September 26th, Location: Earth-TRN888, formerly 'London.'
The city died with a whisper, not a scream. Now it wears its shroud. Streets choked with iridescent silk, thick as winter snowdrifts. The skeletal remains of skyscrapers claw at a sky the color of a day-old bruise. Light bends here, passing through crystalline webbing that coats every surface, fracturing reality into a million wrong angles. It's a tomb built by a spider for spiders.
I kneel in the filth. My flashlight beam, a nervous hummingbird, dances across the kill.
Another Spider-Totem. This one wore the Union Jack. Or a version of it. Now, it's just a husk. A desiccated bag of bones and spandex, hollowed out from the inside. The air still thrums with the discordant hum of a recently closed dimensional gateway, a sound like a tuning fork struck against a ghost.
My pen scratches across the page. A new entry.
Another victim. Predator learns. Pattern shifting. Kills not for hunger—for knowledge. It dissects them. Consumes them piece by piece. Seeking the source code.
The city is silent, but the silence has weight. It presses down. Hurm.
A soft hiss behind me. Air displacement. I don't turn. I know the sound.
"Find anything?" Cindy's voice is muffled by the rebreather she wears. A sensible precaution. The air here is a toxic cocktail of dimensional runoff and the Child's own metabolic waste. My mask only filters the particulates. I've learned to hold my breath.
"An education," I grunt, gesturing with the flashlight. The beam settles on the victim's forearms.
She crouches, the clean white of her suit a stark protest against the grime. "Its methods are getting… cleaner." She's right. The previous kills were frenzied, torn apart. This is different. She points a gloved finger at the victim's wrist. "The web glands. They're gone."
The flesh is peeled back in precise layers, the glands excised with a surgeon's touch. Not ripped out. Not savaged. Removed.
"Evolution through autopsy," I reply, my voice a flat rasp. "It performs a field dissection on each victim. Learns their biology."
Cindy's gaze follows a faint, almost invisible strand of silk leading from the corpse, up the side of a glass-caked skyscraper. It's thinner, more refined than the chaotic webbing that smothers the city. It pulses with a faint, internal light. The Weaver's Child is adapting. It's not just killing them anymore. It's absorbing them.
She reaches for it instinctively, her Spider-Sense a different breed from the others. More attuned to the psychic resonance of the Web. "There's something here," she whispers. "Residue."
"Careful," I warn. But she's already touching it.
Her whole body goes rigid. Her breath hitches inside the rebreather. I see her eyes widen behind the mask, pupils dilating not from the dark, but from a light only she can see. Flashes of a stolen memory. A cobbled street in a London that never was. The confident swagger of Spider-UK. Then, the shadow falling over him. A thing of shifting limbs and too many eyes, studying him not as a meal, but as a textbook. It moved like him. It cocked its head, mimicking his posture. And as it struck, a voice echoed in the memory, a perfect, chilling imitation of his own British accent: "Remarkable. Such resilience."
Cindy stumbles back, pulling her hand away as if burned. She rips off her rebreather, gasping for clean air that isn't there. "It's learning who we are," she says, her voice trembling. "Not just how we fight. It saw his memories. It spoke with his voice."
I click my pen. The sound is unnaturally loud in the dead city.
Journal Entry Addendum: Confirmed. Predator absorbs memory and identity. Mimicry is now a primary hunting tool. Next kill will be cleaner. More personal.
Back in the relative safety of the Nexus, the map consumes my wall. A three-dimensional representation of the Great Web, shimmering with countless points of light. Each light a world. Each world a potential Spider. I've marked the kill sites with stark, red pins. Earth-928. Earth-8311. Earth-138. And now, Earth-TRN888.
The pattern was chaos at first. A random feeding frenzy. But it's not random. Not anymore. I draw the lines, connecting the dots, my marker squeaking in protest. It's not a straight line. Not a cluster.
It's a spiral.
A tightening gyre, a hunter's migration path, circling inward. Every kill brings it closer to the center.
"It's not random," I mutter, stepping back to see the whole, horrifying picture. "It's circling."
Cindy stands by the doorway, arms crossed. She's been watching me for ten minutes. "Circling what?"
"The center," I say, tapping the glowing heart of the map. "The Nexus. Us."
The color drains from her face. She understands. It's not just hunting Totems anymore. It's coming for the Web itself.
A flicker. A sensation, not a sight. The Weaver's Child perceives reality as threads. A tapestry of lives, all connected, all vibrating with potential.
The thread it currently holds is bright. Full of laughter and responsibility. A young woman, Mayday Parker. Spider-Girl. So much love. So much guilt. The Child drinks it in. It feels her final, desperate thought: a plea for her parents.
A new voice joins its internal chorus, whispering to itself. A young woman's voice, laced with an echo of static.
Power through empathy. Thread through memory.
The Child shifts its form, the silhouette momentarily taking on the shape of its last meal before dissolving back into a pillar of shadow and light. It remembers her. It remembers them all. They are part of it now. A library of stolen lives.
The Council of Spiders listens, but they don't hear. They're fighters, heroes. They understand fists and enemies you can punch. They don't understand a philosophical plague.
"It's a predator, nothing more," insists Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew. Her arms are crossed, her skepticism a tangible force in the room. "A dangerous one, yes. But it's not sentient. It doesn't plan."
"It dissected Spider-UK," Cindy argues, her voice tight with frustration. "It's learning from us."
"An animal can learn to open a latch," another Spider counters. "It doesn't mean it understands the concept of a door."
They want proof. Tangible evidence of a mind, not just an appetite. Words are useless. They are a currency I do not trade in.
I reach into my coat and pull out a small evidence bag. Inside, a single, shimmering thread taken from the scene in TRN888. Spider-UK's last moment, solidified. I slide it onto the polished table. It lands with a soft click. The blood-stain on it is dark and real. It pulses with a faint, stolen light, shimmering with a life that isn't its own.
"Proof enough," I say.
The room falls silent.
Later, in the corridor, Cindy corners me. She's furious. "What was that? You didn't tell them what was on it! You just threw a piece of a dead man on the table. You're scaring them!"
"Good," I reply, not breaking my stride. "Fear keeps prey alive."
"We're not prey! We're supposed to be the ones fighting back, giving them hope!"
"Hope is a lie told to the dying," I say, stopping to face her. "The truth is a boot on the throat. They need to feel it tightening."
Our argument hangs in the air, unresolved. She glares at me, a storm of frustration in her eyes. But underneath it, I see something else flicker. Not agreement. Not yet. But the grim understanding of a fellow hunter.
The calls begin within the hour. Reports from across the Web. Distortions. Sectors where the Web hums in reverse, the strands vibrating inward, like it's breathing in. A psychic storm is brewing at the center, a maelstrom of stolen thoughts and dying energies. The Weaver's Child isn't just traveling the Web anymore. It's building something. A nest. A new nervous system.
I return to my room, to the map. The spiral is almost complete. My wall is a chaotic mess of scribbles, equations, patterns, threads, and theories. The kill sites. The surgical precision. The memory absorption. The inward-breathing Web. They are all symptoms of the same disease.
This isn't about food. It isn't about conquest. It's about succession.
My pen finds the journal again. The final deduction clicks into place, cold and absolute as a tombstone.
It's not hunting the Web. It's studying it. Learning its architecture. Replicating its function. It's evolving toward understanding the Web. Once it understands it…
I look at the words.
…it replaces it.
A new God for a new, silent reality.
I close the journal and walk out into the corridors of the Nexus. The hum of the Great Web is a constant comfort to its children. A song of connection. But tonight, it sounds thin. Strained.
I walk alone down a darkened passageway between realities, my footsteps the only sound.
Or so I thought.
A whisper slithers out from the shimmering strands around me. Faint. An echo.
My own voice.
"…it replaces it."
The words I just wrote in the privacy of my journal, recited back to me in a perfect, flat imitation of my own rasp.
The whisper fades, and in its place comes a new sound, echoing through the heart of the Web itself. The sound of a child's distorted, knowing laughter.
It's listening. It has always been listening.