(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)
Their fists crashed into each other's faces at the same time.
The impact snapped both their heads back.
For one brutal instant, neither of them moved. The recoil traveled through their necks, shoulders, spines, and down into their feet. The ground beneath them buckled outward in a ring. Every loose piece of metal in the commune rattled. Windows shattered in buildings that were already half-abandoned. The entire sanctuary shook like the cavern itself had flinched.
Adriel staggered one step.
Anansi staggered one step.
Then both of them planted their feet at the exact same time.
Stone cracked under their soles.
Their balance locked.
And they swung again.
Two hooks tore through the air and connected at the same time, each fist smashing into the other's jaw with enough force to make the commune scream. The second shockwave was worse. It rolled outward like a bomb had gone off between them, ripping through the pale structures, folding cloth canopies backward, tearing loose wooden beams from their frames, and sending dust blasting through the streets.
For a second, the whole place looked like it was about to come apart.
Then both of them focused.
The testing was over.
Adriel moved first.
His right hook came sharp and heavy, shoulder turning, foot cutting into the ground, the punch meant to crush straight through Anansi's guard and take his head with it.
Anansi bent around it.
His spine folded with disgusting flexibility, his upper body slipping under the punch by a hair. Then his hands touched the ground, his body spun sideways, and his heel came around in a bright cosmic arc.
The kick smashed into the side of Adriel's cheek.
Adriel's head whipped to the side. His body nearly followed, the force trying to tear him off his feet and send him flying through the street. But his heel dug into the ground, stone splitting under the pressure as he forced himself to stay upright.
He tasted blood.
Anansi was already smiling.
Adriel answered with violence.
Bio-electricity crawled over his fist, snapping blue-white across his knuckles as he stepped in and drove an uppercut straight toward Anansi's stomach. The punch should have folded him in half. Should have detonated through his ribs and launched him into the air.
Anansi snapped his fingers.
The electricity died.
Just like that.
One second, Adriel's fist burned with Venom energy.
The next, nothing.
Dead air.
Adriel's eyes widened a fraction.
Anansi's foot was already coming up.
The front kick slammed into Adriel's face.
His skull snapped back.
The entire world blurred.
And Adriel was sent rocketing away.
He tore through the first house like it was paper. Then the second. Then the third. Walls burst around him, beams snapped, rooftops folded inward, and his body kept going, barrel-rolling through abandoned homes until he crossed the commune and struck the far side of the cavern.
The stone wall swallowed him.
His back carved a crater into it.
For half a second, he was pinned there, buried in the indentation his own body had made.
Then he dropped.
His knees hit the floor.
A wet grunt tore out of him.
His skull had caved in around the impact.
Bone shifted under skin. Blood ran down the side of his face. His vision split into three different angles before his regeneration forced everything back into place. The fracture sealed. The pressure inside his head faded. His face rebuilt itself in seconds.
Adriel stood.
And Anansi was already there.
The distance between them vanished so fast it might as well have been teleportation. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. With Anansi, speed and tricks blurred together until the difference stopped mattering.
The Spider-God came in low, one leg whipping upward toward Adriel's shin, the strike sharp enough to break the bone clean and steal his stance before the next blow came.
Adriel's spider-sense screamed.
He moved.
The kick cut through empty air.
Adriel caught Anansi's leg with both hands.
For one split second, Anansi's smile widened like he wanted to see what Adriel would do with the opening.
Adriel showed him.
He lifted Anansi like he weighed nothing and smashed him into the cavern wall.
The entire area shook.
Before Anansi could rebound, Adriel ripped him free and slammed him into the ground. Stone exploded beneath the impact. He hauled him up again and drove him into the wall a second time. Then back into the floor. Then the wall. Then the ground again.
The rhythm became ugly.
Wall.
Floor.
Wall.
Floor.
Each impact cracked the cavern deeper. Each slam made the air jump. Adriel's grip stayed locked around Anansi's leg as he used the Spider-God like a hammer and the world like something that deserved to break.
On the fifth slam, Anansi clapped his hands.
Cosmic energy burst outward.
The wave struck Adriel in the chest and threw him backward. Before he could stabilize, the blast pinned his whole body against the cavern wall. Pressure folded around him, crushing him into stone, driving him deeper and deeper until the wall cracked behind him.
Then the energy pushed harder.
Adriel punched through the entire side of the cavern.
He tore out into open air like a ragdoll launched from a cannon, spinning above the lower stretches of Zaun before gravity caught him again. He crashed through the slums in a trail of broken rooftops, bent pipes, and shattered walkways, finally skidding through a half-collapsed street in a storm of debris.
He lay there for a second, staring at the cracked ceiling far above.
Every time he used an ability, it was getting blocked.
The Venom Punch had died in his hand.
His spider-sense had warned him once, then failed to catch the next rhythm properly.
Even his instincts felt wrong, delayed by a fraction too small to matter against normal enemies and too fatal to ignore against this one.
Adriel shoved debris off his chest and sat up.
His mind snapped into place.
Of course.
Of fucking course.
How had he forgotten something that important?
This was Kwaku Anansi.
The original Spider-God.
The first spider.
Adriel was fighting the thing that stood at the root of every spider-thread that came after. Every Spider-Man ability he used was a door Anansi had built before him. Venom, spider-sense, wall-crawling, that entire rhythm of movement, all of it sat inside a language Anansi understood better than Adriel ever could.
No.
Worse.
A language Anansi could interrupt.
If Adriel relied on anything Spider-Man related, Anansi would shut it down.
He could not trust spider-sense.
Could not trust venom.
Could not trust wall-crawling.
Could not trust the instincts that usually saved his life before he even knew danger existed.
Fine.
Adriel pushed himself to his feet, rolling his neck until it cracked.
No spider.
Raw instinct.
Everything else.
His stance settled.
Lower.
Quieter.
Less acrobatic.
More grounded.
Anansi appeared at his side.
A kick blurred toward Adriel's ribs, bright with cosmic force, coming from the exact angle that would have folded his body sideways if it landed.
This time, Adriel reacted without waiting for a warning.
He jumped, his body turning in a full rotation above the strike. His leg rose high, then came down like an axe.
His heel smashed into Anansi's face.
The Spider-God hit the ground face-first.
The crater swallowed the street.
A shockwave pushed every house within fifty meters off its foundation. Walls bent outward. Roofs peeled away. Dust and broken stone shot into the air in a rising ring.
Adriel landed in the center of the destruction.
Anansi lay beneath him for one quiet second.
Then he laughed.
His face turned just enough for Adriel to see the smirk.
"So you realized it."
Adriel's eyes narrowed.
Anansi pushed himself up, dust sliding off his shoulders.
"About damn time. No more Spider-Man tricks, then? No more borrowed little spider gifts?"
He rolled his neck, still smiling.
"Good. Use the rest. Show me what you actually are."
Black tendrils erupted from Adriel's back.
They did not grow like limbs.
They tore into the world like corrupted code forcing itself through reality. They lashed around Anansi's arms, legs, torso, and throat, binding him in place as Adriel lifted one leg high above his head.
The axe kick came down for Anansi's face.
Anansi vanished.
The tendrils snapped shut around empty air.
Adriel's heel struck the ground.
The street caved in.
A small earthquake rolled through the slums, splitting stone and dragging nearby structures several inches off their foundations.
Anansi reappeared behind him, one hand already drawing a pattern through the air.
Magic whipped into existence.
Bright threads lashed around Adriel's wrists, ankles, and waist. They tightened like living cables, burning where they touched, then yanked him violently off his feet. Anansi spun him through the air, faster and faster, until the world blurred into stone, light, and motion.
Adriel's body became a weapon in Anansi's hands.
Then Adriel caught one of the magical whips.
His fingers closed around the burning thread.
Anansi's brows lifted.
Adriel pulled.
Hard.
The magic reversed direction.
Anansi's body snapped toward him, dragged by his own spell before he could release it.
Adriel stepped in and buried a hook into his face.
The punch cracked across Anansi's jaw and sent him spinning through the air.
Adriel followed before the rotation finished.
Space twisted around his fist.
The distance between his knuckles and Anansi collapsed in a way that made no sense, folding into a single violent point. His uppercut rose through that broken geometry and connected.
The impact did not just hit Anansi's chin.
It struck his entire position in space.
For one second, the area around them stopped functioning correctly. The street bent inward. Dust froze midair. The angle of nearby buildings shifted like the world had forgotten what straight lines were.
Then reality snapped back.
Anansi rocketed away.
He flew across the distance between Zaun and the mountains beyond, crossing the horizon like a green comet. His body slammed headfirst into a mountain far beyond the city's edge.
The mountain split in two.
A line of destruction tore from peak to base, stone shearing apart with a sound that rolled across Piltover and Zaun like distant thunder.
Anansi climbed out of the split rock almost immediately.
He looked up.
Adriel appeared above him.
One hand reached toward the sky.
Clouds gathered.
Not naturally.
They were dragged into place, pulled from every direction until the sky darkened over the broken mountain. Thunder rolled once, deep and heavy. Then lightning struck Adriel's raised hand.
He caught it.
More bolts followed.
The storm poured itself into him.
Adriel's arm burned white-blue with raw power, and then he threw the lightning downward like a spear from a myth.
Anansi raised both arms.
Cosmic energy coated his forearms.
The first lightning bolt came down.
Anansi punched it aside.
It detonated against a distant ridge, blowing stone into molten fragments.
The second bolt followed.
He struck that one too.
Then the next.
And the next.
Adriel rained lightning from above, each strike powerful enough to split the landscape, and Anansi kept moving forward through the storm. His fists blurred, knocking bolts away one after another, redirecting heaven's wrath into the mountains around him.
Every impact lit the horizon.
Every redirected strike echoed across the entire expanse.
Then Anansi was in front of him.
His kick shot toward Adriel's ribs.
Adriel became intangible.
The leg passed through his body as if he wasn't there.
Anansi's eyes gleamed.
Adriel solidified at point-blank range.
Electricity wrapped his entire arm.
No windup.
No space.
Just one inch between his fist and Anansi's chest.
Adriel drove the punch forward.
Thunder cracked from the contact.
The force compressed into Anansi's sternum and exploded through his back, bending the air behind him into a violent cone. For the first time, Anansi's teeth clenched.
But he was still smiling.
Then something hit Adriel.
The same force.
The same exact impact.
His own punch came back through him.
Adriel's ribs screamed.
His body launched backward.
He crashed into a lake hard enough to carve a trench through the water. He skipped across the surface once. Twice. Again and again, each impact throwing walls of water into the air, before his back smashed into the base of a waterfall.
The rock cracked behind him.
Water crashed down over his shoulders and head, endless pressure hammering him into the stone.
Adriel barely had time to breathe.
His eyes snapped open.
Anansi came down knee-first.
The knee smashed into Adriel's face.
The entire cliff around the waterfall ceased to exist.
Stone vaporized outward. Water exploded into mist. The impact buried Adriel deeper into the broken rock, blood bursting from his nose in a hot spray before the waterfall swallowed it.
Anansi did not let him fall.
He wrapped himself around Adriel in a twisting scissor trap, one leg hooking behind Adriel's neck, the other locking across his trapped arm. His hips turned sharply, folding Adriel's posture the wrong way while his body coiled around him like a living knot.
It looked almost graceful.
It felt like being crushed by a goddamn hydraulic press.
Adriel's neck bent near the breaking point.
His trapped shoulder screamed.
The bones in his arm started to creak.
Anansi tightened the lock.
Adriel snarled and drove his free fist into Anansi's ribs.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
Each punch landed with enough force to shatter bedrock. The impacts dug into Anansi's side, one after another, but the Spider-God held on. His smile stayed close to Adriel's ear.
Then the heat came.
Cosmic power flared around Anansi's body.
It was not fire.
Fire would have been kinder.
The heat swallowed the entire area in an instant, turning stone red, then white, then liquid. The remains of the waterfall hissed into steam. The air itself distorted. The world around them began to melt as if the sun had been shoved into the cliff face.
No.
Hotter than the sun.
Something that hot should not exist in this reality.
Adriel's skin burned black.
Then healed.
Then burned again.
Then healed again.
The cycle repeated so fast the pain became one continuous scream inside his nerves.
His free hand opened.
This was stupid.
This was suicidal.
He did it anyway.
Adriel dug through biology, physics, thermonuclear knowledge, every forbidden corner of what matter could become when forced into the wrong shape. In his palm, atoms compressed. A miniature sun of nuclear death was born between his fingers.
Anansi's eyes flicked toward it.
Adriel punched the newborn bomb into his ribs.
At the same instant, a barrier snapped around the entire area.
Two miles wide.
Sealed.
Absolute.
The explosion went off inside it.
The force was the equivalent of the Tsar Bomba detonating at point-blank range.
Light swallowed everything.
The barrier turned white from the inside. Heat and pressure slammed against the containment field, trying to tear out, trying to turn the surrounding land into a graveyard. Inside, Adriel and Anansi took the full force together.
No escape.
No distance.
Just the sun screaming in a cage.
Seconds passed.
The barrier cracked.
Then faded.
The world outside remained intact.
Barely.
Inside the blast zone, everything was gone.
Stone had become glass. Water had vanished. The air shimmered with impossible heat.
Adriel stood in the center of it, body smoking, clothes burned and reforming, skin charred in places where it should have already healed.
Anansi stood across from him.
Also smoking.
Also burned.
Still smiling.
At least the explosion had forced him off.
Adriel looked down at himself.
His wounds were not closing properly.
His regeneration stuttered.
Burned skin remained burned longer than it should have. Cracked flesh knitted together slowly, then stopped, then started again like something was interfering with the command.
Adriel's eyes narrowed.
"What did you do?"
Anansi tilted his head, enjoying the question way too much.
"You thought it was only the Spider-Man abilities?"
Adriel's jaw tightened.
Anansi brushed soot from his shoulder.
"No, Guardian. I am powerful enough to block more than that."
His smile sharpened.
"When are you going to realize it? I am above your league."
The words hit harder than Adriel wanted them to.
Anansi stepped forward, relaxed, almost casual.
"The only reason I'm letting you hit me is to make this interesting. To make it feel like you have hope."
Adriel's fists clenched.
"But you do not."
The glass beneath Anansi's feet cracked as he walked.
"You are so determined to win, but you cannot. Why can you not get that through your skull?"
Adriel's breathing grew heavier.
"You cannot win, Adriel."
Anansi's eyes gleamed with neon green light.
"I am having the time of my life."
He spread his arms slightly.
"Every second, I become stronger. Yes, yes, you have your adaptability skills. Damage, combat, environment, survival, whatever little collection of growth mechanics you carry. Every moment this fight continues, you improve."
Anansi laughed.
"But I grow faster."
Adriel's gaze darkened.
"You cannot keep up. It is like Saitama and Garou. Both keep rising, both keep breaking limits, but one climbs so much faster that the comparison becomes insulting."
Anansi leaned in slightly.
"That is us."
Adriel's nails dug into his palms.
"So come on. What else can you show me? Make this fun. Keep persisting."
The Dark's smile turned cruel.
"Honestly, it is incredibly stupid that you keep going."
A pause.
"But tearing you apart is very entertaining."
Something snapped.
Adriel's eyes burned.
"For the love of fucking God," he roared, "shut the fuck up!"
He moved before the echo finished.
One instant he stood in the glassed crater.
The next, he slammed into Anansi and drove him into the ground.
The impact cracked the earth beneath them.
Adriel mounted him and started punching.
No elegance.
No testing.
No restraint in the motion itself.
His fist smashed into Anansi's face once.
The ground jumped.
Again.
A crater deepened under Anansi's skull.
Again, again and again.
Some punches landed clean. Some Anansi twisted away from. Some struck the ground beside his head and sent fractures racing outward for miles.
Adriel's right hand flashed.
Metal tore from the surrounding ruins and wrapped around his fist, forming a compact gauntlet over his knuckles. It locked into place in layered plates, dense and dark, humming with manipulated mass.
He hit Anansi again.
This time, the impact sounded wrong.
Too deep.
Too heavy.
Like the air had been punched out of the world.
Adriel had compressed impossible mass into the gauntlet. A black-hole weight folded under his control, infinite pressure kept from becoming an extinction event only because he forced the damage into the smallest possible point.
Every punch carried impossible weight.
Every strike was a controlled disaster.
Anansi felt it.
For the first time, his expression flickered.
Adriel kept going.
Left.
Right.
Right again.
His fists hammered down with infinite mass caged inside them, each blow trying to drive Anansi through the planet without allowing the planet to follow.
But Anansi smiled again.
His hands shot up and caught both of Adriel's wrists.
The lock stopped the next punch dead.
Adriel pushed.
The ground beneath them began to collapse from the pressure.
Anansi pushed back.
Then he sat up and smashed his forehead into Adriel's face.
The headbutt sounded like a meteor hitting steel.
Adriel's skull nearly split open.
His vision went white.
Anansi drove the force upward.
Adriel launched into the sky.
He tore through the atmosphere like a bullet fired from the planet itself, the world shrinking beneath him in seconds. Clouds ripped apart around his body. The air burned away. The blue of the sky turned black.
Then the moon filled his vision.
Adriel crashed into it.
The impact carved a crater across the lunar surface and sent dust rising in a silent wave beneath the stars.
Adriel tore himself out of the lunar crater.
He threw both arms outward, and the rocks burying him blasted away in every direction. Boulders the size of houses skipped across the moon's surface. Smaller fragments scattered into space, spinning silently through the darkness.
Adriel barely got his feet beneath him before something screamed through his instincts.
Not spider-sense.
He could no longer use that.
Something simpler.
Experience.
Adriel moved.
Anansi struck the moon where he had been standing a second earlier.
The impact was catastrophic.
Half the visible lunar surface erupted.
Rock rose in a continent-sized wave. Cracks raced across the moon in branching patterns, spreading like spiderwebs over nearly every part of its surface. Entire mountain ranges collapsed into new trenches. Lunar dust exploded outward in a gray storm that climbed hundreds of kilometers above the surface.
For one absurd moment, Adriel genuinely thought the moon was going to break apart.
Somehow, it didn't.
Barely.
Adriel was already moving.
He shot through the cloud of lunar debris and drove himself toward the center of the crater Anansi had created. The Spider-God was still rising from his crouch when Adriel came in airborne, knee aimed directly for his face.
Anansi slipped sideways.
The knee missed his nose by inches.
His hand flashed down and caught Adriel's trailing ankle.
Adriel's momentum stopped violently.
Anansi twisted his hips and swung him downward.
Adriel hit the moon face-first.
The ground burst beneath him.
Before he could push himself up, Anansi dropped on top of him.
Then the punches started.
One smashed into Adriel's cheek.
His head bounced against the lunar stone.
Another struck his mouth.
Teeth cracked.
The third drove the back of his skull deeper into the crater.
Anansi kept going repeatedly.
Each fist crashed into Adriel's face with enough force to shake the crater around them. Lunar rock fractured beneath his head with every impact, the hole growing deeper as Anansi pounded him into the moon.
Adriel caught the next arm.
His body moved immediately.
He pulled Anansi forward, threw one leg across the Spider-God's shoulder, then locked the other behind his knee. His thighs snapped shut around Anansi's neck and trapped arm while Adriel pulled down on the wrist.
The pressure came instantly.
Anansi gagged.
His neck compressed between Adriel's legs, blood flow constricted while the trapped arm was dragged across his own throat.
Adriel squeezed harder.
Anansi's expression tightened.
Then he stood.
With Adriel still hanging from him.
Anansi lifted him into the air and slammed him down.
The triangle of Adriel's legs loosened for half a second.
That was enough.
Cosmic energy erupted from Anansi's body.
The blast threw Adriel across the moon.
He struck the surface, bounced, rolled, then bounced again. His body carved a long trail through the lunar dust before he disappeared over the edge of a crater.
Adriel crashed into the bottom.
Silence.
Then—
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—
A piercing screech filled his head.
Adriel clenched his teeth and pressed one hand against the side of his skull.
The sound wasn't external.
It was inside him.
Tinnitus.
Damage.
His vision pulsed in and out of focus.
He could feel the fractures in his skull.
Feel the torn muscles around his neck.
Feel damage that should have disappeared already.
But it wasn't.
His healing factor was failing.
Not completely.
But enough.
Too much.
Panic started crawling into his chest.
No. No, think.
Anansi was interfering with his regeneration.
Fine.
Two could play that game.
Adriel reached through the systems between them and pushed back, using Hacker to interfere with Anansi's own restoration. If the Spider-God wanted to suppress his healing, then Adriel would do the same.
Something clicked.
Adriel felt resistance.
Then interference.
Their abilities were starting to collide more aggressively now. Every attempt to cancel something created another counter-command. Every defense created an override. Every override met another block.
Meaning the damage was beginning to stay.
On both of them.
That should have been good news.
It wasn't.
Because Anansi was hitting harder.
Much harder.
And Adriel was beginning to wonder how much punishment his body could actually endure if regeneration stopped being reliable.
His breathing quickened.
Think.
He pushed himself onto one knee.
Think, damn it.
A presence appeared above him.
Adriel looked up.
Anansi quickly descended into the crater.
The Spider-God touched down and immediately swept one leg low, the kick carving a crescent through lunar dust.
Adriel hopped over it.
Anansi's fist came next, driving straight toward his ribs.
Adriel turned.
The punch struck the thick muscle of his shoulder instead.
Pain exploded through the joint.
Adriel gritted his teeth, planted his rear foot, and drove upward.
His fist smashed beneath Anansi's chin.
The uppercut carried so much force that the lunar surface around them lifted.
A massive layer of rock bulged upward around the point of impact as though the moon itself had been struck from underneath.
Anansi shot into the air.
Adriel followed him with his eyes.
Too slowly.
The Spider-God recovered almost immediately.
Anansi twisted in the vacuum, body turning with impossible control. Both hands fired outward.
Two web lines shot past Adriel and attached themselves to opposite sides of the crater behind him.
Anansi pulled.
The webs stretched.
Then contracted.
The Spider-God became a projectile.
He launched himself between the two lines like ammunition fired from a slingshot, crossing the distance at light-speed.
Both feet slammed into Adriel's face.
The dropkick snapped Adriel's head backward.
But his body went up.
His face went down.
Adriel struck the lunar surface headfirst.
He kept going.
His body drilled through the moon.
Rock exploded around him as he punched through layer after layer, his own momentum turning him into a living projectile boring through the lunar interior.
Adriel forced himself to react.
As Anansi followed, Adriel reached outward with Hacker.
The command latched onto Anansi's leg.
Got you.
Adriel immediately tried to access the deeper systems behind him.
Abilities.
Statistics.
Functions.
Character settings.
The architecture beneath the Dark.
For the briefest second, Adriel saw it.
Then—
Nothing.
The information disappeared.
Anansi's entire character sheet vanished from Adriel's reach as if someone had unplugged it from one network and connected it somewhere completely different.
Adriel blinked.
"What the fuck?"
Anansi's laughter entered his head telepathically.
"It's like a goddamn VPN. HAHAHA!"
Adriel's expression went blank.
Then annoyed.
"Did you seriously just—"
Anansi hit him.
The Spider-God rocketed into him so hard that both of them tore out through the opposite side of the moon.
A portal opened behind Adriel.
They vanished through it.
The next instant, Runeterra filled their vision.
They were falling.
Very fast.
Anansi punched Adriel across the mouth.
Adriel answered with a fist to the temple.
Anansi drove an elbow into his cheek.
Adriel grabbed him.
The two gods fell through the atmosphere tangled together, beating the absolute shit out of each other while fire burned around them.
Adriel wrapped both legs around Anansi's waist.
One arm locked over his shoulder.
His free hand rose.
Then came down.
The bottom of Adriel's fist repeatedly crashed into Anansi's face.
Each hammering blow snapped Anansi's head sideways as they fell, Adriel gripping him tightly enough that the Spider-God couldn't simply separate.
Clouds exploded around them.
Then the mountain arrived.
They hit it together.
The impact blew apart the peak.
Stone erupted into the sky as both of them crashed down the mountainside, tangled together in a violent tumble of limbs and broken rock.
They rolled.
Adriel landed on top for half a second.
He punched Anansi in the mouth.
The roll reversed.
Anansi's heel slammed into Adriel's ribs.
They crashed through a wall of stone.
Adriel caught him with another wild punch while they continued tumbling.
Anansi answered with a kick to the jaw.
Neither had stable footing.
Neither cared.
The fight had become ugly.
Two bodies rolling down an entire mountainside, striking whenever an opening appeared, bouncing off rock formations and plowing through trees, dirt, and stone as gravity dragged them toward the cliff below.
Adriel saw the edge approaching.
He caught Anansi before they fell.
Then he drove both of them over it deliberately.
They crashed into the ground below.
Adriel immediately moved into position.
He forced himself across Anansi's upper body, chest pressed over the Spider-God's head while one arm threaded beneath his neck. Adriel dropped his weight, clasped his hands, and squeezed.
Anansi's throat compressed.
His neck twisted beneath the pressure.
The Spider-God gagged.
Adriel tightened everything.
His arms.
His shoulders.
His chest.
His entire body became part of the choke as he tried to crush Anansi's windpipe through sheer strength.
Anansi clawed at him.
Adriel squeezed harder.
"Go to sleep."
Anansi's hand rose.
It pressed against the top of Adriel's head.
Light appeared.
Adriel's eyes widened.
The first blast detonated against his skull.
His hair burned away.
Another came immediately after it.
Then another.
Then another.
It felt like someone had placed the surface of a star directly against his head.
Adriel screamed through clenched teeth.
His scalp charred.
Skin peeled away.
The upper half of his face blackened beneath repeated blasts of cosmic heat.
Still, he didn't release the choke.
Anansi fired again.
Adriel's hair vanished completely.
Flesh burned from his skull.
Regeneration tried to repair it.
Anansi's suppression slowed the process.
Adriel squeezed harder.
The Spider-God gagged again.
"Persistent little bastard—"
Adriel snarled.
"Fuck you."
He refused to let go.
So Anansi changed tactics.
His expression sharpened.
For the first time in several exchanges, the amusement faded slightly.
He placed his palm flat against the crown of Adriel's head.
Something began forming.
Not fire.
Not cosmic radiation.
Not normal gravity.
Space around Anansi's hand started bending.
Adriel felt it before he understood it.
A gravitational field folded inward around his skull.
Then another formed around the first.
And another.
Layers.
Pressure without a singular center.
Anansi smiled through the choke.
"Let's try something theoretical."
Adriel's eyes narrowed.
"Oh, fuck you."
Anansi created a barrier.
It expanded around them in every direction, covering a full mile before sealing itself shut.
Adriel immediately understood what that meant.
Containment.
Whatever Anansi was about to do, even he didn't want it spreading.
That was not comforting.
The object forming against Adriel's skull stabilized.
A gravastar.
Or at least Anansi's weaponized interpretation of one.
The gravity came first.
Adriel's head was pulled inward from every direction.
Not toward one singular point.
Toward an entire spherical boundary.
His skull compressed.
Bone screamed.
His eyes bulged as pressure climbed behind them. Blood vessels burst throughout his face. His brain felt like it was being forced into a smaller shape without being allowed the mercy of simply collapsing.
Adriel finally lost the choke.
His arms loosened.
Anansi tore himself free.
But he kept one hand against Adriel's head.
The field expanded.
Adriel dropped to his knees.
Gravity multiplied around him.
The ground beneath his body compressed into a smooth bowl. Stone became denser, packed tighter and tighter as the gravitational shell forced everything toward its boundary.
Adriel tried to stand.
His legs folded.
The pressure was coming from everywhere.
Above.
Below.
Behind his eyes.
Inside his bones.
His ribs contracted around his lungs.
His spine shortened under the load.
Adriel screamed.
Anansi stood untouched inside the field, protected by his own authority over the structure.
Then came the second stage.
The shell.
The compressed gravitational field locked Adriel inside a microscopic boundary of impossible density. For one horrible instant, he could not move at all.
Not because he was restrained.
Because every direction became equally hostile.
Then the interior changed.
Negative pressure.
Vacuum energy.
Repulsion.
The force reversed.
Adriel's compressed body was suddenly attacked from the inside outward.
Every atom of him felt like it was trying to escape every other atom.
His already-damaged bones cracked outward.
His ribs separated.
Joints dislocated.
Blood erupted from his nose, mouth, ears, and eyes as internal pressure fought against external gravity.
Compression and expansion attacked him simultaneously.
The outside tried to crush him inward.
The inside tried to tear him apart.
Adriel's body became the battlefield between the two.
The barrier turned black.
Then white.
Then neither.
Space inside the mile-wide containment zone warped so violently that the landscape became impossible to look at. Light circled. Trees stretched into thin curves. Rocks rose from the earth and froze halfway through their own destruction.
The field contracted.
Adriel vanished inside it.
Then Anansi released the pressure.
The gravastar-like structure rebounded.
The entire mile-wide zone exploded outward.
Not with fire.
With spacetime.
The ground flattened.
Mountains of dirt and stone were torn apart and hurled against the barrier. The atmosphere compressed into a visible wall, then rebounded with enough force to pulverize everything caught between the expanding pressure wave and the containment field.
At the center—
Adriel took all of it.
His body shot across the inside of the barrier.
He hit one side.
Bounced.
Crossed the mile-wide space in an instant.
Hit the opposite end.
Then the gravitational rebound caught him again and threw him back.
His body became a pinball trapped inside a collapsing star that refused to become a black hole.
Impact.
Reversal.
Impact.
Reversal.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Until even Adriel could no longer count how many times his body had been broken.
Then—
Silence.
The field disappeared.
The barrier fell.
For several seconds, nothing moved.
A circular wasteland remained where the mountain valley had once been.
At the center stood Anansi.
Untouched.
His suit glowed faintly around him.
Several hundred meters away lay Adriel.
Face-down.
Motionless.
Blood spread slowly beneath him.
One arm was bent backward.
Several ribs had torn through his side.
Half of his face was crushed.
His healing factor flickered weakly.
Stopped.
Started.
Stopped again.
Anansi tilted his head.
Then smiled.
"Still alive?"
Adriel's fingers twitched.
His vision refused to focus.
The world around him had become a smeared mess of color and movement. Sound reached him as a distant, broken ringing, muffled beneath the pressure building inside his skull. His brain felt swollen, as if another thought might be enough to make it rupture.
His eyes burned.
Everything was red.
Blood covered his vision, running from somewhere above his brow and into both eyes. His body lay twisted against the ruined ground, one arm bent beneath him while his fingers twitched uselessly against the dirt.
But beneath all the damage, one thought remained stubbornly intact.
What the hell is going on?
Adriel knew what he could survive.
This wasn't arrogance. He had experience.
Far too much of it.
He had survived attacks that should have erased him. Fought beings capable of tearing apart worlds. Endured physical, spiritual, conceptual, and narrative damage in enough different forms that there should have been very few surprises left.
This was not his first rodeo.
So why did this feel so different?
Was it Anansi interfering with his abilities?
That had been Adriel's first conclusion.
But even that explanation felt wrong.
He had dealt with power suppression before. After everything that happened with Sentry, Adriel had made sure he would never allow himself to be completely helpless against that kind of ability again. He had created redundancies. Countermeasures. Layers underneath layers.
As long as he noticed the suppression coming, he could fight it.
Yet Anansi was shutting things down casually.
During combat.
Without preparation.
Without even looking like he was trying that hard.
Adriel's bloody fingers curled against the ground.
There was something else bothering him.
Something worse.
Why did every good idea come too late?
Adriel knew how to fight Anansi.
Or at least, he should have.
There had been dozens of opportunities already. Hundreds of possible counters. Ways to interrupt Anansi's spells, redirect the energy, alter the battlefield, change his own state, restructure matter around them, attack the systems beneath Anansi's abilities.
Hell, Adriel could think of counters to almost everything that had happened so far.
The gravastar attack was the clearest example.
He could have done something.
He knew he could have done something.
While Anansi had been creating the attack, Adriel had understood enough of what was forming to interfere.
So why had he simply stood there?
Why had he taken it?
Adriel's breathing became uneven.
What the fuck is going on?
His body twitched.
He forced one palm against the ground and tried to push himself upward.
His arm shook violently under his own weight.
Why?
His teeth clenched.
Why?!
His knees dragged underneath him.
WHY, DAMN IT?!
Adriel coughed blood onto the ground.
FUCKING WHY?!
Across the wasteland, Anansi watched him struggle.
The Spider-God's expression slowly stretched into another smile.
Then he laughed.
Not loudly.
He didn't need to.
The mockery carried well enough.
"You still haven't figured it out?"
Adriel raised his head.
Anansi chuckled as he walked closer.
"Well, I cannot entirely blame you."
He tilted his head, looking strangely amused by something beyond Adriel.
"Not even the narrator has noticed what is happening."
...
Huh?
What is he talking about?
What exactly am I supposed to have missed?
I have been here for the entire fight. I know what happened. I have been describing it.
Adriel and Anansi fought through the commune, then Zaun, the moon, the atmosphere, the mountains. I saw all of it.
Didn't I?
No, wait.
Why am I even questioning that?
Of course I did.
I narrated it.
Anansi blocked Adriel's abilities. Adriel adapted. They kept countering each other. Anansi gained the advantage because his growth and suppression outpaced Adriel's own adaptations.
That's what happened.
...Right?
Then what the hell is Anansi talking about?
Why would he say I missed something?
How could I—
The narration stopped.
Anansi was laughing now.
Actually laughing.
His shoulders moved with it as he watched Adriel struggle on his knees while, somewhere beyond the scene itself, the narrator began questioning his own account of what had happened.
The Spider-God looked like he was having the time of his life.
"Oh, this is wonderful."
Adriel glared at him through bloodshot eyes.
"What did you do?"
Anansi's grin widened.
"Wouldn't you like to know?"
He snapped his fingers.
A stack of pages appeared in his hand.
Adriel froze.
The pages looked ordinary.
White paper.
Black ink.
Nothing about them appeared threatening.
That made the feeling crawling through Adriel's body much worse.
Anansi casually tossed the first page toward him.
It floated through the air and landed in the blood near Adriel's knee.
Adriel looked down.
Then his breathing stopped.
It was the fight.
But it wasn't.
The words were different.
The chapter described Adriel countering Anansi's attacks.
Anansi's first attempt to suppress his Venom abilities had been countered almost instantly. Adriel had recognized the interference and changed the architecture of the skill before Anansi could completely disable it.
The kick that Adriel had failed to predict?
In these pages, he had seen it coming.
He had caught Anansi in the middle of the movement and driven him through three layers of the cavern floor.
The attack that launched Adriel toward the moon had never happened.
The fight had gone somewhere else entirely.
Different locations.
Different exchanges.
Different dialogue.
Different thoughts.
Adriel reached for another page.
His hand shook as he read it.
"No..."
Anansi smiled.
"Yes."
More pages appeared.
Dozens of them.
They spread through the air around Anansi like a flock of white birds.
Adriel looked from one to another.
Every page told a version of the battle that had never happened.
No.
That wasn't right.
It had happened.
Or it was supposed to.
Adriel's eyes moved faster across the words.
The original chapter.
The first script.
His counters were there.
His strategies.
His actual responses.
Even the narration was different.
The sentences he remembered hearing around himself, the flow of events, the locations, the actions—
All of it had been changed.
The realization came slowly.
Painfully.
Anansi held the first version of the chapter.
And the events currently happening around them belonged to the second.
A revision.
An edited script.
Edited by Anansi.
Adriel looked up.
His expression emptied.
The narrator went silent too.
No.
That can't be right.
I would've noticed.
Wouldn't I?
I thought Adriel was going to win.
I wanted him to win.
He has to win.
If he doesn't—
If Anansi wins, the Darks win.
And if the Darks win...
I die too.
So how could I not notice this?
How could I narrate an entirely different fight and never realize the words weren't mine?
Wait.
Were they ever mine?
...
Oh.
Oh, no.
Anansi looked upward, almost as though he could see the realization happening beyond the battlefield.
Then he bowed slightly.
"There you are."
The truth settled over the scene.
The narrator had not simply failed to notice Anansi's interference.
The narrator had been compromised too.
The voice describing the chapter had been allowed to believe it was in control while Anansi altered the events underneath it.
Adriel wasn't the only one who had been manipulated.
The story itself had been hijacked before either of them realized they were fighting inside an edited version.
Anansi had changed Adriel's actions before the chapter was even published.
He had changed the counters.
Changed the choices.
Changed the locations.
Changed what Adriel noticed and what he failed to notice.
Then he had changed the narration describing those failures.
Adriel stayed on his knees.
Blood dripped steadily from his chin.
His eyes were red from more than broken vessels now.
"So this whole time..."
His voice barely came out.
Anansi spread his arms.
"You were fighting a battle I had already edited."
Something inside Adriel went quiet.
This entire fight had been against him from the beginning.
Not because Anansi was simply stronger.
Not because Adriel had made one bad choice.
Not because he had failed to adapt quickly enough.
The script itself had been changed to make sure Adriel's proper decisions never happened.
And the worst part?
He hadn't noticed.
Adriel had always noticed.
Whenever the narrative shifted, whenever the structure of a story changed around him, whenever someone touched the deeper layers of causality or narrative law, he felt it.
This time, there had been nothing.
No warning.
No instinct.
No Hacker alert.
Nothing.
Anansi had edited around his ability to notice the edit.
Adriel stared at the pages lying in his blood.
Then he laughed.
It came out weak at first.
One short, breathless sound.
Then another.
There was no joy in it.
Only disbelief.
Of all people, Adriel understood the irony.
He had done similar things with Hacker.
Changed systems beneath someone's feet.
Altered outcomes before an enemy understood what was being changed.
Reached into rules that others assumed were absolute and rewritten them.
But this?
This was different.
Someone had done it to him so completely that he had never even realized there was a fight happening on another layer.
Adriel's shoulders shook with another cynical laugh.
"So that's it."
Anansi watched him.
Adriel lowered his head.
"I lost."
The words tasted disgusting.
But there was no point pretending.
At least, not right now.
Then another memory surfaced.
A warning.
The Chaos God had told them.
Don't fight Anansi alone.
Adriel had heard it.
Understood it.
And then, when the time came, he had still decided to carry everything himself.
Of course he had.
Because apparently learning lessons was something he only did when they were beaten into him repeatedly.
Adriel laughed again, quieter this time.
His bloodied fingers closed around one of the discarded pages.
The truth was almost funny.
Almost.
He had been so anxious about failing again.
So determined not to repeat Infinity War.
So desperate to control every piece on the board that he had placed everyone where he thought they needed to be, removed them from danger, and faced Anansi by himself.
Exactly like Anansi wanted.
Adriel stared down at the original script.
At the version of himself who had fought correctly.
At the battle he should have been having.
Then his expression darkened.
He had thought this fight began when their fists collided in the commune.
He had been wrong.
Anansi had already attacked long before the first punch was thrown.
Long before Adriel reached the moon.
Long before the gravastar.
Long before the chapter began.
Adriel's grip tightened around the page.
He had been beaten before the chapter even started.
Adriel refused to accept that conclusion.
He couldn't.
Even if this entire chapter had been edited to doom him, there had to be something he could do.
Something.
Anything.
The problem was that nothing came to mind.
And that terrified him more than the damage.
Adriel had spent years surviving because there was always another option. Another angle. Another exploit buried somewhere beneath the obvious rules. His mind was usually overflowing with possibilities even while his body was being torn apart.
Now there was only noise.
Every promising thought seemed to disappear before it fully formed.
A counter would begin taking shape in his mind, only to become useless halfway through. A strategy would appear obvious for a fraction of a second, then somehow feel like something he had never seriously considered.
Anansi's influence through this chapter had stretched too far.
Any good idea Adriel found could simply be removed from the version of the chapter that actually happened.
A counter became hesitation.
A solution became a thought that arrived too late.
A decision became something he never did.
The realization infuriated him.
His fingers dug into the bloody ground.
Think.
His body was healing beneath all that frustration, but painfully slowly.
Bones shifted back into place with grinding pressure. Torn muscle pulled itself together. The ruined half of his face reconstructed piece by piece instead of snapping back into shape like it normally should have.
Seconds.
It was taking actual seconds.
At any other time, that would have been absurdly fast.
Right now, it felt unbearable.
The one time he desperately needed his regeneration to work instantly, it was dragging itself along like his own body had forgotten what urgency meant.
His anxiety climbed higher.
Across from him, Anansi watched.
He had broken Adriel physically.
Then mentally.
He had even managed to make the narrator question his own place in the chapter.
Apparently satisfied with his little performance, the Spider-God lazily rolled one wrist.
Then snapped his fingers.
Adriel's heart nearly stopped.
Three figures appeared ten feet above the ground.
Vi.
Jinx.
Isha.
They dropped immediately.
Vi caught herself roughly on one knee. Jinx hit the ground shoulder-first and rolled onto her side. Isha landed nearby with a startled cry before scrambling upright.
For several seconds, none of them understood where they were.
Jinx reacted first.
"What the hell?!"
Her head whipped around frantically.
One moment, they had been somewhere else.
The next, they were standing in the middle of a destroyed landscape with no idea how they had gotten there.
Then Jinx saw Anansi.
The Spider-God stood several meters away, looking down at the three of them with casual amusement.
Like someone had just delivered him a present.
Vi's attention went elsewhere.
She saw Adriel.
Her face lost all color.
"Adriel?"
He was barely recognizable.
Blood covered most of his body. Parts of his skin were still burned and rebuilding themselves. One arm shook beneath him while he struggled to keep himself upright.
Vi ran toward him.
"Adriel!"
Anansi moved.
His hand reached for the back of her neck.
Adriel saw it.
Something inside him broke loose.
Every ounce of fear vanished beneath a surge of primal rage.
He crossed the distance before Anansi's fingers could touch Vi.
Adriel slammed into him.
The collision ripped Anansi away from her and carried both of them across the ruined landscape. They struck a mountain together.
The entire formation split down the middle.
Stone erupted around them as the two crashed through the rock and disappeared into the fractured interior.
Adriel's scream rolled back through the destruction.
"RUN!"
Vi stared toward the mountain.
"ADRI—"
"RUUUUUUNNNNN!!!!!!!!"
Jinx grabbed Isha.
This time, neither sister argued.
They ran.
Vi followed after one last look toward the destruction behind her.
Adriel tore Anansi out of the broken mountain and drove him into the ground.
His fist came down like a hammer.
The first blow buried Anansi's head deeper into the stone. Adriel ripped his hand back and struck again, shaking the surrounding terrain. He kept pummeling him, rage stripping away every thought except one.
Keep them away from him.
But Adriel knew the truth.
Running was not enough.
How could anyone escape someone who could edit the plot?
Anansi didn't have to chase them.
He could decide where they were.
He only had to think of Vi, Jinx, and Isha, and they could appear beside him as easily as they had moments ago.
Adriel needed somewhere beyond the chapter's reach.
A separate space.
A pocket dimension disconnected from this episode entirely, somewhere Anansi's current edits could not immediately touch.
At least until the next chapter began.
It was the only idea Adriel had managed to hold onto long enough to consider.
He raised his fist for another blow.
Anansi caught the arm.
His body moved underneath Adriel's weight, legs threading around Adriel's shoulder and neck before locking together. Adriel's arm was dragged across his own throat as Anansi tightened the triangle around him.
Adriel tried to stand.
Normally, he would have simply lifted Anansi with him and slammed the Spider-God into the earth.
Webs exploded around Anansi's body.
They spread across the ground and anchored him from every direction.
Adriel pulled.
Nothing.
The webs held Anansi so firmly against the earth that Adriel couldn't raise him a single centimeter.
The choke tightened.
Pressure crushed the arteries along Adriel's neck while Anansi freed one hand and started punching him.
A fist slammed into Adriel's cheek.
The impact snapped his head sideways.
Another struck the same place before he recovered.
Then another.
Each punch sent a shock through the ground beneath them, the blows piling damage onto a skull that still hadn't properly healed from the gravastar attack.
Adriel's vision darkened around the edges.
His free hand rose.
He needed something concentrated.
Something strong enough to force Anansi away without destroying the planet in the process.
Matter shifted at the tips of his fingers.
Energy compressed.
Adriel manipulated the structure until a tiny object of impossible brightness formed there, resembling a miniature quasar concentrated into a point no larger than a marble.
Anansi noticed.
His eyes widened.
Adriel aimed directly beneath his chin.
"Get off!"
The concentrated blast fired.
Light swallowed Anansi's face.
The Spider-God was ripped from Adriel and launched hundreds of feet away. His body tore through boulders, ricocheted across the ground, and smashed through the broken walls of the landscape before disappearing into a cavern.
Adriel fell onto one hand, coughing violently as air returned to his lungs.
The distant hole went quiet.
Then Anansi stepped out of it.
Still smiling.
Adriel's stomach tightened.
Anansi disappeared.
He reappeared directly in front of him and grabbed Adriel by the face.
Before Adriel could react, a massive spectral hand formed around his body.
Cosmic fingers closed over him.
He was trapped.
Anansi lifted his other hand.
Electricity gathered around him.
Adriel recognized the feeling instantly.
His own ability.
"You have got to be kidding me."
Anansi grinned.
Then screamed as he released the attack.
The Venom Blast detonated at point-blank range.
Energy consumed Adriel.
The beam expanded until it became visible across Runeterra, a column of violent electricity tearing through the clouds and stretching beyond the atmosphere. It climbed into orbit and continued toward the darkness of space.
Inside it, Adriel screamed.
His muscles seized.
His nerves overloaded.
Every part of his body locked under the electrical current while Anansi held him directly in the center of the blast.
The attack finally ended.
The clouds remained split apart.
Electricity crawled through the air long after the main beam disappeared.
Adriel fell.
He crashed into the ground hard enough to leave another crater, his body twitching uncontrollably as residual electricity continued snapping over his skin.
Anansi walked toward him.
Slowly.
Casually.
He stopped beside Adriel and lowered himself into a crouch.
Adriel tried to move.
His fingers twitched.
That was all he managed.
Anansi looked almost pleased with him.
"You have truly entertained me, Guardian."
Adriel's bloodshot eyes shifted toward him.
"But I still do not want to kill you."
The Spider-God rested an arm casually over one knee.
"There is so much more I could show you. So much you still need to learn."
Adriel breathed through clenched teeth.
"You can become stronger than this. You can continue entertaining the Readers."
Anansi's smile softened into something almost thoughtful.
That somehow made it worse.
"You can still suffer more."
Adriel glared at him.
Anansi continued.
"That is what a Guardian does, is it not? You carry the burdens of imagination and creativity on your shoulders."
He tapped one finger against his knee.
"And we Darks are the opposite. We create the blocks. We suffocate imagination. We make inspiration stop."
Anansi leaned closer.
"So tell me, Guardian. How long can the human spirit keep going?"
Adriel said nothing.
"Can you continue fighting after what you learned in this chapter?"
A quiet laugh escaped Anansi.
"I find that difficult to believe."
Adriel's hand pressed against the ground.
His arm failed to lift him.
Anansi watched the attempt with interest.
"Still, you exceeded expectations."
His expression sharpened slightly.
"This simply was not your victory."
Adriel's teeth ground together.
Anansi looked at him for several seconds before continuing.
"Let me give you a lesson. I know how strange that sounds coming from the person currently kicking your ass, but listen carefully."
Adriel's eyes narrowed.
"Stop carrying everything alone."
That got a reaction.
Small.
But Anansi saw it.
"You were warned, weren't you?"
Adriel's expression darkened.
Anansi smiled knowingly.
"If you continue like this, perhaps this story never reaches a third season. Perhaps the future of this entire saga dies before it has the chance to happen."
He straightened slightly.
"And believe me, Guardian, I do not want this story to end either."
His gaze drifted upward.
Beyond the battlefield.
Beyond Runeterra.
Toward something Adriel could not see.
"Because when stories are forgotten, we disappear from people's minds."
The humor left his voice.
"And once nobody remembers something anymore, that thing is truly dead."
He looked back down at Adriel.
"So I need you to continue."
Anansi stood.
"Maybe you simply need a little motivation."
Adriel's blood ran cold.
Anansi turned his head.
Toward the distance.
Toward Vi, Jinx, and Isha.
More specifically—
Isha.
Adriel's eyes widened.
No.
Anansi smiled.
"I am only going to fix a few things."
Adriel forced his body forward.
"Don't."
His hand reached for Anansi.
"Things that were meant to happen in canon."
"No."
Anansi's smile widened.
"I want to see what you do afterward."
Adriel grabbed his ankle.
"ANANSI—!"
The Spider-God looked down.
Then kicked him in the face.
The blow snapped Adriel's head backward and tore his hand loose. Blood sprayed from his mouth across the ground.
Adriel collapsed onto his side.
Anansi dusted off the leg Adriel had grabbed.
"Don't worry."
He looked in the direction the girls had fled.
"I'll be right back."
Then he disappeared.
Adriel stared at the empty space.
For a second, his mind stopped.
Then his breathing changed.
Too fast.
Too shallow.
His chest tightened until every breath felt trapped halfway through his lungs.
"No."
He tried to stand.
His arms gave out.
"No, no, no…"
He clawed at the ground and dragged himself forward.
His thoughts crashed into one another.
I can't fail.
His body trembled.
I can't fail.
He forced one knee beneath himself.
But I can't win.
The realization made his breathing worse.
He couldn't fail.
He had to move.
Had to reach them.
Had to protect Isha.
But he couldn't win.
And for the first time since the battle began, Adriel had no idea which truth terrified him more.
Anansi was only centimeters away from Isha.
His hand stretched toward the back of her shirt.
Adriel saw it.
His heart stopped.
"NO!"
He screamed with everything left inside him.
Hacker answered.
Space folded.
A portal tore open directly in front of Anansi's face just as his fingers were about to close around Isha. Before the Spider-God could react, Adriel's fist came through the opening and buried itself in his cheek.
The punch snapped Anansi's head sideways.
It didn't hurt him enough.
It didn't need to.
Adriel only needed one second.
He threw himself through the portal after his fist, hit the ground face-first, and rolled violently across the dirt. His hand caught Anansi during the tumble. Adriel twisted, planted both feet, and used every bit of momentum from the roll to hurl the Spider-God into the sky.
Anansi became a green streak.
He disappeared through the clouds and continued into orbit.
Adriel immediately spun toward the girls.
"GET IN!"
Vi, Jinx, and Isha stared at him.
Behind Adriel, the portal twisted in place like a hole punched through the chapter itself. There was nothing recognizable beyond it. No Piltover. No Zaun. No landscape at all.
Only a dark, empty space.
Jinx looked between it and Adriel.
"What the hell is that?"
"Doesn't matter!" Adriel shouted. "Get inside!"
Vi hesitated. "Where does it go?"
"JUST MOVE!"
His voice cracked so violently that all three of them froze.
Adriel pointed toward the portal with a shaking hand.
"Please! Don't question me this time! Just go!"
Anansi returned before they could move.
He appeared beside Adriel and drove into him shoulder-first.
They hit the ground together.
Anansi landed on top and immediately began punching.
The first blow smashed Adriel's head into the dirt.
The second turned his face sideways.
Adriel raised an arm, but Anansi tore through the defense and drove another fist into his mouth.
Then electricity filled Adriel's vision.
Anansi placed one hand against his chest.
A Venom Blast erupted at point-blank range.
Adriel screamed as the ground swallowed him.
The blast drove him downward through layer after layer of rock, his body disappearing into the planet as the earth collapsed behind him. Stone melted around the path of the attack. The beam continued burying him until he was hundreds of feet beneath the surface.
Vi stared into the smoking hole.
"Adriel!"
There was no answer.
Only distant rumbling from somewhere deep underground.
Jinx grabbed Isha's hand.
"Come on!"
That was enough for all of them.
No more questions.
No more hesitation.
They ran toward the portal.
Anansi landed between them and the opening.
The three stopped.
He looked genuinely disappointed.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Jinx immediately moved in front of Isha.
Vi stepped beside her.
Anansi looked at all three of them and sighed.
"You know, you had several opportunities to escape."
Jinx's eyes narrowed.
"He told you to run." Anansi pointed toward the hole Adriel had been driven into. "Several times, actually. And what did you do?"
He tilted his head.
"You questioned him."
Vi's jaw tightened.
Anansi spread his hands.
"The man whose entire job is keeping you alive tells you to run from something that scares even him, and your first instinct is to stand there asking questions?"
His expression twisted with disbelief.
"Seriously?"
Vi opened her mouth.
"Do any of you have survival instincts?"
"Go fuck yourself," Jinx snapped.
Anansi blinked.
Jinx pushed Isha farther behind her.
"You show up from nowhere, beat the shit out of him, drag us back here, and now you're gonna lecture us?"
Her hand twitched toward a weapon that wasn't there.
"Who the hell even are you? Why are you doing this?"
Anansi didn't answer.
His ankle suddenly disappeared into the ground.
Then the rest of him followed.
Something beneath the surface had grabbed him.
Anansi was ripped downward so violently that his body vanished into the earth.
A second later, Adriel exploded out of the same hole.
Blood poured from his face. His clothing was shredded, and pieces of rock fell from his shoulders as he dragged himself completely onto the surface.
"Hurry!" he screamed. "Get in the portal!"
Vi moved first.
Adriel reached toward them.
He never got the chance.
A web line shot out of the broken ground.
It wrapped around his ankle.
Adriel looked down.
"Oh, fuck—"
He was yanked underground.
The earth closed over him.
For half a second, nothing happened.
Then the entire landscape began to shake.
Something massive moved below them.
The ground rose beneath Vi's feet and dropped again. Cracks formed across the dirt. The sounds of impacts traveled upward through the earth, each one making stones bounce around them.
Jinx stared at the ground.
"Adriel…"
Vi grabbed her.
"Move!"
For once, Jinx listened immediately.
Vi shoved both Jinx and Isha toward the portal.
"We're going. Now."
Jinx held tightly onto Isha's hand.
Neither of them knew where the portal went.
At that point, it didn't matter.
Anywhere was better than here.
Jinx reached the opening first.
She stepped through.
Isha followed.
Or tried to.
The ground beneath them split.
A blade of condensed cosmic energy shot upward.
It moved too quickly for anyone to react.
The edge passed through Isha's wrist.
Her hand separated from her arm.
Jinx still had hold of it.
For one terrible second, she didn't understand why Isha was no longer following her.
Then her own momentum carried her backward into the portal.
"Isha!"
Jinx disappeared.
The severed hand went with her.
Isha screamed.
The sound tore through the battlefield.
She fell onto her knees, clutching the bleeding stump against her chest as blood poured between her fingers.
Vi stared.
Her mind failed to understand what her eyes had just seen.
Then instinct took over.
"Isha!"
Vi dropped beside her.
She grabbed the girl's arm and tried to stop the bleeding with her bare hands.
Blood covered them almost immediately.
"No, no, no. Fuck."
Isha sobbed uncontrollably.
Vi looked around.
Nothing.
She had nothing useful.
No medical supplies.
No proper bandages.
No time.
Vi tore a piece of cloth free and wrapped it around what remained of Isha's wrist, pulling it as tightly as she could.
"Stay with me, kid. Stay with me."
Isha cried harder.
Beneath the ground, Adriel screamed.
There was nothing human in the sound.
The earth erupted.
Adriel and Anansi shot out of the ground together.
They climbed hundreds of feet into the air, locked around each other, before separating and crashing back down in different directions.
Both hit the ground and rolled.
Anansi recovered first.
His eyes found Isha.
He moved.
Adriel saw where he was going.
"No!"
Anansi crossed half the distance.
Adriel caught him around the waist from behind.
His feet planted.
Adriel arched backward and drove Anansi headfirst into the ground.
The suplex shook the entire area.
The earth folded around Anansi's body.
Adriel tried to hold him there.
"VI!"
She looked up.
"GO!"
Vi lifted Isha.
The girl whimpered and clung to her with her remaining arm.
Vi ran for the portal.
Behind them, cosmic energy exploded.
Adriel was thrown away from Anansi.
His body crashed through a boulder, ricocheted from the shattered stone into a cliff, then disappeared into the side of another mountain.
Vi kept running.
Ten meters.
Seven.
Five.
She could see the portal.
Almost there.
Then Isha stopped moving.
Not willingly.
Her entire body froze in place.
Vi was still running.
The sudden stop nearly tore Isha from her grasp.
Vi held on.
Something in her shoulder popped.
Pain exploded down her arm.
"ARGH!"
Her shoulder dislocated under the sudden force.
Vi stumbled but refused to release Isha.
The girl hung suspended in the air as if the scene around her had glitched and forgotten to continue her movement.
Vi gritted her teeth and tried to pull.
Isha didn't move an inch.
"Come on!"
Vi pulled harder with her good arm.
"Come on, come on!"
A figure appeared beside her.
Vi turned.
Anansi.
She swung at him.
He avoided the punch and placed one hand against her chest.
Vi's eyes widened.
"No—"
Anansi pushed.
She fell backward through the portal.
Time seemed to slow.
Vi reached desperately toward Isha.
"No!"
Anansi grabbed the back of Isha's shirt.
The terrified girl kicked helplessly beneath him.
Vi kept reaching as the portal swallowed her.
"NO!"
Her fingertips disappeared into the darkness.
"ISHAAAAA!"
Her scream followed her into the void.
Then she was gone.
Far away, beneath the wreckage of the mountain, Adriel opened his eyes.
He couldn't hear properly.
A high-pitched ringing filled his skull.
Boulders covered most of his body.
His vision doubled when he tried to move.
For several seconds, he couldn't remember which direction was up.
Then he felt it.
Isha.
Adriel's eyes widened.
"No."
He shoved the rocks away.
The entire pile exploded off him.
Adriel stumbled onto his feet.
The world tilted.
He nearly fell.
His balance refused to cooperate, and every sound around him remained buried beneath that endless screeching inside his ears.
It didn't matter.
His body would cooperate because he was ordering it to.
Adriel saw Anansi.
Saw Isha.
Saw how he was holding her.
One hand around the girl's neck.
The other around her legs.
Adriel understood immediately.
His heart stopped.
"NO!"
He launched himself forward.
The ground shattered behind him.
Adriel flew toward them with everything he had left. The landscape smeared around his vision. Mountains became streaks. Light bent around his movement.
Isha saw him coming.
Her face was soaked in tears.
She was terrified.
Her remaining hand reached toward him.
Adriel reached back.
Just a little farther.
He could make it.
He had to.
"NO!"
Anansi looked directly at him.
"Everything is fixed with this one edit."
Then he pulled.
Adriel heard the sound.
A wet, violent tear.
Isha's body came apart.
Blood exploded across the ground.
Adriel's eyes widened.
The upper half of her body separated from the lower.
Her organs spilled free between them.
Adriel was still moving.
He couldn't stop.
He reached Anansi—
And passed straight through him.
There was no impact.
No resistance.
Nothing.
Adriel's hands closed around empty air.
The portal was directly behind Anansi.
Adriel flew through it.
Blood followed him.
So did pieces of Isha.
The force of his movement dragged the remains through the opening with him. Intestines wrapped around his shoulder and chest. Blood covered his face. Fragments of tissue and organs struck his body as he tumbled through the portal.
Adriel crashed into the empty dimension.
He hit the ground and rolled.
Then stopped on his knees.
The void was silent.
Vi was there.
Jinx too.
Both turned toward the sound of his arrival.
Their expressions changed.
Vi stopped breathing.
Jinx stared.
Adriel knelt before them.
Covered in blood.
Isha's blood.
Gore clung to his clothing. Pieces of tissue covered his arms and chest. A length of intestine had wrapped around him during the fall through the portal. Blood dripped from his hair, his chin, and the tips of his fingers.
But Isha wasn't with him.
Jinx's face went completely blank.
Her eyes moved over him.
Slowly.
She searched behind him.
Nothing.
She looked toward the portal.
Nothing came through.
Her breathing changed.
"Where's Isha?"
Adriel didn't move.
His hands remained suspended in front of him.
Open.
His arms were still held in the position of someone reaching to catch a person who was no longer there.
Jinx stepped toward him.
"Adriel?"
He stared at his empty hands.
"Where is she?"
No answer.
Jinx's breathing quickened.
"Adriel."
Vi finally moved, but only one step.
Her face had gone pale.
Jinx got closer.
She didn't care about the blood.
Didn't care about the organs clinging to him.
She grabbed his shoulder.
"Where is Isha?"
Adriel's mouth moved.
Nothing came out.
His lower lip started trembling.
Jinx stared at him.
"Adriel?"
His mouth shook harder.
"Tell me where she is."
Nothing.
"Adriel."
She shook him.
"Where is she?"
His teeth began to chatter.
The sound was quiet at first.
Then uncontrollable.
Adriel folded.
His hands struck the ground.
Then the rest of him followed.
He curled into himself, forehead pressed against the floor, arms wrapping around his head while his entire body shook.
He couldn't scream.
That was the worst part.
There was too much inside him for his body to release any of it.
His lungs dragged in breath after breath, each one too fast and too shallow. His teeth clattered together. Every muscle in his body trembled while blood continued dripping from him onto the empty floor.
Jinx stood over him.
She looked at the blood.
At what remained tangled around his body.
At his empty hands.
At the way he had collapsed.
And finally, she understood.
Her face crumpled.
"No…"
Vi closed her eyes.
Jinx shook her head.
"No."
Her knees gave out.
She collapsed beside Adriel.
"NO!"
The scream tore out of her.
She grabbed at him, at his ruined clothes, at anything she could reach, sobbing so hard that the words stopped making sense.
Adriel remained curled on the floor.
Still unable to make a sound.
Jinx cried enough for both of them.
To Be Continued...