1.

The sun had set two hours ago. People were arriving home from work or were going out on a date with their significant other. Others were skulking in the shadows silently looking for trouble or an opportunity to take part in said trouble. For roughly a year, those of the criminal element took full opportunity of the freedom afforded them by the supposed death of a certain wall crawler. That freedom was soon revoked as a new arachnid themed vigilante made his presence known. This one was darker, less friendly, and made it perfectly clear to those whose paths he crossed that he was the only web slinger to be afraid of.

His days were spent preparing for when he would go out on nightly patrols around Queens by working out in his attic bedroom. Where it was once suitable for an ordinary teenage boy, Peter Parker had changed it into an area suitable for an at home gym. Weights were stacked in the corner. A metal bench took its place towards the back of the room and was bolted to the floor. Mats lay on the floor with evidence of being heavily used. A small area was marked out for various scientific equipment and chemicals with pieces of metal lying on a table ready to be assembled into his signature wrist mounted weapons. In fact, the entire room looked to be a training area for a reclusive crime fighter with the only thing missing is a cave to put it all in. Now, the occupier of said room silently sat atop a small church at the far end of the area known as Queens, New York, resembling one of the many stone gargoyles found around the large metropolis of a city.

Donned in a blue and red outfit, the young man known as Peter Parker squatted down in front of a large white cross with the hood of his upper gray garment drawn over his head. The blue areas of his costume merged with the darkness around him with the red highlights making for a sinister appearance and were the only thing to stick out in the blackness of the night. Large, angry, white eyes shimmered with reflective light as he slowly turned his head this way and that. His breath filtered out of his mask causing no fog whatsoever to build up on the inside of his lenses. The exterior mechanical web shooters he wore caused his index and middle fingers to itch in anticipation of using them, but he had to sit and wait. He was on the hunt on this particular night, a hunt that could only end with him as the top predator in the city.

A tingle occurred in the back of his head. Immediately, he knows he is needed by someone at least three blocks away to his left. Opening his eyes under his mask, he raises his head until he's looking straight ahead. Standing up to his full height, the vigilante known as Scarlet Spider, leaps off his perch and fires a webline to snag a streetlamp to swing off into the night.

Buildings pass under him and the street becomes a dark gray blur as swoops through the neighborhood. It's a far cry from the city he used to patrol nightly but given the circumstances, as well as a certain someone still being angry at him for being caught in a compromising position with his girlfriend a week earlier, he was making the best of his situation. A car or two came to a screeching stop when he swung by with their drivers looking on at the red, blue, and gray blur overhead in an attempt to make out what it is, only to be yelled at to get out the way and move on with their night time plans.

Reaching a part of the neighborhood where it was harder to swing from streetlamps, Scarlet Spider began to fire weblines ahead of him to zip across several rooftops. Those he landed on were touched by his feet for an instant before he bounded back into the air to zip across the dwellings once again. In less than three minutes, he was crouched on a rooftop across the street where a young woman was being drug into a house.

Her screams were muffled by someone putting a hand over her mouth with another holding the door open and shutting it with the locks undoubtedly being applied soon after. He knew who they were. The cops had been looking for at least two or three men wanted for kidnapping young women for trafficking. A small smile spread on his lips from having the luck of finding them first.

The next few minutes were a blur to those inside the house. A dark colored figure burst in through an upstairs window. There were four young women in the room tied together and crying hysterically from the entrance of the vigilante. Black, spray-painted glass shattered on the floor as an armed gunman shielded his face from the debris. A gunshot rang out but Scarlet Spider ducked under the deadly projectile and punched the pistol from his grasp. A spinning roundhouse kick to the head put out him out of commission and Scarlet Spider soon crashed out through the door to keep surprise on his side.

The room across the hall was a storage room for a large amount of drugs and money but was voided of any criminals. The hallway was a different story as the sound of footsteps running up the stairs echoed off the walls. The moment one of the criminals came around the corner to investigate where the sound came from, Scarlet Spider snared him from behind with a web shot and drug him into the opposite room with him. The man didn't have time to yell before he was knocked unconscious. The other person running down the hall with him quickly unloaded several blasts of buckshot into the wall of the room his buddy was drug into. They were for nothing as a glob of webbing impacted against his stomach and encased him completely. Scarlet Spider wasted no time in delivering a head punt to the downed criminal before bounding down the stairs to find the two criminals and the girl from earlier.

Without pause, the masked individual attacked the criminals as the young girl crawled clear of the chaos. The first of the two tried to stab the vigilante but failed to do so as his hand was encased in webbing and a fist backhanded him away. The second grabbed the hero from behind but was head-butted back and kicked in the chest, causing him to crash through a dust covered coffee table. Moving his attention back to the first one, Scarlet Spider snared him with a webline and flung him onto his partner. A blast of his glob of web incapacitated both men who were now unconscious.

Using his spider sense, Scarlet Spider didn't detect anymore traffickers in the house. Five criminals lay unconscious in the dwelling with five young women safe from any harm.

"Get out," he told the woman on the floor. "And call the cops."

"Who, who are you?" she asked in near hysterics. Tears were still on her face with trails of mascara snaking their way down her cheeks.

"A friend. Now go." Before she could pose any more questions or make any statements, Scarlet Spider leapt back up the stairs to both web up the remaining two criminals and free the other four girls.

He stayed near the house until the police arrived. The four girls were all looked over and were met by their parents shortly after. No one noticed the vigilante within the shadows who kept a close eye on everything until all five of the criminals were loaded, web and all, into a few police cruisers then driven away. Reaching into the right pocket of his gray hoodie, he pulled out a small luminescent watch and checked the time before silently web zipping away.

Several minutes later, the masked hero arrived at a house and crawled into a second story room, which had its window open and a single dim light on. No cars were in the dive way, no pedestrians were out walking by, and no cars cruised past. He was completely in the clear of being spotted.

Upon stepping foot in the room, he removed his hood and mask as he was greeted by the young red headed woman of his dreams. She was waiting for him to come over and made sure to leave her bedroom window open for when he arrived. He looked upon her as she came through the door wearing a pair of blue boy shorts and a red tank top, an outfit she had chosen especially for him.

"My mom won't be home till ten fifteen at the earliest," Mary Jane told him.

"My aunt won't be back until eleven," Peter responded.

"That gives us around an hour and a half on my end, Tiger."

"Plenty of time." He unzipped his hoodie and let it fall to the floor with the rest of his costume and her clothes soon after.

The next morning, Peter awoke with his alarm blaring a Guns 'N Roses song, which he immediately turned off. It wasn't like it was a good song; it was just that he set it too loud when he got home last night. Climbing out of bed wearing only his boxers, he hastily made his way over to his dresser for a shirt and pair of sweat pants before shaking the lagging sleep out of his system and rushed downstairs to see what was for breakfast.

"Morning Aunt May," he said as she ran into the kitchen.

"You're up early Peter, what's the occasion?" She removed several strips of bacon from a frying pan and placed them with half a dozen others on the table where Gwen was finishing off her French toast.

"I gotta go into the city and I only have about two hours to do it in." Grabbing the gallon of orange juice, he slammed the refrigerator door shut and plopped in a seat at the table across from Gwen. "Kinda in a hurry."

"What for Pete?" Gwen asked.

"Stark's holding a press conference. I need to see him about something."

"About what?" May asked.

"I had an idea last night. I was at a church and-"

"Wait a second," Gwen interjected. "You went to church last night?"

"No, I was at a church last night patrolling around the neighborhood when I got an idea of what to do with my extra life."

"And what coyote scheme did you come up with?" his aunt asked.

"Okay, hear me out. I've been going for runs in the mornings every day and go to the gas station to pick up a few things every now and then. With the blond hair and sunglasses on, nobody has noticed who I am. So I was thinking, maybe I could go back to school as someone besides Peter Parker."

Silence filled the kitchen for a moment.

"Are you sure that's what you want?" Aunt May asked. "Because I don't think that's a very good idea. You'll be much closer to the students than the people at around here and they could figure out who you are in an instant."

"That's just it, Aunt May. I ran into a group from Midtown the other day and none of them noticed who I was even when I asked one of them if they had the time. I was thinking that maybe I could be my cousin twice removed or something like that."

"Ohh, I have an idea," Gwen spoke up. "If you're gonna do this, you gotta do it right."

"Should I be afraid of what you're gonna suggest?" Peter asked with a worried face.

"Nah. Okay, first you should get a tan. Second, learn Spanish or some other language. But not Klingon. Third, you could learn to speak with an accent and be Peter's foreign cousin, which is why you look like him but were never around here to begin with. I even have a name for you."

"And what is this name, Gwen?" Aunt May asked with a grin brought on from the blonde girl's racing imagination.

"Miguel O'Hara."

Peter looked at her as if she were out of her mind. "Uh, no. That would never work.

AN: For those who are new to this, this is a continuation of my Ultimate Spider-Man saga and takes place after: Heroes Never Die, Valentine Luck, and Face Off, in that order. So for the full story, I reccomened reading those first so you can get caught up. For those of you who have been around since the beginning of the saga, I'll be revising and posting updated chapters of the others to erase my grammer mistakes and add some suggestions that I've been given to add more "meat" to the overall story. With that said, thank you for reviews and comments and I hope you all enjoy.