Midtown Manhattan.
The wreckage of two mountain-sized Leviathans lay across the streets like beached whales made of armor and alien biology, still belching thick columns of black smoke into the sky. The Chitauri soldiers that had been riding them scattered into the surrounding blocks — disorganized, confused, like an army that had just watched its aircraft carriers get thrown into a river.
Beep — beep — beep —
The red alarm on Way Big's chest was screaming.
Energy depletion. Critical. The Omnitrix's power reserves were hitting empty. Way Big was a To'kustar — a cosmic-tier lifeform born in the storms between galaxies — and maintaining that form in Earth's low-energy environment was like trying to run a fusion reactor on household batteries. The drain was exponential, and the math had just caught up.
Can't even stay cool for three minutes.
Jake felt the dizziness hit — a deep, nauseating wave that blurred the edges of the Manhattan skyline into watercolors.
Show's over.
Red light detonated.
The three-hundred-foot titan vanished in an instant, and in his place — falling from a height of several hundred feet, very much not three hundred feet tall — was a sixteen-year-old kid in a ruined hoodie.
"JAKE!"
On the street below, Steve Rogers — mid-shield-bash against a Chitauri soldier — looked up and went pale. He tried to break toward the falling figure, but a squad of Chitauri on chariots swooped in with suppressive fire, forcing him behind a wrecked taxi.
Jake twisted in the air, reaching for the Omnitrix. Even Jetray would do — anything with wings—
The dial was dead red.
[Recharge Mode activated. Estimated recovery: 180 seconds.]
Three minutes. Falling from this height, he had about six seconds.
Does Stark Industries' worker's comp cover "falling from extreme altitude"? Jake thought grimly. Going to have to check the fine print on that contract.
The ground rushed up at him like a fist.
And then the sky twitched.
The wormhole — the massive, swirling portal overhead — shuddered. Not from the Chitauri traffic flowing through it, but from something else. Something residual. The gravitational waves Gravattack had generated earlier, still reverberating through the local spacetime like ripples in a pond, had finally intersected with the Tesseract's spatial energy.
A bolt of purple lightning — not blue, not white, but the flickering, unstable purple of digital static — lanced out from the portal's edge.
ZZZZT—!!
Space cracked.
Not the clean, circular opening of the Chitauri portal. This was something else — a jagged tear, like a broken mirror showing the other side of reality. Through it, Jake caught a flash of a world with impossibly vivid colors, neon light, stylized shadows — an art style that didn't belong to this universe.
Then—
"Thwip!"
A strand of white webbing — strong, elastic, impossibly precise — shot through the dimensional crack and stuck to the massive "A" logo on the side of Stark Tower.
A figure swung out of the rift on the web's arc, accompanied by a voice that was equal parts surprise and delight:
"Whoa! Why is the gravity so heavy here?!"
The web carried her in a perfect parabola across the gap between buildings, and mid-swing, she spotted the falling boy below.
"Gotcha, unlucky guy!"
Jake felt webbing wrap around his waist — tight, secure, and yanking him sideways out of his death plummet with a force that made his spine feel like it was being rearranged. The falling stopped. The world blurred with lateral motion. He crashed into something that was simultaneously firm and unexpectedly resilient.
Thump.
Two bodies landed on the roof of an abandoned city bus, sliding several feet across the metal surface before coming to rest in what could generously be called a superhero landing pose.
Jake opened his eyes.
The face looking down at him was hidden behind a mask — white hood pulled up, black-and-white design, with large pink eye lenses that contracted and expanded with the wearer's expression. They were currently wide with curiosity, studying him like a cat investigating something that had just fallen out of the sky.
Which, to be fair, he had.
The suit was sleek, athletic, white with black accents and a striking purple-pink web pattern lining the interior of the hood. A lock of short blonde hair peeked out from under the edge. The build beneath the suit was compact, strong — a dancer's body, or a gymnast's, or someone who spent their nights swinging between buildings at speeds that would make Olympic athletes weep.
Spider-Gwen.
From Earth-65.
She's actually here.
"Hey, handsome."
Gwen released him and dropped into a crouch on the bus roof, tilting her head with the easy confidence of someone who treated dimensional displacement like a minor scheduling inconvenience.
"While I don't want to interrupt your Leap of Faith thing, this doesn't... exactly look like Brooklyn?"
Jake stared at her for two full seconds.
Then he looked down at the Omnitrix. Still in red-light recharge mode — but during the rescue, the watch face had vibrated intensely, as if it had detected something in close proximity. Something it recognized. Something compatible.
The gravitational waves from Gravattack. The Space Stone's spatial radiation from the Tesseract. And now — a dimensional traveler pulled through the intersection point.
"So that's it," Jake murmured. "Gravattack's gravity waves punched a hole in the multiverse's firewall."
"WATCH OUT!"
Before Jake could explain, Gwen's mask-eyes went wide. Her hand slammed his head down flat against the bus roof, and she ducked simultaneously.
BOOM!
A Chitauri energy bolt vaporized the spot where their heads had been a millisecond ago, blowing a hole through the bus roof and showering them with molten metal.
"Whoa!" Gwen was already moving — rolling off the bus, landing in a crouch, wrists up. "These aliens are really ugly. Uglier than the Lizard back home, and that's saying something."
Thwip! Thwip!
Two webs shot out in rapid succession, plastering across two Chitauri soldiers' faceplates. Gwen yanked hard, ripping them clean off their hovering chariots, then used the momentum to launch herself into a spinning kick that sent a third tumbling into a fire hydrant.
"Hey!" she shouted to Jake while mid-leap between two chariots, casually webbing a fourth alien to a lamppost. "I don't know who you are, but it looks like we're on the same team? I'm — well, just call me Ghost-Spider. Or whatever works."
"Gwen."
Jake pulled himself to his feet, grabbed a Chitauri energy rifle from the ground, checked the charge mechanism with practiced efficiency, and smiled at her.
"I'll just call you Gwen."
The pink lenses went perfectly circular.
"How do you know my—" She almost missed her next web-anchor point. "Have we met? At a party in some parallel universe?"
"Something like that." Jake sighted down the rifle and squeezed the trigger, catching a diving chariot in its fuel line. It exploded satisfyingly. "In a comic book shop. Very far away."
More Chitauri were converging. Without the Omnitrix, Jake was a regular human with an alien rifle and one hundred and sixty seconds of vulnerability.
"Looks like we're surrounded." Gwen dropped back to stand beside him — back to back, the classic formation. "Can you fight, handsome? Or was that growing-to-three-hundred-feet thing just an inflatable special effect?"
"I'm in recharge mode." Jake glanced at the countdown. "Two more minutes."
"Two minutes?! In this warzone, two minutes is enough for us to die ten times over!"
"Then survive ten times."
Jake detonated another fuel tank with a precision shot. "Trust me — once I'm charged, you'll see a much better trick than the giant."
"HEY! You in the ballet outfit!"
The roar of repulsor engines cut through the chaos. Iron Man dropped from the sky, palm cannons blazing, and shredded the Chitauri squad closing in on their position in a three-second burst of targeted destruction.
Tony hovered, faceplate opening, and stared at Gwen with the expression of a man whose understanding of reality had been exceeded for the fourth time that day.
"While I'm thrilled to see new talent joining the roster — could someone explain where the spider-themed leotard came from? Osborn Industries bio-experiment? Escaped circus performer? Interdimensional cosplay convention?"
"Circus?" Gwen's mask-eyes narrowed dangerously. "Old man, this is called punk aesthetic. Also, does that tin can of yours need oiling? I can hear it creaking from here."
"Old man?!" Tony clutched his chest plate. "JARVIS, add 'emotionally devastating spider-child' to my threat assessment database."
"ENOUGH!"
Steve Rogers charged in behind his shield, bouncing it off one Chitauri skull and catching it on the rebound. He took in Gwen — the suit, the webs, the attitude — with a single assessing glance, filed his confusion under deal with later, and defaulted to what he did best.
Lead.
"I don't care who you are or where you came from. If you're fighting these things, you're on our side." He pointed toward the top of Stark Tower, where the blue beam still lanced into the sky. "That wormhole needs to be shut down. Until it is, this battle never ends."
"Close the wormhole?"
Gwen looked up at the portal — and then her gaze dropped to the Omnitrix on Jake's wrist. The pink lenses contracted thoughtfully.
"That hole feels wrong. The force that pulled me through — it's got some kind of resonance with your watch." She tapped her temple. "Spider-Sense. It's practically singing at that thing."
Jake's mind clicked into gear.
She's right. The Omnitrix, the Space Stone, and Gravattack's residual gravitational waves — they've established a three-way link. The portal isn't just the Tesseract's doing anymore. The dimensional fabric is weakened across multiple frequencies.
And if a certain alien in the Omnitrix can understand those frequencies...
"Gwen. Take me up there."
Jake grabbed her wrist, his eyes sharp. "I know how to shut it down, but I need to get close to the device on the antenna."
Gwen looked up at Stark Tower — several hundred feet of glass and steel, swarming with Chitauri, topped by a god with a grudge and a glowing cube of cosmic power.
"That's a VIP seat. Gonna cost you extra."
Despite the quip, she was already moving. Her arm wrapped around Jake's waist, a thick strand of web shot upward and caught the building's exterior wall, and—
"Hold tight! This is the most intense ride in New York!"
WHOOSH—!
They launched upward, swinging between buildings in arcs that would have made a normal person's stomach exit through their throat. Chitauri energy bolts screamed past them — close, too close — but Gwen's spatial awareness was supernatural. She dodged without looking, adjusted without thinking, her body moving on instincts that operated faster than conscious thought.
Mid-swing, on Jake's wrist, the Omnitrix countdown hit zero.
The dial flooded green.
The watch hummed to life, warm and ready, like an old friend waking up.
Jake looked up. The top of Stark Tower was rushing toward them. He could see the Tesseract device. He could see the energy shield surrounding it. And he could see Loki, standing on the terrace, scepter raised, preparing to reassert control.
"Loki," Jake said, quiet enough that only Gwen heard. "You thought I was out of power?"
His finger found the dial. This time, he didn't spin to a combat icon. No fire. No muscle. No crystal or speed or gravity.
Facing a problem of pure energy manipulation and spatial physics, he needed something different entirely. Not the strongest fist in the Omnitrix.
The smartest brain.
"Grey Matter."
The icon was tiny — a palm-sized silhouette with an oversized head and two separate brain hemispheres visible through translucent cranial plates. The smallest form in the entire DNA library. And, pound for pound, the most intelligent being in the known universe.
"Who says saving the world always requires fists?"
Jake pressed the dial.
"Sometimes — brains are worth more than brawn."
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