Luke followed a tourist map to Manhattan in the Big Apple, but found no Stark Tower, which puzzled him a little. He had wanted to check in here.
Thinking back over the plot carefully, Stark Tower really did seem to be absent from Iron Man 1. Its first appearance should have been in The Avengers. After all, the scene of Stark working underwater in his armor to supply power to Stark Tower had been quite memorable.
Unable to check in at the popular landmark, Luke left in disappointment. For now, he had better get some money and find a place to settle down.
After all, Ancient One had tossed him aside after using him, without even giving him any money or sorting out his identity. He was still an undocumented nobody in Marvel.
If he was discovered, he might be deported back to his home country-if they were capable of doing that.
As Luke walked, he pondered where to get money. With so many Ninja Soldiers, perhaps he should just go haul bricks. He remembered labor costs being pretty high here.
In the end, though, Luke did not look for construction work. Having someone with superpowers do that would be a little beneath him. Mostly, though, all the superpowered people on Earth kept themselves hidden, and making such a high-profile appearance felt strange.
(P.S. Mutants were not included.)
Or should he go rob the gangs in Hell's Kitchen?
Luke thought of the Hell's Kitchen dungeon that so many superheroes farmed for huge amounts of reputation, experience, and money, so...
Paul looked at the sparse crowds on the street. The buddies he usually chatted with had all disappeared, and even he had been ordered by his gang boss not to cause trouble.
This was all because some outfit called the "Shadow Army" had recently appeared out of nowhere and kept robbing the various gangs of Hell's Kitchen, plundering all their money.
Strangely, however, they never took the most valuable "washing powder." Instead, they burned it, taking only cash and the like. They did not even want the guns, which had brought quite a few more "scavengers" to Hell's Kitchen lately.
Pah, what Shadow Army? They were nothing but another little team of street vigilantes.
Paul felt the gun tucked inside his jacket and spat.
Who cared what kind of vigilantes they were? If they dared show themselves, he would shoot them dead. He refused to believe those guys could not be killed!
Pushing open the door to his gang's base, Paul walked inside, only to find it a little too quiet today.
A pair of red eyes silently appeared in the shadows behind him, and a cold gleam slashed toward Paul's neck...
Luke sat atop the building, playing on a handheld console. Thank goodness for the Marvel World's advanced technology. Although phones were not smartphones yet, handheld consoles and such still existed.
Pairs of red eyes emerged within his shadow. As though he had received a message, Luke stood up and left.
After receiving word, Coulson arrived at the Blood Hand gang's base. The base before him had already been cordoned off, with yellow tape across the main entrance warning people not to enter. Someone had long since peeled it away, however, and there was no telling how many times the place had been looted.
Coulson walked straight inside.
The moment he entered the base, a decapitated corpse came into view. Since no one was paying, nobody had come to deal with the bodies here. Even the police had only conducted a brief inspection before leaving this dangerous neighborhood.
As a top agent, Coulson naturally would not fear a mere headless corpse. People like him could watch someone being ground into mincemeat and still put away two more bowls of plain rice.
Coulson examined the situation at the entrance: someone had just walked into the base when a sharp blade from behind had cut off his head.
After looking at both sides of the door, Coulson was certain nobody could have hidden behind it without being noticed by the person entering.
Had an acquaintance done it, then? Impossible. After all, practically all this fellow's acquaintances were lying inside.
Coulson already had a conclusion in mind, but rather than settle on it immediately, he headed farther inside.
Everything in these areas had been looted. Not even a shell casing remained.
Coulson's head ached a little. Their presence in Hell's Kitchen was still far weaker than elsewhere, and by the time they received word, it was already too late.
Looking at the mess before him, Coulson sighed and began examining it from the beginning.
After a while, Coulson sorted through his findings.
That fellow had flushed all the "washing powder" in the warehouse into the sewers with water or something, while not a single coin of the cash at the scene remained. It almost made one suspect the culprit had been so poor that he had developed a superpowered "nose for money."
All the victims at the scene had been killed with a single stroke of a sharp weapon. Some bodies also bore marks from throwing darts, but strangely, no darts or similar objects had been left behind.
Questioning people nearby also revealed that there had not been much noise during the incident, as though everyone inside had been killed all at once.
But the gangs of Hell's Kitchen had been keeping a very low profile lately, with almost all their members staying in their bases. How had the culprit killed so many people so quickly? They had received no word of any special forces deployment.
A count of the bodies at the scene came to over a hundred. Most had been gathered in groups, but some had been in extremely well-hidden places. Examination indicated that their times of death were no more than an hour apart.
The more Coulson thought, the more his head hurt. To meet all these conditions, the culprits would have needed to bring at least fifty people into the base, locate every enemy as though they had a wallhack, and kill everyone within an hour without letting anyone react or fire even a single shot.
Recalling the corpse at the entrance, Coulson concluded that the culprit was very likely someone with superpowers.
Although superpowered people were exceedingly rare in this world, S.H.I.E.L.D. still knew they existed. But did they not all hide quietly behind the scenes, terrified of being exposed and dragged off for dissection? How had one dared to pop up?
Although he now had a suspected type of culprit, he found no unfamiliar fingerprints or footprints at the scene and had gained no leads at all, leaving Coulson with a terrible headache. Just as he was wondering how to report to his bald boss, someone slipped in through the entrance.
The man showed no surprise at seeing Coulson, letting Coulson know he had come specifically for him.
"Would you like to know who did all this?" the man asked Coulson.
Deep within Hell's Kitchen, an enormous man stood before a floor-to-ceiling window, looking at the neighborhood not far away.
Kingpin was annoyed. Recently, an outfit called the "Shadow Army" had suddenly appeared on his turf. This outfit showed no reason whatsoever, destroying one gang after another. Strangely, however, they left the most valuable goods untouched and instead took cash worth less than a tenth of the drugs' value. It was utterly bizarre.
Yet their actions did not resemble those of the old friends with whom he shared such a love-hate relationship. In other words, another new enemy had appeared on Hell's Kitchen's turf. Unlike the previous ones, this enemy was extremely powerful and efficient, inflicting considerable losses on him in a short time.
But the dignity of the underworld's emperor could not be insulted. Naturally, Kingpin had prepared a set of gifts for them, though he first needed to learn their identity. And when it came to investigating identities, who was better than that bureau? They were professionals, after all.
Kingpin crushed the tempered-glass tumbler in his hand, letting the fragments fall to the floor, and took out a phone with his unscathed hand.
"Did you tell the Strategic Homeland... whatever bureau what I told you to?"
Coulson walked out of the gang base. He had not expected such an outfit to have appeared in Hell's Kitchen recently. Combining this with his earlier findings, Coulson felt there was something here he could work with, and hurried away in his beloved car.
Luke returned to the small apartment where he lived. After exchanging a few friendly greetings with his upstairs and downstairs neighbors, he went inside his home.
Ninja Soldiers emerged from the shadows one after another, each carrying some amount of money.
They placed the money in a small room. Quite a lot had already accumulated there, but Luke was not satisfied. He did have something of a hoarding streak.
Luke still did not know he had insulted Kingpin's dignity, nor that Kingpin had leaked some traces of his activities to S.H.I.E.L.D. He only knew he had destroyed another gang guilty of heinous crimes, and felt peace within.
Mm, I'm great.
At first, Luke had not been so cold-blooded and ruthless. He had merely ordered the Ninja Soldiers to knock them unconscious and take their money. But once, in a gang's basement, he had discovered hundreds of barely clothed women, including quite a few minors! Many corpses were piled in a corner, with flies buzzing around them and even maggots breeding there.
The sight had enraged Luke, so he had ordered the Ninja Soldiers to kill everyone in that gang. Afterward, he continued doing things the same way.
Feeling that his style had become a little like an antihero's, Luke could not help giving a bitter smile, but he also knew some people deserved to die.
To quote a famous saying: forgiving them was God's business, and his job was to make sure they met God on time.
Borrowing that line to express his thoughts, Luke had killed no fewer than a thousand people in Hell's Kitchen. Of course, 99.99 percent of them had been killed by the Ninja Soldiers. There had been only one gang leader who, even at death's door, kept threatening those women and him, prompting him to kill the man himself.
And then, Hell's Kitchen truly had a devil.
The devil himself inspected his little treasury with satisfaction, then ordered some takeout. The delivery fee cost no less than the meal itself, simply because this was Hell's Kitchen. That cost extra.
Thinking back to that incident, he had called the police to clean up the scene, then had the Ninja Soldiers confirm that the women had not been sold back to other gangs by the police. After that, he left the matter alone.
This was no alarmist talk. Once, while clearing out a gang, he had unexpectedly obtained evidence of crimes committed by a parasite of the Big Apple. Yet the police to whom he submitted it had sold it back to a gang, forcing him to verify what actually happened.
Opening the system, Luke saw that after so many days of mining, he now had seventy Ninja Soldiers under his command. He had also encountered what Ancient One had mentioned earlier: the system's built-in Energy Crystals had been mined out, and his Energy Crystal count no longer increased.
His current panel read:
[Luke Ninja Soldiers: 70 Energy Crystal mining rate: 7/minute Energy recovery rate: 7/second Current Energy Crystals: 71]
The remaining seventy-one Energy Crystals had not been spent on Ninja Soldiers because Luke feared he might later encounter a situation requiring energy without having enough. So he had kept some Energy Crystals in reserve to preserve his mana bar.
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