Hands Everywhere

Why did you clean a room?

Thinking about the Hand's actions that way made their many suspicious points easier to understand. The reason they controlled drugs and cracked down on gangs was not because they were planning some earth-shattering conspiracy—or rather, it had no direct connection to one.

Using cleaning a room as an analogy, Peter and the Defenders had previously assumed that the Hand cleaned the room to make space for their own things. But now, perhaps the Hand cleaned the room simply because it was dirty.

"Looks like you thought of something?"

"The Hand's goal is to summon some, uh, demon or evil god or something. It has the power to corrupt people, so the Hand needs to create a suitable environment for it—in other words, the better New York's environment is, the more comfortably it can corrupt people..."

Even Peter found what he was saying hard to take. The possibility existed, but compared to their previous guesses, it was not much different. Yet as he thought this through, Peter suddenly felt much lighter. Although Felicia's absurdly funny suggestion was hard to take, it was precisely that absurdity that made Peter let out a long breath.

If the reason they were doing all this could be so ridiculous, why focus so much on these anomalies? No, perhaps those anomalies were smoke screens arranged by the enemy as well. The right course of action was to set those doubts aside for now. Rather than obsessing over the Hand's ultimate purpose, they should directly capture the Hand's higher-ups first.

"Then do you have any thoughts on where the Hand might be?"

"No. Where do they usually operate?"

"It used to be Hell's Kitchen, but their cleanup range has been getting larger and larger. Other than some of Kingpin's old subordinates