Caiera clutched her bulging belly, breath hitching as Peter whisked her through the war-torn sky. The world behind them was falling apart, torn stone, disintegrated metal, clouds crackling with gamma fury, but here, in the stream of Peter's momentum, there was a strange and fleeting calm.
The threads of spirit silk that cradled her weren't harsh like chains or mechanical restraints. No, they felt... comforting. Warm. They enveloped her body like the softest blanket after a long, punishing march through the cold, a rare kindness in a life built around loss, pain, and survival.
Her eyes, a deep and wise silver-gray, watched the chaotic world shrink behind them as they ascended into clearer air. Smoke churned below. Distant explosions thundered in the background, echoing like drums of war. But Caiera, strong, stoic, scarred, allowed herself a moment to ask:
"Who are you people?"
Her voice was quiet, strained by discomfort, yet laced with curiosity and steel. She wasn't just asking out of interest. She was assessing. Weighing possibilities. Trust did not come easily to her.
Peter didn't respond immediately, not out of disrespect, but because he couldn't. The air was a minefield of debris: shattered alloy, spinning chunks of stone, stray energy blasts from the ongoing clash of titans. He ducked instinctively, one hand supporting Caiera as his other fired web lines at the shattered remains of a floating platform. He yanked them both through a narrow opening just as a scorched tree trunk slammed past them.
Only after weaving through the last of the falling wreckage did Peter find cover behind a half-collapsed cliff face, its base glowing faintly with residual heat from the battle below. The stone groaned, but it held. They landed on a narrow ledge, shielded from immediate view.
Peter exhaled sharply, shoulders rising and falling with the adrenaline.
Then he pulled off his mask.
His brown hair was damp with sweat, stuck to his forehead, and his face carried the subtle tension of a man trying very hard to hold it together under cosmic pressure.
"Hi," he said, sheepishly. "Peter Parker. I'm, uh... friends with those guys. Also, kind of friends with the Hulk, when he's not trying to kill everyone."
He gave her a lopsided grin, hopeful. Nervous. Friendly in the way only Peter Parker could be.
Caiera gave him a long, slow look.
No emotion. No reaction. Just a stare that could flatten empires.
Then, she suddenly hissed and doubled forward, clutching her stomach again, knuckles whitening as her fingers dug into her side. Her breath came in sharp, shallow gasps.
Peter's spider-sense flared, not in the way it did when he was about to be punched, but deeper. More instinctual. It rang in his bones.
Without hesitation, he dropped to one knee and took her hand. His voice was soft but laced with concern:
"What's wrong? Are you okay?"
He didn't expect an answer. But her fingers gripped his hard. Too hard. Her body trembled. She wasn't just hurting. She was in labor.
And then—
"Drip!"
He heard it before he felt it.
A soft, trickling sound beneath them.
He blinked, looked down, and there it was: a clear fluid running between her legs, trailing onto the stone beneath their feet.
His face paled instantly.
"Oh... oh no..." he whispered.
His brain kicked into overdrive.
"OH, SHIT. YOU'RE HAVING A BABY!""OH SHIT, YOU'RE HAVING A BABY!!"
His voice echoed off the rocks in rising pitch as panic overtook him. He shot upright, pacing in tiny, nervous circles, arms flailing slightly like he could web-sling the problem away.
"I don't—do I know how to deliver a baby?! I don't know! I read a biology book once! I dissected a frog! That's not the same! Can spider-silk be used for medical stuff? Do I boil it? I need boiling water, right? And towels? What do I even do with towels—!"
Then, without warning—
"SLAP!"
A sharp, echoing smack cracked through the tension.
Peter staggered backward, blinking rapidly. His cheek stung red, and the outline of Caiera's palm was faintly visible across his jaw. She stared at him with narrowed eyes, panting heavily, but focused.
"You are the least calm midwife I have ever seen," she muttered through gritted teeth.
Peter shook off the daze, rubbing his cheek, but the slap had worked. His breathing steadied. Mind cleared. Eyes focused.
"Okay. Okay. I got this. We got this. You're having a gamma-powered baby in the middle of an alien battlefield during a superpowered war... and I'm the one delivering it."
He took a deep breath.
"...This is definitely going on my resume."
Back on the battlefield, chaos reigned supreme.
The skies, once a dark bruised gray, now churned with unnatural storms, twisting, coiling clouds that spun with energy sucked from the sheer fury of the two titanic beings locked in combat.
Hulk and William moved not like men, but like warring elemental forces, and with every impact, the world bent to their will.
Each footfall was a shockwave. Every swing of a fist was a detonation.
With every collision, the land itself cried out, fissures ripped across the landscape like spiderwebs of pain, rivers boiled dry from proximity alone, and once-proud structures were atomized into drifting debris.
In the middle of all this apocalyptic fury, far from godhood yet too high to fall unnoticed, the emperor, once draped in golden armor and supreme confidence, was now a quivering heap in the dirt.
His robe was torn, his once-flawless breastplate scratched and dented. Half-buried in rubble and dust, he whimpered and flinched at every thunderous quake.
His fingers clutched desperately at a small device, a fist-sized controller with a single glowing button. It pulsed with quiet menace, a dim red light blinking in sync with his heartbeat.
This was his lifeline. His final defense. The one thing keeping the Hulk, whose rage had become apocalyptic, from turning and grinding him into paste.
The button controlled the detonation mechanism implanted in Caiera's neck. A cruel leash. A reminder that even the strong could be owned.
And he held it like a drowning man clutching driftwood.
His eyes, wide and bloodshot, flicked upward, and he watched.
He watched as two titans, Hulk and William, tore reality apart.
In the far distance, the capital city, once a sprawling jewel of power and architecture, had become a smoking crater. Towers lay broken like fallen dominoes. Flames danced where fountains once flowed. The skies above it swirled like a maelstrom, painted in firelight and ash.
The landmark mountain, an age-old sentinel that had stood for generations, casting its shadow over the capital, crumbled into dust beneath Hulk's rampaging feet. It didn't fall. It was obliterated, crushed into powder and launched skyward as an unrecognizable mist of stone.
And the desert beyond, an expanse of golden sand that once stretched to the horizon, had been emptied.
One punch from William had created a shock burst so violent that it cleared the dunes, exposing the cracked bedrock below like a scar across the earth.
The emperor trembled, muttering broken thoughts aloud.
"T-This is... this is so beyond fucked..."
He dropped to his knees fully, face twitching between terror and disbelief, voice barely above a whisper.
"...Gods save me..."
And then—
"BOOOOOOM!"
The ground heaved.
Not from a blow. Not from a fall. But from contact.
William and Hulk, rushing toward each other at incalculable speeds, met in a clash of grip, their hands snapping together in midair, palms against palms, fingers interlocked, as if arm wrestling the soul of the planet.
The force of that single moment of contact ruptured the atmosphere in a ring-shaped blast that flattened the remnants of everything for miles. It blew apart entire ridges, evaporated pools, cracked open new canyons.
And from the center of that terrible pressure point, a roar of power echoed outward.
As they grappled, neither gave an inch.
Every sinew of Hulk's monstrous body tensed, his face a twisted mask of primal fury. Veins bulged like steel cables along his neck. His biceps flexed with enough torque to split continents.
But across from him, something was changing in William.
His body surged, not just with power, but with a transcendent shift.
His aura, once a storm of gold and crimson, began to evolve, tinged now with a brilliant emerald green that rippled with energy both ancient and raw. It shimmered, not violently, but vividly, like the dense green of a living forest bathed in sunlight, wild and untamed.
His long, black hair began to rise, floating upward even without wind, lifted by pure aura pressure.
The green deepened, brighter and more alive with every passing second, until the very ends of his hair became a sharp, jade hue. Like flames turned into leaves. Like life itself set ablaze.
And then his muscles, already honed like steel, began to expand.
Not grotesquely, not with grotesque bloat, but with measured, terrifying precision. His shoulders widened, spine stretching, biceps swelling as if his body was answering a call to meet Hulk on equal ground.
His frame, once lean, refined, became a towering mountain of strength.
His transformation into Super Saiyan 3 was no longer following a known path. It was mutating, adapting. Evolving.
He was growing to match Hulk not just in power, but in presence.
And then, like a sun blooming in the middle of a warzone, his aura erupted.
A towering pillar of green light shot into the sky, roaring like a second dawn. The force of it peeled back clouds, scorched craters into the ground, and drove nearby debris into orbit.
From below, the emperor could only gawk in frozen horror.
Two monsters. Two gods.
Locked hand-in-hand.
Turning the planet into their colosseum.
And he was nothing but an insect praying the storm wouldn't notice.