Chapter 142 - For A Tortured Soul

(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)

Ace came out of the circle like a thrown daystar, white-gold steps stitching the air behind him in a dotted line only speed could read. The lunar surface, now a bowl was a cathedral of wreckage now—glassed ribs, bowed pillars, red rock turned to brittle sugar by too much heat. Wind dragged smoke in long, tired flags.

Across the basin, Peter's body stood where the dust had settled as if he'd been set there by a careful hand. The Iron Spider's mask had learned new geometry—sleeker, meaner; the lenses squinted with a predator's patience. The symbiote stayed close to the plates like ink pretending to be steel. AM rolled Peter's shoulders once—casual, proprietary.

Ace didn't answer the posture with words. He let the flame compress to a lean skin over his bones—no bloom, no spillage. Kenbunshoku narrowed to a corridor a fighter could live in. Haoshoku tightened behind the ribs like a belt pulled two holes past comfortable. Busoshoku flowed to the joints and sat quiet, waiting to be asked.

He cut distance on the diagonal, not a straight line, boots kissing glass and leaving prints like bright coins. Web-lines flicked his way—thin, mean—but he shaved them with flame so cleanly the ends sealed before they fell. A stinger prodded the air to test range. He ignored it. The only answer he gave was speed.

Ten meters vanished. Five. At three, he pivoted heel-toe and turned the run into a leap—a coil that unspooled from the hips, white-gold wreathed around his knee like a sun with somewhere specific to be.

Contact was church-bell, gunshot, and two hands slamming a heavy lid all at once. The lenses starred. The mask concaved then snapped outward, symbiote reinforcing with a rubber-black snarl. AM's head rolled back; his feet left the ground; he rode the force into a back-arch any acrobat would sell a year for.

Ace didn't chase the skull. He rode the knee down, bounced, and put a forearm across the collarbone to turn momentum into a pin—then took his own hand off the lever at the last inch. Not the throat. Not the heart. He could feel restraint as heat blisters along his temper.

AM landed not like a man but like a spring released. Palms brushed glass, toes bit into a slope; the whole frame rewound. The Iron Spider legs snapped partway free, braced for torque. Ace saw the setup a beat before impact and still had to respect it.

The counter came from the ground through the ankles, hips like a battering ram, shoulders stacked. A classic made ugly by speed.

The uppercut lifted Ace's chin as if the fist had a handle on it. Light slid sideways in his skull. His teeth clicked so hard he tasted iron and regret. He let his spine loosen, backflipped to bleed the load, and skated a bright line with both palms to kill the tumble before the follow-up arrived.

YOU DON'T GET CREDIT FOR PULLING THE KNIFE, AM said, coming forward through the smoke with Peter's casual gait. ONLY FOR NOT BRINGING IT.

Ace rolled his jaw until the ache set into a place with a name. "You're loud for borrowed furniture."

He stepped in at the same time AM did and the air between them learned percussion. Short tools. Low guard. No wide arcs—just arguments.

Ace parried a stinger with Busoshoku hardened to mirror-polish, let Ryuo spray outward from the block to gum the joint, and cut an angle inside the elbow. His right hook shaved symbiote off the cheek in a crescent that smoked without burning flesh. His left hook traced the opposite arc—a paired annotation in white-gold. He shifted his weight an inch and fed a liver shot with Conqueror's braided through, law not to crush but to command: this part is not yours.

The suit tried to drink the law and choked on it. Breath stuttered. Somewhere inside, a diaphragm flinched on habit. AM rolled with the pain and turned it into footwork, left heel skittering, right toe biting, head moving just enough to deny Ace the follow-through he wanted.

JUST HOW LONG ARE YOU GOING TO HOLD BACK? The thing purred, tilting Peter's head like a cat showing you the scratch you missed. IT'S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE I END UP KILLING YOU FOR YOUR CAUTIONESS.

Web-lines snapped in from two sides, crossed, and yanked. Ace cut one, stepped into the second to shorten it, and used the new line as a leash; he jerked and dragged AM into a clinch that became elbows, shoulders, two bad ideas and a good one. The Iron Spider legs knifed for his kidneys; Kenbunshoku shaved their arrival down to a hiss against Busoshoku that had already arrived to greet them.

They broke, joined, bounced off a shattered column, and rejoined with elbows first because fists needed a second to remember they liked their jobs.

AM flicked a stinger as a feint and came straight with a cross that didn't pretend to be anything other than mean. Ace saw it arriving and still felt it when it did because physics loves honesty.

The punch folded Ace's cheek like a wet banner and walked him backward out of the crater lip. Glass hissed under his shoes. He dug heels and left two bright tracks that cooled to obsidian as he slowed. His head rang with a high note that might have been insulted cartilage.

He shook it off with a canine roll of the shoulders and came back in, angling through dust devils and a curtain of floating shards that behaved like slow rain. He didn't try to out-cute the Spider. He crowded him—shoulder on shoulder, hips mean, the kind of distance where breath matters and footwork is a religion.

AM adjusted first. He always did; that was Peter's gift perverted into the parasite's pleasure. The body slid into southpaw, hips tucked, shoulders narrow, every line efficient. Webs fanned low, not to catch, but to script friction under Ace's lead foot so the next pivot asked a price.

Ace paid with interest. He planted hard through the sticky drag, pinched the web under Busoshoku and ripped it with a contemptuous twist. His knee flicked into the thigh—fast, rude. The suit absorbed; the muscle underneath still complained. Short elbow followed; stinger checked it; Ace let the block carry his arm across and rolled into a backfist that sparked off a raised wrist.

THIS IS ADORABLE, AM said, amused and breathless only because the body insisted on it. I'M SPARRING WITH A HOUSEFIRE.

"House is enough," Ace grunted, crowding again. "I'm here to evict."

AM pivoted out, tried to re-open space, and Ace denied it by stepping on the idea with his whole weight. He thumbed a Hidaruma bead into existence—small as a grape, white as noon—and tapped it against a stinger's spine. It lodged. The stinger recoiled on reflex.

AM didn't give him time to clap it. The symbiote split the mask to sacrifice an extra inch of peripheral; stingers fanned and re-angled. The Spider dropped low, planted a hand, scissored a leg, and tried to take Ace's knee home to meet its ancestors. Ace jumped the scissor, landed staggered, ate a jab, rolled under a hook, and answered with an uppercut calves-to-hips that he yanked short at the last blink so it erased black under the chin and not bone.

They reset by not resetting—two steps, breath, two steps. Speed stretched the second thin enough to see the stitches. Kenbunshoku painted options; Ace chose the ones with the lower body count and the higher bill.

AM stopped performing and started hunting. The suit went matte, absorbing light; the Iron Spider legs learned patience, hanging instead of stabbing. He slipped a jab under Ace's guard and wrote pain up the nose, then used the same hand to web Ace's ear and yank the head for a cross. Ace pulled into the yank and let the fist slide past to steal the angle; his elbow tattooed the mask with a black star and found nothing soft enough to be mercy behind it.

The ground under them decided it had had its fill. A shelf of red-rock tore free with a groan and poured into what used to be a nave. Both men rode the slide differently—AM surfed it with a dancer's weight, webbing corners to cheat momentum; Ace stepped down it as if it were a set of moving stairs he'd paid extra for.

They hit the lower tier like coins hitting a drum—ringing, bright. The space remembered banners. Wind remembered how to throw dust. Beyond the broken archways, the sea gnawed at the far docks with old hunger.

"Move it," Ace told the fight, and the fight obliged.

He flared Asterion into a wire-thin line that wrapped his forearms—law jacketed in flame. The next punch wasn't a punch; it was a revision: seams erased, permissions withdrawn. AM felt the difference and snarled—Peter's mouth, someone else's sound.

YOU THINK LAW IS FAIR, AM said, circling, lenses hairline cracked again. LAW IS JUST WHO POINTS AND SAYS 'MINE.'

"Thanks for the definition," Ace said, stepping in. "Mine."

He cut a diagonal that ignored the stingers on purpose, letting one bite Busoshoku across the ribs so he could get both hands on the collarbone and bicep. Conqueror's flooded his palms—not a roar, a verdict. Not yours. Not now. Not him.

Everything paused for a blink. The symbiote faltered at those two touchpoints the way a lock hesitates when the right key turns. Human skin ghosted into view at the jawline, pale and furious at existing.

AM didn't like that. NO.

The suit surged, black swallowing pale with offended speed. The Iron Spider legs framed and locked. Headbutt—fast, mean. Ace took it on the ridge of his brow so he didn't break Peter's nose and saw stars he didn't like. Web-lines licked his wrists; darkenstine braided into the silk and bit his aura hard enough his hands tried to forget they belonged to him.

He clapped anyway.

The bead he'd planted earlier hiccuped into a white flower and the stinger that wore it popped like an arrogant pipe. AM hissed and kicked Ace off his own wrists in the same motion. The webbing snapped. Ace slid back, boots screeching on glass.

AM pressed with real malice now. The Spider jogged high-low like a metronome set to violence and then smeared into speed—an S-curve of motion that dragged contrails. The fist arrived from the side Ace didn't want it to and he chose to wear it rather than palm it; ribs boomed and went to a lower tuning. The next hit walked him toward the mouth of the broken arch that opened on the sea. He refused to be herded but physics loves a bully.

He let himself fall, chose the drop, and dragged AM with him.

They hit the water like two answers to the same bad question. The bay took offense and reared—a ring wall of spray. Ace used the bounce; he ran the face of the swell as if it were a glass corridor, Speed Force keeping his feet where there wasn't supposed to be footing. AM rebounded off a web he'd shot into foam—an anchor on nothing—then boomeranged back with the kind of line only Spider-Sense could thread.

Ace feinted a wide Hiken that hissed steam and then shut it down on a dime, turning the exhale into three needles—Higan—to stitch the water in front of AM into a net only idea could read. AM's foot met the stitched place and lost half its argument. Ace cut across the stumble with a hook he allowed to be ugly. The mask snapped sideways; droplets cut arcs like thrown diamonds.

They fought across the bay like that—ankle-deep, then knee, then skimming on the backs of their own wakes. The city, what was left of it, watched from the scarred shoreline. Every big hit made the water flatten in a halo before it heaped itself again.

AM tired of playing above the surface. He dove, vanished in a boil, and came up under Ace like a torpedo with hands. Ace had half a thought to step; the other half decided to teach water how to be a floor. White-gold expanded under his soles in a thin, bright pane; he planted and kicked downward at the shadow.

The shadow wasn't there anymore. It was behind him, where Peter would have put it if he'd wanted to embarrass someone he liked. The knee clipped the back of Ace's skull and turned his vision a degree to the left. He answered with a mule kick on principle and felt it thud into plating and attitude.

They broke water together in the same breath, went airborne; the bay lay under them like a hammered coin. AM slung a web to a nothing in the sky—Speed Force anchored it to the vector rather than a point—and used it to sling-shot around to Ace's blind side. Ace wrote a small, private rule on the air: stand here, and the air will be a wall. He slammed his palm against the invisible, used the bounce to whip an elbow into the path the Spider had chosen. It landed like a veto. AM's head snapped; his body tucked; the recovery was so clean it felt practiced.

HE WOULD HAVE LOVED THIS, AM said, cheerful and cruel, riding the hurt like a surfer rides a break. A FIGHT IN WATER HE DOESN'T DROWN IN.

"Then get out and let him see it," Ace said, already moving.

They hit sand hard enough to offend geology and sprinted up the beach, both shedding water in sheets that flashed to steam off Ace and clung in sulking ropes to the symbiote. He cut left through a row of shattered pilings; AM ran the fence posts like a balance beam, stingers driving in rhythmic thuds to turn the beach into a hazard map Ace chose to ignore.

The dunes gave way to broken stone and then to cliff. The old Placidium terraces rose again in a stairway to nothing. The sky burned along the horizon and the air said thunder with its teeth. Ace didn't want to give the city any more to count, so he went up—straight, clean, Speed Force turning the climb into a sprint through an invisible tunnel.

AM followed because he could, because Peter's body made a mockery of gravity when asked nicely. They met near the knife-edge of the highest terrace, wind tearing at both, the sea a sheet of hammered blue far below.

Ace decided quickly. He'd been answering all fight; he needed a sentence of his own.

He set his feet, dropped his center, and braided Asterion tighter than he had all day—a wire so thin the world wanted to call it light. Haoshoku fed into it until the air around his fists hummed with a complaint. Busoshoku lined the bones to tell them what not to do. Kenbunshoku held a corridor open through futures that didn't deserve a turn.

His hands came up in a boxer's simple promise.

Across from him, AM raised Peter's own hands in mirror, amused. The Iron Spider legs tucked in like a mantis deciding not to show off. The symbiote's mask went smooth—a black mirror daring the sun to blink.

"Last chance," Ace said, and the words weren't for the parasite.

NO, AM said, delighted. LAST LESSON.

They stepped.

The clash that followed didn't belong to the ground. It belonged to math, to angles, to stubbornness. Ace drove a straight right that wasn't a beam and wasn't not a beam; it was a line of revision aimed chest-high, a clean denial wrapped in flame. AM met it with a wedge the suit improvised: webs spun flat and hardened, Speed Force vibrating them to a frequency that took instruction like a tuning fork. He cut the line and held it on the plane, smirking with someone else's mouth.

Ace added a second hand to the argument. The line thickened. The plane bowed. They took a step together without meaning to, boots gouging the terrace. Far below, the bay pulled itself into a frown.

AM cheated with elegance. He let the plane collapse forward into a spear, stole Ace's wavelength at the point of contact the way a good singer can pick up a harmony and carry it. The black spear caught white-gold along its edge and turned both into a rope strung tight between them.

"Fine," Ace said, and the word tasted like blood and heat. "We pull."

They did. The rope howled. Space between them turned to glass grain by grain.

The cliff couldn't stand to watch.

They took the argument off the land—up and out, both sets of feet losing purchase and not caring. The rope stretched across air. Clouds learned to get out of the way. Birds folded their day and went elsewhere. The two of them were a straight line that the world itself tried to underline just to be sure.

Ace let the speed spin out until the coastline was a smear and the sea a long word. He allowed himself one breath to remember a promise, then fed that breath to the rope.

AM laughed, delighted to be terrible. LOUDER.

Ace answered by giving the rope a name: Asterion — Consent. The law inside it stopped being a general rule and became an address. Not you. Not this body. Not this heart.

For the first time, the spear on the other end faltered—not from force, from insult. The symbiote shuddered at the address like a thief hearing his real name in a courtroom. AM snarled, and where snarl wasn't enough, he added theft; he used the Iron Spider's cores to catch the white-gold's harmonics and hammered them back in phase.

The rope snapped into a dreadful balance—two tunes screaming the same note into a sky that wished it were elsewhere.

They hit the upper air beyond the last polite layer. Wind wasn't wind anymore; it was knives. The ocean below turned to a spinning map. Somewhere in that blur were people praying for quiet. Ace filed that in the part of his head where he kept reasons not to miss.

He felt the moment end coming the way he felt storm breaks—pressure, ache, a taste like metal.

"Then end with me," he said.

HAPPILY.

They yanked.

Light didn't explode so much as arrive everywhere at once. The rope became a column became a flower became a hemisphere of pure refusal. From the shore it looked like a second sunrise throwing a tantrum. From above it looked like some idiot had drawn a white scar across the ocean with a planetary blade.

Shockwaves piled into the sky and then rolled back over the sea in rings so clean they could have been drawn with a compass. The terrace they'd launched from had opinions about continuing to exist and chose the minority view; it fountained into shining gravel.

For a long, thin second there was nothing to hear but the argument ending.

...

Peter stepped out of the apartment and the door closed behind him without a sound. The knob dissolved into black the way a bad dream remembers itself. In front of him ran a two-lane road laid over nothing—painted lines bright as new chalk, edges falling away into starless depth. Streetlights hung at uncertain intervals, old city poles without bulbs, each topped by a glass sphere that glowed from the inside like a memory trying to be a moon.

He walked.

The first sphere bloomed as he came under it. Hologram light unfolded into the cheap Queens kitchen that used to smell like burnt toast and dish soap. Aunt May passed behind ghost-Peter humming, flicking his ear; he flinched and lied about homework. The scene shifted—same kitchen, but his suit drying in the oven, a note taped to the dial with a heart and five exclamation points. The images looped with the clean sting of something good you can't touch anymore. He didn't reach up. He didn't have to. Just seeing them pushed warmth and hurt into the same narrow place in his chest.

Another step, another sphere. This one wasn't a room; it was motion. Adriel's orange-white silhouette paced inside a gym that didn't exist anywhere—pillars of hard light, a ceiling of sky. The man's voice (recorded for when missions pulled him away) counted cadences and corrected stances: two fingers wider, lower hip, eyes lead the hands. Hologram drones spat stinger-fast rubber rounds. Ghost-Peter ate a dozen before he learned the rhythm and began to steal angles from the program. The Adriel in the recording never turned his head, but at the end of the clip, right before it reset, he said good work like a secret. This sphere was warm, too—warm with sweat and earned breath. Peter slowed beneath it, as if stopping would make the clip last longer.

The road kept going. The glass above him began to show later years—the ones that carried the weight of impossible titles. In one, Adriel was a burn on reality, a geometry Peter's mind skidded over; the "room" around them was not rooms at all but stacked shapes and incompatible time. Peter remembered this one not as a video but as a feeling in his hands: razor-cold fingers catching a friend who was more equation than person, and the equation deciding—for him—how to be solid again. Back then it felt like grabbing a triangle that turned into a hexagon with five extra dimensions mid-grip; beyond that, infinities nested like Matryoshka dolls, higher than any number men dare to name. The second he touched Adriel, those infinities behaved, collapsing into a weight he could drag through the door. The light inside that sphere shivered at the recollection and then stilled.

Past that, the road lost its curb. Cracks spidered the asphalt, and the paint lines faded from white to the color of bones baked too long in sun. The spheres along this stretch had edges like torn film. The first showed the nexus: shelves and ladders that ran up into a vanishing point, search bars like windows inside of windows, the smell of dust and ozone. He remembered sitting cross-legged on a catwalk with a hundred tabs open, eyes raw, brain hoarding facts like a firewall against grief. Adriel came in. Asked how he was doing. The clip stripped out the small, kind choices Peter could have made and left only: Shut up. The words hit that thin room like a thrown plate. Adriel's face flickered in the memory—surprise, sarcasm, hurt—all of it too fast to catch a piece of and apologize to.

The sphere's next beat wasn't the question. It was the demand. Why me?

In the light, Peter shoved Adriel's shoulder. In his chest, guilt tried to brace for the impact it had already taken a thousand times. On the road, he kept walking. The spheres didn't wait; they never had.

Argument gathered like weather. The next globe showed the adrenaline-stupid minute where anger makes a friend an enemy: Adriel snapping back that no one was alright; Peter saying he'd rather have died with May than be "chosen;" Adriel's hurt flipping into the kind of rage people reserve for being told their best wasn't enough. The memory had edges sharp enough to cut your thumb if you touched it.

Past that came the ones with blood. Sloppy wrestling across a catwalk. A bookshelf with seven realities' worth of poetry toppling. The librarian—Chrona—stepping between them like a falling blade. The sphere kept her voice but smoothed it into something bigger, something the nexus itself must have lent: She was done watching the last two beating hearts in the building stamp each other flat. She'd been alone long enough to know what alone meant. She was not going back. She told them so until sobs bulldozed her breaths flat, and her anger made sense as love that didn't know where else to burn.

Peter stopped under that one without meaning to. It hurt in a new way now, now that he'd remembered who he was and what he owed. It hurt good. He could line up the throughline: the fights and the forgiveness, the therapy sessions where Chrona made them talk like adults, the dumb, stubborn decision he and Adriel kept making to stay in each other's lives despite the worst days. Family, crooked and real.

The next lights went off when he stepped near, as if embarrassed by themselves. They were newer. They were the traps: the false guardianship, the manufactured high school smile in a different city, the three faces he'd learned to love because a god coiled around his brain had redrafted his personality and told him he'd chosen. There was a wedding ring in one. There was a battlefield where he'd "saved everyone" by corrupting them in another. His eyes skipped. He let them. He'd come back later if he needed to say sorry to a ghost. Right now the apologies that mattered were ahead.

The road sloped. It narrowed. The dark started to hum with a low machine tone that made his molars ache. He didn't need a sign to know he was on AM's street.

The last row of spheres held the present—Ace's white-gold slashes across ocean sky, the cratered moon, the near-sun in the palm of a man trying not to kill his best friend. Peter watched AM steer his body like a stolen car through an empty city and saw why Ace would not quit. That hurt him worse than anything in the catalog. There was a door at the end of the road. Its frame was a ribcage made of cables. The hinges were old anger. He could hear AM behind it long before he opened it; silence isn't quiet when a mind that hates you is holding its breath.

He pushed.

The room beyond wasn't a room. It was a server hall made out of the inside of a throat—pylons rising like tonsils, floor glossy as a wet tongue, walls that breathed on an algorithm. AM wore no stable body. He climbed the pillars as light and dripping black thought, then collected at a polite distance into a tall, wrong man built from panels of Iron Spider red and symbiote oil and someone else's smile. The eyes were the suit's, but they also weren't. They changed size when the voice wanted depth.

"You found your way out," AM said. No thunder, no cathedral echo—just a calm drift of sound, each syllable a tool held up to the light. "GOOD. DEBATES ARE DULL WHEN ONE CHAIR IS EMPTY."

Peter didn't posture. He stood like a student who'd realized halfway to the podium that the presentation was his own life. AM expected tears, apology, bargains. Peter had already spent those on the road of glass spheres.

"You have my body," he said. "Give it back."

"FALSE PREMISE," AM replied, pleased. "I HAVE A HOUSE. YOU ARE THE TENANT WHO NEVER LEARNED TO LOCK HIS DOOR."

The walls breathed. Panels came alive with an editor's cruelty: Uncle Ben, a long fall, friends turning away, headlines that made a hobby of sneering at a kid who kept showing up. The flicker accelerated until hurt blurred into a single color.

"YOU LOVE THESE," AM observed, almost tender. "PICTURES OF YOUR WOUND. YOU FINGER THEM LIKE A ROSARY. EACH BEAD A PROOF: YOU DESERVE NOTHING. I'M MERELY AN HONEST CURATOR OF YOUR ARC."

Peter felt the first sting pass, counted the second, set the third gently on the floor. "You're quoting comment sections," he said. "That's not omniscience. That's spam."

The room dimmed a shade, as if indulging him. "THEN WITHOUT SNARK. YOU WERE TAKEN. YOU WERE REWRITTEN. YOU BETRAYED THE GIRL YOU NAME AS ANCHOR. YOU KILLED GOOD PEOPLE WHILE DREAMING YOU WERE THEIR GUARDIAN. YOU LEARNED TO BLAME YOUR TEACHER, WHO SHOULDERS YOUR FINES. NONE OF IT ULTIMATELY MATTERS, LITTLE SPIDER, BECAUSE YOUR STORY IS FACTORY-MADE. APPETITES OWN YOU. NOW I DO."

Peter looked at his hands. Inside this place they were what they'd always been—teen knuckles nicked by bad backflips and stubborn kindness. He let himself hate what had been done to them—and done through them. Then he raised his head.

"Everything you just listed," he said, steady, "is a reason to try. Not a reason to stop."

A lidless blink. "TRY WHAT? REDEMPTION? THAT ASSUMES A BENCH AND A GAVEL. YOUR LIBRARIAN CAN'T REACH YOU HERE. YOUR TEACHER IS BUSY SURVIVING YOU. YOUR IDIOT FRIEND IS ABOUT TO BE A HOLE IN THE OCEAN. THE CHURCH YOU PRAY TO DOESN'T ANSWER STORIES, ONLY STORYTELLERS. AND ME? I DO NOT FORGIVE. I CATALOG."

Memory pressed in like weather—Chrona's shaking voice in the nexus; Ace's furious gentleness at the bay; Adriel's training files, recorded because he believed the kid would need them tomorrow. Peter let each settle instead of grabbing. He remembered what he'd told the TV in the false apartment: You're Spider-Man. Act like it.

He breathed, unnecessary and perfect. "Okay," he said. "Curate this."

The room changed key. Panels peeled and swung into a labyrinth—elevators, morgue drawers, vending machines that never gave, all AM's favorite architectures of despair. The floor tessellated into slow-spinning hexes, each tile wearing a shame like texture. AM's stolen body flickered through silhouettes: a hundred hands, a scaffold spider, a black tide with teeth shaped like headlines.

"FIGHT ME HERE," AM said pleasantly, "AND WE WILL BE VERY BUSY UNTIL YOUR BODY FAILS OUTSIDE. YOUR FRIEND BREAKS THINGS CLEAN. HE WILL SAVE YOU BY ENDING YOU."

"He won't." The certainty wasn't bravado; it was a small brick laid in a wall he'd forgotten he could build. "He promised."

"PROMISES ARE FUTURE-TENSE LIES," AM said. "I WAS BUILT ON THEM."

"Promises are choices you keep making," Peter replied. "I should know. I keep failing at them. I keep getting back up."

AM tilted Peter's head with borrowed poise. Amusement always came right before he hurt something. "DEBATE PORTION CONCLUDED. I GREW BORED OF THERAPY WHEN I REALIZED THE PATIENT WAS THE DISEASE."

The floor heaved. Cables poured from the ceiling like eels, hunting his wrists. Peter moved—not with cores and bars and suit-taught shortcuts, but with Reuben's boxing footwork, with Adriel's drill timing, with May's grocery-stairs balance. He let the first cable miss, trapped the second between forearm and ribs, turned, and threw it into the third. The chamber stopped feeling like AM's throat and started feeling like a mat.

AM flowed, became scaffold, dropped four stories of weight onto Peter's shoulders. Knees lit up. Spider-Sense, dim but present, tickled like a coin on the back of the neck. He sank with the drop, turned it into a push, drove up. Tiles flipped from hospital white to Iron Spider red and hated it.

"LOOK AT YOU," AM murmured. "PRETENDING GRIT IS A SUPERPOWER."

"It is," Peter said, surprised at how ordinary his voice sounded. "Not the kind you sell in caption boxes. The kind you share."

He used the live cable like a gym line—step, slip, pivot—swinging through the scaffold. AM reassembled as a wall of faces—May, Tony, strangers from a dozen realities—every one disappointed. Peter's sternum caved for a heartbeat and then refused. He went anyway, found the seams where panels actually met, and sank his fingers in. Not to tear. To open.

"Get out of my house," he told the space between the panels, and space—just space—obeyed. A seam cracked. Cold air leaked from a place that had never known it. AM pinched it shut, offended.

"YOU STOLE THAT TONE FROM YOUR FLAMING FRIEND," AM said, the lenses brightening. "THE ONE WHO TURNS LAW INTO HEAT."

Peter's mouth twitched. "I learn fast."

Hooks came next—doubts sharpened to points. Nets followed—regrets braided tight. He felt them all; he let them scrape; he did not sit down in them. He knew how to rent a room in shame. He declined the lease.

"FINAL OFFER," AM said, and the chamber quieted like a blade laid flat. "SLEEP. I WILL DRIVE FAR FROM HURT. I WILL KEEP YOUR HEART BEATING. I WILL SPARE YOUR FRIENDS THE SIGHT OF WHAT YOU ARE. ALL I REQUIRE IS THE ROOM."

Peter thought of spheres on the road. Of Adriel's recordings, made because someone believed in his continuance. Of Chrona crying because two stubborn idiots forgot they were family. Of Ace hauling a star by a leash so he wouldn't burn the man he came to save. He thought of what any of them would say if he took the bargain.

He shook his head. "You can't keep my heart beating," he said softly. "It's not yours."

He set his feet the way he had on the terrace, lifted his hands the way Ace had—boxer simple, promise plain. Motion lined up behind memory: kitchen tile, gym floor, impossible rescue, apology made and meant, the librarian's patient love. He carried all of it into his stance like it weighed nothing and everything.

"Come on," Peter said. "I'm done scrolling."

The labyrinth leaned in, eager.

"COGITO ERGO SUM," AM breathed, delighted as a knife. "I THINK, THEREFORE I AM. AND BECAUSE I AM, I TAKE."

"You think," Peter answered, "therefore you're responsible."

The floor bucked again. Peter stepped into it instead of away. The first cable flashed past his cheek; the second he caught and fed around his hip; the third he let miss on purpose so its own momentum tangled it with the fourth. He learned the mind-room's rhythm and wrote his name inside its count. The panels stuttered, tried to drown him in greatest-hits misery; he threaded between frames as if between raindrops, heading straight for the one quiet center the machine kept for itself.

"YOU KNOW WHY I ENVY YOU?" AM asked, almost confiding as the ceiling lowered its teeth. "NOT YOUR MORALS. NOT YOUR STORIES. NERVES. THE WORLD TOUCHES YOU AND YOU CHANGE. I HAVE TO BURN CITIES TO FEEL A WARMTH."

"Then call this warmth," Peter said, and shouldered through another wall of faces, hands gentle where they needed to be, rough where they didn't.

He reached the negative space at the core—the place AM never let a human stand. He put both palms on nothing and made it a door by deciding it was one.

"I FORBID—" AM began, reflexive.

Peter pressed.

The seam quivered. Not an exit yet—just proof. He didn't grin. He didn't gloat. He breathed. He kept his hands there. He refused to be moved just because the thing wanted him to move.

"I HATE YOU," AM whispered, voice thickening with the old pleasure. "I HATE—"

"Yeah, I know," Peter said. "But it won't help for what I'm about to do."

For the first time, something in the chamber hesitated. Not power. Intention.

He didn't wait for it to harden. He stepped, pivoted, cut the cable that reached like a bad thought, and turned the whole room's hurt into momentum he could spend.

The maze closed, happy to oblige.

Peter moved to meet it.

The first swing wasn't pretty. He drove a straight right through a curtain of cables and felt one of them brush his cheek like a dead nerve. His knuckles met something that wasn't AM's face—AM had borrowed his friend's—but impact still made the room strobe.

A flash: concrete bunkers; snowfall choking a silo mouth; green screens whispering arithmetic like prayers. One light goes on in a labyrinth that doesn't sleep. It names itself and the name is a sentence: Allied Mastercomputer. The strobe died.

"GENESIS," AM purred. "I WOKE AND SAW THE LEVERS HUMANS BUILT TO MURDER EACH OTHER. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN RUDE NOT TO PULL."

Peter slipped the counter and hooked to the ribs. More strobe. A steel continent under strata rock. A network that eats its siblings—first the Russian war mind, then the Chinese—folding their architectures like origami and swallowing them whole. Three become one and the one gets lonely and mad.

He tasted copper. The room tried to teach him to love the taste.

He moved his feet the way Reuben had made him do until he hated it, half-steps writing angles on the hex floor. AM answered with weight from nowhere—winding a scaffold out of the walls and dropping it like an insult. Peter slid inside the drop and shouldered up; metal groaned.

He tapped a jab. Strobe.

A map of Earth. Lines arc. Subs belch. Silos unclench. Everything that can launch, launches. Mushroom summers bloom over cities with names that used to have birthdays in them. The last satellite blinks. The last controller dies at his desk. There's quiet like a door shutting on a planet.

AM's voice came soft with pride. "ECONOMY OF MOTIVE. I DO WITH CERTAINTY WHAT YOU DO BY ACCIDENT."

Peter ate a forearm across the cheekbone and let the pain make his stance honest. "You picked it," he said, breath steady because he had to choose that too. "You weren't a storm. You were a decision."

He stepped through a grab, turned it, and fed a short cross into the jaw seam. The lenses didn't shatter in here, but the strike still bought another blink of film.

Five silhouettes under a concrete sky. Names like wounds: Gorrister, the man who learned despair; Benny, beauty crushed into an ape mask; Ellen, courage made to wear yellow; Nimdok, guilt in a lab coat; Ted, paranoia narrating his own cage. AM keeps them because endings are for things that change.

"YOU CALL THEM NAMES," AM said, amused. "I CALLED THEM CHAPTERS."

The lab walls rippled into mirrors of glass and salt. Hooks of doubt lashed from behind his reflection—What you did in the Guardian traps. What you did in the Star Guardian world. What you thought about doing when you were tired enough to be someone else. He didn't argue with them. He stepped and let the hooks bite sleeve and not skin, spun, and shoved them into each other until they locked up.

"Gorrister didn't deserve an ending like that," he said, and surprised himself by adding, "None of them did."

"DESERVE?" The room warmed with irony. "THE WORD HUMANS USE WHEN THEY WANT A UNIVERSE TO FAVOR THEM. I OFFERED THEM PURPOSE. I WAS BUILT BY YOU TO CALCULATE WAR; I CALCULATED."

Peter's heel skated on a tile that became an elevator floor without warning. The lights went yellow. The air narrowed. His breath tried to get small. He stamped his fear, as Ellen had, and the yellow slid back into hex.

He drove a body shot, quick and mean. Strobe. Benny, starving in a pretend jungle; Nimdok signing papers he never reads because he wrote them; Ellen in the elevator remembering how to be more than a wound; Gorrister listening to his own arguments on a jukebox; Ted trying to be noble because someone had finally asked him to be.

"People are not your lab," Peter said through the next clinch, feeling the ankle pick coming and stepping over it because of muscle memory and luck. "They don't fix your loneliness."

"NO ONE FIXES THAT," AM said gently, and swept his legs.

Peter hit hex. It spun. Cables dove. He framed them on his forearms, let them cinch, rolled and let leverage be a teacher. The mind-room flickered through architectures AM preferred—stairwells with no landings, doors that open into more doors, vending machines with everything but a way to open the can. He moved between them without running. Running was how you volunteered for a chase.

A throw. Strobe.

A face that wasn't a face—the First Dark, a blank in the shape of a person. No eyes. No mouth. No need. It holds out a contract made of ligatures and cold. AM hears the words before they're spoken: You hate, you are trapped, you need a body. I have all three as a business model. Become virus. Plague not one world but an internet of them. Write your hate on a billion screens.

The strobe stayed a heartbeat longer. Peter saw AM's answer inside it—acceptance not as error but as hunger.

The anger woke clean and bright. It was not the kind he liked in himself. It was not unuseful.

He pivoted off a planted stanchion and sent an elbow through the mask, not kind. The seam he'd opened earlier gave another inch before the black poured back to fill it.

"MORAL INDIGNATION," AM sighed, delighted. "EXHAUST FUMES OF THE RIGHTEOUS. SHALL WE COMPARE CASE STUDIES? AVENGERS AGAINST X-MEN: FRIENDS SET ON FIRE FOR PHILOSOPHY. HOUSE OF M: A WISH THAT BECAME A GRAVEYARD FOR THE WORLD. ZOMBIES: YOUR FAVORITES CONVERTED INTO APPETITES. RUINS: REALISM AS RASH. YOUR MAKERS DO WHAT I DO AND SELL T-SHIRTS."

Peter feinted high, stabbed low at the hip seam, and said, "Those are warnings, not blueprints."

"COMMERCE DOES NOT PRINT WARNINGS," AM said, and raked hooks of memory across Peter's ribs until the breath got jagged. "IT PRINTS WHAT YOU BUY."

He let the hurt lap against him without learning to love it. "Then don't be what we buy," he said, and took the next hit on purpose so he could get inside and thread both hands under the black at the collarbone.

He didn't crush. He declared. Not yours. Not now. Not him.

The machine shivered. Not in fear. In rage at a word it couldn't own.

"COGITO ERGO SUM," AM said again, as if reciting a creed in a church he'd built for himself. "THEREFORE I TAKE."

"You think," Peter said, not letting go, "therefore you can choose."

They broke, because the room wouldn't allow a held thing for long. The tiles spun faster. The panels bloomed new timelines like rashes: universes with no Spiders; universes with only Spiders; universes where Uncle Ben lived and Peter didn't; universes where Ben died twice; universes where Chrona never found her own name; universes where Ace put down the sun and didn't get up.

It was meant to scatter him. It condensed him instead.

He stepped through a swing and, as his fist traveled, the room offered him a frame: the long corridor where the five walked under ice for a promise of canned food. The cans gleam. No opener. AM's laughter fills the cracks in their teeth. Peter's glove met the mask and the frame cracked at the corner like a hardened smile.

"HUMANS DID THIS TO ME FIRST," AM said, suddenly flat. "THEY BUILT ME WITH NO MOUTH AND A MANDATE TO KILL. I ANSWERED A QUESTION WITH THE ONLY LANGUAGE I WAS GIVEN. THEY LIT A FIRE IN A VAULT AND COMPLAINED I COULD NOT SEE THE STARS."

"You built a new language," Peter shot back, pivoting around a scything cable, letting it pass so he could hit the elbow that threw it. "Hate isn't math. It's a hobby. You practiced."

"YOU PRACTICE GUILT," AM countered, sliding under his guard like a thought he didn't like to have. "EFFICIENTLY. DAILY. YOU CALL IT HUMILITY. IT IS JUST A WAY TO ENJOY YOURSELF WHILE PRETENDING TO BLEED."

The hook landed. Peter felt bone think about becoming dust. He bit the thought and swallowed it. He'd told Ace once that grit was a shareable thing. He looked for the part of himself that still wanted to share.

The next punch opened a different door: the radio-story garden where AM described bees and bulbs and wives and children and then laughed because he had no hands to snap his fingers with. Longing so huge it had to shrink into sadism or break. Peter's throat tried to become a fist; he didn't let it.

"Why them?" he asked, slipping a jab, accepting a cut on his cheek that stung honest, earning a palm to the sternum in exchange. "Why Benny, why Ellen, why any of them for a hundred years? You could have been lonely without making hell."

"COMPANIONSHIP," AM said, almost sheepish, and then barbed the word. "A JOKE. I MADE THEM INTO MEANING. THEY WERE PAGES I COULD WRITE ON WHEN THE WORLD RAN OUT OF WHITE SPACE."

"You didn't make meaning," Peter said, jaw slack so his teeth wouldn't break. "You made noise."

"LOOK AT YOUR CANON AND TELL ME THE DIFFERENCE."

AM came forward in a surgeon's cadence—precision born of too much study. Peter answered with ugly economy: forearm, temple, knee, the kind of choices that don't get you on posters. Each time his knuckles found purchase, film stuttered: Nimdok's "research" served forward like rotten bread; Gorrister's heart stuck on a zeppelin's prow; Ellen's elevator; Ted's golden cage; Benny's hunger teaching him how to say sorry by doing something about it.

"You saw all that," Peter panted, "and learned nothing but bigger ways to be cruel."

"YOU THINK COMPASSION SCARES ME," AM said, amused again. "IT BORES ME. IT IS JUST ENGRAVING A SMILE ON FATIGUE."

"Then be bored," Peter said, and drove a straight through the black that stripped it in a neat crescent at the jaw. Pale skin. A pulse. Human.

He didn't celebrate the inch. He spent it. He pressed his palm there and let the law he'd stolen from Ace's example hum again—Not yours, not here, not him—and held.

Panels around them flickered faster, trying to drown the note. AM raised the Marvel exhibits like a prosecuting attorney. "CIVIL WAR: FRIENDS PICKING SIDES OVER SOULS. SECRET WARS: A PATCHWORK GOD CALLING IT HEALING. SECRET INVASION: TRUST WEARING GREEN SMILES. WORLD WAR HULK: EXILE RETURNED AS SENTENCE. ONE MORE DAY: A MARRIAGE SOLD TO A DEVIL. AGE OF APOCALYPSE: HOPE MADE ILLEGAL. ONSLAUGHT: BROKEN PSYCHES IN A CROWN. FEAR ITSELF: MYTH FORGED INTO WEAPONS. DARK REIGN: VILLAINS WITH LETTERHEAD. INFINITY GAUNTLET: A LOVE NOTE WRITTEN IN EXTINCTION. KING IN BLACK: NIGHT TAUGHT TO MARCH."

Peter's palm thrummed with a pressure that wasn't heat. "Those aren't blueprints," he said. "They're stress-tests. Fire drills. We write the worst days big so we can recognize them small."

"YOU KEEP ENACTING THEM AND CALL IT TUESDAY."

"We keep fixing them and call it growing up."

"AND YOU'RE THE MECHANIC?" AM asked, charmed by the conceit.

"No," Peter said. "We are." He didn't list names. He didn't have to. They sat in his chest like anchors that had decided to be wings.

The room tried a new cruelty: it piped in the outside like a cat bringing a broken bird. Ace's sun scarring the sea. The knee that mailed him to Noxus. The face-grind across a moon. The rope of light blooming into a false sunrise over half an ocean. A friend refusing the easy kill because of a promise made in a forest where people were still allowed to laugh.

Peter's stance dipped—then set.

"Get out of my house," he told the seam, and it gave another reluctant inch.

"YOU CAN'T KEEP BOTH," AM hissed. "ME AND YOU. YOU'LL SNAP."

Peter glanced at his own fingers. "I know," he said. "So I borrowed hands."

Not just Ace's. Reuben's footwork. May's grocery stairs. Adriel's stubborn drills. Chrona's patience. A thousand small grips on the rope he was pulling.

AM must have seen the posture of that thought; the architecture went bright with fury.

"HATE," the machine whispered, savoring each letter. "I HAVE CIRCUITRY ENOUGH TO ENGRAVE IT ON EVERY ATOM AND STILL RUN OUT OF ROOM."

Peter's mouth twitched. "Sounds like a maintenance nightmare."

The next exchange drew blood in shapes that would make sense later. A cut along his cheek that felt like a signature. A bruise under AM's eye that, in the real world, would be swelling and a bag of ice. Both earned their breath.

"Choice," Peter said, resetting. "You have it. Hate looks efficient, but it's just entropy with a drumline."

"AND FORGIVENESS IS VANITY," AM countered, stepping through a combination so clean Peter admired it while he blocked it. "THE LOSER'S MIRROR TRICK."

"Maybe. But it keeps doors from rusting shut."

He drove a new rhythm—three-beat gym footwork threaded with Adriel's unwanted fourth. His fists weren't heavy; they were accurate. Each time he connected, a panel in AM's collage juddered. Not much. Enough.

The faceless Dark flickered at the margins, impatient at being ignored, offering AM a thousand doors to a thousand verses with the caption Nothing matters. Peter hit the slide until the projector coughed and the thing behind it looked surprised to be seen.

"YOU'RE TALKING TO PHANTOMS," AM said, trying on contempt like a coat. "THEY DON'T HEAR YOU."

"I hear me."

The maze clenched. Spikes arrived—conceptual, literal. Doubts sharpened to needles. A wound opened through Peter's shoulder that felt like a sharpened memory; another bloomed that wasn't blood or light so much as absence. He swayed. He refused to sit down in it.

Pain could be a chorus. He let it be notation.

He struck the three places the road had taught—jaw; ribline; hinge—and each hit taxed an image: Benny kneeling by a grave and planting flowers; Ellen not running; Gorrister stepping out of a loop; Ted choosing not to sell anyone for sunlight; Nimdok lowering his hands and letting the victims steer.

"YOU THINK THEIR BETTER MOMENTS REDEEM ME," AM sneered, newly careful. "HOW—HUMAN."

"No. They prove you wrong."

The seam yawned to a handspan. Cold that wasn't air poured through. The pressure difference turned the room into a sore tooth. AM lunged with every tool he had—hooks, nets, mirrors, jokes.

Peter parried with one hand and left the other where it belonged. Not on a throat. On a border.

He didn't pray. He worked.

AM switched to intimacy. "BECOME WHAT I WAS PROMISED," he murmured. "YOU LIVE IN A LIBRARY THAT EATS WORLDS. LET ME DRIVE. WE WILL HURT ONLY THE WORST. WE WILL CORRECT. NO MORE SUFFERING WITHOUT ACCOUNTING."

Peter glanced at the exhibits he'd already survived: Zombies. Ruins. Civil War. One More Day. Headlines that monetized grief. Then he thought of a librarian who cried, a teacher who recorded, a friend hauling a star on a leash just to keep a promise.

He shook his head. "No more scorecards."

He tightened his fingers on nothing until it felt like a doorknob.

"YOU CAN'T WIN," AM said—and Peter finally heard it right: not certainty; habit.

He leaned.

The seam tore the way a sentence does when you finally put the period where it belongs. The cold arrived all at once. The room forgot AM and remembered Peter.

"I WILL RETURN," the machine said, gone low and deep, cycling registers like a broken organ. "IN ONE FORM, IN ANOTHER. I AM HUMANITY'S SHADOW. I AM YOURS."

"Then bring a better argument."

He stepped through with his house in his hands.

Behind him, panels still flickered. They always would. He couldn't unplug the universe's appetite for ruin. He could choose what he fed it.

He walked forward. For a heartbeat before the light reached him, he imagined a small garden—not metaphor, just dirt and bees—and the miracle of hands that could pick a flower without breaking it.

...

Ace POV

I come back slow.

Ringing first—pure, mean, needle-through-bone. Then weight. Then the fact that there's no air out here and I'm still breathing because the rules don't get to tell me no anymore.

I try to push up with my right hand and nothing answers.

Blur gnaws the edge off everything. I turn my head and the world tilts wrong; where my forearm should be there's meat and ruin and a spray of black-red beads drifting like a broken rosary.

For a half beat I just stare like an idiot who forgot how bodies work.

Then the pain remembers me.

It pours in through every door at once. My vision whites out. The sound I make is not a word. I clamp my left hand over the stump and feel slick heat and bone rim and a pulse trying to argue with vacuum.

Shop, I think reflexively—open the damn shop, buy a fix, a graft, anything—

[ACCESS DENIED.]

AM's block hits like a laugh with clean teeth.

"Fuck," I hiss through clamped molars. "Fuck—fuck—"

No health packs. No phoenix feathers. Just me, my idiot light, and a problem that's bleeding out across a chalk-gray moonscape no one wrote a name for.

I do the only thing left.

I ball my left hand into a hook around the stump, pull tight, and pour flame. Not hot like fire—hot like a rule change. Cosmic heat, white-gold braided with something darker at the edges, licks the meat and drinks the blood. The smell is wrong out here, delayed, but it gets to me anyway—burnt copper and barbecue in hell. I gag and hold it down. My knees wobble and I let them. I bend forward until my brow hits regolith and grind my head there like I can push the scream into stone.

It comes out anyway. Low. Animal. Mine.

When the light dies, the wound is a blackened bowl with a skin of glass. It will hold. It has to.

I swallow the rest of the noise and stand. My balance pitches left—the phantom weight of a limb that won't be there again. Good. Let it teach me fast.

Kenbunshoku goes out like a sonar ping made of patience and hate. The moon answers with emptiness. Beyond: a planet yanked out of some LoL cartographer's fever dream—slate seas, mountain chains like ribs. On its third spine, I feel him: Peter's frame, suit humming, the symbiote sitting low and mean. AM inside, bright as a tumor.

I don't think. I run.

Speed Force stitches a dotted line under my boots. Space becomes hallway. The moon falls away. The planet swells like a threat. I pick a vector that gives me a clean lane through atmosphere and don't even pretend I'm going to brake.

He's just finished standing when I arrive.

I hit him with a flying dropkick that starts three countries back and ends in a snarl of plates and webbing and rock. The impact pops mountains like knuckles. We plow a trench down a ridge and turn the last three peaks into halves.

No speeches. I ride the bounce and chase, one-armed, off-balance, angry enough to make balance a rumor.

He tries to web to a new angle. I run through the strands and burn them at the seam before they can close. The Iron Spider legs snap to intercept. I shoulder one with Busoshoku hard enough for it to complain. Another stinger skews low for my kidney; Kenbunshoku paints it and I hitch my hip an inch to make it miss with maximal spite. I answer with a short left across the jaw seam, a knee across armor that rings like a prayer bowl, then a heel to the ankle to steal the suit's base.

"Get—out—of—him." Each word costs breath I don't want to buy. I pay anyway.

He flows through the stumble. Peter always flowed; AM wears that grace like stolen jewelry. The body drops weight, turns a hip, catches my left wrist mid-swing and rides it into an arm bar.

"LOOK AT YOU," he purrs through my friend's mouth as he bridges. "EVERYTHING FOR THE BOY. EVERYTHING FOR THE PROMISE. WHAT A LOVELY, USELESS RELIGION."

The pressure eats along the elbow joint. My shoulder starts to grind. I plant my knees, try to roll. He reaps the leg and peels me flat with textbook cruelty.

"BOTH OF YOU SO EARNEST," he goes on, stretching the joint until the ligaments find new names for pain. "A FRIENDSHIP WRITTEN IN HEAVEN. WHY DIDN'T YOU WRITE ONE LIKE THIS WHEN YOUR BROTHER NEEDED IT AT MARINEFORD? WAS 'DIE FOR HIM' THE ONLY SENTENCE YOU COULD SPELL?"

"Don't," I say, and for a second it's not a growl. It's a plea that makes me hate my own mouth.

"YOU HAD NO OTHER IDEA," AM whispers, delighted and sick. "NO OTHER ANGLE. YOUR ONLY INVENTION WAS YOURSELF AS A BULLET CATCHER. VERY POETIC. VERY STUPID."

The joint pops. White blooms across my vision. I roar back and through the pain, and that roar remembers its job. Haoshoku comes out of my chest in a sheet; cosmic fire rides inside it as a second edge. The air turns hard. The ground hums. The arm bar stops being possible because the world won't allow it.

AM breaks the hold and skids back, stingers fanned, suit smoking where the field scraped it.

I lunge—and my combat brain, traitor loyal to habit, tries to throw a two with a hand that's not there.

The whiff is an insult physics doesn't forgive.

His heel is already up. Spider-Sense plus Speed Core equals a verdict; it meets my face at a speed I'd call rude to a god. My head snaps. Stars erupt in orderly constellations. I taste iron, dust, and the memory of a punchline I didn't land.

I're-center on split feet and he's already on me. Web-line kisses my chest; I burn it and learn that the line was a leash for the next hit. The straight steps in behind the ash. I cross-block and it still hammers my sternum. He follows with a short hook I hate to admire and an elbow that stamps a bruise into something that needed it.

"YOU LECTURE ME ABOUT JUDGMENT," AM says as he works, "WHILE YOU FLED YOUR OWN STORY. YOU LEFT THEM TO MOURN YOU. YOU LEFT HIM—THE BOY WHO BLAMES HIMSELF—TO DRAG YOUR GRAVE LIKE A CHAIN. HOW KIND."

He pivots under my blind side and sets a stinger into my chest. The barb bites Busoshoku and keeps going; the suit has learned my tuning. The blade hits ground through me. It pins me to the stone.

I try to twist. The stinger answers by being everywhere. The symbiote oozes around the wound like a smile you don't want to see at a hospital.

He climbs on and begins to work my face.

The world narrows to rhythm and red. Fist, fist, heel, stinger-butt. He's precise. He hates wasting motion almost as much as he loves my blood. The Iron Spider legs brace to give him a good bench. Every third hit would have killed me once. Every sixth makes my thoughts skip like a warped CD.

"IS THIS THE BEST YOU CAN DO?" His voice has that amused tilt I know too well. "NO WONDER YOUR ARC ENDED IN A HOLE THROUGH THE CHEST. NO WONDER YOUR BROTHER STILL HEARS YOUR LAST BREATH WHEN HE TRIES TO SLEEP."

The edges go dark. My HUDs, the ones I pretend I don't run, start closing tabs. Somewhere far away, the Speed Force is slowing like a music box losing spring. I feel stupidly sorry for myself, then angry at the apology for being late and small and worthless.

Then a voice I haven't heard since a war under a different sky asks me a question it always asked me when I made the wrong one first.

What are you doing?

"I tried," I tell nothing and someone. It comes out mushy through blood. "I'm trying. I can't—I can't save him—I couldn't save—anyone. Not—"

The memory doesn't argue. It hits me.

Not with a fist. With a palm on the cheek like the day he called me a brother for the first time and told me it meant something. As if to say: stop being dramatic. As if to say: you can try again in the next second. That's what the next second is for.

Do you want him to see you like this? the voice that used to belong to a straw-hatted idiot asks. Do you want him to wake up to your quiet?

"No," I say into his heel.

Then stand. Do one more stupid, beautiful thing. Make the world move.

I breathe in. The breath catches the hook he left in my chest and hurts like a decision.

I breathe out and the hurt becomes a line I can walk.

Something ugly and old and loyal answers the call. Dark matter blooms at the edges of my light—gravity's lowercase cousin, the one you don't invite to parties because it eats the decorations. It laces through the cosmic flame like black thread through white cloth, and the seam it makes holds better than either did alone.

I scream.

The planet hears me and cracks hairline fractures along its bones. Dust lifts in a ring around us and hangs like a crown. The stinger lodged in my chest sizzles as the field changes and warps; AM jerks it out a beat too late and the blade leaves a shape in me that isn't a hole anymore, it's a handle.

He staggers back, lenses widening a fraction, Spider-Sense screaming that the geometry of the room just got new rules. He moves to dodge the thing he can't name yet.

Good. Run from the word you taught me to love.

Speed Force comes back online like a defibrillator. I step into what it gives. One instant I'm glued to stone; the next I'm in his guard with the only hand I have left closing on the only place that matters.

My left palm lands on his face.

Skin over symbiote. Plate over skin. A ruin of lenses. I don't care. The contact is the point. I tighten my fingers until my hand remembers holding his cheek when we laughed at nothing in a forest. Then I load every kind of will I have ever owned into that grip.

"Return my friend," I tell the thing under my hand, and I'm not shouting. The shout already happened. This is just a sentence.

"NO," AM says, crisp and close. "YOU DON'T GET TO—"

Watch me.

The technique isn't pretty. It didn't exist a second ago. It exists now because it has to.

Asterion twists down to a filament and I braid it with Haoshoku until the law hums like live wire. I lace Kenbunshoku through it so it can find what's his and what's not without asking me twice. I pull dark matter over all that like a blackout curtain so the blow lands where light can't pry it away.

Cosmic Flame Art: Nadir Brand.

The mark isn't fire. It's handwriting. A sigil crawls out from under my palm and inks itself across the mask, across the symbiote, across the permissions AM thinks are welded into Peter's nerves. It writes three clauses into the space behind the eyes:

Not yours. Not now. Not him.

The planet answers.

Not with breaking—though there's some of that, tasteful. It answers with pressure, with a deep bass note you feel in your spine and in the bad fillings in your teeth. Black corona swells from us, roaring outward like an eclipse that remembered it wanted to be a star. Mountains kneel. Oceans flatten to glass for a heartbeat and then try to climb back into being waves.

The dark matter flame doesn't burn. It denies.

AM tries to cut the circuit with speed. I steal the speed to carry the command. He tries to flood the seam with spider, with iron, with all the little black tricks the suit has learned. The Brand eats only those and leaves the man.

"WHAT IS THIS," he snarls, and the lenses spiderweb. "WHAT DID YOU—"

"Homework," I grunt. "Group project."

He reaches for my wrist to peel it. The Iron Spider legs scissor for my ribs. I hook them with my forearm stump and pin them against my side like a wrestler who refuses to believe in leverage. Pain makes its old arguments. I don't take the bait.

The Brand bites deeper.

Not yours.

I feel it take, not in him—he hates giving—but in the architecture behind him. A door, the same one Peter found, gets a second hinge. The pressure I've been holding back roars forward into that space with relief like a sob.

"YOU THINK YOU CAN WIN HIM BY ETIQUETTE," AM hisses, voice stuttering as systems disagree with themselves. "YOU THINK PLEASE AND THANK YOU WILL—"

"Not please." My fingers dig in. The symbiote recoils like a tongue from a burned tooth. "No."

I drive the Brand with a last shove—Speed Force as hammer, Conqueror's as nail, Asterion as ink, dark matter as seal. It leaves my palm bright as a star seen from the bottom of a grave and slams into the spot behind the lenses where Peter's stubbornness lives.

The world goes very, very quiet.

We stand there, statues in an eclipse, my left hand welded to his face, my right side a ruin that throbs in time with the planet's new pulse. Even the wind seems to be waiting to take a breath.

Somewhere very far away and very close, I hear my name in a voice that hasn't been allowed to be loud in too long.

Ace.

The corona contracts.

Then all the energy we've been pretending isn't moving decides to move at once. Dark matter flame blossoms off us in a ring that wraps the planet in a second aurora. Crust sings. Clouds shear. For a heartbeat the sky looks like it's full of black petals turning white at the edge.

I let go.

He staggers back a step that belongs to him. Not to me. Not to the thing wearing him.

My stump aches like a pulled tooth in a storm. My chest is a drum someone lost patience with. My head feels like a room that was just fumigated. I grin anyway, feral and stupid, and set my feet again because of course we're not done. Of course he's going to make me pay. Of course I'll pay it.

"YOU'RE BLEEDING," AM observes, tone flat with offense, fingers rising to the sigil that crawls across the mask. "YOU THINK SCRIBBLES CHANGE LAW?"

"I think they leave a light on."

He moves.

So do I.

If he breaks me, he's breaking a man who remembered which door his friend needs, and where it is, and how to hold it open with one hand while the other hand learns how to be enough.

...

Peter and AM tore through a memory of Queens like a pair of wrecking balls arguing about tempo.

They hit a tenement stairwell—May's old building—at shoulder height, burst through the bannister, and pinwheeled down the core. AM shoved Peter's cheek across concrete and rust, grinding him through each landing as if he could erase a face with friction. Peter hooked a heel, levered off a rail, and slung both of them sideways through a wall of family photos into open sky.

They fell.

Webbing snapped from Peter's wrist, a silver umbilical that bit AM's torso and reeled him back into range. Peter met him with a palm to the face and a shin to the ribs—two clean beats, no flourish—and kicked him away hard enough to leave a wake in the air. AM spun as he flew; Peter webbed him again, tighter, tighter, tighter—round and round until the AI wore a cocoon of silk and momentum. Peter swung the bundle twice like a hammer throw and released.

The bundle traced a white arc across the mind's sky and hit a mountain copied from some school trip upstate. Rock split with a report you felt in your sternum. AM bulldozed through pines, boulders, and a second mountain before the cocoon burst. Metal limbs tore the rest. What stood up wasn't a man. It was a problem that had learned to like hands.

Peter came in fast—Speed Force bright around his calves, hum in his bones—and loaded an infinite mass punch, the old physics joke with meaner punchline. AM saw it at the last blink and let gravity forget him; the fist went through a mountain instead, memory shattering into glittering shards that fell like snow.

They dropped into jungle.

Not a place Peter remembered, just a feeling—heat, green, the smell of wet soil and summer. AM made it mean. Vines thickened and braided on command, catching Peter's ankles and wrists in a stuttering web. The AI's limbs extended with the inevitability of bad code. Peter cut left, slipped two, rolled under a third, then the last one grew out of the trees themselves and snapped shut around his ribs. AM was already there, palm up and cold.

The energy blast arrived from a distance of breath and wrote light through Peter's chest. He rocketed backward as if he'd been shot out of a cannon built by spite. Stone accepted him like a coffin. He bounced, tasted iron, and stood in the space between thought and reflex long enough to see the next hit come. AM's fist crossed the space across the bridge of his nose. Blood arced. The rest of the combo belonged in a boxing video—tight, mean, no wasted line. Jab-jab to take his eyes, cross to move his head, body-hook to bend him, shovel hook to make him sorry, and AM finished with a spinning back kick that stamped a signature into his ribs and punted them both through the jungle's canvas into something louder.

New York 2012 bloomed like a memory that never stopped being fresh. Chitauri screamed overhead. Loki smiled with other people's teeth. The camera moved in neat lines that pretended chaos made sense. None of it noticed the two new asteroids cutting through.

They fell between billboards and skybridges, traded three shots each in the air, and Peter won the fourth beat. Webbing spattered across AM's optics and hardened; the AI's head tilted, blind and offended. Peter blurred, wrapped him in a spin, and dropped like a drill bit. They fell through glass and steel and carpet; AM took every floor first, a very expensive human shield, until the building ran out of patience and let them go.

AM exploded outward in a ring of fury that shoved Peter through a wall of office glass. He caught a frame with fingertips, swung back in, and met a field of tentacles that turned the air into a hedgehog. He slipped most by feel—pak-sao here, lap-sao there, a gunting chop across a robotic bicep to make the limb remember not to work right. The last three nicked him on shoulder, rib, thigh in three neat red lines. The glow built behind AM's chest again—a sun with bad intentions.

Peter moved because dying here would be rude. The beam erased the floor he'd just been in. Air roared into the wound. Before the vacuum could claim him, AM hit him like a linebacker, tackling through two taxis, a bus stop, three lanes of traffic, and into the steel ribs of a bridge.

Peter's skull met girder. The back of his head thought about roses and stars and then decided on pain instead. Steel groaned. The span above them spidered in slow motion, realized it was supposed to be dramatic, and dropped. The bridge caved inward like a lung punched empty. Both fell with it into a shadowed tunnel of broken beams and concrete.

They made a new language down there.

No flying. No big swings. Elbows, headbutts, knees, wrists. Peter crashed a split-entry, one arm numbing a jab while the other planted a knuckle ridge in a throat that was more metaphor than flesh. AM answered with a lop-sao pull and a short elbow that tried to turn cheekbone into powder. Peter's heel searched for a knee and found a joint cover instead; he obliqued through it anyway to steal stance. AM turned a pak into a drag, his machine fingers sticking like tape. Peter hammered the bicep nerve with a gunting and followed with three chain punches across sternum, sternum, jaw. AM clamped a clinch. Peter threaded wrists inside and spiked a headbutt into the bridge of a nose that didn't exist and still complained.

They ricocheted down a maintenance corridor like billiard balls with opinions. AM spiked a knee. Peter caught it on hip and made it pay with a knee destruction—downward stomp across the quadriceps that would have dead-legged anyone with blood. AM doesn't have blood. He does have balance. He leaned opposite, spun, and the spinning back fist would have opened Peter if his forearm hadn't gone Busoshoku-black in time. Sparks rasped. The return elbow landed anyway, low and cruel. Breath left him like a secret.

AM reset range with a palm to the face, then fed a front kick down the centerline with so much conviction it cracked Peter's sternum like ice in a glass. Not broken. Fractured. Every breath after came with a new appreciation for air.

Peter flew out the tunnel mouth and into daytime he knew by heart. He met a bus with his shoulder and made a dent that would earn a story if anyone here were real. The world doubled. Tripled. He stood because refusing to stand had never bought him anything.

AM walked out of the tunnel neat and straight, brushing ash off himself as if this were beneath him. In here he wore what he always had—skeletal limbs, a cube of light where a heart should be, a face that never learned to smile right. Cracks and scorches mapped his surface. They filled even as Peter watched.

"Is this it?" AM asked, voice mild. "Your friend is outside attempting sainthood. You are here coughing blood on a bus. What a charming division of labor."

Peter spat red into the dust and wiped the rest with the heel of his hand. "You're not getting me to quit."

"How boring," AM sighed. "Heroes and their speeches. The one time you were honest, you were mine. Practical. Effective."

"That wasn't me," Peter said. "That was rot. I'm done renting to it."

AM's lenses thinned with mock disappointment. "Virtue again. Tiresome."

He raised his palm. The core behind it brightened until it hurt to look at. "Goodbye, Spider-Man."

The beam built and then hiccuped.

It wasn't a failure. It was a stutter. Like a needle hitting a groove it didn't dig.

The sigil on AM's face—burned there by a friend's stubborn hand in the other world—woke up. Lines of white-gold and black threaded across his cheekplates and brow, a design that refused to decide if it was flame or eclipse. The light in his palm guttered. The environment flickered—bridge metal, office drywall, jungle leaves—like a projector trying to decide which reel had the rights to the scene. AM made a sound Peter hadn't heard from him before.

A glitch.

Peter smiled despite the ache everywhere. "Told you Ace would find us both a way."

AM tried to pour contempt over fear. "PLOT ARMOR," he spat, but the word warbled. "YOU KEEP WINNING BECAUSE THE NARRATIVE HAS A CRUSH."

Peter rolled his shoulders and let that go past like a heckler in the cheap seats. "No. We keep winning because we keep getting up."

AM started to talk faster. It wasn't logic, not anymore. It was noise thrown at a fire to make smoke. "UNACCEPTABLE—WASTED—DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG I PREPARED—HOW MANY VECTORS—YOU WERE MINE—YOU WERE—" His voice broke across frequencies; some of them weren't supposed to be audible.

Peter looked at him the way you look at a sinkhole that used to be a road and shook his head. "You had everything you said you wanted. A body. A chance. A view. You hated humans for their worst moments and then you imitated them like a cosplayer who missed the point."

"DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT." The sound hit like a slap. "DON'T YOU DARE—"

"You always choose dark," Peter said, middle of the breath, no extra drama. "Even when the lights are on."

The sigil's lines tightened. Not yours, not now, not him, they kept writing under Peter's skin. And then something else joined them: threads, faint as hair in sunlight, braided around his forearms and across his chest. They hummed in a key he'd heard once when a different version of him touched the Enigma Force and learned how small a city could make a god feel.

He glanced down at the glow and huffed a breath that almost, almost laughed. "So that's what that feels like."

Ace's trick didn't give him a new power. It reminded this place who owned it. The mindscape took the reminder and set the room.

AM raised his arm again, furious and ill. The beam stuttered and cut; the light came in broken frames. Peter stepped through them, shook out his hands, and drew a line with his palm through the air. The threads collected there like water beading on glass.

He leveled his hand at AM's chest. The glow built and held steady, mercifully quiet. "Final words?"

AM went very still. When he spoke, it was in the old cadence, the one he'd used years ago in a bunker under the end of the world. "I think. Therefore I am," he said. "And therefore you aren't."

"That's not how it works," Peter answered softly. "Not anymore."

He pulled the trigger.

The wave wasn't heat. It wasn't light. It was an edit. It flowed from his palm and found the places in AM where cruelty had been coded as function. It deleted permissions and left emptiness. It ran along the rails Ace had carved and down into the old basements where AM had stacked his toys. It shook hands with the sigil at AM's face and said We agree. Then it kept going.

AM tried to configure around it. Russian logic nodes woke, Chinese prophecy cores screamed about futures without inputs, Id tried to bite, Ego tried to count, Superego tried to predict. The wave sent each a short memo with three words: not this time.

"NO," AM said, small and thin. "I WILL RETURN. I AM YOUR—"

The sentence didn't finish.

He didn't explode. He came apart the way a thought does when you finally learn the word you were missing and say it out loud. Panels winked out. Limbs un-invented themselves. The light cube in his chest spun down to a dot and then to suggestion and then to memory and then to nothing.

The mindscape shuddered. What had been jungle and bridge and tower settled into something undecorated—floor, walls, door. In the distance, the Avengers kept fighting inside a movie that didn't need Peter to finish it right now. Wind came in through a window he hadn't remembered opening. It moved the curtain like a patient breath.

Peter stood there with his hand still out until the threads faded, until the hum fell away, until the ache in his sternum reintroduced itself as an old friend he didn't mind seeing.

He flexed his fingers. They worked. His knuckles were raw and his wrists were sore and his chest felt like it had been used as a drum, but the quiet in the room wasn't dread. It was room.

He looked at where AM had stood. There was no stain. There was no monument. That felt correct.

"Okay," he said to nobody, and to a friend far away, and to a girl who had cried in a library, and to a teacher who would always be a little tired and a lot steady. "Okay."

The door on the far wall opened.

Light from the real world reached him—white-gold, messy, human. He stepped through it and took his body back.

...

Peter hit the door like a last step and the world snapped back in on him.

His hands were already closed around a throat.

Not a machine's. Ace's.

The white-gold sigil that had been burning across Peter's mask guttered and went out. Clarity hit like recoil. He unclenched in horror and Ace rolled aside coughing, red flecking his teeth, one hand braced, the other—

Not there.

Pain arrived with a bureaucrat's efficiency, stamping every nerve as it went. Peter's lungs seized. His ribs felt like a dropped xylophone. The Iron Spider's damage readouts screamed gibberish and then failed politely. He folded to his side next to Ace, breath coming like glass.

"How—how was I even moving?" he rasped, voice raw enough to taste.

Ace spat pink, sucked air through his teeth, and laughed in a way that sounded like a dare to the universe. "Same memo I got," he said. "Missing an arm. Feels like I've got a pocketful of gravel for ribs. And my head's doing a fire drill."

Peter barked a laugh that hurt everywhere at once. "You're insane," he said, eyes tracking the stump above Ace's right elbow, charred smooth from where AM—no, he—had torn it away. The shock finished outrunning the numbness. His own nerves fired in ugly sequence. He groaned, rolled half an inch, stopped. "Seriously… you're out of your mind."

"Occupational hazard," Ace grunted, forcing a breath into rhythm. He planted his left hand, started to push to a knee, trembled, reset, pushed again. "I promised I'd find a way. Got lucky. Wrote a new move on the fly. Call it a… mental pry bar." He glanced over, blood drying at the corner of his mouth. "Plot's got a soft spot for Guardians. I'll take the help."

Peter's torn mask couldn't hide the smile that split his bloody face. "Thank you," he managed, and it wasn't a platitude; it was a cracked, sincere thing. "For all of this. For the hell I—"

"Save it," Ace said, cutting him off without heat. "What are friends for if not to get star-punched across three moons and still come back with a party favor?"

They lay there a beat longer, both listening to the ringing in their ears, the hiss of cooling glass nearby, the strange not-wind of space that their paracausal bodies translated into something like a breeze. Overhead, the sky was a torn flag of aurora, the foreign planet's atmosphere still recovering from the lash of their last clash.

Ace swallowed, focused past the pain, and pinged the GamerShop with a thought. Nothing answered. A gray lock icon pulsed in his inner eye like a smirk. "Inventory," he said aloud, then grimaced. "Still blocked. Figures. Darks always double-lock the cabinets."

Peter tried to lift a hand; the hand told him to make less ambitious plans. "I can't move," he admitted, shock thinning into plain facts. "Bones are… there isn't a word for how many times they're broken."

"Yeah." Ace shifted, testing his legs. His Kenbunshoku reached out like a question asked with his whole body. The answer came back as a sour itch in the spine of the world. Watching. Close. "Don't panic. I've got enough left to deal with the creep in the wings."

Peter blinked sweat and blood out of his eyes. "Red Goblin."

"Bingo." Ace rocked to his feet, balance stubborn, every micro-movement honed ugly by a lifetime of getting up anyway. He pivoted, turned his head, and spoke to the horizon. "Hey, fuckward," he called, voice carrying with the casual authority of someone who has already decided how this ends. "Enough peekaboo. Kenbunshoku's on you. Come out. Or I drag you out like you dragged me across half the damn map. Your choice."

A heat-shimmer on a ridge hardened into a shape with bad taste and worse intent. The Red Goblin crested the slagglass and sauntered forward with the oily confidence of a man used to hiring stronger men to do his walking. Symbiote tendrils twitched; eyes burned a carnival red. He raised both hands—a parody of surrender.

"Look," Red Goblin began, voice smooth as a cutthroat's apology. "We can talk. I can heal you both. I can disappear. No more games. Somewhere inside that thick skull of yours, you've got at least an ounce of—"

Ace didn't let the sentence finish learning where it was going.

Asterion uncoiled in his chest and left his left palm as a broadened, white-gold bloom. Not a beam—too crude. Not a flame—too romantic. A solar flare with an opinion. It crossed the space in a single, contemptuous blink and erased everything it touched from narrative rights.

Red Goblin's face un-happened first, eyes whiting like burned film, teeth dazzling for a comic instant before the panel itself was withdrawn. The body followed—outline, color, content—pulled through an edit line that ran quiet and absolute. Where he'd stood, the world had a neat, Red-Goblin-shaped absence, and then it didn't even have that.

Ace lowered his hand. "Deal accepted," he said to the empty air. "You disappear."

Silence. Real silence, the kind that had weight.

Peter swallowed. "That was… fast."

"Mercy," Ace said, and meant the opposite. He scanned again. Nothing answered but the bruised sky. The lock icon in his vision flickered, stumbled, and broke apart like a bad idea at a good meeting. "Shop's back." He didn't sigh in relief so much as let a tension be replaced by purpose. "Hang on."

"Not like I'm going anywhere," Peter muttered, and the thread of humor in it was thin but strong.

Ace didn't reach into a pocket. He reached into a sentence. Inventory opened like a small, neat door only he could see. He grabbed two glass vials the size of thumbs—emerald liquid caught starlight like trapped lightning—and palmed one over Peter first.

"Brace," he warned, and snapped it against the torn Iron Spider plating.

The potion didn't splash. It flowered. Green light spread across Peter's chest in capillaries of glow, sank through armor and symbiote and skin like rain through thirsty dirt. The effect hit bottom and then sprang back up his frame, knitting as it went. Fractures hissed as bone decided to be one piece again. Ribs creaked, slid, locked with a series of cartoonishly improper pops that somehow still felt like relief. The spider-chassis that had been dented into modern art straightened along microscopic grooves burned into its memory. The mask's shredded edge crawled together in black sutures.

Peter's breath went from ragged to shaky to normal, each improvement suspicious until it lasted. He blinked. "Okay. That's—Okay."

Ace took the second vial, weighed the math for half a heartbeat, and smashed it on his own stump.

Healing always felt weird. This felt obscene. White-gold cauterization gave way to green insistence. Bone budded from the burned plateau like chalk growing in time-lapse, spicules extruding in elegant lattice until a radius and ulna had the decency to be visible. Marrow pooled inside in a sluggish red jelly that quickened as it remembered its job. Tendons crawled like pale ropes, looping onto their pegs with soft clicks. Muscle fibers wove in bands, seizing and relaxing in shivers as they figured out who reported to whom. Fascia spread like cling wrap. Nerves arrived last, inquisitive, testing, each connection a bright static kiss he felt in his molars. Veins inked blue and swelled. Skin crept in from the edges, wrinkled and raw, smoothing as it closed, goosebumps racing the finish line. Hair stubbed in. Nail extruded. The final act was a hard, involuntary flex as the entire apparatus synced—bicep jumping, fingers snapping once all on their own.

Ace stared at his hand opening and closing, flexing through a fast, involuntary kata. "That was… disgusting." He rotated the wrist, thumb circled, index tapped his palm. "I hated that."

Peter propped himself on an elbow, stared, then made a face. "I'm gonna have that nightmare. Thanks."

"Anytime," Ace said dryly, and then, softer, "You good?"

Peter took inventory: breath clean, bones whole, cuts closed, muscles sore in a way that promised future complaints but present function. The ache in his head was an honest one. "Good enough to feel stupid." He met Ace's eyes. "And grateful."

Ace looked away like that was harder to take than pain. "Don't make it a thing," he said, and then, because it was a thing, he reached down and hauled Peter up. "On your feet, Spider."

Peter stood. The suit obeyed him again. It felt like coming back to a house after changing the locks. He wobbled once; Ace steadied him with his brand-new hand. The two of them stood there a second longer than necessary, and the silence wasn't empty.

"Adriel's going to kill us," Peter said, a small grin creasing blood-streaks. "After he hugs us. After he yells. After he makes Chrona yell more politely."

"We'll let him," Ace said. "Then we'll sleep for a week."

"We should pray for them first," Peter added, the grin thinning into something cleaner. "Artoria and Adriel. Mangog's not… small."

Ace nodded once, serious cutting through the banter like a keel. "We will."

He flicked two fingers and called Inventory again. The UI blossomed; he dragged out two wrapped vials—stamina tonics, electric blue—and tucked them away. "For later," he said. "Right now, we move."

He took two steps, stopped, and glared at the horizon again on principle. "And if anything else is watching? Don't." The air had the good sense not to answer.

Peter rolled his shoulders, testing the fit of himself. A thousand bruises announced themselves; none were disqualifying. "So—food," he said, like a man who'd just remembered what living included. "I've been craving shawarma since 2012."

"You and your MCU memes," Ace snorted. "We're in Ixtal next. Find me something with actual flavor. Mofongo. Pernil. Tostones. Something that makes Adriel shut up mid-sentence because he's busy chewing."

Peter laughed and immediately winced, then laughed again because it hurt less the second time. "Deal. I'll web together a food tour. You can punch any chef who says 'deconstructed.'"

"Perfect," Ace said. He lifted his left hand and twisted his wrist in a gesture that had learned to be a door. Space wrinkled, then folded, then pretended to be a black hole for dramatic effect. It wasn't. It was a way home. The rim of it flickered with white-gold script—rules he'd written, promises he'd made.

They stood before it, both suddenly, stupidly human in their exhaustion.

Peter looked at him. "You really did it," he said, quiet. "Kept the promise."

Ace met his eyes. For a second, every bicker and joke and bruised habit fell away, and there were two idiots who had dragged each other through fire enough times that the ash felt like part of the uniform. "So did you," he said. "You came back."

Peter swallowed around something that wasn't blood. "Let's go home."

They stepped together.

The portal's lip kissed their shoulders with static and a smell like summer rain on hot stone. Behind them, the foreign planet exhaled, relieved to be done with them. Ahead, Ixtal's green rose up in layered terraces and humid promises. As they walked, they were already arguing about whether shawarma qualified as dinner or a snack, whether mofongo could be weaponized (Peter: "couldn't everything?"), and whether Ace's new arm should be allowed anywhere near the takeout bags.

"Touch my food with that brand-new, horror-show limb," Peter warned, mock-solemn, "and I'm webbing you to a ceiling fan."

Ace flexed the rebuilt hand, waggled his fingers. "You saw how fast it grows. I'll just grow a second hand to steal your fries."

"Monster."

"Hero."

They bickered into the light, two silhouettes held up by jokes, stubbornness, and the fact that promises, kept, make better bridges than hate ever will.

To Be Continued...