Today's Frank incident hit this neighborhood far harder than the rest of New York. Elsewhere in the city, people treated it as an entertaining bit of gossip. But in Hell's Kitchen, almost everyone had some tie to Frank Gardes—threads too numerous to count.
Some made their living moving his product, like Lucius's family once had. Others had brothers or friends working under Frank as low-level muscle—a handful of Maya's more delinquent classmates were practically reserves-in-waiting. And then there were those already licking their lips, dreaming of stepping into Frank's shoes and claiming the throne of Hell's Kitchen's underworld. That particular ambition ran thick around here. Crime bosses were practically the neighborhood's most storied export.
Manhattan—that narrow island—runs roughly 12.5 miles (20 km) north to south and about 4.5 miles (7 km) east to west at its widest, though the northern tip narrows to barely a mile (under 2 km). Whoever designed its street grid clearly had a one-track mind: avenues running north-south, streets running east-west, nearly everything laid out like a chessboard. Avenues count from east to west; street numbers climb from south to north. Hell's Kitchen occupied the stretch between 9th and 10th Avenues, radiating outward from around 39th Street.
Just one block over, though, the scene shifted entirely. By the time you hit the next major avenue, the streets turned clean and bright. At one or two in the morning, neon light poured into the grimy surrounding blocks, and car horns played an endless call-and-response that carried all the way to Maya's ears, several streets away.
Hell's Kitchen was unusually loud tonight. In every corner and alley, people with very different agendas lingered and whispered. Under normal circumstances, Maya—President of the Student Council—wouldn't have dared wander around so brazenly. But tonight was different.
She let her chakra flow, and a layer of dark shadow swallowed her whole. Even someone standing directly in front of her would only see a vague, blurry shape—and if that faint silhouette held perfectly still, most people's eyes would simply slide past it without registering anything at all.
This was Maya's modified Shadow Concealment Jutsu.
In canon, the original technique belonged to the Nara clan—a defensive move that wrapped shadow around the user's body to absorb a measure of physical impact. Maya had looked into it, tried developing her own version, and quickly concluded that the defensive application was useless. It couldn't stop a bullet. It couldn't stop a brick.
What she did think about was the future Manhattan—cameras on every corner, practically everyone carrying an iPhone. Wandering around like this would be asking to get caught on video. So she stripped the jutsu of its defensive function entirely and rebuilt it as a stealth technique.
The reason she hadn't used it against Frank was the same flaw baked into every Nara clan secret art: it was vulnerable to direct light.
Shine a beam on her and Maya's silhouette would flare into a stark black shape against the brightness—as conspicuous as a firefly in the dark. Only an idiot would miss it.
The dimmer the surroundings, the more invisible she became. The Nara clan had never designed the technique to make someone disappear, after all—they used it for direct combat, not infiltration. Stealth was never the point.
But in a city at night? Her modified Shadow Concealment Jutsu was exactly the right tool.
As Maya brazenly leaped clean over the head of a streetcorner thug, neither he nor his companion noticed a thing. That was proof enough—the modification had worked.
Even when passing car headlights briefly caught her mid-air, no one registered the fleeting shadow. Maya moved fast, retracing her steps to the familiar building: Frank Gardes's headquarters. This time, she went straight up the side of the tower.
From the ninth-floor rooftop, she could faintly hear voices below. To sharpen her perception, she released her sensory awareness into the building.
The group had relocated. They were no longer gathered in Jimmy's office—Jimmy, Wade, and the rest of Frank's inner circle were all assembled in a much larger, more lavishly furnished room. Behind a solid wooden desk sat a high-backed leather chair—conspicuously empty. This, clearly, was Frank Gardes's private office.
But the power struggle Maya had anticipated never materialized. Instead, something far stranger: the room was completely silent. The entire group stood clustered around a single telephone, their faces etched with anxiety.
Nobody spoke. Maya couldn't just wait them out, so she turned her awareness to the documents scattered around the room.
Unfortunately, after scanning for several minutes, she understood almost nothing. The files inside the wall safe made sense word by word—but strung together, they were impenetrable. One line read something like "Disney Nine Horror House received seven Mercedes". What the hell did that even mean? Was this what she got for not even getting her elementary-school diploma?
Maya's confidence took a quiet hit.
After puzzling over it a moment longer, she let it go. These were clearly Frank's personal bookkeeping codes—shorthand only he could read. Given time and the original documents as a reference, she might eventually crack the cipher. But she didn't have time, and she wasn't especially interested in untangling Frank Gardes's revenue streams.
The man was dead. What was the point?
Sweeping her awareness through the rest of the building, Maya found the lower floors packed with armed men—Frank's foot soldiers, stationed at concealed positions on every level, weapons ready. They were braced for something. Or someone.
Then the telephone on Frank's walnut desk rang.
Every pair of eyes in the room snapped toward it. Broken-ass Jimmy—his forehead slick with sweat—stepped forward and lifted the receiver, his voice careful and controlled:
"Hello—is this Mr. Fisk? I was wondering —"
"Ha! Ha! Ha!" The voice that answered was deep, jovial, and completely in control. "Little Jimmy! I've decided to pass on entering New York this time. Everything we discussed in our previous meeting? Null and void. Ha! You've just lost your boss—I'm not going to kick a man while he's down. Alright then. That's that. Goodbye."
The line went dead before Jimmy could get another word out.
He stood there holding the receiver, listening to the dial tone for a long moment. Then he let out a shout that filled the room:
"We're safe!" — almost in tears — "Wilson Fisk just pulled out of New York!"
The room exploded.
"You sure you heard that right, Jimmy?"
"Wasn't that fat bastard demanding we hand over our territory within three days?"
"Christ—without the boss, we'd have had no shot against those LA boys."
Once the assembled gangsters confirmed the news was real, they vented weeks of tension in a torrent of profanity and relief. Then, gradually, they settled down to business.
"What about the boss's murder?" demanded a heavyset Black man with a thick, hard-looking face. "We going after that rookie cop or what?"
Jimmy's expression didn't flicker. "We're not rushing that. Let the heat die down first, then we talk."
"The hell do we need to talk about it for!" the big man snapped.