Chapter Text
Miracles in New York usually come with an exorbitant price. Peter Parker was, above all, a boy with abysmal luck and an unwavering stubbornness. When he threw himself to heroically intercept the bullet meant for Jean Grey, he didn't weigh the consequences or calculate the pain. He simply acted. The result left him on the brink of the abyss, in a hospital bed where the monotonous beep of medical monitors was the only soundtrack to his survival.
Now, having been officially discharged, the diagnosis was blunt: under strict doctor's orders, all he was allowed to do was take things easy, maintain absolute bed rest, and recover in the quiet of his apartment.
But Spider-Man's life has never known of rest or truces.
He was barely trying to settle under his bedcovers, feeling every stab of pain shooting through his torso, when the calm shattered into pieces. The city air began to shudder with the distorted roar of sirens and the abrupt interruption of all television broadcasts. Multiple emergency reports began to flood the news: a massive attack was consuming Times Square.
The footage showed the main avenue turned into a war zone after the sudden arrival of a group of unknown individuals, wielding devastating superpowers and wearing suits as flashy as they were threatening.
While the red and blue lights of the police cruisers illuminated his bedroom ceiling and the screams of people echoed on the news, Peter looked at his folded suit resting on the chair. His body begged for a truce, but responsibility demanded the exact opposite. Rest, once again, would have to wait.
The air over Manhattan no longer smelled like the city. It smelled of sulfur, hot copper, and the dense stench of a shattered ozone layer.
The sky over Times Square had ceased to be the blue mantle of any given New York afternoon; it was now a gaping maw in reality, a roaring purple vortex that twisted the clouds as if they were shadows in a spiral of violet fire. Circles of light tore through the heights, projecting flashes of an overwhelming energy that made the glass of the skyscrapers flicker in green and pink.
Below, the heart of the metropolis was bleeding out.
Hundreds of civilians ran aimlessly, crushing each other in a panic-stricken stampede. The sirens of the fire department and the NYPD wailed in an out-of-tune chorus that competed against the echoing thunder rolling out of the purple clouds. The gigantic billboards on the great avenue, which moments before had been broadcasting fashion and soda commercials, flickered furiously through white static, flashing emergency alerts in massive red letters:
IMMEDIATE EVACUATION — DISASTER ZONE
Overturned yellow cabs burned in the middle of the asphalt; the display windows of the most prestigious shops were blown into a thousand pieces by the shockwaves shaking the ground. Advancing through the tide of rubble and thick smoke was a contingent of unknown figures, wrapped in striking and threatening costumes, flaunting indecipherable technology and physics-defying powers. They unleashed bursts of dark matter and force fields that snapped buses in half, marching forward like an army that hadn't come to negotiate, but to level everything.
And in the midst of that apocalyptic scenario, the stampeding crowd saw something crawling up the brick walls.
He emerged from the shadows of 42nd Street. He didn't descend flying on a jet of golden thrusters, nor did he arrive leading a formidable squad of superheroes. He arrived alone, stumbling along the cornice of a building, clutching his left side savagely.
It was Spider-Man.
The fabric of his classic suit was covered in a patina of dust, soot, and fresh blood seeping through the synthetic mesh. The elastic compression bandages the hospital doctor had wrapped around his torso barely managed to contain the laceration of his gunshot wound. Every breath was a burning dagger in his lungs; every time his foot bore weight on the concrete, a jolt of pure agony shot up his spine to the base of his skull, threatening to make him pass out right then and there.
"A bullet... it was just a bullet for Jean..." he told himself, his voice muffled under the mask, breathing with agonizing difficulty. "Breathe in, Parker. Breathe out. Ignore the broken ribs. Ignore your head spinning. Ignore the doctor. Ignore it all..."
His Spider-Sense buzzed behind his eyes with the aggression of a swarm of infuriated wasps. The atmospheric pressure caused by the purple vortex made his brain feel like it was about to burst. But there was no time for weakness.
A massive chunk of masonry and steel, blown from the Marquis theater facade by an explosion, plummeted toward a group of families trapped between two burnt-out cruisers. The screams of children cut through the air.
Peter didn't think. He didn't calculate the impact on his wounds or the muscle tearing. He dove headfirst into the void.
"Watch out below!" he shouted, his throat raw.
He fired two lines of reinforced webbing toward the edges of the concrete block in mid-freefall. With an agonizing yank that forced a howl of pain from his lungs—drowned out by the storm's roar—he brought the tons of stone to a dead stop. He felt the tendons in his arms on the verge of snapping and the wound on his side tearing open again, spilling a damp heat over his waist. With one last superhuman effort, he spun on his axis and redirected the rubble's momentum into an empty alley, reducing it to harmless debris.
He landed on his knees on the hot asphalt, an impact that rattled his bones. He stayed motionless for a second, resting one hand on the ground, coughing up a trail of blood that stained the inner fabric of his mask.
The civilians surrounding the area, covered in dust and trembling with terror, stared at him in deathly silence.
"Move!" Spider-Man ordered, his voice broken by fatigue but carrying unquestionable authority. "To the subway! Head north, don't stop for anything! The police have the perimeter cleared on 48th! Go!"
Driven by his command, the people began to run, escaping the imminent destruction.
Peter tried to stand. His legs shook like bamboo stalks in a storm. He looked up. The sky seemed to be devouring itself; the spirals of purple and black light were expanding at a terrifying speed, swallowing the flashes of the setting sun and plunging Manhattan into an unreal twilight, illuminated only by the spectral glow of the cosmic phenomenon.
About fifty meters away, at the front of the destroyed barricades of Times Square, the brightly costumed individuals were regrouping. Their cold, calculating gazes fell upon the solitary figure of the wounded hero standing amidst the smoke.
Peter Parker wiped the mouth of his mask with the back of his glove, adjusted his stance despite the martyrdom burning through his body, and took a step forward.
"Alright..." he whispered to himself, watching the vortex roar above his head as the earth trembled once more. "I don't know who they are or where they came from... but this is my city. And today is not a good day to die."
The ground shook beneath his feet as one of the invaders stepped forward. He was a colossal figure covered in crimson cybernetic armor plating that emitted a constant electric hum. In his right hand, he wielded a containment cannon that was beginning to charge with a purple light similar to the vortex tearing through the sky.
"Unidentified subject interrupting deployment," the giant's synthesized voice boomed through the storm. "Priority elimination."
"'Unidentified subject'?" Peter mocked, forcing his vocal cords to sound as defiant as possible while lowering his center of gravity. "Come on, guys, even in outer space they know red and blue are the colors of the friendly neighborhood. Show a little respect for the wardrobe."
The cannon fired. A blast of destructive plasma crossed the space between them at terrifying speed.
Peter jumped. It wasn't the clean, parabolic leap of his uninjured days; it was a clumsy, agonizing maneuver driven solely by the violent reflex of his Spider-Sense. The beam scorched the asphalt exactly where he had been standing a microsecond before, kicking up a curtain of sparks and glass shards. The shockwave caught him in mid-air, altering his trajectory and sending him crashing sideways onto the crumpled hood of a taxi.
The air escaped his lungs in a guttural sound. His vision went dark for a few moments as the pain in his ribs shifted from a localized fire to a direct explosion across his nervous system.
"Get up... get up, Parker..." he demanded of himself, digging his fingers into the car's wrinkled metal. "If you stay on the ground, Times Square becomes a mass grave."
Through the warped lens of his mask, he watched three other members of the enemy group advance. Two of them moved at high speed along the walls of the surrounding skyscrapers, deploying technology to stabilize the opening of the purple vortex, while the leader charged a second shot.
Peter shot a web at the giant's cannon, clogging the energy output, and pulled with his entire body weight. The weapon overheated in the invader's hands, detonating in a contained explosion that forced him three steps back. Capitalizing on the distraction, Spider-Man catapulted himself into the air, weaving web lines between two streetlamps to improvise a human slingshot.
"Welcome to New York!" he yelled as he launched himself at high speed straight toward the enemy group.
Despite the doctor's orders, despite the tearing in his torso and the blood that was beginning to completely soak his left side, the shadow of the arachnid crossed the violet flashes of the great avenue once more, ready to give everything until his last breath. He dismantled those cybernetic aberrations with little difficulty, hindered only by his own preexisting injuries.
All under that unsettling sky, which brought back to mind MJ's farewell, his other selves, Ned, and the spell cast by Stephen.
Peter stood over the scorched remains of an avenue. A few meters away, six figures advanced slowly through the haze of debris.
Leading them was a short, broad-shouldered man with gleaming metal claws dripping blood; beside him stood a tall man with a ruby-quartz visor that emitted a constant, threatening red glow. Behind them, an organic steel giant walked next to a bestial brute with yellowing claws and exposed fangs, growling like a starving animal. Floating in the air, her eyes turned into white orbs and enveloped in lightning, the weather woman dominated the sky.
But there was someone else. A guy in a red and black suit covered in harnesses and weapon holsters, who was bounding absurdly over the rubble, adjusting the pistols on his waist while looking Peter up and down.
"Well, well... look what the dimensional rift dragged in," the guy said, taking a dramatic pause as he shifted his weight onto one leg. "Truly nostalgic. You look an awful lot like the other guy we took out a little while ago."
Peter, in his half-shredded fabric suit, his body trembling from the effort of evacuating civilians at top speed, took a step forward, his voice cracking with panic and confusion.
"What... what the hell are you talking about?" Peter questioned, clenching his fists. "Who did you take out?"
Deadpool let out a theatrical laugh, bringing his hands to his cheeks.
"Oh, please! Don't get all melancholy on me. Though I have to admit, that guy's suit style was way more vintage. Lots of raised webbing, very early two-thousands vibe..."
Without warning, Deadpool reached into a tactical bag on his back and, with a careless flick of his wrist, tossed an object at Peter.
The object rolled across the concrete floor until it stopped right in front of his armored boots.
Peter bent down slowly, his spider-sense screaming in his ear with a deafening buzz that rattled his skull. With trembling hands, he picked the garment off the ground.
It was a mask. A thick fabric mask with arched metal-rimmed lenses and a silver web pattern sewn in relief. It was torn, stained with soot and dried blood.
Peter 2's mask. The adult Spider-Man. The man who had taught him that revenge didn't cure the pain, the one who had spoken to him about his Uncle Ben on that Queens rooftop during the multiversal villain crisis.
"He gave us a good fight, I won't lie," Deadpool added with his usual ironic tone, pointing at the mask with his thumb. "But Wolverine isn't a big fan of the great responsibility speeches, you know how it is. We're the X-Men, kid, the major leagues, you get it."
An icy chill ran down Peter's spine. Rage and horror mixed in his throat into a suffocating knot. Throwing himself without holding back against that figure, knocking him unconscious with a single blow. Watching him crash into one of the traffic lights still standing on the avenue.
He looked up just in time to see Cyclops tap the side of his visor, flooding the area with a blinding red glare, while Wolverine's claws popped out with a metallic snikt.
"NOW!" Logan roared.
Cyclops's optic blast hit Peter square in the chest at the exact moment the sky split open with an Earth-shattering crack of thunder.
Through the shattered lens of his mask, Peter watched the giant marquee screens flicker between static and live news broadcasts. Millions of people were watching from their homes, but no one was coming to help. The New Avengers weren't there. There were no satellites or distress signals. Just him, bleeding on the cold asphalt of Times Square, facing an army that hadn't come to conquer the world, but to erase it in order to save their own.
"Subject 1 approaching from the left. Multiple thermal signatures..." the synthetic voice of his suit's interface crackled, muffled by magnetic interference.
Before Peter could roll away, the air turned to pure ozone.
"Code..." he mumbled, his voice broken, raspy, but steeped in suicidal stubbornness. "Override code... Underoos..."
"Send... 17-B," Peter whispered. "Send 17-B to my location. Now."
Ororo Munroe descended between the skyscrapers cloaked in a white tempest. Her pupil-less eyes flashed. There was no hatred on her face, only a relentless and tragic determination.
"I'm sorry, child," Storm murmured.
The sky opened. A bolt of pure, massive, blinding plasma struck straight down onto Spider-Man's chest.
The impact didn't just feel like tons of mass dropping from space; it was a neurological explosion. The synthetic fabric of the suit disintegrated instantly, fusing to his skin in second-degree burns. Peter's muscles contracted in a violent spasm, his lungs collapsed from the overload, and the roar of the thunder burst his eardrums.
The blast slammed him against the hood of a burning taxi, leaving a crater of folded metal and crushed glass.
WARNING: CRITICAL STRUCTURAL FAILURE, flashed in fuchsia red inside the visor. EV SYSTEMS: OFFLINE. LIFE SUPPORT: 4%. SECONDARY BATTERY: MASSIVE FAILURE...
"EV..." Peter tried to articulate, but only exhaled a puff of smoke and blood that stained the inside of his broken mask.
"Emergency... pro... tocol... damag..." the AI stuttered, dissolving into a high-pitched, monotonous beep. The HUD screens in the visor powered down one by one, leaving him plunged in a suffocating red gloom.
A few meters away, Colossus's heavy footsteps made the concrete vibrate. The scraping of Wolverine's adamantium claws echoed like a funeral dirge beneath the storm's roar. Cyclops led the advance, bringing his fingers to his optic visor to deliver the final blow and clear the area.
Peter couldn't move his left leg. The pain was a wildfire devouring him from the inside, and the weight of his Earth's extinction crushed his chest far worse than the lightning strike itself.
He forced his trembling fingers to press the micro-transmitter lodged at the base of his jaw, channeling the last micro-amps of the auxiliary battery before the final blackout.
Cyclops looked up as he heard a hypersonic whistle slice through the storm clouds.
A second of absolute silence enveloped the avenue.
Suddenly, the cloud mass tore open in a supersonic burst. A streak of fire pierced the atmosphere at Mach 8, leaving a trail of ionized air in its wake. An armored containment pod, with sleek geometry and red and gold titanium finishes, impacted directly in the center of the street, shattering the pavement and creating a shockwave that forced Sabretooth and Wolverine to cover their eyes.
The pod didn't wait. It deployed into arcs of fluid nanotechnology before even touching the ground.
The liquid nanowave erupted in metallic surges, wrapping around Peter's battered body. Gold and crimson covered the burns, sealing the wounds with instant medical pressure and pumping synthetic adrenaline straight into his bloodstream. The optical lenses of the armor flared to life with a freezing, brilliant neon blue.
Four mechanical legs made of gold and titanium alloy unfolded from the back of the armor with a hydraulic hiss, digging into the asphalt and lifting Spider-Man's body off the ground.
Through the lenses of news helicopters broadcasting live to the entire country, the world watched the fallen hero rise again, hovering on four steel legs, clad in Tony Stark's final gift.
Peter exhaled inside the purified helmet, feeling the suit's strength flow through his ravaged nerves. Impressively, it still had that new car smell. He looked at the X-Men.
"Round two," he said.
The armor's tactical response was instantaneous. The Iron Spider's neural interface flooded Peter's brain with calculated doses of coagulants and synthetic analgesics, drowning the pain of Storm's burns in a cold, cerebral buzz.
Inside the helmet, the golden holographic interface processed the two frontal attackers in a matter of milliseconds:
Subject A (unknown): Low mass, anomalous bone density, high biological threat. Slashing range: 30 cm. Subject B (unknown): Organic steel body structure, approximate weight 2500 kg. Kinetic-brute threat: Massive. Conventional hand-to-hand combat not recommended.
"Back off, Logan! He's mine!" Sabretooth roared from the flank, but Wolverine had already lunged forward, slicing the air in a low trajectory.
The adamantium claws drew a deadly arc straight for Peter's throat.
Peter didn't dodge sideways; he used the micro-repulsor propulsion in his boots and the thrust of two of his mechanical legs to catapult himself vertically, soaring right over Logan. As he flew over the mutant, the Iron Spider's upper right leg came down with the speed of an industrial piston, digging into Wolverine's back and smashing him face-first into the ruined chassis of the taxi.
CLANG!
Before Logan could get up, the nanotechnology at the tip of the leg reconfigured into a high-frequency sonic emitter, discharging a shockwave directly into Wolverine's hyper-sensitive ears. The mutant let out a guttural howl, clutching his head as his nervous system temporarily collapsed from the auditory overload.
"One down... for now," Peter muttered. "EV, activate 'Superior Six' protocol."
But the shadow of Piotr Rasputin already covered him completely.
Colossus charged forward like a runaway train, plowing through light poles in his path. His organic steel fist traveled with enough force to punch through a bunker wall. Peter crossed his four mechanical legs in front of his chest like a shield, while the nanotechnology densified the titanium gold at the exact point of impact.
The collision sounded like naval artillery fire.
The shockwave blew out the windows of surrounding shops within a fifty-meter radius. The impact pushed Peter three meters backward, carving two deep trenches into the asphalt, but the nano-alloy shield absorbed the kinetic force without yielding.
"You're strong, kid," Colossus said with a metallic, thundering voice, clenching his teeth. "But you can't win this. Your world has to fall so ours can live."
"Then you're going to have to break me first," Peter replied as a psychotic laugh escaped him in brief bursts.
The "Superior Six" protocol was something he worked on after his clash with his alternate selves' villains. Pumpkin bombs were already housed in his forearm alongside a temporary-use variant of the Goblin formula. Anti-Electro systems and combustion protocols in case he encountered a being like Sandman. His mechanical legs now possessed their own AI based on the one that controlled Doc Ock's mechanical arms. His fingers now took the shape of claws for a better grip against opponents like the Lizard..
Taking advantage of the fact that Colossus's fist was still pinned against the shield matrix, Peter didn't try to strike him—knowing the organic steel would just absorb the impact. Instead, he used the physics of the environment.
Two of the mechanical legs on his back fired like harpoons, anchoring deeply into the concrete foundation of a commercial building to his left. At the same time, the micro-launchers on his wrists fired a braided cable of electrified nano-webbing that tightly wrapped around Colossus's neck and shoulders.
"Repulsor systems: 85% power. Transferring mass," Peter ordered the AI.
Using the tension from the mechanical harpoons anchored to the building as leverage and the propulsion from his boots, Peter pivoted on his axis. The centrifugal force, combined with the Iron Spider's hydraulic amplification, lifted Colossus's two-and-a-half tons of steel right into the air.
With a roar of exertion, Peter slammed the Russian giant into the facade of the opposite building. The masonry came crashing down in a rain of debris, temporarily burying the mutant under tons of brick and concrete.
Peter landed on his feet in the middle of the street, breathing heavily inside the helmet. The four spider legs retracted, settling into a defensive stance over his shoulders, ready for the next attack. The area had been evacuated earlier; he could fight without holding back.
Through the smoke of the rubble and the rain Storm maintained over Manhattan, Peter saw Scott Summers take a step forward. Cyclops adjusted the dial on his ruby visor.
"Enough," Scott said with absolute tactical coldness. "Logan, get up. Storm, close the perimeter. Don't let him move."
Peter's Spider-Sense didn't stop vibrating at the base of his skull. He knew the armor was only buying him time; Wolverine's regeneration was already clearing his ear canal, the concrete where Colossus had fallen was beginning to shift, and the rest of the mutant patrol was closing the net.
He knew he had to buy time or do whatever it took, so right where he had previously thrown Colossus, he tossed several pumpkin bombs.
He was alone in this fight, but 17-B had given him something the X-Men didn't expect: a chance to fight until his final breath.
Scott Summers's ruby visor began to glow an incandescent red. Beside him, Storm drifted down slowly, lightning weaving between her fingers, as the rubble where Colossus lay groaned under the pressure of the steel giant rising back to his feet.
Peter, with the Iron Spider armor emitting a tactical hum and the four mechanical legs deployed in a defensive arc, planted his feet on the asphalt. The holographic visor calculated evasion trajectories at brutal speeds, but the math wasn't adding up: cellular exhaustion was starting to bleed through the suit's painkillers.
"Stop," a voice echoed.
It wasn't a scream, but a command that seemed to vibrate through the ozone-charged air.
Through the haze of the rain and the smoke of the explosions, someone stepped forward. A redhead, clad in her dark leather uniform, walked with an almost unsettling calm. Her eyes didn't reflect Scott's tactical fury or the savage desperation of Logan, who had just gotten up a few meters away spitting blood.
"Jean, step back," Scott said without dropping his guard. "We can't give him any space. If we don't neutralize their protector, the Incursion will collapse on our Earth before we can secure the anchor."
"He's just one man, Scott," Jean replied, her eyes fixed on Spider-Man's metallic figure. "And he's destroyed. Let me disable his nervous system from the inside. It will be quick and painless."
Peter clenched his fists. Telepathy. Inside the helmet, the Iron Spider's interface began flashing warnings of unidentified bioelectric interference.
"Try it, redhead," Peter muttered, his voice distorted by the helmet's synthesizer, adjusting his stance.
Jean closed her eyes slightly and raised two fingers to her temple. She expanded her consciousness, launching a subtle and precise psychic pulse designed to shut down the motor centers of Peter's brain, just as she had done a hundred times with enemy soldiers and hostile mutants.
What she didn't expect was the response from Peter Parker's organism.
At the exact moment Jean's mind touched the boy's psychic barrier, Peter's Spider-Sense reacted not as a mental ability, but as a purely instinctive, precognitive, and primal defense mechanism.
ZAP!
A whip of bio-sensory static rebounded straight back into Jean's brain. It wasn't a conscious mental shield or a trained technique; it was a swarm of millions of needles made of pure hyper-awareness. To Jean's mind, it felt like plunging her bare hand into a nuclear reactor of survival instinct.
Jean choked back a scream and staggered two steps back, bringing her hands to her head. Her pupils dilated in shock as the pain of the psychic feedback hammered her temples.
"Jean!" Scott stepped forward, but she raised a hand to stop him, breathing heavily.
"His... his mind..." Jean stammered, staring at Peter with a mixture of dread and absolute astonishment. "I can't get in. His instinct... perceives contact as a lethal threat before the thought can even fully form. It rejects the intrusion on pure reflex."
But the clash hadn't been one-sided. The momentary breach caused by the Spider-Sense's reaction left a tiny crack open. In those few microseconds of psychic collision, Jean's perception failed to shut Peter down, but she did manage to catch a glimpse of what lay behind that wall of instinct.
What Jean saw wasn't the mind of a soldier, or a conqueror, or an enemy of her universe.
She saw a boy. A kid covered in invisible scars, completely alone in a city that didn't know his name. She felt the crushing weight of an ancient guilt, the memory of an older woman's face smiling before dying in his arms, the echo of an entire universe forgetting his existence due to a spell, and a sense of duty so ridiculously pure, selfless, and painful that it bordered on suicidal.
Jean froze. The magnitude of grief and nobility in Peter's mind was a tide so thick that it momentarily eclipsed the X-Men's own desperation to save their world.
"You..." Jean whispered, her voice cracking, looking at the gold and red mask observing her in silence. "You aren't fighting for glory... or hatred. You're completely alone."
Peter breathed heavily inside the helmet, feeling the residual dizziness of the psychic backlash. The mechanical legs of his armor creaked slightly as he held his ground.
"We all have something to protect," Peter said, his voice raspy but unbreakable through the speaker. "Your world wants to live. Mine does too. And as long as I'm still breathing... I won't let you erase this one."
Scott, completely unaware of what Jean had just experienced on the astral plane, adjusted his visor again, jaw clenched tight.
"Jean, can you knock him out or not?" Cyclops demanded, the ruby energy building up behind his lenses.
Jean looked at Scott, then at Logan and Storm, and finally locked eyes again with the badly wounded Spider-Man standing tall in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
Three miles from Times Square, on the roof of a skyscraper on the Upper East Side, Jean Grey—the Jean of this Earth—had just landed. She had returned to the city just a few minutes ago after deciding not to run away; she wanted advice from Peter on how to move forward, but the air in Manhattan smelled of burnt ozone and the sky crackled on a frequency that didn't belong to this existential plane.
Below, on the glass facade of the Samsung Flagship store, an entire wall of giant screens broadcast the nightmare live.
The news helicopter feeds shook in high definition. Jean walked to the edge of the ledge, her eyes glued to the screen. What she saw froze her blood: a tactical team wearing uniforms she had never seen before was reducing Fifth Avenue to rubble. And in the center of the crater, encased in cracked gold and titanium armor billowing smoke, was Spider-Man.
Peter.
Her telepathy picked up the real-time echo of millions of terrified minds watching their televisions. But what truly broke her was the sheer breach of pure anguish she felt on the psychic plane. There were no Avengers. There were no reinforcements. It was just one battered boy holding the line against an army of superpowered strangers.
"I... I'm not going to make it in time if I walk," Jean murmured.
She expanded her telekinetic aura to the absolute max. A pink and crimson flare enveloped her body as she threw herself into the void, crossing the skies of Manhattan at supersonic speeds toward the epicenter of the disaster.
On Fifth Avenue, the Iron Spider armor's visor blinked a deep blood-red.
Through the helmet's glass, Peter watched Scott Summers adjust his visor for a maximum-power blast, Wolverine advancing with a bloody torso, and Colossus pulling himself from the rubble of a storefront. Jean Grey (the invading version) remained frozen, fingers pressed to her temple, trembling from the psychic shock.
WARNING: BIOLOGICAL INTEGRITY AT 18%, the suit's synthetic voice notified. INTERCOSTAL MUSCLES TORN. THIRD-DEGREE BURN ON TORSO. HEART RATE DANGEROUSLY ELEVATED. GOBLIN SERUM INSUFFICIENT FOR REGENERATIVE FACTOR.
"EV... whoever is still running the system," Peter spoke, panting in short breaths that tasted like iron. "Override biological safety protocols."
Not recommended. The mechanical stress of the suit on your damaged skeletal structure could cause cardiac failure or permanent spinal snapping.
"Override restrictions," Peter repeated. Cyclops's shadow loomed over him. Behind them, the Incursion threatened to devour the horizon. "Activate Instant Kill Mode."
A sharp, freezing beep rang out inside the helmet.
INSTANT KILL MODE ACTIVATED. LETHAL FORCE PROTOCOL UNLOCKED.
The neon lenses of the Iron Spider instantly shifted from blue to a deep crimson red.
The four mechanical legs on his back reconfigured in microseconds: the titanium alloy tips sharpened like surgical needles, and the servo-motors' power unlocked to 200%, overloading the circuits with a deafening hum.
"Get back!" yelled the alternate telepath, snapping out of her daze as she felt the brutal shift in Peter's intent. "Scott, no! His attack pattern just changed!"
But it was too late.
Peter didn't wait for Cyclops to fire. The shockwave from his liftoff shattered the asphalt under his feet. He appeared instantly in front of Scott. One of the suit's mechanical legs shot out like a hydraulic spear, not aiming for his chest, but for Cyclops's ruby visor, crushing the control mechanism and redirecting the optic blast into the clouds before he could even pull the trigger. With a savage twist, Peter delivered a repulsor-boosted knee strike that sent the X-Men's leader rolling fifty meters down the avenue.
"Damn him!" roared Sabretooth, leaping off a taxi with his claws fully extended.
Peter didn't even turn around. The Iron Spider's upper right leg sliced through the air and embedded itself with surgical precision into Sabretooth's shoulder, lifting the two-hundred-pound mutant straight into the air before slamming him into the ground with the force of a hydraulic press, followed by an electrical pulse discharged directly into his joints.
Wolverine lunged blindly, throwing a cross-slash. Peter used the Instant Kill speed to dodge by mere millimeters. The three adamantium claws cut nothing but air, while two of the armor's mechanical legs pinned Logan's arm down, anchoring him to the ground like an industrial stake as the nanotechnology began to seal the armor's joints to keep him immobilized.
"Agh!" Peter choked back a scream of agony. His own body was paying the price. He felt a rib give way under the sheer tension of the maneuver, and his vision spotted with black. The AI's voice sounded like a distant echo warning of the imminent failure of his organs.
Colossus advanced like a wall of steel, raising both fists to crush the armor's helmet.
Peter looked up. The suit's red lenses gleamed with a murderous, desperate light. The four spider legs angled themselves for direct penetration right into the metallic giant's joints. It was kill or be killed. There was no room left for mercy.
"PETER!" a deafening scream tore through the Manhattan sky.
A tide of fiery pink psionic energy crashed down from the clouds like a meteor, striking dead center between Peter and Colossus. The shockwave of pure telekinesis swept the street, tossing the alternate mutants into the air and stopping the lethal strike of Spider-Man's armor dead in its tracks.
In the middle of the crater of smoke and debris, her hair floating and her eyes glowing in brilliant pink and crimson, the Jean Grey of this Earth touched down.
She looked at the invaders, looked at the devastated state of Fifth Avenue, and finally turned to Peter. Seeing the gold and red suit leaking blood from its joints and the red kill-glow in the mask, Jean's heart broke into a thousand pieces.
"Turn that off, Peter," Jean said, her voice heavy with a mix of guilt and a heartbreaking tenderness as she walked toward him. "I'm here now. You don't have to do it alone."
The burst of Jean Grey's psionic energy froze the invaders' advance. The current of pink fire wrapped around Peter's wounded body, not to harm him, but to forge a telekinetic force field that cushioned the pressure on his failing systems.
"Jean..." Peter mumbled through the synthesizer. The lenses of the Iron Spider shifted from Instant Kill's crimson red to a flickering neon blue, responding to an allied presence.
"Rest a second, Spider-Man," Jean said without taking her eyes off the invading X-Men. Her voice was a firm whisper that echoed straight into Peter's mind, warm and protective. "I've got this."
Colossus climbed back up from the rubble, dusting off the metallic debris. Wolverine managed to rip himself free from the nanotech harpooning with a growl, and Cyclops got to his feet, adjusting his damaged visor.
"Another mutant?" Logan grunted, sniffing the ozone-saturated air. "I smell Phoenix... but it's not our Jean."
"It doesn't matter who it is," Scott Summers declared, his face bloody but his gaze unwavering. "There's no room for two Earths. Attack!"
The battle resumed with renewed ferocity. But this time, Peter wasn't alone.
Jean threw her arms out, and a tide of pure telekinetic force lifted the destroyed vehicles off Fifth Avenue, hurling them like projectiles against Colossus and Sabretooth to cut off their advance. At the same time, she expanded her consciousness in a massive psychic sweep, trying to shut down the invaders' minds from the astral plane to end the carnage without killing them.
"Not on my watch!" a voice echoed across the psychic frequency.
The Jean Grey from the alternate universe reacted instantly. Although shaken by the empathy she had felt toward Peter moments earlier, the instinct to protect her mutant family prevailed. The invader erected a domed psychic shield over the minds of Scott, Logan, and Ororo, blocking her counterpart's intrusion.
On the astral plane, the clash between the two Jeans felt like the collision of tectonic plates. Jean was met with a rigid, desperate defensive wall.
"You're making a mistake!" Jean broadcast telepathically to her variant. "Destroying this Earth won't save yours!"
"We don't have a choice!" the invading Jean replied in the collective mind, struggling to hold the psychic barrier while tears mixed with sweat on her face. "It's our people or yours!"
With the psychic front locked in a stalemate by both telepaths, the physical combat devolved into tactical chaos.
"Peter, on your right!" Jean warned through the mental link.
Peter didn't need to look. With Jean's telekinetic support lifting him slightly off the ground to compensate for his broken leg, Spider-Man fired a web at Wolverine's wrist just as the mutant tried to flank her. With a combined thrust—Peter's physical pull and an invisible shove from Jean—they sent Logan flying into the side of a bus.
The two fought in a terrifying, fluid synchronicity: Jean controlled the mass of the battlefield and redirected the debris, while Peter used the Iron Spider's four legs and his reflexes to neutralize the direct attacks from Sabretooth and Cyclops. It was a dance between cosmic power and urban agility.
However, the sky over Manhattan roared once again.
Ororo Munroe, suspended high above the storm's vortex, noticed that the Jean of this world was focusing 90% of her psionic energy on holding back her counterpart's mental barrier and keeping Colossus at bay.
"Forgive me..." Storm whispered in the heights.
Raising her arms, the weather mutant channeled the entirety of the city's tempest into a single point. The clouds turned an incandescent white. A bolt of pure mass, overloaded with gigawatts of static electricity, shot straight down aiming directly at the unprotected back of the 616-Jean.
Jean, entirely absorbed in the psychic clash against her variant, didn't see it coming in time. Her telekinetic shield was angled forward.
WARNING: EXTREME LEVEL THERMAL THREAT, the AI shrieked inside Peter's helmet.
Peter's Spider-Sense erupted with a violence that made his nose bleed. There was no tactical calculation; there was no survival analysis.
"JEAN!" Peter screamed.
Pushing the Iron Spider boots' micro-repulsors far past their limits, Peter launched himself diagonally. He tore through the air and positioned himself squarely between the falling lightning bolt and Jean's back.
The impact of the overloaded strike hit the Iron Spider's chest plate dead center.
An explosion of blinding white and blue light blinded everyone on the avenue. The sheer force of the discharge punched through the armor's titanium and gold alloy, causing the nanotechnology to spark and cascade in reaction to the Anti-Electro protocol, but it wasn't enough. Peter's body absorbed the electrical overload meant for the mutant, unleashing a scream of pure agony that tore through the audio channel just before the helmet shattered under the pressure.
The impact sent Peter rolling across the asphalt, leaving a trail of smoke and blood. The Iron Spider armor was reduced to scorched scraps that barely covered his body.
Jean spun around in horror. The shockwave dropped her to her knees.
Seeing the young man on the ground—his face exposed, unconscious, suffering severe burns, and barely breathing after taking a second direct lightning strike for her—something inside her broke.
The pink telekinetic aura surrounding her extinguished for a second. In its place, a cosmic, golden flare of colossal proportions erupted from her chest, shooting toward the heavens and dissipating Ororo's storm in a single blow.
"It's over..." Jean murmured, in a voice that no longer sounded human, but like the roar of a dying star.
The sky above Fifth Avenue didn't just clear of clouds; it shattered into a blaze of golden and crimson cosmic fire.
The shockwave from the flash erased Ororo's tempest as if it had never existed. The air temperature spiked by fifty degrees in a millisecond, melting the asphalt around Jean's feet as she walked, floating mere millimeters off the ground, toward Peter's prone body.
The entity's telekinetic force pinned the alternate X-Men in the blink of an eye. Colossus was slammed into the ground by thousands of tons of pressure; Wolverine and Sabretooth were nailed to the masonry of the buildings, unable to move a single adamantium muscle; Cyclops's visor was frozen in place beneath an impenetrable psionic cage. The alternate Jean fell to her knees, clutching her head as the astral roar of the Phoenix humiliated her own mental power.
Jean knelt beside Peter. His face was completely exposed; the Iron Spider helmet had disintegrated. His face bore severe burns, his skin was bloody, and his chest was motionless.
"EV..." Jean's voice trembled, breaking amidst the cosmic fire swirling around her. "EV, answer me. Tell me his status."
A blinking red light flared from the remnants of the metallic nanoweave embedded near Peter's neck. The artificial intelligence replied in a voice distorted by static, but freezing and precise.
"Processing... The armor's battery is at 100% capacity due to the influx of absorbed electrical overload," EV communicated in a monotonous tone. "However... the user's organism suffered sudden cardiorespiratory arrest. Pulse has ceased. Massive cardiac arrest. Peter is not breathing."
"No, no, no..." Jean placed her fire-wreathed hands over Peter's shattered chest, sending pulses of energy in an attempt to restart his heart. "Keep trying, EV! Transfer the battery charge to his nervous system!"
"Impossible. Brain activity has dropped to zero. The user... is gone."
The AI's words hung in the air like a death sentence.
In that moment of absolute silence, the metal of Times Square's screens and the steel beams of the nearby buildings began to groan. The air turned heavy, saturated with a crushing magnetism.
From the top of a ruined structure, a figure descended on a floating metal platform. Crimson helmet, purple cape billowing in the wind. Erik Lehnsherr, Magneto, surveyed the scene without a hint of hesitation or remorse on his face.
"You're too late, Phoenix," Magneto said, his gravelly voice echoing across the avenue. "Your sacrifice for this boy was in vain. The dimensional inversion bomb has already been armed in the core of the city. Your Earth will fall in a matter of minutes so ours may survive."
Jean didn't look up from Peter's lifeless body right away. She remained frozen, feeling the absolute void in the psychic plane where the purest, most solitary, and noble mind she had ever known once resided. The boy who had taken a lethal lightning strike to save her... had died in her arms.
When Jean finally lifted her head, she was no longer there.
Her eyes had no pupils; they were two wells of absolute darkness. Her pink telekinetic aura twisted into a destructive, unbridled fire. The flames of the Phoenix took the shape of gigantic wings that scorched the facades of the surrounding skyscrapers, turning the concrete into liquid glass.
She looked at Magneto and the invading X-Men with a pure, primordial, and absolute hatred.
"Then..." Jean's voice didn't sound like a single person, but like a chorus of stars dying in sync. "All of you will burn with this world."
And everything erupted.
The psionic shockwave didn't just expand; it overflowed like the explosion of a confined supernova.
The primordial fire was no longer heat; it was the real-time rewriting of matter. The gravitational pressure of Jean's wrath turned the asphalt of Fifth Avenue into a mass of incandescent magma. The steel beams of the surrounding skyscrapers began to twist and sublimate before the flames even touched their structures.
Magneto didn't have time to react.
The electromagnetic field the master of magnetism erected around himself lasted less than a microsecond. The cosmic fire punched through the magnetic barrier as if it were dry paper. The plates of his titanium armor melted into tar instantly. Erik Lehnsherr let out a scream as Jean's telekinetic force shattered the atomic bonds of his platform, smashing him against the burning pavement at three hundred kilometers per hour before vaporizing the metal of his helmet.
"JEAN, NO!" screamed the alternate Jean Grey from the ground, desperately trying to erect a psychic wall with the last reserves of her life.
It was useless. The strength of a mortal telepath trying to hold back the embodiment of universal life and death lasted about as long as a spark in the ocean. Jean's wave of hatred crushed her variant's mind, shattering her astral shields and leaving her unconscious from an instantaneous cerebral hemorrhage.
Colossus, the organic steel giant who had withstood the direct impact of the Iron Spider, was next.
Jean didn't even turn to look at him. With a single flick of her left hand, the molecular force gripped Rasputin's metallic structure. The indestructible steel began to buckle and soften under a temperature that defied all bounds. Colossus roared in agony as his steel skin melted like wax, turning into a shapeless mass of molten metal that solidified and sealed against the foundations of the street.
"GET HER!" Logan howled, lunging forward with his adamantium claws leading in one final act of suicidal desperation.
Jean fixed her hollow gaze on Wolverine in mid-air.
Time stopped for the clawed mutant. Pure energy seized Logan at a cellular level. Wolverine's healing factor, capable of regenerating flesh and organs in seconds, was overloaded and utterly destroyed in record time. Logan's skin, muscles, and ligaments disintegrated into a flurry of red ash, exposing the naked adamantium skeleton that fell lifelessly to the ground with a dull, funereal thud. Sabretooth, witnessing absolute annihilation right beside him, tried to run, but a wing-shaped flare engulfed him entirely, reducing him to atmospheric dust in a fraction of a second.
Cyclops tried to lift his hand to his damaged visor to unleash the full force of the ruby quartz dimension, but Jean clenched her fist from a distance.
Scott Summers's visor exploded. The optical energy was compressed inward by Jean's telekinetic pressure, collapsing on Scott himself in a burst of red light that consumed his body before he could utter a single word.
In less than ten seconds, the invading tactical team—the legendary patrol that had crossed dimensions to save their species—had ceased to exist. There were no soldiers, no strategies, and no survivors left standing. Just a landscape of molten glass, floating ash, and air frozen by the sheer violence of the impact.
In the center of the hell she had just created, Jean descended slowly onto Fifth Avenue. The blaze of her wings cast gigantic shadows against the ruined buildings of Manhattan.
She turned back to the center of the street.
There, untouched in the middle of the firestorm—protected by a bubble of absolute telekinesis that Jean had maintained subconsciously throughout the extermination—lay Peter Parker's lifeless body.
The wings of cosmic fire began to fold back into Jean's spine, wrapping around her as she fell to her knees on the burning glass beside the boy. The unbridled fury that had obliterated the invaders gave way to a desolate, freezing void. Jean took Peter's cold face in her blood-stained hands, resting her forehead against his.
A few meters away, hidden in the bowels of the collapsed subway station, the digital timer of Magneto's dimensional inversion bomb let out a dull, rhythmic beep.
00:05... 00:04... 00:03...
The silence that followed the destruction was more deafening than the recent explosion of her wrath itself.
The golden fire around Jean began to collapse inward, transforming into a pillar of ashen light. Kneeling on the melted glass of Fifth Avenue, surrounded by the charred remains of the army she had just annihilated, Jean didn't feel the triumph of victory. She didn't feel the absolute power of the Entity.
She only felt the crushing, familiar irony of her own tragedy.
"Not again..." she whispered, her voice breaking with a sob that tore at her throat. "Please, not again..."
She pulled Peter's inert body tightly against her chest. The shattered armor of the Iron Spider was cold. Peter's hands, the very same ones that had held up the weight of buildings and the responsibility of an entire city, lay heavy and lifeless between her fingers.
The pattern repeated itself like an indelible curse in her mind.
It didn't matter what universe they were in, or what version of them found each other: Peter Parker always ended up throwing himself in the middle. It was always him taking the hit. It was always him paying the highest price for a mercy the world never paid back. He had thrown himself into an overloaded lightning bolt without a second of hesitation, not because he knew she was a cosmic entity, but simply because he saw her in danger.
00:02... 00:01...
Magneto's bomb timer hit zero.
A pulse of pure gravitational distortion erupted from the depths of the subway. The tide of the Incursion broke free, ripping through the fabric of space-time in Earth-616. The sky tore open in a purple and white rift as reality itself began to crumble around them, disintegrating matter into a void of no return.
But Jean didn't even look at the sky. She didn't care about the Incursion. She didn't care about the collapse of worlds.
"I couldn't protect you again..." Jean whispered, pressing her forehead against Peter's as her tears fell upon the burns on the boy's face. "I'm sorry, Peter."
The primordial fire, fueled not by fury, but by the pain and desperation of an absolute mourning, erupted from the core of her soul. The flame was no longer golden or crimson; it turned a pure, incandescent white.