Chapter 194: Captain Universe Spider-Man, and a New Transmigrator?
Ethan watched Miguel's figure shrink into the distance and felt the corner of his mouth lift.
That encounter had genuinely caught him off guard. He'd come into the Garfield-verse with a simple plan — grab Dr. Connors, bring him back to Hell's Kitchen, put him to work teaching the community school kids whatever harmless nerdy science he wanted, and rescue one unlucky Spider-Man variant along the way.
Instead he'd somehow ended up tangled in Spider-Society business.
It wasn't a bad development. He knew exactly how rare it was, in a multiverse this size, to find a power structure that could actually pull heroes from a single source-universe together into one functioning unit. Spider-Men individually weren't the strongest variant on the multiversal power scale, but in sheer numbers? That mattered.
Outside of the Council of Kangs, the Council of Reeds, and the Deadpool Corps, very few organizations managed to coordinate that kind of cross-universe scale. The Avengers led by that Sorcerer Supreme Loki variant — strong, sure, but still just an Avengers assembly pulled together across a handful of timelines.
Ethan had a theory rattling around in the back of his head: that somewhere in the Spider-Society's ranks was the apocryphal strongest Spider-Man of all — Captain Universe Spider-Man. The legend, if it was true, had inherited the powers of a previous Captain Universe and absorbed the Eternals' Uni-Power on top of it, putting him near multiversal tier — close enough to actually go toe-to-toe with Galactus.
Ethan knew, with total clarity, that he wasn't anywhere near that league yet.
But he doubted that figure was actually active within Miguel's Society. If he were, he'd be running the place, not Miguel. Ethan didn't see that as a disappointment so much as an opportunity — if Captain Universe Spider-Man existed somewhere out there, the Society's own network might be the fastest way to track him down. And if Ethan could recruit him personally, that was a massive asset against whatever the Council of Kangs eventually threw at him.
There was also the simple practical advantage: every Spider-Society member already had a dimensional watch, meaning they could move between universes without any help from Ethan at all. His own Exclusive Skill still only summoned a couple of people at a time, and he had no idea when the next upgrade was coming.
He let himself imagine it for a second — the day the Kang threat finally hit the main timeline, and he opened a call to both Hell's Kitchen and an entire allied Spider-Society at once. That would be a genuinely good day.
So: building a relationship with the Spider-Society mattered. Long-term project. He had no interest in running it himself — Miguel could keep the job, he clearly wanted it, and Ethan had zero appetite for the administrative side of being everyone's father figure.
If this worked, he wondered, half-joking with himself, whether Hell's Kitchen could eventually pull off something similar. A multiversal Hell's Kitchen network. Sure, most of the people back home were just regular humans without powers, but —
That thought soured fast. In every novel, every adaptation, every version of this story he'd ever encountered in his old life, Hell's Kitchen got treated like the tutorial zone. Everyone's punching bag. The place people farmed for cheap conflict before moving on to somewhere that mattered.
He, personally, took offense to that. Whatever universe, whatever story — Hell's Kitchen was his. He was going to make it the strongest neighborhood that had ever existed, full stop.
His mind drifted to the bigger problem waiting down the road: the Council of Kangs.
Even before he'd transmigrated into this world, he'd already suspected that the surviving second-generation heroes of the main timeline weren't going to be enough to actually beat the Council when it came. Kang the Conqueror himself had bragged, somewhere in the source material, about having personally wiped out countless versions of the Avengers. That tracked with why Loki, God of Stories, had reached out to him specifically — that kind of threat needed something more than the standard roster.
And now, unexpectedly, he'd landed in the middle of the actual main-timeline Spider-Man movie continuity — the exact era of the three-Spider crossover. Convenient, honestly. He could get the meeting he'd dreamed about and swing by for a chat with this universe's Strange, who by now should already be Sorcerer Supreme.
Plenty of friendship farming potential in that, too.
But one detail kept nagging at him: Tony Stark was alive.
Miguel had already confirmed this was the movie-canon MCU. Which meant, by the timeline Ethan remembered, Tony should have already snapped his fingers, said his line, and died for it. That was the ending. That was the whole point of the ending.
So why was he sensing Tony's signature at all?
Did he get a pay cut and decide to live this time? Did someone change the budget on this universe's hero?
Ethan turned the question over and didn't like where it led.
Is there another transmigrator in this universe?
It wasn't a comfortable thought. But it wasn't one he could afford to ignore either.
Either way, first things first — somebody had to clean up Strange's mess before it got worse. He called Harry and Tobey-Peter in and laid out the situation: the Sinister Six, the displaced villains, the wager with Miguel, all of it.
Tobey-Peter's expression hardened the moment he heard it.
"Don't worry, Master. I'll handle it. I won't let you down."
This was, technically, his first real solo assignment under Ethan. The fact that Ethan trusted him with it mattered more than he was saying out loud. He needed Ethan to see that he wasn't the same scared kid who'd first gotten bitten — he was going to prove it, by making sure every other Peter Parker out there got to keep their Uncle Ben the way he'd gotten to keep his. He meant that literally. He'd die before he let this go wrong.
Beside him, Harry was quiet in a way that didn't suit him. Something was working behind his eyes — something he clearly wanted to say and wasn't saying.
Tobey-Peter kept glancing at him, confused. Normally Harry was the first one bouncing off the walls at the mention of a new mission. The two of them had been cooped up together long enough that a fight usually sounded fun to him.
After a long stretch of silence, Harry finally worked up the nerve.
He took a breath.
"Mr. Ethan," he said, voice lower than usual but steady. "This time — among the enemies — is my father there? Or, I mean. Some other universe's Green Goblin?"
He kept his eyes locked on Ethan, like the answer might be hiding somewhere in his expression if he looked hard enough.
Ethan understood immediately. He gave a small nod, then let out a breath of his own.
He knew exactly what was sitting behind that question.
When Harry heard the confirmation, something in him settled — relief, and underneath it, something sharper and more determined.
He hadn't tagged along on this trip purely out of curiosity, the way Tobey had. Tobey wanted to meet another Spider-Man. Harry wanted to find out if some other universe still had a father in it — because his own had been gone for a while now, and that absence had never really closed.
Everything he'd been training for, every bit of strength he'd built up since becoming Kamen Rider Accel, had one real purpose underneath it: suppressing — or destroying — whatever twisted personality had taken over his father and turned him into the Goblin in the first place. He'd had Oscorp quietly researching it the moment he learned the multiverse was real. Eventually, through Ethan, he'd gotten access to Professor X and Tony Stark, and between the two of them they'd built him something — a helmet, a neural suppressor, something designed specifically to keep a second personality from taking the wheel.
He was going to get justice for his father. His real father — the man underneath the mask, who'd never asked to be possessed by whatever the Goblin serum had unleashed in him, who'd suffered through it just as much as anyone he'd ever hurt.
Now he had his chance.
"The Goblin's mine, Pete," Harry said, voice gone hard and quiet. "I'm finishing this one myself."
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