Seeking

Leon ultimately gave that unlucky ninja a quick death.

After all, he wasn't a cruel person.

The Hand.

That was the name Leon had pried from the red-clad ninja as the mastermind behind it all.

The Hand wasn't a person, but an organization. Leon had some impression of it, mainly because of its connection to Daredevil.

They seemed to be traitors expelled from K'un-Lun for seeking immortality or something.

The organization seemed to have been searching for something called the Black Sky, Dragon Bones, and the like, while maintaining deep cooperation with Kingpin...

"Oh! Kingpin!"

Leon finally remembered. Back when he watched the Daredevil series, the Hand and Kingpin had worked together trafficking drugs and children!

No wonder...

It seemed he had dealt the Hand a devastating blow.

Now that he had a direction, things became much easier. That left only one problem.

Where the hell did the Hand members live?!

While Leon was still considering the Hand, Tony Stark was in a different situation.

After returning home, escaping that cave, and reclaiming his former identity, Tony began seriously designing armor.

After correcting an error in his power calculations and solving the issue of high-altitude icing, the new generation Mark III Armor was finally born!

Wearing the newly red-painted armor, Tony was ecstatic. He went straight back to the place where he had been kidnapped and gave the armor's performance a thorough field test.

Tony was very satisfied with the results.

And Zhang Yang's undisguised actions had made this suit of armor the center of attention.

When he returned to his office, Pepper was waiting in his workshop.

Pepper was Tony's personal assistant. Within Stark Industries, her official position was merely that of a secretary, so compared to handling the company's administration, much of her actual work involved taking care of Tony Stark, this overgrown child.

Yet, as the president of Stark Industries, Tony often knew less about and cared less for his own company than Pepper did as his secretary.

When Tony returned this time, Pepper found that he had changed. She couldn't say exactly how. He was still indifferent toward the company, and he still liked tinkering alone in his workshop with lasers, components, and gears.

Right!

He had even made a cat bed in his mansion. Yesterday, he had mysteriously asked JARVIS whether it knew how to raise a cat...

When Pepper entered the workshop, Tony was fiddling with his big toy. Maybe it was a robot or something. Pepper didn't understand.

"I need you to do me a favor."

The moment she reached his side, Tony placed a USB drive in her hand. "There are shady dealings within the company. This contains the password to the central control room. I need you to break into it and find all the transaction records..."

Pepper looked at the item in her hand, puzzled. "Find them, and then what? What are you planning to do?"

"The same thing as last time," Tony said. "Find my weapons, then destroy them."

"I can't help you, Tony."

Pepper looked at him. "You'll die because of this! I don't want to be an accomplice to it."

She tossed the USB drive back onto the desk and turned to leave.

Tony stood where he was, watching Pepper's retreating back. "You've supported me all these years. Even when I made money from destruction, you still supported me. But now that I want to protect something, you're leaving me, aren't you?"

Pepper stopped and turned back to look at him. "You'll die, Tony. You'll die!"

Tony slumped into his chair, his voice growing low. "Maybe I was never meant to live."

After a pause, he added, "Unless there's some other reason."

"Only now do I know what I should be doing." He stared at Pepper, the only person he could trust. "From the bottom of my heart, I believe what I'm doing now is right!"

Pepper looked at this child who seemed to have suddenly grown up. Hadn't she been waiting for this moment all these years? But why, now that she was truly seeing it, did she instead feel somewhat...

With a relieved little sigh, she finally understood that he still needed someone to take care of him~

She stepped forward, picked up the USB drive, and said, "You know, you're all I have too."

Pepper entered the central control room. Although she was the president's secretary and could enter any office in any department under certain circumstances, that required authorization from the president.

But now, Tony had secretly sent her here to do this.

After sending away the assistant stationed outside the office, Pepper sat down and turned on the computer.

Meanwhile, Zhu Bajie... no, Leon's side wasn't going nearly so smoothly.

Though he knew a little about the Hand, it was like being a fan chasing a celebrity: you knew plenty of information, but even all that information put together still wasn't enough to find them.

That red-clad ninja had merely been a low-level grunt. Usually, orders came down from above, and they mindlessly carried them out according to the arrangements. There was simply nothing valuable to pry out of him.

Leon paid a visit to one of the hideouts the red-clad ninja had confessed to. Other than rescuing over a dozen kidnapped children, the trail ended there. The ones left behind were red-clad ninjas of the same rank, and they probably wouldn't have known anything either, so he simply sent them all to keep the first one company.

Mephisto, don't mention it!

Leon had always acted without much thought in the past. Rescuing hostages was truly a first for him.

For a while, he was completely at a loss.

He knew how to kill hostages, but taking care of them...

In the end, he called Coulson. Calling the police would probably have solved the problem too, but Leon didn't know them well. Coulson was more trustworthy!

He was a good guy, after all.

When Coulson received Leon's call, his voice even trembled a little. He was terrified Leon would tell him that he had purged another building or something!

Fortunately, only seven or eight people had died, and more than a dozen four- or five-year-old children who didn't know where they lived, when they had been kidnapped, or how to speak English had been rescued.

Hehehehehehe...

Leon dumped all the trouble on S.H.I.E.L.D. What could they do no matter how unhappy they were? Could they just abandon those children?

Leon hid atop a streetlamp and watched S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Chevrolet arrive, then left with peace of mind.

Leon got to experience Joseph Joestar's kind of happiness too.

Just do the job, and someone else would clean up the mess afterward~

Awesome!

Flying through the air, Leon the Mystic Cat immediately found himself back in the awkward situation of not knowing where to look for the Hand.

He couldn't just wait for them to come knocking. There was no sense in guarding against thieves for a thousand days!

He wandered around aimlessly, occasionally dropping down to give the scum in alleyways a beating. After wandering for quite some time, Leon suddenly had a flash of inspiration.

"Right! Why do I know anything about the Hand?"

Because of Daredevil!

I don't know anything about the Hand, but Matt does!