Chapter Text
Miles stared at a sky that was far too blue for a city that smelled like a bin left out in July.
He stood on a deserted Atlanta motorway, half-expecting a camera to pan out and show him looking small and dramatic against the wreckage. If this was a crossover, he really hoped the main characters were the types to talk out their feelings rather than the types to carry katanas and scowl. He adjusted his mask, wondering if he was now a guest star in a grittier franchise.
Miles took a deep breath of the stagnant air. Suddenly, the melody of a half-remembered pop song mocked him from the back of his mind. Darling, just hold my hand. Because truly, nothing beats a spontaneous trip to a literal hellscape. And right now, you can save exactly zero percent of your sanity while being chased by the undead. So much for the grand plan of getting home to save his dad.
The adrenaline was finally beginning to ebb, leaving a hollow calm in its wake.
Honestly, compared to being chased through a neon-coloured nightmare by Miguel O’Hara—that crazy, self-serious, muscle-bound skyscraper of a man—this was almost relaxing. At least the zombies weren't lecturing him on the sanctity of the 'Canon' while trying to pile-drive him through a skyscraper.
Suddenly, a familiar tingle buzzed at the base of his skull.
It was not the screaming, high-pitched alarm of a multiversal collapse, but a dull thrum.
Miles closed his eyes, extending his awareness like a ripple across a pond. He could feel them: slow, heavy shapes dragging themselves through the alleyways. He performed a casual, effortless leap, sticking the landing on top of a rusted articulated lorry just to be safe.
Below, a few ‘shufflers’ emerged—grey-skinned blokes in tattered suits who looked like they had been through a particularly rough Friday night in Soho and simply forgot to stop. “Okay,” Miles muttered, looking down at a walker whose jaw was hanging on by a literal thread. “If Rick Grimes shows up on a horse in the next five minutes, I’m officially retiring from being a protagonist.”
He waited, half-expecting a commercial break or a flashy transition to save him from the silence.
But the only thing that moved was the shuffler below, whose skin was beginning to peel away like damp wallpaper. Back home, things were high-stakes, but they weren’t... this. His life was a PG-13 adventure, you know? There was punching and glitching, but people didn’t usually have their intestines on display. Here, the air tasted of copper and rot. If this was a crossover, the age rating had just spiked, and “kill or be killed” felt less like a dark motto and more like the only rule left on the syllabus.
Miles lay back on the warm metal of the lorry roof, peeling his mask off to let the evening sun hit his face. He stared up at the orange-tinted clouds, wondering if this was some cosmic detour with a purpose. Maybe he was in one of those manhwas Ganke was always reading—the ones where the hero gets dumped into a death-trap world just to level up before being sent back to his own timeline to fix everything.
He sat up as the shadows lengthened, squinting down the road.
Still no Rick Grimes on a horse.
“Maybe the bloke hasn’t even woken up from his coma yet,” Miles muttered, rubbing his eyes.
He hopped down and raided a nearby SUV, swapping his look for a baggy hoodie and some grey joggers he found in a gym bag. He felt like a total criminal. “Look, I’m sorry, owner of this car,” he said, hiding his suit away underneath. “I’m borrowing these. I’ll pay it forward, okay? I’ll rescue a cat or a survivor or whatever.”
He decided to run some tests.
He webbed a particularly nasty-looking bloke in a shredded suit to a telephone pole. The smell was straight-up foul—like a rubbish tip had a baby with a butcher’s shop in the middle of a heatwave. He poked at it with a web-line. Hmm. It was blind as a bat and reacted to every little click, but when Miles stepped closer, it just... stopped.
Miles stood on a car bonnet and did a full-on shout.
“YO! OVER HERE! FRESH SPIDER-MEAT!”
The walker looked up, its milky eyes passing right over him, and then it just turned away to sniff a bin. Miles dropped his arms, feeling genuinely slighted. “Are you for real right now?” Maybe the radioactive spider DNA made him smell like a chemical spill or a predator. As the legend Stan Lee used to say, nobody likes a spider. Apparently, that included the undead. They didn’t even think he was food.
Miles sat on the edge of the lorry, dangling his legs.
“Okay, so... is this a win or a massive fail?” On one hand, being invisible to the local brain-munchers was the ultimate cheat code. It was a proper protagonist perk. But on the other hand, it was kind of trash for his “training arc” theory. How was he supposed to get stronger or level up if the enemies treated him like a bad smell? If he was just going to be an overpowered Mary Sue who could walk through the apocalypse without breaking a sweat, the plot was going to get real boring, real fast.
As he hopped down and started walking, the shufflers actually parted for him like the Red Sea, stumbling over their own feet to get out of his bubble. He snorted, the irony hitting him hard. Every zombie flick ever made always hammered home the same point: the dead aren’t the real problem, it’s the living. Humans turning on each other just to see tomorrow.
He thought about Miguel and the Spider-Society, and a bitter laugh escaped him. At least the people in this world had a reason to be cut-throat—they were literally starving. But the Spider-Society? They were hunting a kid in the name of some ‘Canon’ they were too scared to question.
Miles pulled his stolen hoodie up as the sun dipped below the skyline. “Right,” he muttered, stepping into the shadows. “Time to go find this Rick guy and see if I’ve actually landed in a box set.”