(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)
No POV
The moment the Speed Core flared, the castle's foundation fractured beneath it. The floor gave way, entire corridors melting into spiraling voids. And yet,
the real battle had just begun.
Spider-Man, locked in his Iron Spider armor—coated with the black, living sheen of the Venom symbiote—stood across from Aqua and Riku, their eyes glowing with otherworldly darkness. Their auras bent gravity. The ruined castle was collapsing, but the battlefield had just stabilized enough for war.
And war came fast.
Riku moved first, disappearing with a blink of inverted light. His Keyblade arced from the side—meant to cleave through muscle and circuitry alike—but Spider-Man's Spider-Sense screamed, and his gauntlet surged upward in time.
Clang!
Sparks exploded as symbiote tendrils wrapped around the blade. But Aqua wasn't far behind—her own blade spinning in with a glowing pulse of water and shadow. She moved like a phantom. She struck like an executioner.
The trio collided in a whirlwind of color and light. Stone shattered. Gravity twisted. Glass melted off nearby walls.
Every punch Spider-Man threw was met with counter-pressure. His superhuman agility was tested to its absolute limit. Every evasive leap barely avoided dismemberment. And despite his strength, he was being pushed back.
Zoe ,Xayah, and Rakan flanked the edges of the battle. They launched spells, blades, and chaos flares—but Spider-Man dodged them with peripheral awareness only.
They weren't threats.
They were noise.
Rakan's illusions fizzled out before contact. Xayah's feathers shattered midair. Zoe's void magic was swatted like a fly.
But they kept trying—kept throwing themselves into the outer edge of the fight. It only distracted Peter more. And that cost him.
Aqua's blade found his shoulder.
Shhhk!
A burning gash tore across the Iron Spider plating, exposing dark fluid and torn tissue. The symbiote reacted instantly, sealing the wound, but the pain was real. It jolted him back into full focus.
Riku warped behind him—again. This time, faster. Stronger. The Keyblade slammed across Peter's back and threw him into a fallen column with bone-snapping force. A sonic boom followed.
The rubble buried him. For a second.
Then it exploded outward in a wave of black.
Spider-Man rose—eyes glowing white, his breath ragged.
He was angry now.
The symbiote flared, stretching its tendrils in every direction. The
Speed Core
pulsed violently in his chest. He opened his stance and pulled everything inward.
And then—
Boom.
He vanished.
He reappeared behind Riku, delivering a spin-kick so fast the air cracked. Riku blocked, but skidded back.
Another burst of motion—Peter blurred past Aqua and nailed her ribs with a punch so fast it looked like five hits stacked in one.
The Speed Force was singing through his bloodstream now—unleashing kinetic potential at
barely survivable thresholds. He pushed past it anyway.
His body shouldn't have held together.
But the suit evolved. The symbiote adapted. His biology stabilized under impossible pressure.
Still, they weren't slowing down either.
The battlefield became a ruin.
Entire wings of the castle imploded from shockwaves alone. Windows shattered across dimensions. Time stuttered.
And through all of it, Zoe, Xayah, and Rakan kept fighting—and falling behind.
They couldn't keep up. Every time they tried to get close, a stray slash from Aqua, a blink from Riku, or a backdraft from Spider-Man's Speed Core threw them yards away.
Zoe's chaos bolt missed completely and disintegrated a piece of the moon.
Xayah tried one last wing‑slash. Spider-Man didn't even look. A symbiote tendril grabbed her mid-air and slammed her into the wall with enough force to knock her out cold.
Rakan caught her. Barely.
They looked around, pale and shaking.
This wasn't war.
It was godly slaughter.
And they have no right to enter a battle of Gods.
The three of them retreated to the far side of the ruins.
"I... I can't even see them move," Rakan muttered.
Zoe didn't laugh anymore.
Aqua and Riku knew what they had to do.
This version of Spider-Man couldn't be worn down. Not through attrition. Not through counters. Not through brute strength.
He needed to be erased.
There was a flicker of silent understanding between them. No words exchanged. Just resolve.
Riku raised his hand, fingers glowing with sigils older than memory—dark chants murmured between timelines, lost to every recorded language. Aqua floated beside him, her eyes dimmed with purpose, Keyblade rotating in a rising sphere of voidlight and crystallized water. Their magic began to entwine.
Glyphs exploded around them, circling like broken halos—symbols warped by the corrupted narrative of their existence. The glyphs spun faster. Faster. Until the laws of time and sound started to bend in their presence. The stars dimmed overhead. The ruined dimension groaned beneath them, as if sensing what was coming.
Below them, Spider-Man stood alone.
His body was cracked—fractures glowing red beneath the sheen of his suit. One arm hung loosely, regenerating in jerks as the
symbiote struggled to reknit flesh and armor. His breaths came heavy and slow, laced with smoke and blood. But he didn't run. He didn't hide.
He just looked up, chest heaving.
"I swear to God, if this is another beam attack—"
Then it dropped.
From the torn heavens above, the Tera Flare descended.
It wasn't a beam. It wasn't a spell. It was a judgment.
A white-hot sphere of stellar collapse, compressed into a glowing orb of death. The moment it appeared, reality twisted in its presence. Sound inverted. The ground bent. Light screamed.
The orb spun faster, gravitational lines pulling everything toward its core. First pebbles. Then stone. Then entire chunks of what was left of the castle.
Spider-Man stood unmoving as gravity spiked around him. His feet cracked through the surface beneath, boots digging into glassed stone. Symbiote tendrils lashed wildly, shielding his face. The Speed Core flared and began to overclock on its own, reading the rising pressure.
Then—
It collapsed.
The Tera Flare compacted into a singularity for the briefest moment—
—and detonated.
But not with sound.
Not with fire.
With annihilation.
The world didn't explode.
It peeled.
Color vanished. Geometry folded. Gravity was ripped into ribbons. The ground didn't crack—it unmade itself, pixel by pixel, memory by memory.
Castle: gone.
Sky: gone.
Concept of "up": gone.
The wavefront of light expanded in slow motion,
devouring all meaning of distance or space, reaching across the battlefield in a blinding crescendo. Spider-Man vanished inside it—his silhouette swallowed mid-defiant scream.
His Iron Spider suit shattered at the molecular level.
His symbiote screamed through his nervous system, desperately trying to hold him together.
His Speed Core overloaded, flashing uncontrollable arcs of energy that lit up his skeleton from the inside.
And yet, he refused to fall.Refused to yield.
As everything turned to light—
The dimension ended.
A memory fragment in the multiverse's archive.Ashes scattered across higher layers of fiction.
The light faded... eventually.
There was nothing left.
Just debris, weightless and trembling,
floating through the air like ash caught in a vacuum.
Chunks of stone warped by the heat drifted alongside liquified fragments of space-time—burnt echoes of a world that no longer existed. Physics had given up trying to apply itself here.
Time stuttered. Gravity pulsed like a broken heartbeat.
In the farthest reaches of what remained, a
flickering sphere of azure light held its shape.
Aqua's shield.
Tattered. Humming. Barely holding.
Inside it, Zoe, Xayah, and Rakan floated—
silent, wide-eyed, frozen.
They had survived.
But only because Aqua had spared them.
They didn't understand what they had just witnessed. They couldn't. Their minds struggled to categorize it. They had seen death, yes. They had seen battles. Worlds burn. Friends fall.
But this?
This was erasure.
A spell that didn't just destroy—it rewrote.
Erased the rules, rewrote the script, then set fire to the page.
Their breath caught. Their voices were gone.
Zoe clutched her arms. Her mouth trembled, eyes darting through the mist.Rakan blinked, disoriented, too shaken to even speak.Xayah gripped her shoulder, trembling, mind racing in silent panic.
"Did... did we kill him?" Zoe finally whispered.
The question lingered.
Because for one brief, flickering moment—
It felt like they had.
Nothing moved. The battlefield remained empty. Riku and Aqua floated above it, breathing hard, silhouetted by the unstable horizon. Their armor was scorched, eyes narrowed in focus. Even for them, the Tera Flare had taken something. Left a burn on their essence.
Riku's eyes scanned the smoke. "It should've been enough," he muttered.
Aqua didn't answer. Her fingers twitched. She wasn't sure.
Then—
A sound.
Not a boom. Not a blast.
A voice.
Low. Ragged. Crawling out of the depths of what should have been oblivion.
"You better hope that was your final move..."
The dust split apart.
The darkness folded open.
And out stepped Spider-Man.
His suit was ruined.His body—
broken.
One of his arms hung wrong, bone clearly dislocated. His chestplate was split wide open, revealing the
Speed Core pulsing violently, leaking golden arcs of unstable energy.
Blood soaked through the webbing, dripping from his exposed side, staining the iron and black.
His mask was half-ripped, showing the bottom of his jaw—cracked lip, smeared in blood, curved into a feral, twisted grin.
The symbiote hissed, bubbling across his shoulders like boiling tar. It twitched in fury, oozing over his wounds, desperately holding his shattered form together. Bits of shattered nanite armor hovered and reconnected with rapid clicks, the Iron Spider suit reforming itself mid-step.
His eyes—what remained of them beneath the mask—were glowing white.
Rage.
Pain.
Survival.
He shouldn't have survived.
Zoe knew that. Rakan felt it. Xayah's breath caught as her heart dropped.
They watched—horrified, slack-jawed—as Spider-Man straightened.
As his back cracked into place.As his broken leg reknit with a sickening pop.As the Speed Core surged again, feeding him power he should no longer be able to harness.
He looked up—right at the Darks.His voice was a rasp now, low and burning:
"All that power... and you still couldn't kill me."
A tremor shot through the battlefield.
Then—
He vanished.
Not with a jump.
Not with a web.
With a flicker of black lightning.
He broke through time.
And launched straight at them.
The Guardian moved like a whisper through flame.
Black lightning cracked the void as Spider-Man surged forward—half-man, half-nightmare. A jagged trail of webbing lashed behind him, anchored to nothing. He twisted mid-air, hands aglow with raw Speed Force, and slammed into Aqua first.
The impact thundered.
Aqua grunted, catching him with her Keyblade just in time—but even so, the force knocked her back through floating debris. Her boots shattered a drifting slab of crystallized stone. The sound echoed like breaking stars.
Peter didn't stop.
He pivoted mid-motion, firing a burst of webs in a spiral that twisted into a magnetic tether. He yanked himself forward and drove a spinning heel straight into Riku's face.
Riku's body bent with the hit, but he didn't fall.
Instead, he summoned his blade in reverse grip and sliced upward, catching Peter's torso mid-spin. Blood spattered. The cut ran deep—but Peter didn't scream. He didn't slow.
The venomous tendrils peeled away from his side, oozing like ink, and stitched the gash closed mid-movement.
His other hand grabbed Riku's wrist.
Snap.
He dislocated it—just before Aqua's spell hit him.
"Thundaga."
The blast of lightning struck his back, launching him into a cluster of debris. He crashed through meteoric rubble, skipping across the fractured gravity like a ragdoll.
But the moment his body stilled, he bounced back—suit steaming, lips curled into a bloodstained grin.
His mask had long since burned off.
Half his face was slick with crimson. One eye swollen shut. His jawline cracked and stained with ash. But the Speed Core along his spine pulsed, and the symbiote hissed and pulled tighter, dragging skin and armor back into place.
"Still standing," he growled.
Above, Aqua and Riku regrouped.
Both of them were bruised now—Riku's cheek burned with spider silk, his wrist twisted out of place. Aqua's lip was split, and her left vambrace had been shattered completely.
They panted.
And then moved again.
Riku dived first, blade spiraling with darkness. He disappeared mid-flight—teleporting behind Peter.
But Peter had already moved.
Spider-Sense.
He bent backward, letting the blade slice just over his nose, and kicked backward with both feet—smashing into Riku's chest, then flipped forward and slammed his fists into the incoming Aqua.
Boom.
Three bodies collided in a blinding display.
Peter webbed himself to Aqua's arm, swung over her shoulder, then whipped her into Riku like a flail. The two Darks collided, but recovered instantly, retaliating in tandem.
Aqua cast a triple-freeze hex.
Riku followed with a wave of collapsing gravity magic.
Peter screamed.
The spellwork ripped through his flesh, tearing pieces of the Iron Spider suit apart. One mechanical leg exploded, the others clung by melting threads of nanite. His arms were covered in blood and black web, barely keeping his bones in place.
He hit a wall of floating debris hard enough to crack it—and lay there, still for a second.
From the sidelines, Zoe watched with pale horror.
"W-What the hell... am I watching?" she whispered.
Xayah didn't speak. She stood frozen, gripping Rakan's arm, her claws twitching nervously.
Rakan whispered, "They're all monsters."
They weren't wrong.
Each blow shook the remnants of reality. Each strike came faster than comprehension. The three of them were only catching flashes of the battle—trails of light, bursts of black, streaks of crimson and blue.
They couldn't see the whole picture.
But they felt it.
Like gravity had lost its direction. Like the world was unraveling.
And the worst part?
They couldn't tell who was winning.
Back in the fray, Peter exploded forward again.
Fury now. Full tilt.
His eyes were wide with adrenaline. Blood streamed down his arms and soaked the core of his chest. The Speed Force pulsed harder, pushing energy into his muscles at an unstable rate.
He roared, dashing with such force that a sonic boom detonated behind him.
He blitzed past Riku.
Three cuts landed on the Dark's ribs before Riku even registered the movement.
Aqua tried to intercept—but Peter backhanded her Keyblade, then jabbed her in the throat with a symbiote spike. She choked, staggering, coughing blue mist.
Riku retaliated with a void slash.
Peter took it straight across the chest—his ribs cracked open, suit splitting like glass under pressure. But he didn't fall. Instead, he kicked Riku down mid-air and followed with a pounce, slamming both fists into his skull.
Riku screamed. His aura cracked.
Peter turned—webs spiraling—just in time to block Aqua's ice barrage with an iron leg, now reconstructed from symbiote shards.
She narrowed her eyes. "You should've died."
"I've tried," he rasped. "Didn't take."
The three of them collided again.
Sword met claw met nanite. Webs crackled with electricity. Dark magic swirled with starlight. Blood soaked into broken air.
They didn't slow.
They couldn't.
Each one had reason.
Aqua and Riku fought for corrupted orders, shackled by unknowable masters.
Peter fought with a mind torn by memory, trauma, and relentless duty.
As they crashed into the final remnants of the battlefield, everything began to collapse.
The Speed Core glitched—runes sparking.
Peter's breath came in rasps. He was running out of blood. His bones ached. His body begged to stop.
But he wouldn't.
Riku's arm dangled. Aqua was limping. Their magic flickered.
They wouldn't stop either.
They were killers. Survivors. Ghosts of their former selves.
And this war between them?
It would end in ruin.
There was blood in his mouth.
Peter's jaw cracked back into place with a sickening snap, black tendrils tightening and knitting torn muscle. His breath was ragged. The Speed Core along his spine hummed violently, flickering with unstable bolts of red and white. His shoulder had been nearly dislocated from Riku's last strike—now locked back into place with a scream muffled behind gritted teeth.
And yet, he moved. Like a beast refusing to die.
Aqua roared, Keyblade coated in purified darkness and cascading water. She blurred forward in a spiral of spiraling sigils, slamming down—Peter rolled beneath her with inhuman flexibility, twisting his body midair, and kicked her across the temple. Her shield cracked.
Riku came next, phasing between layers of space with shadow steps. His blade clashed with one of Peter's Iron Spider arms, but the other three jabbed at his sides. Sparks flew. Riku yelled as one arm pierced his thigh, another stabbed toward his shoulder. He spun in midair, cutting one off—but Peter was already above him.
Black lightning spiraled downward.
Spider-Man punched through his guard.
The blow cratered what was left of the sky, sending Riku spiraling through a hundred floating ruins. Aqua's shout echoed behind as she raised her Keyblade once more.
The broken dimension reeled.
Below them, Zoe, Xayah, and Rakan had stopped breathing.
Not from exhaustion. But from disbelief.
They stood atop a crumbling platform of glass and ruined glyphs, mere bystanders to gods tearing through the remains of reality.
Zoe, eyes wide and frantic, tried to rationalize it. That's not fair. He shouldn't be alive. He shouldn't be able to—
Spider-Man slammed into Aqua like a meteor, dragging her down through ten layers of spatial debris, his claws digging into her armor as she screamed in fury.
Blood sprayed in every direction.
Rakan clutched his chest, sweating, trembling. "I... I thought we were working with them..."
Xayah said nothing. Her lips parted, but no sound came.
All three of them watched in dread as their leaders—their saviors, the Darks they'd pledged themselves to—were being undone.
Piece by piece.
And Spider-Man wasn't just surviving.
He was learning.
Each time Aqua conjured a new magic pattern, Peter responded faster. Each phase-step from Riku was met with counter-phase disruptions from Peter's own narrative-coded threads, summoned from the Speed Core's conceptual coding. His battle IQ was rising at an uncontrollable rate.
He was becoming something else.
Peter landed hard, body smoking, half his suit torn off. Riku's blade was embedded in his side—but he didn't remove it.
He grabbed it, yanked Riku forward—then stabbed him with his own weapon.
Riku howled. Peter's free hand glowed with a webbed glyph, charging with compressed lightning from the Speed Force. "You've overstayed your welcome," he muttered.
The strike blasted Riku across the void.
Aqua tried to intervene, screaming Riku's name—but Peter met her halfway, one Iron Spider limb jabbing into her shoulder and spinning her with centrifugal force. He twirled midair, kicking her into a dimensional rift forming in the wake of Riku's fall.
He gave them no rest.
He couldn't afford to.
Not with the symbiote screaming for blood and the Speed Core now fracturing his nervous system with overclocked bursts. His vision doubled. His muscles trembled.
But he wasn't stopping.
"You're just two corrupted puppets," he growled, voice distorted. "And I'm the damn firewall."
He dashed through reality. Black and red streaks of lightning flooded the battlefield.
One arm grabbed Aqua by the throat. Another blasted Riku with a kinetic burst.
They cried out in sync—trapped between converging spider-arms and venomous strikes.
Peter's claws gleamed with conceptual energy.
Then came silence.
One breath.
Two.
Peter's fist exploded through Riku's chest—webbed, charged with a lethal spark of the Speed Force that erased more than flesh.
It erased essence.
Riku's scream stopped. His eyes dimmed. His existence bled into null.
"Sleep," Peter whispered.
Aqua shrieked in unrestrained agony.
But it was too late.
Riku faded into glowing particles, his body unraveling from the story itself.
Zoe let out a choked sob.
Aqua lashed out with all the hatred left in her heart. Her Keyblade flared with hundreds of timelines folded into one final attack.
Peter let it hit.
It cut across his face, tore through his chest.
But his hand wrapped around her neck all the same.
"You were a good person," he muttered, black goo crawling over his lips. "Too good to be dragged this deep into the dark."
She wept as he lifted her, eyes glowing with collapsing galaxies.
The final strike came fast. Merciful.
She, too, was erased.
Dissolved into nothingness.
Only silence remained.
Only the breath of the Guardian, shaking in exhaustion.
Only the humming core at his spine, dull now.
Only the ruins.
And the cage.
It floated there—untouched by the storm of war.
A twisted crystalline structure, glowing with a soft teal, humming with foreign glyphs. Peter walked toward it, one hand still clutching his side. The wound sealed in a hiss. His mask was off now, hanging in tatters.
He reached the cage and muttered, "...Darkenstine."
His fingers ran across the material. It shimmered with anti-reality—metal forged from corrupted narrative that rejected causal logic. No wonder it survived the Tera Flare.
So had she.
Inside, curled in an unconscious slumber, was Neeko.
He touched the center of the seal, injecting raw Guardian energy through his fingertips.
The cage shattered in slow motion.
She tumbled into his arms.
Lightweight. Warm. Still breathing.
He held her like she was made of glass—like something fragile, precious. Like a symbol of everything he'd just clawed through hell to protect.
A soft breath escaped her lips.
Her eyes fluttered open.
And then—
Neeko POV
There was weightlessness.
Then warmth.
And then the strangest thing—stillness.
Neeko... Neeko was not used to stillness.
Not after years of running. Of hiding. Of fighting to breathe in places where stars had died and shadows wore familiar faces.
She blinked slowly. Her mind floated just above reality, like a dream just barely remembered.
The last thing Neeko remembered—two voices, twisted, warped. A boy and a girl. Monsters from another realm. They came with Zoe, Xayah, and Rakan. All of them were smiling with rot behind their teeth.
Neeko remembered being dragged through ruined timelines. Her hands were bound by fate. Her light dimmed, her hope all but buried.
She was ready.
Ready to die.
Ready to be corrupted.
To become another star twisted in reverse, a mocking echo of what she once was.
She never expected to wake up again.
And certainly not like this.
"Ah..."
Her vision cleared.
She saw him.
She saw the knight.
Battle-damaged. Scorched. Armor made from black and red metal that pulsed like it had a heartbeat. Glowing veins of light—blue and red and white—traced across his chest and shoulders. His face was half-lit, blood still drying on his jaw.
And he was smiling.
Neeko's heart skipped.
"Who...?" she breathed softly, ears twitching as sound returned.
She turned her head slowly. Behind him, there was no battlefield. No sky. No castle. No dimension.
Nothing.
Only floating debris.
Remnants of existence.
Like shattered paint strokes on a white canvas.
The world she had been imprisoned in...
Was gone.
Neeko gasped.
"Did—did the whole thing... go boom?" she whispered, more to herself.
The knight looked down at her. His eyes held galaxies... and something deeper behind them. Something that flickered once, red and dark and ancient.
He asked gently, "Are you alright?"
Neeko's chest trembled.
"Neeko... Neeko is okay?" she whispered, confused. "Neeko... is safe?"
He nodded.
"Yes."
That was all.
One word.
But it was enough to shatter her.
Tears welled in her eyes, fast and sudden. She bit her lip. "You... you saved Neeko?"
Another nod.
She sniffled. Her face crumpled.
Neeko cried.
Not softly. Not politely.
She wept, head pressed into his chest, arms weakly grasping around his neck. Her body trembled with every sob. Because no one had ever come back for her. No one had dared. Not Ahri. Not Miss Fortune. Not even the stars.
Years of loneliness. Years of surviving. Running. Hiding. Dreaming that maybe—just maybe—someone would come.
And when she finally gave up hope...
He came.
"You came for Neeko..." she sobbed. "Neeko thought she was forgotten... that the others... they never..."
She couldn't finish.
Peter's grip didn't falter. He let her cry, let her voice crack. Let her shake.
He didn't speak again.
He didn't have to.
His presence alone wrapped around her like armor.
Her heart felt like it was melting.
His wounds were healing in real-time. She watched with awe as the black and crimson suit slithered over open cuts, sealing them shut. Blood dried and vanished beneath symbiotic regeneration. Glowing nodes reconnected along his spine.
A miracle in motion.
Even now, after surviving a god-killing blast, he stood tall. Strong. Unshaken.
Unreal.
"Neeko... dreamed of this," she said shakily, pulling back slightly to look at him. Her cheeks were soaked. Her fingers gently touched the side of his face. "A knight... a savior... someone who would hold Neeko like this and make the monsters go away."
She let out a quiet, hysterical laugh through the tears. "Neeko never thought dreams came true..."
She stared at him, wide-eyed.
"And yet... here you are..."
The Guardian Aura pulsed—soft, low. An invisible warmth that soaked into her skin, into her heart. Her mind quieted. Her pain eased.
And her illusions deepened.
She believed with all her soul that he was the one.
Her knight in shining armor.
Her dream come to life.
Her fate.
"Neeko... loves her knight already," she whispered, laughing softly through the last of her tears. "Even if Neeko just met you..."
She rested her head against his chest.
Peter said nothing.
But his arms remained tight around her.
And his smile—still so warm—curved just a little higher at the edge.
A flicker of red gleamed in his eyes once more.
Then they vanished—into the dark.
Neeko, safe in his arms.
Still crying.
Still dreaming.
And still unaware...
That her knight had claws.
To Be Continued...