BOOM!
This impact actually moved him backward a full step and he felt something that might have been a hairline crack in a rib. But already, even as he registered the pain, he could feel something happening beneath the skin. A warmth. A tightening sensation.
Alex pulled up his shirt and watched in the small mirror he'd positioned nearby.
The skin where the impact landed was red, already bruising. But as he watched, the swelling reduced visibly. Not instantly like some absurd comic book regeneration. But faster. Much faster than any human body should heal bruised tissue.
'There it is. Accelerated healing confirmed.'
He grabbed a scalpel from his medical kit and made a small, controlled cut along his forearm. Just deep enough to draw blood properly.
Alex watched the wound. Counted seconds.
Ten seconds. The bleeding slowed.
Twenty seconds. The edges of the cut began visibly closing.
Thirty seconds. Nearly sealed, leaving only a thin pink line where the cut had been.
"Healing factor approximately ten to fifteen times baseline human regeneration," Alex said, staring at his own arm with something between scientific satisfaction and genuine awe. "Not full regeneration like advanced mutant-tier healers. But significant."
He spent the rest of the evening testing his senses. Standing in complete darkness, he found he could navigate the bunker without bumping into anything, his enhanced perception picking up subtle echo and air current changes he'd never have noticed before.
His hearing picked up sounds from outside the bunker that shouldn't have been audible through reinforced walls. The distant hum of a car on the county road half a mile away. An owl somewhere in the woods.
No spider-sense. No precognitive danger warning like Peter had. Alex hadn't built that into the formula, hadn't known how to replicate whatever biological mechanism created it.
But everything else was there. Strength, speed, reflexes, durability, healing, enhanced senses.
'A complete physical package,' he thought, sitting down finally as exhaustion from the day's testing caught up with him. 'No wall-crawling. No webs. But everything else humanity has ever fantasized about having.'
He are an enormous meal that evening. Six thousand calories disappeared without much effort, his body screaming for fuel to support its new baseline metabolic demands.
That night he slept twelve hours straight. When he woke, the integration felt complete. Settled. Like his new capabilities had finally become part of him instead of something layered on top.
He spent another full day testing combat movements. Forms and techniques he'd studied through books and videos but never had the physical capacity to properly execute. Now his body matched his theoretical knowledge perfectly.
A punch landed with textbook form, generating force he'd only calculated before on paper. A kick swept through the air with controlled power instead of clumsy effort.
By the third day, satisfied with his understanding of his new limits, Alex packed up his equipment, locked down the bunker, and drove back to Manhattan.
...
Peter noticed immediately when they met for their usual Thursday study session.
"You're different," Peter said, studying him carefully across the kitchen table. "Like, physically different. The way you're sitting. The way you moved when you opened the door. Something's off."
"Astute observation."
"Alex. What happened to you?"
They were in Alex's apartment. Private. Secure from prying eyes or ears.
Alex had thought carefully about how to frame this. The truth, that he'd deliberately injected himself with a calculated serum derived partly from Peter's own DNA samples, was not something he wanted to share. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
'A small lie protects a larger trust,' he thought. 'Easier this way.'
"There was an accident," Alex said. "At Oscorp. I was going through the Specimen 15 archive late one night, finishing up documentation for Norman's report. Pulled a sample container off a shelf and it cracked. Some kind of preserved genetic compound, I'm still not entirely sure what it was, got onto a cut I had on my hand."
Peter's eyes went wide. "Wait. That's basically what happened to me. Lab accident, exposure to something, then powers show up a few days later."
"Funny how that works out," Alex said, keeping his expression neutral.
"Dude." Peter leaned forward. "That's insane. That's actually insane. You got bit by destiny too, basically."
"Something like that."
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