6th November. The stench of failure clings to the air.
We came back broken.
The Nexus gates hissed open, a sigh of relief from a dying machine. We stumbled through, a ragged procession of torn suits and shattered confidence. The boy, Miles, leaned on the big one, the one called Miguel. His suit was shredded, revealing raw, weeping skin underneath. Silk holding her arm along with a look of distraught, And me. My mask was gone, ripped away in the chaos. My face, the face of Walter Kovacs, was exposed to them all. A piece of meat. Unimportant.
They swarmed us. The others. The ones who stayed behind in this glittering cage. Their faces, a hundred variations of the same mask, turned to us. Shock curdled into horror. I could see their thoughts in the way their lenses widened.
Whispers started. A contagion.
"They lost."
"Look at Rorschach… he's…"
"The Child is unstoppable."
The words slithered through the crowd, finding purchase in the cracks of their courage. The most venomous one repeated itself, a frantic prayer to a deaf god.
"It evolved again."
The boy tried to rally them. He pushed himself upright, wincing as ribs protested. "We… we held it back. We learned—"
His voice was a thread in a hurricane. Thin. Unsteady. Useless. They weren't listening. They were looking at us, at the wounds we carried, and seeing their own futures. They began backing away. Not in a rush, but with a slow, deliberate shuffle, as if we carried a plague.
We did. The plague of truth.
The hall filled. A collection of bright colors and desperate hopes. They called it a debriefing. I called it an autopsy. Miguel, his face grim, laid out the facts. How the Child, the multiversal parasite we were formed to hunt, had not just fought us, but learned from us.
"It mimicked my own attacks," he said, his voice a low growl. "It adapted in real-time even using our own abilities."
That was the spark. The panic went viral.
A gaudy, western-themed Spider raised a trembling hand. "So… it can take our powers? It can hunt us with our own strengths?"
"It seems so," Miguel admitted. The admission was a death sentence.
The room erupted. Not in a roar, but in a panicked hiss.
"We're not hunters—we're livestock." The voice came from a Spider in sleek, black armor.
"If it's marked them," another cried, pointing a shaking finger at our team, "it knows the way back here. It'll come for us!"
"We should retreat! Seal our universes! It can't follow us all!"
The fear was a living thing now, feeding on itself, growing stronger with every trembling voice. Then, one of them, a stout man in a thick, insulated suit, threw his hands up in the air. His voice was a raw shriek of despair that cut through the rest.
"We're not an army anymore—we're a buffet!"
That broke them. The illusion of a united front shattered into a thousand selfish survival instincts. I saw them turning to each other, not for support, but to measure who was weakest. Spiders began to web supplies from the walls, packing medkits and dimension-hopping watches. They were preparing to flee. To abandon the fight and hide in their own little corners of the Web, hoping the monster would eat their neighbor first.
Pathetic. Predictable.
The shouting was at its peak when she arrived. Gwen Stacy. She returned through a personal portal that sliced the air like a razor, the sound sharp and clean amidst the messy chaos. The crowd parted for her. She didn't look at them. She didn't look at the boy, who watched her with a desperate, pleading expression. Her eyes, cold and furious behind her mask, were locked on me.
She marched through the hall, her steps silent and deliberate, a predator closing in. She stopped directly in front of me. The entire room went quiet, sensing the confrontation. Her voice, when it came, was a low tremble of pure rage.
"This is your fault."
The silence that followed was absolute, heavy as a tombstone. She didn't need to shout. The accusation was a knife, and she twisted it.
"You pushed us into the nest before we were ready. You insisted on a direct confrontation with a creature that feeds on aggression." Her gaze flickered over the broken members of our team. "You shattered what little morale we had left with fear and brutality, telling them they were weak, telling them they would die. You made it a self-fulfilling prophecy."
She took a step closer, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper that everyone could still hear. "And then you brought it back here. A marked presence. A scent for it to follow right to our door."
She let the weight of her words settle. Then, the final blow.
"You don't hunt the Child. You feed it."
I stood. Slowly. The scrapes on my face pulled at the skin. Felt nothing. My mask was gone, but it didn't matter. My face is just a face. The shadows in the cavernous hall did the work of hiding it, carving it into something hard and feral. I looked at the girl. At her righteous anger. A child's emotion.
My voice came out low. Dead-flat. The sound of gravel grinding against bone.
"Fear is not my weapon. Cowardice is yours."
Gasps rippled through the room. Good. Let them feel it. Let the truth sting.
I continued, my gaze sweeping over her to encompass the entire, terrified assembly. "You're not soldiers. You're children hoping monsters play fair." My words were stones dropped into a silent pond. The ripples spread, distorting their colorful reflections. "Monsters don't play. They eat. They end you. The only rule is survival, and you cry when the lesson is hard."
I raised a hand, not to strike, but to point. An accusation. My finger swept across the sea of trembling figures packing their bags.
"Those who run now were never going to survive the real fight."
I expected it to galvanize some of them. To shame them into standing firm. Instead, it was like throwing gasoline on a fire. The panic intensified. My words hadn't fixed the morale collapse. They had confirmed it. They had given them an excuse. The fight was unwinnable, Rorschach said so. Run.
The boy snapped.
A surge of energy, a crackle of ozone. Miles launched himself forward, getting between me and the girl. His hands slammed into my chest, a desperate shove born of frustration and grief.
"Enough!" he screamed, his voice breaking. "You're tearing us apart!"
I didn't move. Didn't even brace myself. The shove was nothing. His anger was a brief, hot flare against an unmoving wall. My stillness seemed to unnerve him more than any retaliation would have. I looked down at his hands on my chest, then back to his tear-streaked face.
"I didn't tear anything," I said, my voice unchanged. "I revealed it."
Bio-electricity, a violent blue-gold, sparked and danced across his knuckles. It was his tell. The overload of emotion manifesting as raw, uncontrolled power. He was going to strike. To lash out at the source of his pain. Before he could, a blur of motion. Silk grabbed his wrist. Her grip was iron. The lightning sputtered and died.
Her intervention was too late. The dam was broken.
"He's right about one thing," a Spider in a shimmering, high-tech suit announced, slinging a web-pack over his shoulder. "This fight is over. I'm going home."
He turned and walked toward the Nexus gates. He wasn't the only one. A dozen followed him. Then two dozen more. The girl with the hood watched them go, then turned her cold gaze back on me, her voice ringing with grim satisfaction.
"At least they value life. That's more than I can say for some of us."
Her words acted as a benediction for the deserters. More joined her side, nodding in agreement. Panic and principle intertwined, creating a wildfire of defection. I watched as nearly half of the assembled army, our last defense against the encroaching dark, turned their backs and walked away.
Silk stepped forward. She moved into the void left by the deserters, placing herself between me, the boy, and the rest of the fractured force. She wasn't trying to be a general. She was trying to be glue.
"Stop!" Her voice was raw, not heroic. It was the plea of someone watching their last hope crumble. "We can't win by splitting apart. But we also can't win by killing pieces of ourselves to make the fight easier." Her eyes found mine for a moment, a flash of defiance. Then they swept over the remaining few.
"We are all that's left. We fight because extinction is a worse fate than fear. We fight because the Web demands it." She took a deep breath, her shoulders sagging for a second before she straightened them with visible effort. "Leaving is a choice. I won't condemn them for it. But staying… staying is a responsibility."
Some of them listened. I could see it in their posture. The indecisive few who were wavering, caught between terror and duty. A handful unpacked their supplies. But many did not. The cracks remained, too deep to be filled with pretty words.
Later. The hall was mostly empty. The echoes of shouts and accusations had faded, leaving a hollow silence. The boy found me standing before the great crystalline window that looked out onto the Web of Life and Destiny. It was dimmer than it had been yesterday. Sickly. Strands were frayed, some were already dark.
He stood beside me, not speaking for a long time. Just the two of us, watching the universe die.
"She was right, you know," he finally said, his voice quiet, defeated. "Everything you did today just pushed them away." He turned to face me. "If you can't work with them, if you can't trust them, we lose everything."
I didn't look at him. I kept my eyes on the dying light outside.
"If I work like them," I replied, "we lose faster."
I finally turned my head, meeting his gaze. He needed to see. He needed to understand the grim arithmetic of our situation.
"This isn't an army anymore," I told him, the words tasting like ash. "It's a countdown."
I saw the realization dawn in his eyes. The last vestiges of his hope flickering out. He finally understood. I won't change. I can't. But the Child… the Child has already changed him. He just hadn't been willing to look at the new shape of his own soul.
The final blow came without violence.
The girl with the hood, Gwen Stacy, stood at the Nexus gates with a small contingent of her most loyal followers. Twenty, maybe thirty of them. Not fleeing to their own worlds, but setting out on their own. A schism.
She waited until she knew the boy was watching. Her parting words were meant for him, a final, poisoned dart.
"When you let him in, Miles… you let the Child in, too."
She and her group stepped through the portal and were gone.
I watched the boy. He didn't shout. He didn't spark. He just… crumpled. Not his body, but something inside him. The light in his eyes went out. It was his worst fear, spoken aloud by someone he trusted. That in seeking a weapon hard enough to win, he had embraced the very darkness he was fighting.
The few remaining Totems, the ones who had chosen to stay, looked at him. Their new leader. They didn't see a hero anymore. They saw a mistake. They saw a failure.
I turned back to the window. The Web was darker still. Let them look. Let him feel their judgment. Let him break.
A broken thing has nothing left to lose. A broken thing is sharp.
Now, the real work can begin.
————————————————————————————————————
[Miles]
The Web isn't a map; it's a living thing. It breathes. Or it used to. Now, it just shudders.
From my perch in this… nowhere, this nexus between realities, I can feel its agony. It's a constant, high-frequency scream funneled directly into my skull, a migraine made of a trillion dying souls. My Spider-Sense is broken. It's not a warning anymore; it's a eulogy.
I look up, my cracked lenses reflecting the cosmic graveyard. The Web of Life and Destiny stretches out before me, a tapestry of infinite, shimmering threads. Each thread is a universe, each one glowing with its own unique light, humming its own specific song.
A brilliant amber thread, one where Peter B. finally got to teach Mayday how to thwip, suddenly flickers. The hum drops to a low, painful moan. I want to reach out, to grab it, to hold it together with my own hands, but I'm just a spectator to the execution. The light sputters, struggles for a moment against the encroaching void, and then it's snuffed out. The thread goes slack, turning a dead, lifeless grey. The song is gone. Replaced by a deafening silence that rips through the cosmos.
Another universe goes dark. This one's a vibrant magenta, a reality I never knew but mourn all the same. A city silenced. A hero fallen. A world erased.
And another. A pale, silvery blue thread winks out of existence.
And another.
They're falling in sequence now, a chain reaction of absolute despair. Like dominoes knocking themselves over in the dark. The Silence, the Nothing, whatever it is, isn't just destroying worlds. It's un-making them, pulling the threads from the loom so they never existed at all. The darkness creeps down the strands, methodical, patient, and unstoppable.
I see a thread close to my own, one where Gwen was the one bitten, but her Peter survived. I watched them from a distance once. They were happy. It goes dark. My breath catches in my throat, a dry, ragged sob.
My own thread, my home, Earth-1610, pulses with a frantic, terrified light. I can feel the tremors now, the vibrations of the coming end. The darkness is getting closer. Soon it will be my mom's turn. My dad's. Ganke's.
My hands, trembling inside my gloves, clench into fists. The suit is torn, the air in this place is frigid, and I've never felt so small. So utterly, completely alone. I look at the cascade of vanishing lights, the relentless march of oblivion eating its way through everything that is, was, or ever could be.
I whisper to the empty space, to the ghosts of a thousand Spider-Men, to the encroaching end of all things.
"We're running out of time."
The darkness consumes the light before me, and the last thing I see is the reflection of my own terrified eyes.