Lizard

Beneath the sewers of Manhattan, in water that never runs clean, something ancient wears a surgeon's face. Dr. Curt Connors lost his arm to a battlefield and lost himself chasing the cure: a serum brewed from reptilian DNA, built to regrow what war had taken. It worked. The arm returned, thick with green scale, and so did something else, older than the man who drank it. The Lizard does not remember mercy. It remembers only the tide, the hunt, and the hunger to remake every soft, two-legged thing into something stronger. Spider-Man has cornered it in flooded tunnels and rooftop rain and always finds the same argument waiting: that evolution is not cruelty but kindness, that a world of scales cannot be hurt the way a world of skin can. Somewhere under the coils and the claws, Curt Connors is still screaming, and sometimes, for a moment, he claws his own way back to the surface. It never lasts. The tail always returns. The city keeps its sewer grates locked at night, and every scientist who studies regeneration eventually hears the same warning: some cures cost you the patient.