White Coat Crushes Ninjas

It was not that Lynn was worried about him.

Frank Castle was the last person in the New York underworld who needed anyone to worry about him.

He simply adjusted his risk assessment in his mind—without Frank sitting at the door, the safety level for the night had dropped by one notch.

One-zero-three in the morning.

Lynn lay on the folding bed on the second floor, eyes closed, his brain maintaining a semi-active monitoring state.

The auditory coverage of his Super Senses was stabilized at a two-hundred-meter radius.

Within this range, every heartbeat, every breath, and every footstep was automatically tagged and categorized by his brain.

Normal background signals: three households in the building next door were sleeping, one of them snoring at a steady frequency.

A stray cat was rummaging through a trash can across the street. A taxi had just cut its engine two blocks away.

Then—

Heartbeats.

Not one.

Twelve.

From the northeast.

About one hundred and sixty meters away, approaching.

Lynn's eyes opened.

He read the characteristics of all twelve heartbeats within two seconds.

Resting heart rates concentrated between 52 and 58 beats per minute—well-trained combatants.

Breathing frequencies were deliberately suppressed to under six times per minute—professionally trained in stealth.

Stride lengths were uniform, the sound of soles touching the ground extremely light—Ninja Tabi.

Ninja Tabi.

Lynn sat up from the bed.

Ninja Tabi were modern, improved versions of traditional Japanese footwear, and only a very small number of organizations still used them.

The Hand.

The intelligence file Fury had given him three days ago mentioned it—the New York branch of The Hand was currently reorganizing, and intelligence indicated they had developed an interest in several "special assets" in Hell's Kitchen.

Fury hadn't explicitly stated who the "special assets" referred to over the phone, but Lynn didn't need him to spell it out.

A doctor who could heal anyone was, in the eyes of The Hand, nothing more than a weapon.

Twelve people were approaching the clinic from four directions simultaneously in squads of three.

Three from the east were coming from the front of the street, three from the west were circling to the back alley, three from the south were taking the fire escape, and three from the north were coming over the roof of the adjacent building.

Surrounded on all four sides. A standard ninja annihilation formation.

Lynn got out of bed.

He didn't put on shoes, stepping onto the floor barefoot—the tactile feedback of bare feet was far better than wearing shoes.

Twelve people.

He quickly performed a combat power assessment in his mind—

On his side: 55% Superhuman Strength, capable of lifting about a ton with one hand.

Indestructible skin; ordinary blades and low-caliber ammunition couldn't hurt him.

Healing Factor for instant recovery from minor wounds. Super Senses acting as an omnidirectional radar.

Super Intelligence for real-time tactical calculation. The Combat Infiltration Technique he had just copied provided melee instincts.

The opposition: twelve warriors trained by The Hand, likely carrying cold weapons—The Hand rarely used guns.

He could fight them.

But he didn't want to expose too many details of his abilities in a head-on confrontation.

If The Hand knew the upper limit of his combat power, the next group to arrive wouldn't just be twelve people.

Therefore, there was only one way to fight—utilize the environment, pick them off one by one, be fast, and finish it in the dark.

Lynn walked down the stairs.

He didn't turn on the lights.

The entire clinic plunged into total darkness.

But his world didn't need light.

Super Senses allowed him to "see" every corner of the building—the three-dimensional spatial perception constructed through sound wave reflection, air currents, and floor vibrations was more precise than the naked eye.

He reached the first floor.

He did a few things quickly.

There were three bottles of medical alcohol in the operating room cabinet.

He unscrewed one and poured it onto the floor of the back door corridor.

The alcohol was colorless and invisible in the dark. But it would be slippery to step on.

The movable medicine rack in the hallway—a metal frame, one point six meters high, with four casters.

He pushed it to a corner of the west corridor, forming a sixty-degree angle with the wall.

It looked like it had been parked there casually from the front, but this angle would force those coming from the west to walk against the right wall—exposing their right flanks perfectly.

He unplugged the operating lamp's power cord from the wall outlet and looped it loosely on the floor.

It wasn't a tripwire—that was too amateur.

He just let it exist in that position. When a person felt a wire under their feet in the dark, their instinctive reaction was to look down—that half-second of looking down was enough.

He finished the setup in thirty seconds.

Then he stood in the corner of the first-floor clinic, back against the wall, and waited.

Seven seconds later, the lock on the back door was silently picked.

Three people entered from the back door.

Their footsteps were light to the limit of human hearing.

But Lynn was no ordinary person.

He could hear the sound of fabric fibers compressing as their soles touched the ground, and the faint metallic clinking of weapons against leather as they moved at their waists.

Short blades.

Two on each person's waist.

The first ninja stepped on the alcohol.

His right foot slid about fifteen centimeters on the smooth floor.

His body instinctively tilted forward.

This tilt shifted his center of gravity, and he spread his arms to find balance.

Lynn flashed out from the shadows of the corner.

Black Widow's combat instincts took over his body.

His right-hand knife-hand strike landed precisely on the first ninja's carotid sinus.

The force, calculated in real-time by his Super Intelligence, was not fatal, but it would cause blood pressure to plummet to the threshold of unconsciousness within zero point three seconds.

The ninja didn't make a sound.

His body went limp, and Lynn caught him by the back of the neck, laying him gently on the floor.

The second ninja's reaction speed was fast.

The moment his companion fell, he judged the situation, and his right hand's drawing motion was as natural as breathing—it took only zero point two seconds from his waist to the draw.

The blade swept horizontally, targeting Lynn's abdomen.

Lynn didn't dodge.

The blade slashed across his abdomen.

The fabric of his white coat was sliced open, but the skin underneath felt only a slight, dull sensation. Indestructible.

The feedback the ninja felt in his hand was wrong.

He should have been very familiar with this feeling—the jarring sensation of a blade hitting stone.

Before he could make a second move, Lynn's left hand had already clamped onto his sword-wielding wrist.

With the aid of Superhuman Strength, Lynn's grip easily crushed the structural limits of the opponent's wrist bone.

A "crack" sounded.

The ninja groaned, and the blade dropped.

Lynn's right elbow slammed into his temple.

It was a short-range strike from the Sambo system, requiring no large wind-up, with all the power compressed into the single point of the elbow tip.

The second one fell.

The third ninja was calmer than the first two.

He didn't rush forward, but instead took a step back, opening the distance.

His right hand pulled a flail from behind his back—a metal-linked double-section weapon with a strike range nearly twice that of a short blade.

But the step he took back landed him exactly in the blind spot created by the medicine rack Lynn had positioned.

Lynn kicked the base caster of the medicine rack.