Kingpin

"Who are you?! Who sent you to spy on me?!"

Dilos gripped the man by the throat and demanded an answer. But even with Dilos choking him, the man showed no intention of speaking. Instead, his muscles tensed as he tried to open his mouth and bite down on something.

How could Dilos let him get away with that? The hand around the man's throat shot up to lock his jaw in place, then twisted hard.

There was a crack as Dilos dislocated the man's jaw. He was left with his mouth hanging open, unable to bite down. Through the man's open mouth, Dilos saw that one of his teeth had been hollowed out, with a tiny, tooth-sized sphere hidden inside.

"Cyanide?"

Dilos curled his lip. He couldn't imagine who would go to such lengths. As far as he knew, he was just a small fry to everyone else. Was there any need to go to such extremes to spy on him?

Dilos's sharp gaze swept over the black-haired bruiser in front of him. The man struggled desperately, but Dilos's powerful arm kept him pinned in place.

The man looked to be in his thirties. His body showed no signs of age; if anything, he was quite muscular. Judging by the force of his struggles, his strength was nearly twice that of an ordinary person.

Feeling a little puzzled, Dilos lifted the man with one hand. With the other, he lightly brushed the area around the man's cervical vertebrae and the back of his head, sending a wave of An Jin into him.

In an instant, the bruiser's vision went dark, and he lost consciousness.

After extending his mental power and sensing no one else within several dozen meters, Dilos steadied the man. Then he shaped his mental power into a needle and plunged it into the mental sphere in the man's mind. Since the man was unconscious, Dilos had little trouble getting inside.

With his eyes closed, Dilos sensed everything within the man's mental sphere, searching for the memories he needed.

Although he could enter the man's mental sphere fairly easily while he was unconscious, the memories within it had become somewhat jumbled. Dilos had to search patiently to find what he was looking for.

As Dilos searched through the man's memories bit by bit, he finally learned what the man did. Jay Pike was a member of the American Mafia, skilled at tracking people and escaping. His direct superior was William Fisk.

William Fisk was an imposing name, but there were plenty of people in the United States with the same name. This one, however, had another alias—and there was no mistaking who went by that.

Kingpin.

The biggest crime boss in the United States. Going by the movies and comics from his previous life, this villain, responsible for forty percent of the country's crime, had made enemies of a whole host of superheroes. Spider-Man, Punisher, X-Men, Daredevil, Fantastic Four...

Dilos didn't know what Kingpin was like in this world. But even if his influence wasn't as great as it had been in the movies and comics of Dilos's previous life, it couldn't be far off.

Those facts weren't enough. Dilos continued probing. But the memories he found next were frustratingly mundane: the man robbing places, smuggling goods, raping...

The depraved scenes flashed by in an instant, but Dilos still felt sick. He fought the urge to torture the scum in front of him until he begged for death, then crush his head with a punch. His mental power began to scour the man's memories more brutally.

As Dilos's mental power violently rummaged through the bruiser's mind, the man began to convulse and foam at the mouth. Just as he was about to die from brain damage caused by Dilos, Dilos found what he was looking for.

The man hadn't been sent to spy on him. He had been watching Dr. Connors, along with several of Connors's interns. Dilos had only happened to be caught in his sights. The man had realized something was wrong when he saw Dilos's eyes following him as he moved, and tried to run.

He had planned to contact his superior once he got away. But just as he was about to make the call, Dilos caught up with him, so he had to abandon the idea and flee.

As for why the Mafia goon hadn't used his gun, it turned out he had dropped it from his waist while trying to escape down a pipe outside the building. Dilos had caught up too quickly for him to retrieve it.

"Looks like I got lucky."

Dilos curled his lip with a smirk. Still, just in case the man had some kind of miniature camera on him that had caught Dilos on film, he thoroughly scanned the man with his glasses' X-Ray Vision.

After finding no suspicious objects that could be surveillance equipment, Dilos looked down at the bruiser groaning in pain on the ground and grinned viciously.

He wouldn't show mercy to someone like this.

Three days later, in the lobby of Fisk Enterprises in New York.

A bald white man who looked somewhat corpulent addressed a group of men in various outfits standing before him.

"Would any of you care to tell me who did this?"

The bald man's voice seemed emotionless, but anyone who knew him could sense his fury and murderous intent. The men facing his question lowered their heads and dared not answer, afraid that the slightest misstep would anger him.

The bald man pointed a plump finger at the video. A burly man was engulfed in flames, screaming without pause. "Who had the nerve to kill one of my men, then use Pike's phone to record this and send me a threat?"

"If that bastard hadn't sent me this threatening video, I wouldn't even have known Pike had been dead for three days!"

The bald man's voice suddenly rose. It boomed like thunder, leaving the people in front of him momentarily dazed. Seeing the fear on their faces, he lowered his voice.

"Do we know who did it? A Mutant? S.H.I.E.L.D.? Some other organization? Or some self-righteous hero? Ster, this is your responsibility. You couldn't find out anything?"

A black-haired man with a full beard and a suit stepped forward, looking somewhat nervous. "We couldn't find out anything. We only know that the person destroyed all the cameras on the street, including those in the alley where Pike died. They destroyed cameras across a huge area—so many that cameras in several districts were affected. Under the circumstances, we can't use the areas where the cameras were destroyed to figure out who was responsible."

At that, the bald man frowned and looked toward an elderly man in his fifties with a head of silver hair. The latter pursed his lips and said, "We don't know who it was. The man wore a mask and covered himself from head to toe. He even broke into the police station and destroyed the surveillance backups. The whole department's in an uproar over it."

"Useless!" The bald man slammed his cane against the floor, making the group instinctively take a step back. Then he said, "Keep a low profile for now. But put more men on this and find out who did it! Anyone who dares to go after my people will suffer a fate worse than death!"