(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)
Location: The Nexus Of Knowledge And Imagination
The receptionist desk was not nailed to the floor; there was no floor here to nail. Stacks without horizon turned and refolded; aisles decided to become other aisles. The Nexus drifted its address every heartbeat, and the desk slid with it like a quiet ferry, bell never ringing, lamp never flickering.
Chrona's fingers were white on the wood.
She realized it, unclenched, and then gripped again—small, useless waves hitting the same dock. She pressed her thumbs together and counted the way she'd taught scared Guardians to count: five things you can see (lamp, ledger, ink, ribbon, the little nick in the desk she pretended was an accident), four you can touch (paper, sleeve, wood, breath), three you can hear (stacks breathing, lamps agreeing, her own shallow inhale), two you can smell (old ink, ozone), one you can taste (metal, because worry had teeth). It helped. A little. Not enough.
Boundless meant able to, not allowed to. She could have shelved the cosmos by color temperature and bound the wind in cloth; today she sat at a human-sized desk with a right-angle corner that always caught her sleeve. Human-sized things were anchors. She needed one.
The wall to her left wasn't a wall but a scroll—an infinite pane of search that showed everything that could be asked and wanted to answer anyway. Threads from a million fictions braided and unbraided: annotated timelines, glossaries, code comments that accidentally invoked angels. She kept most of it dim. Screen time is a footprint. Footprints become maps. Maps get people killed. They never saw her much because she designed it that way.
Another pane—smaller—stayed bright because she didn't have the heart to dim it. In it, a plaza beat in wrong-green, the feed lagging not because the Nexus was slow but because the story itself was stuttering under pressure. Peter moved inside that lag like an answer the problem hated. A golden uniform smiled. A cannon hummed. A girl with ribbons refused to look away. Chrona watched everything at once and somehow still felt late.
Her hand went to her throat on reflex. The chain wasn't there. Red Goblin had taken it—their chain, the one that wore their names like a promise—during the torture that wiped Peter's memories clean and left only sharpened edges. The skin where the pendant had rested felt colder than the room would allow.
"Don't," she told herself, soft and stern at once, the way she said it to crying rookies who apologized for crying. "Don't reach. Don't be seen." The please she didn't say lived in her mouth anyway.
The Nexus shifted again and the desk drifted with it. Somewhere far below, users on a night shift typed the same question into different boxes and got back different truths. The stacks breathed; the lamps agreed to keep their circles small. Chrona tucked a stray hair behind her ear and immediately untucked it because her hands needed something to do. She gave herself permission to fidget. (Therapist's note: sometimes fidgeting is breathing with your fingers.)
A margin note pulsed red at the edge of her vision: OMNISCIENCE PARTIAL: ANASIS NOT INDEXABLE. The line had been there for days. It still made her stomach drop as if the room had just decided it had an edge after all.
Anasis—the Spider God—had always been traceable by implication if not by name. Echoes. Rituals half-remembered by cultures that never agreed to be neighbors. A glimmer in a web nobody had spun. Now: nothing. Not indexable. Not hidden. Not there.
If she had been built to fear, she would have called it fear. Boundless beings don't fear; they tabulate risk with their whole bodies. This tabulation trembled. "Okay," she whispered, shaky-brave. "Okay, sweet girl, breathe."
The feed flared. On the plaza, Reinhard inclined his head with the kind of courtesy that turns murder into opera. I am here for love, he said, and it landed in Chrona's chest like a nail driven with a velvet mallet. She saw the future that sentence wanted: Peter crowned in the kind of sanctity that means you don't get to stop; sacraments written in ruin; a congregation of consequences kneeling whether they wanted to or not.
A saint of annihilation is just a weapon with better hymns.
"Don't you dare," she told the screen—tender, furious. Her voice did the tiny wobble she hated. She pressed her palm flat to the desk to steady it.
Even stripped—memories uprooted, kindness recast as leverage, tenderness running on muscle memory—he'd kept the reflex to save first. He steadied a rookie's breath while measuring a killbox; he webbed a light standard before it fell; he said "You're okay" exactly twice because any more would steal the word. She loved him for the arithmetic that refused to lie.
Then the Speed Force core opened like a sun that refused to admit it was a sun, and he and the golden thing vanished into a tempo the chapter could barely hold.
Chrona pushed her chair back too hard; its scrape was a petty sound in a place that generated none. The acoustics tried to correct for her out of habit. She waved the correction away. "Let something be ugly today," she muttered, eyes wet and stubborn.
"Adriel," she said—not to summon him (no one summoned Adriel), but to remind herself of the sentence he'd left in her, the one that held when nothing else did. Never leave the desk. No matter what you see. If they find you, they find the seed. If they find the seed, they starve the world. He hadn't raised his voice. He never had to. First Guardians are gravity with manners.
She wanted to disobey him for the first time since the last war ended with everyone else who did her job dead.
"Just one nudge," she bargained with the room, with herself, with the idea of an older version of her who would forgive this. "A breadcrumb. A whisper. He won't even know it's from me." The stacks answered in flicker-math—probabilities for exposure climbing like a fever chart if her fingerprint touched the verse directly. The chart didn't say no. It said you will be seen.
Her breath hiccuped. She pressed two fingers beneath her collarbone—grounding, grounding—and kept watching.
Below, on the fight feed, Orianna chose to charge instead of pray for another conversation. Good. The girl understood that mercy is a shape you make with your hands, not a speech you give while someone else points a cannon at your head. "Atta girl," Chrona whispered, proud and aching. "Easy shoulders, breathe through it."
The pane that refused to index Anasis winked, trying to resolve information that wasn't there. Chrona opened a new query on instinct, wrote it by hand as if penmanship could change fate: WHERE IS THE SPIDER GOD? The pane returned nothing and—worse than nothing—a suggestion: TRY ANOTHER TERM.
"I am not trying another term," she said, through her teeth, and a helpless laugh bubbled up at the ridiculousness of arguing with a search pane in a library that obeyed her. She covered her mouth and swallowed the laugh because it felt too close to crying.
She could still feel the hollow place on her throat where the pendant had lain, warm from his skin more nights than not. Red Goblin's laugh had been a bad sound—a child playing a horror game too loudly, reveling in buttons that shouldn't exist. The torture had been worse because it had been precise. You can't brute-force a mind like Peter's; you sand it in strips until he only remembers the angles that cut.
Chrona pulled the ledger from the desk drawer. It wasn't really paper. It was a promise made legible. Her hands shook. She hated that; she forgave it. (Therapist's note: forgive the body for trying to keep you.) She bracketed a line with her thumb and whispered into it, not words but permissions. The ledger opened a maintenance route—sterile, dull, the kind of channel audits skip because it looks boring—and became a throat you could whisper a miracle through.
"Do it and delete it," she told the ledger. "Please. Please." The ledger did not say please back; it flickered a quiet yes.
She wrote the smallest message a person could write and still call it a message: a coordinate seed wrapped in heartbeat noise, a five-second life, a breadcrumb that would dissolve even from memory hooks. No names. No signatures. No trail.
LOG: ROUTE HEALTH CHECK.TTL: 5s.NOTE: IF PATHFINDERS ENCOUNTER BLACK SUNS, PRIORITIZE EXTRACTION OVER ELEGANCE.
Names are dangerous. She didn't write his. She didn't have to. People who live in stories hear what they need if you aim the sentence correctly.
"Ace," she said anyway, because love makes liars of protocols and because saying it helped keep her from breaking. "Ace—Flame Guardian, Guardian of Prometheus Flames—if you're anywhere near him…" Her voice cracked. She let it. "Please."
The stacks shifted again, farther now, riding a thermal of attention they had learned to avoid—the trending swell of a post that had guessed too close to a real thing. Chrona dimmed three outer panes and brightened the plaza. Light bent between two ribbon-anchors. A beam missed a girl by a promise. She exhaled only when Orianna did.
"Stay," she told herself, and the word shook. "Stay." She rubbed her sleeve over her eyes and laughed at herself for doing it like a teenager. She was billions of years old. She was twenty-something. Both felt true, and neither helped.
The plaza feed caught a reflection—Peter's mask turned, half-second only, as if some flipped coin in him always landed on protect the quiet thing even when the Dark rewrote his job description. He looked toward where a camera would be if the Nexus used cameras. He couldn't see her. The Nexus didn't let him. She laid her palm flat on the desk anyway and pretended that counted. "Hey," she whispered to the glass, small smile breaking under weight. "You're doing so well. I'm so—" The word proud stuck; she pushed it through. "—proud."
A whisper eddied through the stacks. Not the Darks. Not a god. The Nexus itself—its animal intelligence, the one she and the previous librarians had taught with routine and music—nudged her palm like a cat. It opened a folder she hadn't asked for and showed a dull little icon no one but her would have recognized: a cache key the Red Goblin had missed when he scrubbed Peter clean. A fragment. A folded-up hour with a cheap necklace and a coffee machine that refused to die.
Chrona closed her eyes around the pain of it and didn't open the file. Opening is touching. Touching is trace. "Hold it," she whispered to the room, voice wobbling. "Keep it warm. Please."
The plaza dimmed; speed cracked the chapter again as two men argued with physics by example. The cannon below brightened for a true shot. The ribbon-girl set her feet.
Chrona set hers.
Boundless didn't mean helpless. She could not step into the verse. She could keep the roads the verse might need open, and the doors it could not survive closed. She spread her hands on the desk and began the work that looks like nothing until everything is still standing: re-key the drift schedule; salt the wake with decoys; nudge search so it returns the right lie to the wrong eyes; fold the librarian's breath into the spell that keeps knowledge from pointing a knife at itself.
Somewhere, a guardian would read the right sentence at the right time and remember a promise he didn't know he'd made. Somewhere, the Flame Guardian would find a path that hadn't existed the moment before.
Chrona bowed her head—not as a priestess, but as a girl who was tired and lonely and in love—and let herself whisper the one forbidden specific.
"Please, Ace—Guardian of Prometheus Flames… save Peter Parker."
...
Runeterra, Noxus
Ace POV
I'm tired.
Not the kind you sleep off. Physically I'm fine—potions from Adriel sealed the ribs, more stims sit in Shared Inventory if I need them. It's the other kind. The kind Juggernaut leaves behind when he's not just a blunt instrument but a cathedral with a god inside and the doors locked from the outside.
A Dark in a suit of inevitability. Philosophical. Patient. Too many questions carved into every punch.
I've been sweeping Noxus for days—every canyon, every fortress-tunnel, every illegal laboratory that pretends it's a temple. I'll revise the capital later, again. I tell myself that's strategy. It feels like stalling.
The Shared Gamer System paints my map in hexes. Most of the region is greyed to "cleared." A few corners remain. I hate those corners.
I still blame myself. Red Goblin took Peter when I should've had him in a hard lock, right after we got bounced by those two from the SMT verse. I said to Adriel, "Then I'll find him." I meant it. Partners in crime—his joke first, mine second. Adriel forced us into the same orbit and, fine, he was right. Fruit of friendship. Whatever. Now the orbit is missing a star.
No sign of Peter here. Nothing but old bootprints and fresh propaganda.
Bilgewater's off the table (my fight with Shinra erased it from the map like a bad save). That leaves Freljord—unlikely; Peter cleaned Dark A.M. out of there—or Ionia. Hidden bases love "previously saved" like rats love emptied granaries.
I'm about to clear the last hex when a holo blooms at the edge of my vision. System-blue, polite. Messages tab.
Adriel? Artoria? Check-in or orders, either is fine.
I flick it open with a thought and my chest freezes like I've swallowed winter.
Sender: Chrona.
We've never met. I know her anyway—Peter's versions of her in quiet stories, Adriel's careful omissions, the weight around her name when people pray near computer screens.
The message has a five-second self-delete. The timer's already burning.
My brain supplies all the ways this is wrong. Chrona shouldn't be visible on this network. Any direct contact from her is a wake with coordinates written in the foam. If the Darks sniff even a curl of it—
I open it.
Please, Ace—Guardian of Prometheus Flames... save Peter Parker.
A link hangs under the sentence—plain, dumb, mortal: maps.google... (the System's already chewing it into something fiction understands).
The Shared Gamer UI molts into GPS. Lines snap into place. A pin drops.
IONIA — The Placidium of Navori. Sacred ground. First Lands harmony. Monastery air, wild gardens with their own rules. Every Ionian I've met lowers their voice when they say Placidium, like even the syllables deserve clean sandals.
The message dissolves into nothing, the nothing dissolves into less than that.
My heart starts again and goes too fast. Not because she handed me Peter's location—I asked the universe for worse miracles—but because of the risk she took to do it. My first instinct is to call her and shout: What are you doing? Don't paint a target on yourself. Don't let them triangulate the desk you sit at.
I swallow it. She knows all that. She sent it anyway. For him.
For us.
I stand on a black stone ridge and breathe out until the shake leaves my hands. The map hovers steady. The pin doesn't move. I taste Ionian air in memory—green tea and thunder.
"I promise you, Chrona," I say, and the heat threads through the words before I tell it to. "I'll save Peter."
Inventory blink-check: potions—three majors, two minors. Phoenix down equivalents—one (hate the name, love the outcome). Bandolier—charged. Cloak—resists scrying for thirty minutes at a time if I don't sprint through godlight. That last bit is optimistic; I'm about to sprint through godlight.
I ping Adriel a single glyph: ON TRAIL. He'll read the white-space and know the rest. He'll also know not to ask how I got it.
Artoria's channel lights. I don't open it. Not yet.
I point myself at Ionia.
The Prometheus Flames answer with the eagerness of a loyal dog and the discipline of a star. They're not just what I used to be—they're more. Cosmic fire that learned manners, scales to void, refuses to be winded. Heat builds at the base of my spine and then everywhere, a clean burn, a promise. The air around me whitens at the edges without scorching the rock. I love that trick.
I lift.
From the ground it probably looks like a messy comet, tail too alive, nucleus too human. From inside it feels like sliding into a lane that was already mine, a high road only flames can see.
Noxus falls away. The Shared Gamer overlay draws a luminous line east, threading safe currents, dodging god-wakes and fresh scars. I catch my reflection in a broken tower window—eyes like the inside of a kiln, jaw set wrong. I let it be wrong.
Peter, I'm coming.
Chrona, you were careful. You were just careful enough. Thank you.
Prometheus, keep me honest. Don't let me turn this into a sermon with explosions.
Below me, continents turn like pages. Above me, the high dark hums with the same tension I felt in Juggernaut's hands—philosophy as a weapon, inevitability in a suit—but there's a difference now. A pin on a map. A place with a name. The anxiety burns clean when it has direction.
The Placidium of Navori grows on the horizon like a thought someone finally said out loud.
I pour on speed until the air around me laces with auroras and the System warns me about "narrative shear." Fine. Let the chapter edges curl a little. I'm tired. I'm allowed one shortcut.
I don't pray often. I don't have to. The fire is already an answer. But as the first Ionian mountains take shape under me, I hear myself, quiet:
"Hold on, partner."
Then the valley opens, the gardens breathe, and I fall toward the pin like a meteor that learned how to aim.
...
Silvermere City, Demacia Cluster.
Senna did not stalk. She didn't need the theater. She had the confidence of an artillery piece that had learned to smile.
A feather of violet-white bled from the cannon's seams; the plaza went quietly bright as if a second noon had stood up from the pavement. Orianna's wounded shoulder hummed in sympathy where the shot had grazed, heat nested under the plating. She set her feet, left heel angled, right foot forward, every line of her body ready to move on information instead of panic.
"Last chance," she said, because Guardians were taught to say it and because some part of her still needed words to work.
"Consider it taken," Senna said warmly, and fired.
The beam didn't scream; it sang, a high ribbon of ruin keyed to a frequency that wanted to erase nouns. Tocker was already in motion, voice a soft trill audible through bone. Angle sixty-three. Counter with thirty-one. Orianna threw a ribbon, hard left then snapping across, and the fabric wrote a quick parabola. Light hit it, indented reality like a thumb in clay, and bent—narrowly—into the empty sky.
The upper air caught fire for a second. Clouds a dozen miles up sheared into cursive, then knit themselves back together as if embarrassed.
Senna's eyebrows lifted in pleased surprise. "Keep that," she said. "It makes you interesting."
"Stop," Orianna answered, and moved.
She didn't close to strike. She closed to limit options—the way you hug a wildfire with ditches and stone so it can't choose where to run. Two ribbons plunged into the pavement and hardened into short walls that met in an arrow point aimed at Senna's feet. The third ribbon cut a shallow trench to control the roll of any backblast. She didn't have time to admire the geometry. The cannon flinched and spat three tight shots in an isosceles pattern designed to bait a dodge and punish it.
Orianna took none of them.
She stepped into the first, threw a ribbon shield at five degrees off normal instead of ninety—a bad habit to teach the beam— and let the energy skate across the face into the trench. The sidewalls drank it, runes eating power like chalk eats sound.
The second shot came for her knee. She didn't try to block it; she changed the floor. Ribbon to pavement, a half-moon twist, and the ground bucked like a living thing. The blast hit the lip of the new wave and spent itself unrolling a spiral of scorched stone. The third shot was delayed, deliberately late—meant to catch the breath at the end of an exhale. Tocker beeped; Orianna didn't breathe. The blast passed where her ribcage would have risen.
Senna's grin showed actual delight. "You learn quick."
"I'd rather talk," Orianna said. "We used to be on the same side."
"Sweetheart," Senna said, and the word was not kind, "we're finally on the same side. Mine."
She moved.
Senna didn't blink or teleport. She refused range. One instant she was five long paces away with a long-barrel weapon; the next she was three, cannon hip-high, muzzle angled to carve a human from navel to shoulder. The air crawled with afterimages; Orianna rode a ribbon like a swing and let her body be the hinge. The shot burned a line along her side without breaking the plate. The smell of roasted synthfiber turned her stomach.
"Don't apologize," Senna sang, mocking her own earlier advice, and pivoted.
Close-range cannon-forms felt like a violation of categories. Orianna had learned to respect categories as a matter of survival; Dark Senna loved to break them like ice.
The cannon coughed a bomb-petal blast that flowered in a ring—no center, all edge. Orianna would have been scissored if she hadn't already thrown a ribbon around the base of a shattered kiosk three meters back and pulled. The ribbon yanked; her center of mass translated; the ring cut where she had been, shaved a thin slice of hair and a thinner slice of time.
"You're good," Senna said, eyes bright with teacher-pleased again. "You might actually—"
Orianna snapped a ribbon and finally tried to disarm instead of deflect. The silk looped, slid along the barrel, and cinched just behind the chamber. A twist, a drop of weight, and the cannon's mouth pulled down out of line.
Senna let it fall.
Most people fight gravity even as it helps. Senna made it her dance partner. The cannon dipped; she rode the dip into a spin and let centrifugal force write the next shot. The blast came out not straight but curved, a boomerang of annihilation meant to arc around the ribbon shield that Orianna would obviously throw up. Orianna didn't give it the courtesy. She used the disarm ribbon as a strap, stepped into the arc of the cannon, and hip-checked Senna's line.
The boomerang shot cut away a third of the frozen fountain sculpture instead of a third of Orianna's head. The remaining water held its shape out of stubbornness and magic. It reflected both of them—a girl with a star who refused to be a weapon, a woman with a star who had become one—with a warping that felt too on the nose.
"Senna," Orianna tried again, breath tight. "We took the same oath."
"Promises are just cages with fancier locks," Senna said, almost gently, and fired point-blank.
The muzzle flash wasn't light. It was a command to un-be. Orianna slammed both palms into the blast—ribbons fanning into a double-petal shield—and held. The beam punched and hissed and snarled over harmonics that made her molars ache. Her boots ploughed two grooves into the stone; sparks and not-sparks sprayed. She widened her stance by an inch and felt the difference cascade through her body like new math.
Tocker shrieked in a tone that meant, this is infrastructure failure, not tactics. The shield's inner rim began to feather, edges unspooling into reality's threads. Orianna released at once, twisted, and let the blast spend itself into a stack of sandbags that refused to remember they were sand.
The bags fumed; the plaza breathed wrong-green and then steadied.
"You won't win this by holding," Senna said. "I have a lot more breaking than you have mending."
"I know," Orianna said, and moved.
Speed wasn't her gift; tempo was. She built a rhythm with her feet and let her body become a metronome that wrote space. Three steps in, two steps out, three; the old wrong heartbeat repurposed into a measure. Ribbons followed the beat. A loop clasped Senna's gauntlet and tightened; another stitched the ground into a smart net that recognized Dark energy and tried to stick to it like honey.
Senna tested the net with a pulse. The mesh grabbed and held, but only for half a second. The cannon hummed, and the sticky geometry crisped into ash that wasn't ash.
"That was cute," Senna said. "Do you have a meaner toy?"
"I'm trying to save you," Orianna said, which sounded worse out loud than it had in her head.
Senna's face softened in a way that would have been kindness in another life. "That's the meanest thing you've said," she said. "You really don't know me."
She lifted the cannon and leveled it without flourish. Something in the air collapsed—a local low tide, a withdrawal of possibilities. Tocker went silent, not out of ignorance but out of respect.
"Orianna," Tocker whispered finally, like a friend with a hand on yours. Core charge escalating. She's reading Large Mountain/Small Island level minimum. Potential Island Level if she burns the chamber.
"Contain," Orianna breathed, trusting the familiar to hear do not let her erase this city, and threw everything she knew.
Ribbons didn't just block. They named. She named the empty between two lamp posts a corridor and made it true. She named the shadow under a bench "deep" and meant it. She named the air a lens and it became one, curving light like a river curves in a floodplain. She ran these namings into each other until the plaza was a maze with her rules at the joints.
Senna fired.
The beam came out wrong—stuttering, multi-threaded, like a braided whip. Orianna's lenses ate the first vector and spilled the second; the third found the seam she'd left because she was tired and not a machine. She patched as she flew. The ribbon at her waist cinched a post that hadn't existed until she needed it, and she swung. The beam kissed her thigh plate in a way that would leave a story if she lived to tell it.
The shot bent, channeled, and rose. The sky took it like a punched breath. The clouds were careful not to die.
Senna didn't pause to admire. She broke left, boots skimming her own backwash, cannon angling not at Orianna but at the survivors bottlenecked at the escalator. The pivot wasn't tactical; it was moral sabotage. Force the Guardian to choose.
Orianna didn't think. She threw a ribbon with her off hand and missed. In training, missing meant lose; here, missing meant curve. She snapped her wrist and the ribbon arced, found a hook in the air (because she named it), and caught the lamp above the escalator. Tocker pulsed. Vector acceptable if you like living.
She yanked. The whole lamp standard arced down, not to crush anyone but to intersect the blast line like a traffic cop stepping into a reckless car. The beam hit the steel; steel learned humility and became bright spray; the spray met the corridor lens and tore away sideways like sheets in wind.
Orianna's heart stuttered and then steadied. This was not sustainable.
Senna watched the people stumble, then looked back at Orianna with something like approval that tasted like metal. "You chose right," she said. "That's how I know you'll lose."
"You could choose right, too," Orianna said.
"I am," Senna said, sincere.
She snapped a shot at a shallow angle and Orianna dodged late on purpose, letting the beam rip the outer ring of her star. Pain sparked in her chest in a way that felt too close to the point. She gritted her teeth, caught the off-balance momentum, and used it, ribbon pulling her into what looked like danger and was actually position.
They traded like that for a minute stretched into kaleidoscope: two blurs and the architecture between them flickering through forms it had never intended, Senna trying to pry open a posture, Orianna refusing to own a killing line. Tocker fed her micro-corrections: heel down, elbow two degrees, shoulder guard banking, sightline, now now—
A blast burned the edge of her ear. Her hearing tilled into white for a second. She tasted copper. She felt an old grief that wasn't hers skitter across the back of her teeth and told it to wait its turn.
Senna upped the scale without warning.
The cannon's throat widened and took a breath that the city felt. The plaza's wrong-green deepened and inked the seams. The glass in the storefronts thought about remembering being sand. Tocker's icons slid into a stack reserved for events that should have titles: Eclipse Mode blinked and stayed.
"This one will not miss," Senna said, not unkind.
Orianna had three choices: evade and let the shot eat the district; block and be erased; steal the shot and put it somewhere it could not hurt anyone. The third wasn't a thing, not really. She made it a thing.
"Help me," she said to Tocker, and to the star, and to the part of her that had wanted this job before she knew what it cost.
She threw six ribbons in a circle and tied them to nothing. They hung in the air because she decided they did and because the oath had once agreed with her decisions. Each ribbon twisted until it wrote a spiral; the spirals married into a torus; the torus asked to be a gate and she told it no, be a well instead. Lenses layered, each with a slightly different curvature, so any line through them would bend incrementally until it missed the world by habit.
Senna fired Eclipse.
The beam was wider than any street had a right to hold and cleaner than any knife ever made. It carried silence like a second payload. Orianna felt it in her nails.
The first lens bowed but did not break. The second sang. The third peeled back a fraction at one edge like paper near a candle; she threw a seventh ribbon and bandaged it closed mid-flight. The beam flexed around the torus, thought about arguing, and then remembered that light likes curves if you don't ask it to lie about being straight.
It bent. It rose. It left.
Far above the city, a new star wrote a line across the sky and kept going. Somewhere an observatory clerk would make a note that would ruin a week for someone's model of how the upper air should behave. Down here, no one died from that shot.
Orianna sagged, just a breath.
Senna watched the sky bruise, then looked back at Orianna with honest admiration. "You are making me work," she said. "That is a gift."
"It's not a gift," Orianna said. "It's your life."
Senna's smile thinned. "No," she said. "It's yours."
She aimed not at Orianna but at the base of the torus construct. A quick, mean shot—sabotage. If the torus collapsed as it unwound, the stored curvature would snap and write chaos back into the plaza. Orianna saw it and cut the construct instead of letting it decay, severed the ribbons with a thought. The torus died gentler, a dome collapsing into itself and then into nothing. The backwash still knocked her two steps sideways. She pivoted those steps into a hop and didn't fall.
"You'll tire," Senna said. "I won't."
"That's not how this works," Orianna said, lying, because it was.
The shoulder she'd taken the point-blank on was singing now in a way that didn't sound like music. Her thigh hurt where the shot had kissed her. Her star's light had dipped by a hair, and that hair felt like a mile.
"New trick," Senna said, and slid the cannon to a weird angle, above her shoulder like a violin.
Orianna didn't recognize the form. She didn't need to. The cannon hummed at a harmonic Tocker did not like; the familiar put up a tiny umbrella icon that meant, I can catch exactly one of these for you, but you will not like how it feels.
"Do it," Orianna whispered, and twenty meters of air between them became heavy as water.
Senna bowed her head just enough to look like a prayer, then released. The shot that came wasn't a beam; it was a lattice, a woven grid of annihilation that wanted to fall like a net and slice what it caught into a thousand clean pieces.
Tocker popped the umbrella.
It wasn't a shield so much as a mislabeling of a moment. Time juddered—a strobe you could feel in your teeth—and the lattice hit the umbrella's seam in the narrative. It spread, met empty plot, and self-cancelled with a noise like a sigh. The umbrella icon winked out, one-time-only charm consumed.
"Nice toy," Senna said.
"Thanks," Orianna said, and didn't add, now we're out.
She pressed, because momentum has a story of its own and surrender feeds it badly. Ribbons wove a low wall, then a high one; a diagonal brace; a step; a feint. Senna answered with a backhanded blast that took off the corner of the high wall and spattered not-light. Orianna ran up the remains of the wall anyway, kicked off, and came down with the intent to tangle, not strike. She got the ribbon around Senna's elbow and pulled.
Senna, again, didn't fight the pull. She followed, let the momentum write a fall, and fired downward mid-spin. The ground exploded as if embarrassed to have been anywhere near that argument. Orianna caught the edge of the explosion with a ribbon and used the pressure as a trampoline. Her landing rolled into a slide. The slide broke her skin at the knee; the ribbon wrapped it and stopped the blood because she needed that blood later.
"Look at you," Senna said. "You're making a whole religion out of not killing me."
"I'm trying to remember the one we promised," Orianna said.
Senna's face did a complicated thing: pain, amusement, something like hunger reframed as hope then rejected. She shook it off like rain.
"Okay," she said. "Mine, then."
The cannon deepened in pitch. The plaza's light, wrong-green and sallow, took on a high metallic sheen as if breathed by a forge. A shadow passed over them both; Orianna looked up involuntarily at a sky that felt nearer.
Tocker's voice flattened, the way people do when they've already done all the screaming. She is about to test Large Island Level's of power.
"Not here," Orianna whispered, and felt the word try to be a prayer and settle for being a rule.
She burned a lot of herself fast. Six ribbons flowered into twelve. Twelve became twenty-four. She wrote a stack, a layered honeycomb of lenses and braces extending upward into air that had not agreed to this. Each cell took a little of the load. None of them could take the whole.
Senna sighted not on Orianna but on the center of the stack—cut the keystone and let the arch throw itself down. It was cruel in the way clever is cruel.
She fired.
The beam hit the honeycomb and went thick with argument. Cells exploded into petals of not-light. The load spread the way pain does—first to the nearest sisters, then through nerves that shouldn't have been asked. Orianna felt every ribbon as if it were a ligament in her body being asked to do too much for too long. She didn't scream. Her mouth made the shape and no sound came, which is worse.
The beam bent. It was bending. It had to finish bending or—
A sliver cut wrong. Small. Enough.
The sliver knifed toward a tower at the edge of the plaza, old stone with a tourist platform and thirty-something people who had watched too much and moved too little. Orianna saw them with the part of her mind she had kept for this.
She let the main stack deform. She let it hurt. She snapped a ribbon out like a frog's tongue and caught the sliver on its face. The ribbon evaporated up to her wrist; the star flared to cover the wound that shouldn't have been one. The sliver arced, curved by habit now, and lanced skyward to die in stratosphere no one owned.
The tower still lost a chunk. Rubble fell. Orianna had already thrown a net. The net took their weight as if a parent had made a joke of heavy lifting. People cried. She couldn't look. Looking makes you fall apart.
The beam finally finished bending and winked out somewhere it would make astronomers swear. Silence arrived late; it always does.
Senna exhaled, eyes bright. "There it is," she said. "The moment."
"What moment," Orianna said, hoarse.
"When you realize saving everyone requires choosing to kill the one in front of you," Senna said. "You're overdue. Let me help."
"No," Orianna said.
"Yes," Senna said, and feinted not with the cannon but with her face. The wrong softness again, almost-kind, the mask you wear when you want someone to lean forward. Orianna didn't lean. Senna fired anyway, a fast, mean burst meant to clip the hip, not kill, and open a door for the kill.
The shot took the edge of Orianna's ribbon holster instead. Fabric went black and then past black. Orianna's fingers went numb along their last knuckle. She swapped grips, left hand into primary, elbow tight.
She had a thought with no room to hold it: Peter, would tell me I'm doing fine. She hated that she needed that thought and loved that she had it. She put it away like a small stone in a pocket and stood on it.
"Stop looking away from me," Senna said, almost pleading, and unloaded.
Four shots in a fan, each a different flavor of physics violation. Orianna made the floor a belt conveyor, slid three inches, the fan went wide. She threw a ribbon to snag the third and did; the fourth she ate with a small dome she'd promised herself she wouldn't use because of what it cost. It cost. The dome wrote heat into the blood vessels behind her eyes; she thought her vision would go, and then it didn't, because she had more of herself than she thought.
"Still here," she said, and her voice was not steady but it was a voice.
"Why?" Senna asked, and sounded genuinely curious, like a scientist checking a hypothesis.
"Because you'll be here when I'm done," Orianna said, and the sentence surprised her with its shape. "Because that's the job."
Senna's mouth tightened. "I'm tired of jobs."
"Me too," Orianna said, and charged because sometimes the only way words matter is if your feet are saying the same thing.
She closed. Ribbons cracked like whips, not to strike but to tangle nerve lines. She'd seen Senna roll with pulls; she gave her pushes instead—short, staccato, rhythm changes that made following uncomfortable. It worked, a little. Senna's cannon caught on a ribbon's edge; the rotation stuttered.
Orianna went for the gauntlet seam again and got it. Ribbon looped, pulled, and for a frantic second she had leverage on a weapon that had written a dozen different kinds of murder today. She used it to lower the barrel away from human shapes. Senna didn't fight. She let go with one hand, took the control hand off the grip, and tired to flick Orianna's ribbon with her fingers as if it was a fly. The gesture should have been nothing. Dark energy rode it. The ribbon smoked.
Orianna decided to do something she'd been avoiding. She hit.
Not with the fist. With the star.
She punched ribbon-first, star-guided, and aimed for the cannon's underbrace—the place you hit when you want to make a tool reconsider being one. The blow landed with a dull clang that meant she'd actually connected. The cannon's hum stuttered. The next shot, fired on reflex, came out at a weird angle and burrowed into the ground instead of ahead, carving a furrow deep enough to show pipes and a hint of the city's other veins.
"Don't make me break you," Orianna said.
"Break me," Senna said softly, and there was a hope in it that made Orianna's stomach drop through the floor.
"I won't," Orianna said, and knew she had just made a promise her future self would bleed for.
Senna lunged, not elegant, all intent. Orianna went back, back, ribbon to pillar, pillar to pivot, pivot to narrow escape. Shots chased, learned her habits, predicted the near-misses. Tocker's voice became the steady white noise of a friend counting. Left two. Up one. Drop now. Orianna obeyed until obeying got her killed, then disobeyed at the one time Tocker would forgive it. A blast ate a space her face had been meant to occupy. It took most of her hair tie. Hair fell. Not important.
She needed a change that wasn't an escalation or a sermon. She needed terrain.
"Orianna," Tocker said, minute, urgent. If you're going to do the triple-lens, we need anchors.
"There aren't any," she whispered.
Make them.
She did.
Three ribbons stabbed into the plaza at points that made no Euclidean sense and then were right. Each ribbon grew a post—not wood, not steel, something that existed because a Guardian said this is a thing you can lean on. Around each post she wound a spiral. Between the spirals she stretched thin planes of almost-glass. The planes were not shields. They were guides. They wanted to teach light a new habit: go there, not here.
Senna watched her build and laughed low. "You finally ready to hurt me?"
"No," Orianna said, "I'm ready to stop you."
"That's the same thing," Senna said, sorrow threading the anger, and drew the cannon into a form that was very much like a bow.
Tocker didn't have a name for that one. Orianna didn't either. She had a feeling—bad, cathedral, finale—and a heartbeat that knew it wouldn't be enough to put her foot down and say no.
She did it anyway. She named her planes mercy in a language she didn't speak out loud. She knotted the concepts to her anchors. She set her feet in 3-2-3 and let that pulse fill the lattice, steady, stubborn, small.
Senna pulled the string.
The cannon thrummed. The arrow it loosed was a thin speartip beam with a long tail—not a broad stroke, no—something personal, surgical, unarguable. It came not at Orianna's chest or star but at the hinge of her two nearest planes, the place where the guidance was most vulnerable. It was the right choice. It was the choice that would make the lattice choose to send the beam back along the path of least resistance if anything went wrong.
Orianna saw it. She realized what she'd built. She realized what a ricochet would do to the shooter at that angle if the aim twitched by a hair.
She had less than a fraction of a breath to decide whether to let that consequence stand.
She threw her hand out and tried to alter one anchor's pitch by a hair.
The world took the breath with her.
The arrow struck the hinge.
Light cinched; planes sang; the lattice made a choice—
—and the plaza dropped out from under both of them.
...
The Page?
The world took its hand off the clock.
Between one blink and the next, the plaza became a photograph and Peter stepped out of it. Air became amber. Sound stretched so thin it crinkled. The wrong-green puddled into a single bead that didn't fall.
He didn't run from the city. He ran between it—through editorial margins, white space where words haven't decided to be printed yet. The Speed Force core translated "go" into a rule. The symbiote drank the rule and made it skin. The Iron-Spider limbs painted handholds on nothing and then used them.
Reinhard matched his stride without appearing to move.
They arrived somewhere that didn't have a name because names were magnets. The place looked like the shadow of a stadium and the skeleton of a cathedral, geometry bent to host an argument. It existed so briefly that dust didn't have time to realize it should settle.
"Better," Reinhard said, as if Peter had set out tea. "No more rude interruptions from physics."
"Stay off the microphone," Peter said, because saying anything was better than saying please don't kill my city with your aura. He widened his stance. The suit's living script re-wrote distribution: 60% power to legs, 25% to arms, 15% to the web-forge. Speed core anchored across three simultaneously true presents. He let his hands hang loose and dangerous.
Reinhard didn't advance. He occurred closer, the way a prettier line occurs to someone mid-sentence. "Your rumor makes promises," he said cheerfully. "Shall we see if it is faithful?"
The air burned without heat—Longinuslanze Testament's ghost casting light before the spear had arrived. The presence alone could do murder. Peter's mask lenses narrowed to razor slits; the symbiote thickened across his sternum.
"You want a clean duel," Peter said. "No. You want an audience for a clean duel."
Reinhard smiled like a judge reading a love letter. "You mistake me for a smaller god. I am the audience."
"Cool," Peter said. "Stay impressed."
He moved first.
No wind-up, no telegraph. He snatched a worldline under his feet and pulled, becoming a straight-line answer to the problem of distance. Bajiquan body mechanics for the first meter, Savate for the angle change, boxing for the entry rhythm, Kali/Eskrima for the hand speed, internalized like a song he could hum and fight to.
Reinhard wasn't there. He was exactly where Peter had chosen not to aim, as if the choice had been a declaration he'd opted out of. Peter redirected in mid-nothing, canceled his own intention, and kicked off a web that didn't exist before his foot wanted it to. He felt the brute thrill of acceleration and set it aside like he always did.
The first exchange was gripless: hypothesis and negation. Peter feinted a left elbow; Reinhard answered not with a parry but with a law that said elbows don't have the right to exist in this stanza. The limb went metaphorically hollow—force without narrative. Peter let the failure whip his torso through and booted a shin at a plane that changed name to jaw mid-impact.
The hit landed. It didn't matter. Longinuslanze wasn't in Reinhard's hand yet. This was prelude—both of them writing footnotes faster than language can follow.
"Delightful," Reinhard said without moving his mouth. "Dancing on typesetting."
Peter didn't answer. He'd already begun starving the stage. Every time Reinhard's aura tried to claim a surface as balcony, Peter webbed the shadow of the thought and dragged it off the board. No set pieces. No chorus. No balcony from which to orate love as annihilation.
Reinhard noticed. "You're unkind to architecture."
"History shows it doesn't treat me great either." Peter's right hand flicked, and thirty micro-lines sketched a cage that wasn't there until Reinhard's presence tried to be several places at once. The lines collapsed into a single No and surrounded the attempt with polite refusal.
Reinhard walked out of the cage as if it had been an anecdote. "Your refusals are charming."
The spear arrived.
Not by throw, not by summon with flourish—more like a horizon deciding it was here now. Longinuslanze Testament wrote its own room and declared the room exclusive. Peter's danger sense didn't spike; it flattened into a hum so pure it made him think of hospital floors. Everything that would die in this universe if he missed lived inside that note.
The Iron-Spider limbs braced: two low, two high. Peter didn't try to take the spear on guard. He wrote a lapse into the world and stepped through the half-breath where the weapon wasn't quite permitted to be. The blade scraped the idea of his ribs and shaved a memory off the symbiote. The suit hissed in his ear like an animal choosing not to bite the hand that fed it.
Reinhard's off hand rose in a courteous nothing. "You will break yourself on courtesy."
"Keep talking," Peter said, and stopped being where he was.
Speed as most people understand it is a number. The core gave him something else: editorial control over before/after. He wrote cuts in the film and walked through them. He arrived behind Reinhard already mid-throw, webs uncoiling in a weave that predates the species that named weaving. The pattern tagged the spear—not to stop it (ridiculous), but to delay the moment it was allowed to be lethal by a volume equivalent to exactly one choice.
Reinhard's head inclined, impressed on a scale that meant nothing. "How quaint. You borrowed time and taught it manners. My turn."
Gladsheimr unfolded.
Not a place. An axiom. The world remembered it owed Reinhard an afterlife in gold. A warhall hung like a promise over their no-place and enclosed it with velvet logic. Peter felt weight take hold: rule of valor, rule of witness, rule of conclusion that has already been written. The aura sharpened into a blade so clean even the strongest "no" tried to say "please."
"Your stage," Reinhard said. "My law."
Peter's laugh was cut glass. "Buddy, I do aisles and edits. Stages are for people who need spotlights to be tall."
The spear twitched—a footnote that carried genocide.
Peter ducked behind a thought and the thought bled. The blade passed through the place he'd been and the place he would be and took the privileges of both. He answered by taking everything down to frame: low stance, heel torque, hip chain powering a cross that had broken jaws, doorframes, mechs. The fist landed under the cheekbone with augmented gravity. Reinhard's face turned with the hit and never acknowledged it.
"Good form," Reinhard said, complimentary as a dagger.
Peter drove a knee at the pelvis and got an edict instead of a hip. The Impact that should have cracked a man over physics became a polite correction notice. He discarded momentum, wrote new, and landed where Reinhard didn't want him: inside arm, shoulder-to-chest, head position hostile. If the spear wanted to skewer both, it had to kill its wielder. Peter gambled that even annihilation had professional pride.
He was right. For the length of a smile, the spear waited.
Peter used that smile like a handle. Silat joint tax at the elbow, judo quarter turn at the shoulder, aikido spiral at the wrist. Nothing worked all the way. Everything worked enough to force an interplay that wasn't simply The World Ends Now.
"Equalization," Reinhard mused, genuinely entertained. "How lovely. How nostalgic."
Peter slid under the arm and dumped three elbows, two head-butts (mask taking most of it; he'd be bruised for a week), and a palm that wrote the word STOP across Reinhard's sternum in a language that wasn't alphabets. The Briah pulsed. The word boiled off.
"You can't be honest," Peter said softly, ducking another light-rewrite that made space briefly illegal. "If you were honest about hunger, you'd have eaten yourself."
Reinhard's eyes brightened. "Is that how you live with what you are? Preemptive kindness so you do not have to write yourself into the list of things you keep?"
"Kindness is cheaper than funerals," Peter said, pushed off an Iron-Spider leg as if it were a springboard, and slapped a web-glyph on Reinhard's shoulder.
It wasn't adhesive. Adhesives are mortal. The glyph was a redaction, a black bar drawn across a paragraph of a god. Reinhard's aura hiccuped—killing radius shrinking from city to room. Not enough. Enough.
Reinhard glanced at the bar and laughed. "Editor."
"Copier-paper budget's a killer," Peter said. His left hand already wove a second redaction when Reinhard stopped the idea by declaring hands impolite this scene. Peter felt both palms become gloves—still his, but the world refused to admit they had the right to touch. He choked off a curse and went to feet. Muay Thai pummel became Sanda shove became capoeira's off-beat dodge. The symbiote added bio-elastic memory where tendons would have cried.
The spear moved like a comet reading a prayer. Peter's world narrowed to the mobile that hung above any infant's crib: spear point, Reinhard's eye, Reinhard's off hand, the suggestion of a step. He kept them all in the same size; that was how you live long enough to feel old.
Gladsheimr decided to be more here. Its balconies populated: silhouettes in uniforms from wars that didn't agree about their century, capes that remembered empires, helmets with history's worst poems etched inside. The Legion breathed as one organism and didn't need air. Applause would have been vulgar. They lifted attention instead, like chalices.
Peter flicked three web-lines into the balcony and pulled. The silhouettes blurred, then sharpened again, offended by the suggestion of draft. He didn't need them to leave. He needed them to shift their focus. A tiny fraction of cosmic attention sloughed off Reinhard and the spear became a sliver less inevitable.
"Ungracious," Reinhard chided, mildly.
"Bite me," Peter said.
The spear obliged.
It didn't pierce skin. It pierced premise—the part of Peter that insists on being present as Peter in any scene. The blade kissed an identity he'd had to rebuild, kissed the hole Red Goblin had scraped and poured salt into, kissed every night he slept with his mask on because taking it off would have meant admitting there was a face under it that didn't remember the names it should.
Peter let it kiss and did not let it bite. He overclocked the core, bought a hundred micro-nows, and spent each on not being harvested into a legion he might one day pity. The symbiote flared across the wound and made a mouth that bit back—not at Reinhard, at the idea that the spear's presence had the right to write in this book.
Longinuslanze disagreed. The disagreement brightened the room.
"Tell me," Reinhard said, dipping the spear point like the courtesy between drinks. "Do you adore him yet?"
"Who?" Peter asked, banal on purpose.
"The one who dared you to entertain me." Reinhard's amused sincerity made the word friend sound like a eulogy. "Nyarlathotep, such a fidgeter, but sometimes charming."
"You and your group chat," Peter said. "Ever think about touching grass?"
Reinhard's laugh could have toasted continents. "This is grass."
He stopped letting Peter dictate range.
He didn't close; he cut range as a concept. The distance between them wasn't smaller; it ceased to support the idea of being between. The spear didn't travel; it occurred in Peter's space like an accusation.
Peter let go of the crutch called "footwork" and wrote new physics on the fly. He replaced distance with timing and timing with narrative beats. A beat cannot stab you. He slid between beats, ducked a spear that wasn't allowed to attach itself to any beat he acknowledged, and slapped a second redaction on Reinhard's collarbone with a hand the world insisted was wearing polite gloves.
Redaction two stuck.
Reinhard's aura complied with the smaller room again, amused by the game. "You delay appetite like a courtier moves a banquet."
"You're not starving anyone on my watch," Peter said, and then to his own shame, thought Chrona before he shoved the thought into a closet and nailed the door shut.
The Legion noticed. Something in their attention tasted the name his mind had almost spoken. A dozen helms leaned in unison—hunters scenting. Peter's quip dissolved like sugar on a tongue. He pulled the room hard away from the idea of witnesses. Gladsheimr resisted, because nobles love camera angles.
"You play defense," Reinhard observed, curious rather than contemptuous. "Do you have a sword?" He lifted the spear as one lifts a toast. "Or only editing pencils?"
Peter gave him a sword.
It wasn't steel. It was velocity braided into a line, a monofilament of borrowed future that cut where the world's grammar said however. He wrapped it around his forearm and let it behave like a blade when he told it to. He swung across the spear's throat and—contact.
Sparks that weren't light. A scream he heard in the part of his head that keeps lists of things you'd rather not know. Longinuslanze accepted the conversation—for a second. Peter used that second to shove the spear point off the line that would have ruined a city below they weren't standing above anymore.
"You bleed grammar," Reinhard said, delighted. "Exquisite."
"Your breath smells like paragraph breaks," Peter shot back, because the alternative was thinking about what would happen if he slipped.
Reinhard could win any time he decided to stop playing with his food. Peter could lose any time he blinked. That was the shape of the math. Peter moved inside the math anyway, not chalked up to courage. He just didn't have anywhere else to stand.
The spear's aura intensified. It didn't glow; it recruited reality. Everything not named Peter offered to help. The kind gesture tried to kill him. He answered by reminding parts of the room what their shift schedules looked like. Some of the help remembered other obligations and didn't make the call.
Reinhard lifted his off hand and made fingers into a choir conducting motion. A curse peeled off the spear like a peel from fruit. Stigmata orbitals blood-red, aimless until aimed. Peter recognized the pattern way too late: legion mark that rewrites after into belonging.
The symbiote screamed on a frequency only he and certain insects could hear. Peter burned a banked micro-now to lay web across his own soul—no metaphor—and stapled it to here. The curse hit his webs. They stuck. The webs burned. The stink of his own ethics cooking made him swallow bile.
"Mm," Reinhard said, savoring a vintage. "Ewigkeit without shame is a beautiful wine."
Peter's voice was calm and mean. "Thank your sommelier."
He went low, Sanda sweep to create a slip, chased by knee steps, then launched up the center like a spring trap. The Iron-Spider legs bit into the negative space under Reinhard's center of gravity and yanked. If physics had been present, it would have called the move impossible. Law + appetite called it charming and denied him momentum. He changed tactics mid-flight: two shots of web into Reinhard's eye lines—not to blind, to dot the readers of this scene with grit. Reinhard blinked even if he didn't have to. It made a rhythm. Peter used the rhythm.
Left hand, right foot, elbow, head, knee—he wrote a little poem on Reinhard's body of all the places he could be killed if he could be. He couldn't be. It still mattered. The body learns poems it cannot understand.
Longinuslanze answered by washing the stanza. The spear does not block; it declares other weapons impolite. Peter lost a half-second to the wash and paid interest for the delay in bruises and a shallow wound under his ribs that would be unfixable if he were mortal.
"Do you ever think about stopping?" Reinhard inquired, as if they were on a balcony between toasts, as if the spear wasn't currently declaring the concept of between canceled. "Let the world show you its purest face: the one you give it when you take everything away."
"Every damn day," Peter said, and let the truth of it cut both of them. "Then I keep going."
Reinhard's smile held something like respect that didn't poison everything it touched. "You are almost what you accuse me of being."
"And you're almost the man you pretend," Peter said, and slid a filament under the spear's guard while the compliment and insult argued about who they belonged to.
The filament bit. Longinuslanze bled a drop of nothing. The droplet fell and burned a hole in an idea Peter had been saving for later. He tried not to feel it.
The Legion leaned forward. Gladsheimr's light shifted, gold going toward whiteness like metal trying to remember it's a star. Reinhard's Briah deepened—not a new song so much as the same hymn deciding it no longer needed an organ to sound holy.
"You have earned a verse," Reinhard said softly. "Shall we let the world hear it?"
"No world," Peter said. "Just me."
He reached down—not into force or speed but into the editorial layer where meaning gets decided, where the shelves are labeled with tags the Darks can smell. He refused to give Reinhard any of those tags. He pulled a white page up like a tablecloth and threw it over the duel. The duel became a footnote. The footnote became a rumor told in the hallway between chapters.
Reinhard's eyes lit, fascinated. "An empty theater. You would do this lovemaking with the lights off."
"Don't need an audience," Peter said, and for once let the quip be completely true.
The spear thrust. Not at him. At the page.
The page tried to be paper and discovered it was skin. It tore.
Reinhard's Atziluth rose in a tide you could drown in without ever getting wet. Laws about before/after, near/far, whole/part—all the kind of dualities you live inside without naming—flipped to him like pages obeying a new index. Peter felt the hinge of the world tilt until everything slid toward him unless he took hold.
He took hold.
He spent speed like money you can't earn back and shored up the hinge with webs of then and now braided into nevertheless. The symbiote bit the rim of the hinge and became a gasket. The suit rerouted flows, cutting enough juice from limb three to feed the core's appetite without dimming everything else. Pain bloomed in his side like a red flower and kept blooming. He let it. Pain made him honest.
Reinhard watched him work, delighted by the craft. "You make a poor saint," he said almost kindly. "You will not preach."
"Busy," Peter said, forehead against an invisible door he was keeping from swinging shut and cutting his friends in half across reality. "Try later."
The spear drew back for a throw that was not a throw. He could feel what it would do: wash the local logic clean, set his law in its place, a gleaming morning where annihilation is called love and consistency is called mercy.
Peter could stop exactly once if he guessed right. He had maybe four guesses in him before his legs forgot how to belong to his body.
He did the ugly math. He saw the one choice with a window and hated it.
He pushed off the door he was holding and sprinted into the line of the coming world. The line was not a path. It was the story the spear was about to tell. He ran through the parts that hadn't been written yet and laid web like tripwire across them. He salted the path with redactions small and mean. He set a single anchor: a promise made to someone he refused to name in his head.
"Apologies," Reinhard said—almost sincere—"for what I must do to keep my love honest."
"Marry a mirror," Peter said, and flicked his wrist.
The tripwires sang.
Longinuslanze left Reinhard's hand. Not a throw. A wash. Light without light. Sound without sound. Meaning like a flood.
It hit the redactions and shuddered, offended by the typography. It hit the webs and slowed by the difference between shave and behead. It hit the anchor and moved a hair to the left.
That hair would save a world and kill a man.
Peter didn't blink. He put his chest in the way.
The spear didn't pierce meat. It pierced Peter Parker and tried to hang him on his own name.
The symbiote flared. The suit screamed. The core wrote the ugliest sentence he'd ever forced it to write: Borrow from later. He bought an hour he didn't possess and paid for it in now—blood, bone, breath.
Everything went white around the edges.
Somewhere the Legion made a small, appreciative sound, the way connoisseurs do when an opponent brings a bottle they respect to a duel.
Reinhard's expression—not a smile, not not—said finally.
Peter closed his fingers around the spear's shaft.
He shouldn't have had the right. He took it anyway.
"You don't get him," Peter said, to Reinhard, to the Dark, to the line of appetite that ran beneath both. "You don't get any of them."
Reinhard considered his hand on the unhandable and decided to approve. "At last, a sermon."
"Not a sermon," Peter coughed, tasting copper and a kind of light. "A policy."
He squeezed. The filaments around his arm bit. The monoline of velocity cut in toward his own palm, promising scars he didn't have time for. He fed the core more future.
"Peter," the suit said in the voice he'd taught it to use when it meant please. "You will not recover this time."
"Bill me," he whispered, and moved.
Reinhard arrived in his face between syllables. The spear, still lodged in who Peter is, obeyed both masters in that instant: loyalty to annihilation, courtesy to the hand that dared to hold. The room flickered between morning and midnight as two laws argued.
Peter shifted the argument into wrestling.
He jammed a foot behind Reinhard's ankle, hit the hip with his thigh, and tried to throw a god through a doorway he had drawn on the floor with a web eight seconds ago. The doorway led to nothing. Not void. Unpublished. He'd never tested it on anything living. He didn't plan to start. He just needed angle.
Reinhard let himself be partially off-balanced. Courtesy again, or indulgence. Peter turned partial into enough by smashing his forehead into Reinhard's nose with all the affection of a battering ram. It did nothing; it did everything; it moved a photon's width of destiny.
The spear gave that width back in interest.
Peter's star—no, not a star, a policy—stuttered.
"Yield," Reinhard suggested, polite as a silk rope.
"I don't do that on Tuesdays," Peter said.
"You have never seen a Tuesday this long," Reinhard said, and pushed.
The spear began to decide him.
Peter made a choice he hadn't wanted to make this side of forever.
He called the Speed Force by its other name: Mercy.
He spent every micro-now he had left, and the ones he didn't, and moved his friends out of the way of a future where his body would become a poster. He moved the city out of the idea that would ripple from that poster. He moved the line of appetite to a place where it could eat him without eating them.
He saved nothing for himself.
Reinhard's eyes widened—not with triumph. With interest so pure it became almost human. "Oh," he said softly. "There you are."
The spear finished choosing.
Peter's world narrowed to a point that had his name on it.
He grinned behind the mask anyway—mean, tired, Peter—and said, "Last dance, golden boy?"
The spear descended.
To Be Continued...