It wasn't that Lynn was worried about him.
Frank Castle was the last person in all of New York's underworld who needed anyone to worry about him.
He was just adjusting his risk assessment in his mind. With Frank no longer sitting by the door, the clinic's security level had dropped by one notch.
1:03 a.m.
Lynn lay on the folding bed on the second floor, eyes closed, his brain maintaining a state of semi-active surveillance.
His Super Senses' hearing had stabilized at a radius of two hundred meters.
Within that range, every heartbeat, every breath, and every footstep was automatically identified and classified by his brain.
Normal background signals: three households in the neighboring building were asleep, one of them snoring at a steady rhythm.
A stray cat across the street was rummaging through a trash can. A taxi two blocks away had just switched off its engine.
Then—
Heartbeats.
Not one.
Twelve.
From the northeast.
About a hundred and sixty meters away, and approaching.
Lynn opened his eyes.
He had read all twelve heartbeats' characteristics within two seconds.
Their resting heart rates clustered between 52 and 58 beats per minute—trained combatants.
Their breathing had been deliberately slowed to fewer than six breaths per minute—trained in professional stealth.
Their strides were evenly spaced, and their feet made barely a sound on the ground—soft-soled split-toe shoes.
Split-toe shoes.
Lynn sat up in bed.
Split-toe shoes were a modern version of traditional Japanese ninja tabi, still used by only a handful of organizations.
The Hand.
The intelligence file Fury had given him three days ago had mentioned that the New York branch of the Hand was recently reorganizing. There were reports that they had taken an interest in several "special assets" in Hell's Kitchen.
Fury hadn't said outright over the phone who those "special assets" referred to, but Lynn didn't need him to spell it out.
In the eyes of the Hand, a doctor who could heal anyone was a weapon.
The twelve men approached the clinic simultaneously in groups of three from four directions.
Three came from the east, straight down the street. Three circled around to the back alley from the west. Three took the fire escape from the south, while the last three came over the rooftops from the neighboring building to the north.
A four-sided encirclement. A standard ninja kill formation.
Lynn got out of bed.
He didn't put on shoes, stepping barefoot onto the floor—the tactile feedback was much better without shoes.
Twelve people.
He quickly assessed the odds in his head—
His side: Superhuman Strength at fifty-five percent; he could lift about a ton with one hand.
Indestructible skin; ordinary knives and low-caliber ammunition couldn't hurt him.
Healing Factor; minor injuries healed instantly. Super Senses served as an all-around radar.
Super Intelligence for real-time tactical calculations. The Combat Infiltration Technique he had just copied gave him combat instincts for close-quarters fighting.
The other side: twelve warriors trained by the Hand, most likely carrying melee weapons—the Hand didn't use guns much.
He could take them.
But he didn't want to reveal too much about his abilities in a head-on fight.
If the Hand learned the limits of his combat ability, next time they wouldn't send twelve people.
So there was only one way to fight: use the environment, take them out one by one, and do it fast, in the dark.
Lynn went down the stairs.
He didn't turn on the lights.
The entire clinic sank into complete darkness.
But he didn't need light to see his world.
His Super Senses let him "see" every corner of the building—through a three-dimensional awareness built from reflected sound waves, air currents, and vibrations in the floor, more precise than eyesight.
He reached the first floor.
He quickly took care of a few things.
There were three bottles of medical alcohol in a cabinet in the operating room.
He unscrewed one and poured it across the floor of the back-door passage.
The alcohol was colorless, invisible in the dark. But anyone who stepped on it would slip.
The movable medicine cart in the hallway had a metal frame, stood five feet three inches tall, and had four caster wheels.
He pushed it to a corner of the west corridor, angling it against the wall at sixty degrees.
From the front, it looked as though it had been left there carelessly, but its angle would force anyone coming in from the west to hug the right-hand wall—exposing their right waist.
He unplugged the operating light's power cord from the wall socket and loosely looped it across the floor.
It wasn't a tripwire—that would've been too crude.
He just left it there. When someone felt a cord underfoot in the dark, their instinct was to look down. That half-second of looking down would be enough.
He finished setting everything up within thirty seconds.
Then he stood in the corner of the first-floor examination room, his back against the wall, and waited.
Seven seconds later, the back-door lock was silently picked.
Three men entered through the back door.
Their footsteps were so light they were at the limit of what hearing could detect.
But Lynn wasn't an ordinary person.
He could hear the fabric fibers compressing as their feet touched the ground, and the faint scrape of metal against leather as the weapons at their waists shifted.
Short blades.
Two at each man's waist.
The first ninja stepped onto the alcohol.
His right foot slid about six inches across the slick floor.
His body instinctively pitched forward.
The shift threw off his balance, and he spread his hands to steady himself.
Lynn darted out of the shadows in the corner.
Black Widow's combat instincts took over his body.
His right-hand chop struck the first ninja's carotid sinus with pinpoint accuracy.
Super Intelligence had calculated the force in real time. It wouldn't be fatal, but it would drop his blood pressure below the threshold for consciousness within 0.3 seconds.
The ninja made no sound.
His body went limp. Lynn caught him by the nape and gently lowered him to the floor.
The second ninja reacted quickly.
The moment his companion fell, he assessed the situation. His right hand drew his blade as naturally as he breathed—he pulled it from his waist and out of its sheath in just 0.2 seconds.
The blade swept horizontally toward Lynn's abdomen.
Lynn didn't dodge.
The blade slashed across his abdomen.
It cut a gash in the fabric of his white coat, but Lynn felt only a faint, dull impact against the skin beneath. Indestructible.
The feedback through the ninja's hand was wrong.
He knew the sensation well—the jarring feel of a blade striking stone.
Before he could react again, Lynn's left hand had already clamped around the wrist holding the blade.
With Superhuman Strength boosting him, Lynn's grip easily crushed the limits of the man's wrist bones.
Crack.
The ninja grunted, and the blade fell.
Lynn's right elbow slammed into his temple.
It was a short-range strike from the Sambo system. It required no wide motion; all the force was compressed into a single point at the tip of his elbow.
The second man went down.
The third ninja was calmer than the first two.
He didn't rush forward. Instead, he stepped back to create distance.
His right hand drew a flail from behind him—a metal-linked, nunchuck-style weapon with nearly twice the reach of a short blade.
But the step back took him right into the blind spot Lynn had created with the medicine cart.
Lynn kicked the caster at the base of the cart.
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