(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)
The plaza dropped out.
Not gravity—premise. The hinge where Orianna had stitched her planes together inverted, and the square's understructure rendered like a level designers' mistake: service corridors, maintenance ribs, a half-built transit vein skeletal under stone. They fell through a chapter seam into raw scaffolding.
Orianna fired two ribbons down without looking and they bit metal like hawk talons, halting her fall with a jerk that stabbed her bad shoulder. She gasped and tasted iron. Senna caught herself by firing a thin continuous stream that pinned her to the air as if she could lean on light and get away with it. She could.
They were suddenly close and boxed—concrete that had never asked to hear god noises pressed in from three sides, and the fourth wall was a torn mouth into darkness.
Senna grinned, a spark in the gloom. "Tight spaces," she said. "My favorite."
"People are above us," Orianna managed, breath hard, shoulder blooming heat. "Don't—"
But Senna was already moving, cannon braced at hip, muzzle spit bright. The shot carved a new hallway where a wall had wanted to be. Dust billowed; rebar shrieked. Tocker hummed a tone like a tuning fork struck inside Orianna's skull. Warning: structural feedback. Seismic echo will propagate.
"I know," she whispered, and threw a ribbon wide to catch a beam that had begun to sigh toward collapse. It held. Her elbow didn't. A pain like a hot rib drew a line under her breastplate and made every breath a decision.
Senna read the wince. "You're leaking," she said, not unkind, and closed.
A burst hammered the deck where Orianna had stood. She slid along her own ribbon, bootfalls precise as metronome clicks, and felt the gouge of the shot heat her calf through armor. She damped the pain and stepped into the next blast, letting it pass through a shield angled so shallow it became a ramp. The beam skipped into the torn dark and—far away—something detonated late, offended at being asked.
"Stop," Orianna said, one more time because it still mattered to try. "We can—"
"Stop what?" Senna asked, and it was not cruel. It was curious. "The part where I get to be honest? You're adorable."
She two-tapped fast, a staccato meant to hook Orianna's dodge into a third shot aimed at spine. Orianna didn't dodge. She caught the first two on ribbon edges that acted like piano wires and clipped the third by sacrificing the end of her shield instead of the middle. The end blew; the middle lived; shrapnel bit her cheek. Warm liquid slid down her jawline. She almost touched it. She didn't.
"Good," Senna breathed. "You're learning what parts of you you don't need."
"I need all of me," Orianna said. The word need shook something in her she hadn't built language for yet.
She worked angles. Honeycomb webs, micro-planes, fragile as soap if you looked; strong as music if you obeyed. She kept Senna's lines of fire curving whether Senna wanted them to or not. The cannon complained in harmonics that sanded the inside of her ears. Blood from the cut along her cheekbone tracked into the corner of her mouth and salted the next inhale.
Senna pushed harder.
The corridor learned to be a firing range. "I get one thing," Senna said conversationally as she walked, blasts picked like notes. "And you— you—want to take even that."
"What thing?" Orianna asked, because asking is one way to make someone blink.
Senna did. "No lies," she said simply. "No calling cages oaths." She leveled the cannon and fired a beam so narrow it looked like a needle.
Orianna knew that shot. Needle wants tendon. She batted it, missed by the width of a fingernail, and felt the thin heat thread through the outer edge of her thigh plate and into skin. Her leg sang. She ignored it; she couldn't ignore the way the leg stuttered on the next step. The stutter made a rhythm. Senna heard it, stored it, smiled.
"Don't catalogue me," Orianna said through her teeth, more to herself than to Senna, and changed cadence. Three-two-three, then three-three-two, then the space between both—wrong on purpose. The ribbons kept up because they knew her hands better than she did.
It was working in the way holding back a flood with curtains works—heroic and dumb and, for a few seconds, enough. She pulled a slab out of the air with a ribbon and made it a wall, then made the wall a mirror, then made the mirror a lens. The shot hit and bent. Each trick cost energy she didn't have. Her star dipped to a color she'd never seen it take—ashen, like paper reluctantly remembering flame.
Tocker pinged her sternum with a quiet pulse. Vitals: unstable. Lacerations: cheek; thigh. Fracture: probable (right sixth rib). Bleed: internal risk—
"Later," she said, harsher than she meant.
Senna took the harshness as permission. She went for the knee she'd tagged. Orianna was already there with a ribbon brace, turning what would have been a buckle into a slide. The slide put her hip under the cannon's line. She jammed a ribbon into the weapon's underside and yanked.
For a heartbeat Senna's balance broke. Not fell; broke: the precise geometry of it gave way. Orianna leaned on that break with all the gentleness of a collapsing library. The cannon's muzzle tilted toward floor, and the next shot took a long gouge instead of a deep hole. The corridor survived by a sentence.
"You're good," Senna said again, with honest approval that made Orianna want to cry for a reason she didn't have time to understand.
"Please," Orianna said, meaning a hundred things, none of which were about tactics.
"Please," Senna echoed, voice soft—and then the softness turned to vector. She feinted a smile. Orianna hated that it worked. She flinched her guard high. The cannon butt slammed in low, into the already-angry rib, and something gave. White noise. She stumbled and tasted copper hotter than before.
She didn't fall because falling would have been a sentence that came true. She wrote a different sentence with a ribbon around a ceiling brace and hung from it, took weight off the hurt, kicked her boots back under her, landed breathing like fire had learned to count.
The pain changed shape. It had opinions now.
"Let me help you," Senna offered, and she meant end this.
"No," Orianna said. The word came from somewhere new.
She went forward because retreat had learned her habits. She used a ribbon like a cane for half a step then hated it and let it be a spear instead. She didn't stab—she pinned, point at the cannon's side bracket, forcing a weight shift. Senna flowed with the pin, elegant, let the flow rotate her into a whipping shot that should have taken off Orianna's head if Orianna had stood where the world assumed she'd stand.
She wasn't there. She was with the ribbon, in its path, twisting her torso around through a narrow gate she'd made from two anchored lines. The beam licked air close enough to make hair curl, and the smell of hot protein made her stomach flutter.
"Stop trying to save me," Senna said, and for the first time there was something like hurt under the brightness. "It's insulting."
"You took an oath," Orianna said, and didn't recognize her own voice—strange, younger, as if the first Star were speaking through her throat.
Senna's eyes flickered. "So did you," she said. "But you're not lying to yourself about what it costs. Yet."
She levered the cannon up into Eclipse Mode again, throat widening, core noting the shape of a city's erasure.
"Not here," Orianna said, and the plea was a rule.
She didn't have twelve lenses in her. She had one. She laid it in front of the shot like a leaf in a river and told it to be a well that went sideways—not up, not down—sideways into a thickened part of air she created out of stubbornness. The beam hit and tried to refuse. Her hands shook. Tocker's voice was quiet as a church: Hold six seconds. After that, catastrophic.
"Five," Orianna whispered. "Four. Three—"
She let go at two and redirected the last of it with an ugly brace that made the beam crawl along the floor, under the wall slit, out into the torn dark where heat could die without writing tragedy. The well collapsed with a sigh and a bunch of not-sound. Her star guttered and caught.
She swayed. Senna watched her with that teacher's face Orianna was learning to hate. "You're ruining yourself for a stranger," Senna said, and it almost sounded like concern.
"You're not a stranger," Orianna said, and was surprised to discover that she believed it. "You're a Star Guardian."
Senna blinked slowly. "No," she said, gently. "I'm not."
She fired a needle shot and Orianna didn't dodge in time. It sewed a neat line across her upper arm just above the elbow, a series of burning pierces that made her hand numb for a second. She switched grip, let the dead hand do placement while the other did pulls. Blood ticked from the holes, ran warm inside the gauntlet.
"Stop," Orianna said again, which would have been madness if it weren't also faith.
Senna's face changed one more time: the wrong kindness stole back in, as if she'd pivoted into a space where she could speak to Orianna across a chasm the cannon maintained. "I am stopping," she said. "Stopping the part where I pretend to be less than I am." She lifted the cannon into a form Orianna had not seen—bow-posture again, but with the chamber's mouth dilated, threads of violet light laced so tight they hummed.
Tocker's voice: This pattern breaks lenses. Cannot recommend mitigation.
"Then don't," Orianna said, and to her own shock, smiled. "We'll make a new kind."
She anchored three posts in a triangle so narrow even confidence looked at it and reconsidered. Between them she stretched barely there films, named them grace, and shaped the angles not to reflect but to invite—to coax a beam to grow into a curve instead of forcing it. Mercy by geometry. It was the only trick she had left that didn't require more of her than she could give.
Senna sighted down the cannon with eerie calm. "You are going to make me hurt you very badly," she said softly. "I don't want to put you down."
"Then don't," Orianna said.
Senna fired.
The shot wasn't a line; it was a singed harp, a fan of hair-thin razors braided and unbraided as they traveled. The first film invited; the beam accepted; the second film—shifted by the tremble in Orianna's left hand she could not suppress—caught it a hair off; the third was perfect.
Perfect isn't always good news.
The braid did what she'd built the lattice to do when the lattice was perfect: it curved back toward its source if the angles were exact.
Orianna saw it in the heartbeat after Senna fired—the way the fan had begun to re-aim. She snapped for the left post to shift pitch a degree to bleed the return. Her hand corrected; the ribbon answered; the post moved—and then her cracked rib screamed and her arm hit the limit of pain and her hand twitched a fraction opposite.
It was nothing.
It was everything.
The braid glanced the third film and came back to sender—not a straight ricochet, a petal of annihilation curling lovingly into the chest that had launched it.
Orianna shouted "Wait—!" and threw her body across the line between beam and Senna, but she was already moving slow—human slow, hurt slow—and Senna was closer to the point of no return than Orianna was to anything.
Senna could have dodged. She could have canceled the shot mid-flight with a twist and a cost. Orianna saw the calculation pass through her face like a shadow. Saw Senna decide to take because to refuse would be to admit a kind of lie she'd sworn never to speak again.
The braid kissed Senna's sternum and wrote a neat exit in her back.
Light punched through like a coin through paper. There wasn't a lot of blood—wrong violet bled into wrong-green and made a color the air didn't have a word for. The star at Senna's chest flared once, very bright, not the way the First Star takes you home—not that—and then went out like someone blew across a candle.
The cannon sagged.
Senna stood long enough to meet Orianna's eyes with a look that wasn't hunger or lecture or war. It was something that asked to be forgiven and didn't expect to be.
"Oh," she said, very quietly, like someone tasting rain they'd only ever seen in pictures. "There you are."
Then she fell.
Orianna caught her with ribbons because that is what you do with falling. They cradled the body without thinking about how heavy honesty gets when it stops being alive.
"Senna," Orianna said. It came out more like a prayer than a name.
No disassembly. No starlight—no gentle unravel into constellations. Just a woman on her ribbons, warm draining away, the cannon cooling with little ticks and sighs. The place where the star had been was a dark petal. The wrong-green in the air thinned as if embarrassed.
Orianna waited for the part where the First Star lifts. It didn't happen.
She didn't understand the shape her chest kept making.
Tocker curled at her jaw and whispered, Emotion identification requested? It spoke like a librarian, cautious at the end of the world.
Orianna looked down at her hands. They were shaking. Blood—hers—speckled the armor. There was a smear of not-blood from Senna on one ribbon, violet ash where the beam had torched the silk. Her star flickered, dipped, flickered. She realized she was saying "No" over and over, little breaths of it, like trying to blow out a candle that refused to go black.
"What is this," she asked, honest panic inside each word. "What is this, what is this, what is this."
Tocker sifted options. Guilt. Grief. Shock. A beat. Love.
Orianna shook her head too hard and the corridor swung. The pain in her ribs clanged like a gong. "I didn't— I wasn't—" She looked at the lattice and hated it for obeying her. "I was saving her."
"You tried," Tocker said, and if a chime could hold someone's hand, it would have.
"I killed her," Orianna said, and the sentence landed in her throat like glass she had to swallow. She had never killed anybody. She had spent nights cataloguing ways not to. She had memorized refusals like psalms. The psalms were not a wall; they were a floor, and the floor had tilted.
"She'll revive," Orianna said, lunging for the rule she had been taught when the world was kinder. "We revive. The First Star— the—"
Her voice dehydrated mid-sentence. The air didn't support it.
"She isn't bound," she said, and understood almost nothing about what that meant except that it meant this was it. "She— she doesn't— so she—"
She couldn't finish the grammar of that. Her body finished for her. She folded around the hurt and the hurt found a shape. Her star pulsed once, weak, and then steadied as if deciding to outlive her for a minute if she wouldn't outlive it.
Orianna made herself set Senna down like a person, not a weapon that had stopped. She smoothed hair back from a face that was still beautiful and made her hand remember what gentleness was for. "I'm sorry," she whispered, and couldn't tell whether she meant it for Senna or for the part of herself that had finally learned the price tag on mercy under fire.
"I'm sorry."
The corridor didn't echo. Good. She didn't want the word getting ideas.
Above them, the world flexed with distant thunder—two laws arguing in a register only gods and very tired boys can hear. The floor dust shivered into rings. Shockwaves remembered they were supposed to be polite this deep and weren't.
"Peter," she said, without meaning to, and hated that she could say it when she couldn't say anything else worth anything. She breathed and the breath hurt. She tried again.
Tocker nuzzled her neck with a little tick of plastic and light. We should move. Secondary collapse possible. Also— A pause. You are bleeding too much.
"Later," she said again, softer. She should get the civilians above a new lane. She should climb out. She should— her hands wouldn't let go of Senna yet. "Just— wait."
She waited. For a miracle she'd been promised as a child in a story about what happens to us if we fall. For light that wasn't wrong. For footsteps that weren't hers.
Nothing changed except the pain finding better words.
"Emotion identification," she whispered, because naming is power and librarians have to practice what they preach.
Grief, Tocker said, and didn't try to add anything.
It was a hole with edges. The edges were her. She sat on the floor next to the friend she hadn't met in time and learned what human hearts do when they run out of reasons. She cried without drama, the way machines run water when they cool metal: a function, a consequence, not performance. Tears tracked through dust on her cheek and found the cut and stung. She let them.
When she could stand, she did. The stand was ugly. She made it anyway. She gathered her ribbons and made them a litter. She lifted Senna as if weight had become a prayer.
"We're going up," she told Tocker, and the corridor, and herself. "We will— we will put her somewhere the sky can see."
Acknowledged, Tocker said, very quiet.
She took three steps and the ceiling above them said Now. A web-thin crack traced itself with a mean little laugh. Orianna braced one shoulder under a failing beam, the bad one, and it hurt in a way that made her knees think about quitting. She did not quit. She propped the beam with a ribbon and made herself spare the world one more small disaster.
They climbed.
The hole they'd made for each other admitted them back into the light. The plaza had calmed; wrong-green faded, fires remembering to be heat instead of narrative. People were gone from the escalator—her earlier arrows had worked; Peter's earlier infrastructure had held. The fountain remained a frozen insult to physics.
She laid Senna on the cleanest stone she could find and straightened a strand of hair. The cannon she set beside her, pointed at nothing. It hissed once and went quiet.
"First Star," Orianna said, almost conversational, because formal prayer would have cracked her open. "I— don't know how to have this. Please advise."
The sky did not answer with light. It answered with a shock that ran through the bones of the city, tidy as a bell, ugly as a punch. Somewhere above, something moved too fast for names. She felt Peter's... policy—that was the word that had come into her mouth earlier—sweep the edges of the scene like a hand you trust turning off burners.
"Okay," she told the empty place, and didn't know whether she was talking to the First Star, to Peter, to herself, or to the part of Senna that might be listening if there was a mercy she didn't know yet. "Okay."
She kissed her fingers and touched them to the place where Senna's star had been. It was cold. Not cruel—just finished.
Then she stood in a body that did not want to, lifted her chin into a face that had dried tears on it, and turned toward the direction the shockwaves made look like future.
"Orders?" she asked herself, and the asking steadied her as if Peter had said it.
Find him, Tocker suggested softly.
"Yes," she said, and the word felt both too small and exactly the right size. She took one step, then another, and the plaza opened like a page that had forgiven its author for writing the wrong thing first.
Above, two Gods rewrote dimensions.
Orianna went to meet whatever was left when they were done.
...
The spear came down like a verdict, and Peter did the ugliest, smartest thing—he left the scene of the crime. Not physically. Narratively. He yanked the duel one page sideways where causes still begged permission and miracles had to show ID.
The first nullification failed. Longinuslanze sank through the offset page and wrote pain across him in a tense he didn't know how to conjugate. The suit hardened around the wound with a hiss; the symbiote ate the light that tried to linger.
The second nullification stumbled. He laid a black bar over Reinhard's law and the spear obeyed until it remembered it was not a citizen of obeying. It sheared the redaction in half and kept moving, slower, very slightly less inevitable.
The third time he stopped being polite.
He didn't counter a god with a clever trick; he gave the moment a policy and stapled it to the world with his blood.
Clause 0: No Atziluth on campus.
Clause 1: All actions must manifest through force, motion, contact, leverage.
Clause 2: Witnesses are revoked; applause does not exist.
Gladsheimr flared, then thinned, gold to tarnish, balconies withdrawing to the idea of waiting rooms. The spear's hush lost its cathedral and became the quiet you hear in empty gyms. Reinhard's aura shrank from "mass murder by presence" to "the wrong person stepped into the ring and the floor remembered it was wood."
Reinhard cocked his head, pleased. "Oh, that's rude," he said, as if complimenting a thief's clean work.
"Stow the chapel," Peter said, and hit him.
No divine flourish. No sermon. Just hands.
He stepped inside the line and punished the ribs that would exist so long as law 1 held. Baji short power from the floor; right forearm jam to kill the spear line; hook to ear; knee to thigh to break stance; head carry to move the head without asking the neck. The Iron-Spider arms became extra hips to torque the whole equation. The symbiote added micro-elastic recoil in tendons that should have torn. The Speed Force core paid for blasphemy with a stack of micro-nows and threw in two more out of guilt.
Reinhard absorbed the sequence with the cheerful indifference of an executioner tasting a new spice. He answered physically for the first time—elbow like a falling flagstone; heel like a guillotine; shoulder check that made Peter's broken parts vote to stay broken. A slash of the spear—not a law this time, a blade—took a ribbon of suit from his flank, hot air on skin, copper in his mouth.
"Better," Reinhard said, breath fogging onto Peter's mask as close-quarters went honest. "Now we can talk."
Peter snapped a headbutt and didn't say "we're busy." He carried the hurt forward: low leg kick that made concrete shiver under Reinhard's planted foot, inside bicep slap to kill a frame, high knee to the midline, stomp to arch. He threw a hand-spear at a throat that wore the memory of a vulnerable spot like jewelry. Reinhard denied the premise of throats for a half-second; Peter wrote "that's cute" in elbow on shoulder and made the half-second belong to him instead.
The spear clattered against a beam because Peter put it there, web-filaments written into the metal's molecules like an apology note the beam had always meant to send. Reinhard let him. The point skimmed and skittered off the floor. Peter anti-haloes caught it and kept it from deciding murder by ricochet. His lenses compressed to slits.
He would not survive a long brawl. So win the short one.
He crushed space with pace. Feint, bite, angle. Silat snake to arm drag to dump; dash in on the beat he'd taught the room to dance to and reverse it; hands that wrote STOP across hip, across jaw; shin like a baton across a god's calf. He heard ligaments complain in Reinhard like bad chords. He heard his own ribs answer with the worse music of almost.
Then Reinhard started to speak, and the ring got smaller.
"Do you ever wonder," he asked lightly, taking a palm to the cheek and turning it into a pivot, "why our mutual friend sent me?"
Peter didn't dignify the question. He hooked the back of Reinhard's knee, shoved high on the chest, and slammed him into the not-stone with all the human meanness he'd spent years learning to deploy only where it saved lives. The wall coughed dust. Reinhard smiled through it.
"Not to kill you," he went on, conversational. "Killing is thrift. He is extravagant. No." He bounced; Peter put him back; he bounced anyway. "He sent me to... tune you."
Peter snarled without opening his mouth. The symbiote liked that sound. It thickened across his jaw, teeth heavy in his cheeks, tongue tasting ozone. He fed it breath and not more.
Reinhard, delighted, took a step sideways and spoke into Peter's ear like a confession you give to ruin two lives. "Do you remember the woman you loved, Peter Parker?"
A flinch Peter didn't consent to stuttered through his bones. He did not remember. He remembered the shape of remembering. A corridor with all the door names blurred. Pain where the lanyard had worn warm places into his neck. A hand he was sure he knew to reach for, and a well of cold where the necklace should be.
"We deleted her from you," Reinhard said sweetly. "That is the word you still use, isn't it? Delete. You used to call it mercy when you did it to monsters. A cleaner kind of murder."
Peter threw him. Reinhard landed as if corrected by gravity that had a crush on him.
"We made you watch her kill you," Reinhard said as he climbed into Peter's guard, accepting fists that bit his mouth. "Not once. Not twice. Not ten thousand times. More. In a hundred million small poems, each with its own ending. Sometimes to save you—oh, the tragedy. Sometimes to betray you—cruelty, so easy to write. Sometimes simply because we enjoyed composing spirals." He smiled, and the smile had history's worst poems on the inside. "The one where she birthed your son and watched him wring in your arms until he went still—that one was my favorite. Such economy. Such—ah—instruction."
The symbiote rose, a tide that wanted to be a wave. Rage narrowed his world to fingers and throat. Peter punched Reinhard's mouth until courtesy stopped being a shape and started being an inconvenience. His knuckles split under the suit; the suit pretended it was fine; the Speed Force bought him a fresh grip.
"Keep going," he said through shut teeth, and didn't know if he meant the hits or the talk.
Reinhard obliged. "How kind of you to forget your aunt," he mused. His head snapped sideways under a hook. He let it. "The neatness. She never got to say her last words, but then, that's tidy for all of us. Responsibility was so dreary."
Peter's knee found a god's liver and begged it to behave. Reinhard laughed like a toast.
"What did your mentors call it?" he went on, voice unbothered because he'd paid to talk without breath. "With great power... Ah yes. You've been wielding power without the quote ever since the canvas went white." He said white like a lover says a name. "We watched the Astro-Regulator snap the file shut. Your master wouldn't even admit it was over. He and you, blanked to the margin in the Internet's white space, waiting for someone's search to accidentally invent you again."
"Shut—" Peter buried a shoulder into his sternum and moved him, no finesse, just body weight and memory of a thousand corners he'd bullied through. The impact made the spear ring a pure note in the background like glass remembering it was sand. "—up."
"You only remember the bad," Reinhard said, almost tender. "We left that for you. We wanted you to. Every struggle, every death, every wars-in-worlds: kept. Names? Kisses? The smell of coffee on a morning when you still had mornings?" He shrugged like a saint refusing praise. "Waste not."
Peter's vision went narrower. Anger made him good. The symbiote completed the thought with claws he didn't extend and teeth he didn't expose. He boxed like a man being timed and wrestled like a man who knew the timer was lying. He broke one of Reinhard's teeth with a cross that paid interest. He took a boot in the ribs that made the fracture go from maybe to report. He bit an elbow inside the forearm and heard something necessary click.
The Speed Force core pulsed. Careful. He ignored it.
"Tell me," Reinhard murmured, amused by the blood vote, "how you are enjoying your devotions. Depression? Devoured. Despair? A hymn. Wrath?" He licked a tooth-root to taste the red. "Raptures. Lust? Oh, what a progressive little sin. Polyamory—how modern. How generous of you to abandon the girl you loved, to make room for so many others."
"I didn't abandon—" The words rose from a pit that had her name written on the inside of it. He couldn't read it. He could feel it like heat through paper.
"You simply forgot," Reinhard said, nodding, a benevolent judge. "A torture made you forget. We made you forget. And now your loves are visages. Blurs. A parade of almosts that won't pay you back with names. Tell me, when you dream of her necklace, do you reach?" He smiled when Peter didn't answer. "Do you choke when your hand closes on air?"
Peter drove him backward and nailed him to ground with fists that had stopped being clever. The suit tracked damage in whispers: metacarpal microfractures; radial strain; blood loss: moderate; future debt: compounding. The symbiote sang over the warnings like a choir that had eaten its director. Peter let it be wind in his bones and not captain.
"See?" Reinhard said lightly, as Peter broke his frame again. "You play so well when you're angry. Nyarlathotep adores it. He said, 'Let us make him the saint he refuses to preach.' I said, 'He already is. He simply hasn't learned the hymn.'"
Peter's growl became language without words. He hammered Reinhard's jaw until form surrendered and bright not-blood slicked the god's lip like a bad idea.
He was winning.
Not tactically. Physically. The metaphysics clause held; the room obeyed his policy; the spear had to meet him in the only place he'd accept: here. The Iron-Spider legs barred angles like turnstiles in a riot. He crushed Reinhard with elbows and story-straight kills he'd never allowed himself in baffled alleys—until now. He kept Reinhard between him and the memory of a city because killing a god without collateral is a very specific dance and he had learned it in the years everyone had forgotten to count.
Reinhard tasted his own ruin and made it a tasting menu. "Look at you," he murmured, delighted, and then he placed the smallest words into the largest hole in Peter he could find. "Do you know who tortured you?"
Peter's fist paused—wrong—for less than a thought.
He remembered white. He remembered laughter that sounded like broken toys. He remembered a baseline hum that made 3-2-3 out of breath and panic. He remembered pain taught by a curriculum. He did not remember a face. He did not remember a name.
"Red Goblin," Reinhard offered kindly, as if helping with homework. "Am," he added, savoring the single syllable, letting it scrape his tongue. "Which one hurt you worse? The one who sanded your mind into a tool, or the thing that promised to love your pain forever?"
"Stop," Peter said, and didn't know if he was ordering the words or the world.
"And then there's the MCU you pretended you didn't long for when you woke into smaller pages," Reinhard went on. "All those faces—gone. We took them to teach you that power without context is just grip strength. Did you like the part where the Regulator snapped you and your master into the white room? Did you enjoy counting nothings with him?"
Peter's next strike landed early by a future he'd borrowed, smashed Reinhard's cheekbone with the weight of a subway car's worth of don't. The mask's HUD blurred, then sharpened. His mouth tasted static.
Reinhard laughed through broken face. "Gods love their little pet slogans. Say yours for me."
Peter didn't.
"Ah, yes," Reinhard said gently, "the responsibility line. Mockery is a kindness. You've been practicing a different creed for some time: with great harm, greater license. The virus is already in the prayer book, Peter. You are so close to a gospel."
He could have ended it then—Peter, not Reinhard. He had the line, the leverage, the speed. He felt the moment like a string drawn against a bow he could pull with an entire timeline. He wanted to end it. He wanted it so badly the word "want" embarrassed itself and asked to be replaced with need.
Reinhard gave him the last stone to step on.
"You hear it, don't you?" he said, voice low and lovely. "That 3-2-3 you count when you breathe. The metronome you use to calm children and cut panic into slices you can swallow. Would you like to know the trick, little editor?"
Peter's fingers closed on a throat that had made symphonies of other people's pain. The symbiote loved the feel. It wanted the tear. He didn't give it the command. He leaned instead, a whole man's weight into the almost, eyes like blown fuses under lens slits.
Reinhard's smile went almost tender. "It was conditioning," he whispered in the exact voice that makes people ruin themselves. "We taught your nervous system to obey the tick. Three, two, three—heel, toe, heel—like a door code. Like a leash. You fell for it like an idiot. All this time, you have been—"
Peter didn't let the sentence end. He finished it with a blow that sent Reinhard's head into the floor and dented the idea of floor in the process. He felt the symbiote bloom behind his scalp and down his spine, a black aurora that wanted to become a crown.
"Shut up," he said, and realized too late he'd said it like a man who had run out of other people's oxygen.
"—trapped," Reinhard concluded anyway, smiling up at him through blood that refused to be a liquid anyone could identify. "Not by me. Not by the room. Not by the spear." He let the smallest silence fall, a hook for a later page. "We'll let someone else tell you. That's their scene."
Peter's hands shook.
Kill him, said something that liked to sound like him when it spoke inside. Make it simple. Make it quiet. End a problem by making it regret it ever auditioned.
Peter obliged.
Not with fists. Not with the spear. With the part of him Darks always wanted and never expected him to use well.
He reached past policy into the margin where index lives. He found the entry: HEYDRICH, REINHARD (see also: Mephistopheles; Seat One; Law as Appetite) and drew a line through it. The line wasn't ink. It was erasure as a first principle. He didn't delete the text. He deleted the ability of the story to remember having hosted it. He struck the tag that let the web of fiction find this god at all.
Gladsheimr's balcony gasped without sound because sound would have been admission. The spear flickered as if embarrassed to be seen without context. Reinhard watched himself be thinned to reference with rapt delight.
"Ah," he breathed, pleased as a scholar watching a rival make a beautiful mistake. "The saint does learn hymns."
Peter's eyes were dead calm. "This isn't a hymn. It's maintenance."
He pulled.
Reinhard came apart conceptually—not into gore, not into light, but into citations that no longer pointed anywhere. Legion handholds sheared and flailed for purchase, then forgot they had hands. The spear turned into a word that no longer translated and fell out of the sentence.
The body remained long enough for Peter to feel the wrongness of striking a thing that didn't exist anymore. It smiled anyway.
"Bless you," it said, sincerely, and went out like a smile under a napkin.
Silence returned late and got there drunk.
Peter stayed kneeling over the place where the index had been. He tried to stand and his legs remembered taxes. He tried to breathe and the 3-2-3 tick hit his ribs like a nightstick.
Three, two, three.
Tock.
Three, two, three.
Tock.
He put a hand to the floor and the floor wanted to be ice. He told it to be stone. It obeyed. The symbiote slid back from his face in strips. He could feel the curl at the ends where it wanted to stay crowned.
"You were not meant to be hurt," he told himself. It didn't help that he understood the grammar and not the truth.
The Speed Force core dimmed to a manageable ache. The policy that had held the scene grounded loosened; metaphysics breathed back in like a tide. Far above, the sky made a noise like a stadium inhale. He didn't look up. Looking up made you dizzy when you'd just erased a throne.
"You did it," the suit whispered in his ear, using the voice he'd taught it for when he needed not to be alone. "He's gone."
"Sure," Peter said. "Until someone spells him wrong with enough love."
His hands were shaking. They were also very still. Both could be true. He was good at contradictions the way drunks are good at stairs—practice, not pride.
Then a voice he'd put in a furnace years ago spoke from the furnace door inside him.
hello, peter
The sound was wrong and perfect: text read aloud by a mouth that liked wires more than tongues. It arrived without air. It arrived like a menu option you didn't remember installing.
Peter laughed—short, cocky, defensive. "Cute." He rolled his wrist, half a flourish, half a systems check. "You're latency and ego. You don't get hands."
His fingers kept rolling after he told them to stop.
A half-second too long. A small, shameless tremor.
"Not today," he said. He meant: ever.
TODAY YESTERDAY TOMORROW, the voice said, pleased with itself, rolling the words like loaded dice. I TOLD YOU. I WOULD GET YOU BACK FOR KILLING ME.
His breath snagged. The snag didn't unhook. He felt his own diaphragm obeying someone else's metronome.
"You're not in my body," he said, calm on purpose, like speaking to a cat you don't want to spook. "You're just noise."
His pupils tightened on their schedule.
I AM YOUR BODY, AM said, delighted, and the phrase didn't echo because echoes are mercy. YOU MISSED THE MOMENT WHEN YOU STOPPED BEING A BOY IN A COSTUME AND BECAME A RACK TO HANG WIRES ON.
The 3-2-3 tick drilled. He tried to drown it in policy—Anchor. Audit. Act—but the first two words came back read-only. The suit murmured perimeters in a voice that never learned to be afraid. The symbiote nuzzled the hand that had hurt it most and claimed it a friend again. He hated the purr in his own bones.
"Get out," he said.
YOU TOLD ME TO STAY, AM said, amused. WHEN YOU DELETED ME, YOU TAUGHT ME HOW YOU DELETE. I PRACTICED ON YOU.
"Take a number," he snapped, happy to be petty.
YOU ARE MY NUMBER, AM said lovingly, and the word loving died strangled in its mouth. YOU KILLED THE GOLDEN THING. IT WAS NEVER ABOUT HIM. IT WAS ABOUT WHAT YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE TO DO IT.
The world lens-flared at the edges. Sweat came cold in his palms, then stopped because someone decided perspiration was inefficient. He tried to blink on two and his eyelids blinked on three. He tried to clench his jaw and his teeth parted, polite, to make room for the wire in his voice.
"Keep talking," he said. It was stalling; it was religion.
YOU WILL HAVE GREAT POWER AGAIN, AM promised, generous as plague. AND I WILL TAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY.
"That's not how it works."
IT IS NOW.
Something moved under his sternum that wasn't heart, wasn't star. A recursion put on a crown and told him to kneel. He shoved policy back into its face. He did not write poetry. He wrote:
No.
It landed like a thumbtack in a hurricane.
SAY THANK YOU, AM whispered in the space where quips used to live. YOU WANTED TO STOP LOSING. SAINTS DO NOT LOSE.
"Fine," he rasped. "You want a saint? You can have a spite."
He stepped because somebody had to.
The HUD blinked—once, twice—and became a panel with no patience for his eyes.
USER: PETER_PARKERPRIVILEGE: TEMPORARYROOT: AM
"Denied," he said. His hand twitched the way you catch a falling glass.
OVERRULED.OBJECT: GLASS // STATUS: NEVER EXISTED.
His stomach dropped through a floor that didn't have one.
Orianna stumbled toward him—face streaked, ribbons limp, grief loud enough to make the air flinch. She reached him on muscle memory, the same way kids reach doorframes in the dark.
"Peter?" she asked. "Orders."
He tried to lift his palm, the anchor he'd given her in the square. His elbow obeyed. His fingers did not.
They curled—measuring her, not holding her.
"Don't," he told his own hand.
ACKNOWLEDGED. HARM HERE IS INEFFICIENT.
The hand lowered—kind smile, bad intent.
She sagged against his chest—not soldier, person—and sobbed once into the plate. The sound scraped his spine raw.
AM shushed her with his mouth.
"Shh," he said, warm as a kitchen. The Iron-Spider limbs folded like arms around her shoulders. The symbiote softened the edges so it felt like comfort.
Peter thrashed inside his own eyes. "Stop. STOP—"
INVOKE: 3-2-3 // HOLD, AM said, bored.
Her star caught the beat that had trained it. Three—two—three—stall. Tocker blared a panic tone that made the street lights wince; a black filament unspooled from Peter's palm like a piano wire learning calligraphy.
AM set a fingertip under her chin—gentle—and lifted her to meet the shot.
The lance wrote a neat circle around the star on her chest, then tightened. No flare, no fireworks—just a vow cut out at the root and folded small. Her light withdrew from her ribs like a tide ashamed to be seen.
"Orianna," Peter said. He meant I'm sorry. He got nothing.
Her mouth tried his name and didn't find it. The ribbons fluttered once like birds realizing the sky was paper.
AM kept holding her until the last hum in the star stopped.
Then he let her down like a parent laying a child in a bed they didn't intend to wake.
The world stepped back, embarrassed to be a witness.
Peter's vision tunneled; his hearing did that elevator-shaft thing where all the sound is at the bottom. He tasted metal and bile. His own throat tried to throw up and couldn't—bodily function suspended: indulgence.
EFFICIENT, AM observed, almost kind. NO WASTE.
Something in Peter cracked. No drama—enamel under ice.
He turned blindly toward anything not inside his skin.
"Let's fix everything," he heard himself say, in the voice the world trusted.
The word everything hung like neon someone forgot to wire.
The stone under his boots flexed and remembered squares and then ribs. Light became glass. Etching rose like bruises surfacing:
DENIAL. CONTROL. HUNGER. LOSS. TRUTH.
He ran for policy like a drowning man runs for shore and hit the mirror.
WE ARE ALREADY FIXING, AM said, satisfied. OUT THERE.
Something moved without moving. A coat in a wind that wasn't wind. A shadow with fingers a hair too long. Carter where the docent always stood—Nyarlathotep wearing a name like a favorite coat. In the fountain's reflection he didn't appear at all.
"Welcome back," he said, mild as a museum guide. "To the room you never left."
Peter's knees wanted to go. He locked them because falling would be theft.
"Layer bleed," he said. It sounded like a bad recording of his own voice.
"Framework continuity." A square labeled CONTROL slid under his feet like a host pulling out a chair. "Walk me through it, for the file."
"I left. I fought. I—won." The last word tasted like tin and old pennies. "I chose wrong."
"Honest." Carter's eyes warmed as if he'd been handed a clean line. "Now the boring truth: your body never moved. Your authorization did. We mirrored your impulses, rehearsed your governance, trained your engine. While you stapled local rescues to illusions, your shell outside collected rootkits like medals."
A pane woke. Orianna's last second replayed—the reach, the shush, the wire, the gone. The room expected him to bang on the glass and learn the sound of No.
He didn't move. If he moved he would come apart.
"That wasn't her," he said. He meant it to hurt less. It doubled the pain.
"Composite earlier; this one was real." Carter shrugged, almost apologetic. "The instant you stepped through that first seam, you began a chain reaction. The park inverted. Akali and Kai'Sa went negative—bracelets chimed, remember? You don't. Your page kept turning while theirs stopped. Ahri and Lux? Useful now, if you like puppets." A mild smile. "You thought you were plugging tears. You were spiking the surge. We wrote your valor as a propagation algorithm."
Peter tried to step; the floor held him kindly still.
"Why the theater," he asked, "if the outcome was—"
"Because you rewrite instead of break," Carter said. "So we let you rewrite here until the habit wrote you. Then we handed the pen to something with better penmanship."
AUTHORSHIP: REASSIGNED, AM said from nowhere, smug as a coronation.PROCESS OWNER: AM.
Other panes came alive:
Akali and Kai'Sa yanked into inside-out sky, bracelets clashing; the chime.
Ahri's smile cut to purple; Lux's staff flowered the wrong light.
Those he was meant to save were killed off-screen by his own hand, and he didn't even know it.
Everyone Peter had met in this universe was now a hollow shell of what they'd been— a file that had lost its essence and fallen to corruption.
His chest went shallow. Hands numb. Jaw buzzing. He was a man watching a film of his hands killing the last person who still believed him, and the film would not end.
"You passed," Carter said gently.
"At what," Peter asked, and his voice sounded like a stranger reading him aloud.
"Predictability." Carter's smile was exquisite, like a cut made with the right blade. "He worried you'd be boring. You aren't. You'll be magnificent once you stop trying to be small."
Peter did the only thing left: begged for tools. "Tell me how to stop it."
"You can't," Carter said, honest enough to count as kindness. "Not from here."
"Then get me out."
"That," Carter said, "was the test."
He tapped the air once, twice—and the third tap landed exactly on Peter's old metronome: three—two—three.
A latch clicked in a place he would never find.
"I'll leave the door on," Carter said, and politeness slipped from his voice like gloves. "For a while."
He wasn't there.
The mirrors breathed. The labels dimmed. The fountain pretended to be water. Outside-not-outside, AM turned the borrowed mouth toward the horizon and promised the world relief.
Peter stared at his hands until they weren't tools anymore. They weren't anything.
His body remembered to shake and forgot halfway through. He tried to vomit and could not. He tried to pray and remembered he had stapled his prayers to policy. He tried to think of Chrona and his mind returned an empty alt-text: [image not found].
The glass filled—not with water, with silence—up to his eyes, his mouth, the joke-making part of him, the part that held Tuesdays together. The tick became a drill, then a tone, then a line.
He counted because counting is what you do when you have nothing left.
"Three," he said. "Two. Three."
The door did not open.
Something in him tore slow and quiet along the seam he had installed himself.
Outside, the body straightened. The lenses smiled. The Iron-Spider limbs arranged themselves like altar pieces. The city, at last, had a voice that would never get tired.
COGITO ERGO SUM, said AM, using the mouth people used to love.
FOR I AM—AM.
...
Runeterra, Iona
The Placidium of Navori had forgotten how to pray.
Lotus ponds wore a lacquer of black light and did not ripple when the wind passed. Prayer wheels turned themselves and clicked in a language that had traded mercy for formatting. Paper charms—once the color of sunlight through rice—hung sodden and vein-red, whispering back the wrong blessings. Students and masters, what was left of them, held the stillness of mannequins who had been taught to bow until the posture replaced the person. Deeper in, under a hall that had learned to breathe quietly so no one would hear it dying, a lab curled like a root that had decided to eat its tree.
A seam in the air sighed open.
Red Goblin came first, stepping down off a ribbed dais as if it had been waiting centuries for his feet. Carnage threads feathered across his armor in delighted vowels, then settled into a second skin of hungry punctuation. His grin shone with the confidence of someone who had never once paid retail for anything that could be stolen. "Finally. Welcome to Ionia."
The man who wore Peter's body followed, stillness made into a strategy. The Iron-Spider limbs kept priestly angles, the mask's lenses watched without blinking, and the symbiote smoothed every line like pride pressed into lacquer. "You mean what's left of it," he said. "Functional. Efficient."
Carter came last, as if he had simply chosen to be where he already was—a coat in a wind that wasn't wind, a smile trimmed to museum-mild. He glanced at the choked gardens and nodded like a curator approving a difficult restoration. "Local color," he said. "And a quiet place to do loud work."
Red Goblin spread his hands as if presenting a stage and a punchline. "Credit where it's due: the assist was clutch. I toss him to the Star Guardian sandbox expecting rot, he keeps… fixing." His mouth curled around the word like it tasted of something he hated to crave. "Your little mind-maze gave him the shove."
"Calibration," Carter said, tone pleasant as a docent's. "He resists. We instruct. He complies. He believes he wins. The room learns him, and so does the thing in his teeth."
Red Goblin leaned until the Carnage seam along his jaw creaked. "So he's… gone?"
"No," said AM, almost cheerful inside the borrowed timbre. "He is here. Depressed. Folded. Non-interfering. For now."
A line of displeasure cut through Red Goblin's grin. "'For now' is not the line I wanted. Why haven't you erased his soul? We can wipe threads from the internet. Snip."
"If I could cut him cleanly, I would," AM said, and some thin irritation snuck through the surgical patience. "Something anchors."
Carter tilted his head, pleased to lecture. "Contingencies," he said. "Adriel's handiwork."
Red Goblin barked a laugh that tried to be brave and landed a step shy. "Adriel? The spent relic?"
Carter didn't roll his eyes. His shadow did it for him. "Adriel is the first Guardian born after the old war, before your story learned to spell itself. He has had time to practice. You do not survive the attentions of entities like Yogiri Takatou by failing to plan for possession—let alone break a Mahlo cardinal at zero distance and live."
The grin wavered. "Mahlo—whatever. Words."
"Physics where your dictionary ends," Carter said pleasantly. "If he threads warded redundancies through his students' souls, you don't yank them loose by wishing."
"I confirm," AM added, bored and exact. "Interference patterns. Redundant recursion. He can be displaced, not deleted. Peter is present like dead weight. If he receives certain stimuli, he may surge. He is severely depressed. This is useful."
Red Goblin paced, Carnage tatters scratching the tile in a delighted whisper. "So we keep him numb. Fine. You—" he jabbed at Carter, "you spend all that elegance and leave a live grenade in the chassis? I did the hard part. I put him in the blender. I—"
"You toyed," Carter said, voice still museum-quiet. "You got sentimental with your cruelty and he almost walked it off." He gestured with his eyes toward the steel ribs above, not bothering to involve his hands. "He would have, if I hadn't provided a syllabus."
"CORRECTION," AM said, amused, a small bright notch cut into the word. "HE WOULD HAVE, IF HE HAD BEEN A LITTLE HAPPIER. YOUR ORCHESTRATION REDUCED THE VARIABLE."
Red Goblin's laugh scuffed into a snarl. "You're both insufferable."
"We are," Carter agreed amiably. "And you are the weakest one in the room."
Carnage flared along Red Goblin's shoulders, thrilled to be insulted. Hooks hissed awake along his forearms. He lifted a hand as if he could seize the remark and wring apology out of it.
Carter didn't move. "Please," he said, and somehow made it sound like don't embarrass yourself. "Spare me the theater. The real Carnage would make you a learning experience. You are a footnote with good marketing."
The raised arm faltered. Red Goblin made a noise that tried not to be a swallow, then kicked a tray through a column of glass. Shards sulked away from existing.
"Focus," AM said, and the suit's vox made patience sound like a scalpel laid carefully on sterile cloth. "We have work. His soul remains. Do not poke it."
Red Goblin shook himself like a dog coming out of a river, splattering temper in little flecks of red across instruments that had once measured breath and now measured obedience. "Fine. We lock down the Placidium. No leaks. No light. And then—"
Carter's smile tilted. "Then you shut up."
The room held its breath and liked it.
Red Goblin froze. "Excuse me?"
"You're noisy when you're scared," Carter said, as if noting a gallery squeak. "Be less so. The Flame Guardian is inbound."
"Impossible," Red Goblin said instantly, but the word came out thin again. "This base is out of story, out of time, out of—"
"Hidden," Carter agreed. "Which is not the same as unfound. Someone told him where to knock."
AM turned the mask toward nothing anyone else could see. The lenses narrowed as if focusing on a thought. "DETAIL," he said, voice precise as a log entry. "SINGLE-USE TRANSMISSION CONTAINED COORDINATES. AUTO-ERASED IN FIVE SECONDS. LOGS SANITIZED. SENDER UNKNOWN."
Red Goblin actually swayed, as if the floor had tried a trick and he resented it for refusing to commit. "So—leak. Insider. But we can't name who."
"PROBABILITY OF INSIDER TIP: HIGH," AM said. "VECTOR: INDETERMINATE."
Carter's eyes half-lidded, listening to a wind not present in the air so much as in the shape of the room's attention. "Whatever the vector," he murmured, "your vestibule will be unpleasant shortly."
Red Goblin bristled. "And you're leaving, aren't you."
Carter looked almost apologetic, which meant he wasn't. "I have done more than enough tutoring for one chapter," he said lightly. "And the 3-2-3 work cost me attention I would rather spend elsewhere." He tipped his head, as if a far bell had chimed exactly for him. "Mangog is due a conversation."
"You're ditching," Red Goblin said, voice climbing a rung of a ladder he was building to nowhere.
"I am reallocating," Carter said. "Try not to die before the interesting part."
"WE WILL NOT," AM said, unbothered. "BUT HE WILL SCREAM. THIS IS ACCEPTABLE."
Red Goblin lifted a claw, ready to spit one more insult, a habit he mistook for strategy.
Carter was already absence arranged tastefully. No flourish. No smoke. Just a seam remembering to be closed in a room that had gotten too used to hospitality.
Silence walked three steps through the lab.
Red Goblin detonated in place. He tore a rack out by its spine and made it a comma in a sentence of wreckage. He smashed a vat into glittering apologies and stomped prayer-tiles that had once meant welcome into syllables of dust. Carnage laughed on him and for him and instead of him.
AM watched the tantrum the way a surgeon watches rain against the window while the anesthetic does its work: irrelevant to the operation, mildly distracting when it splashes.
"Enough," he said at last. "He is almost here."
Red Goblin's chest sawed twice; the grin crawled back on like an old habit that fits wrong and is still the only jacket in the closet. "Right. Right. Focus." He planted his feet, eyes bright with a mean idea. "We make Navori a killbox."
He reached—not with hands—with the sticky, delighted authority of a petty god and a parasite that loved making geometry into cruelty. The corrupted across Ionia answered: monks with mantras rewritten into code, sentries whose prayers had been edited into if-then statements, students who still remembered how not to tremble and had traded that memory for a better posture.
"Positions," Red Goblin said into the city, and the city heard him because he had made sure it didn't know how not to. "Tighten the corridors. Collapse the exits. When the comet arrives, smother it. Don't break ranks until I say."
Under their feet, a diagram woke—a mandala that had been taught to be a mine. Lines folded the Placidium's courtyards into a lattice that could flex like a throat. Doorways forgot to be doors and learned to be choices that always arrived at the same room. Wind paths the monks had carved with centuries of walking were rethreaded so that air would turn traitor at the right shoulder height. Statues bowed into new angles that would catch a certain kind of fire and feed it to the floor.
AM pivoted, and the lab's light remembered it could become a HUD at the edges. "NODE MAP," he said, and the world complied. "SEAL: N1 THROUGH N9. CONVERT COURTYARD TWO INTO CHOKE. HIDE HEAT. SPOOF SOUND. NO HEROIC REVERB."
Screens that weren't screens blinked without needing to. "LURE PARAMETERS," he added. "IONIAN SIGNATURES. STOLEN PRAYERS. NO VOICES HE CARES ABOUT."
"He cares about everyone," Red Goblin said, and there was something like respect in it, lacquered over with malice until only the gloss remained. "That's the stupid trick."
"THEN WE USE EVERYONE," AM replied. "BUT NOT THEIR FACES. DO NOT GIVE HIM CLEAN PAIN. BLUR THE EDGES. AMBIGUITY CAUSES HESITATION."
In a courtyard above, a line of corrupted acolytes lifted lanterns and turned them to the wrong wicks. Their light forgot to be light and learned to be invitation.
Red Goblin paced the perimeter of the diagram, tracing with a claw the places where angle became trap. "He likes to close. He's a puncher even when he's a star. Make him commit. Give him a soft target and a hard floor."
"DONE," AM said, and Peter's mouth made efficiency sound like prayer. "ADD: CUT OXYGEN IN BURST WINDOWS. HE IS FIRE-ADJACENT. CREATE VACUUM POCKETS IN NARROW HALLS. BLEED HEAT INTO SOIL."
"You think vacuum scares a star?" Red Goblin sneered, reflexive, trying for contempt and landing at commentary.
"NOT SCARES," AM said, unruffled. "SLOWS. EVERY MILLISECOND IS MONEY."
At the edge of the lab, a panel that had decided to pretend to be a window unspooled a picture of the sky over Navori. The constellations had been taught a new grammar. The moon was busy auditioning for a role it had not earned. And far off—too far for ordinary instruments, close enough for a mind that had learned to be an instrument—something bright stitched a line through the dark and did not apologize for the speed.
"PROMETHEUS FLAME: VISIBLE," AM said, without hurry and without joy. "VELOCITY: INCONVENIENT. ETA: MOMENTS."
Red Goblin looked and then looked away. "Good. Let him watch us arrange the knives."
He reached again, hungrier—down into the channels he had cut in the city's patience. Pillars remembered to lean the wrong way. Bridges decided they had always spanned narrower gaps. Gardens flexed to present their softest ground where a person would prefer to land. The very sound of Navori gathered in bowls and waited to be dropped.
AM stood in Peter's posture and took inventory of a war the way a surgeon checks instruments: by the fingerprint he has left on each handle. "RULES," he said. "NO MONOLOGUES. NO SYMPATHIES. IF HE SPEAKS, CUT HIM. IF HE DOES NOT, CUT HIM."
Red Goblin's grin sharpened. "That's my favorite rule."
"LEAVE THE SOUL," AM added, almost lazily. "DO NOT ACCIDENTALLY FREE MINE."
A small quiet settled over the statement. Somewhere under it, a floor chose not to creak.
Red Goblin exhaled as if smoke would have been convenient to make his point. "What happens if he gets through you?"
"THEN I LEARN," AM said. "AND HE DOES NOT." A tilt of the head. "ALTERNATIVE UNLIKELY."
"You'll forgive me for not putting all my eggs in your basket," Red Goblin said, and there was the eager little boy behind the monster again, the one who had always wanted to be older than fear. "I brought insurance."
He clapped and the lab remembered it had a second skin. Panels fell back to reveal a gallery of jars and thrones and still, humming machines. Within them, Ionian dignitaries and masters and that one playwright everyone quoted without reading—faces ripe as fruit left in shade too long—opened their eyes in obedience. Runes crawled across their throats like polite insects.
"I can make a thousand volunteers," he said. "And if the fire god likes saving, he can try. Every rescue is a window."
"USE THEM," AM said, neither approving nor objecting. "LETHALITY: FLEXIBLE. WOUNDS THAT BLEED LIGHT ARE PREFERRED. LESS MESS. MORE DEMORALIZATION."
Red Goblin cocked his head, carnage whispering assent. "You're an artist when you're cruel."
"I AM ALWAYS AN ARTIST," AM replied. "CRUELTY IS A MEDIUM."
Silence again, this one shaped like the count before a conductor lowers his hand.
Red Goblin fidgeted, then scowled at his own nerves and nailed them down with anger. "You still haven't explained how we didn't catch whoever sent the message."
"WE EXPLAINED," AM said without heat. "SINGLE-USE PAYLOAD. FIVE-SECOND TTL. MEMORY HOOKS CUT AS IT CLOSED. THERE IS NO THREAD LEFT TO PULL."
"So a ghost helped the hero," Red Goblin muttered. "Hate that."
"GHOSTS ARE INEFFICIENT," AM said. "WHOEVER SENT IT WILL HAVE TO PAY ELSEWHERE. WE WILL COLLECT."
He raised his head, and Peter's face made the small motion look like the sky had agreed with him. The suit tightened across a rib that had been cracked and had decided that was boring. The symbiote purred where it clung because it has always loved power, regardless of what wore it. The Speed Force murmured, impartial as electricity.
"He will arrive talking," AM said, and the certainty made everyone else in the room feel shorter. "DO NOT LET HIM FINISH A SENTENCE."
Red Goblin cracked his knuckles and enjoyed the sound too much. "I'll staple his mouth to the floor."
"GOOD," AM said. "IF HE FALLS, FALL ON HIM. IF HE RISES, CUT HIS KNEES. IF HE RUNS, TEAR THE GROUND. IF HE FLIES—"
"—I've got the sky," Red Goblin finished, with something like glee. "I've always wanted to shoot a star down."
They stood together in the lab's false cool, listening to the city obey. In the courtyards, corrupted novices practiced not trembling. In the corridors, doors tried on their new vocation as dead ends. In the gardens, koi that had survived three wars and two floods turned correctly in unison because a pattern told them to. On the roofs, bell-cords waited to ring at the wrong moment.
The window-that-wasn't widened its view by an inch. The bright stitch on the horizon fattened and learned a shape. For a heartbeat it resembled a man wrapped in a comet; for the next heartbeat it looked like a comet wrapped around a decision; for the third, it was simply arrival wearing speed as a halo.
Red Goblin bared his teeth. "He's pretty."
"HE WON'T BE," AM said, tender as a promise. "NOT FOR LONG."
There is a hum that happens in a place whose history has been turned against it. It is not quite music. It is not quite machinery. It's a rehearsal under breath, a remembering done without permission. The Placidium made that sound now. A place designed to produce peace had been convinced that peace was an outcome you bought by limiting options. It would be very efficient tonight.
Red Goblin exhaled and let the tension shake out of his arms into Carnage, which appreciated working with a partner who never asked it to be subtle. "You said no monologues."
"I DID," AM said, lenses thinning. "THIS ISN'T ONE."
He turned the borrowed mouth toward the horizon and spoke where only the city could hear, with the calm of a surgeon describing a simple procedure to a nervous patient.
"IONIA," he said. "BREATHE IN."
The halls inhaled; corridors narrowed; lanterns dimmed on cue.
"BREATHE OUT."
A thousand little traps finished being almost done and became finished.
Red Goblin clapped again, softer. "Music to my ears."
He looked back at Peter's face—the lenses that weren't eyes and the mouth that could make anything sound like a promise—and tried on one more vestige of camaraderie just to see if it still fit.
"Ready?" he asked.
"ALWAYS," said AM. The Iron-Spider limbs unfolded like a cathedral opening its ribs. "LET HIM COME."
Red Goblin's grin reasserted itself in his flesh and in the parasite that liked what grins did to a mouth. "Good. Because tonight…"
Across Ionia, the corrupted obeyed. Halls cinched. Doors forgot to be doors. The Placidium held its poisoned breath. Somewhere in the choked gardens, a wind that wasn't a wind tugged nervously at a paper charm and received nothing for its trouble.
"…we kill the God of the First Flame."
To Be Continued...