Peter Parker was currently flying completely solo. Without the Venom symbiote wrapping his muscles in alien biomass, his raw strength and durability had dropped significantly. He was back to relying entirely on his own baseline abilities.
But he still had to face Kang the Conqueror.
"Your sheer mental resilience may have freed you from the illusion, Spider-Man," Kang boasted, his voice dripping with arrogant certainty. He hovered slightly above the ground on his Time Chair, looking down at the exhausted teenager. "But waking up has only brought you destruction. You cannot stop me from eradicating the Cosmic Cube anomaly. Cease your futile resistance. I am fighting to save the entire multiverse."
In a way, Kang was right; Peter's current predicament was entirely his own fault.
When the kinetic shockwave hit the tarmac, Adam Warlock's Soul Stone had forcefully absorbed everyone in the blast radius, trapping them inside a pocket dimension and burying their consciousness in idyllic, personalized dream worlds. This effectively neutralized the Cosmic Cube by temporarily sealing Michael Korvac's volatile energy inside the Stone.
Only a handful of individuals had managed to break the illusion. Cindy Moon was one of them, her innate Silk-Sense immediately recognizing that the Peter Parker in her dream was a fake.
But Cindy wasn't the first to wake up. Peter and Kang the Conqueror had beaten her to it.
Kang's mind had broken free from the temporal and spatial constraints of the illusion thanks to the raw power of the Time Stone embedded in his armor.
Peter, however, was anchored by something far older. His connection to the Web of Fate and his status as the Spider Patriarch made his mind highly resistant to external reality-warping. He had realized the truth of the Soul Stone's illusion almost instantly. Once awake, Peter had attempted to telepathically reach out to Korvac, hoping to ground the man. He had actually succeeded. Korvac's scattered energy had reformed into his physical body, though his mind remained completely catatonic as the Soul Stone fed him fragmented desires from the other dreamers.
But Peter's success had immediately drawn Kang's attention.
Fortunately, the Time Stone's power was severely muffled while trapped inside the Soul Stone's domain. When Kang attempted to use the emerald gem to permanently erase Peter and Korvac from the timeline, the Soul Stone violently intervened. The resulting cosmic clash restricted Kang's powers, only allowing the Conqueror to isolate himself, Peter, and the catatonic Korvac into a locked, localized temporal pocket.
"You're talking about saving the multiverse, but you're perfectly willing to completely vaporize twenty-first-century Earth to do it!" Peter shot back, dropping into a low combat stance. "You didn't even stop to consider that Reed Richards might actually be able to fix Korvac's mind and send him home peacefully!"
Kang didn't care about the twenty-first century. He only cared about preserving his thirty-first-century empire from the impending multiversal collapse. In his mind, his victory was the only acceptable mathematical outcome.
"If you refuse to see logic, Spider-Man," Kang said coldly, raising his hands, "then I will simply eliminate you first, and execute Korvac second."
Kang tapped a control on his gauntlet. The Time Stone flared. He didn't teleport; he hyper-accelerated his own localized timeline, moving at speeds that defied standard physics, attempting to bypass Peter to reach the catatonic Korvac.
Peter's Spider-Sense screamed. He ducked, barely dodging a crackling energy strike from Kang's gauntlet, and threw a desperate, twisting uppercut. His knuckles slammed into Kang's faceplate, cracking the purple polycarbonate visor.
The crack automatically repaired itself in a millisecond. Kang turned, raising his wrist blaster.
Peter didn't hesitate. He tapped into the latent abilities granted by the Universe 42 spider bite. His bio-electric field shifted, completely bending the ambient light around his body. In the blink of an eye, Spider-Man turned entirely invisible.
Kang stopped, his blaster aimed at empty air. He tapped the side of his helmet, activating a multi-spectrum chronal analysis scan to see through the active camouflage.
But the Conqueror still couldn't find him.
Because Peter wasn't hiding in the grass. He was stuck directly to the back of Kang's own Time Chair.
Let's see your armor absorb this, Peter thought. He pressed both hands flat against the metallic chassis of the throne. He channeled every ounce of the bio-electricity humming in his nervous system, unleashing a massive, blinding surge of yellow venom-lightning directly into the chair's circuitry.
The high-voltage current violently arced over the throne, enveloping Kang in a localized lightning storm.
"You primitive insect!" Kang roared, the futuristic alloys of his armor easily absorbing and grounding the electrical current. He spun around in the chair, his armored hand shooting out to grab Peter by the throat. "Did you believe a crude electrical discharge could penetrate thirty-first-century shielding?!"
Peter dropped his invisibility, hanging suspended in Kang's grip. He didn't panic. He just stared the warlord dead in the eyes through his white lenses.
"Nope," Peter quipped, his voice entirely calm. "But it definitely got you to stop moving, didn't it?"
Peter planted both feet squarely on the center of Kang's chest plate, reared his fist back, and punched the Conqueror squarely in the jaw with the proportional strength of a spider.
"We need to find Reed Richards."
Cindy Moon stood on the empty streets of Hell's Kitchen. She knew exactly what they had to do. Even with the brilliant, reformed Doctor Octopus trying to crunch the numbers in Peter's dream world, there was no way to build a functional time machine purely out of subconscious desire.
They needed the smartest man in the world. They needed Reed Richards to physically invent a way to breach Kang's time-locked pocket.
Their first stop had been Adam Warlock. Unfortunately, the glowing golden guardian was currently in terrible shape. The Soul Stone was fundamentally tied to his life force, and right now, his internal pocket dimension was hosting an Infinity Stone, a time-traveling warlord, an enraged Spider-Man, and a highly unstable Cosmic Cube. Adam looked incredibly pale, practically doubled over in the golden grass as if he were suffering from a cosmic stomach ache. He was completely powerless to intervene.
All Adam could do was grant Gwen and Cindy access to the other heroes' pocket universes, hoping they could wake up enough heavy hitters to turn the tide.
"I will attempt to guide you toward the proper dimensional doors," Adam wheezed, clutching his stomach. "But the interference is too strong. I cannot see clearly whose minds these doors belong to. You must navigate them blindly."
"For a guy who looks like a literal god, he's surprisingly useless," Gwen muttered under her breath as they left Adam behind.
Cindy didn't respond. She stared at a shimmering, vertical rift of light hovering in the air before them. Without a word, she stepped through. Gwen took a deep breath and followed.
The transition was instant. The golden fields vanished.
Gwen stumbled onto a cracked concrete sidewalk. She looked around, her eyes widening behind her mask. The cars parallel-parked along the street were entirely boxy sedans and station wagons with wood paneling. The pedestrians were sporting massive perms, denim jackets, and neon leg warmers.
"Okay," Gwen scratched the side of her masked head. "Unless Mr. Fantastic has a secret obsession with 1980s music videos, I'm pretty sure we walked into the wrong dream. Whose universe is this?"
Cindy looked around, equally confused.
Before either of them could formulate a plan, a rhythmic, upbeat bassline echoed down the block.
"Heeeeey (hey)! What's the matter with your head? Yeah..."
Peter Quill came jogging down the sidewalk. The Star-Lord had a massive, carefree grin plastered across his face. He was wearing an old-school Sony Walkman, bobbing his head perfectly to the beat of Redbone's "Come and Get Your Love."
Instead of his usual twin quad-blasters, Quill was happily pushing a metal shopping cart. The cart was absolutely overflowing with vintage 1980s children's toys—Rubik's Cubes, Transformers, a pristine Atari system, and an entire mountain of unopened comic books. He looked like a kid who had just been given the keys to a mall.
Quill danced right past Gwen and Cindy, completely oblivious to the two Spider-Women staring at him.
"So..." Gwen pointed a thumb at the dancing space mercenary. "Should we... wake him up too?"