Chapter 223: Ethan's Doubts
Ethan had no idea.
He'd gone to the Spider-Society, broken a few floors, made a few hundred friends, and come home. Simple enough, as his days went. He didn't know that the ripples from that visit were already spreading through organizations he'd never heard of in rooms he'd never seen. He didn't know Tsukasa had found his way into Reed's Illuminati. He didn't know about Spider-Man Kang, or the Reed Dimensional Council's quiet decision to route his assessment through the local Reed Richards, or the way Immortus had stood alone in an empty colosseum and spoken to a dead man's memory.
He was sitting on the second-floor balcony of the Lucky Dragon with a cigarette, watching the city.
Hell's Kitchen at night had its own quality — not quiet exactly, never quite quiet, but a different register than the daytime noise. The construction sounds had stopped. The streets below carried the ordinary sounds of people going home or not going home, of a neighborhood that was becoming something different from what it had been, slowly, block by block.
He'd been thinking for a while.
The more you gain, the more you carry. He turned the thought over without particular urgency. It wasn't a new observation. He'd just been feeling the weight of it more concretely since the Spider-Society, since standing in front of a hundred damaged Spider-Men and telling them their universes were stable as long as he stayed alive. Which was true. Which was also a strange thing to have become true about yourself.
He'd come into this as a transmigrator with a survival plan and not much else. Keep his head down, use the System, get strong enough that the world's various catastrophes didn't kill him, find a way home eventually. That had been the whole program.
At some point the program had changed and he hadn't noticed until it was already different.
I'm a selfish person, he thought, without much conviction. I was supposed to be a selfish person.
The transmigrator playbook, as he'd understood it before he'd ever needed to use it: don't get attached. Treat the people around you as context, not as stakes. Use the System, build the power, don't let sentiment slow you down. He'd read enough of those stories to know the template.
He'd meant to follow it. He genuinely had.
And then Wade had shown up with flowers at entirely the wrong moment, and Fisk had started calling him nephew, and Tobey-Peter had looked at him with that earnest hero-worship that was somehow more disarming than any attack he'd faced, and somewhere in there the template had become unworkable.
The truth was simpler than the philosophy: he'd gotten most of his abilities from these people. The Gravity-Gravity Fruit came from somewhere. The Rumble-Rumble Fruit, the Ultra Instinct, the Spider-Sense, the surgical skill, the swordsmanship. All of it had a face attached to it. Walking away from that felt like a specific kind of ingratitude he didn't actually want to be capable of.
Equivalent exchange, he thought. I got their power. That means I owe them something.
It was a cleaner framing than sentiment. He found it easier to hold.
The question he kept circling was the one he hadn't answered yet, the one that sat underneath all the others: if he could go back — if a door opened tomorrow to wherever he'd come from before all this — would he take it?
He thought about his parents. He didn't know if they were still there. He'd been in this world long enough that the answer to that question had become genuinely uncertain, and the uncertainty was its own kind of fear — the fear of going back and finding the thing you'd been homesick for was already gone.
He thought about what going back would actually mean. The office. The commute. The particular smallness of a life that fit inside a job description. He'd done that. He remembered how it felt.
And he thought about what was here. The building he was sitting on top of. The people sleeping in it, or working in the kitchen below, or patrolling the streets because they'd chosen to. The community school with its impossible faculty roster. The ongoing, improbable project of making this neighborhood into something that would last.
He'd lived here for more than twenty years, in this world's accounting. For everyone else in it, this was simply the world — the only one they had, with all its weight and texture and irreversibility. He'd come in knowing it was fiction and had stayed long enough that it had become something else.
Can I go back to being a regular person after this? He didn't know. He suspected the answer was no, and wasn't sure how he felt about that.
What he knew was that going home had been his fixed star for a long time, the thing he'd been navigating toward, and somewhere it had quietly changed from a destination into a habit of thought. The thing that kept him moving now wasn't the door back. It was the people on this side of it.
He stubbed out the cigarette and let the thought settle without resolving it.
Table it. He had a talent for that.
There were more immediate questions anyway. The System — where it had come from, why him, what exactly he was inside its logic. He probed at those edges occasionally and found the same wall each time: something his mind couldn't get purchase on, too large or too strange or simply not yet knowable.
And then the actual threats. Thanos was out there somewhere in this timeline, building toward something. Kang — multiple Kangs, different flavors, different agendas — was apparently in motion in ways he was only beginning to understand. The gap between what he could currently do and what he'd need to be able to do was still real, even after everything.
Stop philosophizing and get stronger, he thought, with mild self-mockery. That's actually the plan.
He leaned back in the chair, looked up at whatever stars were visible through the light pollution, and let the night be quiet for a little while.
The Gacha was always there. That was something.
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