Peter brought the hammer down.
The ancient Uru metal crashed into Anansi's face with a deafening crack, unleashing a shockwave that shattered the bedrock beneath them. Peter didn't pause to catch his breath. He hoisted Mjolnir high above his head, the leather strap groaning in his grip, and brought it down again. And again.
"Whack!" Peter yelled over the roaring thunder. "And another one! High score in Asgardian Whack-A-Mole!"
Peter had successfully trapped the God of Stories in his own narrative snare. A pure lie offered Anansi infinite room to counter with a stronger fabrication. But Peter had framed his deception within a strict logical structure—a story with defined rules. The god was bound by the very domain he ruled.
Mjolnir slammed into Anansi's jaw. The god's head snapped back, his eyes rolling lazily in their sockets. But despite the brutal, relentless impacts, Anansi didn't bleed. His dark skin showed nothing more than minor, superficial scrapes.
Anansi just smiled, taking a full-force blow from a thunder god's weapon without flinching.
Peter stopped. His chest heaved, his lungs burning inside the Iron Spider armor. The physical resistance of the body beneath him felt wrong. It felt hollow.
Peter raised the hammer and unleashed a blinding, radial wave of blue lightning mixed with his own golden bio-electricity. The current washed over the entire mountain peak, incinerating every shadow.
The battered, smiling Anansi on the ground flickered. He dissolved into a cloud of golden dust.
Thirty feet away, the real Anansi sat casually on a jagged boulder. He had been resting for a solid two minutes.
"Don't you ever get tired?" Anansi asked, resting his chin on his hand. "Hammering away at a mirage over and over again with that chipped mallet?"
Peter lowered Mjolnir. The black symbiote writhed aggressively over his shoulders. "Don't you find hiding behind illusions a little boring? I always spot them eventually."
Anansi laughed. He stood up, slowly stretching his arms. The joints popped with the sound of grinding boulders. The God of Stories understood the reality of the situation. The mortal boy possessed a terrifyingly unyielding will and held a weapon forged in the heart of a dying star. This was a complete stalemate. Anansi knew he would have to retreat.
But a god did not leave a battlefield without teaching the mortal a lesson in humility.
"You know," Anansi said, his voice dropping into a cold, resonant baritone. "We Spider-Totems are incredibly outstanding compared to the rest of our species. The sheer, cosmic power you inherit when the spider bites you is almost unimaginable." Anansi offered a chilling smile. "But there is one fundamental difference between you and I, Patriarch. You are human."
The air pressure plummeted.
"I was born a god."
Anansi exploded forward. He moved faster than the lightning cracking overhead. Peter swung Mjolnir in a brutal, horizontal arc to intercept the charge.
The hammer passed straight through Anansi's chest. Another phantom.
Spider-sense screamed. Before Peter could pivot, a thick cable of golden spider-silk slapped squarely against his backplate. Anansi yanked the line with catastrophic force. Peter's boots left the ground. Anansi spun him in a massive, dizzying circle through the air, building terrifying centrifugal momentum, before violently hurling him toward the cliff face.
Peter didn't even have time to fire a web. Anansi materialized right in front of him mid-air. The god grabbed the back of Peter's neck, his fingers digging into the gold-titanium armor.
"You are just a Spider-Man among mortals!" Anansi roared. "I am the Spider-Man of the gods!"
Anansi slammed Peter face-first into the solid granite of the mountainside.
He didn't stop. Using his momentum, Anansi flew forward, physically dragging Peter's face through the rock. The impact carved a trench five meters deep across the cliff. Jagged stone shrieked against the Iron Spider plating. A shower of blinding orange sparks rained down into the valley.
Miles away, in the smoldering ruins of Hammerfall, Clint Barton dug through a pile of collapsed brick. He grabbed Deadpool by the tactical harness and hauled him out of the rubble.
"We have to get up there!" Clint roared over the wind. His cybernetic eye whirred frantically, tracking the violent bursts of light illuminating the distant peaks.
"Are you out of your mind?!" Wade wheezed, aggressively popping his dislocated shoulder back into its socket. "That is a literal god-tier boss fight! We are level-one NPCs with zero healing potions! Besides, Spidey never dies. He is Disney's most profitable IP! Nobody squanders the golden goose while actively paying for the crossover budget!"
"I don't care about your corporate synergy!" Clint yelled, grabbing Wade by the collar. "I only care that an Avenger is currently getting his skull caved in!"
Clint pointed a trembling finger toward the edge of town. Parked half-buried in the sand was a sleek, retro-futuristic hovercar bearing a faded '4' insignia. Clint had scavenged the Fantastic Four vehicle from the Hulk Gang's garage for one specific reason: it could fly.
Wade stared at the flying car. He slapped his thighs. "A flying car? Oh, say less! I'm driving. Colonel Sanders, you just sit in the back and shoot. The more arrows, the better. Go for the one-hit kill!"
"I have lived for over seventy years, Wade," Clint grunted, vaulting into the passenger seat. "And I have never missed a shot. So having only one daughter is definitely not my fault."
Before Wade could hit the ignition, a figure scrambled over the side of the hull. Clint froze. Ashley dropped into the backseat. She had stripped off her grease-stained overalls, replacing them with Clint's old, faded purple tactical uniform. She didn't wear a mask.
"You little brat, what the hell do you think you're doing?!" Clint barked.
"Making sure my deadbeat dad doesn't look down on me for the rest of my life," Ashley shot back, racking the slide of a scavenged shotgun. She slapped Wade on the shoulder. "Hit the gas, Uncle Wade."
"Alright, folks, I have a line I legally have to say right here," Wade announced, taking a deep, dramatic breath. He slammed his boot onto the accelerator. The hovercar rocketed straight up into the sky. "FREEDOM!"
High in the mountains, Peter Parker did not feel free.
The grinding of solid granite against his skull was deafening. If Venom hadn't surged out of the suit's seams—forming a thick, biological shock-absorber over Peter's face—his skull would have been pulverized. The black symbiote hissed in pain, blindly lashing out. A massive black tendril formed a backhand, slapping Anansi squarely in the chest.
The god's grip broke. Peter tumbled out of the trench, free-falling toward the valley below.
Peter twisted mid-air. He hurled Mjolnir directly at Anansi, channeling every ounce of bio-electricity he had left. A massive web of blue lightning erupted from the hammer, blanketing the sky to incinerate any potential illusions.
Anansi didn't dodge. He simply stood there.
As the Uru metal closed the distance, Anansi flicked his wrist. A strand of golden silk shot out, sticking directly to Peter's chest plate. Anansi yanked hard, violently pulling Peter straight into a devastating right hook.
The punch landed squarely on Peter's sternum. The Iron Spider armor cracked. Peter was sent rocketing backward into the dirt.
"Who do you think you are?!" Anansi spat, rubbing his bruised knuckles. "You are not Thor! You are just a boy in a metal suit!"
Without even looking behind him, Anansi reached back and casually caught Mjolnir by the handle as it attempted to return to Peter. The god slammed the hammer down onto the bedrock. He fired three rapid bursts of thick golden silk, permanently webbing the ancient weapon to the mountain.
"You should feel proud, child," Anansi said, slowly walking toward Peter's prone body. "As a mortal who has deceived the God of Lies twice, your performance was exceptional. But you are not a god. Your power depends entirely on the narrative strength of the reality you inhabit. The only reason you survived this long is because you hail from the prime reality. Earth-616."
Anansi stopped at Peter's feet. Venom lashed out, attempting to wrap around the god's ankle. Anansi scoffed. He grabbed the thick black tendril and violently ripped a massive chunk of the symbiote clean off Peter's armor, tossing the writhing black sludge into the wind.
"You win the war, Patriarch," Anansi said coldly, raising his fist. Narrative energy glowed around his knuckles. "I cannot kill you. I cannot bring this timeline under the Legion's control. But I am going to show you exactly how broken a mortal can become when they insult the divine."
Peter pushed his hands into the dirt, desperate to stand.
Anansi drove his fist down.
Before the blow could land, a sharp, whistling sound cut through the howling wind.
Anansi sensed the projectile. A simple, primitive arrow flying rapidly toward his exposed back. The god didn't even turn his head. He flicked two fingers, firing a thin strand of golden silk to swat the nuisance out of the air.
Clint Barton's arrow grazed the golden web.
It didn't shatter. It didn't explode. It emitted a blinding, concentrated flash of red light.
Anansi's fist stopped inches from Peter's face. The god's dark eyes went wide with sudden, unadulterated panic.
Anansi began to shrink. The red Pym Particles violently collapsed the space between his atoms. In a fraction of a second, the towering God of Stories was reduced to the size of an ant, then a microbe, before vanishing entirely into the Quantum Realm.
The mountain fell dead silent.
The Fantastic Four hovercar slowly drifted over the ridge. Clint Barton lowered his bow, leaning over the side of the chassis. His cybernetic eye whirred as it scanned the empty dirt.
"That was my last Pym Particle arrow," Clint yelled down, a tired grin breaking across his scarred face. "I was originally saving that to shrink my ex-wife's new Ultron husband into a toaster. You got off easy, kid."