The Great Web screamed.
It wasn't a sound one could hear with ears, but a shriek that vibrated through the soul of every Totem connected to its infinite strands. In the command hall of the Nexus, the scream manifested as a waterfall of raw data and shredded transmissions, a storm of universal panic.
"—it's learning the voices—can't trust comms—it wore Larry's face—" The voice, from a reality designated Earth-928B, was choked with static and terror before being severed by a sound like snapping silk.
Another feed, audio only, from a steampunk London: "—we tried fire, we tried everything—it laughed—that's all it did, it laughed at the flames—" A wet, tearing noise, then silence.
"—the Web isn't responding. I can't jump. The gate is… it's turning to dust. Oh, gods, the Web is dead here—" The signal from a desert world cut out, leaving a pulsing red void on the holographic map.
One by one, the lights representing entire realities flickered and died. Miles Morales watched as constellations of interconnected worlds vanished from the star chart. He saw flashes of Totems in their last moments. A grim, black-and-white Spider-Man shattering his reality's Web-gate with a crowbar, his face a mask of resolute despair. A cybernetic Spider, her mech suit sparking, firing its core reactor into the portal before being consumed by the blast. More chilling were the others—the ones who simply vanished. No final transmission, no heroic last stand. Just a sudden, absolute erasure, their thread in the Great Web not just cut, but unwritten.
The grand, harmonic hum of the Nexus was gone. In its place was a fractured, off-key pulse, a discordant thrumming that felt like a dying heart. The light from the Web's energy conduits, usually a steady, reassuring gold, now flickered like a candle in a gale, casting long, dancing shadows across the grim faces in the hall.
"That's the twelfth sector sealed in the last hour," Jessica Drew said, her voice flat, devoid of the calm professionalism she usually projected. She gestured to a swathe of the map that had gone dark. "They're collapsing their own realities to stop the spread. It's not containment. It's amputation."
The room was too small, the air too thick. Miles stood at the head of the command table, hands gripping its edge until his knuckles were white. Gwen Stacy paced behind him, her movements sharp, panther-like. Ham was uncharacteristically quiet, chewing on a matchstick, his wide eyes fixed on the dying star chart. Silk, Cindy Moon, stood perfectly still near the far wall, her gaze unfocused, as if she were listening to something they couldn't hear.
"We need a plan," Miles said, his voice straining to be the anchor in the storm. "Something other than running and hiding."
"I have a plan," Gwen snapped, stopping her pacing to glare at a shadowed corner of the room where their guest was being held by hard-light restraints. "We isolate Rorschach. Now. This all started getting worse when he arrived. His reality is a cesspool of this kind of… nihilistic rot. It's like he's a carrier."
Rorschach, didn't react. His masked face remained a shifting blot of black and white, a void in the flickering light.
"That's paranoia, Gwen, not a strategy," Jessica countered, stepping forward. "He's the only one who has seen this 'Weaver's Child' up close and survived. His insights, however grim, are the only intel we have. We can't afford to lose the one person who understands what we're up against."
"He doesn't understand it, he worships it!" Gwen shot back, her voice rising. "He talks about it like it's some kind of cleansing fire! Keeping him here is an invitation."
"An invitation for what?" Miles asked, turning to her. "For it to come here? Gwen, it's already everywhere."
"Maybe a real invitation will do the trick," Ham muttered, forcing a grin that didn't reach his eyes. "Send it a nice fruit basket. 'Welcome to the neighborhood, please don't unmake us.' What do you think?"
No one laughed. The joke fell into the suffocating silence and died. Silk finally moved, her head tilting. "The Web… it feels wrong," she whispered, her voice barely audible. "It's not just broken. It's… listening."
As if on cue, a new report materialized on the central display. It was a proximity alert, a flagged account from a Totem on Earth-138, the punk-rock Spider-Man. His report wasn't a panicked cry for help, but a single, terrified observation.
He'd seen it. They had cornered a sliver of the Weaver's Child, a tendril of the entity that had bled into his reality. They had hit it with everything—an anarchic orchestra of sonic cannons, feedback loops, and pure, weaponized noise. They had watched it disintegrate, atomize into a cloud of shimmering dust. And then, they had watched in horror as the dust swirled, drawn together by invisible strings. The motes began to knit themselves back into being, weaving flesh from nothing, reassembling not as a copy of its previous form, but as something new, something more perfect. It had reformed itself from dust and stray web-particles.
The report ended there, but the rumor it birthed spread through the fractured comms channels like a virus of its own. Panic began to curdle into something far worse: theology.
Other whispers followed. Totems claimed to hear a voice on the edge of their senses, a sibilant whisper carried on the discordant hum of the Web itself. It didn't threaten; it promised.
"The end of the hunt."
The phrase was repeated in dozens of languages, across realities teetering on the brink. It wasn't a declaration of war. It was a statement of finality. The spiders, the eternal hunters of their own worlds, were now the prey. And the game was almost over.
In the darkest corners of the multiverse, the meaning began to twist. Fear gave way to a desperate, insane reverence. If the Weaver's Child was inevitable, then perhaps resistance was blasphemy. Perhaps survival lay not in fighting, but in worship.
A live feed blinked onto the main screen, unbidden. It showed a darkened city on a dying Earth. In the center of a vast square, a lone Spider-Totem—one Miles didn't recognize—was on his knees. He wasn't fighting. He was weaving. With trembling hands, he was meticulously crafting a new sigil into his web, an intricate pattern of broken circles and jagged, outward-facing hooks. It was the mark of the Weaver's Child. He was weaving it for protection, for appeasement. He was praying.
The room fell silent. Gwen's anger evaporated, replaced by a cold, hollow dread. Jessica stared, her analytical mind failing to process the sight. This was no longer an enemy they could fight. An enemy could be punched, trapped, outsmarted. But this… this was a gospel of dread, spreading faster than any monster could travel.
Miles watched the lone Totem finish his heretical prayer. The flickering light from the Web outside threw his own spider-emblem into sharp relief on his chest, for a moment making it look like the very sigil on the screen. He realized, with a sudden, soul-crushing certainty, that they weren't just fighting for survival anymore. They were fighting a new god, and it was winning by convincing its victims to build it's their own graves.
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October 23rd. The Nexus bleeds. Not blood, but light and sound. The great latticework of creation groans like a dying animal, and its self-proclaimed guardians scurry like maggots on a carcass.
The corridors, once crystalline and humming with ordered power, are now a filled with panicked echoes. Spiders in a hundred different costumes argue, grieve, and break. Their voices are a shrill counterpoint to the deep, thrumming sickness that has taken root in the Great Web. I walk through them, a ghost in a trench coat. They give me a wide berth. Good. Fear is a useful barrier.
I observe the infection's progress. It follows a predictable pattern.
Stage One: Denial. A Spider-Punk variant, all spikes and snarling confidence, dismisses the flickering lights as a "power grid issue." A Spider-Man in an academic gown babbles about quantum fluctuations and cyclical resonance decay. They are children covering their ears, believing the thunder cannot strike if it is not heard.
Stage Two: Rationalization. The denial cracks, and they try to plaster over it with logic. Jessica Drew's team huddles around a tactical display, trying to map the blight's trajectory, to give it a name and a number. They believe that to understand a predator is to tame it. They fail to grasp that this thing does not hunt. It simply… expands. They are scientists trying to measure the tide as it drowns them.
Stage Three: Collapse. This is where most of them are now. A Spider-Man, his suit the classic red and blue, sits on the floor, mask in his lap, weeping. A Spider-Woman from a Victorian-era Earth stares blankly at a wall, her mechanical arms twitching uselessly. They have seen the impossible. They have watched their god—this great, interconnected Web of life and destiny—bleed. They are children clinging to broken toys, unable to accept the plastic has shattered. Their faith collapses faster than bone. Easier to shatter, harder to rebuild.
But the final stage is coming. I can smell it.
Stage Four: Worship. The desperate search for a new absolute. A new power to obey, to appease. The Web is not dying—it's changing hosts. And some are already turning to welcome the new parasite.
A side corridor offers a moment of quiet. It is quickly broken.
"Kovacs."
Miles Morales. Young. Resilient. Still believes the world can be fixed with a strong enough punch and a good heart. A dangerous delusion. He stands with his arms crossed, his suit's lenses narrowed into a glare.
"Your silence is louder than their screaming," he says, his voice tight. "You walk through here like a vulture, just waiting for the last breath."
"Vultures serve a purpose," I reply, my voice a dry rasp in the humid air of shared panic. "They clean the rot."
"You're feeding it. This… coldness. This idea that it's all inevitable. That's the real poison." He takes a step closer. The air crackles with his frustration. "We're supposed to protect people, not dissect them."
I face him fully. The shifting patterns on my mask swirl, a chaotic mirror to the order he so desperately craves. "Dissection reveals truth. Truth reveals infection. Infection must be removed."
"And who decides what the infection is? You?" he challenges. "Some of these people are losing everything. Hope is all they have left."
"Hope is the fever dream of the terminally ill. Fear is clarity. Only by letting the weak fall away can the strong adapt. The Web is culling itself. We are merely witnesses."
He stares at me, his fists clenched. I can see the argument die on his lips, choked by the gulf between our worlds. He sees a family to be saved. I see a compromised structure that needs to be purged, even if it means burning it to the foundation. The silence that falls between us is heavier than any scream in the hallway. He cannot sway me. I have already shown him the truth he refuses to see. He turns away, a soldier retreating from an unwinnable debate.
The breaking point arrives not with a bang, but with a whimper broadcast across all channels.
We are gathered in the central observation chamber, the heart of the Nexus. A distress call from Earth-1220. The connection is weak, the image flickering like a dying candle. A Spider-team—five of them, clad in silver and black—are cornered in the ruins of their city. The Weaver's Child, the blight, is upon them. A shimmering, geometric biomass that warps reality around it, pulsing with an alien hunger.
But they aren't fighting.
The transmission clarifies. They are on their knees. Their weapons are discarded. In the center of the encroaching corruption, a sigil glows—a pattern of broken, intersecting lines. The Spiders of Earth-1220 are kneeling before it. One of them, their leader, speaks into the comm, his voice eerily calm. "We accept the new pattern. We ask for mercy. We ask for purpose."
Then, the shimmering mass surges forward. It doesn't attack; it absorbs. They vanish into its light without a sound, their forms dissolving into the greater whole. The transmission cuts to static.
The chamber is utterly silent. Someone drops a datapad, the clatter unnaturally loud. Drew stares at the screen, her face pale. Morales looks like he's been punched in the soul.
Then, a voice cuts through the shock, sharp and accusatory. Gwen Stacy.
"They're following your philosophy now," she says, her eyes fixed on me. Her voice trembles with a rage that is colder and harder than Morales's. "Cold. Detached. Give in to the inevitable. You taught them fear can be useful."
She is wrong. They have not learned to use fear. They have been consumed by it. They have reached Stage Four. They worship the boot on their neck.
But I do not argue. An explanation is a form of defense, and I have nothing to defend. The truth is its own shield. I simply turn and walk out of the chamber, their stunned, hateful silence following me like a shroud.
My steps lead me to the Hall of Broken Threads. It is a place few visit now, a memorial to what has been lost. A vast, cavernous chamber where severed strands of the Great Web dangle from the vaulted ceiling like snapped nerves. They glow with a faint, residual light, pulsing irregularly, a dying heartbeat. The air is cold, still.
As I walk among them, my reflection appears in the polished, fibrous surfaces of each broken thread. Distorted. Elongated. Fractured. A hundred different versions of my masked face, all watching me back. An army of Rorschachs in a silent tomb.
Then, I hear it. A whisper, carried on the faint hum of the decaying Web. It's not one voice, but countless voices, overlapping, faint as static. Totems from dead worlds, their last psychic echoes trapped in these strands. And they are repeating my own words.
"Containment. Not comfort."
"Truth reveals infection."
"Let the weak fall away."
The realization hits me with the force of a physical blow. The infection is not just physical. It is not just psychic. It is ideological. My mindset, my cold, brutal logic… it has spread. I came here to observe a disease, and in doing so, I have become a carrier. My contempt for their weakness has become a pathogen in itself, weakening their collective will to fight.
I find a clear space on the floor and sit, the cold stone seeping through my coat. I unlatch the containment case I carry. Inside rests the journal—my journal, it has become the epicentre of this plague. My words are no longer mine.
I open it. The pages are supposed to be blank.
They are not.
Written in a perfect imitation of my own terse, blocky handwriting are new entries. Words I never wrote.
"Fear spreads faster than truth. You did well."
"Their hope was the sickness. Your logic is the cure."
"They are afraid of you because they should be."
My fingers tremble. For the first time, a tremor of something alien jolts through me. A violation. This thing has not only been listening. It has been learning. It has been agreeing.
I slam the book shut. And in the sudden, echoing silence of the hall, I swear I hear it. Faint, distant, from somewhere beyond the veil of reality. The soft, dry sound of mocking applause.
Later, I stand at the main viewport of the Nexus. It overlooks the entire Web, an infinite lattice of glowing realities. One by one, I watch them flicker out. More worlds going dark. The applause has stopped, but the echo remains.
Footsteps approach, quiet, hesitant. Silk. Another one still clinging to hope.
"Do you believe we can still win?" she asks, her voice barely a whisper. She is not looking for an honest answer. She is looking for a lie to hold onto.
I do not give her one. I continue to stare out at the dying cosmos.
"Winning implies balance," I state, the words feeling like carved stone. "Balance implies mercy. We're past that now."
I can feel her horror without seeing it. The warmth of her presence recedes as she turns to leave, her fragile hope finally shattered against the wall of my certainty.
As her footsteps fade, I add one last thing, spoken not to her, but to the devouring darkness beyond the glass.
"Let them tremble. Fear is the first step toward understanding."
Across the infinite lattice, the Web quivered like a dying nerve. In the static between heartbeats, two voices spoke the same phrase, an echo and an answer. One from a man in a stained trench coat, staring into the abyss. The other from the abyss itself, staring back.
"The hunt continues."