The Aftermath

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3 days later

After 3 grueling days. The Apostle has finally had enough of terrorizing Sydney and scattered away. The Military had been deployed and even managed to defeat a few apostles. The damage to the city is immense, a few buildings were damaged and hundreds of thousands lost their lives. Millions were injured and their lives were forever changed. When the demons were attacking, the people of Sydney all thought, where is SpiderWoman? Why isn't she saving them?

As the trio, they managed to survive by hiding out in the church. The boys took care of Charlotte and stabilized her long enough for the entire invasion to end and for emergency services to take her to the nearest available hospital. While everyone in the hospital all crying and screaming from the experience they'd all endured, they had no idea what Charlotte had to go through. And now she is amongst the thousands that are crowded inside Sydney Hospital.

Before she was brought here, Hunter and James had made the embarrassing decision to strip her from her spider suit and dress her in clothes she found on a corpse they found to keep her identity a secret.

Now as she lays on the only available bed, she looks around at all the other patients with pity. If it weren't for the injuries she sustained during the Eclipse, she would have saved them all. Now thousands are dead and so many more are injured. It was a catastrophe. By now the whole world has heard about what has happened, who knows what will happen now?

Her injuries are bad but not too serious which means she'll be released very soon. With her broken arm, she will have to take some time off from being Spider-woman and her mental state needs time to heal. Her mind is plagued with memories and visions of the eclipse. At some point, she tried to get some sleep but when she closed her eyes, she got visions of those horrible beasts, ripping and tearing people to shreds while she couldn't do anything about it.
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1 week later

A week later Charlotte is out of the hospital and is now at home. For the past week, she had to endure all of the memories of the eclipse and how much it really fucked her over. Her mother has asked her how she had survived and comforted her the best she could but the damage is just too immense.

Charlotte is now no more.

SpiderWoman will now have to wait. During the eclipse, she lost her sword and dagger, both of which helped save her from her demise. The Skull Knight had saved her from death which she is very thankful for. Now she wonders, where is the mysterious knight now?

It was then during a panic attack that she bursts through the door and runs out onto the streets of her town. She ran and ran while tears fell from her face as her mind replayed the eclipse over and over. Eventually, she stops by an open field and collapses onto her back and gazed up at the sky. She suddenly got a funny tingling feeling on the far right of the back of her neck, followed by a spider twitch which made her sit up and her eyes met with dark eyes staring at her from the grass. "The hell?", she mumbled, "the nightmares again?".

"You should take heed", a voice spoke from behind, making Charlotte spin around and meet with the Skull Knight. "From now on, this is your world, the boundary between the living and the dead. The Interstice". Suddenly, the dark eyes that stared Charlotte down emerged from the grass as evil spiritual beings and charged at her. "Here, use this", the skull Knight tosses Charlotte his sword and she starts using it against the evil spirits that are now swarming her. "These are the dead spirits that roam this place", the Knight explained. "Being dead, they now cling to life. They have banded together for their desire for your warm blood and flesh. Because you were once branded in a previous life".

The sentence struck Charlotte. 'Wait. I was branded?!', she thought to herself. 'But that was in a previous life! There is no way the brand is still there!'. When she was distracted in her thoughts, the spirits began to cling to her.

"Life..."

"Blood"

"Give me life!"

"Let us inside you!"

"Let us in your body!"

Charlotte lets out a scream of defiance and the spirits scatter away from her. She collapses onto her knees as she struggles to catch her breath. "Steel yourself struggler", the Skull Knight explains. "Otherwise you'll be haunted until death. After all, to them, you are a tossed torch that has been re-lit. No doubt they once lost their way through the darkness and now that the torch has been lighted back up again, they won't hesitate to seek that light again".

Charlotte gets back up. Her mind is racing with this new view of the world and how it is now, even more, crueler than she originally thought. "Fuck... why me?", she mumbled to herself, tears forming in her eyes. "That is the destiny for those who have been branded, those who are managed to be reborn are met with the same destiny", the Knight stated, making something snap inside Charlotte.

"No.... NO!", she yells. "ENOUGH ALREADY!!". She swings the sword and all the spirits finally vanish. "Screw this shit! I've been branded in a previous life and all those thousands of people had to pay the price! I won't let that happen again! I'll hunt down all of those beasts, I'll kill every single last one of them! This world won't be at peace until all of those demons have been extinguished! I'll swear that I will drive all of demon-kind into extinction!".

{golden age arc} ended

To be continued

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