The mind of Max Eisenhardt, the mutant once feared across the globe as Magneto, was fracturing like dry, brittle parchment.
He was incredibly old. Even during the golden age of heroes, he had been a man of advanced years. Now, forty-five years after the villains had slaughtered the Avengers and the X-Men, Magneto was well past a century old. Dementia eroded the edges of his memories.
He sat in a rusted iron throne overlooking the Midwestern wastes, his liver-spotted hands trembling as they gripped the armrests. He had actually believed the Red Skull. He had genuinely thought that if they wiped the board clean of heroes, mutant-kind would finally thrive under his absolute leadership.
He had been so profoundly wrong.
The villains possessed no concept of governance. They only understood brutal subjugation. When pockets of America refused to submit, Red Skull simply launched the nuclear arsenal. The resulting hellfire turned the continent into an irradiated sandbox. And the cruelest joke of all? Since the day the bombs fell, not a single new mutant had been born. The mutant population under his protection was dwindling into extinction. Magneto's grand vision had resulted in a slow, agonizing genocide.
Now, his fractured mind conjured ghosts.
Pietro and Wanda stood by his throne. They didn't speak. They just stared at him with empty, condemning eyes.
Magneto's throat tightened. He had used his children's absolute trust against them. He had killed Wanda himself, holding her down so the Absorbing Man could siphon her chaos magic. That stolen magic was the only thing capable of killing Thor. Without that betrayal, the heroes might have won. The world might not have burned. His youngest daughter, Lorna, might not have looked at him with absolute disgust before abandoning him to the wastes.
"What do you want me to do?" the withered, frail old man rasped. He asked the ghosts this exact question every single morning.
Pietro and Wanda never answered.
But today, something had changed. A terrifying new energy signature flared in Hammerfalls, a territory strictly monitored by his magnetic fields. An alien presence. An intruder radiating impossible cosmic power.
Guided by the whispers of his hallucinatory children, the Master of Magnetism launched his strike.
Down in Hammerfalls, Peter Parker stood in the center of the street, completely stunned by the sheer, chaotic absurdity of this universe.
What exactly is he protecting?! Peter thought frantically.
The entire rusted town of Hammerfalls was violently tearing itself out of the bedrock. Corrugated steel roofs, rusted cars, and heavy iron beams shrieked as they lifted into the air. If Tony Stark hadn't specifically designed the Iron Spider armor with a demagnetized gold-titanium alloy, Peter would have been ripped into the stratosphere alongside the local diner.
"You see? This timeline is exceptionally unfriendly," a calm, polite voice murmured.
Peter spun around. Anansi stood casually beside him, dusting off his woven robes.
"Weren't you just crushed by an I-beam?" Peter asked, pointing at the massive pile of twisted metal where the god had been standing a second ago.
"Please," Anansi scoffed, waving a hand. "Even that pathetic Asgardian child, Loki, could conjure basic illusions. I banished Loki."
"The Loki of your universe, you mean," Peter corrected.
Anansi chuckled. The sound was rich and warm, yet entirely devoid of humanity. "Child, you misunderstand the fundamental nature of the divine. Gods are not born; they are created. They are manifestations of magic filtered through the collective consciousness of humanity. They are stories made flesh. Every god across the multiverse originates from the same conceptual seed, shaped differently by the minds of their respective universes."
Anansi stepped closer, the chaos of the floating town entirely ignoring him. "I am the God of Stories. I control the narrative. I simply prevented the fundamental magic of my reality from flowing into any story other than my own. I starved them. I didn't physically banish a pantheon; I erased their narrative existence."
Peter stared at the man through his golden visors, processing the sheer, terrifying scale of that power.
Anansi seemed to read the tension in Peter's shoulders. He sighed, shaking his head. "Very well. I will be direct. That... Hive Goddess you mentioned earlier? Shathra. She is currently trapped beneath the deepest layers of the Web of Destiny. You do not need to concern yourself with her."
Anansi raised his hands, his dark eyes locking onto Peter's. "As for your hesitance to join the Legion, it truly does not matter. I am the God of Stories. Rewriting an entire universe requires effort, yes, but modifying the life of a single boy from Queens? That is a trivial editing pass."
Peter's fists clenched. The symbiote shifted restlessly beneath the metal plating.
"Unlike you, Patriarch," Anansi continued, "we Spider Gods pay a heavy toll to traverse the multiverse. The dimensional friction damages us. You, however, slide through the Web seamlessly. If you join us, our crusade becomes infinitely easier."
"And if I say no?" Peter challenged.
"Then I rewrite you," Anansi smiled. "But first, you have to survive the old mutant."
Anansi vanished into thin air.
"Hello? Earth to Spidey? Anyone home in that shiny metal head?"
Wade Wilson aggressively waved a gloved hand directly in front of Peter's visor.
"Wade," Peter said, not taking his eyes off the spot where Anansi had stood. "That guy is a massive, universe-conquering problem."
"Yeah, no kidding," Wade grunted, resting his hands on his hips. "And I'm guessing we can't just talk him to death. You got a plan, web-head?"
Wade turned his head. His white eyes locked onto the massive crater in the center of the street. Mjolnir sat quietly in the dirt.
Wade gasped, clapping his hands together. "Oh! Oh! I've got it! Lift the hammer, Spidey! Pick up the magic mallet and smash that creepy cult-leader Spider-God into paste! Be the Thor we deserve!"
Peter sighed. He walked over to the edge of the crater. He stepped down into the dirt and stood over the Uru metal hammer.
"Lift it! Lift it! Lift it!" Wade chanted like a deranged cheerleader, pumping his fists.
Peter reached down. He wrapped his gauntleted hand around the leather-wrapped hilt. He held it for exactly three seconds.
Then, he let go, stood up, and shrugged. "Can't lift it."
Wade froze mid-chant. His jaw dropped behind his mask. "You didn't even try! You didn't even flex your glutes!"
"Because I know I can't lift it, Wade," Peter said flatly. "I carry way too much guilt to be worthy of an ancient cosmic lie-detector."
Ashley Barton watched from the porch of the auto shop, her shoulders slumping. She had secretly hoped this alternate-universe hero would pull off a miracle and heft the divine weapon she had spent her childhood kicking. Instead, he just gave up. They were all going to die here. And her father, Clint, had predictably vanished the second the metal started flying.
Up in the atmosphere, Magneto's fractured mind finally realized the collateral damage he was causing.
There is not enough metal here to kill the intruder, Magneto thought. And I am destroying the homes of my subjects.
Magneto changed his frequency.
Deep beneath the bedrock, millions of microscopic iron filings violently erupted through the crust. The metallic dust swarmed Anansi as he reappeared on the edge of town. The iron bonded together, forming thick, unbreakable shackles that snapped around the god's wrists and ankles. With a flick of Magneto's wrist, the iron cage dragged Anansi violently out of Hammerfalls and out into the barren, irradiated desert.
Magneto concentrated. He reached out with his magnetic fields, attempting to violently rip the iron atoms directly out of the intruder's bloodstream.
Nothing happened.
Magneto frowned, his trembling hands clenching. He tried to lock onto the man's biomagnetic field, attempting to shut down his nervous system.
Still nothing. The man possessed zero iron and zero standard biology.
Magneto's cloudy eyes widened. Panic seized his chest. Is he real? the old man thought, his breath hitching. Or is this just another ghost? Another hallucination?
Out in the desert, Anansi laughed.
The God of Stories simply flexed his arms. The condensed iron shackles shattered like brittle glass. The magnetic fields were strong, but Anansi was a god.
"You possess raw power, mortal!" Anansi's voice boomed across the wasteland. "But you are not qualified to challenge the divine!"
The voice echoed in Magneto's ears.
He is real. A strange, incomprehensible light flared in Magneto's cloudy eyes. He let out a low, guttural whimper that rapidly built into a furious roar. He threw both hands high into the air.
The sun vanished.
A shadow the size of a city block fell over the desert. Peter looked up, his lenses widening in absolute shock.
Magneto had dug deep into the irradiated earth. He had unearthed a massive, rusted, mile-long S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier that had been buried in the sand for forty-five years. The colossal warship groaned in the sky, suspended purely by the will of an ancient, dying mutant.
Magneto thrust his hands downward.
"Die, you villain!"
The Helicarrier plummeted from the sky, accelerating at a terrifying speed, directly toward the God of Stories.
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