The silence stretched between them like a wound waiting to close.
Rorschach's hand remained on his grappling hook, metal cold against his palm, every muscle coiled for violence. The Child stood motionless, patterns on its mask swirling slowly, waiting with the patience of something that had already seen every possible response.
Then it spoke again, and the words landed like hammer blows.
"You are not my enemy," the Child said. "You are my demonstration."
Rorschach's jaw tightened. "Explain."
"You proved an idea could survive reality." The Child's voice remained level, factual. No emotion. Pure statement. "That purity of purpose outperforms morality. That isolation sharpens judgment. That mercy corrupts outcomes."
It took a single step forward, and the Web-threads woven into the alley pulsed in rhythm with its movement.
"I watched you walk through collapsing worlds. Saw you eliminate threats while others debated ethics. Observed how you survived by removing variables—connection, hesitation, doubt. Unnecessary weight."
The Child tilted its head slightly, patterns shifting to create something that might have been contemplation.
"You demonstrated that philosophy could be weaponized. Made functional. That conviction without compromise was not weakness—it was evolution."
Rorschach's grip tightened on the grappling hook. "You're conflating survival with correctness."
"Am I?" The patterns on the Child's mask stilled for a moment, became mirror-smooth. "You survived because you were correct. Those who compromised died. Those who hesitated were consumed. The universe selected you, Rorschach. Not through destiny—through efficiency."
The Child's cadence had shifted. Rorschach noticed it immediately—short sentences, clipped observations, brutal syntax. The same rhythm he used in his journal when thoughts needed to be preserved without sentiment.
Not mockery. Adoption.
"The Web enforces paths," the Child continued, each word precise and surgical. "Paths create complacency. Complacency breeds filth. Spider-Totems die the same deaths across infinite realities. Call it destiny. Call it narrative structure. Truth is simpler: inefficiency masquerading as purpose."
It spread its hands, and the corrupted Web-threads around them pulsed brighter.
"Destiny is a cage. Protects the weak. Punishes deviation. Creates a system where failure is mandatory—where heroes must sacrifice, suffer, die according to patterns they did not choose and cannot escape."
The Child's voice dropped lower, more certain.
"Destiny must be erased. Not out of rebellion. Optimization."
Rorschach felt something cold and sick settle in his stomach. Not fear—he'd burned that out years ago. This was worse. Recognition.
The Child wasn't misunderstanding him. Wasn't twisting his words or corrupting his philosophy through malice or ignorance.
It had followed his logic to its conclusion.
He saw himself reflected back—not as he was, but as what he enabled. The methodologies he'd refined through decades of violence, stripped of the context he told himself mattered. Intent. Choice. The belief that his targets deserved what they received.
The Child had removed those variables. Kept only the structure.
"No," Rorschach said. The word came out harder than intended. "You're wrong."
"Demonstrate how."
"Intent matters. I eliminate threats to order. You are chaos incarnate."
"I eliminate the system that creates threats." The Child's response was immediate, clinical. "Remove the source, not the symptoms. You taught me that. Watched your memories, you burned down an entire drug operation because arresting dealers was inefficient. Kill the supply chain, the problem dies with it."
Rorschach's free hand clenched into a fist. "That was different. Those were criminals. Parasites."
"So is the Web." The Child moved closer. "It feeds on Spider-Totems. Forces them to suffer, die, regenerate in new forms, suffer again. Infinite cycle. Infinite consumption. You hate parasites, Rorschach. The Web is the greatest parasite ever conceived."
The patterns on its mask began swirling faster, creating shapes that looked disturbingly like Rorschach's own face.
"I looked at your methodology and understood: half-measures fail. Compromise enables corruption. If the system itself is diseased, removing individual infections is meaningless."
"You're rationalizing genocide."
"You rationalized isolation." The Child's voice remained utterly level. "Chose effectiveness over connection. Survival over sentiment. Told yourself it was necessary because the alternative was weakness."
It gestured at the impossible alley around them, at the looping memories frozen in Web-stitched reality.
"I made the same choice. Larger scale. Same logic."
Rorschach's breathing had become carefully controlled. His mind raced through arguments, searching for the flaw in the Child's reasoning, the place where its philosophy diverged from his own.
The flaw didn't exist.
That was the problem.
"Choice still exists," he said finally. "People can choose to be better. To maintain order. To not become what I hunt."
"Can they?" The Child tilted its head, genuinely curious. "Or do systems determine outcomes? Do environments create behavior? You've seen it. Watched good people become corrupt because the structure rewarded corruption. Watched heroes die because destiny demanded sacrifice."
The patterns on its mask shifted again, creating something almost gentle.
"You stopped believing in redemption decades ago. Understood that some contamination is permanent. That trying to save the unsavable wastes resources better spent protecting what remains clean."
"That's not—" Rorschach started, but the words died in his throat.
Because it was. Exactly that. Written in his journal a thousand times across a hundred different worlds. The belief that certain lines, once crossed, couldn't be uncrossed. That mercy for monsters was cruelty to their future victims.
The Child had simply expanded the definition of "monster" to include the Web itself.
"If my actions disgust you," the Child said quietly, and now its voice carried something new—not accusation, not cruelty, but genuine inquiry, "why do they succeed?"
The question hung in the air like a blade suspended over Rorschach's certainty.
Because the Child was winning. Had been winning since the moment it learned to think, to evaluate, to apply judgment with the same ruthless precision Rorschach had spent his life perfecting. It consumed realities not through random destruction but through systematic elimination—identifying weakness, exploiting it, removing it permanently.
It used his methods.
And they worked.
Rorschach answered with motion.
The grappling hook fired at point-blank range, metal head screaming through the air and slamming into the Child's chest with enough force to crater brick. The Child shot backward, threads tearing, and crashed into the alley wall hard enough to make the impossible geometry shudder.
Brick and Web-thread exploded outward. The frozen memory fractured. Trash piles that had repeated endlessly scattered in different directions. Graffiti ran like wet paint down surfaces that suddenly remembered how physics worked.
Rorschach was already moving, closing distance while the Child was still embedded in the wall. His boot connected with its ribs, driving it deeper into the brick. Once. Twice. Three times, each impact sending cracks spiraling outward through the reconstructed memory.
The Child erupted.
Spider-limbs tore free from its back—eight of them, stolen from consumed Totems, each one barbed and precise. They caught Rorschach mid-kick, wrapped around his leg, and hurled him across the alley with casual violence.
He hit the opposite wall, rolled with the impact, came up already reaching for his belt. The Child was on him before his hand connected with the weapon, moving with speed that shouldn't exist, fist driving into his solar plexus hard enough to rupture organs.
Rorschach felt ribs break. Ignored it. Caught the Child's wrist on the follow-up strike, twisted, used the momentum to throw it over his shoulder. It landed like a cat, all grace and predatory focus, and immediately webbed his legs.
Not normal webbing. This was razor-edged, corrupted, burning through his clothes on contact. He tore free, feeling skin shred, and launched himself forward anyway.
They collided in the center of the alley with the sound of breaking bone.
Close quarters. No room for technique. Just violence refined to its most fundamental form—two bodies trying to destroy each other with perfect efficiency.
The Child's stolen strength was overwhelming. Each blow hit like a freight train, precise and devastating. But Rorschach had been fighting things stronger than him since before this creature existed. He went low, targeting joints and nerve clusters, trading damage for positioning.
His elbow shattered the Child's kneecap. It didn't slow down. Its palm strike crushed his cheekbone. He returned with a hook to the throat that tore threads loose.
They separated for half a second, both bleeding.
The Child's blood was black, viscous, alive. It moved independently, crawling back toward the wounds it had come from, trying to knit flesh that shouldn't heal. Rorschach's blood was just red—human, mortal, limited.
They met again, mask to mask.
The Child's spider-limbs lashed out. Rorschach grabbed one, used it as a lever to throw the Child into the ground. It rolled, came up firing webs from both hands—not to trap, to slice. He dodged left, felt one web tear through his coat and the flesh beneath.
His grappling hook caught the Child's shoulder, yanked it forward into a knee strike that drove the air from its lungs. It responded by driving all eight spider-limbs into his torso simultaneously, lifting him off his feet and slamming him into the nearest surface hard enough to crack the reality-stitched brick.
Rorschach coughed blood. Grabbed two of the limbs before they could retract. Twisted with every ounce of strength remaining and tore them free at the root.
The Child screamed—a sound like tearing metal, like reality fracturing, like every voice it had ever consumed crying out at once. Black blood sprayed. It staggered back, limbs regenerating even as Rorschach threw the severed pieces aside.
This wasn't just survival. Wasn't just combat.
This was rejection made flesh.
Every blow Rorschach landed was a denial. A refusal to accept the future that had learned from him. A desperate, violent attempt to kill the reflection before it could prove they were the same.
He charged again, grappling hook in one hand, knife drawn with the other. The Child met him with webs and stolen power, venom crackling across its fists, super-strength channeled through techniques it had absorbed from a dozen different Spider-Totems.
They crashed together again and again, each exchange faster than the last, each strike carrying more desperation. Blood—red and black—painted the alley walls. The frozen memory couldn't hold under the strain. Brick crumbled. Web-threads snapped. The geometry that had looped endlessly began to tear, revealing the void beneath.
Rorschach drove his knife into the Child's chest. It caught the blade between its ribs, locked it in place, and headbutted him hard enough to crack his mask.
They fell together, still grappling, still destroying each other, mask pressed to mask, breath mixing in the space between.
The alley fractured completely.
Reality tore under the weight of two identical philosophies refusing to coexist. The walls collapsed inward. The ground opened up. The Web-threads holding the memory together snapped one by one, each break sounding like screaming.
And through it all, they kept fighting.
Not for survival.
For denial.
Because if the Child was right—if it truly had learned from him, if its methods were just his methods scaled to their logical extreme—then everything Rorschach had built his life on was a foundation for apocalypse.
The hunt was no longer about containment.
It was about proving the reflection wrong.
Even if that meant destroying them both.