Journal. The 27th of October. The location, a festering wound in reality they call the Command Center. The light is sterile, buzzing like a trapped fly. It does nothing to hide the decay. The structure of the Web of Life and Destiny groans, a dying animal.
The faces before me are a study in fracture. The Cartoon rocks on his heels, a dissonant note of color in this gray reality. His presence is an absurdity I am forced to tolerate. Silk, stands with coiled stillness, her eyes sharp. A predator, pragmatic. Good. She understands the nature of the cage.
Then there is The Boy. Miles Morales. He wears his guilt like a second costume, heavier than the first. His leadership has splintered, the pieces scattered between himself and the Woman. Now, I hold the shard that matters.
"The coordinates are locked," I state, my voice flat in the humming silence. The screen behind me shows a dimensional schematic, a tangle of broken threads. "The target is a parasite. It thinks. It learns. Its latest pattern suggests a preference for the weak."
The Boy shifts his weight. "They're not weak. They're just… alone. Underequipped."
Sentiment. A cancer. I turn from the screen, my masked face offering no sympathy. "Weakness takes many forms. Isolation is one. Hesitation is another." My gaze lingers on him. He looks away.
I address the team, my authority a physical pressure in the small room. "Our purpose is simple. We track. We hunt. We kill. Or the Web dies with us." I look to Silk. Her nod is almost imperceptible, a sharp, clean motion. She has reservations, I can see them in the tight line of her jaw, but she has weighed the odds. Survival is the only metric that matters now. The Cartoon gives a two-fingered salute, his cartoonish grin a grotesque mask of its own.
Miles says nothing. A ghost in his own army. Good. Ghosts don't argue.
"Move out," I command, turning and striding toward the portal. Its shimmering surface ripples, promising a journey into another dying world.
The air tastes of ash and sorrow. This dimension is a corpse, picked clean. The sky is a bruised purple, choked with the dust of pulverized skyscrapers. We stand in the skeletal remains of a city. The silence here is absolute, the kind that follows a final scream.
"It was here," Silk says, her voice low. She points with her chin toward the epicenter of a crater. "The psychic trail ends."
We move forward, boots crunching on crystallized debris. In the center of the crater lies the evidence. Not a body. A husk. The tattered remains of a Spider-Totem's costume, drained of all color, clinging to a thin, desiccated shell that might have once been a person. It is arranged almost artfully, a monument to a god of hunger.
As we get closer, it hits us. A psychic echo, the last moments of a life imprinted on the very fabric of this broken place. It's not a memory, but a raw, sensory feed of terror. Confusion. A feeling of being invaded, hollowed out from the inside, your own mind turned into a weapon against you. The sensation of a thousand tiny legs crawling under your skin, rewriting your being. Then, finally, a terrible, ecstatic submission before the end.
The Boy stumbles back, his hand flying to his head. "God… he didn't even fight back at the end. It… it made him welcome it."
"A logical progression," I state, kneeling to examine the husk. The material crumbles to dust at my touch. "The Child doesn't just devour the body. It infests the mind. The weaker Totems, the ones riddled with doubt or fear, are more susceptible. Their minds are fertile soil for its parasitic influence. It turns their strength into a welcome mat."
"He was a hero," Miles bites out, his voice shaking with a rage I recognize as the flimsy armor of grief. "He had a name. He had a purpose."
"His purpose was to die and give us a trail to follow," Silk cuts in, her tone as sharp as shattered glass. She stands over the remains, her face a mask of grim acceptance. "Rorschach is right, Miles. We can't afford to mourn them. We can only learn from how they died."
She looks at me, then back at The Boy. Her loyalty is a fraying rope, stretched between his bleeding heart and my cold calculus. For now, it holds with me.
I rise, turning my back on the fallen totem. It is no longer a hero. It is data. A footprint.
"The parasite leaves a trail," I say, looking toward the horizon where another dimensional tear shimmers faintly. "Another weak link in the chain is about to break. We will be there when it does."
The Boy watches me, his eyes filled with a conflict I have no time for. He sees a monster. He is not wrong. But it takes a monster to hunt one. The Web is a pattern of predators and prey. We have been prey for too long.
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The broken Earth, a fractured construct of splintered realities, hummed with a sterile, oppressive silence. Miles Morales felt the weight of it settle on his shoulders, a familiar, leaden ache. This was the Weaver's territory, a place where the very fabric of existence frayed.
Silk, a blur of determined motion, took the lead, her senses already tuned to the faintest whisper of the Spider-Totem's presence. They found him not in a web-spun sanctuary, but huddled in a dusty corner of a derelict library, a spectral figure in spectacles, his form flickering with an overwhelming, paralyzing fear. The Weaver's Child, a writhing tapestry of shadow and hunger, loomed over him, its nascent form already pulsating with the stolen essence.
"He's… he's just a kid," Miles whispered, his voice tight with a rising nausea. The Totem, a scholar judging by the scattered tomes, was utterly broken, a rabbit caught in the headlights of oblivion.
Rorschach, a silhouette against the dim light, remained impassive. His voice, a gravelly rasp, cut through the tension. "If he's too far gone, eliminate the threat. We can't let it grow."
Miles flinched. "Eliminate? He's a Totem, Rorschach! He's part of us."
"He was," Rorschach corrected, the word a cold pronouncement. "Now he's a vessel. An appetizer. The Child learns from what it consumes. We starve it, Morales."
The clash was brief, a flicker of defiance from Miles against the unyielding pragmatism of the masked man. Silk, ever efficient, had already assessed the situation. The Totem's light was dimming, his fear a beacon for the Child. There was no saving him. There was only survival.
With a heavy sigh, Miles turned away, the hum of the nexus suddenly deafening. He heard Silk's sharp, decisive movements, then a soft, final exhalation that wasn't entirely hers. The Weaver's Child, momentarily stunned by its premature satiation, recoiled, then began to coalesce, a fraction larger, a degree more potent.
Miles's guilt, a constant companion, surged. He saw not a tactical victory, but another life extinguished on his watch, another thread severed from the infinite tapestry. Only the chilling echo of Rorschach's grim logic and the hollow ache in his own heart could be heard. He was a Spider-Man, yes, but the cost of this war was beginning to feel like a debt he could never repay.
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The data was a scream condensed into silence. It scrolled across the fractured holographic displays of the Nexus Frame, a sterile tomb where realities came to die. I watched the light-streams flicker over the grime on my mask. Each flicker was another dead world, another extinguished Spider-Totem. Another number in a long, ugly equation.
They saw chaos. I saw a blueprint.
"It isn't hunting," I said. The words were gravel in the hollow quiet. Miles and Silk turned from their own screens, their faces illuminated by the ghost-light of collapsing universes. Miles's exhaustion was a physical weight, pulling down the corners of his eyes. Silk's jaw was a hard line of tension. Efficient. Good. But brittleness was setting in.
I pointed a gloved finger at the central map, a web of dying timelines. Red dots pulsed rhythmically, marking the Weaver's Child's appearances. "It's not a feeding frenzy. It's an invasion."
I dragged a series of data points into a sequence. A backwater reality where their Spider was a novice, barely in control. A timeline where the hero was old, their connection to the Web frayed. An Earth where the Totem was isolated, with no allies to call.
"It's picking the low-hanging fruit," I explained, my voice flat. "Weaker Totems. Ones on the periphery. It uses their essence not just for sustenance, but as anchors." Lines of corrupted energy began to snake between the red dots on the map, forming a grotesque new web. A tumor growing on the corpse of the old one. "Each kill expands its influence, solidifying its presence across the multiverse. It's terraforming reality itself."
Silk stepped closer, her analytical gaze narrowing. "It's… learning."
"It evolves," I corrected. "It learns. It is not just hunting. It's building."
The silence that followed was heavy with the truth of it. We weren't chasing a rabid animal. We were fighting an architect.
The infection I predicted was not the Child's, but our own. It began with Silk. I saw the first symptoms in the way her movements lost their sharp economy, replaced by a subtle hesitation. She started watching Miles, not for tactical cues, but with a look of troubled sympathy. A liability.
I found them near the precipice overlooking the Chronos-Engine, the dying heart of this place. The air was thick with ozone and the smell of burnt time. Her voice was low, but carried in the sterile environment.
"We're becoming him, Miles."
I didn't need to see her gesture to know she meant me. Morales said nothing. His silence was a constant, a vacuum where leadership was supposed to be.
"We jump to a world, we identify the target, we sterilize it," she continued, the words sharp with frustration. "We don't even know what we're killing anymore. We just follow his calculus. There's no room for… anything else. The team is running on fumes and fear."
"It's the only way we're surviving," Miles finally mumbled. A weak defense. Pathetic.
Silk's response was a bitter laugh. "Are we? Or are we just dying slower?" She took a step toward him, her silhouette stark against the swirling vortex of temporal energy. "We're not just hunting a monster. We're hunting what we've become."
The statement hung there, a diagnosis of a rot I had long since identified. Sentiment. A disease of the soul. I made a mental note. Asset C.S. Moon: Compromised. Asset M. Morales: Ineffective. The mission parameters remained unchanged.
The mission proved my assessment. The Child had established a nesting ground in the husk of a collapsed city, a lattice of black, chitinous webbing strangling the skeletal remains of skyscrapers. It pulsed with a sick, embryonic light.
The Child's spawn were fast—skittering things of shadow and teeth. One caught Silk as she was pulling a civilian—a child, predictably—from the path of a collapsing building. A moment of moral indulgence. The price was a razor-sharp limb through her shoulder. She went down with a clinical grunt of pain, her efficiency shattered.
For a moment, the team froze. A chain of command is only as strong as its weakest link. Right now, every link was brittle.
"Morales!" My voice was a crack of thunder in the chaos. "Lead. Or we all die here."
Something shifted behind his mask. The indecision was still there, but buried under a layer of pure, desperate adrenaline. He barked orders. Coordinated fire. Fallback positions. He directed the strike with a brutal, textbook precision he rarely showed. It was clumsy, raw, but it was functional. We moved like a well-oiled machine for the first time in weeks, purging the nest with focused, overwhelming force.
We left the world burning behind us. A victory.
But back in the Nexus, as Silk was being treated, the victory curdled. Miles stood apart from everyone, his shoulders slumped. He had done what was necessary. He had won. And the look on his face was that of a man who had just lost everything. He was staring at his hands, as if expecting to find them covered in something other than his own sweat and blood.
He was wrestling with the calculus. He wondered if my methods made him culpable. The answer was simple. Yes. Survival is a dirty business. He was just now realizing how much filth he'd have to wade through.
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place on a world that had no designation. It was simply… gone. A blank space on the multiverse map. When we ported in, the reason was clear. The reality was a corpse, picked clean. The sky was the color of a dead television screen, static and grey. The ground was dust.
And in the center of the desolation stood the husks of what should have been destroyed Spider-Totems. Dozens of them. Not dead. Not alive. Something else.
They were encased in strange, web-like cocoons that pulsed with the same dark energy as the nests. But this was different. More intricate. The webbing snaked into the empty eye sockets and hollow chests of the fallen Totems, threaded through them like wiring in a circuit board.
I walked toward the nearest one, a version of Parker from a world of knights and castles, his armor rent and corroded. I placed a hand on the cocoon. It was humming. Reconfiguring.
"It's not just killing them," I said, the revelation crystallizing in my mind, cold and perfect. "It's not just building a network between worlds."
I ran a diagnostic. The energy signature wasn't just draining the residual Totemic power. It was rewriting it. Inverting it.
"It's building the network out of them."
Silk, her arm in a sling, looked horrified. "It's… reanimating them?"
"Worse," I stated, turning to face them. The full, monstrous scope of the Child's strategy was laid bare. "These aren't zombies. They're conduits. It's replacing the Totems of the Great Web with its own. An unstoppable, self-replicating network that will overwrite reality itself. It's not just destroying the multiverse. It's paving over it."
The weight of it finally broke them. Silk's remaining pragmatism crumbled into open despair. Two other team members started arguing, their voices sharp with panic. The thin veneer of unity we'd maintained through sheer momentum dissolved into accusations and fear.
Miles tried to intervene, to be the leader, but his voice was lost in the noise. He looked at me, a silent plea in his eyes. He wanted me to fix it. To fix them. But people are not machines. Their broken parts cannot be easily replaced.
I could feel it—the final, splintering fracture of our purpose. We weren't a team anymore. We were just a collection of survivors, drowning in the same storm but clinging to different pieces of wreckage. We were no longer fighting to win. We were fighting to preserve what little of ourselves we had left. It was a losing battle. Humanity is a flaw, not a feature, in the grand design of survival.
We stood on a precipice of cracked obsidian, overlooking the abyss where that dead world fell away into nothing. Below us, the multiverse roiled—a sea of dying stars and fading possibilities. We had the pattern. We had the motive. We had the endgame. And we had nothing. No clear way to stop it. No weapon that could sever a billion corrupted threads at once.
My focus was absolute. The problem had been defined. A solution, however costly, existed.
Morales stood beside me, not looking at the abyss, but at the fractured faces of his team. I could see the vow forming in his mind, a silent promise to himself that he wouldn't let them break further. A fool's hope. They were already broken. The cracks were structural.
"There's no clean way out of this," I said, my voice as cold and unyielding as the void before us. The statement was a fact, not an opinion. A simple observation of the state of play.
Miles finally looked at me, the full weight of a thousand dead worlds in his eyes. The guilt, the fear, the crushing burden of a crown he never wanted. He understood.
"But there's no other way forward."