The air in the Nexus outpost was thick with the dust of fallen realities. I sat on an overturned crate in a room where the wall had given up, exposing the glitching, static-laced void beyond. The pen felt alien in my gloved fingers, the tremors in my hand a betrayal I couldn't suppress. Beside me, the remnants of my mask lay on the floor, a monochrome puddle of fabric, useless as shed skin.
I wrote. The ink bled into the cheap paper of my journal, the words a bulwark against the shaking.
Weakness is the first sin. The original. From it, all others are born: fear, compromise, hope. Hope is the most insidious of them all. It's a parasite that convinces the host it is symbiotic. It whispers of better days while it hollows you out from the inside. This place… this army… was built on hope. Now, the foundation is sand, and the tide is coming in.
The whispers started hours ago. They slithered through the fractured corridors like snakes made of sound. Raised voices, sharp and brittle. The percussive slam of a portal closing, a sound like a guillotine's final verdict. I heard Pavitr arguing with Hobie, his voice strained with a desperate optimism that was already dead. I heard Margo's frustrated sigh, a sound of heavy resignation. The great Spider-Army, the bastion against the collapse of everything, was dying. Not with a bang. With the sound of people packing their bags.
I did not go to the boy, to Miles. I could feel his despair radiating from the command center like heat shimmer off asphalt. A black hole of grief pulling everything in. Comfort is a lie we tell the dying. It serves the teller, not the recipient. It eases their guilt. I have no guilt to ease. He chose his path. He clung to a phantom, a girl from another world, and in doing so, he fractured his own. He showed them weakness. And weakness, once smelled, invites predators.
I remained in my broken room, a sentinel watching a city burn from a distant hill. The structure groaned around me, crystalline lattices flickering and dying. The Web of Life and Destiny. A pretty name for a failing power grid. I watched the remaining Totems scurry past my doorway, their movements frantic, their faces tight with a fear they were trying to hide. They were insects sensing a change in barometric pressure, knowing the storm was about to break. They looked at each other, but they didn't see allies. They saw potential casualties. They saw the reflection of their own terror.
Then, she left. The girl. Gwen.
I didn't need to see it. The sound told the whole story. The specific hum of her dimensional watch, a clean, sharp tear in the fabric of the Nexus. No hesitation. No final, lingering goodbyes. Just the cold, efficient sound of a strategic retreat. An amputation.
I picked up my pen again, my hand steadier now. The chaos was giving me focus.
She is gone. The little ghost. Left without a word. Smart. Sentiment is a boat anchor in a sinking ship. She cut the rope. The boy will not see it that way. He will see it as a wound. He will bleed out where he stands. The others see it, too. Fear spreads faster than poison. Quicker to kill, too. It doesn't just stop the heart; it dissolves the spine. The air here is thick with it. They are breathing it in, choking on it. The army is a corpse. It just hasn't realized it's dead yet.
I closed the journal. The observation was complete. The hypothesis proven. The age of heroes, of hope, of webslinging camaraderie, was over. It was a failed experiment.
Enough waiting.
I rose from the crate, my joints protesting with a series of dull clicks. The pain was a familiar companion, a reminder that the body is a machine, and all machines eventually break down. I moved with a deliberate, unhurried purpose. The roll of medical gauze felt rough in my hands as I unwrapped the crude binding on my forearm. The wound beneath was ugly, a deep gash from the Child, puckered and inflamed. I cleaned it with a stolen antiseptic wipe that stung like fire, then re-wrapped it, tight and functional. Healing was a luxury. Preventing infection was a necessity.
I checked the straps of my gear, pulling them until the leather groaned. The grapple gun was cold and heavy. I ran a whetstone along the edge of the combat knife I kept strapped to my boot. The shing-shing-shing of steel on stone was a calming mantra, a promise of sharp, decisive answers in a world of meandering questions.
My old mask was useless. The sensitive inks had been fried by a dimensional surge, leaving it a static, meaningless blot. Compromised. Weak. I found a spare swatch of the white, durable fabric and a bottle of black, industrial-grade dye. There was no artistry to it. I didn't try to replicate the shifting patterns. I painted a face of stark, jagged geometry. Two brutalist black shards for eyes, asymmetrical and wrong. A slash of a mouth that was more of a stitched-wound grimace. It wasn't a face that changed with my expressions. It was a face that had none. A death mask. More frightening. Good.
The collapse of the Spider-Army was not a tragedy. It was a clarification. An absolution. It stripped away all the pretense, all the moral hand-wringing and debate. It burned away the fat and left only the bone. The mission. They had failed because they were unwilling to do what was necessary. They talked of saving everyone. An impossibility. A child's dream. You cannot save a body by preserving the diseased limb. You cut it off.
They failed. Their failure was my permission.
I walked to the glitching Web-window, the only source of light in the room. It showed a chaotic tapestry of worlds, some burning, some fading to black. An endless panorama of decay. I knelt before it as if it were an altar. I pressed the worn leather cover of my journal against my chest, the book a dense, heavy weight over my heart. I opened it to a fresh page and wrote the final entry of this chapter. The first vow of the next.
Filth dies. If no one else can do it, I will. Alone if I must.
My fingers, sure and steady now, tore the page from the journal. The sound was a final, satisfying rip. I folded it. A childhood memory, a flash of a simpler time, guided my hands. Crease, fold, tuck. I made it into the shape of a spider. A mockery of their sacred symbol. An effigy.
I held it up to the dying Weave-light, the paper insect stark against the cosmic chaos. Then, I tossed it into the window. It didn't fall. It was caught by the raw energy of the Web, and for a moment, it glowed. Then, it turned to black ash and disintegrated, my oath consumed by the very thing they held so sacred.
A pulse.
It wasn't a sound. It was a physical blow. A bass note that rattled my teeth and shook the dust from the ceiling. The Nexus screamed. The threads of the Web-window flickered violently, from blood-red to corpse-blue. The alarms kicked in—not the high, frantic siren of an invasion, but a deeper, guttural tone I'd never heard before. A shriek of violated physics. The monitors that still worked flashed a single, terrifying word: INTRUSION.
Something was coming through. Not knocking at the door. Tearing down the wall.
I pulled the new, rigid mask over my face. The world narrowed to what I could see through the jagged eye-slits. It fit like a coffin lid. Perfect.
I strode out into the main concourse. The central platform was a scene of pandemonium. The last dozen or so Totems were gathered, a herd of frightened animals. Their wide-eyed lenses stared at the heart of the Nexus, where the Great Web itself was spasming. Miles arrived last, stumbling onto the platform, his eyes hollowed out, the costume hanging off him like it belonged to someone else. He looked like a ghost at his own funeral.
The Weave didn't open. It was unstitched. A jagged, unstable aperture tore itself into existence at the center of the platform, bleeding a darkness that wasn't merely the absence of light. It was an active, hungry rot. The crystalline structures around it darkened, corroded, and crumbled into digital dust.
A silhouette appeared in the tear. It was small, vaguely child-like, but it was a void in the shape of a child. It didn't enter. It didn't have to. Its presence was enough. It did not speak, yet a thought scraped across my mind, cold and ancient: Mine.
Then they started coming.
They crawled from the rift, one by one. Husked things that wore the familiar red and blue. Their bodies were twisted, limbs bent at impossible angles. They were Spider-Totems, but their shells were empty, piloted by an unseen hand. They scrambled across the platform, not with the grace of spiders, but with the jerky, unsettling gait of broken marionettes. The snap of dry ligaments echoed in the sudden, horrified silence. Their eye-lenses were dark, vacant. Their web-shooters twitched uselessly at their wrists.
One of them, wearing the suit of a Spider-Man I recognized from a world consumed by a symbiote plague, turned its head with a sound like grinding gravel. Its empty gaze swept across the terrified survivors.
The Totems recoiled in unison, a wave of pure horror washing over them. Someone screamed. Miles took a stumbling step back, his breath catching in his throat, a choked, dying sound. He was seeing ghosts. He was seeing the price of his failure, animated and walking toward him. The panic spread, a contagion of shrieks and desperate, fumbling movements. They were broken. All of them.
I stood apart from them, my feet planted on the shuddering floor. I felt nothing. No fear. No shock. The new mask hid any trace of humanity I might have left. The jagged black shapes stared out at the unfolding nightmare, unblinking. This wasn't an invasion. This was a cull. This was nature, in its cruelest, most honest form, cleaning house.
"Good," I whispered, the sound swallowed by the chaos. Let Hell come to our doorstep. Saves me the trip.