Chapter 187: You've Broken My Spell Six Times, Peter!
While everyone else was still reeling from the revelation about the Spider-Society, Gwen had stopped listening to the room. Her eyes had locked onto Ethan, and they hadn't moved.
He knew more than her. More than the watch had told her. More than Miguel had briefed her on. She didn't know what to do with that yet — but she was cataloguing it.
Doesn't seem like a villain, she decided, reluctantly. Doesn't mean he isn't.
She pushed it aside for now and turned to the three bewildered teenagers staring at her.
Right. Introductions.
"Okay," she said. "I'm Gwen. Gwen Stacy. In my universe, I got bitten by a spider while I was working at Oscorp — became Spider-Woman. Some people call me Ghost-Spider." She paused, glancing between them. "I'm still in high school. Had my own band going. Then there was an accident, I ended up crossing into another universe, and after that... I joined the Spider-Society." She held up her wrist. The watch caught the light. "This is how I travel between universes. I was actually on my way out when this one—" she jerked her chin toward Ethan— "intercepted me."
Garfield-Peter picked up immediately after. "Peter Parker. This universe's Spider-Man. I snuck into Oscorp using my girlfriend's badge—" He caught himself, glanced at Gwen, and the tips of his ears went red. "My girlfriend Gwen. She works at Oscorp too. The one from — from here, I mean. Not—" He cleared his throat. Gwen shrugged, unbothered. He took that as permission to continue. "Anyway. Spider bit me. I became Spider-Man." A beat. "I'm sorry about your Peter."
He said it simply, without ceremony, because there wasn't a better way to say it.
Tobey-Peter smiled his quiet smile. "I'm Peter Parker too. I got bitten on a school trip — a lab tour. And then I met my master." He glanced at Ethan, brief and warm. Then he half-turned. "And this is my best friend Harry."
Harry's expression was caught somewhere between charmed and genuinely aggrieved.
"Why didn't our spiders ever bite me?" he demanded. He looked between Garfield-Peter and Gwen with something approaching betrayal. "I'm going back to Oscorp the second we get home. I'm checking every room. There has to be a spider somewhere." He pointed at the two of them. "Both of your powers came from my family's company — why does the actual Osborn son not have anything to show for it?"
Ethan, watching from the side, didn't say what he was thinking.
You'd have to legally change your name to Peter Parker first, kid. The spider has a type.
And honestly? Be grateful. Every Spider-Man loses things. You've still got your face. You've still got Pete. That's winning.
Gwen walked them through the Spider-Society — the infrastructure, the mission, what the watch actually did. Garfield-Peter leaned forward the entire time, asking questions, lighting up in a way that made it obvious he was already mentally filling out an application.
Tobey-Peter listened carefully and said little.
He doesn't need it, Ethan noticed. Tobey had already thought it through. Hell's Kitchen had firepower the Spider-Society couldn't match, and he knew it. What he wanted was to earn his place in it — to be ready the next time things got serious. The Society was a detour.
Then Garfield-Peter turned to Tobey-Peter, and something shifted in his voice.
"Did you grow up with your parents?" He paused. "Is your Uncle Ben still — I mean, did he..." He trailed off. His face said the rest.
Tobey-Peter understood immediately.
"He almost didn't make it," he said quietly. "There was an accident. But Master Ethan got there in time."
He looked over at Ethan when he said it. Not dramatically. Just — the kind of look that means something.
Garfield-Peter sat with that for a moment.
Glad. Genuinely glad that somewhere, in some version of the story, Uncle Ben got to stay. And underneath that, something smaller and more complicated — the quiet sting of why not mine — which he didn't say, because it wasn't a fair question and he knew it.
He straightened up and turned to Ethan. Bowed.
"Thank you for saving Captain Stacy," he said. "And thank you for saving Uncle Ben. In another world, but still."
Ethan smiled slightly. "It was nothing."
Across the room, Gwen's expression had been doing something complicated for the last two minutes.
She was glad. Of course she was glad — George Stacy alive, Uncle Ben alive, tragedies averted. That part of her was simple and clear.
But the part of her that had sat through Miguel's briefings, the part that had read the Spider-Society's data on canonical events and what happened when you started pulling threads—
The web, she thought. He's changing the web.
She knew what Miles's situation had caused. One anomaly in one universe, and suddenly every Spider-Man in the multiverse was dealing with displaced villains. Because the story had been disrupted, and the disruption spread.
What Ethan was doing was bigger than that. Much bigger.
Does he know? she wondered. Or does he just not care?
She turned the darker question over in her mind: what if the point was to destabilize the Spider-Man universes? What if he understood the web exactly, and was systematically dismantling it?
Then she looked at Tobey-Peter, who was smiling at something Harry said. And at Garfield-Peter, who had just bowed to a stranger out of genuine gratitude.
She couldn't say it out loud. She couldn't look at these two and explain that the man who saved their uncles might be unraveling the fabric of their worlds.
She wasn't even sure she believed it herself.
Miguel's rules aren't sacred, she thought. Every Peter Parker suffers and loses and carries it alone — and we're supposed to protect that? Protect the tragedy?
She didn't have an answer. So she filed it and kept watching.
Then Garfield-Peter, who had been building toward something for the last thirty seconds, straightened up with a look of absolute resolve.
"Mr. Ethan," he said. "I have an audacious request."
The room turned to look at him.
He met Ethan's eyes.
"Please take me as your student."
「DING!」
「Congratulations, Host! Garfield-Peter Parker has been added as a friend!」
"..."
「Congratulations, Host! Garfield-Peter Parker's Friendship Level has risen to ★★★★★!」
Ethan stared at the notifications.
He wants to be my disciple.
I'm going to be the patriarch of every Spider-Man.
He was about to respond — decline, probably, or at least stall — when he felt it.
A vibration. Subtle. Wrong.
Something in the fabric of this universe had just moved.
He was out of the villa and airborne before he'd finished the thought, leaving behind a room full of people staring at the space where he'd been standing.
Garfield-Peter looked at the empty air, then at the door, then at Tobey-Peter.
"...Did I make him angry?"
Meanwhile, somewhere in the multiverse—
In a sealed chamber in the middle of a city of towers and fire escapes and ten million people, a middle-aged man in a red cloak was working.
His hands moved through the air with the practiced precision of someone who had spent years making the body forget it ever held a scalpel. The spell array was almost complete. Almost.
Then the teenager in front of him opened his mouth.
"Could you also make it so MJ and Aunt May and Ned don't forget me?"
The man in the cloak closed his eyes.
He was not a patient man by nature. He was becoming one by necessity.
He agreed.
And then the spell broke.
The array collapsed inward, and the backlash hit like a pressure wave — both of them lifted off the ground as raw magical energy went looking for somewhere to go. The sorcerer threw everything he had into containment, forcing it back, sealing it inside something that held.
After a long moment, everything was still.
He lowered himself to the floor and looked at the teenager.
"My spell has been altered six times, Peter!"
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