Hiro the Spider
Episode 6 — Thread That Bites
The titan's shadow swallowed the ruined campus.
Gold-plated plates stacked like a cathedral, helm horned, broadblade slung across one shoulder. Every step of the thing cracked stone. The HUD bled warnings into the sky like sirens.
[Elite Boss Combatant Detected: Level 50.]
[Faction Raid Continues: Survivors Remaining — 1,211.]
[Optional Objective: Slay the Commander — +10 Levels.]
Hiro rolled his neck, blood drying on his hoodie, hands still buzzing from the last ten skulls he'd tuned like drums. Level 25 burned above his head. The wind tasted like iron and ozone and the next bad decision.
"Finally," he said, smiling like a knife. "A real dance partner."
The titan planted his blade. Gold rippled with light—twelve sharp rays carved into the pauldron, flaring like a miniature sun.
Hiro's grin froze.
Twelve points. Sunburst. The exact shape. The exact shine.
—and the world jerked backward.
⸻
Before the Web
He'd always been the only kid in a too-quiet apartment. One cup at breakfast. One chair pulled close to the TV at night. A roof that echoed when it rained because there weren't enough voices to soak up the sound.
Two people filled that silence as best they could: Dr. Aya Kuroda and Eiji Kuroda—Hiro's parents. They wore lab IDs instead of capes, lived in deadlines instead of spotlights, came home smelling like metal and rain. They weren't famous. They were necessary.
"Don't climb that railing," his mom would say.
"Don't run the building like a racetrack," his dad would add.
Hiro would do both anyway, because the emptiness was louder if he stood still.
He had two friends and no more. Mina—quick mouth, quicker hands, always dismantling things just to see if she could build them better. And Dom—heavy laughs, heavier fists, a brawler with a heart you could hear before you saw. They were the whole crew. That's it. No club, no party, no season of smiling strangers. Just three kids chasing wind on the city's spine.
But even with them? Lonely stuck like gum on his shoe. Most nights, it was Hiro and the rooftops. Running edges. Testing how close to falling off he could get before his heart learned to fly.
"Why don't you ever invite people?" Mina asked once, legs dangling over ten stories of bad choices.
"I did," Hiro said, smirking at the moon. "You two showed up. That's two more than I asked for."
Dom snorted. "Damn, Spider. Romantic."
"I'm married to gravity. She treats me right."
They all laughed. The wind ate the rest.
The Door He Wasn't Supposed to Open
There was a place under the city that adults pretended didn't exist. Rumors called it Sector Zero, others the Crawlspace, and the braver liars said there's a spider down there that weaves reality.
Hiro didn't care about ghost stories. He cared about the logo stamped on the delivery crates his parents carried home on their clothes like dust: a twelve-point sunburst stamped faint and fading.
"Seriously, don't go near the Axis Institute after dark," Aya warned, sliding a palm over his cheek. "Please. Promise."
"I promise," Hiro said.
He lied.
Because the lonely part of him wanted the truth more than it wanted anyone's love.
They picked a rain night—easier to disappear between cameras. Mina jacked the maintenance locks with a smile and a knife; Dom wedged doors with a crowbar jail would have envied. They descended into cement that sweated electricity, past signs that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in letters big enough to be dared.
"You sure about this?" Dom whispered.
"Absolutely not," Hiro said, grinning. "Which means yes."
Sector Zero breathed like a sleeping animal. Lights pulsed. Distant hums braided into a single low song you could feel in your teeth. They passed a shattered plaque that once read: ATLAS SPINDLE—THREAD ENGINEERING LAB, SUBSTRATE-CLASS.
"What the hell is a Thread Engine?" Mina asked.
Hiro shrugged. "Something my parents never talk about."
A door stood at the end of a long throat of hallway: layered steel, three-factor locks, and that same sunburst—the twelve-point lie—glowing faint as infection.
Mina cracked it because the door didn't know it shouldn't. They slid inside.
The chamber wasn't science. It was a myth strapped to machines.
Suspended over a black well churned a lattice of shimmering lines, threads that weren't quite light and weren't quite matter—geometry stretched until it learned to sing. Drones spidered along the framework, clicking, tending the glowing web with needles and song. The whole thing vibrated in a rhythm that wasn't time.
At the dais, facing the web like a prayer, stood Aya and Eiji.
And standing across from them—gold armor catching the engine's glow—were a half-dozen Paladins in the sunburst sigil. Behind them: a man in a white coat with a politician's smile you could fall into and drown.
"Compliance isn't optional," the lab-coated mouth said. "The Council needs the Weaver Core online for deployment. The academies require an edge."
"We built it to map dimensions, not cut them," Aya shot back. "You want to weaponize every possible world."
Eiji held a drive chip like a blade. "Shut it down. Or we burn everything."
Hiro did not plan to breathe. He did not plan to make a sound.
But the web's song hit him in the bones and his lungs forgot the rule. His breath fogged the window. The nearest drone froze, lens tilting, curious as a child.
The alarm didn't scream. It exhaled.
Paladins pivoted as one, sunburst flaring. Aya turned, eyes finding Hiro through three layers of glass and bad decisions, and for one carved-out heartbeat, her mouth shaped no like a prayer she knew the gods wouldn't take.
"Shit," Mina whispered. Dom's hand tightened on the crowbar.
The politician smiled wider. "Ah. How… motivating."
He flicked two fingers. Gold moved.
Hiro ran.
The Bite
Dom met the first Paladin in the hall with his stupid brave heart, swung the crowbar, and the armored man barely tilted his head before breaking Dom's nose with a gauntlet. Dom roared and tackled anyway. Mina pulled Hiro by the sleeve. "Move, idiot!"
"Mom—Dad—" Hiro choked, yanked back by the tendons of Mina's fear.
The Paladins flowed like one body: two after the kids, four into the chamber, white coat sliding in their wake like a snake that learned to grin. Something detonated. The world flashed tungsten.
Hiro tore his arm free. He sprinted toward the chamber door, because he was dumb enough to be loyal. A drone dropped from the ceiling—curious again—and landed on his chest with six delicate limbs. It touched him once, right beneath the collarbone.
The thread slid into him like a needle of winter.
He saw sound freeze. He heard light bend. His heart hiccuped and then learned a new beat, off-rhythm with reality. Every motion around him developed a silver outline a fraction before it happened.
The Weaver Core sang, and his nervous system answered, and the world suddenly had routes he'd never noticed—paths along walls, along air, along between.
He shoved the drone off as if he'd trained for this. He hadn't. His body had.
The chamber screamed open—Aya slammed a Paladin with a lab cart; Eiji stabbed another with a screwdriver like a man who'd never seen a battlefield and decided to win one anyway. A gold blade cut the cart in half. The white coat tutted. "Please. We're working."
Hiro moved without thinking. He leaped, hit the wall, stuck, ran along it like gravity had been demoted, and dropped into the fight with a feral joy that terrified him as it thrilled. He grabbed a Paladin's wrist mid-swing—his new thread-sense told him where it would be—and twisted until the blade kissed the owner. Sparks bit the air. He shoved the armored man into another, chaos eating their formation.
"Run!" Aya screamed. "Hiro, run!"
"I can fight!" he shouted back.
"You can live!" Eiji bellowed—and then a gold edge came through his chest like morning through blinds.
For a second there was no sound, just the outline of what would happen a beat later if the world bothered to finish. Then the thread-sense updated. Time snapped. Eiji coughed red, surprise more than pain on his face, and he sagged into Hiro's arms like a bridge giving up.
Hiro didn't scream. The sound inside him didn't know how to leave.
Aya snapped in half and became a weapon. She tore the Paladin's helm free and clawed at eyes that didn't know what mothers were. Another gold blade answered her grief. Two rays of the sunburst found ribs and then there was only the floor and the red and the sound his throat finally remembered to make.
Mina dragged him. Dom—nose crooked, mouth full of blood—turned into a wall and was cut down for trying to be architecture. He slumped, looking surprised, as if death had been rude to interrupt.
Hiro's thread-sense painted the rest: if he stayed, he died; if he reached left, a blade; if he reached forward, a gauntlet; if he ran upward, the Weaver itself.
He ran up.
He sprinted along glass, along steel, across the trembling lattice. The drones didn't question him anymore; they sang in another register and made space. He split three ways inside—one part clawing the sky, one part being dragged by Mina's steel grip, one part forever on the floor with his parents.
The white coat smiled past the dying. "Close it."
The Paladins smashed the dais. The web shuddered. The chamber folded inward like a predator yawning. Mina shoved Hiro through a maintenance hatch as the room tried to become a needle.
Doors. Stairs. Dark. Running. Falling.
Night.
After the Bite
They didn't hold funerals in that city for people the Council needed erased. Aya and Eiji became a paragraph in a report and then an empty chair at a table that no one sat at anyway. Dom became a crack in a wall that still didn't hold the roof up. Mina became angry in a way that required soldering irons and stolen passwords.
Hiro became quiet. Quieter than rain, quieter than rooms without enough chairs. He stopped smiling like a wolf. He started smiling like a man who had memorized knives.
The sunburst lived at the center of that smile.
Mina found him on the roof three months later, hanging off the edge by two fingers because the only thing that made sense was making the ground jealous.
"They killed them," she said into the wind, because he wasn't going to say it and she needed it said.
"Yeah."
"You think your parents were the only ones who could see where this was going?" Mina's eyes were all flint. "If they were building a net big enough to catch worlds, someone had to be planning to fish."
"You want justice?" Hiro asked, voice a rasp that came from somewhere new.
She shook her head, ugly smile tearing a hole in the night. "No. I want their servers. Justice is a bedtime story."
He finally looked at her. Really looked. "You in?"
"Till I'm not breathing," she said.
He reached out, squeezed the back of her neck. Not comfort. Agreement.
Hiro didn't become a hero. He didn't become a villain. He became the thing you send into webs when you're tired of being prey.
He became the Spider.
⸻
Back to the Sunburst
The gold commander's blade hammered the campus, buckling courtyards into bowls. Factions broke like waves against a cliff. The air got heavy with command pressure—a flex of will that made knees ache and spines reconsider their allegiance.
Hiro didn't kneel.
He couldn't. The sunburst wouldn't let his joints work like that anymore.
Beside him, the crimson-armored heroine raised her sword like defiance had an edge. She glanced at the sigil on the titan's shoulder, then at Hiro's face. Something in her expression changed when she saw whatever had burned through his grin.
"You know that mark," she said softly.
Hiro's voice came out gravel and gasoline. "I learned to hate it before I learned to shave."
Her gaze flicked over him—blood, hunger, the too-still breath—and for once she didn't say reckless. She said, "Tell me where to swing."
"You don't take orders," he said.
"I don't," she agreed. "But I pick good bets."
The titan turned, sunburst flaring like it remembered a lab and a woman who wouldn't bow. Its helm tracked to Hiro as if the symbol could smell bloodlines.
Hiro rolled his shoulders. The thread-sense fanned out—silver outlines of possibilities, a dozen routes across walls, across bodies, across the commander's blade. The world slowed into shapes he could eat.
He touched the place below his collarbone where the drone had kissed him into a new life. He didn't pray. He didn't promise. He counted.
"Two friends," he said, almost to himself. "One gone. Two parents. Both gone. One sunburst. Still here."
The heroine stepped closer, not touching, close enough to be a fact. "We end it."
He smirked at the titan, baring wolf teeth that had learned patience. "No. I end you."
The HUD flared again, loud as prophecy:
[Commander Engaged.]
[Dynamic Modifier Applied: Nemesis Thread — Personal Damage Amplified When Facing Sunburst Command.]
[Warning: Commander's Aura Will Resist Reflex Advantages.]
"Good," Hiro breathed. "Make it fair."
He took a runner's stance—a blasphemy before a god-thing—and the campus waited for someone else to blink first.
No one did.
So Hiro went.
He sprinted, snapped into a wall-run, kicked off a banner pole, and rocketed straight for the sunburst with his past bleaching everything to bone-white focus. The commander's blade came down like a verdict.
Hiro smiled like a man remembering a door he wasn't supposed to open—and how good it felt to open it anyway.
To be continued…