The portal is a wound.
Not metaphor. Observation. It tears wider above the Nexus like flesh splitting under pressure, edges writhing, pulsing with infected light. Reality bleeds around it. The Web of Life and Destiny trembles, threads snapping audibly in dimensions only I can hear through the distortion.
Through the wound, they come.
Husks.
Spider-forms. Warped. Hollow. They wear familiar suits—red and blue, black symbiote, armored exoskeletons, future-tech—stretched over frames that move wrong. Joints bend at angles that suggest broken bones never set. They drag web-lines behind them, trailing like viscera, and their coordination is not natural. It's predatory. Instinctive in the way a cancer is instinctive.
The Nexus reacts to their presence. Gravity stutters. I feel my weight shift left, then right, then disappear entirely for two seconds before slamming back. The corridor ahead twists, architecture folding into itself like origami made of steel and panic. Alarms scream, then die mid-wail as power grids fail in cascading waves.
Around me, the Spider-Army fractures.
Predictable.
Some fight. Instinct takes over—webs fire blindly, venom strikes lash out, fists connect with skulls that crack but don't bleed. Others freeze. They stare at the suits. The symbols. The shapes of mentors and friends and versions of themselves twisted into puppet-shells. Recognition breeds hesitation. Hesitation breeds death.
A few turn and run.
Portals flare open, ragged tears in space leading back to safer dimensions. A Spider-Woman in purple vanishes mid-scream. A teenage Totem with six arms scrambles backward, eyes wide, and tumbles through a portal that snaps shut behind him like a closing mouth. The Web hums erratically, frequencies overlapping, responding to mass fear the way a body responds to fever.
Chaos. Expected. Irrelevant.
My focus narrows.
The portal. The source. The throat of the beast.
Everything else is noise.
I move forward.
A husk lunges from my left, wearing a tattered Scarlet Spider suit. Its face is a smooth mask of chitin where eyes should be. No expression. No humanity. Just hunger given form. I sidestep, catch its wrist mid-swing, redirect its momentum into the wall. Chitin cracks. It doesn't fall. I fire my grapnel point-blank into its chest cavity, pin it to the wall, leave it twitching.
Another comes. This one faster. Black suit, symbiote variant, but the fluid motion is gone. It jerks and spasms like a marionette with tangled strings. I drop low, sweep its legs, drive my boot into its spine as it falls. Vertebrae separate with a wet crunch. It stops moving.
Efficient. Necessary. Clean.
The Nexus tilts. Gravity inverts. I'm on the ceiling now, or what used to be the ceiling. Blood rushes to my head, then drains as orientation shifts again. Irrelevant. I keep moving. The portal is ahead, maybe fifty meters, obscured by smoke and the writhing mass of husks and panicked Totems.
A defensive line attempts to form near the central platform. Eight Totems, maybe ten, standing shoulder to shoulder, firing coordinated webs to create barriers. It's tactically sound. Temporarily effective.
It collapses within thirty seconds.
A husk wearing the Iron Spider armor breaks through first. Its mechanical arms are twisted, fused with organic matter, dripping something that hisses when it hits the floor. A Totem—young, maybe sixteen, wearing a homemade suit with mismatched colors—steps forward to intercept it. He hesitates. Half a second. His eyes lock on the armor, recognition flashing across his face.
"Mr. Stark?"
The husk kills him.
No hesitation. No mercy. Just efficiency. A mechanical arm punches through his chest, lifts him off the ground, throws him aside like refuse. He hits the wall and doesn't get up.
The line breaks.
Totems scatter. Some fire webs as they retreat. Others abandon weapons and run. The husk advances, dripping, relentless.
I shoot it in the head.
My grapnel punches through the faceplate, embeds in whatever passes for its brain. It drops. I retract the line, keep walking.
Behind me, someone is shouting.
Miles Morales. The interim leader. The one they look to because he stood up when others stepped back. His voice cuts through the chaos, hoarse but determined. He's trying to organize. Trying to form new lines, assign teams, prioritize evacuation over engagement.
"Fall back to secondary positions! Cover the civilians! Don't engage alone—stay in pairs!"
Some listen. Most don't. Authority without certainty is a house built on sand. When the tide comes, it collapses.
I ignore him.
The portal is thirty meters away now. Husks swarm thicker here, their numbers concentrated near the breach. They protect it instinctively, or perhaps they're drawn to it, unable to stray far from their source. Either way, they're in my path.
I don't slow down.
A husk with multiple arms—too many arms, sprouting from shoulders and ribs like tumors—charges me. I web its legs together, let momentum carry it past me, smash its head into the floor as it falls. Another drops from above. I catch it mid-descent, redirect it into a third husk, let them tangle and collapse together. I fire into the mass, incapacitating limbs, severing joints.
No wasted movement. No hesitation. This is not combat. This is removal.
"Rorschach!"
Miles again. Closer now. I don't turn.
"Rorschach, fall back! We need to regroup!"
I step over a husk missing its lower half, still twitching. Twenty meters.
"That's an order!"
Orders. Commands. The illusion of structure imposed on chaos by those who need to believe they have control. I've heard it before. From generals. Police chiefs. Men in suits who thought authority was granted by title rather than earned by necessity.
I don't respond.
"Goddammit, Rorschach, I said fall back!"
His voice cracks. Fear bleeding through the authority. He's afraid of losing control. Afraid of what happens when the center cannot hold. Understandable. Irrelevant.
I am not falling back.
The portal is fifteen meters away. Its edges pulse with corrupted light, casting shadows that move independently of their sources. The air near it tastes wrong—metallic, ozone-sharp, with an underlying rot. Husks emerge in clusters now, birthed from the wound in reality like maggots from carrion.
I reload my grapnel. Check my mask's respirator filters. Assess the terrain.
The platform ahead is unstable. Sections of floor flicker, phasing in and out of tangibility. Gravity wells open and close randomly. There are bodies. Totems who got too close, who were overwhelmed before they understood what they faced. Their suits are torn. Some are being dragged backward into the portal by web-lines attached to their corpses.
The Web itself warps here. I can see it through the distortion—threads of possibility and fate twisting, fraying, snapping. Each broken thread sends shockwaves through connected dimensions. If the breach isn't sealed, the damage will spread. Cascade failure. Total collapse.
This is not a battle that can be won by holding defensive lines.
This is surgery.
And the only solution is to cut out the infection at its source.
I start forward again. A husk blocks my path—massive, wearing an oversized symbiote suit that's merged with what looks like pieces of the Lizard. It roars, a sound like grinding metal, and charges.
I web its eyes, slide under its legs, fire my grapnel into its ankle as I pass. The line goes taut. I swing around a support pillar, use the momentum to pull the husk off-balance. It crashes face-first into the unstable floor, phases halfway through, gets stuck. I fire three more shots into its skull. It stops moving.
Ten meters.
"Rorschach!"
Miles is running now. I can hear his footsteps, rapid and uneven, accompanied by the sound of his venom-strike charging. He's coming after me. Trying to stop me. Trying to pull me back into the formation, into the plan, into the collective delusion that this can be solved by teamwork and coordination.
He doesn't understand.
There is no formation. There is no plan. There is only the source and the will to reach it.
I don't slow down.
Behind me, the Nexus continues to collapse. Alarms that had gone silent suddenly scream back to life, pitch wrong, frequencies overlapping into a sound that makes teeth ache. A section of the eastern corridor implodes, folding into itself like compressed paper. Totems scatter away from it, some caught at the edges, pulled in before they can escape.
The Web hums. Discordant. Wrong.
Five meters.
The portal looms above me now, vast and wrong, its edges lined with husks that cling to it like remora on a shark. They're guarding it. Or perhaps they're part of it. The distinction doesn't matter. They're between me and closure.
I web-swing up, momentum carrying me toward the nearest cluster. My coat tears on a passing strike, fabric shredding, but the impact doesn't connect. I fire mid-swing, grapnel punching through a husk's chest, use it as an anchor point to change direction, swing into another husk feet-first. Ribs crack. It falls.
I land on the platform edge, three meters from the portal's threshold.
The light here is blinding. Wrong colors—ultraviolet bleeding into infrared, wavelengths that shouldn't exist. I can feel it on my skin, a pressure like being underwater, like being watched by something vast and indifferent.
Behind me, Miles lands hard, boots skidding on the unstable floor.
"Rorschach, stop!"
I don't turn.
"We can't just charge in there! We don't know what's on the other side! We need to—"
"Need to what?" I ask. My voice cuts through his desperation. Cold. Flat. "Hold another defensive position? Form another committee? Wait for someone else to make the hard choice?"
"We need a plan!"
"Plans are compromises. This is the only solution."
"You don't know that!"
I turn then. Just my head. The mask's patterns shift, angular symmetry forming, black and white dividing sharply down the center. No ambiguity. No gray.
Miles freezes. His venom-strike flickers, uncertain.
"I do," I say.
And I step toward the portal.
"No!"
He lunges. Fast. Faster than I expected. His hand closes around my arm, venom-strike discharging, electricity arcing through my coat and into my nervous system. Pain. Sharp. Disorienting.
I don't stop.
I turn into the grip, break his hold with a sharp twist, drive my elbow into his ribs. Not enough to injure. Enough to create distance. He staggers back, breath hitching, eyes wide with shock and something else.
Hurt.
He thought I would listen. Thought that somewhere beneath the mask, there was enough humanity left to obey orders, to submit to authority, to choose collective safety over individual action.
He was wrong.
"This isn't about tactics," I say. "It's about necessity."
"It's about not getting everyone killed!"
"Everyone is already dying."
I gesture toward the Nexus. The bodies. The fleeing Totems. The collapsing corridors. The infected Web pulsing overhead like a diseased artery.
"Your leadership is a bandage on a severed limb. Symbolic. Useless. The only solution is cauterization."
"That's not—you can't just—"
"I can. I am."
I turn away. The portal is one meter from me now. Close enough to feel its pull, like standing at the edge of a cliff, like staring into deep water and knowing something is staring back.
"Rorschach!"
Miles's voice cracks. Desperation. Anger. Grief for a decision he can't stop, for authority that means nothing in the face of absolute certainty.
I don't look back.
Behind me, husks continue to pour through. The Nexus continues to collapse. Totems continue to die or flee or freeze in the face of choices they're not equipped to make.
Ahead, through the wound in reality, through the throat of the beast, there is the source.
And I will reach it.
Whatever the cost.
I step into the light, into the wrongness, into the breach. The world twists. Gravity inverts, then disappears. My coat billows, torn edges trailing like flags. The mask's patterns shift rapidly, trying to adjust to input it can't process.
Behind me, I hear Miles scream something—a warning, a plea, a curse. The words distort, stretched by dimensional interference until they're meaningless.
And then the portal swallows me whole.
The last thing I see before reality fractures completely is Miles standing on the platform's edge, silhouetted against the dying Nexus, reaching toward something he can no longer save.
Two people.
Two definitions of salvation.
Only one leads forward.
I always knew which one I would choose.