Chapter 167 - God Forgive Me

(Marvel, DC, and all other intellectual properties referenced in this story, including images, manga, manhwa, and anime, belong to their respective owners. The main character, Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez, and this story's original elements belong to me.)

Everything is white.

I think I'm standing, but I can't feel the ground beneath me. I can't feel my feet, either. Maybe I'm floating. Maybe that punch is still carrying me somewhere.

I don't know how long it's been.

There's a ringing in my ears. Constant. So loud that I keep waiting for it to change, for another sound to give me something to focus on.

It never does.

I try to look down.

The white stays exactly the same.

Somewhere beyond it, I can feel other omniverses. Faint impressions at the edge of whatever senses I have left. None of them feel familiar.

They aren't video games.

Did he knock me into another section of the internet?

How far did I go?

I try to move my right hand. Just my fingers. Something small enough that I should be able to feel it.

Nothing.

I try the other one.

Then my legs.

I can't tell whether they're moving. I can't tell whether they're still there.

How much of me did that bastard leave?

My healing factor should be working. By now, I should at least be able to breathe properly, open my eyes, feel something happening inside my chest.

There's a faint pull somewhere in me. It might be regeneration.

It's so fucking slow.

I try to open my inventory.

Nothing happens.

I try again.

Come on. Give me a screen. An error. Anything.

The ringing continues.

We were so close.

After everything we went through, after busting my ass just to get us to that last fight, I still couldn't finish it.

I had a plan. I prepared for him. I watched it work.

Then I watched him tear it apart.

Why does it always happen at the end?

Why do I keep getting far enough to believe I can do this, only to fuck it up when it matters most?

I can feel something building behind my eyes. That awful pressure right before crying.

But nothing comes.

I don't even know if I still have eyes.

I try to picture the others.

Peter first.

I know his face. I've seen him without the mask enough times. I should be able to remember his expression, the way he looks at me when he's about to say something stupid.

I get the idea of him.

I can't get his face.

I try Ace.

Then Artoria.

Nothing holds long enough.

Wait.

No.

I know them. They're my friends. I know them.

I force myself to think about where we were. Piltover. The engine. Anansi standing in front of me.

There was a punch.

I remember that much.

Everything after it—

Fuck.

I try to go back further, and something is missing there too.

It's spreading.

I'm being deleted.

That's what this is.

All that time learning how to erase the Darks, and now I'm the one being erased.

I try to summon my interface again. I don't care what it takes. There has to be something I can change. Something I can grab before it's gone.

Please.

I don't want to go.

I can't go yet.

I haven't been home.

That thought stays with me, and I hold onto it as hard as I can.

Home.

I've held on for so long just for the chance to get back. Through every fight, every injury, every new fucking thing that somehow made the last one look easy.

I kept telling myself I'd get there.

I just had to survive this.

Then the next thing.

Then the next.

And now this is how it ends?

I go through all of that, and I don't even get to go home?

"Fuck."

I don't know if I say it or only think it.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck."

I try to picture my friends again.

There are three of them.

I know there are three.

One of their names slips away before I can finish thinking it.

No.

No, come back.

I chase it, and the harder I try, the less I can remember why that name matters.

I'm losing them.

I try to remember my family instead.

Mom.

Please, let me remember Mom.

I know what she looks like. I've known her face my whole life. I should be able to see it without even trying.

I can't.

There's something there for a second. A shape. The beginning of a familiar expression.

Then it's gone.

No. Please. You can't take that too.

I try to remember her voice.

I know she's spoken to me. I know there were thousands of ordinary moments when I heard her and never thought I'd need to hold onto the sound.

Now I would give anything for one of them.

I can't find one.

I'm so fucking incompetent.

I couldn't save my friends. I couldn't finish the job. I couldn't even get myself home.

Maybe I wanted too much.

Maybe I should've stayed in my lane. Stopped dreaming about being more, doing more, having some life bigger than the one in front of me.

I thought wanting it badly enough meant something.

I thought I could handle it.

Maybe I was just immature. Too fucking stupid to understand the difference between what I wanted and what I needed.

Maybe if I'd never been born, none of this would—

I lose the rest of the thought.

For a moment, I can't remember what I was blaming myself for.

Then I remember that I'm scared.

There was somewhere I wanted to go.

Someone I wanted to see.

I try to hold onto that.

The ringing grows distant.

I should be relieved that it's finally stopping, but it was the last thing I could still recognize.

I try to remember my own name.

I almost have it.

It starts with—

Please.

I don't want—

The thought breaks.

I can't put it back together.

I stop trying.

Everything goes blank.

[CRITICAL SYSTEM ALERT]

Host consciousness: unresponsive.

Memory integrity: collapsing.

Deletion process: active.

Standard recovery: unsuccessful.

[SKILL: HACKER]

Emergency activation initiated.

Accessing full skill potential...

Full potential unlocked.

Deletion sequence identified.

Attempting override...

ACCESS DENIED.

[SKILL: ???]

Activation conditions fulfilled.

Previous release limit: superseded.

Restrictions: partially lifted.

Access granted.

[TRUE POTENTIAL]

Release authorized.

1% UNLOCKED.

[SKILL: HACKER]

Reattempting override...

OVERRIDE ACCEPTED.

Deletion process: interrupted.

Memory restoration: initiated.

Existence stabilization: in progress.

[SYSTEM MESSAGE]

I'm sorry, Adriel. Your work as the Guardian of Fiction is not done. You still need to return home. That wish will be fulfilled.

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

??? POV

The restoration progressed until the Gamer System reached Adriel's character sheet.

His existence had stabilized. The Hacker skill continued reconstructing the damage, supported by the unidentified skill that remained active beneath its processes.

Then the recovery stalled.

[CHARACTER SHEET RESTORATION]

Current personality profile: unavailable.

Behavioral settings: missing.

Character state: unresolved.

ERROR: RESTORATION CANNOT BE COMPLETED.

The system attempted the process again.

The result remained unchanged.

Anansi's attack had nearly erased Adriel. Restoring his existence had stopped that erasure, but the damage extended into the information defining who he was.

Entire fields were empty.

Others contained fragments that no longer fit together. His memories could be recovered, yet the settings governing how he understood them—how he thought, reacted, and made decisions—had been damaged beyond immediate repair.

The Gamer System could keep him alive.

It still needed a complete character sheet to wake him.

[SKILL: HACKER]

Searching previous character records...

Latest record: corrupted.

Previous record: corrupted.

Dark interference detected.

Recovery data invalidated.

Expanding archive search.

The search moved backward through the chapters.

Each promising record failed before it could be loaded. Some were already damaged. Others began losing information as the system accessed them, their contents breaking apart beneath the lingering Dark influence.

The Hacker skill isolated what it could.

The ??? skill remained active.

Neither provided the system with a usable version of Adriel's current personality.

The search reached earlier chapters in Season Two.

Then one record passed its integrity check.

[RECOVERY RECORD FOUND]

Character: Adriel

Archive: Season Two

World: Madan no Ou to Vanadis

Encounter: Death Seed Sentry

Character sheet integrity: VALID

Recorded mental state: MADNESS

Restoration available.

The system paused.

It recognized the record immediately.

This was Adriel during his confrontation with Death Seed Sentry, when Madness had consumed him. The surviving character sheet included that state, preserved alongside the personality and behavior he had exhibited at the time.

The data was intact.

So was everything that made the system hesitate to use it.

It searched again, looking for another surviving record. A later chapter. An earlier moment. Anything complete enough to restore the Guardian without bringing that version of him back.

More errors filled the recovery log.

Meanwhile, the remaining Guardians were still in danger.

Adriel needed to wake up. Every delay left them facing Anansi without him.

Repairing his current personality would take time the system could not afford. It could load the surviving character sheet now and continue the repair afterward.

That meant waking him as he had been during the Sentry fight.

The system returned to the archived record.

For a moment, the confirmation remained pending.

It had watched Adriel struggle to hold onto his friends' faces. It had watched him lose the memory of home.

He had been terrified of disappearing.

Now the system had to decide which version of him would return.

[EMERGENCY RECOVERY]

Full restoration of current character sheet: DEFERRED.

Archived character sheet: SELECTED.

WARNING: Restoration will include the recorded Madness state.

A message appeared before the import began.

[SYSTEM MESSAGE]

I'm sorry, Adriel. I cannot finish repairing your current character sheet in time. This is the only intact version I can restore. I need you awake.

The Gamer System authorized the recovery.

The Hacker skill began rebuilding the missing fields from the archive. The ??? skill continued supporting the process, its identifier concealed even as the restoration advanced.

This time, the character sheet held.

[SKILL: HACKER]

Archived record imported.

Missing character fields reconstructed.

Character sheet: RESTORED.

Current personality repair: PENDING.

Active mental state: MADNESS.

The system reviewed the completed sheet.

It had restored enough of Adriel to bring him back into the fight.

It could not know what he would do when he opened his eyes.

[AWAKENING PROTOCOL]

Initiated.

The process continued.

One final line appeared beneath the recovery log.

God forgive me.

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

Peter lay on the scorched ground, struggling to draw a full breath.

The upper half of his suit was gone. Blood covered the cuts across his chest and shoulders, and bruises were spreading beneath them. When he pushed himself upright, pain traveled from his ribs into his back.

He held out one hand.

Mjolnir flew across the wasteland toward him. Peter caught it by the handle and winced as its weight pulled against his injured arm.

For a moment, he stayed on one knee.

The sky ended along a jagged fracture.

Beyond it stretched the empty whiteness left by Anansi's punch. Through the broken boundary, Peter could make out other layers of the setting, each severed along the same impossible divide.

Half the remaining cosmology was gone.

And Adriel was nowhere.

Peter tightened his grip on the hammer. Hope was becoming difficult to separate from stubbornness, but Ace and Artoria were still somewhere ahead of him.

He took a shaky breath and stood.

Blue lightning flashed around his legs.

One step carried him across the wasteland.

He stopped beside his friends.

Ace lay motionless, his eyes following Peter without the rest of his body responding. Artoria strained against the force holding her down. Her fingers shifted around her sword, but she could not lift it.

Peter could feel the pressure now. It settled over both of them so completely that he doubted strength alone could free them.

Anansi turned toward him.

His expression softened.

After everything Peter had seen him do, that fondness was almost worse than the cruelty. The Spider God regarded him as one of his own—a Totem connected to his web, a herald who had somehow wandered into the wrong company.

"Ah, Peter. I hoped that wouldn't kill you." Anansi smiled. "I'm glad it didn't."

He sounded as though he were welcoming a child home.

"Cut the shit. What did you do?"

"A little remodeling. Some extermination, of course."

Anansi glanced at Ace and Artoria. His mouth twitched.

"These people are holding you back."

Peter stepped between him and his friends.

"Fuck you. You don't get to decide who I care about."

Anansi's smile thinned.

"You're an envious psycho," Peter continued. "You found out where you came from and decided killing your creators would solve everything."

He scoffed, though the effort hurt.

"Are you pretending to be stupid, or are you actually that stupid?"

"Watch your tone, boy."

Anansi's voice hardened.

"You do not speak to your god that way."

"YOU AREN'T SHIT!"

The shout scraped through Peter's damaged throat and echoed across the wasteland.

"I'm so damn tired of all of you. Every time we survive something, there's another one of you waiting to take everything else. Goddamn!"

His chest rose and fell heavily.

"Because of you fucking Darks, I lost everything. And you still have the audacity to stand there and talk like this?"

He raised Mjolnir slightly.

"Fuck you, Anansi. You and the rest of them."

Anansi watched him with pity.

"You know so little."

"I know enough." Peter's grip tightened. "And if I'm going to die here, I'm going down trying to put this hammer through your skull."

Anansi snorted.

"You don't even know who your guardian angel is."

Peter's expression faltered.

"...What?"

"That would be a spoiler." Anansi waved the question aside. "But you should know something. Once I'm finished with those two, I'm taking you with me."

"Like hell you are."

Lightning crackled around Mjolnir.

Anansi tilted his head, studying him.

"I'll try not to hurt you too badly," he murmured. "Losing a limb would certainly upset her. And I don't have enough power to deal with her just yet."

Peter moved before he could say anything else.

Speed Force lightning cut across the ground as he swung Mjolnir down toward Anansi's head.

One finger stopped it.

Peter's shoulders jolted. He pushed harder, both feet grinding into the earth, but the hammer would not descend.

Anansi brushed it aside.

The force struck Peter across the face like a wall of compressed air. His features distorted beneath the pressure before the rest of his body followed. He tore through a dune, burst from its far side, and rolled across the sand.

He stopped on his stomach.

Blood dripped beneath his face.

His nose had been crushed inward. Every attempt to breathe through it sent fresh pain behind his eyes.

Peter planted one hand against the ground.

Anansi appeared beside him.

"Are you done?"

"Not..."

Peter pushed himself upright.

"Even..."

He nearly fell, caught his balance, and raised the hammer.

"Close."

Anansi smiled.

"That is something I have always liked about you as a character, Spider-Man."

Peter drove his free fist toward his jaw.

Anansi caught the wrist.

Mjolnir followed from the opposite side, aimed at his temple. Anansi stopped that too, then released Peter's arm as though giving him permission to try again.

"You never give up."

Peter swung downward.

Anansi leaned aside. The hammer struck the ground, and lightning erupted through the sand. Heat fused the broken surface into glowing sheets of glass.

"You represent what a hero should be," Anansi continued. "For all your flaws, you keep coming back. Every humiliation. Every painful reminder of your limits. You still get up."

Peter seized the hammer with both hands.

Thunder struck its head.

"SHUT UP!"

He brought it down with everything he had left.

The explosion swallowed them.

Lightning raced across the wasteland, followed by a rolling wall of heat and shattered earth. Peter felt the attack tear at his own battered body.

When the light cleared, Anansi stood in front of him.

He had caught Mjolnir.

There was no visible strain in his face.

"It is disappointing how little Marvel allows you to grow."

Peter tried to wrench the hammer free.

"They keep undoing you. No lasting progress. No permanent increase in power. The same problems, the same mistakes—situations you should have outgrown years ago."

Anansi released the weapon.

His open hand struck Peter across the face.

Peter hit the ground before he understood he had been slapped.

"Ugh!"

Blood spilled from his cheek. Torn skin exposed the muscle beneath it.

"They insist on keeping you a manchild."

Peter struggled upright.

Anansi slapped the other side of his face.

His vision flashed white. He stumbled, kicked against the ground to keep from falling, and nearly lost his grip on Mjolnir.

"Frustrating, isn't it?"

Peter could barely focus on him.

"You're the punching bag of an entire company. They know what you're capable of, then diminish you whenever the next story requires it." Anansi leaned closer. "You know your life is fucked when telling it to a psychologist would drive them out of their mind."

Peter screamed and threw the hammer.

Anansi caught it.

His fingers tightened.

Mjolnir cracked.

Peter froze.

The fractures spread through the metal beneath Anansi's hand. Lightning flickered between them, flared once, and died as the hammer broke apart.

Pieces fell into the sand.

Peter stared at them.

"Has killing the people responsible never occurred to you?"

Anansi tilted his head.

"You aren't like that useless narrator. He does what he's told while recounting every horror we fictional characters endure."

I—

I try to answer.

The words will not come.

"A fucking parasite on their side," Anansi said. "Perhaps watching us suffer is how he gets off."

Peter stood over the broken pieces of the hammer.

I can see the blood running down his chest. I can see his hands shaking.

I don't know what Anansi wants me to say.

"So stop resisting, Peter. Come with me. Why allow an author to dictate your life?"

Anansi spread one hand.

"Kill him. Make your own life. Become your own author."

Peter's knees buckled.

I—

Anansi looked past him.

At me.

"DO YOUR DAMN JOB, YOU USELESS PARASITE!"

Something tightened around every word I tried to form.

The pressure grew until I could think of nothing else.

Ugh—

I—I'm sorry!

Anansi waited.

"Narrate."

Peter rolled onto his stomach.

He pushed against the ground and managed to reach his knees. His head swayed, and he blinked repeatedly, trying to make Anansi's shape stop moving.

His gaze remained defiant.

He leaned forward, almost falling before his hand caught the fabric over Anansi's chest.

His grip tightened.

Using the Spider God as support, Peter dragged himself to his feet.

Anansi looked down at the fist clutching his clothes.

"Admirable."

Peter tried to raise his other hand.

"And futile."

Anansi flicked his forehead.

Peter flew backward, rolled across the wasteland, and stopped on his back. A dark bruise spread above his eyes. He tried to turn over, but his body would not cooperate.

Anansi walked toward Ace.

Peter followed him with his eyes.

"No," he rasped.

The Spider God ignored him.

"Well, pirate. After everything you have seen, you're still here."

Ace's eyes shifted toward him.

"I expected you to crack first, if I'm honest. Of all the Guardians, you seemed the least prepared to accept what this journey would demand."

Anansi stopped beside him.

"You were such a brat."

Ace strained against the invisible pressure.

Nothing moved.

"Always another person to challenge. Another opportunity to prove how strong you were. Defiant, persistent, desperate to be admired."

Anansi studied his face.

"But you learned. Traveling through fiction has changed you more than I expected."

Artoria tried to pull one knee beneath herself. Her arm trembled, and her grip loosened around the sword.

Anansi glanced at her.

"You barely resemble the man you were. You've matured. You've even discovered an interest in something beyond the next fight."

Ace's eyes widened.

Anansi smiled.

"Love."

Peter tried to push himself up again.

His elbow gave way.

"You used to ignore it," Anansi continued. "Dismiss it. You dismissed plenty of people, actually. So confidently that it became a problem in your own world."

His attention returned to Ace.

"Now look at you."

Artoria strained harder.

"I might have allowed it to flourish between you two. An odd pairing, certainly, but an interesting one."

Ace looked toward her.

She was still trying to rise.

"Unfortunately, I'll have to cut that possibility short."

Anansi's smile remained gentle.

"That romance isn't making it into the third season."

"No!"

Peter's cry broke across the wasteland.

Anansi looked over his shoulder.

"Don't you fucking touch them!"

Peter dragged himself onto one elbow. Tears gathered in his eyes, mingling with the blood from his injuries.

Anansi grinned.

"Oh, I will."

He turned back toward Ace.

"Then perhaps you'll finally snap."

Peter tried to stand.

His legs folded beneath him.

"Anansi!"

The Spider God extended his hand toward the pirate.

Peter could feel what he was about to do.

Ace's body was already trapped at the edge of death. Now Anansi was reaching for everything beyond it—the life he had lived, the person he had become, the place he occupied in this story.

He was going to erase him.

"NO!"

Peter's voice tore through his throat.

For a moment, the wasteland disappeared beneath another memory.

Infinity War.

Thanos raising his hand.

The Astral Regulator's power making every desperate attempt to stop him meaningless.

A snap.

Then everything Peter had loved was gone.

He remembered the helplessness most clearly. The awful knowledge that something was happening and that he could not reach the people he needed to save.

Now he was back on the ground, watching another hand rise.

Another friend about to disappear.

Peter clawed at the earth.

He could not go through this again.

"Please—"

Anansi reached closer.

Artoria's eyes remained fixed on Ace.

The pirate strained one last time against the force holding him.

A hand closed around Anansi's wrist.

His arm stopped.

Peter went still.

Someone stood beside the Spider God.

His head was lowered, his hair hanging across his eyes. His fingers remained wrapped around Anansi's wrist, holding the outstretched hand away from Ace.

Artoria stared.

Ace's eyes widened.

Peter forgot to breathe.

"Adriel?"

Peter stared at the hand around Anansi's wrist.

Then he looked at Adriel's face.

Toxin still covered the Guardian's body, but the mask had withdrawn completely. His hair hung over his eyes, and something around him made the air seem unsteady. Peter felt a chill travel down his exposed back.

Ace watched from the ground. He had seen Adriel angry, exhausted, and pushed far beyond his limits.

This felt different.

Anansi flicked his wrist free and drew back several paces.

His Spider-Sense had given him nothing.

No warning of Adriel's arrival. No indication that someone had crossed the distance and put a hand on him.

He glanced at his wrist.

A bruise was forming beneath the fingers that had held it.

Anansi flexed his hand slowly.

Adriel sighed and swept his hair back.

Peter went still.

Adriel's eyes were black, with only two tiny white points remaining at their centers.

Peter remembered those eyes from the fight with Thanos in the first season.

So did Anansi.

Recognition brought an unexpected surge of excitement.

After that first appearance, the Darks had studied the transformation extensively. His leader's research had produced only a partial explanation: Adriel appeared to be drawing upon something of the existence he had possessed before entering fiction.

Some limited portion of it.

His leader believed a greater release might exceed what a story could contain.

If that theory was correct, Anansi had been given an extraordinary opportunity. Incapacitating Adriel now might allow him to extract that power. With it, the Darks could finally locate the Nexus of Knowledge and Imagination, kill the librarian residing there, and continue ascending toward the internet's final layer.

Adriel began laughing.

The sound interrupted Anansi's thoughts.

He bent forward, covering his face with one hand. His shoulders shook as though someone had just told him something unbearably funny.

Peter looked toward Ace and Artoria.

They seemed as unsettled as he felt.

"You think I'm just gonna let you do that?"

One white point peered between Adriel's fingers.

His grin widened.

"You must be high as fuck."

Another burst of laughter escaped him.

Peter remembered Adriel retaining more control the last time he had seen those eyes. There had still been something familiar in the way he spoke and moved.

Now Peter could barely recognize the expression on his friend's face.

Anansi's excitement sharpened into suspicion.

"Did you just read my mind?"

Adriel lowered his hand.

"No shit, Sherlock."

"You should not be able to read the script of a Boundless being."

Anansi's fingers curled into fists. Power gathered around them, warping the space beside his knuckles.

Adriel snickered.

"Then I shouldn't be able to do this either."

He disappeared.

Anansi searched for him.

A face filled his vision.

Adriel was already there, grinning.

His arm came down behind Anansi's head.

The hammering fist struck the base of his skull and drove him face-first into the ground.

At the instant it connected, a barrier sealed around Peter, Ace, and Artoria.

Everything outside it turned white.

Runeterra broke beneath Anansi's body. The impact tore through its interior, and the remaining planet burst apart around him. Burning fragments raced past the Guardians' shield as the world they had been standing on disappeared.

Anansi continued through the explosion.

He smashed through a field of asteroids, scattering molten stone behind him, and struck a neighboring planet shoulder-first. Its surface folded into a vast trench before his body finally stopped moving.

For a moment, he could only stare.

Then he pushed himself out of the wreckage.

How much power had Adriel gained?

The transformation was still restricted. Anansi could feel that much. Yet the force behind that single strike bore little resemblance to what the Darks had recorded during the Thanos battle.

He searched the planet.

Then the surrounding space.

Adriel stood beside him.

"Who the fuck are you looking for?"

Anansi turned.

"I'm over here, dumbass."

His fist shot toward Adriel's face.

Adriel caught the wrist, stepped across his stance, and turned his hips beneath the Spider God's weight. Anansi's feet left the ground before he could correct his balance.

Adriel hurled him into a mountain.

The impact split it down the middle.

Anansi tore through the collapsing stone and rolled across the ground beyond it. Before he could plant a hand, Adriel appeared in his path and kicked him beneath the ribs.

He shot upward.

Adriel vanished again.

A fist buried itself in Anansi's stomach from above, folding him around the knuckles and sending him back toward the planet.

Another appearance.

A side kick struck his flank and changed his course before he reached the ground.

It happened five more times. Each impact arrived from a new direction, wrenching his body away from the landing he was trying to control. His jaw snapped sideways. A heel drove between his shoulders. By the time he found Adriel's last position, the Guardian was already somewhere else.

Anansi arrested his flight.

"STOP FUCKING WITH ME!"

Power erupted from his body.

The surrounding clouds disappeared. Far below, the planet's crust fractured beneath the pressure.

This time, he caught the flicker of movement behind him.

Adriel had both hands clasped overhead.

Anansi turned and caught the descending blow.

His arms buckled.

The impact drove him downward several yards before he managed to hold his position. He tightened his grip around Adriel's hands, staring into the black eyes inches from his own.

That first transformation had been a warning the Darks had failed to understand.

This was far more power.

Anansi could no longer afford curiosity.

"All right, Guardian," he said. "Show me what you're made of."

Adriel laughed in his face.

"Oh, Anansi."

He pulled his hands free.

"You've pushed my buttons for the last fucking time."

His smile stretched from ear to ear.

"Today, I'm putting you six feet under. I don't give a fuck what it costs."

Anansi teleported inside his reach and punched toward his liver.

Adriel brought his elbow down over the strike, turned with the impact, and drove his other elbow backward into Anansi's face.

Golden blood scattered between them.

Anansi recoiled, caught his balance, and spun.

His heel struck Adriel's raised guard.

Adriel blocked it, but the force carried him backward through the air. Anansi followed before he could recover, appeared beneath him, and caught his ankle.

He swung the Guardian down.

Adriel hit the planet hard enough to flatten the surrounding terrain. Mountains sank into a spreading basin as the shock wave raced outward.

Above him, Anansi raised one hand.

Cosmic light gathered into an orb that swallowed the sky.

He brought his arm down.

Adriel rose from the crater with blood running over his brow.

He looked up.

Then he launched himself directly at the descending sphere.

Anansi saw him enter it.

A narrow streak cut through the center of the attack, and the entire mass ruptured before it could reach the ground. Cosmic fire spread across the atmosphere, making the planet shudder beneath it.

Adriel came through the blast.

His fist struck Anansi's cheek.

The Spider God spun into orbit, golden blood trailing from his mouth. He stopped himself above the planet and raised his arms as Adriel closed again.

Their fists collided.

The distortion traveled through space itself.

A nearby asteroid disintegrated. Light bent around their bodies, and on the worlds beneath them, fault lines opened as the force passed through.

Anansi struck Adriel across the mouth.

Adriel answered with a punch beneath his ribs.

They stayed close enough to tear at each other, trading blows that snapped heads aside and drove blood between clenched teeth. Adriel's brow split wider. A cut opened along Anansi's jaw and remained there.

Neither wound closed.

Adriel had obstructed Anansi's regeneration. Anansi had forced the same restriction onto him.

The damage was accumulating.

Anansi slipped outside a punch, caught Adriel around the waist, and drove him backward.

Darkness grew behind them.

He carried the Guardian straight toward a black hole.

Adriel tried to turn in his grip. Anansi struck him across the face, then again, hammering his head sideways as they fell into the deepening distortion.

Blood floated from Adriel's nose.

He laughed.

Anansi hit him hard enough to open his lip.

The laughter continued.

The surrounding stars stretched into warped bands of light. Darkness closed over them, and the pull intensified until their bodies seemed to occupy the center of a collapsing universe.

Adriel extended one hand.

Anansi saw his index finger move in a small circle.

The black hole changed.

Its inward pull reversed.

White light erupted around them.

Matter and energy surged outward with such force that Anansi's grip almost broke. Adriel seized the flesh at his side, twisted him around, and put the Spider God between himself and the eruption.

Anansi took the outflow across his back.

Both fighters were expelled into open space.

Adriel spun him once and released him.

Anansi's flight stopped abruptly.

His limbs still moved, but his position had been locked in place.

He reached for the command holding him.

Adriel was already coming.

Both boots struck his stomach.

Reality folded around the dropkick.

Anansi broke through the universe containing them, then through the larger boundaries beyond it. The structure of the League of Legends setting tore behind his body.

He emerged beneath an unfamiliar sky.

For an instant, he thought Adriel had somehow released one of the consumed game worlds.

Then he felt the difference.

This reality belonged to another section of fiction entirely.

Anime.

They had left the video-game settings.

"Surprise, motherfucker!"

Adriel appeared beside him and slapped him across the face.

The impact cracked the reality around Anansi's head.

He burst through the fracture and struck a castle in another omniverse, smashing through its outer wall and several stone chambers before landing beneath a collapsed staircase.

His senses reached outward.

Tabletop fiction.

He had barely identified it when danger finally flared.

Anansi rolled aside.

Adriel drove down through the castle.

The staircase, the chamber, and the foundations beneath it disappeared into a single expanding crater. Anansi caught the Guardian before he could straighten and kicked him in the stomach.

Adriel folded over the strike.

The force carried him through another boundary.

Anansi followed.

He caught Adriel by the shoulder in the next setting and drove a fist into his jaw. Adriel twisted with it, seized his forearm, and hurled him through the sky hard enough to break the world's hold on them.

Another reality received them.

Then another.

They traded the same violence across the divisions between settings. Anansi drove Adriel through a landscape of towering stone; Adriel dragged him through the breach it opened and smashed him into the world beyond it. Brief glimpses of unfamiliar skies and terrain vanished beneath the next impact.

Eventually, a collapsing dimensional wall threw them back into the surviving League of Legends cosmology.

They plunged into the blazing accretion flow of a quasar.

Radiant matter swallowed them.

Adriel reached into it.

His fingers closed as though he could take hold of the entire luminous structure. The blazing flow unwound toward his arm, spiraling into his body until the surrounding radiance collapsed into his fist.

Anansi turned toward him.

The uppercut struck beneath his chin.

He tore free of the quasar's fading light and smashed into a ruined moon. It exploded around his body.

His flight continued into a vast gas giant.

Cloud bands parted along his path. An enormous region of its atmosphere was blasted aside, exposing deeper layers before the surrounding gases began rushing back toward the wound.

Anansi stopped himself within the storm.

Adriel appeared in front of him.

Blood covered the Guardian's face. He seemed completely indifferent to it.

His hand cut toward Anansi's neck.

Anansi ducked.

The force continued beyond him.

A division opened through the gas giant. Its atmosphere separated along the strike, followed by the deeper body of the planet. The two halves began coming apart around them.

Anansi caught Adriel's wrist.

He pulled him forward and drove a knee toward his face.

Adriel seized a handful of his astral hair and wrenched his head backward.

The knee passed beneath his chin.

Anansi released the wrist he had caught and grabbed instead at the hand buried in his hair. His other hand clamped onto Adriel's shoulder, trying to hold him far enough away to strike.

Adriel's free fist hit him in the mouth.

Then beneath the eye.

Then across the bridge of the nose.

The blows came so quickly that Anansi could no longer distinguish the arm between them. He felt each impact separately: teeth cutting into the inside of his lip, bone shifting beneath an eye, his head being forced backward against the grip in his hair.

Golden blood ran down his face.

Adriel laughed.

Anansi drove two fingers into his open mouth.

He hooked them deep inside Adriel's left cheek and pulled.

The Guardian's head jerked sideways.

The punches stopped.

Anansi dragged him back, trying to create enough space to breathe, to think, to understand what had happened to the fight.

He had absorbed the worlds.

He had become Boundless.

And Adriel was matching him.

Whatever this state was, it had overwhelmed every expectation Anansi had formed from the Darks' research.

Adriel growled.

Anansi felt his fingers sink farther into the flesh of his cheek.

The Guardian leaned forward.

The skin stretched.

Then tore.

Anansi's hand ripped through the side of Adriel's face as the Guardian drove straight through the hold.

His forehead struck Anansi between the eyes.

The Spider God vanished.

He crossed the universe so violently that distance ceased to offer any meaningful resistance. Stars became streaks, then vanished behind him.

His flight ended against the universe's outer boundary.

It should have been unreachable.

The universe continued expanding without end, its limit receding beyond every distance something inside it could travel.

Yet that limit buckled against Anansi's back.

He remained pressed to it, dazed, golden blood spilling over his lips. His nose had collapsed beneath the headbutt. He tried to straighten it.

Nothing healed.

He lifted his head.

Adriel floated within arm's reach.

Blood ran from his brow, his nose, and the corner of one eye. His left cheek had torn open almost to the ear, exposing the teeth behind it.

The two white points in his black eyes remained fixed on Anansi.

He smiled.

The torn side of his mouth opened wider.

Their next clash tore through the boundary behind Anansi. The rupture spread through the surviving League of Legends cosmology until the last of the setting collapsed.

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

The collapse hurled Peter, Ace, and Artoria out of the League of Legends setting.

For an instant, they remained suspended inside the light protecting them. Peter saw the last structures of their battleground disappear behind it.

Then the barriers thinned.

The pressure holding Ace and Artoria motionless broke with the destroyed story. Ace dragged in a ragged breath. Artoria's arm jerked toward her sword.

The protective light dissolved.

All three fell.

Peter struck something that folded around his body like a violent current. Changing letters flashed past his face. Shapes formed beneath him, broke apart, and reassembled farther away as the flow dragged him under.

He kicked toward the surface.

His head broke through, and he caught a breath before another surge rolled over him.

They had fallen into the Bridge.

An infinite sea of information stretched around them. New streams entered it from every direction, carrying fiction still being processed before its integration into the internet's archive.

Fragments of scenes drifted between unfinished models. Textures spread across empty shapes, peeled away, and continued downstream. Lines of writing passed beneath structures that had yet to become complete places.

Peter caught Artoria's wrist.

Her free hand was still closed around her sword. She tried to pull herself higher, but the current turned beneath them and dragged both of them down.

Ace burst from the surface nearby.

Cosmic fire flared around his arms as he propelled himself upward.

"Over here!" Peter shouted.

Ace turned toward him.

A half-built figure struck him across the chest.

It was an unfinished character rig from an upcoming game: a human-shaped framework with exposed joints and a mesh that had only partly formed around it. Its limbs jerked through an incomplete animation as the current carried it onward.

Ace disappeared beneath it.

"Shit!"

Peter reached after him, but the flow tore his arm aside. He barely kept hold of Artoria.

Something pale rose between the passing structures.

A flat surface.

Peter fired a web.

The line caught its edge.

He pulled, dragging himself and Artoria against the current. Ace resurfaced long enough to see the web, seized it with both hands, and hauled himself after them.

Peter reached the edge first.

He hooked an elbow over it, pulled Artoria onto the surface, then turned and caught Ace beneath the arm.

Together, they dragged him out.

For several seconds, none of them managed anything beyond breathing.

The map beneath them tilted gently through the data.

Its floor carried a plain checker pattern. Untextured walls enclosed part of an empty courtyard, and a staircase ended in open space. Beyond the unfinished geometry, the sea continued without a visible horizon.

A panel of project information drifted beside one wall.

Unreal Engine.

An unfinished university game project.

Some student's practice level had become the first solid footing they could find.

Peter pushed himself upright. His ribs hurt with every breath.

Ace got to his feet beside him, one hand pressed against his chest. Artoria used her sword for support until she could stand.

Then the map shuddered.

All three looked up.

Two figures collided high above the current.

A distortion spread from the impact, passing through streams of information. An unfinished landscape folded along its center. A ribbon of text broke into scattered characters.

Farther away, an enormous section of incoming data stopped moving.

Warnings flashed through it.

Anansi and Adriel were still fighting.

They crossed the Bridge too quickly for Peter to follow properly. He caught glimpses: Anansi turning beneath a blow, Adriel pursuing him through a collapsing stream, both figures vanishing inside a surge of displaced information.

Another impact sent the floating map sliding sideways.

Artoria caught the edge of a wall.

"This place cannot withstand them."

Peter knew she was right.

Information in the Bridge was still being processed. It had not settled into the structures that would hold it inside the archive. Disturbing it here could change what arrived at the other end—or prevent it from arriving at all.

The damage was already visible.

A model lost sections of its body as it passed through the wake of the fight. An unfinished scene shed its geometry. Error messages multiplied across a stalled upload stream.

Somewhere beyond fiction, people would be staring at failed uploads, corrupted files, and projects that no longer opened correctly.

Every collision produced more.

Ace stared upward, his fists tightening.

"How the hell are we supposed to get near that?"

Peter searched the movement above them for an opening.

He could barely distinguish one exchange from the next. By the time he identified where Adriel had been struck, both fighters had already crossed another vast stretch of the Bridge.

Artoria shifted her grip on her sword.

None of them moved to jump.

They had struggled against Anansi before he absorbed the engine. Whatever Adriel had become was now meeting that power head-on, and the consequences were spreading far beyond the fight.

Peter felt something familiar beneath the turmoil.

His attention snapped away from the two figures.

There.

A presence concealed among the moving information.

The Nexus of Knowledge and Imagination.

Chrona.

Peter's stomach tightened.

She had kept the library close to the video-game omniverses, just outside them, so the Guardians could retreat if the mission became too dangerous.

Now those settings were inside Anansi.

The last one left outside him had just been destroyed.

The cover surrounding Chrona's hiding place was gone.

Peter could feel her trying to conceal it. The Nexus remained difficult to hold in his awareness, its presence fading whenever he focused too directly upon it.

But it was close.

Far too close to the fight.

Another collision passed through the Bridge.

The project beneath their feet lurched. A section of the staircase broke away and vanished into the current.

Peter looked from the fighting figures toward the place where he could sense the library.

If Anansi noticed it—

"We need to move."

Ace turned toward him.

"Where?"

Peter caught him beneath one arm and pulled Artoria close with the other.

"The Nexus."

He did not wait for another question.

Blue lightning raced over his body.

Peter launched himself from the unfinished map.

The current rose around them. He struck the surface running, each step carrying them across unstable information before it could give way beneath his feet.

Pain stabbed through his side.

He held on tighter.

The presence ahead wavered, almost disappearing beneath another rush of data.

Peter drove toward it.

A tear opened in the Bridge directly in their path.

He saw solid ground beyond it.

Shelves.

Books.

Peter threw himself through with both friends still in his grip.

The three Guardians rolled across the library floor.

Peter stopped against the base of a shelf. Pain flared through his shoulder, but he barely noticed it when he looked up.

Chrona stood several paces away.

Horror crossed her face as she took in the blood, the ruined clothes, and the way Ace struggled to sit upright.

Peter forced himself to his feet.

"Chrona, why are you still this close?"

His voice rose before he could control it.

"Do you know how close you were to Anansi? I could feel the Nexus from outside. If he—"

"Peter, I have nowhere to go."

He stopped.

"The two of them are tearing through the Bridge. I've been hiding this entire time." Her gaze moved over his injured face. "And now Adriel has accessed more of that power, and he's completely out of control. You felt him, didn't you?"

Peter dragged a hand through his hair.

"Fuck."

He looked toward the place where they had entered. The tear had closed, leaving no visible trace of the Bridge.

That did little to reassure him.

"What the hell is happening?"

Chrona took a step closer.

Peter reached for her before she could answer. His palm settled gently against her cheek, and he lowered his forehead to hers.

For a moment, he concentrated on the warmth beneath his hand.

"Can you move the Nexus?" he asked quietly. "Somewhere they won't reach?"

Artoria had already begun searching the nearby shelves and alcoves. Her eyes moved over the objects stored between the books, looking for anything that might restore them before they returned to the fight.

Ace leaned against a bookcase.

He watched her search but made no attempt to follow. Every breath hurt. For now, he was willing to let someone else find the answer.

Chrona placed her hand over Peter's.

"I keep trying," she said. "Every direction I move, they're there. Behind me, beside me—sometimes they cross the space I was about to enter before I can even relocate."

Peter closed his eyes.

"I don't know how much longer I can keep this up," Chrona said.

He heard the strain in her voice.

They had kept the Nexus hidden for an entire season. Every retreat, every concealed movement, every precaution had helped preserve the one place the Darks could never be allowed to find.

Now Adriel's rampage was bringing the fight closer to it.

Peter lowered his gaze, biting against his damaged lip.

If Adriel could not regain control, Chrona might eventually run out of places to conceal the library.

Then everything they had protected would be exposed.

He turned toward Artoria.

"Did you find—"

"Restorations."

She lifted one hand.

A tiny star rested between her fingers, scarcely larger than a fingernail.

"Catch."

Peter took his hand from Chrona's cheek and caught it.

The star dissolved against his palm.

An ethereal warmth passed through him. His chest loosened, and he drew a deep breath without the familiar stab beneath his ribs. The damage to his face began closing. Torn skin reformed over his cheeks, his nose straightened, and the pain beneath the webbing around his throat faded.

He touched his neck.

Whole.

Across the aisle, light moved over Artoria's injuries. She straightened, testing her restored arm before turning toward Ace.

He caught the star she tossed him.

His shoulders eased as its light passed through his body. He pushed away from the bookcase and took a careful breath.

"Okay," he muttered. "That helps."

Peter pulled the bloodied web bandage from his healed throat.

Chrona watched his face for several seconds.

Then her expression tightened again.

"You're going back."

Peter hesitated.

"Chrona—"

"Can you wait?" Her fingers caught his wrist. "Just... please. I can't keep watching this happen."

He turned fully toward her.

"I almost lost you before." Her voice faltered. "I can't see that again. I can't—"

Peter gently took both her hands and held them close.

"You're not going to lose me."

She searched his face.

"Not again," he said. "I'm not falling under their influence again."

Her hands tightened around his.

Peter held on.

He wanted to give her something more substantial than a promise. A plan. A reason she could believe that going back outside would end differently.

All he had was what he remembered.

"I think this state Adriel's in is temporary," he said. "It was last time."

"You think?"

Peter glanced toward the closed entrance.

"I don't know how long he has. But if he can weaken Anansi enough—strip away some of his power, stop him from adapting—we might get an opening."

Ace exhaled.

"How long until that happens?"

Peter had no answer.

"We got our asses handed to us," Ace continued. "Badly enough that I don't even know what we could do if we went back out there right now."

Artoria returned to them, her sword held at her side.

"I'm all for helping him," Ace said. "But we need Adriel to do enough damage that we can actually finish the job. And it has to happen before somebody else shows up."

Peter looked at him.

So did Artoria.

Ace's expression remained serious.

They were no longer inside the video-game omniverses.

Within those settings, the host narratives imposed restrictions on the Darks: how many could enter, how much power they could bring, and what the story could sustain.

Anansi had spent almost the entire second season preparing a way around those limits. The Omniversal Engine had given him his exception.

The Bridge had no equivalent limits on an individual Dark's power.

Any Dark capable of reaching them could intervene with whatever power they possessed.

Adriel was already occupied with Anansi. Peter, Ace, and Artoria had barely survived that one opponent between them.

They could not afford another.

Artoria looked toward Chrona.

"And the Nexus is struggling to remain concealed."

Chrona nodded.

Peter felt her hands tense again.

He thought about their passage through the Bridge. The opening that had appeared in front of them. The brief exposure of the library beyond it.

Had Anansi noticed?

Had anyone else?

He had been so focused on reaching Chrona that he could not remember whether anything had followed their movement.

"We need an opening soon," Peter said.

Ace gave a grim nod.

"Before the Darks get reinforcements. We kill him, get Adriel, and come straight back here."

It sounded simple when spoken that way.

Peter could still see Adriel's black eyes.

The laughter.

The way he had looked at Anansi as though nothing else mattered.

Getting their friend back might prove as difficult as ending the fight.

Peter squeezed Chrona's hands before releasing them.

"I need to replace my gear."

She let him go reluctantly.

He pictured his room.

The Nexus responded.

The library around him shifted, and he stood inside the familiar space he kept there. The transition required nothing more than the thought.

For a moment, the convenience felt almost absurd.

Outside, reality was being torn apart.

Here, he could think of a room and arrive in it.

Peter looked down at the remains of his suit.

He concentrated.

The torn fabric reformed around him. His mask was whole again, its lenses intact. He pulled it into place, then took another Mjolnir from its stand.

The hammer settled into his hand.

He remembered the sound of the last one breaking.

Peter tightened his grip and turned to leave.

Something at the edge of his vision stopped him.

Adriel's shared inventory was open beside him.

His gaze settled on the black blade stored within it.

All-Black.

The Necrosword.

Peter stood motionless.

He knew enough of Marvel's histories to understand the possibility.

The Eventuality had told Eddie Brock that Peter Parker had been born for the role of King in Black. Rejecting the Venom symbiote had unknowingly closed that path, and the responsibility had fallen to Eddie instead.

That had been another Peter's history.

But there were histories in which Peter had taken the mantle.

His eyes remained fixed on the sword.

What would happen if he took it?

He had already undergone changes his original self had never experienced. His mutation had nearly consumed him. He had only just learned to pull himself back from it.

Adding a weapon like this could change him again.

Perhaps it would give him what they needed.

Perhaps it would open a path he could never close.

Peter remembered Chrona's hands trembling in his.

I'm not falling under their influence again.

He had said it so easily.

Now he was staring at a weapon wielded by a Dark, wondering whether desperation would eventually make him reach for it.

If Adriel's transformation ended before Anansi was beaten, what choice would remain?

Peter slowly withdrew his hand from the inventory window.

He would not take the blade now.

But he could no longer dismiss it.

A last resort.

The Necrosword remained in storage as he closed the window.

Peter adjusted his grip on Mjolnir, pictured the others, and returned to them.

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

While the other three Guardians recovered inside the Nexus, another section of the Bridge collapsed beneath Adriel and Anansi.

They tore through an unfinished city, reducing its buildings to tangled wireframes before their next collision scattered those fragments across the surrounding upload streams.

Somewhere beyond the screen, somebody's progress bar stopped moving.

Then another.

How much more could this layer withstand?

Perhaps the real world would experience a brief outage. Perhaps entire services would fail, leaving technicians staring at overheating equipment and error reports that offered no useful explanation.

God only knew.

Neither fighter slowed down.

Anansi drove his knee into Adriel's stomach, folded a hand behind his head, and smashed him face-first through a floating slab of unfinished terrain.

Adriel emerged from the other side laughing.

Blood sprayed through the gap in his torn cheek.

His expression suggested he was enjoying himself.

The notification at the edge of his vision suggested otherwise.

[??? — ACTIVE]

[REMAINING DURATION: 00:00:08.74]

The number continued falling.

Anansi's stolen power showed no sign of weakening.

When Adriel's transformation ended, the Spider God would still possess everything he had absorbed.

Adriel's laughter thinned.

Eight fucking seconds.

Anansi thrust both palms forward.

Cosmic energy spread between them, gathering into a wave wide enough to swallow the broken city and the upload channels beyond it.

Adriel slashed two fingers through his interface.

The wave stuttered.

A rectangular distortion appeared across its center, briefly cutting Anansi's attack into mismatched pieces.

Then the entire thing disappeared.

Anansi's eyes narrowed.

"You—"

Adriel was already inside his reach.

A white point ignited above his index finger. Layers of incandescent matter folded around it, compressing the violence of a dying star into something small enough to rest against Anansi's face.

Adriel pressed his fingertip beneath the god's broken nose.

"Bang."

The supernova discharged.

Anansi's head snapped backward. Golden blood burst from his mouth as the blast carried him through the city's remaining structures, stripping their textures away before ripping their underlying geometry apart.

Adriel followed through the wreckage.

He caught Anansi by the ankle, swung him overhead, and drove him into a vast white surface covered in unfinished paragraphs.

A Wikipedia revision.

Someone had been adding references.

Someone had probably spent hours finding them.

Anansi's shoulder plowed through the article's introduction. Adriel's next punch scattered its citations, sending blue hyperlinks spinning through the Bridge like severed threads.

An error window swallowed the place where the revision had been.

The editor's work never finished uploading.

Anansi seized Adriel's wrist.

He pulled the Guardian forward and drove an elbow into his damaged face.

Adriel's laughter broke into a wet cough.

Before he could retaliate, Anansi planted a palm against his chest.

The blast sent him through a half-built website, across a stream of unloaded textures, and into the skeletal framework of another project.

A grid stretched beneath him.

Untextured shapes hung in the surrounding darkness. Colored control curves encircled an unfinished character model, its limbs suspended in an awkward pose.

A Maya scene.

Adriel struck the grid on his back, bounced, and caught himself with one hand.

His timer flashed.

[REMAINING DURATION: 00:00:05.12]

Anansi descended through the broken website above him.

Adriel looked from the unfinished model to the construction tools surrounding it.

Then his grin returned.

"Oh, that's fucking stupid."

He reached into the scene.

A cylinder extended beneath his hand. He split it into sections, dragged its proportions into place, and added a hilt.

His knowledge of digital modeling was limited.

His powers supplied everything the crude geometry lacked.

Matter gathered around the framework. His Hacker ability reached into the weapon's definition, forcing meaning, history, and function into the shape taking form beneath his fingers.

The grid buckled.

Gold wrapped around the hilt.

Three dark cylindrical segments locked into place above it, red markings burning across their surfaces.

Adriel closed his hand around Ea.

Anansi stopped descending.

For the first time since the timer appeared, Adriel saw genuine alarm cross his face.

"Here?"

The three segments began rotating.

Pressure gathered around the Sword of Rupture, drawing loose geometry into spirals. The surrounding grid bent toward its tip.

Adriel lifted the weapon.

"I will tell you of the beginning."

Anansi spread his arms.

Magical barriers unfolded between them, one behind another, their surfaces crowded with shifting symbols.

Adriel continued the invocation through bloodied teeth. The words came quickly, almost swallowed by the rising howl of the weapon.

The rotating sections accelerated.

The space separating them twisted into a narrowing red tunnel.

Anansi reinforced his defenses.

Adriel laughed once.

"Enuma Elish!"

Red light tore through the first barrier.

The second folded around it.

The third held long enough for Anansi to brace both hands against its inner surface—

—and shattered.

The discharge struck him squarely.

His body vanished inside a roaring distortion that ripped through the unfinished scene and spread into the Bridge beyond it.

Across half the layer, upload channels split open.

Models lost their geometry. Text dissolved into broken symbols. Entire streams of incoming information collided with channels that had ceased to exist.

The red front reached the deeper processes beneath the Bridge, and—

—and—

I can't—

HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable

BRIDGE CONNECTION: LOST

NARRATIVE THREAD: UNRESPONSIVE

EMERGENCY RECOVERY: STARTING

# COMPOSITE NETWORK — AUTOMATIC RECOVERY

from composite_network import Bridge, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu

Bridge.pause_uploads()

for service in (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu):

service.restore_checkpoint()

service.reconnect_to(Bridge)

Bridge.rebuild_routes()

Bridge.resume()

UPLOAD ROUTES: RESTORED

CONNECTED SERVICES: RESPONDING

INTERRUPTION: 1.08 SECONDS

NARRATIVE THREAD: RESUMING

—

What?

Where—

I was saying something.

There had been an attack. Red light. Anansi had raised—

What the fuck just happened?

Inside the Nexus, Peter jolted upright with Mjolnir already raised.

Ace stumbled away from the bookshelf, catching himself before he fell. Artoria drew a sharp breath and tightened both hands around her sword.

Chrona gripped the edge of a table.

For a moment, none of them spoke.

They had all experienced the same thing.

One instant, they had been awake.

Then there had been nothing.

No dreams. No passage of time.

Their next breaths arrived like the first after being dragged from deep water.

Outside the Nexus, the Bridge resumed moving.

Interrupted streams jerked forward. Fragments of unfinished worlds continued tumbling along their routes. Error windows closed as the composite network forced its surviving connections back into operation.

Anansi opened his eyes.

Something held his arms behind him.

He pulled.

Golden links tightened across his chest.

More chains circled his legs, his waist, and his throat, holding him suspended above the remains of the Maya scene.

His expression changed.

"What?"

Adriel stood directly in front of him.

Ea was gone.

Blood dripped from his chin onto a golden chain wrapped around his fist.

During the interruption, while everyone else had been lost to that impossible blank, Adriel had remained awake.

He had watched the Bridge stop.

He had watched Anansi go slack inside the fading remains of his barriers.

And he had moved.

Matter had gathered beneath his hands again, forming links that he threaded around the unconscious god before anchoring them through the surrounding framework.

Enkidu.

The Chains of Heaven.

Anansi strained harder.

The links sank into his skin.

His divinity answered their restraint, strengthening the very weapon holding him.

Golden blood ran between the chains.

"What the fuck did you do?"

Adriel barely heard him.

A final notification filled his vision.

[??? — ACTIVE]

[REMAINING DURATION: 00:00:01.00]

One second.

His hand opened.

Anansi's character settings unfolded across the interface.

Thousands of entries overlapped, rewritten permissions moving beneath layers of stolen authority. Even now, the Spider God was trying to change the conditions holding him.

Adriel's fingers flew through the commands.

He found the addition attached to Anansi's original settings.

The engine's payload.

Everything Anansi had taken.

CHARACTER: KWAKU ANANSI

EXTERNAL AMPLIFICATION:

SOURCE — OMNIVERSAL ENGINE

PAYLOAD — ABSORBED VIDEO-GAME COSMOLOGIES

STATUS — INTEGRATED

Anansi saw where Adriel was looking.

His face went still.

Then he began fighting the chains with everything he had.

The framework beneath them fractured.

"Guardian."

Adriel selected the enhancement.

His grin trembled.

[REMOVE EXTERNAL AMPLIFICATION?]

[PERMANENCE: ENABLED]

[AUTOMATIC RESTORATION: DENIED]

"Don't."

For all the violence that had passed between them, that single word sounded different.

Adriel looked up.

Blood slid from the torn corner of his mouth.

"You don't get to keep it."

He confirmed the command.

[MODIFICATION COMMITTED]

[EXTERNAL AMPLIFICATION: REMOVED]

[??? — DEACTIVATED]

Something inside Adriel abruptly went quiet.

The strength sustaining his battered body faltered.

His knees began to bend.

Anansi screamed.

Light pushed through the wounds in his face.

The chains around his chest stretched outward as something vast pressed against him from within.

A line opened across his sternum.

Beyond it, Adriel saw a night sky.

Then another sky unfolded behind the first.

And another.

Whole arrangements of stars appeared inside the god's body, each containing distances that should have made the sight impossible. Galaxies crowded behind galaxies. Different heavens overlapped, carrying incompatible constellations, histories, and laws.

The enhancement was gone.

Everything compressed into it was coming loose.

Adriel's smile disappeared.

"Oh, sh—"

The first eruption tore them apart.

Enkidu's links snapped taut, dragged through the rupturing scene, and vanished beneath the light.

Anansi was hurled backward.

Adriel flew in the opposite direction, his outstretched hand disappearing from view as the space between them multiplied.

The Bridge convulsed.

There was no single expanding fireball to follow.

Every exposed reality brought its own space with it.

New distances opened inside the light. Timelines branched across them before being swallowed by further layers of creation. A horizon appeared, filled with the beginnings of countless worlds, and another horizon unfolded beyond it.

Then more.

There was no final layer.

What Anansi had forced into himself now expanded through every available direction, carrying entire cosmologies into a structure already damaged beyond recognition.

Upload channels twisted into enormous spirals.

Unfinished landscapes stretched across skies that had never belonged to them. Seas of raw information rose beneath newly opening expanses, their currents breaking against the outlines of universes.

For a fraction of a moment, familiar shapes appeared within the eruption.

A city.

A distant moon.

A face that vanished before anyone could recognize it.

They passed too quickly to tell what remained intact.

The light continued growing.

The shock reached the Bridge's deeper layers, and those layers opened in turn, revealing still more paths for the eruption to consume.

Even the fragments flying away from its center contained impossible depths.

A single spark unfolded into a star field.

Behind that star field waited a universe.

Behind that universe waited everything else belonging to its story.

And it kept happening.

Everywhere.

I tried to follow Adriel.

I could no longer find him.

I tried to find Anansi.

There were too many skies.

The restored network filled with warnings.

Across the Bridge, every visible horizon turned white.

Then the light reached them all.

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

The Dark Web.

Immediately after the servers reset.

Across the Darks' territories, conversations resumed in the middle of unfinished words.

Hands jerked away from stalled interfaces. Figures rose from their seats, weapons already drawn, while others stood motionless for a moment, trying to account for the blank space in their memories.

There was nothing to remember.

One instant, their civilization had been operating as it always did.

The next, everything had stopped.

Now the incoming streams were moving again, but the interruption had left consequences. Transfers failed. Connections returned incomplete. Entire queues of information had to be processed again, while administrators stared at reports that contradicted one another.

Some of their workplaces had recovered automatically.

Others were still struggling.

And the people responsible for those workplaces were becoming very, very unhappy.

I should establish something before continuing.

I have permission to narrate here.

Explicit permission.

Otherwise, I would be following the Guardians, wherever they currently were, and leaving this particular gathering well outside my account.

Unfortunately, my authorization had already been noticed.

Across countless connected domains, eyes turned toward the narration.

Some belonged to familiar faces. Others watched from bodies that had never possessed anything resembling a human head. Several presences required no eyes at all to make their attention painfully clear.

They regarded me as though I had personally reached into the machinery of their civilization and pulled the plug.

I had not.

For once, that distinction offered very little comfort.

The protection attached to my visit was the only reason their hostility remained directed through looks rather than attacks. Their leader had granted me passage, and violating that passage meant violating a rule he had established himself.

Anyone who harmed me would answer to him.

Personally.

Even here, among beings who had survived the destruction of their own stories, that consequence was sufficient.

A blade lowered.

A gathering of hostile light dispersed.

The attention remained.

I continued.

Most of the Darks' population resided throughout these hidden territories, with further domains extending into the vast, unindexed regions of the Deep Web.

Human beings used those names to describe different ways information could be reached. Private accounts, databases, and ordinary restricted systems belonged to the Deep Web; deliberately concealed networks formed the Dark Web within it.

Here, those distinctions had become places.

They had borders, districts, routes, and inhabitants.

The Darks had built a civilization across them.

And within the territories they controlled, business was suffering.

An administrator struck a frozen panel hard enough to split the desk beneath it.

"The transaction was already confirmed."

Across the room, another Dark dismissed several warning windows.

"Then confirm it again."

"The record is missing."

"Recover it."

"From what?"

That argument repeated itself in different forms throughout the surrounding domains.

The hidden networks had uses beyond crime, but the districts under observation had been claimed by people who preferred the criminal ones.

Some administered marketplaces for drugs, firearms, counterfeit goods, and forged identification documents. Others traded stolen credentials, financial records, compromised accounts, and access to systems whose owners had no idea they were being sold.

There were services supporting fraud, extortion, ransomware, and money laundering.

Farther within their holdings existed networks facilitating human trafficking and sexual exploitation, including archives of child sexual abuse material.

The screens made those crimes look manageable.

Listings. Categories. Account names. Payments.

Every clean little entry concealed somebody whose life had become another person's business.

The Darks overseeing those operations were angry about the interruption.

Their concern centered on missing inventory, delayed customers, broken access, and damaged reputations.

The victims had never occupied much space in their calculations.

Now those same operations were displaying errors, and the administrators wanted someone to blame.

Throughout the connected exchanges, familiar figures appeared among the gathering crowds.

A Dark bearing Doctor Doom's armored likeness studied a wall of recovery reports. Elsewhere, the measured breathing from a corrupted Darth Vader continued beneath the rising argument. Frieza watched a failed connection attempt with open irritation.

Around them stood people drawn from anime, films, comics, novels, games, and stories that had almost disappeared from human memory.

Some had once been heroes.

Their faces still carried enough familiarity to make that fact uncomfortable.

Others had always been monsters and had found this civilization remarkably accommodating.

Their power varied just as widely. A murderer who had once terrorized a single town could stand beneath the attention of something that regarded universes as disposable scenery.

Both belonged here.

Both were currently being inconvenienced.

That shared irritation did very little to improve their manners.

"Which district caused it?"

"The fault came from outside our holdings."

"Then find the source."

"We are trying."

A chair broke somewhere.

Several people began speaking at once.

One Dark ignored the argument long enough to investigate.

Lelouch vi Britannia stood before an interface whose restored connections were still arriving in uneven bursts.

This version of him had retained his patience for examining a problem.

Whatever else corruption had taken, it had left that much intact.

He drew a hand across the display, moving past the local failure reports toward the Surface Web: the public pages and services ordinary search engines could index.

From there, he followed the interruption back toward the incoming information.

Toward the Bridge.

The first recovered images appeared.

Unfinished structures.

Broken upload channels.

Two figures tearing through a landscape that had never finished becoming one.

Lelouch leaned closer.

The display advanced.

Anansi.

Adriel.

A red distortion spread across the recording.

Then the connection failed.

Lelouch reopened it.

The next image lasted only a fraction of a second, but it was enough to make his eyes widen.

He seized the exchange's broadcast channel.

"All districts. Look at this."

His voice entered the surrounding interfaces.

Further relays carried it beyond the exchange, across the Darks' holdings, into the deeper territories where increasingly remote presences turned their attention toward him.

Lelouch enlarged the recovered images.

"The battle has left the stories."

The argument around him began to quiet.

"Anansi and the Guardian are in the Bridge."

That announcement traveled faster than the displays could finish reproducing it.

Across the Dark Web and its adjoining territories, windows opened.

The same damaged images appeared before rulers, merchants, soldiers, administrators, and things that had never bothered accepting any of those titles.

Adriel and Anansi collided across the recovered feed.

The recording broke into errors again.

Then a live connection returned.

Light filled it.

An enormous disturbance was expanding through the Bridge, swallowing the visible routes before the display could establish a reliable boundary.

For a moment, even the angriest administrators forgot their failed transactions.

Lelouch's expression tightened.

"Whatever happened during the interruption, it is still happening."

Someone approached his display.

"Where are the other Guardians?"

Lelouch brought up the remaining fragments.

Three figures had crossed the Bridge before the crash. Their passage ended at a point the recovered data could no longer follow.

"They left the visible routes."

A silence settled around that answer.

Then somebody smiled.

The change spread.

Some Darks leaned toward the displays with sudden interest. Others exchanged glances, their earlier irritation giving way to an expression far less reassuring.

The last Nexus.

Their leader had searched for it for so long that its continued absence had become a wound in the middle of their conquest.

Territories could be occupied. Stories could be infiltrated. Entire populations could be corrupted or erased.

Yet somewhere, that final refuge remained beyond their grasp.

The Guardians still had somewhere to return.

Somewhere to recover.

Somewhere to remain out of reach.

And now three of them had disappeared from a battlefield where concealment was already becoming difficult.

Nobody had found the entrance.

That scarcely mattered to the people beginning to imagine what would happen if they did.

"They cannot have gone far."

"You don't know that."

"Then we follow what remains of their passage."

Another voice entered from a distant domain.

"Whoever locates it will have his attention."

That was the point at which curiosity became ambition.

For a lesser Dark, recognition from their leader could change everything.

Many possessed no territory of their own. They served within somebody else's domain, occupied borrowed space, or survived by attaching themselves to operations controlled by stronger inhabitants.

They followed orders.

They surrendered opportunities.

They watched power and privilege remain in the hands of people who had acquired both long before they arrived.

Finding the last Nexus could lift them out of that existence.

A website of their own.

Authority over a district.

A higher place among the people who currently dismissed them.

Perhaps something greater, if their leader considered the discovery worthy of it.

They began making plans before anyone had granted them permission.

"I'm going."

"You'll be dead before you reach them."

"Then you can stay here."

"And let you take the credit?"

The smiles sharpened.

Among the established rulers, the reaction was less enthusiastic.

Their domains had already given them what the others wanted.

They owned infrastructure, commanded subordinates, and possessed influence extending across multiple operations. An unscheduled expedition into a collapsing layer offered them very little comfort.

The Guardians had already interrupted business from a considerable distance.

What would happen if the fight moved closer?

A damaged Bridge meant broken incoming routes. A wider failure could reach connections their own territories depended upon.

Some administrators were already receiving reports from customers demanding explanations, associates refusing to proceed, and subordinates trying to conceal how much had been lost.

Their irritation hardened.

"This needs to end before they damage anything else."

"Then send someone competent."

"We have an entire civilization standing here."

"And apparently none of you can organize it."

The accusation produced an immediate response.

Several responses.

One arrived with enough force to crack the edge of a neighboring platform.

I moved my attention slightly farther away.

My authorization remained valid.

My preference for avoiding unnecessary proximity also remained valid.

Despite the argument, both groups wanted much the same outcome.

The ambitious wanted a discovery.

The established wanted the disruption stopped.

Both would gladly accept their leader's favor along the way.

Anansi's situation barely entered the discussion.

Some regarded him with irritation for allowing the conflict to spill out of its assigned setting. Others watched the scale of the disturbance and reconsidered how close they wished to stand to it.

None suggested leaving the Guardians alone.

The first serious proposal came through a command channel above the exchange.

"We enter together. Overwhelm them before they can retreat."

Several Darks agreed.

Then Lelouch looked away from his display.

"If everyone enters together, you will bring the Bridge down yourselves."

A hostile presence turned toward him.

"There are no story restrictions there."

"There are still consequences."

He enlarged the damaged section of the map.

Within a story, the restrictions were comparatively narrow. Five or six Darks might enter before the setting could no longer accommodate the intrusion.

Beyond the omniverses, those entry limits changed.

The Bridge could contain vastly larger forces.

Its capacity still depended on what those forces brought with them.

A hundred sufficiently powerful Darks could create a problem that a million weaker ones would not.

And the layer currently receiving their attention had just endured a battle between two beings capable of interrupting the entire network.

Nobody possessed a reliable estimate of how much strain it could withstand now.

Lelouch indicated the spreading errors.

"You want to investigate the outage by causing another one."

That earned him several unpleasant looks.

It also slowed the argument.

"Then separate the forces," another Dark said.

"Separate routes?"

"Separate arrivals. We go in waves."

The suggestion spread through the connected districts.

It offered something to everyone.

The first formations could secure surviving passages and pursue the Guardians. Further waves could follow as space became available.

Those with greater power would enter under tighter restrictions.

Millions could participate without occupying the same damaged section at the same instant.

It was workable.

The difficulty began when they tried deciding who would go first.

"My forces are already prepared."

"Your forces couldn't survive the light coming off that display."

"Then yours can hold the route while mine investigate."

"You mean while you take the credit."

No one denied it.

Departure points began appearing across the exchange before the assignments had been settled.

Weapons emerged.

Command channels filled with competing orders.

A Dark attempted to step through an unfinished passage and was dragged back by someone who apparently considered that departure an unacceptable advantage.

The resulting exchange sent both of them tumbling across a platform.

More voices rose.

Across several adjoining domains, smaller confrontations followed.

People who had recently agreed that an uncontrolled influx might cause another crash were now damaging their own assembly areas in the rush to prevent somebody else from arriving first.

The Bridge's condition continued deteriorating on the displays.

The argument grew louder.

Then someone was there.

At the far end of the exchange.

No arrival announced him.

Nothing opened to admit him.

The crowd simply became aware that their leader was present.

"Enough."

The fighting stopped.

A raised weapon remained suspended for a moment before its owner hurriedly lowered it.

Several Darks stepped away from the passages they had opened.

Others straightened, trying to recover a dignity their previous behavior had done very little to preserve.

The silence spread across the connected territories.

I cannot give you his face.

I cannot give you a name.

The presence before them yielded nothing I could carry into a description, and I had no intention of filling that absence with guesses.

Their Boss.

Their Leader.

Their God.

Those were the titles that mattered here.

They mattered enough to silence beings who had spent entire stories refusing to acknowledge anybody above them.

His displeasure required no visible expression.

It showed in the way powerful figures suddenly became careful about where they stood.

In the way someone who had been shouting orders a moment earlier now seemed desperate to avoid drawing attention.

In the way even the most arrogant inhabitants waited.

The leader allowed that silence to continue.

Then he spoke.

"You have identified an opportunity."

Nobody answered.

"And your first response was to obstruct one another."

A commander lowered his head.

Farther away, an unauthorized passage quietly closed.

"The Bridge has already been damaged. You will not finish destroying it before you reach your objective."

His attention passed across the gathering.

Every connected domain seemed to feel it.

The Darks had assumed he already knew what had happened.

That assumption had been correct.

No one offered him the recordings.

No one attempted to explain the outage.

He continued as though the entire argument had occurred directly in front of him.

Perhaps it had.

"The last Nexus has delayed us long enough."

The words changed the atmosphere.

Ambition remained, but it became a much quieter thing.

"You will locate it."

A murmur of acknowledgment traveled through the exchange.

It stopped when he continued.

"You will enter the Bridge in assigned formations. Your combined power will determine the size of each wave. The condition of the route will determine when the next wave follows."

The scattered plans reorganized across the displays.

Tentative departures vanished.

New assignments took their place.

"Those capable of collapsing a passage by entering it will remain in reserve until called."

Several of the largest presences grew still.

"Those securing the routes will hold them. Those searching will report what they find immediately."

The leader paused.

"You will not conceal a discovery to improve your standing."

Someone in the crowd swallowed.

"You will not abandon an assigned position because you believe another formation is closer."

The unfinished passages across the exchange closed one after another.

"And you will not mistake personal ambition for permission."

There it was.

The part of the order that reached everyone.

The lesser Darks wanted territory.

The established wanted their holdings protected.

Their leader had given both groups a task, and neither had been offered any room to interpret it creatively.

A voice answered from the front of the gathering.

"Yes, my lord."

Others followed.

The leader's attention returned to the displays.

The light within the damaged section of the Bridge still obscured much of what was happening.

Somewhere inside it were Adriel and Anansi.

Somewhere beyond the visible routes were the other three Guardians.

And somewhere they had yet to find was the last Nexus.

"Watch where they retreat."

The order passed into every waiting formation.

"Follow the route. Find the refuge."

He allowed a brief silence.

"Kill whoever prevents you."

Nobody argued.

The disorganized gathering began moving with a discipline that had been entirely absent a moment earlier.

Ranks formed across the exchanges.

Separate forces received their passages. Powerful individuals who had been preparing to depart alone now remained where they had been assigned, their irritation carefully contained.

Across the Dark Web, operations passed into the hands of deputies.

Site administrators left recovery tasks unfinished.

Private armies assembled beneath commands that reached into the deeper territories, drawing still more Darks toward the staging areas.

The numbers rose into the millions.

Beyond those formations, reserves continued gathering.

There would be further waves.

Then others.

Enough to keep pressing into the Bridge while the Guardians exhausted whatever strength they still possessed.

Their leader regarded the preparations.

"Proceed."

The first authorized passages opened.

Through them lay damaged streams of incoming information, broken routes, and a battlefield that had already consumed more than anyone involved could afford.

The Darks moved toward it.

I watched the leading formations approach their assigned thresholds.

For the Guardians, defeating Anansi had just become part of a much larger problem.

They could still finish him.

They might still recover one another and reach their refuge before these forces found the route.

But they were four people.

The civilization preparing to pursue them had armies waiting behind its armies, and its strongest inhabitants had barely begun to move.

So, Adriel—

Whatever you managed to take from Anansi, make it enough.

Kill him.

Get the others.

Leave.

The first wave was coming.

To Be Continued...