Chapter 72: I'm Just a Passing-Through Kamen Rider
The moment the spider sank its fangs into Peter Parker, the sky above the Big Apple cracked open.
Tears in spacetime — several of them — ripped into existence overhead, radiating something ancient and wrong.
Figures dropped out.
They looked strange, indistinct, like people who'd been pulled sideways through dimensions they weren't built for.
"Is this... heaven? Didn't I sink into the ocean with the tritium?" One of the figures murmured, drifting.
Doctor Octopus. He blinked at the city around him, lost.
"Am I not dead?" He rubbed his eyes, pained. The buildings looked familiar, but everything felt like a dream he couldn't pin down.
Before he could get his bearings, something in his head snapped. The inhibitor chip. The arms.
The mechanical tentacles erupted into motion — wild, violent, indiscriminate. They grabbed everything within reach and slammed it into the ground. The noise was terrible.
People screamed and ran.
They stared at the mechanical monster tearing through the street and understood, with cold clarity, that there was nobody coming.
This world didn't have superheroes.
All they could do was run, and hope.
Doc Ock seemed to enjoy the fear. The tentacles swung harder. There was something like glee on his face — a man announcing himself to a world that had no answer for him.
Then the sirens. Gunfire. SWAT teams converging, laying down suppressive fire, trying to contain the thing.
The street became a war zone. Cars went airborne, launched by tentacles into the police line. Officers and civilians who couldn't dodge in time went down. Blood on the asphalt. Bodies on the asphalt.
The situation was deteriorating fast. More SWAT went down. The perimeter was collapsing.
News helicopters caught every second. The whole city was watching.
The mechanical monster was beyond reason now. Every block it touched, it destroyed. And the police had nothing left.
Across the city, people watching at home began to pray.
On a bus heading home, Peter Parker saw the footage too. His knuckles went white around the seat rail. If I could stop this—
On-screen, a mother was running with her little girl. The girl tripped on a chunk of debris and went down.
Doc Ock noticed. A cruel smile. One tentacle scooped a car off the ground and hurled it at the child.
The mother saw it coming. She threw herself over her daughter, held her tight, closed her eyes. There was nothing else she could do.
Her face — the terror and the absolute resolve in it — hit Peter like a fist.
He was gripping the bus seat so hard his fingers ached, and something in his chest was tearing open:
"NO!" His voice came out raw, desperate, as if sheer volume could reach through the screen and pull them to safety.
And then — just before the car hit — the TV audio picked up a sound. A mechanical voice:
"Eternal."
The dust cleared.
There was no crushed mother. No crushed child.
There was a knight. Black cape. Blue-and-white mask. Standing between the car and the family, one arm holding it back like it was nothing.
Ethan had felt it the moment the rifts opened. He'd gotten there just in time. As for why he'd transformed into Kamen Rider Eternal — it was simple. He was undocumented in this universe. No ID, no history, no legal existence. The last thing he needed was his face on the news.
"It's okay. You're safe now." He glanced back at the mother and daughter, still frozen.
She came back to herself slowly, stammered a thank-you.
Ethan didn't linger. He told them to run, and they ran.
The crowd — both on the ground and watching from home — erupted into cheering. The first hope they'd had in twenty minutes.
A few older spectators fainted from the whiplash.
Peter pumped his fist in the air. "Yes! That is SO COOL!"
He was glued to the screen, worship written across his face. If I could do what that guy does — would MJ notice me? Would people stop pushing me around?
In that moment, Peter Parker wanted to be a superhero more than he had ever wanted anything.
The only person not cheering was the man with the mechanical arms.
Doc Ock sized up the knight, eyes narrow. "So. You're this world's superhero?"
He hadn't expected anything like Spider-Man to exist here. But he didn't wait for an answer — the tentacles lashed out at Ethan in a blur.
Ethan didn't flinch. His eyes sharpened. One sidestep — the arms missed entirely — and then he was in Doc Ock's face, one clean punch that sent the scientist skidding back several yards.
"Seems like you don't know what you're dealing with," Ethan said, cold and flat.
"You —!" Doc Ock hadn't expected it. Full-power strike, dodged like nothing. And punched back harder.
The crowd couldn't believe it. The thing that had steamrolled SWAT teams, the thing nobody could stop — and the knight in blue and white had just batted it aside.
The chanting started. "Go! Go! Take him down!"
Peter, at home, was vibrating. This was the person he wanted to be.
His imagination was already running ahead of reality. Under the mask — it was him. He was the one who'd saved the city. And now, in front of millions, he pulled off the helmet, turned to MJ, dropped to one knee —
A thin line of happy drool rolled down the corner of Peter's mouth.
Doc Ock, meanwhile, was getting genuinely annoyed by the crowd noise. Ants, cheering for their exterminator.
He sent every tentacle out at once — not at Ethan, but at the bystanders, arms fanning in every direction.
People screamed and scattered again. Ethan watched them go, incredulous.
"Do people not understand that rubbernecking can get you killed?"
He reached out with magnetism and twisted every mechanical arm into a single knotted ball.
Doc Ock felt his arms seize. He stared at the knight, shaken for the first time.
"Who are you?!"
Every person watching — on the ground, on TV, across the city — held their breath.
Ethan flicked his cape.
Pointed one finger at Doc Ock.
And said it slow:
"I'm just a passing-through Kamen Rider. Remember that."
☆☆☆
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