Chapter Ninety-Nine: Parkour Girl—Little Gwen

Since making up her mind a month ago, Gwen had been following Peter’s example and patrolling New York in the name of justice ever since.

Looking back on the past month, Gwen had to admit she was fairly satisfied with it overall.

More than anything, she had finally come to understand just how strong she really was.

To those fierce, burly criminals, subduing them was almost like playing with children. Even when they pulled guns, Gwen could evade every shot with her blinding reflexes and nimble movements.

Then she would finish them off with a single, easy punch.

She still could not even use her full strength.

Lately, the thing Gwen had learned most was not how to fight better, but how to hold back while fighting.

This was not some smug boasting. It was simply the truth.

When she had once punched a man over two meters tall clean through a wall, Gwen had begun her own path of restraint... though her control was still far from perfect, and in a pinch she would often slip.

Every time that happened, Gwen would remember the punch Peter had landed that day.

She was... slowly striving toward that level.

Still, one could hardly blame her. Every time she thought of those criminals who lit up with excitement the moment they saw her, especially the gangs, Gwen, as a young girl, was still a little afraid.

She truly could not understand it.

Why did these gangsters love getting beaten so much?

Could they all be insane?

After being knocked down by Gwen, one by one, they would sometimes even wear expressions of utter satisfaction.

Satisfied, my ass.

It left Gwen frustrated for days. She even wondered if stopping these people from committing crimes and beating them senseless somehow made them happy.

And when she secretly observed that Peter’s criminals behaved the same way, Gwen finally felt a little better.

So it was not just my problem...

Over this month, Gwen had deliberately kept away from Peter. If Peter was in the first district, then Gwen would run to the eleventh.

Then she would set herself a goal: she had to stop more crimes than Peter did, and as a matter of heroic record, she had to do better than he did.

Perhaps that was a kind of stubborn competitiveness... though Gwen refused to admit it.

Sometimes, when she ran into a difficult problem, she would also quietly tail Peter and watch how he handled it.

In short, though she did not want to admit it, Gwen had indeed learned a great deal from Peter over the past month, and it had benefited her enormously.

Tonight, when she slipped out of the house in secret, she did not find Peter anywhere.

That surprised her. After all, Peter was basically a model employee who never missed a day, all year round. Skipping out for an entire day was genuinely rare.

Without Peter as a point of comparison, Gwen’s enthusiasm suddenly ebbed as well.

After quickly dealing with a few difficult cases in New York she had heard about from her father at the police department, Gwen began leaping across the rooftops of the city.

She did not have Peter’s ability to shoot webs; she knew that was something reserved for male spiders. So unlike Peter, she could not swing between buildings on strands of webbing like a child on a playground.

To get around more conveniently, she had to use a more brute-force method.

She had taken the idea from parkour: constantly jumping across rooftops. With her extraordinary leg strength and her formidable physical condition, a little practice was enough for her parkour skills to leap straight to world-class level.

Two buildings ten meters apart?

One easy jump, and she was across. No need to overthink it.

As for falling, that was even less likely. With Gwen’s current physical condition, even if she dropped from several hundred meters up, at worst she would smash a crater into the ground and scrape some skin. Beyond that, there would definitely be no serious injuries.

Not to mention, she still had her bioelectromagnetic field.

That gave her the ability to move as freely on vertical walls as she could on flat ground.

On top of that, Gwen had improved her battle suit. She had extended her arms and added wing membranes like those used in wingsuits between her arms and body, allowing her to glide freely through the air.

So even without webbing, Gwen believed her agility and speed in the city were absolutely no less than Peter’s.

As Gwen turned and flipped, moving constantly among the tops of skyscrapers, she suddenly noticed something.

There seemed to be a heavy burst of gunfire in the distance.

That drew her attention, and she hurried over.

It turned out to be the weapons research and production division of Stark Industries.

At that moment, the facility was under attack by a metal-clad robot. The storm of bullets fired by the security personnel, dense as sparks, could do it no harm at all.

As more and more people fell, Gwen was just about to step in.

Then she saw another, even more dazzling iron robot flying in from afar. The moment it appeared, the two seemed to stand in opposition to each other...

So Gwen gave up on intervening for the moment. She decided to watch a little longer.

And then... she noticed something else.

After all the security personnel at Stark’s weapons research division had been driven out, a cargo truck drove out from inside the facility, deep in its undefended interior.

At the very sight of that specially modified jet-black truck, Gwen understood everything.

She had stumbled into a straightforward robbery.

First, that earlier metal robot was used to draw out and drive off all the security personnel. Then this truck drove into the weapons research division to carry out the theft.

She did not know what they had taken, or who they were.

But Gwen understood that since she had already uncovered their true purpose, she could not let them leave so easily.

At the very least, she needed to follow them to their base before deciding what to do next.

Gwen felt that if Peter were in her position, he would definitely make the same choice.

So... once again, Gwen leaped between buildings, using the night as her best cover, and stayed tightly on the heels of that large, dark truck.

——

“Peter, do you feel like something is off?”

Ivan looked around once more. It was still the same pitch-black, desolate emptiness. Nothing at all. But that unsettling prickling in the back of his mind... made him deeply uncomfortable.

“Nope.”

Peter jumped down from the ceiling, then, following Ivan’s lead, carefully examined the surroundings and said, “There’s nothing here. Must be your imagination.”

No... absolutely not.

Ivan was certain that this feeling had not appeared out of nowhere. In the past, when he was running contraband, that sixth sense had saved him many times.

When something felt wrong, Ivan had no intention of taking any risks.

He looked at the map displayed on the screen beside the truck, the one they had planned out in advance. There was an area on it that Ivan had circled in red.

A thought struck him.

He decided to take a detour... and thoroughly check that particular area before proceeding.

Otherwise, he would not be able to relax.