“How…
how is this possible?” Gwen’s voice trembled behind her mask, a shudder she couldn’t suppress.
She stared at the monster tearing its way out of the woman’s body, unable to reconcile this thing with the pudgy Karl King, the boy whose fingers used to twitch nervously against his trouser seams whenever he spoke.
The gender was wrong.
The size didn’t match.
The temperament and the look in its eyes were worlds apart.
“A spider’s skin can be shed.” Carl King’s voice echoed from within the rift.
The woman’s mouth was still moving, but it wasn’t her speaking anymore.
The voice was muffled, forced up from the depths of a throat, a grating sound that made one’s teeth ache.
“I, too, can shed my skin.” The top of the woman’s head began to split.
The skin peeled back slowly from the hairline toward the sides, inch by inch, revealing a dark purple, chitinous surface beneath.
Her arms were bulging, skin sloughing off the fingers in segments to reveal elongated, multi-jointed limbs.
Countless black spiders swarmed out of the opening.
They poured from the collar, crawled out of the sleeves, and squeezed through the seams of the skirt, cascading down Carl King’s body to form a writhing carpet across the floor.
“This skin,” Carl King’s voice continued, his tone manic with triumph, “belongs to someone I ate.
It is merely the clothes I wear now.” Gwen’s chest tightened.
She watched as the woman’s face shriveled and collapsed in Carl King’s hands, that once-delicate visage turning into a crumpled, hollow husk.
Beneath that layer of skin was something else entirely.
Something not human.
“I see now.” Gwen’s voice suddenly went cold as a realization took root in her mind.
“The missing people in Hell’s Kitchen…
you killed them all!” She thought of the cases her father had mentioned.
The bodies found in abandoned warehouses, their skin completely flayed.
The desiccated spider carcasses.
The details George Stacy had hesitated to share over breakfast.
She had even briefly suspected the hooded man who killed Thompson—after all, he was the most formidable person she had ever encountered, and that cold, lethal efficiency certainly fit the profile of a serial killer.
She never expected it to be Karl King.
Not the fat kid who laughed as he tossed other people’s backpacks into the trash in the hallway.
Not the boy who had stood nervously before a mural, voice shaking as he invited her to be his date.
Karl King made no effort to hide it.
The woman’s skin had been pulled down to his chest, exposing the swelling, dark purple spider torso beneath.
He nodded, a twisted sense of pleasure surfacing on the face that was currently being replaced by a spider’s head.
“That’s right, I killed them,” a buzzing resonance vibrated from the rift.
“But I also gave them eternal life.
They have become a part of me forever.
Their skin is my clothing, their flesh is my strength, and their memories are my collection.
They will not die—they live within my body.” Something burned in Gwen’s chest.
It was heavy, a weight that made it hard to breathe.
“Then why did you kill Mr.
Harrington?” her voice shook.
“And why hurt so many other people?” Karl King tilted his head.
It was no longer a human shape; eyes bulged out from the sides, and the mouth split horizontally.
The proportions of the entire head were utterly wrong.
“I thought you would accept my invitation to the ball,” Carl King’s voice suddenly softened, turning into a silken tone that made her skin crawl.
“After all, we are the same—people changed by spiders.
I thought you would understand me.
Perhaps we could have joined together, evolved…
together.” His voice dropped low.
“But unfortunately, you rejected me.” The red eyes on the spider-face flared to life.
“Now, the only way to obtain your abilities is to consume you.
And besides—” He spread his massive forelimbs, gesturing toward the assembly hall.
“I’ll ruin this ball that annoyed me so much.
It makes me happy to see them screaming, running, and trampling one another.” Gwen clenched her fists, her nails digging into her palms.
Her teeth ground together, and her face flushed red beneath her mask.
“Fine,” she spat through gritted teeth.
“I’m going to make you pay.
You monster.” “A monster?” Carl King’s laughter erupted from the rift, high-pitched and piercing.
He reached out with a forelimb, grabbed the face of the woman’s skin, and wrenched it upward.
“You haven’t even seen a monster yet.” The woman’s features crumpled together instantly before being torn open from the throat.
The skin peeled away from Carl King’s head with a wet, sickening sound.
With the human skin torn away, what lay beneath was revealed— A massive spider head.
The black, chitinous skull was shaped somewhere between a sphere and an oval, its surface covered in fine, short spikes.
Two enormous compound eyes bulged from the sides of the head, glowing with a dull red light.
Below the compound eyes were four smaller simple eyes arranged in an arc, each rotating independently, staring in different directions.
The mouth—if it could be called that—consisted of two massive chelicerae that spread to the sides, revealing a deep crimson inner gullet that was constantly writhing.
Countless tiny black spiders crawled in and out of that maw.
Gwen finally saw Carl King’s full form.
The human torso roughly retained its shape, but the skin was entirely gone, replaced by a layer of dark purple chitinous exoskeleton.
Six spider limbs extended from his shoulders and ribs—counting his two arms, he had eight in total.
Each tip was honed to a lethal point, gleaming coldly amidst the flickering electrical sparks.
His abdomen was highly distended, its surface a highway for innumerable tiny spiders.
They crawled out of his body, down his limbs onto the floor, and back into him through his legs in a never-ending cycle.
More small spiders gushed from the edges of the torn skin—from the eye sockets, the mouth slit, the tears in the flesh—pouring out in thick streams.
Gwen was forced back two steps by the sight.
Her spider-sense wasn’t just tingling—it was screaming.
Every inch of her body urged her: *Run.
This thing is beyond you.
Run.* But she didn’t run.
“How many people did you eat?” Gwen’s voice emerged from behind her mask, calmer than she had expected.
Karl King tilted his head.
The spider head turned nearly ninety degrees as the lateral compound eyes sized her up.
“A dozen or so,” a garbled buzzing came from the rift.
“Maybe twenty.
I lost count.
They all look the same anyway—just food.” He took a step forward.
All eight limbs moved simultaneously, his body gliding forward in an eerie, fluid motion.
“Do you know, Gwen?
Every person I eat makes me stronger.
Their muscles become my muscles; their bones become my bones.
I have already eaten twenty people—do you really think you can defeat me?” Gwen didn’t answer.
She lunged.
Her right fist, carrying the full weight of her spider-strength, smashed into Carl King’s spider head—a force sufficient to punch through a wall.
She struck the left compound eye.
*Thud.* Carl King’s head was knocked to the right.
Dark purple fluid sprayed from the shattered compound eye, splashing onto Gwen’s white suit.
But he didn’t fall.
His head slowly turned back, and the crushed compound eye began to heal at a rate visible to the naked eye.
Tiny spiders swarmed from the wound, filling the cracked chitin and restoring it within seconds.
“That hurt,” Karl King said, his voice tinged with a hint of grievance.
“You hurt me.” A forelimb whipped around with sudden violence.
Gwen’s spider-sense allowed her to dodge at the last possible second, but the limb’s speed was incredible—far faster than she had anticipated.
The pointed limb grazed her shoulder, leaving three deep gashes in her white suit.
Blood seeped through the fabric.
Gwen bit her lip, remaining silent.
“You’re fast,” Karl King said, his eight limbs beginning to move in unison as he closed in on her.
“But how long can you run?” He pounced.
Gwen rolled backward, evading the first strike.
The second followed immediately.
She crossed her arms to block—the force was staggering, sending her flying.
She crashed into a row of overturned tables, wood splinters flying everywhere.
Her left arm went numb.
It wasn’t broken, but it was certainly fractured.
Gwen flipped back to her feet, her white suit covered in splinters and dust.
She tasted copper beneath her mask—she had bitten her tongue.
Karl King didn’t pursue immediately.
He stood his ground, his eight limbs shifting leisurely across the floor while the tiny spiders on his body scurried in and out with a constant rustling sound.