Chapter 4: BUILDING MARCUS COLE
The diner coffee sat heavy in my stomach as I climbed the stairs to my basement hideout. Four in the morning. The city had that particular quiet that only existed between the last drunks stumbling home and the first workers heading to their shifts.
I stripped off my clothes, checked myself in the cracked mirror of the basement's utility bathroom. The bullet graze from the fight—no, wait, there hadn't been any bullets tonight. Gerald only had the revolver, and I'd taken that before he could use it. Clean job.
Clean job.
I repeated the words to myself, waiting for something to shift inside. Guilt. Horror. Something.
Nothing came.
I washed the blood from my hands, changed into clean clothes from the small pile I'd accumulated, and pulled up the System interface.
[CURRENT STATUS]
[LEVEL: 2 | EXP: 550/1,000 | VP: 150]
Not enough. Not nearly enough to survive in a world where gods walked among men and purple-skinned titans collected infinity stones. I needed resources. Identity. Infrastructure.
"System, what can I purchase with 150 VP?"
[SHOP ACCESS RESTRICTED UNTIL LEVEL 7. HOWEVER, ESSENTIAL SERVICES ARE AVAILABLE FOR HOSTS BELOW SHOP THRESHOLD:]
[IDENTITY PACKAGE (BASIC): 500 VP — LEGAL IDENTITY, DOCUMENTS, MINIMAL BACKSTORY]
[EMERGENCY MEDICAL: 200 VP — HEAL ONE MODERATE INJURY]
[CURRENCY CONVERSION: 100 VP = $1,000 USD]
Five hundred VP for an identity. I had one hundred fifty. That meant more missions.
Time to go hunting.
The next week blurred into a rhythm of violence and efficiency.
First target: Raymond Garza, the Bronx. Fifty-three years old, retired construction foreman, current occupation—beating his wife and daughter whenever the mood struck. Three hospital visits in the past year, all "accidents." The system provided his schedule, his habits, his hiding spots.
I found him in his garage, working on a vintage Mustang that his wife had paid for with money she'd hidden from him for years. He saw me come through the side door and reached for a tire iron.
My TK yanked it from his grip before his fingers fully closed.
"What the f—"
I wrapped his own belt around his throat, pulled it tight with a combination of hands and telekinetic force. He thrashed, clawed at the leather cutting into his windpipe, kicked over a shelf of motor oil. Sixty seconds. His face went purple, then slack.
[TARGET ELIMINATED: RAYMOND GARZA]
[EXP +400 | VP +80]
I staged it as auto-erotic asphyxiation. The cops would probably buy it. Even if they didn't, they wouldn't try too hard to solve it.
Second target: Darnell Price, Washington Heights. Twenty-six years old, corner dealer with a side business in murder. He'd killed a fifteen-year-old boy who'd witnessed one of his transactions—shot him in the face and dumped the body in the Harlem River. The body was never found. The case was never solved.
The System knew.
I followed Price for two days, learning his patterns. He had a girlfriend who brought him food at his corner every evening. He had a crew of four who watched his back. He carried a Glock in his waistband and a knife in his boot.
Thursday night, he went alone to check on a stash house in a condemned building. I was waiting on the fire escape.
He never saw me. One TK-assisted shove sent him over the fourth-floor railing. The crack of his spine hitting the concrete below echoed through the empty building.
[TARGET ELIMINATED: DARNELL PRICE]
[EXP +450 | VP +90]
[LEVEL UP! 2 → 3]
[+5 STAT POINTS AVAILABLE]
I put two points into Willpower, two into Intelligence, one into Agility. The level-up rush was better than any drug—a full-body warmth, energy flooding my cells, the mental fog of exhaustion evaporating.
Third target: Michael Vance. No relation to Tommy Vance from the Queens ring—just a coincidence of names. Forty-one years old, former security guard, current mugger-rapist who'd left three women in comas and killed a fourth when she tried to fight back.
This one I took my time with.
I found him in an alley off 125th Street, stalking a young woman who'd just left a late shift at a restaurant. I put myself between them. The woman saw me, saw Vance behind her, understood something was wrong, and ran.
Smart.
Vance had a knife. He came at me fast—he'd done this before, knew how to use a blade. I sidestepped, caught his wrist with TK, and twisted until the bone snapped. The knife clattered to the ground. He screamed.
I picked up the knife.
"How many?" I asked.
"What?"
"How many women did you hurt?"
He spat at me. "Fuck you, man, you don't know—"
I drove the knife into his thigh. He screamed again.
"How many?"
"I don't—seven! Seven, maybe eight, I don't—"
"Seven or eight." I pulled the knife out. Blood pulsed from the wound. "You don't even remember."
I left him in that alley with his femoral artery severed. He was dead in three minutes.
[TARGET ELIMINATED: MICHAEL VANCE]
[EXP +500 | VP +100]
[BONUS: INTERRUPTED CRIME IN PROGRESS — +50 VP]
Seven days. Three kills. Four hundred and seventy VP total, plus the original one fifty. Six hundred twenty.
Still not enough for the identity package.
The System pulsed.
[CHAIN MISSION AVAILABLE: QUEENS TRAFFICKING NETWORK]
[INITIAL TARGET: TOMMY VANCE (NO RELATION TO MICHAEL VANCE)]
[THREAT LEVEL: E-RANK]
[REWARDS: 2,000 EXP | 400 VP | SKILL BOOK (RANDOM)]
E-Rank. A step up from the street-level work I'd been doing. More risk. More reward.
I accepted the mission. The intel downloaded: warehouse location, guard count, operational schedule. The operation was bigger than Gerald Whitmore had suggested—not just Tommy Vance, but connections to the Russian mob, the Kitchen Irish, even whispers about a man named Wilson Fisk who was "rebuilding things" in Hell's Kitchen.
Fisk.
The Kingpin. The man who would own this city's underworld in a few months' time. The man Daredevil would spend years trying to take down.
I filed that away. One problem at a time.
The trafficking mission could wait until I had an identity. Without papers, I couldn't rent an apartment, couldn't open bank accounts, couldn't exist in the modern world. Every transaction would be a risk.
More missions.
I spent the next three days grinding F-Rank targets. A loan shark who'd driven two families to suicide. A pimp who'd beaten one of his girls into a wheelchair. A landlord who'd let a building burn for the insurance money, killing four tenants.
By the end of it, my VP counter read: 1,180.
Enough.
[IDENTITY PACKAGE (BASIC) — 500 VP]
[CONFIRM PURCHASE?]
"Confirm."
[GENERATING IDENTITY...]
[NAME: MARCUS COLE]
[OCCUPATION: PRIVATE SECURITY CONSULTANT]
[BACKGROUND: MILITARY SERVICE (HONORABLE DISCHARGE), SECURITY WORK IN VARIOUS STATES, RECENT RELOCATION TO NYC]
[DOCUMENTS MATERIALIZING...]
The drop cloth beside me shimmered. Papers appeared from nothing—driver's license, Social Security card, military discharge papers, a passport, and a debit card linked to a bank account containing $5,000 in "seed money."
I picked up the license. The face was mine—Marcus Cole's face. The address was blank, waiting to be filled in.
I exist now.
The apartment was a shithole.
Fourth floor walk-up on 48th Street, wedged between a dry cleaner and a bodega. The radiator clanked like a dying robot. The walls were thin enough to hear my neighbor's terrible taste in music—some kind of electronic garbage that thumped through the plaster every night from nine to midnight.
The water pressure was pathetic. The stove had two working burners out of four. The window overlooked an airshaft that smelled like garbage and regret.
I signed the lease, paid first and last month's rent in cash, and felt something I hadn't expected.
Home.
It wasn't much. A mattress on the floor. A folding table with a cheap laptop. A mini-fridge stocked with beer and leftover Chinese food. But it was mine. A place to sleep, to plan, to exist between missions.
I spent an afternoon at a thrift store, picking through housewares like a normal person. Dishes. Towels. A coffee maker. And—
Throw pillows.
The cashier watched me deliberate between a blue set and a green set for nearly fifteen minutes.
"Having trouble deciding?" she asked.
"Interior design is harder than it looks."
I bought the blue ones. Arranged them on the mattress. Stepped back to survey my work.
Even assassins need throw pillows.
That night, I sat at my folding table with a beer and the laptop, scrolling through news archives.
"Third vigilante killing this week in Hell's Kitchen. Police suspect Punisher copycat."
The word hit me like a physical blow.
Punisher.
Frank Castle. The man who would become the deadliest vigilante in New York. The man who lost his family in a massacre at Central Park—three gangs, one innocent family caught in the crossfire.
I searched for the incident. Found it immediately: "Castle Family Tragedy: Wife and Two Children Killed in Gang Shootout."
The date was from last spring. Almost a year ago.
The Castle family is already dead.
Frank Castle was already out there, somewhere in this city, doing what I was doing but on a scale I couldn't match. The news reports I'd been reading—the Kitchen Irish massacres, the biker gang executions, the Dogs of Hell wipeout—that was all Frank.
[MISSION OPPORTUNITY DETECTED]
[ANALYZING...]
[TARGET CATEGORY: CERBERUS CONSPIRACY]
[DETAILS: CLASSIFIED UNTIL INVESTIGATION INITIATED]
[RECOMMENDATION: CONTACT PRIMARY OPERATIVE — DESIGNATION: PUNISHER]
The System wanted me to find Frank Castle. To work with him, or at least parallel to him. The Cerberus conspiracy—that would be the black ops cover-up, the men who'd ordered the massacre to silence Frank before he could expose their crimes.
Big fish. Very big fish.
I closed the laptop, finished my beer, and stared at the throw pillows on my mattress.
The TV across the hall thumped with bass. Someone was arguing in Spanish two floors down. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance.
Hell's Kitchen. Home of the Devil, the Punisher, and now me.
Time to meet the competition.
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