gunman stepped forward and smashed the butt of the revolver into my forehead.
My vision went white. Pain cracked above my right eye — sharp, wet, bad — and my knees finally gave. I caught myself on the dumpster, fingernails scraping rust. Blood started running down the side of my face.
"No!"
Dad came off the ground. I don't know how. He had a bullet in his shoulder and half his blood on the pavement, but he threw himself forward — teeth out, making a sound I'd never heard from him before, more animal than human — and kicked the gunman behind the knee.
The kick was nothing. Weak. Barely made the guy stumble.
But it pissed him off.
"You wanna die faster, old man?!"
The gunman caught his balance and spun around. The revolver swung off me and pointed straight at Dad's face. Three inches from the bridge of his nose. I could see the gunman's thumb pulling back the hammer. I could hear the click over the rain.
His finger curled around the trigger.
And then... everything slowed down.
I don't know how else to describe it. One second the world was moving at full speed and the next second I could count the raindrops hanging in the air. I could see the gunman's finger tightening on the trigger — the tendon standing out on the back of his hand, the knuckle going white.
And I could see Dad's face.
Gray. Twisted with pain. Those eyes — the ones that crinkled when he laughed, the ones that watched me learn to ride a bike and tie my shoes and throw a baseball — staring up at the barrel of a gun with this quiet, calm look that ripped my chest open.
He wasn't surprised.
He wasn't angry.
He'd accepted it. He was looking at that gun and he'd already made peace with dying. Right here. Right now. In a filthy alley in Queens, over a wallet and a watch.
The man who always told me "with great power comes great responsibility" — about to become a body on the ground.
Plot kill.
I knew what this was. I knew. I'd seen it play out a hundred times in a hundred different versions of this story. Ben Parker dies. Peter grieves. Spider-Man is born. That's the script. That's what's supposed to happen. My father — this real, breathing man who laughed at bad movies and smelled like popcorn and engine oil and carried me on his shoulders when I was little — he was supposed to be a plot device. A corpse with a moral lesson attached. A sacrifice so someone else could have a character arc.
To hell with the plot. To hell with every version of this story.
Not him. Not tonight. NOT EVER.
Something cracked inside my chest. I felt it — physically felt it — not a bone, something deeper, something I didn't know was there until it broke. Sixteen years of watching that death sentence float above my father's head. Sixteen years of trying to crack open this useless hunk of metal on my wrist. Sixteen years of plans and contingencies and desperate, pathetic hope— all of it compressed into a space too small to hold it, and the pressure finally won.
The wall broke.
And what came through was hot.
Not anger. Not adrenaline. Actual heat — real, physical, burning — erupting from the base of my spine and tearing up through my body. It hit my chest. Hit my shoulders. Hit the back of my skull and detonated.
BOOM.
Something blew open inside my head. Not pain — a shift. A lock breaking. A door I never knew existed ripping off its hinges.
And the watch on my left wrist — the dead, useless, cold piece of alien junk I'd been carrying since I was two years old — moved.
I felt it seize against my skin. A hard grinding shudder that rattled the bones all the way up to my shoulder. I looked down and the housing was splitting open — the core punching upward, rings of metal I'd never seen before fanning out, gears spinning in opposite directions, the whole mechanism alive and moving with a precision that made every piece of technology on Earth look like a toy.
Then the current hit.
It punched through my wrist and flooded my veins and I couldn't think anymore. Electricity — hot, searing, everywhere at once — racing through every nerve I had.
What the—
The alley was gone. Or no — it was still there, but something had been laid on top of it. Green. Streams of green data pouring down my field of vision, and behind the data everything had been stripped to wireframes and vectors and probability arcs branching off every moving thing in the alley.
The gun wasn't a gun anymore. It was a data point — distance, caliber, firing delay, weaknesses. The three men weren't men. They were threat profiles with legs.
And the fear — that gut-wrenching, knee-buckling terror that had been running my body for the last minute — was just... gone. I didn't push it down. I didn't power through it. It was gone.Deleted. Like someone reached into my brain and pulled it out by the roots.
What was left was... quiet. Clear. Cold. I was looking at the gunman and I wasn't scared of him. I wasn't scared of anything. I was looking at him the way you look at a math problem you already know the answer to.
[Target A — Armed. Distance: 2.3 meters. .38 caliber revolver. Firing delay: 0.4 seconds.][Weaknesses: Improper grip. Center of gravity shifted left. Worn firing pin.]
[Omnitrix restrictions lifted.][Recommended response: Annihilation.]
Annihilation.
I looked at my wrist. The Omnitrix core was blazing green — bright, way brighter than anything I'd ever seen it do, lighting up the whole alley, turning the rain green, throwing hard shadows on every wall. The hourglass symbol pulsed. Steady. Rhythmic. A heartbeat. The first one in fourteen years.
Time snapped back.
The gunman's finger went white on the trigger.
"Die, you old—"
He looked at me.
"My turn."
The kid wasn't scared.
That was the thing that made the mugger's finger freeze on the trigger. He'd pulled guns on dozens of people — men, women, kids — and fear always looked the same. Wide eyes, shaking hands, that flinch that said please don't.
This kid wasn't doing any of that. He was just standing there. Looking at him. Calm. Still. The way you'd look at a cockroach right before you crushed it under your shoe.
Something cold crawled down the mugger's spine. He didn't have words for it. Just instinct — old, animal, screaming from somewhere deep in his gut: wrong. Run. RUN.
He didn't run.
I raised my left hand. My right came over the dial. No shaking. No hesitation. My body moved with a certainty I'd never felt before — automatic, precise, mechanical.
CLACK.
The sound of the dial locking into place cut through the rain. Small. Crisp. Final.
BOOM—
Green light swallowed the alley.
Ben Parker threw his arm across his face.
This is it. The gun went off. I'm dying.
But there was no bullet. No pain. Just heat — a wall of it, slamming into him from the direction of his son, so intense his wet jacket started steaming on contact. The puddles around him didn't dry up — they blew up, erupting into columns of white steam that shrieked off the asphalt. The ground under his back went soft. The dumpster's paint bubbled and curled.
He forced one eye open.
The boy was gone. Where Leon had been standing, a pillar of green light blazed so bright it bleached the alley walls white. Inside it, something was growing — a shape, massive, broad, burning. The rain was bending around it. Every drop that got close hissed into vapor three feet out, and a column of steam twisted upward into the black sky.
"MY EYES! I can't — I can't—"
"IT BURNS! What the — what the HELL—"
The two remaining muggers were stumbling backward, hands over their faces, screaming. The lead gunman had dropped to his knees, clawing at his own eyes, the revolver forgotten on the ground.
The green light faded.
The steam swirled and parted.
And Ben Parker forgot how to breathe.
I couldn't hear the screams at first. Then the transformation settled and the sound came rushing in.
I looked at my hands.
They weren't my hands.
Massive. Made of rock — dark, cracked, with lines of liquid fire running through every gap. I could feel the magma moving under my skin, pulsing with my heartbeat, gold and red and alive. I turned my hand over. The palm was wider than a dinner plate. Cracks ran across it, glowing, leaking heat I could actually see rising in waves.
I looked up. Everything was taller — no. I was taller. Way taller. Eight, nine feet. I could see the top of the dumpster without tilting my head.
The rain was dying above me. Every drop that got close hissed out of existence. The air above my head was a constant column of rising steam.
I could feel the fire. Not on my skin — as my skin. I was made of it. Volcanic rock and magma and flame, and it felt... right. Powerful. Complete. The most natural thing I'd ever felt in my life.
Something caught my eye. Dad. Sitting in a puddle of his own blood, staring up at me, his mouth open, his eyes wide and blank.
It's me, Dad. I'm still in here.
( Img here )
I wanted to say it. But the words that came out of my mouth weren't my voice. They were deep — deep enough to feel in my chest, deep enough to rattle the dumpster — grinding, rumbling, the sound of rock breaking.
I raised my burning hand. Turned it toward the gunman. Tilted my head.
"Which hand was holding the gun just now?"