Spider-Man: Earth-9576

Chapter 9: Burnout

Jason had been calmly swinging about the surrounding neighborhoods to try and decompress to some degree, still a bit heated about the exchange between his father and himself.

He wanted to completely disregard his father's whole argument as him just not understanding why he was routinely doing better, but there was a small part of him that knew it wasn't wrong; he was letting them down. He was reminded again that he wasn't doing good enough, that he was still poor at both doing his job as Spider-Man, while also keeping up appearances for Jason Jaeger at the same time.

No matter how much he was trying to have it both ways, one side of his life suffered for the sake of the other. Every victory as the web-slinger resulted in the high-schooler disappointing someone in some way, and every fulfilled promise with the teenager potentially meant less people the superhero was there to save.

He briefly took the new Spider-heroine into consideration, that maybe she'd be available to pick up some of the slack. But it had been clear from their first encounter earlier that day that she was new, like very new, and trying to fall back on her assistance wasn't a wise decision yet...

'Hope I run into her again to try and start up some sort of collaboration with her, maybe I can show her the ropes, we could team up for stuff, who knows?', he thought to himself as he took a breather on a flagpole off the side of an office building.

He was hanging from the pole, essentially standing perfectly inverted with the soles of his feet stuck to the pole as he heard more sirens.

'More trucks? Surely they've almost got that fire under control by now...', Jason thought to himself as he looked down at the truck passing below, and caught something confusing to him. 'Wait, the guys from the Eighteenth? But they shouldn't be over here, unless...', he paused, webbing down, or more so up, to the roof of the building and pulled himself up to the top of the building.

From where he stood, Jason could see the clear orange aura and thick black smoke pillar rising over the rooftops, clearly much larger than they'd normally be able to handle on their own. "Shit... Dad.", Jason muttered, running for the edge and leaping off, swinging to the burning building...

[About 5 Minutes Later...]

Spider-Man swung up to the area around the fire engines in front of the building as the rescue attempt was well underway, and he landed on a streetlight.

"Talk to me, Chief. What's the situation here? This looks a lot bigger than it sounded like it'd be on the scanner...", he said to the nearest firefighter, making up a more professional-sounding reason to remark on the fire being bigger than anticipated.

"We have no damn idea! But the blaze barely went down at all, and our guys in there have yet to report back, we think there's still about five or six residents still inside.", the firefighter replied. "Wait, there's one coming!", another one shouted to the door, right before one of their colleagues came outside, a teenage girl in his arms, wrapped in a fire blanket.

"Manny! Where're the others? You find the rest of the folks inside?", the first guy said to the one who just came out. "Last I noticed, Robbie was right behind me, he had a lady with him too. I don't know about the cap'n, though, said he heard more inside...", Manny replied.

Jason immediately looked into the fire coming out the shattered windows, realizing his father was inside. Just then, the guy named Robbie that had been mentioned a moment ago emerged as well, helping an elderly Hispanic man out of the flames.

Without thinking further, the teenage hero leapt off the light post, webbing himself into the nearest open window, being narrowly licked by the fire around him. Looking around frantically, he  stretched any of his relevant senses to figure out where anyone else could be, either his father, or one of the remaining trapped residents.