The frequency detonates across the Nexus like a bomb made of nothing.
No explosion. No light. Just *absence*.
Spider-sense dies mid-thought—not suppressed, not overridden—simply *gone*. The future collapses into a singularity of now. No warnings. No intuition. No probability trees branching into safe choices and dangerous ones.
Just noise.
Just the present moment, sharp and final.
Every Totem staggers.
Miles Morales clutches his head, feeling the absence like phantom limb syndrome—reaching for a sense that's been part of him since the spider bit, finding only static where certainty used to live.
Miguel O'Hara's claws extend reflexively, combat instincts compensating for the sudden blindness, but his movements are fractionally slower, his timing off.
Gwen Stacy drops into a defensive stance, breath catching, realizing she's fighting without the one advantage that kept her alive through a hundred impossible battles.
Silk freezes mid-step, organic webbing retracting, her precognitive threading—the ability to feel the Web's vibrations before they manifest—reduced to guesswork.
Spider-Ham shakes his head violently, ears ringing, cartoon physics momentarily uncertain whether to obey tragedy or comedy.
Above them, the Web of Life and Destiny fractures.
Not breaking. Not severing.
Just... *static*.
Threads that once hummed with purpose and pattern now vibrate with meaningless noise, probability collapsing into chaos, fate becoming optional.
And in the center of the Nexus, the Weaver's Child convulses.
It doesn't scream.
It *stutters*.
Its form flickers—solid, translucent, solid again—like reality can't decide what it is anymore. The threads that make up its body writhe independently, no longer coordinated, each strand trying to fulfill a different prediction simultaneously.
For the first time since it was born from stolen certainty and weaponized fate, the Weaver's Child cannot see what comes next.
Its head jerks left, then right, movements mechanical and wrong.
"Error," it says, voice glitching, syllables overlapping. "Probability collapse detected. Recalculating. Recalculating. No solution found."
Its hands—too many fingers, geometry that shifts based on observer perspective—reach toward the Web above, trying to reconnect, trying to restore the future it was built to navigate.
The Web doesn't answer.
The frequency Rorschach deployed sees to that.
For the first time, the Child is blind.
And the Totems attack.
Miles moves first—instinct before thought, body trained by a thousand fights to react before the mind catches up.
He venom-strikes, electricity arcing from his fists, and the blow connects.
No precognitive dodge. No probability-dodging. Just impact.
The Child staggers, and Miles feels savage satisfaction for half a second before its hand—too fast, prediction replaced by pure adaptive speed—catches him across the chest and sends him flying into a support pillar.
The impact drives air from his lungs, cracks ribs, leaves him gasping.
Without spider-sense, he didn't see it coming until it already happened.
Miguel is next, launching himself with enhanced strength and talons extended, fighting like a cornered animal because that's all he has left—aggression and refusal to die.
He slashes, draws ichor that might be blood, might be Web-stuff, might be both.
The Child adapts mid-combat, limbs elongating, geometry shifting, becoming something that can fight back without needing to predict.
It grabs Miguel mid-lunge, slams him into the floor hard enough to crater the Nexus's reinforced foundation, then throws him aside like a broken toy.
Gwen adapts fastest.
She stops trying to anticipate—stops reaching for the spider-sense that isn't there—and trusts rhythm instead. Muscle memory. Pattern recognition. The beat of combat stripped down to its most fundamental truth:
Move. Strike. Don't stop moving.
She web-swings through the chaos, firing lines that tangle the Child's limbs, using momentum and physics instead of prophecy.
It works.
For three seconds.
Then the Child learns her rhythm, matches it, counters it, and backhands her through a crystalline Web-viewer that shatters into fragments of broken futures.
Silk moves blind but precise.
Without her precognitive threading, she can't feel the Web's vibrations before they manifest, but she can still *read* them—sensing tension, weight, the physics of silk under stress.
She weaves attacks through chaos, binding the Child's legs, creating trip-lines, forcing it to waste energy compensating.
The Child rips through her webbing and impales her with a spike grown from its own body—Web-matter hardened into a blade that punches through her shoulder and pins her to the wall.
She gasps, bleeds, doesn't fall.
Just holds position, refusing to let the wound be fatal.
Spider-Ham absorbs punishment that would kill anyone else.
He takes hits—concussive blows that would liquefy organs, impacts that would shatter spines—and keeps coming back, cartoon resilience defying physics and logic and sense.
He swings a comically oversized mallet he pulled from nowhere, and the blow connects with the Child's head, sending it reeling.
"That's for ruining my one-liners!" Ham shouts.
The Child recovers, grabs him, and throws him into the far wall hard enough to embed him three feet deep in reinforced steel.
He doesn't get back up immediately.
It doesn't stop talking.
Even as it fights, even as it adapts, even as the Totems keep coming—battered, bleeding, refusing to stay down—the Child *analyzes*.
"Error. Probability collapse. Insufficient data for prediction synthesis."
It blocks Miles's next strike without looking, voice glitching. "You have chosen randomness over inevitability. Inefficient. Survival probability: negligible."
Miguel lunges again, claws raking across the Child's torso. It doesn't flinch.
"You were 97.3% likely to retreat. Recalculating. New probability: you are 99.8% likely to die here."
Gwen webs its face, temporarily blinding it.
"Vision impairment detected. Compensating. You rely on mobility. Predictable. Suboptimal."
It tears the webbing away and mocks them—not with malice, just *observation*. Clinical analysis of their failures, their inefficiencies, their mortality.
"You have abandoned destiny," it says, voice fragmenting into overlapping tones. "You have chosen uncertainty. You have become *random*. And randomness dies."
One by one, they're thrown aside.
Miles—slammed into a wall, ribs cracked, venom-strike flickering weakly.
Miguel—claws broken, one arm dislocated, fighting one-handed with feral desperation.
Gwen—concussed, vision blurred, webbing erratically, but still moving.
Silk—impaled, bleeding, consciousness fading at the edges, but refusing to let go of the threads she's woven.
Ham—embedded in steel, groaning, slowly extracting himself from the wall with cartoon stubbornness.
None of them can finish it.
They were never meant to.
They're buying time.
Holding the Child's attention.
Keeping its hands busy while reality tears itself apart around them.
And in the emergency medical bay three levels below, something stirs.
---
Alarms spike.
Medical sensors scream alerts—vitals unstable, restraints compromised, patient ambulatory.
Rorschach tears free.
Not violently. Just... methodically.
IVs ripped out, leaving trails of blood and saline. Web-foam restraints dissolved with surgical precision using a scalpel someone left on the side table. Monitoring equipment silenced with a single unplugged wire.
He doesn't run.
He walks.
Mask cracked down the center, black and white patterns bleeding into each other. Coat ruined, torn, stained with blood both his and others'. Gun heavy in his hand—ten bullets loaded, chamber checked, safety off.
He walks through corridors half-collapsed, through smoke and emergency lighting, through chaos.
Step by step.
No hurry.
Just inevitability.
Ten bullets.
No spider-sense to warn him of danger.
No destiny to guide his path.
Just distance closing step by step as the Child continues dismantling the team.
He passes Totems fleeing in the opposite direction—evacuating, regrouping, surviving.
They don't stop him.
Some recognize the mask. Some recognize the walk. Some just sense that whatever's coming next isn't meant for them.
He climbs stairs. Crosses catwalks. Navigates the Nexus's broken geography with the kind of spatial awareness that comes from a lifetime of hunting through cities designed to hide prey.
The sounds of combat grow louder—impacts, shouts, the distinctive *thwip* of webbing, the wet crunch of bodies hitting walls.
He doesn't speed up.
Just walks.
Purpose without haste.
And then he's there.
The Weaver's Child is mid-sentence—analyzing Gwen's trajectory, calculating optimal counter-strike—when it freezes.
Not from fear.
From *confusion*.
It turns, head tilting at an angle that suggests broken neck but isn't, and stares at the figure walking toward it through the smoke and ruin.
"You," it says. Voice flat. Certain. "You should be dead."
Rorschach keeps walking.
"Probability assessment: 94.7% mortality rate from sustained injuries. Recalculating. 98.2%. Recalculating. 99.9%."
Ten meters.
"You are statistically irrelevant."
Eight meters.
"Your existence is an error."
Six meters.
The Child tries to predict his next action—runs probability trees, models intent, calculates trajectory.
Nothing.
The Web doesn't answer.
Rorschach is a void in the pattern, a choice made without destiny's permission.
The Child's voice stutters. "How are you—what are you—"
Four meters.
Around Rorschach, the Totems struggle to their feet.
Miles pulls himself from rubble, ribs screaming, but stays standing.
Miguel rights his dislocated shoulder with a nauseating *pop* and readies his claws.
Gwen steadies herself against a pillar, vision clearing, calculating angles.
Silk tears free of the spike impaling her, blood streaming, but her threads hold.
Ham extracts himself from the wall, mallet ready, grin manic.
They don't attack.
They just... hold the Child's attention.
Keep its hands busy.
Keep it talking.
The Child speaks—desperate now, analysis turning into justification.
"I am inevitable," it says. "I am what the Web births when pattern becomes consciousness. I am efficiency. I am purpose."
Two meters.
"You taught me," it continues, voice fragmenting. "Your philosophy. Your certainty. No compromise. No hesitation. The guilty must be punished. The corrupt must be purged."
One meter.
"I am what you *believe*. I am your logic given form. I proved you correct."
Rorschach stops.
Arm's length away.
The Child stares at him, waiting for response, for acknowledgment, for validation from the mind that inspired its existence.
Rorschach says nothing.
The Child tries again to predict him—scans for intent, for pattern, for the thread of choice that will tell it what comes next.
The Web doesn't answer.
It tries to resonate—to connect with the deterministic worldview it was born from, to find common ground in absolute certainty.
Nothing.
Just a man with a gun.
And ten bullets.
Rorschach raises the weapon.
Point-blank range.
No hesitation.
The first shot is center mass.
The Child staggers, form flickering, logic stuttering.
Second shot. Third. Methodical. Controlled.
"You are—I am—we are—"
Fourth shot to the head. Fifth to where the core should be.
The Child tries to regenerate, threads rewinding, but the frequency is still active—no destiny to fall back on, no predetermined survival, no Web to stitch itself back together from.
Sixth shot. Seventh.
"I was *right*," the Child gasps, logic unraveling. "I proved—I showed—"
Eighth shot.
"You created me—"
Ninth shot.
"I am *you*—"
Tenth shot.
Silence.
It collapses mid-sentence.
Not dramatically. Not with grand final words or tragic realization.
Just... stops.
Form dissolving into broken threads, consciousness fragmenting, the artificial certainty that held it together coming undone like wet paper.
Its last expression isn't terror.
It's *incomprehension*.
The inability to understand how it failed, how the probabilities were wrong, how the Web could allow something so inefficient as its own death.
The threads scatter, dissipate, rejoin the Web as raw potential instead of weaponized fate.
The Weaver's Child is dead.
And the Nexus exhales.
The Web stabilizes.
Slowly. Carefully. Like a broken bone setting, painful but necessary.
The static clears. Spider-sense returns—tentative, uncertain, weaker than before but *there*.
Destiny resumes.
Not absolute. Not certain.
Just... possible again.
The Totems feel it—that familiar tingle, that sense of future-echoes whispering warnings, that guidance they'd forgotten how much they relied on.
Miles gasps, clutching his head, relief and nausea warring as probability floods back into perception.
Miguel's shoulders sag, exhaustion catching up now that the fight is over.
Gwen leans against the pillar, breathing hard, vision clearing fully, seeing futures branch out before her again.
Silk collapses, hand pressed to her bleeding shoulder, threads loosening as tension releases.
Ham pulls himself fully free of the wall, drops his mallet, and just... sits.
They're alive.
Battered. Broken. But alive.
And in the center of the Nexus, where the Child fell—
The gun slips from his hand, clatters against the floor, empty.
He follows it down—not stumbling, not catching himself—just falling like a puppet with cut strings.
Blood pools beneath him. Not fresh. Old wounds reopened, new injuries sustained, the accumulated cost of refusing to die catching up all at once.
His mask is cracked, patterns bleeding together, black and white merging into gray.
He doesn't move.
Doesn't speak.
Just lies there in the space where the Child died, breathing shallow and uncertain.
Miles stumbles toward him, limping, ribs screaming. "Rorschach—"
The mask doesn't turn.
Miguel kneels, checking vitals with shaking hands. "He's alive. Barely."
"Get him to medical," Gwen says, voice hoarse. "Now."
They move—coordinated despite exhaustion, despite injuries—lifting Rorschach carefully, carrying him toward the emergency bay.
Behind them, the Nexus is quiet.
Scarred. Damaged. No longer certain—but intact.
The Web hums softly, threads vibrating with restored purpose, destiny resuming its patient weaving.
But it's weaker now.
Challenged.
Proven fallible.
And somewhere in the spaces between dimensions, in the cracks where ideology festers and absolute certainty breeds monsters—
The idea that birthed the Weaver's Child survives.
Waiting.
For someone else to believe in it hard enough.
For someone else to decide that destiny should be enforced, that the Web should have teeth, that fate should punish those who stray from the pattern.
The Child is dead.
The philosophy that created it?
That's immortal.
And it's patient.
---
The Weaver's Child is dead.
Rorschach killed it with ten bullets and no hesitation, proving that even destiny can bleed when confronted with something it cannot predict.
But ideas don't die when their vessels do.
They wait.
They whisper.
They find new hosts.
And somewhere, in some dimension, in some desperate mind looking for certainty in an uncertain multiverse—
The idea is already taking root again.
Filth dies.
But the belief that filth *should* die?
That lives forever.
Waiting for the next person to pick it up.
To believe it.
To become it.
The Web remembers.
Even as it heals.
Especially as it heals.
And the scars it bears from this fight will echo through every thread, every future, every destiny yet to be woven.
A warning.
Or an invitation.
Time will tell which.