The golden spider-silk dissolved into fine, sparkling dust, scattering across the irradiated wind.
Deadpool and Hawkeye gasped, their eyes snapping open. Clint blinked rapidly, shaking the residual fog of the illusion from his brain. He looked over at Ashley, who was aggressively rubbing her temples, and then at Peter, who leaned heavily against a jagged boulder. Clint had no idea what had just transpired in the physical world.
Wade, however, shot straight up from the dirt. He clapped his hands to the sides of his mask, his chest heaving with lingering adrenaline.
"Oh, man! I just had the absolute greatest dream!" Wade cheered, kicking his legs in the dust. "I was the greatest superhero on the planet! I was internationally beloved! I even completely crushed Wolverine in the official popularity polls!"
Clint dragged a hand down his face, groaning. "I figured you were going to say you dreamed about being the world's biggest movie star."
Wade pushed himself off the ground and aggressively dusted off his tactical pants. "Please. That is a sad, pathetic pipe dream for Ryan Reynolds. That hack doesn't have a single decent script in our universe, and he is absolutely wallowing in the spectacular box-office dumpster fire that was Green Lantern. I am not Ryan Reynolds. I don't need Hollywood validation."
Wade grabbed the fabric at the base of his neck and ripped his red-and-black mask completely off.
"Because I am, without a single doubt, the sexiest man in Canada," Wade declared.
Ashley took one look at Wade's scarred, tumor-riddled, heavily disfigured face. Her stomach violently lurched. She doubled over, loudly gagging into the dirt.
Clint let out a raspy, genuine laugh. He turned his attention back to the center of the crater. Anansi lay pinned flat against the bedrock, completely immobilized beneath the heavy, squared head of Mjolnir. The Spider God's skin was charred and still smoking from the cosmic strike.
"So," Clint grunted, adjusting the strap of his quiver. "What do we do with this guy? Are you just going to keep him pressed to the pavement with a magic paperweight forever?"
"I honestly don't know," Peter sighed, the Iron Spider servos whining as he stood up. "The combined, concentrated power of every Thor-Spider in the multiverse just hit him squarely in the jaw, and it barely knocked him out. This single hammer isn't going to finish the job."
Peter knew the strike had breached multiversal boundaries, but its lethal capacity was clearly capped against a deity. Anansi possessed a terrifyingly massive health pool.
Ashley wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve, eyeing the sky nervously. "Where did all those lightning bolts go?"
"I don't really know," Peter answered honestly, his golden lenses tracking the dissipating storm clouds. "I just followed my gut. I let the Web pull the energy back. Sent the lightning wherever it was needed, I guess."
A low, painful groan echoed from the crater.
Anansi's dark eyes fluttered open. He strained, the muscles in his neck bulging as he tried to shift his weight. Mjolnir didn't budge a single millimeter.
"I should have left this specific errand to the Spider-Phoenix," Anansi rasped, spitting a glob of golden blood into the dirt. "She does not flinch at cosmic parlor tricks."
Clint froze. His cybernetic eye whirred, focusing sharply on the pinned god. "Spider-Phoenix? Are you kidding me? You guys have a Spider-Phoenix?"
Anansi offered a weak, blood-stained smile. "Of course. The Spider Legion is vastly more powerful than your primitive, localized minds can comprehend. I am merely the weakest of the Spider Gods—"
"—merely the weakest of the Spider Gods," Peter and Wade recited in perfect unison.
Anansi stopped, his jaw snapping shut. He glared up at them.
Wade threw his hands into the air, doing a little victory dance. "I told you! I literally called it! It is the exact same routine every single time! These evil syndicates always send the low-level miniboss first to give the protagonist enough XP to level up!"
Peter aggressively rubbed the bridge of his nose through the helmet. If the Spider Legion actually possessed a Spider-Phoenix variant then Peter's multiversal lightning trick might have only been a fifty-fifty coin toss against her. The terrifying reality was that the Spider Gods were actual deities. There were more of them. And Peter absolutely could not fight an entire pantheon at once.
Suddenly, Anansi's chest heaved. He stopped struggling against the hammer. His dark eyes locked onto Peter, and he began to chant in a rhythmic, booming cadence.
"Through darkest days and boundless nights, We hide in earth, forsake the light. When mercy fades and gods ascend, The multiverse will meet its end. All worlds will fall, all hope is shed, Caught within the Spider's web!"
Wade gasped, grabbing Peter by the armored shoulders and shaking him violently. "That's it! That's it! They actually have an evil lantern oath!"
Peter stared at the god, completely speechless. Did an entire multiversal syndicate really sit down and workshop a rhyming chant?
As Anansi finished the final syllable, his throat bulged unnaturally. He gagged violently, hacking a heavy, metallic object up his esophagus. A thick silver ring, encasing a brightly colored, living spider, rolled past his teeth and rested on his tongue.
Anansi smiled through the bile. "Do not get comfortable, Patriarch. We will not let the other Spider Gods fall so easily. But you should know... every time a Totem of your magnitude traverses the multiverse, you cause the Web of Life and Destiny to tremble. The sheer friction weakens the Web's sealing effect."
The ring began to glow with blinding red light.
"If the Web truly speaks to you," Anansi whispered, his form beginning to vibrate. "Ask it about the Hive Goddess."
With a sudden, violent crack of displaced air, Anansi vanished.
The heavy head of Mjolnir slammed down into the empty dirt with a dull thud.
Peter staggered backward. The agonizing, high-pitched screech of his spider-sense instantly dropped. The tension drained from his muscles as his nervous system recalibrated to baseline. Anansi was truly gone.
Will they just send another God? Peter thought frantically, staring at the empty crater. Can they send ordinary multiversal variants? What is the limit of their reach?
Clint stepped forward, his bow lowered. "Kid. What the hell is a Hive Goddess?"
"That..." Peter swallowed hard. "That is probably the real reason the Spider Gods are trying to build an army. She's a multiverse-level deity. Her name is Shathra."
Peter quickly fed them the lore, disguising his meta-comic knowledge as a vision gifted by the Web of Fate.
He explained the ancient history of the cosmos. Gaea, the Elder Earth Goddess, wanted to map the future of humanity. Her daughter, Shathra, provided an answer: The Great Nest. It was a perfect honeycomb structure. Every human soul would be born, raised, and ultimately assimilated into a single, unified hive-mind. Total conformity. Zero conflict.
But Shathra's sister, Neith, wove a superior map: The Great Web. The Web of Life and Destiny. In Neith's design, human souls were not isolated in a hive; they moved freely across the intersecting threads of fate, possessing absolute free will.
Gaea chose the Web.
Enraged by the chaotic, unpredictable nature of free will, Shathra declared war. She attempted to destroy the Web and replace it with her Hive. She failed, and her true form was permanently sealed deep within the threads of the Web of Fate.
Clint's face went pale. "A multiverse-level evil god? What happens if she breaks the seal?"
"She overwrites reality," Peter said, his voice grim. "She replaces the Web of Fate with her Hive. It would instantly rewrite the entire multiverse, stripping every single human being across infinity of their free will. We'd all just become mindless drones." Peter tightened his grip on Mjolnir's handle. "But don't panic. The Web of Fate is theoretically unbreakable. As long as the Spider Gods don't rip it apart with their portals, the seal holds."
But in his mind, Peter's thoughts raced toward a much darker conclusion. Unless someone completes the ritual to destroy the Web.
Peter knew the required components.
The first step was spilling the blood of "The Other" across the Web, ensuring the Spider-Totem would no longer reside in living hosts. In the comics, that required Kaine, Peter's clone. Luckily, nobody was actively cloning him right now.
The second step was spilling the blood of "The Bride" across the threads, ensuring a Totem could never be born by chance again.
The Bride was Cindy Moon.
Peter's heart hammered against his ribs. He needed to get back to New York. He had to protect Cindy at all costs.
The third step was sacrificing "The Scion"—the youngest, newly born Spider-Totem in the multiverse.
As long as the Spider Gods were kept in check, and the ritual was prevented, Shathra would remain buried in the dark. But the board had just expanded. Peter wasn't just fighting street-level thugs anymore. He was fighting for the free will of the entire multiverse.
PS: A massive shoutout to the original author for weaving in that epic, Green Lantern-style oath for the Spider Legion! Also, for those curious about the deep lore, Shathra is a terrifying deep-cut! She first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 2) #46 back in 2002. Originally, she was just an astral predator that hunted Spider-Totems across the astral plane. But after the massive Spider-Geddon comic event, Marvel writers patched her lore, upgrading her into a terrifying, multiverse-level queen codenamed the "Spider-Wasp"!