Given the Watcher's consistently enigmatic, half-explained warnings, Peter hadn't possessed the slightest clue what a "multiverse-level crisis" actually entailed. He didn't know how a teenager with an enchanted hammer was supposed to fix the fabric of reality.
Then he stepped out of the portal, sank ankle-deep into the bloody mud of the Florida Everglades, and immediately understood.
Oh. I'm in the 'Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe'.
Peter pinched the bridge of his nose right through his mask, letting out a long, exhausted sigh. The air here was thick, suffocatingly humid, and reeked of swamp gas and fresh copper. If the Wasteland universe was a gritty, high-stakes western, and the Zombie universe was a terrifying dive into survival horror, this reality was just... stupid. It was a meaningless, mean-spirited, morbidly edgy editorial mandate designed solely to sell variant covers.
"This variant of Wade Wilson is terrifyingly efficient, Spider-Man," Uatu the Watcher boomed, his massive, translucent bald head hovering over the cattails. "He has slaughtered every single superhuman on this Earth. He has even executed cosmic entities of unfathomable power. And—"
Uatu froze. His giant, glowing eyes darted toward the treeline.
Dreadpool stood in the clearing, covered head-to-toe in superhero gore, staring directly at the cosmic being.
"Oh, dear. He perceives me," Uatu stated flatly.
With a soft pop of displaced air, the Watcher vanished, entirely abandoning Peter in the swamp.
Dreadpool stepped over the decapitated corpse of the Taskmaster. He tilted his head, his white lenses narrowing as he looked at the teenager in the black suit. "So, the universe's ultimate final defense is... Spider-Man holding a magic hammer?"
"I'm filling in," Peter said dryly. "And frankly, I have some notes. How exactly did you manage to slaughter your entire universe?"
Dreadpool chuckled, a wet, rattling sound. He spread his arms wide. "How did I do it? Because you are all slaves! You dance on strings pulled by writers and artists! I saw the truth! I am the only one who is truly free! You are just a comic book character, but I—"
"Okay, okay, save the villain monologue," Peter interrupted, waving a dismissive hand. "I'm talking about the logistical details. For example, how did you kill the Spider-Man of this universe? Because as far as I know, you just shot him. With a gun."
Dreadpool didn't hesitate. He drew a 9mm semi-automatic pistol from his thigh holster and fired a round directly at Peter's face.
Peter simply tilted his head two inches to the left. The bullet hissed past his ear, burying itself harmlessly into a cypress tree.
"See?!" Peter threw his hands up in sheer exasperation. "This is exactly what I'm talking about! It completely lacks internal logic! What kind of Spider-Man dies to a standard-issue 9mm bullet? I dodge light-speed repulsor blasts from Iron Man! My Spider-Sense is so fine-tuned I can literally feel the air displacement of your index finger pulling the trigger before the hammer even strikes the firing pin! Make it make sense!"
Dreadpool stared at his smoking pistol in genuine confusion. He shook the gun. That usually works, he thought.
"And Thor?" Peter pressed, resting Mjolnir on his shoulder. "How did you manage to kill the literal God of Thunder?"
"Oh, that?" Dreadpool laughed, holstering his gun and drawing his katanas. "That was my absolute masterpiece—"
Peter didn't let him finish. He hurled Mjolnir. The Uru metal slammed squarely into Dreadpool's chest, throwing the mercenary fifty feet backward into the muck.
Peter extended his hand, recalling the hammer.
Dreadpool immediately sat up in the mud. He snatched a specialized gadget from his belt and fired a concentrated burst of Pym Particles directly at the returning Mjolnir. The hammer instantly expanded, growing to the size of a cement truck as it hurtled toward Peter. This was the trick. This was how he had crushed Thor to death.
Peter didn't move. He channeled the bio-electricity through his suit and simply held his hand up.
The massive, house-sized Mjolnir stopped dead in mid-air, hovering an inch from Peter's outstretched palm.
"Look at this!" Peter yelled, gesturing to the floating monument of Uru metal. "Why would Thor be killed by his own hammer?! It's magically tethered to him! I can stop it right in front of my own face! Thor takes punches from the Hulk and survives, but he gets squished just because his hammer got big? It is fundamentally terrible writing!"
Dreadpool scrambled to his feet, drawing his swords again. "You don't understand—!"
Peter flicked his wrist downward. The massive Mjolnir dropped out of the sky, slamming into the swamp with the force of an earthquake. It pinned Dreadpool entirely to the earth, leaving only his masked head sticking out of the mud.
"What do you know, you bound bastard?!" Dreadpool shrieked, struggling uselessly against the million-ton weight pressing on his spine.
"If you ask me, you're the generic comic book character here, buddy," Peter said, walking over and crouching next to Dreadpool's head. "Some editorial department wanted to publish a morbid, edgy miniseries to boost quarterly sales. So, they created you. They gave you maximum plot armor and wrote a bunch of pointless, illogical deaths. Thor gets squished. Spider-Man forgets how to dodge. Anyone with basic molecular manipulation could have just turned your blood into sand, but they didn't because the script said they couldn't."
Peter stood up, dusting off his knees. "And now you've wiped out your entire universe. There's nobody left to kill. Your usefulness as a gimmick is over, buddy. The massacre is done. You're about to get canceled."
"You can't kill me!" Dreadpool roared, spitting mud. "I know the truth! I see the panels!"
Peter just stared at him. Then, without a word, he turned around, opened a localized dimensional portal, and walked away, completely leaving Mjolnir behind to keep the mercenary pinned.
Dreadpool sneered. The idiot had left his weapon. Dreadpool immediately began calculating the angles to dislocate his own shoulders and slip out from under the hammer.
Before he could pop a joint, the portal flared back to life. Two people stepped through. One of them was already talking loudly.
"Wait, wait, wait, Spider-Boy. You mean I killed all the superheroes and the villains in this universe?!" the Earth-616 Deadpool yelled, adjusting his tactical harness. "Oh, that is way more awesome than damn Logan's timeline! That hairy dwarf only took down the X-Men. I took down the whole freaking world!"
"Yeah, well, if you consider Thor getting flattened by his own hammer a legitimate victory, then sure, claim the trophy," Peter muttered.
Peter raised his hand, using a vial of reversed Pym Particles he'd brought from 616 to shrink Mjolnir back to its normal size. He pulled the hammer back to his grip.
616 Wade Wilson immediately walked over to the pinned, paralyzed Dreadpool. Wade squatted down in the mud, poking Dreadpool's mask.
"My god," 616 Wade gasped, shaking his head. "He really is incredibly ugly."
"You know you are literally the exact same person, right?" Peter deadpanned.
"Are we? I can't kill everyone in my own universe. The authors need to keep those guys alive to sell action figures!" Wade stood up, scratching his chin. "But I can't really manage this guy either. Shouldn't we call in a cosmic heavy hitter to deal with him... wait a second."
Wade's eyes locked onto Dreadpool's waist. "Is that a fully functional multidimensional teleportation belt?"
A massive, wicked grin spread beneath Wade's mask. He had just come up with the greatest idea of his entire life.
Wade dropped to his knees. He clamped his left hand tightly over Dreadpool's mouth to muffle the screams. With his right hand, he reached down, tapped the digital interface on the teleportation belt, and spoke directly into the vocal-command receiver.
"Transmit half of the user's mass," Wade commanded cheerfully. "Vertically."
The belt hummed. A brilliant flash of blue light consumed the swamp.
With a sickening, wet squelch, the entire left half of Dreadpool's body—from the center of his skull straight down through his groin—was instantly teleported into the vacuum of deep space. The remaining right half collapsed into the swamp in a catastrophic shower of blood, organs, and bone fragments.
Peter spun around, clutching his stomach, violently fighting the urge to vomit inside his mask.
Wade completely ignored the gore. He cheerfully reached into the ruined puddle of meat, yanked the teleportation belt free, wiped a chunk of intestine off the buckle, and strapped it around his own waist.
"Aha! Look at that!" Wade cheered, doing a little dance in the mud. "This single chapter, which is barely pushing a thousand words, just had a greater impact on our universe's inventory than your entire weekend getaway in The Walking Dead timeline!"
Peter swallowed hard, forcing his lunch to stay down. "Did you... did you not stop to consider what happens if his healing factor kicks in and he regenerates into two evil Dreadpools?"
"Eh, that sounds like a problem for a Deadpool solo run," Wade waved dismissively. "He definitely won't show up in your comic, Spidey." Wade zipped up his pants, patted his newly acquired belt, and sighed contentedly. "Alright! Nothing much else to do here, right? This place is a ghost town."
"Yes," Peter groaned, rubbing his temples. "There are practically zero survivors left in this universe. No heroes, no villains..."
A bright flash of light interrupted him. Uatu the Watcher's giant bald head reappeared in the clearing.
"Actually," Uatu corrected, looking down at the bloody mess of Dreadpool. "There are precisely two survivors. Three people were kept alive for perpetual torture. Wolverine's children—Daken Akihiro and Laura Kinney—are currently locked in subterranean incendiary traps. They burn alive, their healing factors repair the tissue, and the cycle repeats. If you extract them, they will survive."
"You said three people," Peter noted, glaring at the giant head.
"The third was Kitty Pryde," Uatu stated. "She was trapped inside a four-dimensional tesseract maze. Unfortunately, she does not possess a healing factor. She has already starved to death."
Peter stared at the Watcher. "I am not even going to bother commenting on the pseudo-science of starving to death inside a tesseract."
Peter let his shoulders slump. He was physically and mentally drained. The sheer farce of this reality was giving him a migraine. He just wanted to go home, crawl into his own bed, and sleep for a week.
Wade nudged Peter in the ribs with a blood-stained elbow.
"Hey, Spidey," Wade whispered loudly, leaning in. "Just out of curiosity... exactly how many strays are you planning to cram into your little Wasteland sandbox?"
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