The air in the bunker was thick with the smell of old circuits, ozone, and desperation. Intel flickered on the main holo-screen, a grotesque anatomical scan of something that was once an Inheritor. Now it was a puppet, its strings pulled by the Child's cancerous web-infection.
"It's a Husk," Peni stated, her voice too small for the giant mech she piloted. "Wandering Earth-412. Bio-signs are… chaotic. It's not alive. Not really. More like a record on a loop."
Gwen scoffed, her arms crossed tight over her chest. "So it's a zombie vamp. Great. Another one. We find it, we put him to rest. Standard procedure."
I watched the scan rotate. The neural pathways, lit up in corrosive orange, pulsed with a faint, parasitic rhythm. A corpse, reanimated. A broken machine, repeating its last functions. But machines could be read. "No," I said. The single word cut through the low hum of the bunker. All eyes turned to me. The mask's inkblots shifted, a slow Rorschach test they were all failing. "We do not destroy it."
Miles leaned forward, his brow furrowed. "Rorschach? That thing is a weapon. It's a danger to anything with a spark of life left on that world."
"Its mind is a ruin," I stated. "But ruins hold fragments. This thing fed on Totems. It gorged on their essence, their memories, their power. Those imprints… they are trapped in its corrupted neural lattice. Like scratches on a phonograph record."
I stepped closer to the screen, pointing a gloved finger at the flickering brainstem. "It may hold data. The Child's movements. The location of a new nest. It is not a target. It is an intelligence asset."
Gwen was in front of me in a flash, her face a mask of disgust. "You want to capture it? Are you insane? Then what?"
"It is a tool," I corrected her, my voice level, devoid of heat. Heat was wasted energy. "Sentimentality is a weapon our enemy does not possess. We must be equally pragmatic."
"Pragmatic? This is monstrous!"
Miles rubbed the back of his neck, the weight of trying to regain his leadership pressing down on him. He looked from Gwen's furious, pleading eyes to my impassive mask. "Do we have any other leads?" he asked the room quietly.
Peni shook her head inside her cockpit. "Nothing. The Web is silent. Or it's screaming. I can't tell anymore. It's all corrupted noise."
"Then we have no choice," Miles said, the words tasting like ash. "We go. We contain it. Alive." He looked directly at me. "Alive, Rorschach."
I gave a single, curt nod. The only kind I ever gave. "The objective is acquisition. Not extermination."
Gwen stared at Miles, a betrayal flashing in her eyes, before she turned and walked away, her silence louder than any protest.
Earth-412 was a corpse. The sky was a cataract-grey dome, webbed with black, bleeding cracks that pulsed with a sickly light. There was no sound. Not the wind, not the scuttling of insects, not the distant hum of a city that never slept. There was only the oppressive, thin silence of a grave. The air was stale, tasting of dust and the metallic tang of spilled dimensions.
We moved through the skeletal remains of a city, our footsteps echoing in the hollow canyons of dead architecture.
"I don't like this," Silk whispered, her senses stretching out. "The threads… they're all wrong. Not broken. Infected. It's like a heartbeat. Underground. A sick, slow pulse."
Ham, for once, wasn't joking. He adjusted the dial on a bulky, cartoonish gadget. "The ol' tromboning oscillator is picking up the wacky-waves. Thing's close. And it's hungry."
Miles took point, his red and blue suit a violent splash of color in the monochrome despair. "Alright. Plan. Cindy, you set the silk-seal barriers. Triple layer. We funnel it into the town square. Ham, you're on distraction. Keep its attention divided. I'll provide mobility, try to tire it out. Rorschach…" He looked at me. "You coordinate the takedown. Tell us how to pin it."
I saw the plan. Flawed, reliant on agility and containment. It assumed the enemy would behave predictably. I began crafting my own. Contingencies. The weak points in their strategy. The most efficient points of disabling force. "Understood," I said.
We found it in the central plaza, hunched over the faint, shimmering afterimage of a leonine Totem. It was feeding on the astral residue, a psychic vampire sucking the last echoes of power from a ghost. Its form was a nightmare of jerking, broken angles, all pallid skin stretched over sharp bones. It twitched, and a chorus of stolen voices muttered from its lipless mouth—a child's laugh, a scream, a whispered prayer.
It detected us. Its head snapped up, empty eye sockets fixing on our life force. It moved not with grace, but with the terrifying, unpredictable speed of a shattered mirror sliding down a wall.
The fight was chaos. Miles shot forward, venomed webbing and bio-electric blasts flashing blue. They struck the Husk, pinning it for a second before it tore free, the corrupted energy of its own form dissolving his power. Silk's pristine white strands shot out, wrapping around its limbs. "Got it!" she yelled. The Husk simply flexed, and her powerful webbing snapped like rotten string, the black infection crawling up the threads toward her. "Hey, uglier-than-my-Aunt-May's-meatloaf!" Ham yelled, activating his sonic gadget. A ridiculous, warbling WOOMPH-WOOMPH sound filled the square. The Husk flinched, its head cocking at the dissonant noise. It bought us two seconds. Precious time.
I was already moving. I had mapped its patterns. Its twitches were not random. They were a language of pain and hunger. It favored the left side, where a spectral wound from its original death still gleamed. It sought to bite, to consume, to add our voices to its mixture of stolen ones.
While it was distracted by Ham's noise, I closed the distance. Not with acrobatics. With economy. I unspooled a reel of reinforced silk-wire—Peni's design, capable of holding a train. I didn't aim for the body. I aimed for the joints. The wrists. The ankles. The knees. I wove a cage of unyielding filament around its movements, a spider ensnaring a much larger, much deader insect.
It shrieked, a sound that was a hundred screams layered into one. It thrashed, but my bindings held, cutting into dead flesh. It was contained, but not neutralized. Its head snapped, jaws wide, aiming for Miles as he swung close.
I did not hesitate. My fist, clad in knuckle-dusters of hardened polymer, struck its jaw with a calculated, precise impact. There was a wet, splintering crack. The jaw hung loose, useless.
"Remove the ability to bite," I stated, the Husk's muffled hissing filling the sudden silence. "It learns by consuming."
The thing was on the ground, trussed and muzzled. A captured nightmare.
We had it inside a containment cocoon of pulsating energy, a bubble of silence in the dead world. It hissed and muttered, its body glitching between forms—a flicker of a cape, a glimpse of fangs, the shadow of a fallen Spider.
Gwen wouldn't look at it. Or at me. I approached the cocoon. The interrogation would require specific tools. Not physical pincers or probes. Deeper tools. Pain-stimulus methods. Sensory deprivation. Controlled, escalating agony. I had learned them in another life, in a city that reeked of sin and required a certain… persuasion to loosen tongues. This was no different. The subject was merely less human.
I began. I adjusted the containment field, creating a localized pressure that would simulate the vacuum of deep space. The Husk writhed. I introduced a harmonic frequency keyed to the resonant pain frequency of Inheritor biology, a scrap of knowledge from a previous encounter. The thing's stolen voices became a unified screech.
"Stop it!" Gwen shouted, stepping forward. "Rorschach, that's enough!"
Miles looked pale. Ham looked away, his usual humor extinguished.
Silk moved, not to stop me, but to block Gwen. Her face was grim. "Gwen, don't."
"You're okay with this?!" Gwen's voice was raw.
"No," Silk said, her voice low and strained. "I hate it. But if there's a chance this thing knows where the next nest will form… where the Child is… we need it. We're out of time, and we're out of options." She wasn't defending me. She was stating a terrible fact.
I continued. I used symbolic triggers—projected images of a nurturing matriarch, of a failed patriarch, of a pure web. The reactions were subtle, but they were there. A flinch. A warble in its agonized cries. I was mapping its broken psyche. I was reading the scratches on the record.
It broke.
Its form stabilized, and a torrent of voices spilled out, overlapping, a council of the damned. A scarlet sunset over a skyline… …the taste of electricity and hope… …let's do this one last time… And then, cutting through them all, a new voice. Calm. Eerie. The Child's. …the Spindle must be woven… anchors must be cut… the weak points… Earth-928… 803… 1610… the Web must be unwoven from the inside…
The voices coalesced into a single, horrifying statement. "When the Spindle is complete, the Web will unravel from the inside."
Silence. The first real lead. The location of the project. Its goal. Total annihilation from within.
The Husk had served its purpose. It was a broken, suffering thing, a perversion of nature. Its existence was an affront. My arm shot out, a blade extending from my gauntlet. In one clean, merciful motion, I severed its brainstem. It collapsed, finally, truly still.
"Mercy," I said to the silent, horrified team.
Gwen exploded. "MERCY?!" She got in my face, her finger jabbing at my chest. "You tortured it! You tortured a prisoner and then you execute it and you call it MERCY?!"
"It was not a person," I stated. "It was evidence. And it was in pain."
"You don't get to decide that! You don't get to torture people and call yourself the good guy!" Her voice was shaking with a fury so pure it was almost beautiful. A luxury. "This isn't justice! This is… this is monstrous! You're not saving the Web, Rorschach. You're becoming the very thing that's tearing it apart!"
I looked at her, this girl from a world that still had music, who believed in lines that should not be crossed. She lived in a world of color. We were standing in a world of grey. "Lines do not matter when the world ends," I said, my voice flat, a stone dropped into a well. "Only survival matters. Your morality is a luxury of safe worlds. This…" I gestured to the dead grey around us. "…is not a safe world."
Silk tried to speak, her voice weary. "He's not wrong, Gwen. We got the intel. We know what we're facing now."
Ham said nothing. He just stared at the dead Husk, his shoulders slumped.
Gwen turned from me, her final argument not for me, but for Miles. Her voice trembled, not with rage now, but with a heartbroken finality. "If he stays on this team… I don't."
The silence was absolute. Damning. Miles looked at me, at my unchanging mask, at the brutal, effective truth of my methods. He looked at Gwen, at the soul of everything we were supposedly fighting for.
He hesitated.
That was all the answer she needed. Without another word, Gwen Stacy turned and web-swung away, a streak of pink and blue vanishing into the dying horizon, leaving us alone in the silence.
I watched her go. The ink on my mask bled, shifting without my conscious command, forming a pattern that was, for a single second, perfectly symmetrical and soft, resembling a single, dark teardrop. Then it hardened again into an expressionless Rorschach blot.
Attachment weakens resolve, I thought, the cold certainty of my philosophy wrapping around me like a familiar coat. She chooses comfort. I choose survival. The choice is simple.
We gathered our equipment. We prepared to portal out. And then, a faint, psychic echo slithered through the dead Web-threads beneath our feet, a whisper that was meant for me alone. It was the Child's voice, calm and horribly approving.
He chooses survival. Like me.
I stiffened. The universe held its breath. The ink on my mask remained perfectly, terribly still.