“Your punches are heavy,” Karl King said, tilting his head.
“But not heavy enough.
You’ve eaten too little, Gwen.
You were only bitten by one spider.
But I—” He opened his massive chelicerae, revealing the deep crimson maw within.
“I have eaten dozens of spiders.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
They are all inside my body.
I am legion.” He lunged again.
This time, Gwen didn’t dodge.
Her web-shooters fired two strands that snagged Carl King’s forelimbs.
She yanked hard, trying to pull him down.
The webbing snapped in the middle.
The white strands recoiled under the massive tension, whipping against Gwen’s arm.
She hissed in pain.
Carl King’s forelimb was already sweeping toward her face.
With no time to dodge, she could only cross her arms in a block—*Bang!* Her body was sent flying again, this time slamming into the wall of the assembly hall.
The drywall shattered, exposing the brickwork beneath.
Her back was driven into the wall, leaving her pinned there for a moment.
Gwen coughed, a metallic sweetness flooding her mouth.
“Too weak,” Carl King’s voice drifted from the center of the hall, laden with disappointment.
“I thought you would be stronger.
After all, you’re Spider-Woman.
You’re the most formidable person I’ve ever seen.” He walked toward her, his eight limbs clicking rapidly against the floor.
“But you’ve disappointed me, Gwen.” Gwen struggled out of the indentation in the wall, dropping onto the debris-strewn floor.
She could barely lift her left arm, her knee was gashed, and her white suit was shredded and bloodstained in several places.
But she didn’t retreat.
“I have no interest in satisfying you,” Gwen said, raising her right hand and aiming her web-shooter at Carl King’s spider head.
She fired.
This time, she didn’t aim for his limbs; she went for his eyes.
Compound eyes, simple eyes—all were instantly plastered with white webbing.
Karl King let out a sharp hiss, his forelimbs flailing wildly in front of him as he tried to tear the webbing away.
Gwen took the opportunity to charge, her right fist brimming with strength as she slammed it into his abdomen— Her fist struck the chitinous plate.
The carapace cracked.
Dark purple fluid gushed from the fissure, accompanied by swarms of tiny spiders.
they scurried up Gwen’s arm, slipping into the gaps in her suit and biting her skin.
Gwen retreated, shaking her arm as the spiders left a trail of searing, stinging pain on her skin.
Karl King ripped the webbing from his eyes.
His compound eyes glowed in the darkness, the dark red light more piercing than before.
“You hurt me,” his voice turned shrill.
“I don’t like pain.” He charged.
All eight limbs propelled him forward with a speed that outpaced even Gwen’s spider-sense.
A forelimb struck her in the stomach, hoisting her up before hurling her away.
Gwen’s body traced an arc through the air, smashing through the speakers at the edge of the stage and crashing into the back wall.
Splinters, wires, and broken plastic parts rained down on her.
She slumped in the wreckage, gasping for air.
Her spider-sense was still screaming, but her body was no longer responding properly.
Karl King climbed onto the stage.
His eight limbs made heavy thudding sounds against the wooden floorboards.
He walked up to Gwen and looked down, his compound eyes reflecting her bloodied and dust-covered form.
“You don’t taste good,” Carl King said.
“But eating you will make me stronger.
So, I will eat you anyway.” He extended a forelimb, hooking it around Gwen’s neck and lifting her from the rubble.
Gwen’s feet left the ground, her face flushing deep red beneath the mask.
Her hands clawed at the limb, but her strength was spent—she couldn’t pry it off, couldn’t break free.
“Stop struggling,” Carl King’s voice softened.
“It won’t hurt much.
I’ve eaten so many people, and none of them cried out in pain.” His chelicerae opened wide.
Within the rift, countless tiny spiders writhed.
Gwen’s vision began to blur.
Blood loss and oxygen deprivation sent her consciousness drifting toward the edge, yet she fought to keep her eyes open for one last moment.
Her father’s face flickered in her mind.
Then Helen, Howard, Simon, and Betty.
Finally, Ryan Quinn.
The transfer student in the black suit, standing under the lights talking to Mary Jane.
The boy who was always quiet, whose shadow seemed thinner than a normal person’s.
The one she had invited to be her date, but who had never given her an answer.
She still hadn’t heard his answer.
The chelicerae opened to their limit.
The spiders inside the maw churned, ready to spill out.
And then— Something in the air changed.
It wasn’t a sound, nor was it light.
It was something more subtle, more fundamental—as if the very texture of reality had been lightly plucked.
The space in front of Gwen’s throat began to blur.
The rain continued to fall, and blue electrical sparks still jumped along the walls, but near the joint of the forelimb pinning Gwen’s neck, the air suddenly became unstable.
A molecular disturbance—the boundaries of that small patch of space dissolved as something reached through from the other side of reality, pushing open an invisible door.
A phantom shimmer coalesced in the air.
The patterns of a grey-white suit emerged first, shifting from transparent to translucent to solid in less than half a second.
The edge of a hood rippled slightly in the air, and the quantum flow lines on the suit’s surface pulsed with a cold, dark red light, flickering in sync with the nearby electrical sparks.
Ryan Quinn’s body snapped out of its phased state—he had completed a displacement directly from a state of intangibility, appearing right in front of Carl King and the limb clutching Gwen’s neck, before allowing himself to be seen by the world again.
His right arm was no longer an arm.
The moment he materialized, the Blacklight virus had already completed its morphological restructuring.
From elbow to fingertips, his entire right arm had transformed into a black-and-red blade—a biomass blade formed from highly compressed Blacklight biomass.
The edge was incredibly thin, almost translucent, rimmed with a faint dark red glow that pulsed at the same frequency as the suit’s quantum patterns.
Carl King’s spider-sense finally screamed—but it was too late.
Ryan Quinn swung the blade.
The blade sliced diagonally from upper right to lower left in a perfectly straight trajectory.
The edge bit into the joint of the forelimb, the thinnest part of the carapace and the most vulnerable point of any arthropod.
*Snick.* Clean and decisive.
The limb clutching Gwen’s neck was severed neatly at the joint.
Dark purple fluid erupted from the stump, splashing across the stage and onto Ryan Quinn’s grey-white suit.
The nerve endings of the severed limb were still twitching, and tiny spiders spilled from the wound, flailing their legs aimlessly in the air before being washed away by the rain.
Karl King let out a piercing shriek, all eight limbs retreating simultaneously, leaving a jagged trail across the stage.
The spider head whipped around, compound eyes focusing on Ryan Quinn—the grey-white suit, the skull mask beneath the hood, and that black-red blade still dripping with purple blood.
The severed forelimb was still hooked around Gwen’s neck, but it had lost its power—the joint had lost its hydraulic pressure and began to slide down limply.
Gwen’s body, deprived of support, pitched forward.
She expected to hit the floor.
She had even braced herself to land face-first.
But she didn’t.
The moment Ryan Quinn severed the limb, his right arm reverted to its original form—the black-red blade retracted into his elbow, and the biomass redistributed into fingers and a palm.
He turned, hands reaching out to catch the falling Gwen.
He caught her steadily.
One hand supported her shoulder while the other hooked beneath her knees, lifting her in a bridal carry.
He had perfectly calculated her trajectory and center of gravity.
Gwen’s vision was fading.
Blood loss and a lack of oxygen kept her consciousness on the brink, but she forced her eyes open one last time.
She saw a suit.
A soft, muted grey-white.
The surface was covered in fine quantum flow lines that glowed with a dark red light amidst the flickering sparks.
Those lines flowed slowly across the suit, casting the blood on her face and body into deep shadows.
From chest to shoulder, from arm to leg, every plate of armor fit seamlessly, as if it were a natural growth.
The hood was pulled down over the head, obscuring most of the face, with the same dark red patterns flowing along its edges.
And she thought she had seen—was it a hallucination?—this person’s body shifting from transparent to solid.
He had appeared out of nowhere.
Beneath the hood was a mask.
Its lines were cold, minimalist, and sleek, covering the entire face.
The eye sockets were two deep hollows, emitting a faint, dark red aura from within.
The jawline was sharp and integrated into the mask.
Gwen’s fingers twitched slightly, wanting to touch the mask, but she couldn’t raise her arm.
She only managed to whisper one word.
“You…” Then her eyes closed.
Her consciousness sank into darkness.