And here we go into the next arc, which I have titled as: Black Cat!

At the same time as Momo is having her arc, Ochako would be lost on what to do now without the chance of being a hero, as her family's construction company was under threat of going down under because of the fact that she'd been kicked out of U.A.. Peter would attempt to try and make up for this, and the two would end up reaffirming their sibling-like bond, but Ochako couldn't help but feel resentful of Peter for being one of the reasons that she was removed from U.A..

In lieu of attending U.A., Ochako would end up spending more time with Izuku and Keemia at F.E.A.S.T., and would firstly discover that Keemia had as much of a crush on Izuku as she did, leading to a strange sense of rivalry between the two of them. Secondly, and more seriously, Ochako would discover that Izuku was suffering from a form of acquired brittle bone disease, in that he'd broken his limbs and bones so many times during his brief tenure with One for All that it was beginning to catch up with him and leave him without much mobility without a walking cane, and that One for All had not only been healing the worst of his injuries on its own, but had also been preventing them from affecting him badly. Izuku's friends would resolve to find David Shield, the mutated Lizard, and ask him to help them get One for All, the Symbiote quirk, back to him.

However, it is here where Peter begins to feel a strange sense of attachment to his new suit, and begins to think that it might be better with him than it is with Izuku…

But back to Ochako, she would soon enough find Felicia Hardy and approach her. Ochako, angry at her abandoning them at the end of the Kamino Incident and for leading the Sinister Six to the summer training camp, but she wouldn't say. Instead, she asked Black Cat what she was supposed to do, who would say that she only knew one way to make money quickly: stealing, and if Ochako wanted it, then they could steal from people worse than them.

Ochako, seeing no other means of making money with the stain on her record, decides to take herself on as Felicia's partner. Felicia, not entirely liking the idea, nonetheless agrees.

Soon enough, Felicia sets Ochako up in a disguise (think something like Felicia's outfit from the Marvel's Spider Man PS4 game), and they set off into the night, beginning their little crime spree by breaking into the office of a hero that had been accused of taking Trigger and, upon finding his trigger stash and dump it out right in front of a pair of cops outside the building, before stealing all the money stashed inside.

Back at their temporary hideout, Ochako counts all the money that they stole from the agency, and finds it to be more than she's ever seen. Suddenly spurred on, she and Felicia would go on to rob several corrupt hero agencies for all their wealth and worth, gaining a massive fortune for themselves.

However, during all of this, Ochako cannot help but feel a sense of unease and disgust with herself, and when she tries to give the stolen money to her parents, they react with horror and shock at what she has done and urge her to give it back to the people that she stole it from, deepening the unease in her heart.

However, her and Felicia's actions soon catch the attention of the crime boss known as Tombstone, as several of the heroes that they had robbed had been on his payroll. Ochako is luckily not identified thanks to her disguise, but is constantly hounded alongside Black Cat by Tombstone's goons, the corrupt heroes on his payroll, and the other heroes and police officers, led by one Detective Yuri Watanabe, all of them intent on hunting them down.

Meanwhile, Ochako would begin to hand off the cash that she has stolen to struggling families and homeless children across the city, something which brings her much more joy than simply stealing the money and keeping it for herself. This ends up establishing her as a sort of Robin Hood-like figure, which grates on Black Cat, who is the much more selfish and materialistic of the pair.

The pressure of her new lifestyle would begin to get to Ochako, particularly when some of Tombstone's goons take a potshot at F.E.A.S.T. in retaliation. Desiring to stop Tombstone and bring him down, Ochako, in her civilian guise, tries to reach out to Peter's mutual friend Yuri Watanabe for support, but finds that thanks to Tombstone's influence with the local heroes and police, she is continuously being stonewalled by them, and can't help as much as she would like.

Telling Black Cat about this, the two decide that Tombstone needs to be dealt with, and they can't rely on the local heroes to do anything about it. Plus, they can't talk to All Might about it as one, Black Cat is still a wanted criminal and two, that would mean implicating Ochako in their crimes as well, and as such decide to reach for outside help.

They go out of their way to find Shocker and his Enforcers, White Rabbit, Clash, and Boomerang, and use their stolen funds to hire them as mercenaries to help take down Tombstone.

Soon enough, Ochako and Black Cat's crew would get to work in taking down Tombstone's crew and exposing his affiliations and connections to the various local hero agencies and bringing as much evidence to the cops as they could. However, because the evidence did not come from an official source, despite how convincing it is, Tombstone's agents within the police force are able to discredit and bury it.

As such, Ochako and Black Cat decide to take the fight to Tombstone personally, but Tombstone himself retaliates by paying off Shocker's enforcers to turn on and abandon the two, forcing them back on their own once more. Black Cat then decides that Tombstone is too dangerous to take on and that they should back off from him, resolving to simply going back to stealing from as many people as she can, but Ochako explodes on her for this, finally letting out all her frustrations and rage at Black Cat's actions and attitude, and storms off, intent on bringing down Tombstone on her own.

As such, one night, Ochako moves to infiltrate Tombstone's biggest gambling house to try and record and expose as much as she can about his operations, using every trick that she'd learnt from her time as both a hero-in-training and Black Cat's pseudo-apprentice to infiltrate the building and uncover Tombstone's operations, as well as finding his vast criminal fortune.

But then she is discovered by one of Tombstone's enforcers, a former hunter by the name of Minotaurus, and is brought before Tombstone, who decides to first unmask her, and then kill her for being such a thorn in his side for so long.

However, before he can take off her mask, he is attacked and stopped by a familiar face.

Black Cat arrives to rescue Ochako, alongside Shocker and the rest of his Enforcers, and the two groups clash violently in the underground casino. Ochako asks why Black Cat is there, and she simply tells Ochako that she wasn't going to let Tombstone kill her. Peter would hate her so much for that. Ochako can thankfully tell that she is joking with that last sentence, but when she asks as to why the Enforcers are there after having backed out before, Black Cat tells her that she said that they could rob Tombstone blind if they helped her. Ochako asks if she's joking again. Black Cat wasn't.

Then, the two of them team up once more to take down Tombstone, knocking him out and giving the Enforcers time to steal his entire fortune. Fleeing before the police and heroes arrived, Black Cat and Ochako would leave the illegal casino in ruins, and the Enforcers would run off with all of Tombstone's loot, leaving the crime lord without any money to pay off his various connections and his minions to splinter off and go their own ways once more.

Ochako and Black Cat would meet up on a rooftop, watching the cops take away Tombstone and the ones in his gang who weren't able to flee, and Ochako would thank Felicia for saving her and apologise for exploding at her earlier. Black Cat, however, would say that it was alright, and that while she herself isn't exactly apologetic about her lifestyle, she does acknowledge Ochako's points, and says that she herself has a lot of regrets about her lifestyle, and wishes that she could go back and change some of the things that she did in the past, like falling in love with Spider-Man and not Peter Parker, and trying to become a crime boss and take over New York's underworld-

("You were a crime lord?!"

"Yeah, it was a whole thing…")

-Black Cat eventually says to Ochako that it was clear from the start that this life isn't right for her, that Ochako wasn't made for a life of crime, and encourages her to continue to pursue the life of a hero. Ochako makes it clear that she can't do that now, what with all the legal avenues being closed off to her and with her parent's company in the red, but Felicia would simply point to the site below and restate the point that she had made to Momo before: one didn't need a badge to be a hero.

Soon enough, the two would leave-

(And Detective Yuri Watanabe would notice them. However, instead of reporting them, she would instead let them go, considering that their approach to handling the bad guys might be better than she was trying now.)

-But not before Shocker, out of gratitude for helping his Enforcers get rich, would end up giving the two a portion of the loot that they had taken from Tombstone's fortune. In an act of solidarity, the two would take their newfound funds to the biggest gathering of homeless people in the city, and hand it out to all of them. This act would solidify the two as friend, with the two adopting an elder sister (Felicia) and younger sister (Ochako) dynamic, much like Ochako had with Peter as well.

But then, not too long after, they would end up encountering a bleeding man in a costume, being attacked by a creature, with melting skin, that looked like it was half man, half spider. The two would defeat the Man-Spider creature, but would see that the man that they'd just saved was wearing a red jumpsuit with a blue hoodie over it, with a mask with two wide irises built into it and a black spider logo scribbled onto it…

(Yet another) DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!

Plot twist!

That's right, we're dealing with one of the most well-known arcs in all of Spider-Man's history, one that is equally famous as much as it is infamous.

The Clone Saga!

Moving on from that, though. There're are a few things about this arc that I wanted to share with you. The first one is that originally, the crime boss that Ochako and Felicia were going to be fighting against was Hammerhead. However, when I was writing it out, Tombstone's name kept popping up over Hammerhead's, so I simply decided to have it as Tombstone since I know more about him than Hammerhead anyway.

Blame Timelord2024's fic and Marvel's Spider-Man 2. I was actually thinking about having Hammerhead be Tombstone's enforcer, but I decided that that wouldn't do Hammerhead justice, since he's supposed to be the leader of the Maggia, and replaced him with one of the USJ villains, that being Minotaurus, who is, like the rest of the USJ villains, one of Kraven's former hunters in this world.

And secondly and more importantly, Ochako becoming a criminal like Black Cat. I will admit, I feel like this arc for her is a bit messy, but the general point that I was going for was exploring the avenues that she would be willing to go to in order to get her parents the money that they need, one of them being through villainy and thievery. I thought teaming her up with Black Cat and having her become something akin to an apprentice to Felicia would be a cool thing to do and a good way of exploring Ochako's mentality and priorities when trying to help her parents.

But at the same time, I also wanted to explore how Ochako would feel about becoming a criminal, and how it would clash with her wanting to help people like a hero, which she wouldn't necessarily be doing as a criminal. Felicia seems like a good foil for Ochako in this instance, as she is admittedly a lot more selfish than Ochako, and a lot more focused on her own gain than anyone else's.

In the end, this arc serves the purpose of helping Ochako grow into her own person beyond her connections to Peter and Izuku, and begin making her own choices and becoming her own person, which I have hopefully been helping her to do throughout whatever this story could've been.

This arc also serves the purpose of jumpstarting some character development for Felicia as well through her partnership and friendship with Ochako. Felicia is a good person deep down, she wouldn't have tried to save Peter and Aunt May if she wasn't, and she would've left Aunt May to die at the hands of the villains if she didn't care. However, she is also a selfish person who's biggest priority is her own gain, and never really pays any mind about how this kind of lifestyle, and herself, affects the people around her. So maybe, with what both Ochako and herself have been through in this arc, she will begin to find some self-awareness in her actions and learn to grow from them.

But anyways, with that said and done, this chapter closes, for now, and opens into the next one, probably another of the biggest defining moments in this story...

The Clone Saga.