October 10th
The silence here is a lie. A thin layer of dead air stretched over a foundation of endless, droning vibration.
I woke to the hum.
It wasn't the usual thrum of the Nexus's life support or the distant resonance of trans-dimensional gateways. This was different. A high-frequency oscillation that set my teeth on edge and made the fillings in my molars ache. It was a sound I could feel in my bones, a vibration that ran through the deck plating, up the legs of my bed, and into my spine. The air itself quivered, thick with the presence of invisible web filaments, each one vibrating like a plucked nerve.
My HUD flickered, a cascade of corrupted data scrolling across the inside of my mask. Faint geometric patterns, ethereal and green, crawled across the bare metal walls of my quarters. Spirals. The same impossible, fractal spirals I had seen in the Child's Nest. They writhed like digital maggots, an infection in the light itself.
I sat up, the roughspun blanket pooling at my waist. My own breath was a ragged counterpoint to the room's unnerving harmony.
"Web interference," I muttered, my voice a low rasp swallowed by the hum. I ran a diagnostic, my fingers tapping a familiar sequence on my gauntlet. The results were instantaneous and impossible. "No external source. Internal anomaly."
The source was here. In the room. With me.
My gaze swept the spartan chamber—cot, desk, chair, containment locker. Nothing out of place. Except one thing. My journal lay open on the desk. Its thick, leather-bound cover was canted at an angle, the pages exposed to the dim light.
I never left it open. Procedure. Habit. Paranoia. My logs are my own. No one sees them. I certainly had not opened it before the sleep cycle. A cold dread, colder than the recycled air, snaked its way up my back. I rose from the bed, my movements stiff, deliberate.
As I approached, I saw it. The ink. It was still wet, gleaming like fresh blood under the glitching light of my HUD. It wasn't just wet; it was moving. Across the blank page, a spider of black ink bled into existence, forming strokes, then letters, then words. In real time.
I stood frozen for a full three seconds, a lifetime in which a thousand tactical assessments died before they could form. This was not a physical threat. This was a violation of a different order.
The pen lay untouched beside the journal, but the words flowed onto the page as if from an invisible nib. The handwriting was mine—the same cramped, aggressive script I'd used for years. But this was faster, more fluid. The strokes were not angry, but confident, deliberate. An imitation that surpassed the original.
My training overrode my shock. I activated my personal recorder, the small audio-visual unit embedded in my mask's lens. Document everything. Data is the only weapon against the unknown.
"Journal acting autonomously," I recorded, my voice level, betraying none of the revulsion coiling in my gut. "Ink movement consistent with psychokinetic event. Possible telepathic resonance through infected filaments. The anomaly is… communicating."
The words coalesced on the page, stark and absolute:
THE HUNTER BECOMES THE HUNTED. THE WEB WILL BLEED.
The ink seemed to pulse with the hum in the room, a dark, viscous heartbeat. As I watched, the letters began to warp. The clean lines of the text bled outward, swirling into a new shape. A massive, distorted eye stared up at me from the page. Its iris was a vortex of my own handwriting, the phrase repeating itself, smaller and smaller, spiraling inward around a pupil of pure, bottomless black. It was the eye I had seen in the Nest—the gaze of the Child, the intelligence behind the infection.
I leaned closer, my recorder capturing every shift in the liquid ink. The eye on the page opened wider. The pupil did not just look black; it was blackness. A singularity pulling at the light in the room, pulling at my focus. The ink rippled, the surface breaking like a disturbed pool of oil, and the world dissolved.
I was not pulled into the journal. I was pulled through it.
The steel walls of my quarters vanished, replaced by an impossible vista. I was standing in the Web itself, but it was a diseased, inverted version of the multiversal lattice. The shimmering, silver threads of reality were gone. In their place were black, pulsing veins, thick with a substance that looked like ichor. They stretched into an infinite, suffocating darkness. The sky, or what passed for it, was a deep crimson lattice of clotted light, casting everything in the glow of a festering wound.
The hum was deafening here. And with it came the whispers. They slithered around me, weaving through the black veins of the perverted Web. They were fragments, ghosts of my own thoughts, my own voice culled from my logs.
"…Lockdown denied. Protocol demands containment…"
"…Delay is death. Every moment wasted is a universe lost…"
A new voice joined them, a voice I recognized with a sickening lurch. The Weaver Child's. The voice I heard when it learned through the minds of its victims.
"…You understand me now…"
Suspended in the void, tethered to the black veins like grotesque fruit on a diseased vine, were corpses. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All Spider-Totems, their vibrant costumes faded to grey, their bodies desiccated husks. They were connected by the dark filaments, arranged in patterns that resembled the neural pathways of a brain. A massive, rotting mind.
A horrifying realization washed over me. This was not a vision of the predator. It was a vision from it. I was inside the Child's perspective, seeing the Great Web not as a network of life, but as a harvest.
My perspective shifted, zooming out at an impossible speed. The entire multiversal Web unfolded before me. Each thread glowed with a faint, silver light. And along those threads, like constellations in the dark, were millions of pinpricks of brighter light. The Spider-Totems. Each one a life, a universe, a nexus of possibility.
Then, the harvest began.
One by one, the lights began to dim. They weren't extinguished, not like a candle being snuffed out. They were… absorbed. Drained. Their light flowed along the threads toward a central point, feeding something that was growing in the heart of reality.
From these stolen lights, a massive structure was forming. A cocoon woven from the stolen essence of heroes, stretching across realities. It was a web within the Web, a cancerous pearl growing from the stolen life force of millions.
My gaze was dragged toward its center, into the swirling miasma of its core. And there, I saw it. A figure, silhouetted against the stolen light. It was my shape, my build, my posture. And it was wearing my mask. The black ink blotches on its face were not static; they shifted and swirled like the Child's amorphous flesh, like the ink in my journal.
It was me. And it was not. It was a vessel. A template. An endpoint.
The whispers coalesced into a single, coherent thought, projected directly into my mind. It spoke in my own voice—the cold, flat tone of my recorded logs, stripped of all emotion.
"You investigate infection. You are the infection. Data records data. The Web learns through you."
The voice was calm, analytical. A scientist describing a specimen. I was the specimen.
Rage, pure and hot, burned through the psychic cold. I fought back, focusing my will, my identity, into a single point of defiance.
"I'm no part of your hive," I snarled, the words forming in my mind, a psychic scream. "I am myself. Alone."
The voice answered, a perfect, chilling echo of my own words from a log I'd made weeks ago, after cleansing an infected world. It was a moment of disgust, of grim satisfaction. Now, it was turned back on me like a knife.
"Wrong. Filth belongs to you now."
The psychic pressure became unbearable. The figure in my mask turned its head, and the void in its face met my own. With a raw, guttural scream that tore itself from my throat, I tore myself free.
Reality snapped back into place with the force of a physical blow. I was on my knees, hands pressed against the cold deck, hyperventilating. The hum in the room was gone. Silence had returned.
I pushed myself up, my body shaking with adrenaline and revulsion. My journal lay on the desk. The page with the eye was ripped, shredded by what looked like fingernail marks. It was covered in blood. My blood. My knuckles were split open, the source of the stain. Scrawled over the ruins of the drawing, over and over again in a frantic, bloody script, were the words: THE WEB WILL BLEED.
My gaze snapped to my recorder lens. I rewound the last few minutes of the recording. All it had captured was static—a harsh, digital shriek. But as I listened, I heard something beneath it. Faint, almost subliminal. A single, sibilant whisper.
"…Continue…"
I stumbled out of my quarters, needing air, space, something other than those four walls. The corridors of the Nexus were unnervingly quiet. The main lights flickered as I passed under them, each one buzzing and dimming in sequence with my footsteps, as if reality itself was shying away from my presence.
A figure emerged from the shadows ahead. Silk. Her senses were preternaturally sharp; she must have felt the psychic backlash. She stood with her arms crossed, her expression a mixture of concern and suspicion.
"You look like you've seen the end of the world," she said, her voice soft but direct.
I stopped, my breathing still ragged. The shifting patterns on my mask were probably the only thing holding my expression together. "I've seen what comes after."
"What does that mean?" she pressed, taking a step toward me. "Rorschach, what happened in there?"
I turned and walked away, leaving her question hanging in the flickering air. I couldn't explain it. To give voice to it would be to give it more power. More reality. But the thought burned behind my eyes, a piece of blasphemous new scripture.
"The Web thinks it's eternal," I muttered to the empty corridor. "Every god dies. Even this one."
Back in my quarters, I took the bloody, desecrated journal and placed it inside a lead-lined containment case. I engaged the triple-redundant magnetic locks. The final click echoed in the sudden, profound silence. An attempt to contain the uncontainable. Futile, but necessary.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Then, faintly at first, the hum returned. But it was different now. Deeper. More resonant. It wasn't a vibration in the air; it was a tremor in the bones of reality. The strands of the Nexus, visible through my reinforced viewport, began to tremble.
All across the infinite latticework of the multiverse, every Spider-Totem felt it. A momentary flicker in their connection to the Web of Life and Destiny. A cold spot. A collective, psychic gasp as the heart of their reality skipped a single, terrifying beat.
In the dark of my sealed room, I stared at the containment case that held the Child's message and my blood. I knew what this tremor was. A wound had been opened. A feedback loop initiated.
I whispered the terrible truth into the silence.
"The Web bleeds."
And from the void, from the cold, absolute nothingness between realities, a voice that was not my own whispered the same phrase back in perfect, synchronized unison.