Journal Entry. 5th November. Location: Earth-8034, a terminal Web-Node.
The world died quietly. No fire, no final scream. Just silence.
We arrived in a shatter of prismatic light, seven mismatched spiders dropping into a graveyard. Miguel O'Hara, our reluctant shepherd, had tracked the resonance signature here. He called it a "nest." Looking around, I called it a tomb.
Skyscrapers stood like skeletal fingers, wrapped in thick, pale webbing that mimicked the striations of muscle tissue. The architecture was entombed, the city's corpse lovingly prepared for some final, obscene sacrament. The air was dead, heavy, carrying a low thrumming pulse that vibrated in my teeth. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. A metronome for a dead city. It set the others on edge. I saw Miles Morales's shoulders tighten, saw the cartoon pig, Ham, twitch his ears nervously. Good. Fear keeps you alive. Complacency is a coffin you build for yourself.
Miguel's wrist-mounted gauntlet glowed, projecting a holographic map of the resonance spikes. "It's been here," he stated, his voice a low growl of grim satisfaction. "Repeatedly. The Child uses this place as a larder."
I scanned the perimeter. No movement. No threats. The only pattern was decay. The pulse was the anomaly. It wasn't a sound; it was a pressure change, a patient, rhythmic weight. The heartbeat of the predator, still echoing in the bones of its kill.
The source of the pulse was a cathedral. Of course. The creature had a flair for blasphemous irony. The grand entrance was choked with webs, but a side door, a narrow stone archway, gaped open like a wound.
"I'll take point," Silk said, her voice a hushed whisper. Her white and black suit was already blending with the pallid webbing. She was the best of us for this. A ghost in the machine. Her senses, more attuned to the Web than any of ours, were a scalpel where the rest of us were hammers.
I followed a few paces behind, grappling gun held at low ready. The interior was a cavern of bone and sinew. Webs, thick as bridge cables, crisscrossed the nave, pulling stone pillars into grotesque, leaning shapes. Gossamer threads, thin as nerves, quivered in the still air, catching the dim light that filtered through the filthy rose window. The air tasted of ozone and rot.
Silk paused, one hand resting on a major strand. Her body went rigid. I saw her masked face tilt, listening to something none of the rest of us could hear.
"What is it?" Miles whispered, his voice too loud in the oppressive quiet.
"They're… whispering," she murmured back, her own voice strained. "The threads. They're vibrating with… fear. Not hunger. Just pure, absolute terror."
Sentimental nonsense. A web only feels tension. She was projecting her own anxieties onto the environment, a common weakness. But her skill was undeniable. She moved like smoke through the labyrinth, her feet never making a sound. I watched her navigate the maze, my own senses focused on angles, exits, potential ambushes.
Then she stopped. She didn't just pause; she froze solid, a statue carved from disbelief. Her gaze was fixed on a dense cluster of webbing high up near the altar, a grotesque chandelier of pale, ovoid shapes.
Cocoons. Dozens of them.
I pushed past her. The boy, Miles, was right behind me. He still carried himself with the burden of a hero, the foolish notion that this was a fight to be won with hope. He would learn. Or he would die.
He drew a blade of focused bio-electricity, the venom-sting crackling in the gloom, and sliced neatly through the webbing of the nearest cocoon. The fibrous material parted with a wet tear.
The thing that fell out was not a person anymore. It was an artifact of suffering. It wore the tattered remains of a Spider-suit, a variant I didn't recognize—black with neon green circuitry. The face was visible, gaunt and desiccated, eyes wide, mouth locked in a silent scream that had been frozen at the moment of its death. Its life force, its very essence, had been siphoned out, leaving a hollow, human-shaped husk.
Miles staggered back, a choked sound escaping his throat. "Oh, God."
We looked up. It wasn't just the one. The cathedral was a gallery of them. Hung like grotesque fruit from the web-strung ceiling. Spider-Men, Spider-Women, from countless worlds. A patch of garish red and blue here, a sleek, armored design there. Each one a failure. Each one a victim.
Worse, some weren't totems. I saw the faded denim of a civilian jacket on one. Another was small, heartbreakingly so. A child in Spider-Man pajamas. The predator was escalating. It was no longer selective. Anything connected to the Web, however faintly, was now prey.
Miles forced himself to walk the aisle of the desecrated church, his head tilted up, his shoulders shaking. He was bearing witness, performing some useless ritual of respect for the dead. He was treating this place like a cemetery.
He stopped beneath the child's cocoon and whispered, his voice cracking. "These were people. They had families."
The statement was factually correct. And utterly irrelevant. Their families couldn't help them now.
I brushed him aside and knelt by the first corpse. The others saw a tragedy. I saw a schematic. This wasn't a simple feeding. The webbing wasn't just wrapped around the body; it was integrated. I peeled back the tattered mask. Thin, needle-like filaments of web had been forced through the eye sockets, the ears, the soft tissue of the neck, burrowing directly into the brain stem and spinal column.
The body was a drained battery, but the connections were for data transfer. It wasn't just drinking their life force. It was trying to drink their minds. Their memories, their voices, their powers. A crude, violent attempt at assimilation.
I stood, wiping the desiccated dust from my gloves. My face, my mask, is my own. It shows them nothing. It shows me everything.
"This isn't hunting," I said. The words came out flat, stripped of all emotion. They were a conclusion, not an opinion. "This is harvesting. We are livestock."
I looked from the rows of bodies to the horrified faces of my temporary allies. They still thought they were soldiers. They were wrong.
"This isn't a war—it's a slaughterhouse."
The silence that followed was heavier than before. It was the pig who broke it, his cartoonish voice straining for a levity that wasn't there.
"Well, g-gosh," Spider-Ham stammered, his mallet held limply at his side. "I guess you could say this place is… is really…" He trailed off, the punchline dying in his throat. Even he couldn't find the joke.
It was then we noticed it. In the quiet, our eyes adjusted. Several of the cocoons were empty. Not cut open, like the one Miles had freed. These were torn. Ripped apart from the inside. Jagged, clawed openings spoke of a violent, frantic escape. Or a violent, frantic birth.
The implication settled over us like a shroud. The Child didn't just kill. It repurposed. This is where the husks are born
Ham let out a soft, panicked squeak. "If… if spider-corpses are walking around out there…" he whispered, his eyes wide. "Folks, I am not emotionally or physically equipped for a zombie-me."
A flicker of grim humor, extinguished almost instantly by the chilling reality of his words. We were hunting a monster, and it was building an army from our dead, that we knew. I just misjudged how fast the process was.
Miguel moved toward the far wall, his gauntlet emitting a scanning beam. "Residue shows high concentrations of trans-dimensional particulates and mimic-RNA," he muttered, more to himself than to us. "It's not just absorbing their energy. It's cataloging their conceptual abilities. Learning what it means to be a Spider-Totem."
He was right. The far wall, behind the ruined altar, was covered in symbols. Spirals and jagged lines, drawn in a mixture of dried blood and web fluid. It wasn't random scrawling. It was a language. A pattern. The predator was learning to think abstractly, to communicate, to evolve. Faster than any of us had predicted. It was moving from instinct to intellect. It's creating its own world with its own language and ideals. Ideals I don't want to even imagine.
Miles turned away from the wall, his face pale but set with a familiar, stubborn idealism. "It doesn't matter," he said, his voice regaining a sliver of its strength. "We find it. We stop it. We save who we can. We don't cross the line. Not ever."
I looked from the boy to the desecrated corpses hanging above us. His line. His precious, imaginary line in the sand. He clung to it like a holy text.
"Lines are for people with the luxury of survivors," I replied, my voice flat.
"If we become killers, we lose," he shot back, his fists clenched. "We lose everything that makes us who we are!"
I met his gaze through my shifting mask. The inkblots swirled, forming a new, merciless pattern. Let him see the truth in them. Let him see the face of the world as it is, not as he wishes it to be.
"We already lost," I said, the words falling like stones into a well. "You just haven't accepted it yet."
In that moment, I saw it in his eyes. The idealism finally cracked. He wasn't looking at an ally anymore. He was looking at me, and he was afraid. Not of the monster. Of what I might do to stop it. He finally understood that I would amputate a limb to save the body. Even if that limb was one of our own.
A siren screamed inside Silk's skull.
She gasped, stumbling back, her hands flying to her temples. "It's here! It's—!"
Too late.
The pulse in the air stopped. The silence was absolute for one heartbeat. Then, the entire nest quivered. Every web, every thread, every cocoon began to tremble in unison. The bodies hanging from the ceiling swayed gently, a choir of the dead conducted by an unseen maestro.
A voice echoed, seeming to come from the walls themselves, from the very air we breathed. It was not one voice, but dozens, hundreds, of stolen voices overlapping into a single, dissonant chord. A chorus of ghosts.
"Welcome… home…"
We drew our weapons. Miles's hands sparked with venom. Miguel's talons extended. My grappling gun was already in my hand.
But it was the last thing I saw that froze the blood. The strands of webbing on the walls, the threads that held the dead, began to move. They weren't just trembling anymore. They were flowing, twisting, rewriting themselves into new patterns before our eyes. Thickening like arteries. Pumping with a dark, unseen ichor.
The slaughterhouse doors slammed shut. The nest was awake. And we were inside.