Chapter 213: I'll Take on Ten
Ethan stood motionless in the Killbus Spider form, the crowd's noise washing over him like static. He glanced toward Miguel.
"Sounds like they don't rate your chances very highly."
Miguel's jaw tightened. He said nothing. His fists did.
Ethan turned away from him and faced the assembled Spider-Men.
His voice, filtered through the transformation, had taken on an edge — cooler, harder, like metal in winter. "I think you've misread the situation. I wasn't talking about fighting one of you." He let that land. "I meant all of you. Together. Ten at a time."
The crowd detonated.
"Wait — he wants us to jump him?"
"Hard pass, fighting is exhausting. I'd rather watch."
"Okay I kind of love him actually."
"He's disrespecting Spider-Man! Every universe! Get him!"
"I genuinely don't think we can take him though."
"This Ethan guy is hilarious — he's basically one of us."
Miguel had been holding it together. He stopped holding it together.
He launched himself at Ethan's back, full force, no warning, no preamble. "Don't underestimate me. You arrogant—"
Ethan didn't turn around.
He just stood there.
Miguel's fist connected with the center of Ethan's back and the shockwave from the impact sent a pressure wave rolling outward through the air — strong enough that the nearest Spider-Men felt it in their chests.
Ethan didn't move. Not an inch. Not a fraction of an inch.
Miguel stared at his own fist.
He'd known Ethan was strong. He'd felt it in the air the moment the transformation completed. But knowing something and putting everything you had into a single strike and watching it produce nothing — those were different experiences entirely.
What is he.
Miguel's arms began to change. His fingers elongated, hardened, sharpened — the natural weapons of Spider-Man 2099, claws that could tear through most things that existed. His eyes locked onto Ethan with the focused intensity of something that had decided it was not backing down regardless of what the data said.
He attacked again. And again. Faster this time, claws raking across the Killbus Spider armor in arcs that threw sparks into the air.
The sparks were the only visible result.
Around the room, the mood had shifted. The Spider-Men who'd been laughing were recalibrating. The ones who'd been betting were recalculating their odds in silence.
Ethan surveyed the crowd. Maybe a third of them had moved toward him — the younger ones, the angrier ones, the ones with something still to prove. The rest stood back, arms crossed or hands loose at their sides, watching with the steady eyes of people who'd been through too much to get baited easily.
He understood it, actually. Tobey, Garfield, even Holland — none of them were easy to provoke. That was the thing about Spider-Men. They'd all been hit so many times that most of them had learned to absorb it instead of swinging back.
Which meant he needed to find the thing that actually landed.
He already knew what it was.
"Is this really all Spider-Man can do?"
His voice cut through the ambient noise like something cold.
"No wonder you can't protect the people you love."
The temperature in the room changed.
"Every single one of you stood there and watched. You were right there — and you couldn't do anything. You watched them die."
It wasn't a taunt. It was delivered too evenly for that. Almost clinical. Which made it worse.
Spider-Men who'd been smiling weren't smiling anymore.
"How dare he—"
"Hit him! Everyone—"
The wave that came at Ethan was significantly larger than the first one.
He met it without stepping back. His counterstrikes were precise and unhurried — each one sending a Spider-Man stumbling away without injury that went beyond wounded pride. He fought the way someone fights when they've already calculated the outcome and are just managing the timeline.
At the edges of the room, some of the more experienced Spider-Men still hadn't moved. They watched with level expressions — the ones who'd learned to recognize manipulation when they were inside it and choose not to take the bait anyway. Their stillness was its own kind of answer.
Ethan scanned the remaining holdouts and pushed harder.
"Not enough. Not nearly enough." He wasn't breathing hard. "Are the strong ones only brave enough to gang up on the weak ones? Is that it? Make them watch their loved ones suffer the same way you had to?" A beat. "Or are you just afraid to find out?"
"Every Uncle Ben. Every Aunt May. Trapped in the same loop, every universe, no way out — and you're all still standing here." His voice stayed level. That was the cruelest part. "If I were you, I'd have gone with Aunt May when I had the chance."
The room broke.
"I know it's a provocation tactic," one of the larger Spider-Men said through his teeth, "and I cannot stop myself—"
"Someone shut him up—"
"There is no version of this where one person beats all of us," Peter B. Parker said, and then, somewhat to his own apparent surprise, he put down the stroller and stepped forward. Something steady had come into his eyes. "Let's go."
Spider-Rex came in from the left. Scarlet Spider moved from the right, arms crossed until the last second, and then uncrossed them. The Ultimate variant, the Ben Reilly variant, others whose designations the archive was still logging — they converged.
The fight that followed was no longer a scattered scuffle. It was a coordinated problem.
Ethan's expression, behind the mask, was something close to satisfied.
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