Kaine dropped from the ceiling without ceremony. The impact was soft, controlled, his boots barely making a sound as they met polished marble. He didn't spare the office a second glance. The place meant nothing to him. Parker Industries could burn to the ground tomorrow and it would register as a footnote—an inconvenience at most. He wasn't even in charge. A seat on the board, a name on documents, a presence that could vanish for years without disrupting the machine. Corporations, like cities, didn't need heroes. They needed continuity.
He walked down the corridor at an unhurried pace, hands in his pockets, posture loose. Employees parted instinctively when they noticed him, not out of fear exactly, but discomfort. Kaine had that effect. He didn't smile. He didn't acknowledge. People couldn't tell whether he was angry or simply indifferent, and the uncertainty gnawed at them more than hostility ever could.
The elevator ride was silent. He pressed seventeen and leaned back against the mirrored wall, watching his reflection fracture slightly as the car descended. For a moment, he studied himself with clinical detachment. Civilian clothes. Human silhouette. A disguise so thin it barely qualified as one. The city preferred symbols anyway. Faces were irrelevant.
The doors slid open.
The seventeenth floor was quiet in a way that corporate buildings rarely were. No muted conversations, no clinking coffee mugs, no hum of shared exhaustion. Just stillness. Officially, it was a recreational level—a lounge meant for stress relief. Couches, low lighting, a kitchenette no one touched. Unofficially, it was Kaine's rest bay. Everyone knew it. Everyone avoided it.
The irony amused him, faintly. The "boss" sleeping here had turned the floor into forbidden territory, despite the fact that he'd never said a word about it. Humans were excellent at self-policing when uncertainty was involved.
He crossed the room and opened a drawer near the far wall. Inside, neatly folded, waited the costume.
Spider-Man.
Red fabric with black accents, stark and familiar. No flashy insignias, no excessive plating. A full-body slip-on, seamless, utilitarian. His classic suit. His only suit. It had been designed for comfort first—flexibility, breathability—then reinforced over time as funding and technology became available. Layer by layer, it had gained resistance to blades, blunt force, small-arms fire. Nanofibers threaded through the weave allowed for self-repair, closing tears within minutes.
Once, he'd treated it like something sacred.
Back when it was his.
That illusion had shattered spectacularly the day spider-related abilities became a public epidemic. Civilians swinging through the skyline. Homemade web-shooters. Variations of his suit reproduced, recolored, rebranded. Hundreds of impostors wearing echoes of his identity, some earnest, some reckless, some criminally negligent.
More than two hundred, last he checked.
The memory still irritated him—not emotionally, but logically. Symbols lost value when overproduced. Scarcity mattered. Meaning mattered. After that day, the suit became what it always should have been: equipment.
He pulled it on with practiced efficiency. The fabric slid over his body, conforming instantly, hiding itself beneath his casual clothes with clever compression and adaptive layering. He stowed his phone and wallet in the side pockets, tugged the ESU sweater back into place, and looked utterly unremarkable again.
Ready.
Patrol. Observation. Intervention if necessary. Repeat.
An endless cycle with diminishing returns.
Kaine exhaled slowly, the sound almost a sigh. What a worthless life this is. The thought surfaced without melodrama, just a statement of fact. He moved to the window, gazing out over the city sprawled beneath him. New York at night was beautiful in a sterile way—lights like neural pathways, traffic flowing like blood through arteries. From this height, everything looked orderly. Controlled.
You could almost believe the illusion.
Almost.
Evil hid well. It always had. It thrived in gaps—between buildings, between laws, between intentions. A one-percent crime rate still translated to thousands of victims. Statistics didn't scream. Individuals did.
The sensation hit him without warning.
A dull pressure bloomed at the base of his skull, radiating outward, tightening every muscle in his body in a single, unified response. Spider-Sense. The term was reductive, but functional. An amalgamation of heightened perception, probabilistic threat assessment, and something else science still hadn't named. Call it intuition. Call it precognition. Call it a biological cheat code.
Kaine stiffened, eyes snapping toward the source before he consciously identified it.
Not danger.
An anomaly.
He turned slowly, already annoyed, and saw it.
In the far corner of the lounge, reality had cracked.
Where a wall should have been, there was a fissure—jagged, glowing faintly blue, like a spider-shaped fracture etched into existence itself. The air around it shimmered, distorting light, bending perspective. It pulsed softly, as if breathing.
Kaine stared at it, unimpressed.
"A crack in space again?" he muttered. "Haven't had one of these since the Savage Lands."
Interdimensional instability. Rifts. Tears. Whatever name you gave them, they all meant the same thing: someone, somewhere, had broken something they didn't understand. And somehow, inevitably, Spider-Man was expected to clean it up.
He crossed the room, each step deliberate. The closer he got, the stronger the pull became—not physical, not exactly, but conceptual. Like gravity aimed at his sense of responsibility.
They never ask, he thought. They just force me into it. Alarms. Collapsing buildings. Screaming civilians. Fate had a long history of conscription.
But this was different.
This wasn't a trap or a disaster waiting to happen. It was… an invitation. A silent request for aid, encoded into the fabric of space itself. And Kaine, for all his bitterness, had never ignored a call for help.
He stopped inches from the crack. The blue light reflected in his red eyes, fracturing them into something almost alien. The pull intensified, tugging at his center of mass, urging him forward.
"…Let's recalculate my steps," he said quietly. "This should provide enough relaxation."
Then he stepped forward—and let the world fold around him.
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[Auther: I'll post Kaine's picture in the next chapter...I might actually do that for every character, just so I can remember them.]