A dark night, a biting wind.
In Queens, there was a street that reeked of rot.
Trash cans were piled haphazardly in a corner, overflowing with decaying refuse that formed a thick layer against the base of a wall.
The stench was so overwhelming that passersby hurried past with their noses covered.
Dim yellow streetlights cast small circles of light onto the damp pavement, beyond which lay an impenetrable darkness.
Deep within the sewers, something flashed by.
A black spider crawled out from a gap in the sewer grate.
It was tiny, no larger than a grain of rice.
Its eight legs moved delicately over the slick iron bars, the dark brown markings on its abdomen flickering faintly in the dim light of the streetlamp.
This was Karl King’s spider clone—the sole survivor that had escaped the moment Ryan Quinn devoured his body and crumbled it into countless spiders.
It inherited all of Karl King’s memories and consciousness.
At this moment, it had yet to recover from the agony it just endured.
The sensation of his soul being extracted and crushed still lingered in his mind, causing the spider to freeze at the edge of the sewer grate for a long while.
Its eight legs trembled slightly, and the patterns on its abdomen flickered with residual terror.
That pain was far more terrifying than the deaths of everyone it—no, he—had ever eaten combined.
*What the hell was that monster?* Karl King’s consciousness seethed within the spider’s minuscule brain.
He had seen that masked man’s power, the blade that pierced his heart, and the black-and-red tentacles erupting from his body.
That thing was a true predator; Karl King had been nothing more than a self-important prey from start to finish.
Fear spread through the depths of his consciousness, slowly suppressing his former arrogance.
*No,* Karl King told himself fiercely.
*I can still make a comeback.
There’s no way he knows I’m still alive.
A spider, the size of a grain of rice, crawling through the darkness of the sewers—who would notice?
Who would care?* He still had a chance.
As long as he found food, as long as he devoured enough humans, he could slowly regain his strength and transform back into that invulnerable, eight-legged monster.
When that time came, he would make that masked man pay.
Humans?
Right now, they were just food.
Eventually, the masked man would be, too.
Karl King cursed internally, forcing his fear into the deepest recesses of his mind.
He then manipulated the spider’s eight legs to climb down from the sewer grate and head toward the dark alley across the street.
He moved quickly, his legs alternating in a rapid scuttle, leaving a water trail so thin it was almost invisible on the wet road.
A pedestrian happened to be walking past the sewer entrance.
He was in a hurry and didn’t watch his step.
The night was too dark to see the pavement clearly; he only knew this alley smelled like a dumpster and wanted to get through it as quickly as possible.
His leather shoes made a dull *thud-thud* sound against the ground.
Karl King heard the sound.
He accelerated, scurrying toward the base of the wall.
He was almost there, almost there—there was a crack in the wall he could duck into to avoid this giant, ignorant human— *Crunch.* A leather shoe landed right on him.
It was a total coincidence.
The pedestrian’s right foot happened to land directly on the rice-sized spider.
The tread of the sole and the spider’s body made contact in a tenth of a second.
*Splat.* The abdomen was instantly crushed, spraying blood and viscera across the damp pavement in a small, dark stain.
The head split open under the sole, its tiny red eyes popping one by one.
Dark purple fluid gushed from the cracks, mixing with the rainwater as it washed down the sewer.
The pedestrian didn’t even notice he had stepped on a spider.
He didn’t feel anything unusual—the sensation of a rice-sized bug was no different from a small pebble.
Assuming he had stepped in a pile of trash, he muttered a curse about his “rotten luck” and continued on.
His shoes splashed small ripples into the puddles.
Karl King’s consciousness struggled in the darkness.
The body was shattered, the eyes split, and the brain—if a spider could be said to have one—was rapidly disintegrating.
Memories dissipated; the faces of the people he had eaten were stripped away from his mind, vanishing one by one.
He thought of Gwen.
Then he thought of that spider, and the masked man.
The last image to surface was the first spider he had ever eaten—the shriveled, curled-up dead spider beneath the exhibition stand.
If he hadn’t eaten it, if he hadn’t gone to that exhibition, if he hadn’t seen Gwen get bitten…
There were no “ifs.” His consciousness sank into the abyss.
All his ambition and hatred, along with that fear, vanished into thin air.
He didn’t die at Ryan Quinn’s hands, he wasn’t devoured by the Blacklight Virus, and he didn’t die a grand death in battle.
He died by a leather shoe, a hurried passerby, an ordinary man who didn’t even know he had killed a monster.
Not far away, clinging to the shadows of a wall, another spider watched.
Its body was also black, but a very different kind of black—so deep it was almost formless, marked with dark red veins.
Its eight legs were pressed against the wall, its tiny red eyes watching everything that happened by the sewer: the escaped spider being crushed into a stain and finally washed away by the rain.
It watched the last flicker of Karl King’s consciousness go out in the dark.
Then, it turned around, crawled up the wall, and vanished into the shadows of the roof.
Midtown High, Library.
Ryan Quinn stood before the shattered wall, his gaze fixed on the night sky.
His eyes narrowed slightly, and a faint, dark red light flowed slowly in the depths of his pupils.
Everything the spider he sent out had seen, Ryan Quinn saw clearly—the Blacklight Virus’s ability to create clones allowed every spider he birthed to act as his eyes and ears, an extension of his own body.
He had seen the entire process of the runaway being trampled to death.
Ryan Quinn shook his head.
His lips quirked slightly, though whether in mockery or resignation, it was hard to tell.
In the distance, the sirens were getting closer.
Red and blue lights danced across the buildings a few blocks away, rapidly approaching Midtown High.
Ryan Quinn retracted his gaze and turned back toward the auditorium.
He stepped through the hole in the wall, treading over broken bricks and dust as he re-entered the ruins of the hall.
The floor was littered with abandoned gowns and shoes.
Shards of glass were embedded in the ground, and tables and chairs lay overturned.
The air was thick with the scent of rust and burnt material, and rain drifted in through the broken windows, bringing a damp chill.
Gwen was still in that corner.
Her white suit was covered in dust and blood, and a black suit jacket was draped over her, covering most of her face.
Her breathing was steadier now.
Though her face beneath the mask was still pale, color was slowly returning to her skin.
Her spider physiology allowed her to recover far faster than an ordinary human.
Ryan Quinn knelt down, sliding one hand under her shoulder and the other behind her knees, lifting Gwen into a princess carry.
She was even lighter than he had imagined.
Her long blonde hair spilled from the edge of her mask, resting in the crook of his arm with a dull luster under the moonlight.
He carried her through the ruins of the auditorium, out the side door, and vanished into the night of Queens.
The sirens grew louder.