October 3rd.
The Web bleeds. They call this place the Nexus, a gilded cage hung at the center of infinity, but I see it for what it is: a trauma ward. Hundreds of heroes, all echoes of the same tragedy, clinging to a lattice of light while the darkness gnaws at the edges. They talk of hope. Hope is a delusion. There is only the pattern, and the rot that seeks to undo it.
The central projection table flickered, a holographic wound in the heart of the room. A three-dimensional map of Earth-104 shimmered, glitching and tearing at the seams. It looked like a dying nerve. A massive energy spike, Morales called it. An abscess, I called it. The Weaver's Child was accelerating its consumption of that reality. Reports were already filtering in: multiple Spider-Totems trapped, their life signals fading inside a collapsing reality pocket.
Miles Morales stood at the head of the table, his shoulders squared with a weight no kid his age should carry. He's a good leader, but he still thinks you can reason with a cancer. "Strike team," he announced, his voice echoing in the crystalline chamber. "Myself, Gwen, Jessica, Cindy." He paused, his eyes finding mine across the room. "And Rorschach."
A chill dropped over the assembly. Gwen Stacy, Ghost-Spider, straightened up so fast her hood shimmered. Her dissent was immediate, a sharp, clean crack in the silence.
"We're sending the infection to cure the infection," she said, her voice dripping with contempt. Every eye was on me. Good. Let them look.
Miles didn't flinch. "He's the only one who's tracked its movements accurately. His data is the reason we know about this pocket dimension at all."
I adjusted my mask, the shifting patterns a comfort in their chaotic symmetry. "Accuracy doesn't require approval," I said. The words hung in the air, cold and final. No one else spoke. They knew it was true. They just didn't like the taste of it.
Morales gestured to the portal shimmering to life behind him, a swirling vortex of blue and gold. "Let's move."
We stepped through. Into the wound.
The air on Earth-104 didn't just smell of ozone and decay; it felt like inhaling static. The sky was a bruised, blood-red membrane that seemed to pulse in time with a diseased heartbeat. Chunks of skyscrapers hung suspended in the void, held aloft by glowing silk threads that webbed the horizon, throbbing like infected arteries. This wasn't a city anymore. It was a corpse being devoured from the inside out.
We found them near the epicenter of the collapse. Five survivors, all variants of the Spider-Totem, huddled together on a floating slab of asphalt. They were disoriented, their suits torn, their bodies coated in a tacky, black web residue. Lying near them, cocooned from head to toe in the same obsidian silk, was their world's prime Totem. A middle-aged Peter Parker, his life-signs faint but steady. For now.
Jessica Drew and Miles moved to help the survivors, offering steady hands and meaningless reassurances. Cindy Moon—Silk—knelt by the cocoon, her fingers ghosting over the strange webbing. Her sensitivity to the Web was a finely tuned instrument.
"It's mutating," she murmured, her voice tight with a fear she was trying to hide. "These threads… they aren't from the Web of Life and Destiny. They're a parasite, mimicking it."
I already knew. I pulled out my camera, an old twin-lens reflex model. The others saw it as a strange, cold tic. They didn't understand. This isn't a battle. It's an investigation. A diagnosis. Click. A wide shot of the suspended architecture. Click. A close-up of the viscous residue on a survivor's shoulder. Click. The cocooned host. I wasn't being cold. I was documenting the spread of the infection, tracing the pathology of a dying world.
While the others worked on the cocoon, trying to find a way to cut Parker free without killing him, my cracked lens caught something they missed. A subtle movement inside the silky prison. It wasn't the rhythmic rise and fall of a man breathing. It was something else. A flicker of motion deep within the host's chest cavity. Through the distorted glass, I could see it: a second shape, a parasitic knot of webbing growing inside him, its veins pulsating faintly under his skin. A tumor with a will of its own.
I lowered the camera. "Host compromised," I stated flatly.
Gwen looked up from her work, her white mask hiding a glare I could feel from twenty feet away. "He's alive. We can still save him."
"So was the last one," I said, my voice low. "On Earth-902. Remember? He was alive right up until the moment he wasn't. Until his chest cavity burst open and took three city blocks with it."
The memory silenced her, but only for a moment. Her idealism was a stubborn, pointless thing.
The rescue effort was a waste of time. While they argued over the best way to cut the silk without triggering a biological response, the infection was already making its next move. One of the survivors we'd rescued—a younger woman in a red and silver suit—began to twitch. Her head snapped back at an unnatural angle.
Symptom onset, I noted internally. Rapid progression.
Her mask, a flexible polymer, began to split down the middle as if being torn by something inside. Black fluid, thick as tar, seeped from the tear and from the edges of her eye-lenses. A faint, childish laughter echoed around us, not through the air, but across the Web-layer itself—a psychic shriek that scraped against the inside of my skull. The Weaver's Child was watching. Enjoying the show.
"Hold her down!" Miles yelled, his voice strained. Silk shot thick strands of her own webbing, trying to restrain the convulsing Totem, but the parasitic webs were already consuming hers, turning them black and brittle.
I saw the inevitable conclusion. The only conclusion. I raised my grapple gun, its custom firing mechanism loaded not with a hook, but with a high-density, web-dissolving incendiary dart. A scalpel.
Gwen saw my movement and was on me in a flash, her hand clamping around my wrist like a vice. "Don't you dare—"
I met her masked gaze. "Already dared," I grunted, twisting my arm with a brutal efficiency that broke her grip.
The possessed woman began screaming then, a horrifying duet of her own voice and the giggling, alien cadence of the Child. Her body contorted, limbs bending the wrong way as the corruption took full control.
I fired.
The shot was a dull thump. The dart hit her square in the chest, right where the internal growth would be gestating. There was no explosion, just a flash of white-hot light. The Totem collapsed, her screams cutting off abruptly. For a horrifying second, nothing happened. Then, the black webbing covering her body began to smolder, burning away from the inside out. Her form dissolved with it, turning to a fine, grey ash that drifted away on the foul breeze.
Silence. Heavy and absolute.
Silk recoiled, a hand clapped over her mouth. Jessica stared at the empty space where a person had been, her professional composure shattered. Gwen looked at me, her horror so palpable it was practically a physical force.
Miles was the first to speak, his voice a raw mix of fury and disbelief. "What did you do? You could've given us time to save her!"
I holstered my weapon. They still didn't see. They saw a person. I saw a bomb. They saw a life. I saw a vector for a plague that could consume everything.
"Time doesn't cure rot," I said, my voice as flat as the dead landscape around me. "It spreads it."
The execution, as precise as it was, had consequences. Severing the Child's connection so violently destabilized the already fractured dimension. The sky-web ripped open above us, the breathing red membrane tearing to reveal a vortex of pure chaotic energy. It began to pull everything inward—the floating rubble, the corrupt strands, us.
"Portal, now!" Jessica yelled.
We scrambled, dragging the four remaining, terrified survivors toward the shimmering exit Miles had opened. The vortex's pull was immense. I saw the portal begin to flicker and shrink. Someone had to anchor it. I fired my grapple line, the reinforced hook biting deep into the edge of the collapsing reality. Bracing myself, I held the tear open.
"Go!" I yelled.
Jessica and Silk shoved the survivors through. Gwen hesitated, giving me one last look of pure hatred before following. Miles was the last one, waiting as the force threatened to rip my arm from its socket. The anchor point groaned, then shattered. I was pulled off my feet, sliding toward the vortex.
An electrified web line shot out and snagged my belt, yanking me back from the brink. Miles pulled me through the portal just as it snapped shut behind us, the last thing I saw of Earth-104 being its final, silent implosion. He saved me. A symbolic, reluctant, and ultimately meaningless act of trust. An asset preserved. Nothing more.
Back in the pristine white of the Nexus, the survivors were rushed to the med-bays for quarantine and observation. The mission was a failure. One dead, one world lost. The argument started before the debriefing room doors had even closed. Gwen stormed in, her mask off, her face pale and streaked with fury.
"He killed one of us," she announced to the room, to anyone who would listen. "No hesitation. No discussion. Just execution."
Miles, trying to regain control, held up a hand. "Gwen, calm down. She was infected. We all saw it."
"We don't know that!" she shot back, her voice cracking. "We don't know if it was reversible! He didn't give us the chance!"
I stood by the observation window, looking out at the endless strands of the Web. So many worlds. So much to protect. So much to lose. "I knew enough," I said, not turning around.
Jessica looked uneasy, her arms crossed, her expression guarded. She'd seen things. She knew the cost of hesitation, even if she wouldn't admit it. Silk watched us, her gaze flickering between Gwen's righteous anger and my stoic silence. She was conflicted. She had felt the parasitic nature of those threads. Part of her understood. The part that still knew how to be afraid.
Gwen wasn't finished. She strode past us, onto the Nexus's central platform. A flick of a console and her voice was being broadcast across the secure Web sectors, piped directly into the minds of hundreds of Totems across the multiverse.
"Rorschach is not one of us," she declared, her voice ringing with conviction. "He doesn't protect the Web—he poisons it with his cynicism and his cruelty. He acts alone. He kills without conscience. I'm declaring him a threat to the Web, and to everything we stand for."
A profound silence followed her proclamation. Then, the murmurs began—whispers rippling through the network, a rising tide of agreement, fear, and uncertainty. Miles made no move to stop her. He let it happen. The damage was done.
In the aftermath, I didn't defend myself. What was the point? They wouldn't understand. They couldn't. While they argued and debated the new protocols for dealing with me, I collected my gear in silence. Peter Porker—Ham—waddled over, a rare look of concern on his cartoon face. I waved him off before he could speak.
"They needed a monster," I told him, my voice low. "Now they have one. It's cleaner this way." I slung my pack over my shoulder. "I'll keep hunting. With or without their leash."
Alone in my small, sterile quarters, I opened my journal. The ink seemed to soak into the page, a final, black stain.
October 3rd. Execution misunderstood. Moral outrage a comforting delusion for those who cannot face the abyss. Gwen Stacy—emotional liability. A good heart, easily weaponized. Miles Morales—undecided. Leader caught between pragmatism and sentiment. Will fail if he cannot choose. Silk—still listening. Good instincts. Jessica Drew—compromised by committee. The Web—still watching. And I am still watching it.
As I finished the last word, the ink of the period pulsed once, a faint, approving rhythm. The sigil of the Child. It had been on the journal all along.
Far beyond the Nexus, in the corrupted, cancerous depths of the Great Web where no Spider's senses could reach, the Weaver's Child opened its thousand eyes. The same sigil that had pulsed in my journal glowed across its shifting, chaotic body.
It had watched the events on Earth-104. It had seen the execution. It had learned from the clean precision, the lack of hesitation, the absolute certainty of the act. A new strategy was forming in its alien mind, a new method of infection.
A voice, a perfect imitation of my own gravelly monotone, echoed through the void.
> "No hesitation. No delay. Delay is death."
And then, for the first time in a millennium, the Great Web trembled—the first, deep tremor of a Rift being torn open from within.