The woods around them had become grotesquely twisted.
Trees grew in warped spirals, their branches tangling together into shapes that looked like screaming human faces. On the grass, every single blade seemed to curl and coil unnaturally around its own base. Not far away, the surface of the ornamental lake no longer reflected the sky, but instead countless repeating, spinning, weeping blue vortices.
This place was the convergence point of negative emotions and psychic interference.
It was the cancerous tumor of reality born from the Mind Stone's residual energy.
It was devouring all the fear, pain, and madness in the entire area.
The air at the edge of the light membrane twisted violently.
Two figures were hurled outward as if flung by an invisible giant hand, slamming into the grass more than ten meters outside the membrane.
"Ugh!"
Wanda Maximoff dropped to one knee, both hands clamped hard over her temples. Scarlet Chaos energy boiled wildly around her, straining to resist the invisible psychic shrieking. Her face was as white as paper.
"Chaos… pure chaos energy! It… it's tearing at my mental defenses! I can't… hold it steady…"
Not far from her, Vision was struggling to push himself up from the grass. Spots of flickering, unreal energy were blooming all across his body of vibranium and flesh—signs that the psychic shock was destabilizing his physical structure.
"Warning: core psychic stability down to sixty-five percent… continuous bombardment by high-density hostile information stream… unable to phase through the light membrane. Core of the target convergence is located beneath the music pavilion… it is… mimicking biological neural nodes to proliferate and spread on a mental level."
Even the yellow Mind Stone on his forehead was glowing dimmer than before.
"The interference source is too strong… I can't… I can't stabilize the link!"
Wanda's voice trembled with pain and helplessness.
"I need… I need a barrier…"
As the two of them fought desperately against the psychic storm that was enough to drive anyone insane—
A red-and-blue figure shot in with a whoosh, like a bullet riding a strand of web. He swung past the spire of a library next to the park, flipped several times midair in an unnecessarily flashy flourish, and landed on a decorative boulder a few dozen meters from the edge of the light membrane.
"Whoaaa! This is…"
Peter Parker stared at the massive ghostly blue dome covering most of the park, warping the entire world inside it, then at Wanda and Vision, who were clearly in terrible shape as they struggled on the edge of the membrane. His eyes went wide behind the mask.
"Did Halloween come early? Is this the new 'Hallucinex Brand Air Freshener'? Or did some special effects director start filming Arkham Asylum: The Sequel without telling me?"
He didn't even notice the "civilians" nearby who were hugging lampposts while dancing and singing.
"Spider-Man!"
Sensing the familiar presence, Wanda forced herself to turn her head and shout, voice strained:
"Don't come any closer! The energy field will—"
BOOOOM——!!!
The decorative boulder under Peter's feet suddenly shook violently. The ground beneath it heaved upward, and a massive root, thick as a giant python and made of countless twisted, blue-glowing vines, burst out of the earth!
The tip of the vine split open into a gigantic maw filled with countless spinning blue fangs. With a screech like tens of thousands of people wailing in agony all at once, it lunged straight at the startled Spider-Man to bite down.
"Waaah! Hey, be friendly! I didn't bring any holy water or exorcism spray!"
Peter yelped, firing web to dodge, but the psychic scream crashed down on his hypersensitive Spider-Sense like an invisible sledgehammer.
His vision went dark for a second, his movements warped out of shape.
Crap!
I'm gonna get eaten by this freaky vine thing!
(End of Chapter)
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