Chapter 89
"Right choice."
The voice. That same young, playful voice that had sounded in my head a moment ago. It echoed through my consciousness, and with it the all-consuming darkness began to dissolve, like morning fog.
I was still on my knees, breathing hard, my heart hammering in my chest, my pulse drumming in my ears. My hands were trembling. I slowly raised my head.
I was still on the same skyscraper rooftop. But the world around me had changed. Gone was the living, oily darkness that had swallowed the sky. Gone were the nightmare dragons. Gone was the God of Darkness himself, Knull. Gone were the screams of the dying city.
Gone were Uncle Ben and Aunt May.
Around me was emptiness. A blank, gray, lifeless stage set of a city, stripped of sound, movement, life. The sky was simply a gray canvas, without sun, without stars. The silence pressed down on my ears.
But no. I was not alone.
A man stood at the edge of the roof. Tall, powerfully built, dark-skinned. Over the upper half of his face rested a vivid orange-yellow mask, with feathers from birds I'd never seen before jutting out like an exotic crown. Thick black dreadlocks spilled out from beneath it. The man stood a full head taller than me and was built like an athlete. I automatically compared him to the upgraded John. From his neck to his ankles his body was covered in intricate blue tattoos that converged on his chest into a massive, stylized spider. His only clothing was a pair of simple green harem pants and a necklace of fangs and claws from predators of some kind.
He looked wild. Strange. Like an African spider god straight out of myth. But I didn't let myself relax for a second. If that flash of intuition I'd felt near John's new suit had been real, then right now it wasn't whispering. It was screaming. This man was DANGEROUS. Incredibly so. Not in the way Knull was dangerous, not with all-consuming darkness, but with something else: something ancient, cunning, unpredictable.
And his shadow. His shadow was wrong. It didn't mirror the shape of a man. Across the gray concrete of the rooftop stretched the shadow of a gigantic, many-legged spider.
"Relax, kid, don't jump out of your skin," said the man, grinning, and I noticed his eyes: brown, alive, full of mischief and ancient wisdom. He raised his palms in a gesture of peace. "Chill. Show's over."
"Who are you?" My voice wavered.
"You can call me Anansi," he said with an easy smile, showing bright white teeth. "And yes, I'm basically that same... what did your friend call it? Multiversal conceptual entity. You know, the Web, the powers, the chosen ones, all that business. That's me."
He said it as simply as if he were introducing himself to a neighbor in the hallway.
"What was all that? Knull? The dragons? My uncle and aunt?" I was trying to gather my thoughts. The horror of what I'd lived through still blazed before my eyes.
"A test, obviously," Anansi said with a shrug. "Standard procedure for candidates. Have to check whether you're up to it, whether you can make the right choice. As you figured out, you passed. Unlike your buddy."
"John?" My heart lurched again. "What happened to him? Did he see it too?"
"Don't stress, he's fine." Anansi waved him off. "His connection to the Web is incidental at best. Minimal. Just grazed him. That was purely my personal interest: to see how he'd react. Interesting specimen, I'll tell you that. But let's get back to you. The Key Events, right? That's what you wanted to discuss?"
"Yes." I nodded uncertainly, still struggling to believe any of this was real. I was talking to a God. A Spider God. "I don't want that. I can't risk the lives of my family for power. If that's a mandatory condition, if deaths are unavoidable, then I'm ready to walk away. Right now."
I said the last part with more conviction, looking directly into Anansi's brown eyes through the slits of his strange mask.
"Easy there, kid, no need for all that." Anansi waved his hand lightly. "Don't want Key Events? Then there won't be any. Your call. The Web is flexible. It will adapt. Just be ready for the fact that the threats specifically waiting for you aren't going anywhere. They might even become more interesting."
"I'll be ready for them," I said firmly. "I'll have power? Enough to be ready?"
"Oh, don't even doubt it," the spider god said with a sly grin. "You'll have more than enough power. You're the perfect vessel, after all. They don't come along every day."
"Will it be enough to stand against someone like Knull?"
"Now, don't get too greedy, buddy." Anansi clicked his tongue in mock disappointment, shaking his head. "Knull isn't just Higher League. He is beyond the League entirely. Ancient evil, the whole deal. But you know." He leaned forward slightly, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "You'll have a chance. An illusory, practically impossible chance, but a chance all the same. Someday. To stand at our level. In that strange little world of yours, nothing is impossible, right? Your buddy John seems to live by that same principle."
"For him, it definitely is," I muttered. Anansi's words, a chance to stand at our level, stirred and inspired me to my core. This wasn't just sweet flattery to reel me in, was it? It was a chance at genuine power.
"Yes. He's an interesting case," Anansi mused, looking off into the distance. "Someone whose very existence upends everything my mother knows about the order of things. A funny paradox."
"What does that mean?"
"Ah, never mind. Too far above your pay grade." The god waved it off again. "Better tell me: Key Events, is that all you wanted to discuss? Any other requests for the package? Or is it time to snap my fingers and send you back to your, ahem, broken reality?"
"Broken reality?" I tensed up. "That wasn't said by accident, was it?"
"Nope." Anansi broke into a wide, half-mad, cunning smile, baring every tooth. "But technically, I didn't say anything."
He snapped his fingers.
The storage closet. The same cramped space, but no longer humming with metaphysical energy, just an ordinary room. I was back.
And John. He was standing just outside the door. No, he had only just left. He hadn't even managed two steps down the hallway.
How did I know that? I simply knew. The way I knew where the nearest wall or ceiling was. This was a new sense. Not sight, not hearing. Something else. All-pervasive.
Power.
Yes. I had finally found it.
The world ceased to exist.
But the agony submerging my body did not end with the illusion. The break room returned. Empty. No Gwen fighting desperately for her life. No Peter sleeping on the couch. No infernal Morlun.
Only me, on my knees in a pool of my own blood. Extremis fluid, maybe. My hands, reduced to bloody pulp up to the elbows, were already hissing as they rebuilt themselves. My internal organs, turned to paste, coiled and regenerated with nauseating speed. The pain was absolutely real.
And him.
A dark-skinned man wore a garishly extravagant orange feathered mask. His sculpted body was covered in blue tattoos that converged into a spider pattern on his chest. His shadow on the floor belonged not to a man, but to a gigantic spider.
Clear enough. A test. It had to have an organizer. Apparently, he had just revealed himself.
"Wrong choice?" I rasped. Rage, fear, and despair drained away as fast as my flesh was regenerating. In their place came cold, clear analysis. Less than a minute ago, I had probably been burning hotter than an active volcano; now, I was simply angry. "Isn't it hypocritical to judge a choice that doesn't actually exist? Since when is correctness defined by the ability to adapt to sadistic test conditions?"
Honestly, his answer didn't matter much to me. Whatever the test consisted of, I had failed by this entity's standards. All I wanted was to get out of here. Ideally alive.
Surprisingly, the man smiled. That carefree, almost childlike smile on the face of such a powerful being genuinely unsettled me.
"I already knew what you'd choose," he said breezily. "I was just having fun. You know. In your case, the future is just a little more uncertain than most of what I can perceive across the Multiverse. And I get bored. I just wanted to see exactly how you'd do it."
Having fun? I should have been angry, but given the colossal gap, not just in power but in the very nature of existence itself, I might as well try to find some positives. For instance, my theory that I was a blind spot for cosmic forces had just received direct confirmation from this entity from across the Multiverse himself. But if he already knew the outcome, what was the point of the entertainment? It stopped being entertainment when the result was known.
"What's the point?" I slowly got to my feet. My hands had almost healed. "I'm not a vessel like Peter. If I had passed your test, if I had chosen him, would I have gained Web powers? I doubt it."
"Actually, yes," he said, his grin widening. "You would have made a very entertaining Spider."
"I don't buy it," I said flatly. "And who are you, exactly?"
"Anansi." The name didn't trigger any direct associations from my meta knowledge. A spider god? A multiversal observer? A Weaver of the Web?
"As for your disbelief, honestly, I don't care. You wasted your chance either way."
He let out a loud, theatrical sigh, like someone disappointed by a poor performance.
"Frankly, I don't particularly care either." I shrugged. "Your Web doesn't interest me. I prefer independence. And power. I'll become strong regardless."
"Weren't you literally turned into mincemeat just a minute ago by a pale imitation of Morlun?" He was provoking me. No. More likely he was just having fun again.
I ignored the jab. The emotions had settled completely. I was now processing the recent fight with detachment, as valuable data. Data about an enemy I had previously considered hypothetical.
"Next time I'll be ready," I said.
"Oh, you're that confident there will be a next time? That you'll even live to see it?"
"Fine, there won't be a next time," I said, colder than I should have been. "I'll find the real Morlun myself. And eliminate him. Preemptively."
The smile dropped from Anansi's face.
"If Peter passed your test," I continued, following the thought, "which I don't doubt for a moment, then his newly acquired spider anomaly is bound to attract the Inheritors, which means that since the fight is unavoidable, you need to strike first."
Silence. Anansi's eyes behind the mask narrowed slightly. He studied me closely, all amusement gone now.
"The Inheritors?" he said quietly, almost in a whisper. "You are an even greater anomaly than I thought."
Anansi couldn't read minds, and he wasn't omniscient: valuable data, noted. Anansi himself looked at me for one, two seconds. Then his face broke into a wide, predatory smile again.
"I'll be watching you, blind spot," he said, clapping his hands with delight. "Don't disappoint me."
"As if someone like you isn't watching everything anyway," I muttered, slowly loosening my limbs. My hands, though trembling with phantom pain, had fully recovered. My internal organs were back in order too.
"Nope," Anansi said, shaking his head, his dreadlocks swaying with the motion. "All that 'everything'," he said, making air quotes, "is incredibly boring. But specific events? Specific individuals? Oh, now that is first-class entertainment."
"So Peter and I have acquired a personal God Stalker?"
"God?" he snorted, as though I had said something foolish. "Too grand a word. I'm just a storyteller. And you two are a very interesting story."
"Well, at least you're not denying the Stalker part," I said, testing my restored sternum, still feeling the phantom crunch of ribs. I looked at him with almost no emotion, nothing more than the cold curiosity of an engineer, and asked the question that had formed the instant I realized this was a test. "How did you do it? An illusion that sophisticated? The pain, the regeneration, the despair. I felt all of it as though it were real. Not a single glitch."
"That's because it wasn't an illusion." His smile widened, baring thirty-two brilliant white teeth. Teeth I suddenly very much wanted to drive down his throat. Could he manipulate emotional states? Or was I just a little unstable? "A pocket universe. A small world, thrown together quickly. Simulacra of your loved ones. And a very precise copy of Morlun, plus one other lovely gentleman for Peter, of course. All of it real. Just in miniature."
"Damn," I said succinctly.
He created a pocket universe with the snap of his fingers. He instantly replicated a multiversal energy vampire's power level. I fully grasped, in that moment, just how powerful this smiling abomination was.
"Why are you telling me all this?" I continued, trying to keep my tone level. "Isn't this excessively valuable information?"
"Well, you asked. And since I'm here, why not?" He shrugged carelessly. "I don't understand the reverence some of my colleagues have about information. You already know more than you should. One confirmed theory more or less. What's the difference?"
"Thank you, I suppose. Then I have one more question."
"Last one." He raised a finger. I nodded.
"Why did you decide to talk to me at all? I failed the test. Honestly, after your verdict of 'wrong choice,' I expected..."
"Either to be sent back to your world in disgrace, or simply erased?" Anansi nodded. "Yes, that's standard protocol. But here I am. In all my pompous glory. Chatting with an ordinary, ahem, all right, not entirely ordinary mortal, like we're old friends."
I nodded, still not following where he was going. Anansi leaned a fraction closer. His smile disappeared, and for a moment I saw in his eyes a bottomless, ancient, all-consuming boredom.
"The real reason is simple, John. I. Simply. Felt like it."
And before I could process anything or say a word, he snapped his fingers.
A brief, nauseating disorientation.
And I was standing near the storage closet door. At the exact spot where I had been what felt like an eternity ago, before the test began. I hadn't even taken a step away from it yet. I'd only just finished briefing Peter and left him inside.
Simply felt like it.
Was that sufficient motivation for an entity of that caliber? Probably. Then again, a simple mortal couldn't be expected to understand divine logic. I might not have been entirely simple, but I was still far closer to mortal than to beings like Anansi or Morlun.
On the subject of the latter: Anansi never said there wouldn't be a real encounter. He'd only registered surprise at my knowledge of the Inheritors and promised to watch. Which meant Peter was in danger. Which meant the bastard would have to be dealt with. The real one. Preemptively.
And another thing. I was absolutely certain that the entire test, all that cruel, humiliating demonstration of power, had been a warning. This was what could happen to someone weak, and I now understood, acutely, at a cellular level, just how weak I was, if I again fancied myself the smartest person in the room and decided to play God.
Well. I had plans to enhance Gwen's spider powers too, but after all this, it would be too much. That Pandora's box was better left shut.
I shook my head, casting off the trance. Enough reflection. What about Peter? While I was being put through my own test, he... Had he connected to the Web? Had he passed his test?
I activated Spiritual Sight, focusing on the closed storage closet door.
And. Oh.
In there. There was no silence. There was no emptiness.
In there, in that cramped little closet, right now. A supernova was igniting.
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