New York General Hospital, outside the ICU on the tenth floor.
The hallway reeked of disinfectant. It was one of the best-equipped medical facilities in all of New York, but lately the atmosphere here had been anything but reassuring.
Two full NYPD SWAT teams were positioned along both sides of the corridor.
They wore heavy body armor, ballistic helmets fitted with tactical lights and comms headsets, and each officer held an MP5 at the ready.
George Stacy was still on-site, coffee in hand, working from the front line. In the monitoring room nearby, a whole group was watching the feeds without letting up for a second.
No one dared relax.
Not after Gargan's broken, panicked state, and not after his story about the inhuman figure with an S on his chest.
But for now, the immediate threat was simpler: a possible attempt on the witness, likely by an assassin sent by Wilson Fisk.
"All units stay sharp. Keep your radio channels open. Status check every two minutes. I don't want even a fly getting through," George ordered into the mic.
"Alpha team copies."
"Bravo team copies."
At the far end of the tenth-floor hall, the internal elevator was rising quickly.
Inside stood a man in a blue hospital orderly uniform, calmly adjusting his cap in the mirrored steel of the elevator wall.
There was nothing tense about him.
Nothing that suggested a mass killing was only seconds away.
Bullseye.
Kingpin's deadliest assassin.
To him, killing had never been a job.
It was art.
Though in truth, that had more to do with the fact that something in his mind was deeply, fundamentally wrong.
He despised crude thugs who sprayed rooms with heavy firepower. To him, that lacked elegance. True killing should feel like a carefully arranged symphony: precise, beautiful, ending in the most unexpected instant.
Ding!
The elevator arrived on ten.
The metal doors slid open.
The two nearest SWAT officers instantly raised their submachine guns, weapon lights blasting straight into Bullseye's face.
"Stop! Hands on your head! Walk out slowly!" one of them barked.
Bullseye narrowed his eyes slightly, as if the brightness bothered him.
He raised both hands obediently and kept pushing the cart piled with medical waste.
"Sir, I'm just the orderly here to collect trash. Room twelve reported contaminated material," he said, his voice carrying just the right amount of nervousness and respect.
The officers didn't relax.
They knew tonight's security level was absolute maximum.
Without explicit authorization, nobody got through.
"Against the wall. Show me your ID badge." One SWAT officer kept his weapon trained while the other approached cautiously, one hand hovering near his sidearm as he moved in to search him.
The moment that officer closed to less than three feet—
Bullseye's raised hands snapped downward.
Tsst! Tsst!
Two tiny arcs cut through the air at speeds no normal eye could track.
Coins.
In an ordinary hand, they wouldn't buy much more than a cup of coffee.
In Bullseye's hands, empowered by monstrous precision and terrifying force, they became projectiles with the power of bullets.
The hallway ceiling lights shattered all at once.
The corridor plunged into darkness.
The SWAT officers instantly understood what this was.
"Hostile! Open fire!"
Their reaction was fast.
Bullseye's was faster.
In his head, he had already built a complete three-dimensional model of the hall: every officer's position, height, armor seams, and firing angle.
His hands dipped into his pockets and came back with four surgical blades pinched between his fingers.
"Go on, little beauties," Bullseye murmured with a smile. These men were nothing compared to that damned blind vigilante.
The blades flashed through the dark.
The two officers in front never even got the chance to pull their triggers before their throats were opened and their legs gave out beneath them.
They didn't die instantly.
But the nerves were cut.
Now they lay on the floor waiting for death.
"Fire! Fire! He's by the elevator!"
Rounds tore toward Bullseye from farther down the corridor.
But no one had ever said he needed to stand still.
The instant he threw the blades, he dropped into a low slide and vanished behind the waste cart.
Bullets slammed into it, shredding the plastic bags and scattering bloodstained gauze and discarded syringes across the floor.
Bullseye lay amid the mess, listening to rounds scream overhead, and instead of fear, a nearly sick pleasure spread across his face.
"Too slow..."
"Your bullets are too slow."
Casually, he picked up two used syringes that had spilled from the garbage bags.
There was no medication inside them.
Only air.
He took a breath, kicked off the cart with both legs, and sent it sliding forward to block the officers' line of sight.
Using the recoil from the motion, Bullseye launched himself upward along the wall.
Twisting in midair, he whipped both syringes forward.
They drove straight into the neck veins of the two SWAT officers in back who were in the middle of changing magazines.
"Gh—... ah!"
Both men clutched at their throats. With that much air forced directly into the bloodstream, their eyes bulged before they collapsed to the ground.
It took less than thirty seconds.
No firearms.
No explosives.
And one entire SWAT team was down.
A full unit of well-equipped NYPD tactical officers now littered the corridor, incapacitated, and not one of them had gotten a clear look at the assassin's face.
Bullseye brushed imaginary dust off his shoulders and stepped calmly out of the dark.
He walked over the groaning officers without even bothering to finish them off.
To him, they were nothing but tedious appetizers.
Killing them or sparing them made no difference.
That wasn't tonight's assignment.
He stopped at the glass doors of the ICU and peered through the viewing panel.
Inside, Eddie Brock lay unconscious, tubes running into him from every direction.
"Found you, Sleeping Beauty."
Bullseye smiled at his own stale joke and pulled a ballpoint pen from his pocket, intending to use that to finish Eddie off.
He pushed the door open.
Only the steady beeping of hospital monitors answered him.
Eddie's face was still pale. He had no idea what was happening around him.
Bullseye approached the bed and looked down at the small-time punk who had helped expose part of Fisk's empire.
"You should feel honored. The boss told me to get rid of you however I liked. But I'm in a good mood tonight, so I've decided to give you a dignified death."
He raised his right hand and reversed the pen in his grip, tip pointed at Eddie's eye socket.
With just the slightest flick of the wrist, the plastic pen would go through the eyeball like a bullet, punch into the brain, sever the brainstem, and end it instantly.
Clean.
Elegant.
A perfect little work of art.
The muscles in Bullseye's wrist tightened.
Then he threw.
The pen blurred through the air, carrying enough force to kill, driving straight toward Eddie's eye.