"Sorry. I was merely communicating with them in a language they could understand. Please don't mistake me for some kind of villain."
Despite the apology, Joey sounded utterly unapologetic.
He glanced at the three Spider-People below, who looked as though they were moments away from vomiting up yesterday's apple pie, then confirmed none of them were carrying any sort of tracking device.
Satisfied, he prepared to leave with the two halves of Daemos's corpse.
"Wait!"
Despite the gruesome scene before her, Peni Parker calmly called out to stop him.
"Can you help us?"
"I already am."
Joey casually lifted the two halves of Daemos as he spoke.
The gesture immediately caused the other three Spider-People, who had only just begun recovering, to dry-heave all over again.
He studied the black-haired girl standing before him.
Among the four Spider-People present, the only one who hadn't been visibly disturbed by his rather visceral display was ironically the youngest of them all—the pilot of the Spider-EVA, Peni Parker.
That made Joey a little curious about her past.
"You've clearly been through a lot."
"It's nothing."
"Just another normal day in the life of Spider-Man."
Peni disliked discussing her past.
She piloted a mech that had devoured her father when she was only nine years old.
And not long ago, the second-generation unit Venom, developed from the same Spider-Mech technology, had killed both one of her classmates and Aunt May.
In Peni's eyes, the only way to survive was to build thick emotional walls around herself.
"Let's stop here."
"We all need some rest."
The person suffering the most wasn't actually the three Spider-People currently shaking from nausea.
It was Starfire.
Her extraordinarily powerful empathic abilities could sometimes become a burden.
Like right now.
There was simply too much pain in the air.
"Keep an eye on the spiders for me, Starfire."
Observing the visitors from other universes, Joey noticed that almost every one of them seemed burdened by hardship and loss.
The only exception was the pig, who somehow still looked optimistic.
Joey realized he needed to accelerate his plans.
Originally, he had intended to proceed slowly.
He would rather do nothing than make a mistake.
His plan had been to carefully search for the perfect solution somewhere between future and past.
But now... he probably didn't have that luxury anymore.
The method he'd used to split Daemos in half might frighten the Inheritors temporarily.
But it wouldn't keep a family of endlessly resurrecting lunatics away forever.
Sooner or later, they would return.
This universe, much like his home universe, was not some safe vacation destination.
The appearance of the Fantastic Four's warning and the arrival of the Inheritors had already made that abundantly clear.
Just as he'd said before, it wouldn't even surprise him if a Celestial from ancient times suddenly emerged from Earth tomorrow.
At this point, making mistakes was preferable to standing still.
He had to do something.
And first...
Joey looked down at the object in his hands—the two neatly separated halves of Daemos.
What exactly was the Inheritors' weakness again?
Someone could help him figure that out.
---
"Radiation."
After only a brief examination, Norman Osborn—who had never become the Green Goblin due to a failed genetics experiment—offered his preliminary conclusion.
"This creature's DNA contains fragments from numerous animal species."
"It's an absolute mess."
"I estimate that even 0.1 roentgen of radiation would be enough to make its cellular structure extremely unstable."
Norman had originally been working in a private laboratory, racing against time to produce the first sample of a biological treatment.
As one of the foremost experts in biological sciences, he had known from the moment he obtained Joey's genetic algorithm that it would work.
All he needed now were a few final rounds of live-subject testing.
If everything proceeded smoothly, within a month he would be able to cure genetic diseases and eliminate the hereditary curse that had plagued the Osborn family for generations.
He never expected that the friend he'd sent away earlier that morning with an eight-million-dollar check would return so quickly.
Nor had he expected that friend to appear wearing another identity already known throughout New York.
Superman.
"No need to worry."
Norman's hands trembled slightly as he held the scalpel.
He couldn't tell whether the shaking came from his genetic illness... or from something else entirely.
"I will keep your secret identity confidential. You have my word"
After all, nearly every active superhero in the world hid their true identity behind a mask.
Most people—whether admirers or enemies of superheroes—wanted to tear away their masks and uncover their true identities.
Norman Osborn, however, saw things very differently.
Those masks weren't just there to protect the heroes themselves.
They were there to protect ordinary people like him.
It was like Schrödinger's box.
Before a superhero's identity was revealed, the box merely contained a harmless cat.
The moment the box was opened, that cat could instantly become a man-eating tiger.
And right now, Norman felt as though the box had been opened.
Why had Superman revealed his identity to him?
They barely knew each other.
There was no reason for Superman to trust him.
"You're overthinking it."
Seeing Norman frowning so intensely over the subject of secret identities, Joey finally realized what was worrying him.
"Stop scaring yourself."
"A secret identity is pretty much irrelevant to me."
Ever since that night, no matter which universe he found himself in, Joey Joseph Kent had effectively ceased to exist.
Only Superman remained.
"Haa..."
Norman finally let out a long breath of relief.
Thankfully, Superman's response had been 'you're overthinking it' rather than 'you know too much.'
"Is there anything else you'd like to know about—"
Norman turned around, preparing to begin a detailed autopsy report on Daemos's remains.
Only to discover that Superman had already disappeared the moment he'd gotten his answer.
"...it?"
After spending a perfect Christmas night with Pepper Potts, Tony Stark didn't crawl out of bed until nearly midday.
Looking at the disaster zone that his living room had become, he silently cursed Joey at least three times.
That said, the damage hadn't been entirely uncompensated.
His eyes drifted toward the Terminator robot still standing in the middle of the room, along with the enormous pile of vibranium nearby.
Immediately, new ideas began forming.
Thinking about how Cyborg had repeatedly toyed with him through sheer technological superiority, Tony suddenly felt motivated.
Unlike Cyborg, he would be spending far more time in this universe.
The next time they met, he'd make sure Cyborg experienced what a true technological generation gap felt like.
"Tony."
The sudden voice behind him made Tony nearly jump out of his skin.
"Fuck! Do you ever make noise when you walk?!"
"No."
Joey wasn't Batman.
Of course he didn't walk silently.
"I fly."
The reason Tony hadn't noticed him standing behind him was simple.
He had spent far too long staring dreamily at the Terminator armor Cyborg had built.
And he had been completely absorbed in his own thoughts.
"Tony."
"There's something I need to tell you."
Despite having already made up his mind, Joey suddenly found himself unsure where to begin.
"Uh... well..."
"Oh, come on."
"Don't turn this into some CW primetime family drama."
"What happened to the guy who'd just tell me to my face when I was being an idiot?"
"Spit it out."
Tony stared impatiently at Joey.
After waiting several more seconds and still hearing nothing useful, he made a show of preparing to leave.
"If it's really that hard to say, maybe I should give you some privacy."
"You can practice in front of a mirror first."
"It's like this. I have a friend."
To hell with timeline paradoxes.
Having decided to continue developing the Amazo robot project, Joey intended to find out exactly what would happen if he started creating paradoxes himself.
The project had to move forward.
And to do that, he had decided he needed to be honest with Tony.
Maybe there was no such thing as a fixed destiny after all.
Tony deserved to know about his future.
Joey couldn't, in good conscience, secretly bury a backdoor inside Amazo's core without telling him.
At least not now.
The Tony Stark standing before him wasn't Doctor Doom.
He hadn't done anything wrong yet.
Joey couldn't justify shackling someone in the past for crimes they might commit in the future.
"So... I have this friend."
"He's overconfident, arrogant, egotistical, and completely full of himself."
"He's stubborn, vain, and basically a walking monument to excessive pride."
"I know he's going to end up buried under a mountain of problems in the future."
"My question is..."
"Should I warn him now?"
The moment Tony heard that, his eyes lit up.
He immediately leaned forward, gossip instincts activating at full power.
"You have a friend like that?"
"Come on, tell me who it is."
"What kind of disaster did this poor idiot get himself into?"
Then Tony paused.
A look of realization slowly spread across his face.
"Wait."
"The friend you're talking about..."
"That's me, isn't it?"