Chapter 39
"You don't think Kingpin will decide to disappear?" I asked Blade as the Charger's engine ate up the miles of asphalt. "The moment he learns someone like you has declared war on him, any sane person would go underground."
"Nah," Blade shrugged, eyes on the road. "He's an apex predator. Those don't run and hide. Their power is in the aura of invincibility. The moment they show weakness, their own jackals will go for the throat to take the throne. He can't afford to look weak. Not now."
I had a different read on it. Everything I knew screamed that this man was a slippery, cunning creature capable of wriggling out of any situation. But I didn't push back. Either way, this raid had already paid for itself: Shocker's vibro-gauntlets in my inventory, stronger ties with Blade, and, strangely enough, progress with Gwen. Was it normal that I'd been cataloguing the trophies before worrying about those two?
While I was mulling it over, we pulled up to an unremarkable five-story building on Sixth Avenue. After circling for a couple of minutes, Blade found a narrow, dark alleyway and killed the engine. We got out, and the moment we did, a familiar black-and-white figure dropped silently from the shadow of the fire escape above. Naturally. She'd tailed us the whole way.
"You killed him!" she said the moment she landed in front of us, gloved finger pointed at Blade. "Why?! You can't just take lives like that!"
"And why the hell not, exactly?" Blade spread his hands, genuinely failing to see the problem. He stepped around her like she was an inconvenient piece of furniture and began examining the walls for a way in. I followed.
"It's wrong! John, tell him!" She turned what was presumably a desperate look on me.
"Actually," I said slowly, feeling her pleading stare on the side of my face, "I agree. With Blade."
"But..."
"Gwen, the world didn't lose a person. It lost a serial killer with children's blood up to his elbows. He was a tool in a monster's hands. I don't consider that much of a loss," I said evenly, silently asking myself: could I have done it? Would I have had the nerve? Under NZT, probably yes.
Blade had already found what he was looking for: an inconspicuous steel emergency exit in the dead end of the alley.
"We're not judges! And we're certainly not executioners!" Gwen pushed, falling into step behind us.
"Then who are the judges and executioners, Gwen?" I stopped and turned to face her. "Corrupt officials in robes who decided they were worthy of the title? If we'd handed Shocker to the police, Kingpin's lawyers would have had him out the next morning. And he would have kept killing. Are those your precious judges?"
"You speak truth, kid," came Blade's approving grunt from the doorway.
"But if we kill them, how are we any better?!" Her voice cracked slightly. The argument clearly felt personal.
"At everything," I cut back, feeling the circular reasoning start to wear on me. "At the bare minimum, we save the lives of every innocent person that bastards like Shocker would have killed next. When the choice is between solving a problem and slapping a bandage on it, I will always choose to solve it."
I moved to the door, touched it, and it was gone. A short corridor sloping downward stretched ahead, empty. I let Blade go first, then followed with Gwen behind me, and returned the door to its frame once we were through.
"Please," Gwen said, much quieter now, almost pleading. She was addressing Blade. "At least in here. Try not to kill anyone."
"I'm not making any promises," he snorted, not turning around. "And frankly that question's more for your buddy. He's the rookie. He might not know his own strength."
We came to a second door: massive, armored, with a pair of cameras mounted under the ceiling. They already knew we were here.
"Strength?" Gwen asked with genuine curiosity, shifting her gaze between Blade and me.
Instead of answering, I reached into my inventory and brought out two auto-injectors. The first held muscle stimulator. I hissed as I drove it into my neck. The second held the Absolute Predator serum.
The effect came after a few seconds, and it was like slotting a quantum processor into an old computer. Chemical fire flooded my veins, my muscles swelled and filled with force beneath the suit, and my gait became fluid, almost feline. The whole world narrowed down, cutting away the noise. Only threat vectors, movement trajectories, and attack angles remained. Combined with the mental clarity of NZT, it was an intoxicating sense of absolute control. Through her mask lenses, I could see Gwen's eyes widen as she noticed the change.
"I'll try not to get in over my head," I told her.
I stepped to the second armored door, touched it, and it disappeared. In the same instant I stepped back behind Blade and activated the plasma shield. Just as I'd expected, they were waiting for us.
The long corridor ahead erupted with gunfire. Six of Kingpin's mercenaries in full tactical armor opened up in a torrent of fire. The air filled with the crack and whistle of rounds. Several of them hissed as they slammed into my translucent barrier, then into the suit, arriving with nearly all their momentum spent. I shielded my face with one hand and moved forward, holding the rear.
Blade and Gwen were ahead. What unfolded in front of them wasn't a fight. It was a slaughter.
Blade became a blur. He didn't even run so much as flow between the bullet tracers, closing distance with inhuman ease. The first mercenary didn't get a chance to shout before Blade ripped the rifle out of his hands and broke his jaw with the butt. The second got a kick to the knee that bent it backward with a sound I'd rather not think about.
Gwen complemented him perfectly. She launched herself to the ceiling and from there rained down a sticky curtain of webbing. Rifles were torn from hands, legs tangled, and one mercenary was cocooned entirely and stuck fast to the wall. Fifteen seconds. That's all it took for the two of them to neutralize all six. Judging by the groans, everyone was still breathing. Good.
We pushed deeper into the base, moving further and further underground. Blade led from the front, using his psychic ability, defective as he called it, to sense ambushes before we walked into them. He was a super-fast, super-strong, super-tough battering ram. Gwen moved around him like a lethal butterfly, disarming and immobilizing with her webbing. Despite what Gwen had asked, a couple of the unlucky ones didn't make it. Blade, built for fighting vampires at full capacity, misjudged the fragility of humans, and some necks simply crunched under blows that would have only rattled a bloodsucker. Mercenaries, for all their gear, were too breakable compared to undead.
One other detail I noticed: Blade hadn't drawn his katana. He was working entirely with his hands and feet, wrapped in that barely perceptible aura of Chi that the stimulants let me sense clearly.
Then we stepped into a large, hangar-like space. Beyond a line of barricades, a dozen heavily armed fighters were waiting. And standing in the center, towering over them, was a three-meter figure in massive, futuristic gray armor topped with a huge horn on the helmet. Rhino.
"Oh," Blade's fangs caught the dim light. "Now that's something worth the trip."
"Deal with the small fry," I said, my voice lower and more confident under the stimulants. "The big one is mine."
I stepped forward, already calculating. The technology inside that armor alone, the rare alloys and electronics, represented millions of dollars in materials, and all I needed was a single touch.
Blade and Gwen understood without words. They split in opposite directions and began a methodical dismantling of the cannon fodder. Rhino, honoring his name and apparently outraged by my arrogance, charged straight at me. The floor shook under his footfalls. For something his size, he moved terrifyingly fast.
I didn't move. My mind, wound to the limit, processed everything in slow motion. I watched the servos in his legs tension, watched his center of gravity shift, watched his single eye-visor lock onto me.
One second before impact I dropped the plasma shield. The Absolute Predator serum gave me the reaction time. I didn't just sidestep, I made a smooth, calibrated step to the side, letting the multi-ton bulk blow past me. The moment his side was level with my arm, I reached out and lightly touched the armor.
It disappeared.
A two-meter wall of muscle in a plain black jumpsuit, stripped of his shell, kept going on momentum alone. He hit the steel doorframe head-first at full speed. A wet, sickening crunch echoed through the hangar. His body collapsed limply to the floor. I was fairly sure I'd heard his neck break. I could only hope I was wrong.
I reactivated the shield, pleased with the haul, and turned around. Blade and Gwen were already finishing the cleanup. Ahead, the door to Jeffrey Wykle's office was visible. How perfectly ironic: this deep underground complex, which had only one direction to go, had become a mousetrap for the people who built it.
"Nice work," Blade threw me a glance, wiping blood from his knuckles. "We'd have been picking at that tin can for a while."
"Had to contribute something," I said with a half-smile. "Can't let you two animals take all the credit."
"Yeah," Gwen muttered, finishing with the last mercenary's restraints. "Rich coming from the guy talking about monstrosity."
Jeffrey Wykle was a short man in an expensive suit whose expressive jaw was currently twisted in a grimace of pure hatred. He clearly understood the round was lost, but he clung to the illusion of control with both hands.
"The building's surrounded by Kingpin's people! You're dead!" he shrieked, jabbing a trembling finger at us. "Fire!"
Twenty seconds later it was over. For his people, obviously. They were swept under by a whirlwind of black leather and black-and-white spandex. When the dust settled, Blade was standing over Wykle, whose face had completed its journey from defiant to a mask of absolute terror. The hunter hadn't even touched him. He'd simply looked into his eyes, and every last trace of corporate arrogance fell away from Fisk's deputy like a shed skin. Wykle stared up at Blade, mesmerized and utterly ready to give up everything.
"The boss spends most of his time in his penthouse in the Empire State Building," he began in a flat, lifeless voice. "But he also uses a number of heavily secured private bases and a country estate..."
"Hold on! The Empire State Building?!" Gwen cut in. Her voice had the trembling edge of someone who'd just connected a terrible pair of dots. "Fisk Capital has the entire upper floors on long-term lease! Are you... are you serious right now?!"
"Yeah," I moved closer to her, understanding that keeping it from her any longer was pointless. "Kingpin is Wilson Fisk."
"You knew?! You knew this whole time and didn't tell me?!" She turned on me sharply, voice ringing with hurt and betrayal. "Then what was the point of all this? Why not go straight to Fisk? He's a public figure. The opportunities are there!"
"That is exactly why we didn't tell you," Blade answered, still watching Wykle without blinking. "Don't be stupid, girl. Think it through. You're suggesting we walk into a fortress that's guarded by hundreds of personnel and dozens of metas, through the front entrance, just because we know the owner's name? We came down here for the blueprint of that fortress. For information on his forces, his weak points, his schedule. So that when we go into the flame, we're carrying a fire extinguisher instead of bare hands."
"And this base served as a useful stress test of our individual capabilities and how well we work together," I added.
"Yeah, the kid's right," Blade nodded. "He might have hit less than anyone tonight, but the how of it was elegant. Now stop interrupting."
But Gwen wasn't done. She stepped up to Wykle.
"Police Captain George Stacy. His death. What do you know?"
"Eliminated," Wykle reported in the same flat tone, as if noting a clerical correction. "By a low-level street asset, for refusing to cooperate. He was the only genuinely non-corrupt precinct captain in Brooklyn. He disrupted the statistics. An inefficient element."
I watched Gwen's knuckles go white. Her shoulders shook. I stepped up beside her and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing once. She flinched but, thankfully, didn't snap.
Blade continued the interrogation, pulling everything out of Wykle: details of the Castle case, names of other deputies, a full roster of Kingpin's active metas, connections, contacts, delivery schedules. The entire process took no more than seven minutes. When the information dried up, Blade, without a word, turned Wykle's head at an unnatural angle. A quiet crack. Notably, this time Gwen said nothing. She only turned away, jaw clenched.
We moved upward toward the exit.
"There are a lot of people on the other side of that door," Blade said grimly as we approached the last exit leading to the alley.
I nodded and pulled out the injectors again, taking another dose of each. The sensation of being Bane-adjacent was strange but effective. The plasma shield wrapped around me in its translucent bubble. It was deeply satisfying to have a power source I didn't need to worry about.
"And here they are. The stars of our turbulent evening."
The alley exploded into motion the moment we stepped out. The click of safeties being released rippled outward like a wave until it became one continuous sound. We were in a crosshair. The mercenaries surrounding us were a clear step above everything we'd faced inside: expensive armor, modified weapons. And slightly behind the line stood three figures.
The first was a man in a sleek black suit with a white target pattern across his mask. He lazily juggled a pair of combat knives as he delivered his welcoming remarks. Bullseye. My NZT-sharpened memory helpfully supplied the dossier. Never misses. Not once.
The second was a two-meter wall of a man with an almost square face and stone-gray, ash-colored skin. He wore an immaculately fitted black three-piece suit. Tombstone. Classic, near-invulnerable meta-tank.
The third was a man in a lightweight futuristic exoskeleton with mechanical wings folded against his back and energy blasters where his gloves should have been. Vulture.
Three serious metas, several dozen elite fighters. The party had reached full capacity. Only Blade looked completely unconcerned, standing relaxed with a faint smirk. That calm was contagious.
Then Bullseye, having taken a closer look at our faces, stopped juggling. His gaze landed on Blade. The expression beneath his mask shifted into something frightened and recognition-sharp.
"Blade?! What the hell is he doing here?!" Bullseye's bravado evaporated in an instant, replaced by visible panic. "Nobody told me anything about this!"
"Fire," Tombstone ordered simply, as though issuing a command to a voice assistant. His massive gray hand settled on Bullseye's shoulder before the man could bolt.
All hell broke loose.
I immediately pulled back into the corridor opening, leaving the mass-scale work to more experienced hands. My instincts were screaming: stay back, you're the weakest link here. But I was naive to think they'd overlook me. A sharp zing and a blue flash half a meter from my face made me jerk back. A thrown knife had ricocheted off the wall and buried itself in my plasma barrier before clattering to the ground. I was Bullseye's personal problem now.
Fine. If I couldn't hold my own against someone like Bullseye, what was the point of preparing for anything more serious? Under the deafening thunder of gunfire behind me, I moved deeper into the base. Through the gap, I caught a glimpse of a black-suited figure following me in. Being used as bait was a miserable role. But it was the most sensible tactical move available.
A dry crack sounded behind me, distinct from the ongoing automatic fire. A round from a modified rifle punched through the air and slammed into my side with a dull impact. The plasma barrier flickered, absorbing the bulk of the energy, and Proteus distributed the rest, but a sharp, burning pain still lanced through my body. That was going to leave a bruise. Thankfully, I'd already cleared the short corridor. I quickly positioned myself in the doorway where the door used to be, deactivated the barrier, and pulled a UV grenade and a garlic grenade from my inventory. I dropped them both on the corridor floor, directly in Bullseye's path.
One second. The corridor strobed with a flash comparable to a welding torch, then filled with a thick, acrid cloud of garlic dust. That moment of disorientation was all I needed. I pulled the armored door back out of my inventory and placed it into the frame, except not quite flush. Slightly further in than the frame, tilted at an angle, so that a light push would send it toppling forward directly onto the spot where a blinded and disoriented Bullseye would step out.
No, I'd considered simply shooting him, but the non-trivial chance that he'd react to the sound and throw a knife blindly at my head, or fire a round from memory, wasn't a gamble I was willing to take. The door as a weapon. It weighed at least three hundred kilograms.
He didn't die, naturally. It's never that straightforward. But when most of your body is pinned under a steel behemoth, effective resistance becomes somewhat limited. What mattered was that his head was sticking out past the edge of the door. I walked over calmly, stepped onto the sheet of steel, and materialized the Glock in my hand. Resisting the stupid urge to say something dramatic, I simply fired. Straight into the center of the white target on his mask. The hunter became the prey. My head was clear. No regret, no emotion. Just clarity. This was, technically, my first kill, given that Rhino probably hadn't died. It didn't feel the way I might have expected it to.
I walked back out. The gunfire in the alley had gone quiet. The scene that greeted me was a grim one. Dozens of Fisk's men lay scattered throughout the alley, crippled or unconscious. Vulture was slumped in one corner, his limbs bent at angles that suggested they'd need surgery. Next to him was Tombstone's body, minus the upper portion of his skull, removed in one precise strike. Blade had drawn his katana after all. A little further over, Gwen was bent double, losing her dinner.
I walked quietly to Vulture and touched him, pulling his exoskeleton, wings, and blasters into my inventory. Tonight was without question the most profitable night of my life. The decision to befriend Blade was paying dividends.
"Good work," Blade said as I approached, cleaning his katana blade on one of the mercenaries' vests. "Didn't doubt you for a second. Had to hold your spider-girl back from rushing in to save you, though."
"If I'd died at the hands of someone like that, I'd come back just to die of embarrassment," I said.
"Ha, yeah. Bullseye's a real piece of work," Blade nodded. "Crossed paths with him once before. He survived as long as he did purely by preying on people weaker than him. Works right up until it doesn't."
"Which is more or less what happened tonight," I shrugged. "What's next?"
"First we get out of here," Blade started, and Gwen, drawn by the sound of conversation, came over, having pulled herself together. "And then, honestly, I'm not entirely sure. Storming the Empire State Building head-on is the worst possible option. In the public eye we'd become terrorists overnight. Come on, let's hear some ideas before the night's over."
"We could smoke Fisk out of his penthouse," I murmured, working through the approach. "With our heroine's help, that's not particularly difficult to arrange."
"Now that sounds like the beginning of an actual plan," Blade grinned. "I'm all ears."
"Same," Gwen said, grimly. In the span of a few hours she'd seen more blood and chaos than in all her months of patrolling combined.
"Let's get to the car first," I nodded, filling in the details as they formed. "I'll walk you through it on the way. On paper it's more than doable. And the best part is it's relatively clean."
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