I should have kept some chapters in reserve

The attic was quiet except for the faint clinks of Bruce's teeth against the rim of his bowl as he crunched his kibble.

The puppy's hind leg was still wrapped in spider silk. Every couple of bites, he looked up at Chen Mo, his tail rustling against the cardboard box.

Chen Mo sat on the floor against the battered sofa, the light off. A little orange light from the streetlamp outside fell through the window, landing squarely on the pile of crumpled bills before him.

He smoothed the bills one by one and sorted them by denomination, moving slowly, as though counting new clothes he couldn't bear to wear.

"This one's titanium alloy patches." He placed a twenty on the left.

"This one's ballistic nylon." Another bill went on the left.

"This one's the sewing machine. This one's your dog food." He pointed at Bruce, who lay in the cardboard box. At the words "dog food," the puppy's ears twitched, and his tail wagged faster.

"This one's your anti-inflammatory medicine. This one's your gauze." Two more bills, and the pile on the left grew higher.

"This one's sheets. This one's a duvet cover. This one's the shirt I'm wearing. This one's frozen chicken breast."

He laid out the last few bills in turn, then looked down at the right.

Only a lonely handful of bills remained there, as thin as the last few leaves clinging to branches in the autumn wind.

"One thousand four hundred and eighty-two." He gathered the pile on the right and weighed it in his hand.

Even a single meal for Bruce Wayne cost more than that.

Bruce tilted his head at him and gave a very faint whimper, as though he understood-or was annoyed that Chen Mo was counting too slowly and delaying mealtime.

"You're still being picky?"

Chen Mo looked down at him. "Do you know that bag of puppy food cost me fifteen bucks? A whole box of the compressed biscuits I eat only costs ten. Your food costs more than mine, your bed's warmer than mine, and when you break a leg, someone puts medicine on it for you. When I cracked a rib, I applied the iodine myself. Which of us looks more like a stray?"

Bruce rested his chin on the edge of the box.

Really, weren't they both strays?

One of them was even still covered by laws protecting minors.

Chen Mo rolled up the bills and stuffed them into a gap in the sofa.

The movement tugged at his ribs. He hissed and braced himself against the sofa for a few seconds to recover.

Last night's fight was still replaying in his head.

The sound of that tail slicing through the air, like an iron rod whipping against a clothesline.

The dull ache that rebounded when his fist struck the crocodile's chest, shooting from his knuckles all the way to his shoulder.

The tear in his suit's shoulder, the warped titanium alloy patches, the curled nylon fabric, the burst stitches spreading like fireworks. It needed mending. More money.

How did Batman, an ordinary, non-mutant human, manage to hold his own against this thing?

Peter Parker's learning ability was breaking every frame of the fight into data: Killer Croc's arm span, the minute movements in his shoulders as he wound up for an attack, the habitual angle at which his feet ground against the ground before a tail sweep.

Streams of data surged back and forth through his mind, like a faucet he couldn't turn off.

Chen Mo shook his head, trying to shake the data out. No use. This learning ability wasn't something he could control. Once given, it wouldn't stop.

This was Chen Mo's newly acquired system reward, part of Peter Parker's brain, intelligence +10086.

Had he written it in his diary when he received this ability? He couldn't quite remember.

Chen Mo, who hadn't passed a single math test since starting high school, still hadn't fully adjusted to the way a top student's mind worked.

Well, if he hadn't been bad at certain subjects, why would he have studied art? Pure passion?

"Fine." Chen Mo spoke to the air.

The system ignored him. Bruce answered with a couple of whines.

Peter Parker's learning ability: building web-shooters by hand, devising his own chemical formulas, making Tony Stark question his life before even graduating high school.

He had to hand it to him.

There was no arguing with it.

He was an artist, yet his head was now full of crocodile skeletal structures and muscle arrangements. Even in his dreams, he was analyzing Killer Croc's bite-force data.

Chen Mo tried to stand, then stopped halfway.

The bruising over his ribs was turning from purple to yellow. His spider genes were repairing the damage, but healing didn't mean it didn't hurt.

He gritted his teeth and straightened, then scooped Bruce out of the box and tucked him against his chest.

The puppy wriggled inside his shirt, found a comfortable position, and poked out the tip of his nose. "Behave."

He held the puppy still through his shirt. "I'm taking you out to see the world. In Gotham, a dog who's never been to the library doesn't deserve to be called Bruce."

"Whine!"

Chen Mo changed into the white shirt he'd picked up at a secondhand market. It was washed out and frayed at the collar, but clean.

In Gotham, clean clothes were an admission ticket to the civilized world. A librarian looked at a homeless person and an ordinary citizen as though they were two different species.

Probably the difference between seeing a goblin and a human.

When a group's appearance, behavior, and lifespan were all on an entirely different level from yours, it was hard to recognize them as your own kind.

Chen Mo examined himself in the shard of mirror that could barely reflect anything. Handsome, thin, small-faced, and younger-looking than his actual age.

Though clearly defined muscles lay hidden beneath his clothes, Chen Mo looked slim when dressed.

In this shirt, he looked like a poor student collecting a free meal at a church school.

That was good. The less he looked like Spider-Man, the safer he was.

The Diamond District.

Gotham Public Library.

Massive stone pillars supported the dome, and the air held the dry, mingled scent of old paper and wood.

Chen Mo stood at the entrance for a few seconds, looking up at the two heavy oak doors.

He'd always thought libraries were free. Only now did he learn that somewhere like Gotham, this place would actually charge admission if Wayne Enterprises weren't funding it.

Wasn't this a public library?

Chen Mo pushed the door open and went inside.

The reading room was enormous. Bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling, rolling ladders hung from rails, and the gaps between shelves were so narrow that only one person could pass sideways. Light fell through the high arched windows, cutting dusty shafts through the air.

He found the biology section, tilted his head back to scan the shelf labels, and pulled out the Reptile Anatomy Atlas, thick enough to use as a dumbbell.

He opened the title page. A line of small print read: funded by a special grant from Wayne Enterprises.

Chen Mo stared at that line for a while.

Bruce stirred against his chest, and he quickly held him still. "Don't bark. We haven't got a library card. Technically, we're freeloading. Your dad's undocumented, and an undocumented guy's dog is undocumented too. We can't get cards."

The puppy seemed to understand-or perhaps he hadn't paid any attention at all. He merely buried the tip of his nose deeper into Chen Mo's palm.

Chen Mo sat down in a corner by the window and spread the book open.

From the structure of crocodile jaw muscles to temporal bone thickness, he turned page after page.

Peter Parker's learning ability went to work. Those complex blood vessel distributions, skeletal structures, and muscle arrangements were no longer a mass of dry Latin terminology.

Like living architectural plans, they automatically assembled themselves into a three-dimensional model in his mind.

The temples, on either side of the skull, where the temporalis muscles attached.

Relatively thin bone. A solid punch could shut down his nervous system instantly.

The foramen magnum, the passage through which the spinal cord entered the cranial cavity.

If I wrapped spider silk around Killer Croc's neck and used gravity to yank him backward-no, my silk isn't strong enough yet. Right now, it can only support my own weight plus some extra load. A hard yank would snap it.

Different approach.

The jaw joint. Extremely strong bite, but weak against lateral force.

Wrap silk around the upper jaw. Don't pull against it head-on; pull sideways. The pain of a dislocated joint could rob any creature of the will to attack.

Chen Mo pulled Mutated Organism Metabolism Research from the shelf and turned to the chapter on scale structure.

Killer Croc's back armor is too thick. Direct strikes are too inefficient, but his abdomen is relatively soft.

Force him upright, then attack his lower body. Or knock him down and attack the joints.

The librarian was an elderly woman in reading glasses. She studied the boy in the corner over the tops of her lenses.

He'd been reading for four hours straight, without drinking or making a sound, turning pages as fast as someone shuffling through playing cards.

During that time, he'd only taken a compressed biscuit out of his pocket, fetched a cup of free tap water from the dispenser, and quietly eaten it. The old woman shook her head and looked away.

There were plenty of poor children in Gotham hoping to change their fate through self-study, but most eventually discovered that the little knowledge they'd learned was useless and gave up halfway.

And, like their parents, these children would most likely never live to forty.

At least this one looked clean, unlike the drugged-up ones on the streets. She hesitated, but ultimately didn't go over to disturb him.

By the time Chen Mo closed the last book, it was nearly dark outside. He stood and returned the books to their places one by one, as deftly as a spider spinning silk.

Take notes, citizens of Gotham. This is called decency and manners.

Bruce finally couldn't resist letting out a tiny bark against his chest, as faint as a kitten's hiccup.

He quickly held the puppy's mouth shut and hurried out through the library doors.

Back in the attic.

By the orange streetlight filtering through the window, Chen Mo crouched on the floor and sketched a map of the docks in chalk. The container yard, cranes, abandoned warehouses-every exit was marked with an arrow.

He represented himself as a blue dot and Killer Croc as a red square.

"Set an anchor point here."

He drew an arc on the floor, then slid his finger sideways along it. "Use the crane's counterweight to change the angle at which the container tips. His tail's too long. In a narrow passage, it'll actually get stuck. If I can lure him into a gap between containers and trap his tail, I've half won already."

He tossed the chalk to the floor. This wasn't combat; it was physics. Spider-Man's brain was turning the docks into an applied mechanics problem.

Chen Mo slumped onto the sofa, dragged the sewing machine over, and began mending the tear in his suit's shoulder.

The stitches meandered like a centipede had crawled across them. He looked up and saw a black figure sweep past the top of the clock tower outside. Its cape spread in the night wind like a silent giant bat, disappearing toward the docks.

"Oh, right. This city has an official vigilante too."

Chen Mo lowered his head and turned the sewing machine's spool the other way. "How about leaving this big lizard to Batman? He's got an armored car, a grappling gun, and a bunch of fancy tech I can't afford. I'm a broke guy sewing his own suit. Why butt in? Everyone should fight their own villains. I'll show up when an actual Lizard appears..."

A system notification chimed in his head.

"I was joking!" Chen Mo told the air. "System, why don't you have any sense of humor?"

He looked down at the mended suit in his hands. The crooked stitches sprawled across the shoulder, one side higher than the other, in stark contrast to the intact shoulder opposite it.

"..."

Actually, the stitching on the other side isn't all that neat either.

"If I don't personally beat up that big crocodile, I'll be letting down my three hundred and sixty dollars. Not to mention the six hours I spent in the library going through three lousy books, and especially these stitches that look like a centipede."

He gently moved Bruce into the cardboard box with its extra-thick padding. The puppy yawned, rolled over, and went back to sleep. His tail twitched in his dreams, tapping the side of the box with a soft smack.

"Watch the place."

Chen Mo pulled on his suit. Before putting on his mask, he glanced down at the box again. The silk around the broken leg was already beginning to loosen. Spider silk degraded; it needed replacing.

He crouched and wrapped another strand around it, his fingers much more practiced than last time.

When he finished, he gently flicked the tip of the puppy's ear. "I'll change it again when I get back. Don't wriggle around."

Chen Mo put on his mask, pushed open the vent's iron grille, and leaped into Gotham's night.