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The World's Greatest Detective
The Batcomputer hummed softly in the cavern's depths, a sound not unlike the purring of a restrained engine. Light from thousands of cascading data threads flickered across Bruce Wayne's grim face, his cowl drawn tight, his jaw sharp with thought.
Peter Parker's DNA was unlike anything he'd ever encountered not merely altered, but layered. Strands of multiversal radiation threaded through the helixes like filament wound around a dying star. It wasn't just foreign it was broken logic. And somewhere in that brokenness was the key to Peter's death… and his rebirth.
"Cross-referencing 616–Alpha-Prime data threads," he murmured, fingers dancing across the keyboard. "Isolate divergence nodes. Show me where Parker ceased to be."
The screen blinked.
DATA STREAM INITIALIZED
EARTH DESIGNATE: MARVEL-616
SUBJECT: PETER BENJAMIN PARKER
EVENT: TERMINAL CONFLICT – LATVERIAN STRIKE (DOOM PROTOCOL DELTA-19)
An image unfolded across the massive center display a scorched crater where Manhattan used to be. Heat signatures frozen in time. Burn patterns. Chronal fractures.
Batman leaned in. "Doctor Doom…"
The Phantom Battle
The simulation was incomplete, its gaps filled in by witness reconstructions, drone fragments, and multiversal sensors calibrated by Mister Terrific. But the core held.
Peter Parker had died fighting to save his world. Again.
He'd gone up against Doom, who'd cracked open a reality-bending weapon drawn from the raw edges of the Darkhold and something even older something inscribed in glyphs Bruce had only seen once before… in the forbidden chambers beneath Nanda Parbat.
Bruce magnified the frame. The weapon Doom had wielded wasn't just magic it was designed.
A sigil rotated midair. A spiral etched in fire.
The same spiral Bruce had seen once beneath Gotham, in a buried lab long forgotten. One that hadn't been of Earth-origin at all.
A whisper from his own memory returned:
"These aren't spells, Bruce. They're equations wearing the skin of sorcery." Zatanna.
Gotham's Memory
At midnight, Bruce descended deep below Wayne Manor, into the Old Archives areas untouched even by the Batcave's automation.
The walls were lined with grimoires, clay tablets, books wrapped in chainmail, and manuscripts bound in skin. The only illumination came from a flickering lantern. No sensors. No AI.
He pulled out a scroll kept in a lead-lined box: Codex Mithra-Eclipse, once deciphered by Jason Blood.
Within it drawings of a man wrapped in red silk and webbing, standing before a shattered mirror. Above him, the spiral.
A caption scrawled in Enochian: "The Bridge Between."
Bruce's pulse slowed.
He turned the scroll over on the back, a sigil written in blood. The same one Doom had carved into his weapon.
And next to it, in a different hand more human, more recent one word:
Watchtower.
Grave Matters
Hours later, Bruce arrived at Gotham Cemetery under cover of fog. Beneath plot 412-C rested something he'd buried himself: a shard of alien tech from a dimensional rift that had torn through Gotham in Year Five sealed in steel and concrete, layered with enchantments from Constantine himself.
But something had disturbed it.
He knelt, brushed away the soil.
The seal was intact, but warm. Recently awakened.
A low voice behind him: "You're digging up old ghosts, Bruce."
He didn't look up. "You're two days late."
John Constantine lit a cigarette, its ember flaring in the mist. "I don't like what's under there."
Bruce stood. "You knew Peter wasn't from here."
"I felt it," John muttered. "His soul is splintered. Like he was pulled through death by something ancient… something with teeth."
Bruce stared at the tomb. "Doom used a sigil to kill him."
"Not just kill." John's voice grew low. "That symbol it's not just a death mark. It's a funneling rune. Someone wanted Parker's essence harvested. His death wasn't an end. It was a transaction."
Echoes in the System
Back at the cave, Bruce activated the Red Node a covert satellite feed piggybacking off New Genesis listening tech. It scanned for metaphysical disturbances across dimensional timelines.
The report was grim.
Dozens of echo anomalies traced back to Peter's death. Each had a unique harmonic signature but one reappeared consistently: a decayed frequency Bruce had seen before in only one place.
Apokolips.
He loaded the waveform into the system.
Frequency: 31.77-C. Identified: Life Equation Fragment, corrupted.
"That's impossible," Bruce muttered.
The Life Equation was theory rumor. The opposite of the Anti-Life Equation wielded by Darkseid. The essence of free will. But if someone had fractured a piece of it and embedded it into Peter's multiversal energy…
Zatanna's words echoed: "You're a question the multiverse hasn't answered yet."
Now Bruce understood why.
Peter wasn't just carrying energy. He was carrying code. A key.
And someone or something was trying to use him.
Truth in the Shadows
Later that night, Batman met with Black Canary in a cloaked alley in Blüdhaven.
"You've been running with him," Bruce said.
Canary nodded. "He's brave. Smart. Feels too much. But he's slipping."
Bruce narrowed his eyes. "Slipping how?"
"He's… burning from the inside," she said. "His powers shift. Sometimes he's too fast. Sometimes he glitches. And he dreams. Not just nightmares real ones. Like echoes from other timelines."
Bruce absorbed this.
"He's unraveling," she said softly. "But trying to hold it together for us."
Batman's voice was quiet, certain. "He doesn't know what he's carrying."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
He handed her a drive.
"Tell him when he's ready. But only then."
The Watchtower
Bruce activated the transporter at 02:13 a.m. and materialized in the Watchtower's restricted vaults sector L-Zeta. Walls of reinforced alloy and kryptonian alloy framed a chamber sealed with a phrase only two people in the universe knew.
He entered it.
Inside: ancient records of multiversal incursions, anomalies erased by the Source Wall's collapse. Maps. Star charts. Photographs of events that never happened.
In the center: a hologram of Peter Parker's death.
Not just Earth-616.
Bruce replayed versions from Earth-999, Earth-X, Earth-1811.
Every Peter Parker every Spider-Man had died.
All within the same 72-hour universal span.
"Coordinated multiversal purging," Bruce muttered.
"Someone's been hunting him."
But one version the current one had survived.
The lone spark.
The anomaly.
A living paradox.
Message from the Grave
In a hidden file embedded inside the multiversal energy field around Peter, Bruce found a failsafe a message encoded within a strand of web-DNA.
He ran the decryption.
A voice emerged.
Peter's voice.
"If anyone hears this… I think I died. But I'm still here. Someone pulled me out. I don't know who, or why. But I remember pain. Doom's laugh. Then… something older. A voice like the stars. It said: You are the tether.
If you find this, tell May…
Tell her I tried to come home."
Bruce closed the file.
His eyes narrowed.
"Someone took his death and turned it into a door."
And now… the multiverse might tear itself apart trying to close it.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
" https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/ "
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.