The portal was a wound in reality. It bled us out and closed behind us, leaving the scar of silence.
Earth-7102 tasted of ozone and old smoke, the corpse of a city left to rot under the sickly glow of neon guts. Billboards lay smashed in the streets like fallen titans, their promises of a brighter future shattered along with the glass that crunched under my boots. It felt like home.
The silence was wrong. Not empty, but expectant. The kind of quiet that comes after a scream, where every nerve is a tripwire waiting for the next sound. Hairs on the back of every neck stood to attention. Mine were already there.
"Alright, team," Morales whispered, his voice too young for the command he was trying to hold. "Sweep, contain, extract any survivors. Do not engage unless absolutely necessary. We're ghosts."
Ghosts. A fine sentiment. But ghosts don't leave footprints. We do.
The colorful ones took to the sky. Prabhakar, a streak of blue and red, swung in impossibly fluid arcs, his movements a dance. The woman, Drew, was more direct, a predator gliding from one concrete perch to the next. They were looking for heat signatures, movement, signs of life from a god's-eye view. A child's perspective.
The cartoon pig, Porker, provided the distraction. A running commentary of bad puns and slapstick scanning, until he stopped. The joke died in his throat. A high-pitched squeak over the comms, then a choked, "Oh, jeez." He'd found something. Tatters of a familiar red and blue fabric, caught on rebar like a flag of surrender. And next to it, gouges in the brickwork. Claw marks. Deep.
I didn't need to fly. The truth is always on the ground. I moved low, a shadow hugging other shadows. The Spiders search for what's there. I search for what was. The smell of decay was layered. Old death and new fear. I followed the scent, my eyes tracking the subtle story written in the rubble. Scratches in the masonry, too regular for random collapse. A faint, viscous residue in the lee of a burned-out bus. A trail. Not heroics. Animal tracking. And I knew what kind of animal we were hunting.
The scream of a child cut through the silence like a razor.
It was two blocks east. The team reacted on instinct, a surge of well-intentioned foolishness. They moved as one, a vibrant blur of hope against the city's grey despair. I followed, but my pace was measured. My gut, a cold, hard knot, told me what this was.
Morales was first to the source. A small, overturned hover-pram, a single synth-bear lying beside it. No child.
"It's a…" Stacy started, her voice tight with confusion.
"Bait," I finished, my voice a low rasp through the fabric of my mask.
The attack came from above and from all sides at once. It wasn't a charge; it was a strike, like lightning hitting a tree. A flicker of motion, a black, spindly shape that was less a body and more a collection of sharp angles. It moved on the walls as if gravity was a suggestion it chose to ignore.
A slash of claws ripped through the air where Prabhakar had been a second before. A hiss echoed through the street, a sound that didn't just vibrate the air but the nerves themselves, a paralyzing, venomous note that made muscles lock.
Then came the real weapon.
Porker suddenly yelped, swatting at the air. "Petunia? What're you doing here, dollface?"
The creature was a whisper in the mind. A psionic flicker. It didn't create a full-blown illusion, just a flash, a ghost of a memory superimposed on reality. It showed you what you loved, what you lost. It made you hesitate. And hesitation in a fight is a death sentence.
We were fighting a phantom, a whisper, and a set of razor-sharp claws all at once. It would strike, then fade back into the labyrinth of shattered architecture, its speed a blur.
The team's response was textbook. Coordinated. Clean. They tried to build a cage of light and webbing.
"Gwen, Pavitr, box it in from the rooftops! Funnel it towards me!" Morales commanded, his hands glowing with bio-electric energy.
They moved with a practiced grace, firing web lines to create a crisscrossing net. Drew launched stun-web grenades that burst in showers of electrified filament. Their goal was clear: containment. Subdue the target, take it into custody. Put the problem in a box and hope the box holds.
I don't believe in boxes.
I refused their dance. While they tried to corral it, I set my own traps. I kicked a loose steel girder into a narrow alleyway, creating a bottleneck. I looped a frayed electrical cable across a doorway, a simple tripwire. When the creature skittered past me, a blur of nightmare limbs, I didn't fire a web. I drove the brass knuckles on my right glove into its passing flank.
The impact was solid, like hitting a bag of bone and wire. It shrieked, a sound of static and fury, and recoiled. I didn't follow up. I let it run. Let it think it was escaping. It darted for a shattered storefront, and I threw my weapon: a shard of plate glass, spun like a discus. It wasn't meant to kill. It was meant to open a wound. The glass caught its leg, slicing deep. Black, viscous fluid, not blood, welled up. Now it had a scent I could track even in the dark.
They wanted to catch it. I wanted to put it down.
The creature was more than just fast. It was intelligent. It learned their patterns, slipping through the ever-tightening web-net with an unnatural agility. It folded its body to pour through gaps no solid thing should have fit through. It mocked them with a high, trilling cry, a sound that scraped at the sanity, unsettling even these seasoned heroes.
Then it pressed its advantage. It targeted their hearts.
I saw Stacy freeze mid-swing. Her eyes went wide behind her mask. "Peter?" she whispered, reaching out to an empty space in the air. The illusion of her greatest failure, right there in the middle of a fight. Morales had to tackle her, pulling them both behind the rusted hulk of a taxi as the creature's claws slashed the space she'd just occupied. "Gwen, snap out of it! It's not real!"
It was real enough to her. That was their weakness. They carried their pasts like open wounds. My past is a scar. Hardened, dead to the touch. The creature's whispers found no purchase in my mind. There's nothing left in there for it to use.
I saw my opening in their chaos. The creature, bleeding and agitated, retreated from their web-barrage, straight into the service alley I had prepared. I followed it in, the sound of my footsteps swallowed by the enclosed space. The hunt was on.
It stopped, cornered at a dead-end brick wall. It turned, its multi-jointed limbs clicking on the grimy pavement. It was a predator, and it recognized another. It didn't hiss or prepare to flee. It became curious.
It circled me slowly, its head cocked. It was trying to read me, to find the crack it could exploit. It sniffed the air around my mask, its strange, webbed face inches from mine. Hooked claws reached out, delicately testing the fabric of my trench coat, as if checking its texture. It found nothing. No fear. No hope. No love to twist into a weapon. Just a void, and the cold, hard resolve at the bottom of it.
It saw no hero. It saw an ending.
Its patience broke. It lunged, a screeching explosion of limbs and claws aimed at my throat. It was fast. But predictable.
I didn't dodge. I raised my left arm, firing my grapple gun. Not up, at a rooftop, but straight ahead. It wasn't a tool for escape; it was a weapon. The steel hook, designed to punch into concrete, flew with a sharp thwip.
It struck the creature square in its webbed face.
The prongs tore through the pale, cloth-like membrane, shredding it. The impact threw the creature back against the brick wall with a sickening crunch. It hissed, a sound now mixed with surprise and a pain it seemed unused to.
I didn't give it a moment. I braced my feet and yanked the cable back with all my strength. The hook ripped free, tearing a jagged, diagonal wound across the left side of its face. It left behind a raw, white scar in the pale webbing—an ugly, permanent mark. My mark.
The creature's surprise turned to cold fury. In a single, fluid motion that defied its injuries, one of its bladed forelimbs sliced through the grapple line. The cable went slack in my hand. Before I could react, it exploded upwards, scrabbling up the sheer brick wall and vanishing into the vertical labyrinth of pipes and fire escapes above. It moved with a desperate, wounded speed. Too fast to follow in the cramped geometry of the city's bowels.
The psychic backlash of its escape hit the main street like a shockwave. A wail of phantom voices. I heard a crash and a cry of pain. Emerging from the alley, I saw the aftermath. Two of the junior members of their entourage were down, clutching their heads, caught in the creature's parting psychic shriek. A chunk of cornice, dislodged by the fleeing creature, had nearly crushed Prabhakar, who was now dragging one of the injured Totems to safety while Drew provided covering fire at… nothing. The street was empty again. Porker was making shadow puppets on a wall with a pocket light. A useless, desperate distraction.
The predator was gone. The chaos remained.
We regrouped under the flickering sign of a derelict noodle bar. The air was thick with anger and the smell of ozone from Morales's crackling fists.
Stacy tore her mask off, her face flushed, her eyes blazing at me. "What the hell was that?" she erupted. "Our mission was containment! You went for murder, not capture. You're reckless!"
"It's wounded," I said, my voice flat. "It bleeds. It can be tracked."
"He's right," Morales interjected, though he wouldn't meet my gaze. He was trying to lead, trying to find a middle ground that didn't exist. "It's marked, Gwen. We have a way to identify it now. But the cost…" He gestured to the injured Spiders being tended to by Drew. "The cost was too high."
Cost. They always talk about cost. They never understand the price of failure. An injured teammate is a cost. A monster left alive to kill again is a price I will not pay.
Later, in a collapsed subway tunnel that served as our temporary safe pocket, the air was still and cold. The others were tending to the wounded, their voices low murmurs of concern and strategy. I sat apart, on a cracked concrete bench, and took out my journal.
I didn't open it to write. I just held it. As I watched, a new line of ink bled onto the blank page, forming itself out of nothing. It was a single, jagged stroke, a near-perfect replica of the wound I'd carved into the creature's face. Beneath it, words appeared, stark and black:
The predator bears your stain.
Outside our pocket of reality, I felt it. A tremor. A shudder that wasn't physical. It was the Web. The great cosmic machine they all revered. In the distance, in the direction of our fight, I could feel the threads of fate pulsing with a momentary blackness. A glitch in the system. The Web had registered the event. It had registered me. Not as a hero, not as an ally. As a variable. An error in the code.
Good.
The rift between us was now a chasm. Stacy wouldn't let it go. Her anger had cooled into a hard, diamond edge of resolve. "It's a victim too, in some way," she argued with Morales, her voice echoing in the tunnel. "We find it, we contain it, and we help it. We don't butcher it."
Morales, ever the diplomat, called for caution. "We need a new strategy. A trap it can't escape. We do this smart. We do this together."
I stood apart from them, the dim light glinting off the lenses of my mask. I could still feel the satisfying tear of the grapple hook. The hunt was in my throat, a metallic taste I knew well. The creature's surprised, alien eyes were burned into my mind. They saw me. They understood.
Marked face. Marked hunt. Not finished.