Slaughter and Experiments

Okamoto Taichi's brow twitched.

"Earlier, your men took the money I was handing out on the street. I killed one of them and his men. Then I heard the man kneeling downstairs had a problem with me, so I came here."

"I heard what you were saying just now, too."

Russell shook his head. "It's like the girls you've locked up on the fifth floor. You have all the power, and they have no way to fight back. Now it's the same between us."

He raised a hand, and Okamoto Taichi's body went rigid. It wasn't fear. Every atom in his body had stopped obeying him.

His blood stopped flowing, his heart stopped beating, and even the air in his lungs stopped circulating.

His body was like a machine unplugged from its power source. Every function ceased at once.

But he was still alive. His brain still worked, and he remained conscious, feeling himself lose control of his body bit by bit.

Okamoto Taichi finally spoke, his voice as rough as sandpaper.

"You... you can't kill me. I'm with The Hand. If you kill one of us, the Five Fingers will come for you. They've lived for centuries. They're immortal.

They'll hunt you to the ends of the earth—"

"The Hand," Russell repeated. "The Five Fingers. Centuries old and immortal. Sounds terrifying. That's practically eternal life."

He looked at the helpless Okamoto Taichi. "But have you considered something? Are they really immortal? And even if they are, does that mean you can't be killed?"

Okamoto Taichi's pupils contracted.

"Do you know what a cutoff line is?" Russell murmured, remembering how his former self had been held in a laboratory.

Okamoto Taichi couldn't speak, but his eyes moved.

"You should know this country has an invisible line. People above it get the best medical care, the fastest organ transplants, and the most advanced surgery.

People below it wait—for a donor who will never come, for a place on a list they'll never reach. All they can do is wait to die."

Russell traced a finger through the air. A hair-thin line of blood appeared on Okamoto Taichi's neck. "Your business supplies people above the line with spare parts from those below it.

You take people without names apart and put their pieces into people who have names. You tell yourself it isn't your fault. It's the market's."

Blood seeped from Okamoto Taichi's neck, slowly and thinly, like a tiny red stream.

His eyes bulged. His mouth hung open as he tried to breathe, but no air moved through his lungs.

"But you forgot something." Russell's voice softened, as though he were sharing a secret. "Not having a name doesn't mean they aren't alive."

He snapped his fingers.

Okamoto Taichi's body exploded from within.

The air inside him heated to thousands of degrees in an instant. Its molecules expanded violently while the air outside remained unchanged. The pressure difference reached an unbearable limit, and then—bang.

Flesh, bones, and organs sprayed in every direction like the petals of a blooming red flower.

The calligraphy bearing the word "Endure" was stained red. The folding fan flew across the room and landed face down, hiding the word.

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

System notifications sounded in Russell's mind, but he paid them no attention. He turned toward the underling who was still kneeling on the floor, trembling all over.

The kneeling man's face twisted. His body reddened like a shrimp boiling down in a pan, then exploded with a bang, becoming a heap of shredded flesh.

He had died in exactly the same way as Okamoto Taichi had in Russell's experiment.

"Interesting. A substitute death?" Russell narrowed his eyes. His gaze pierced the concrete walls of the underground complex and settled on a figure sprinting outside.

The man was naked, with graying temples and an unusually sturdy build. He looked nothing like someone in his sixties.

I got out. Lord Demon God didn't lie to me. Too bad I can only use it once. Okamoto Taichi felt like he had escaped death, but he didn't dare slow down for a moment.

That helpless descent toward death had been too terrifying. He never wanted to experience it again.

"Lord Okamoto... you?"

A samurai guarding the way ahead drew his weapon. Then he saw that the naked man charging toward him was Lord Okamoto, whom he held in such awe, and his eyes widened.

"Idiot! The enemy made it to the third floor! What were you doing guarding the doors?" Okamoto Taichi snapped.

"Hurry! Open the door, sound the alarm, and have every samurai take whatever weapons they can find and kill the intruder!"

"Yes, my lord." The guard nodded frantically.

After giving the order, Okamoto Taichi stripped the guard of his kimono and continued toward the exit at top speed.

As he had said before, the entire Triad Gang together was no match for that Mutant. His order had only been a way to use them as fodder and buy himself time.

If every member of the Triad Gang died and the five lords of The Hand held him responsible, that was a problem for later.

His only regret was leaving behind the fortune he had worked so hard to build, along with the girls on the fifth floor intended for the corporate conglomerate and the offerings meant for Lord Demon God. There was no time to move them.

With an enemy inside, the first and second floors, which handled the base's defenses, went into lockdown and began clearing out the gamblers and other outsiders.

"What kind of underground casino is this? I was just getting into it, and now you're throwing us out? Fuck!"

"I'd barely taken off my pants before you kicked us out! There goes the thousand dollars I paid. Damn Nipponese, you've got no integrity!"

The regulars and newcomers who had come to gamble or buy sex cursed as they left. In the end, they had no choice but to use the exit to the outside. The scene quickly grew chaotic and noisy.

One man in the crowd was an exception. He wore a broad brown fedora and dark brown sunglasses, and carried a small, elegant cane in his right hand.

Something's happened? I haven't heard of any superheroes targeting this Hand operation lately.

The man in sunglasses twitched his ears. The disorderly crowd around him took shape in his mind like an image from radar.

He was a lawyer—Matt Murdock—but he preferred his other identity: Daredevil.

Daredevil normally wouldn't have been in Hell's Kitchen during the day. He usually spent his days representing people in court, often for free.

His nightly patrol route seldom passed through here either. Recently, though, he had been investigating missing children, and the clues had led him to the Triad Gang.

Daredevil's covert investigation had shown that the Triad Gang was actually a branch of The Hand.

With the samurai distracted by the chaos, Matt quietly moved toward an empty restroom.

It was time for the red devil to make an appearance.

The debt office on the second floor.

More than a dozen people remained there. They weren't bookkeepers, but Triad Gang elites who had rushed over from across the building after Okamoto Taichi gave his order.

Armed with samurai swords, submachine guns, and even a few crossbows, they guarded the stairwell and waited for Russell.

They opened fire as Russell climbed the stairs. Bullets, crossbow bolts, and even several grenades flew at him at once.

Russell raised a hand. Every projectile stopped in midair, then turned around.

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

Screams echoed through the office for a few seconds, then fell silent. Russell walked past the bodies into the room and looked at the ledgers covering the walls.

He opened one at random. It listed every organ transaction in detail—dates, prices, buyers.

He recognized some of the names in the buyer column: politicians, businessmen, and even a few public figures he had seen on television.

He took the ledger and continued upstairs. Dozens of people lay in wait along the corridor leading to the first-floor casino. They weren't gamblers. They were Triad Gang members.

They poured in through the back door, climbed through windows, and crawled out of ventilation ducts.

Some carried knives, others guns or clubs. They didn't know who Russell was—or perhaps they did, but thought their numbers would be enough to win.

Russell watched them charge and sighed.

He wasn't pitying them. He was calculating how long it would take to kill them, how many Emotion Points he could earn, and whether he could fit in a few Genes experiments.

He raised a hand and seized the neck of the man leading the charge. He didn't squeeze. He used Atomic Manipulation.

The man's neck turned to glass in an instant—not figuratively. It really became glass.

Its atoms were rearranged into a silica crystal structure. Skin, muscle, bone, and blood vessels all became transparent and brittle, like ice.

Crack.

Russell gave a gentle squeeze, and the "glass head" shattered across the floor.

The man collapsed. Blood still seeped from the severed stump of his neck, but the tissue at the wound had turned to glass, so it emerged slowly, like water from a crack in stone.

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

[Shock Emotion Points +1]

"Don't be afraid," Russell told the stunned Triad Gang members. "It's just an experiment. A little dizziness is normal."

He crouched beside the corpse and used Telekinesis to piece together the fragments of the shattered "glass head," studying the arrangement of its crystal structure.

"Turning carbon into silicon normally takes high heat and pressure, but Atomic Manipulation bypasses that. Interesting."

While his head was lowered, a Triad Gang member rushed him from behind and swung a samurai sword at his neck.

Russell didn't turn. He merely reached out and swept a hand through the air. The man's sword—a finely forged blade passed down through three generations—turned to powder in an instant.

It hadn't broken. It had decomposed.

The metallic bonds between its iron atoms were forcibly severed, and the entire blade reverted to the raw state of iron ore.

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

"Your swords aren't good enough." Russell stood and looked at the Triad Gang members, who were on the verge of breaking down.

"I'll upgrade them for you." He raised both hands. Every samurai sword the gang members held floated into the air, spinning, twisting, changing shape, and recombining.

They didn't become swords again. They took on a new, familiar shape: guns.

But these were no ordinary guns. Their barrels were exceptionally long, their bores enormous. They looked like weapons from a science-fiction movie.

"Who wants to try one?" Russell asked calmly.

No one dared.

"Then I'll try them for you."

Russell snapped his fingers. The "guns" fired together, shooting beams of energy instead of bullets.

Atoms accelerated to near light speed shot from the barrels, leaving blue, burning trails through the air.

The beams pierced the Triad Gang members, leaving holes with charred edges that gave off wisps of smoke.

[Shock Emotion Points +1]

[Fear Emotion Points +1]

"I see." Russell studied the paths of the beams, deep in thought.

"Accelerate atoms enough and you get an effect similar to a laser. It isn't a real laser, but it's enough for ordinary people."

He turned and walked toward the door.

Behind him, dozens of bodies lay in pools of blood. The "guns" fell to the floor and regained their original metallic sheen, as though nothing had happened.

While so many underlings had bought him time with their lives, Okamoto Taichi had reached an exit from the warehouse. One more step and he would be free of this nightmare.

"What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. I'll make an offering to Lord Demon God and gain even greater power."

He glanced back once, then turned to leave—only to slam into a transparent wall with a bang.

"What?!" Rubbing his aching forehead, Okamoto Taichi reached forward to feel his way.

He searched around. His eyes could see no wall or anything within the barrier, but there was no mistaking the solid surface beneath his fingertips.

His gaze hardened. He pulled out the revolver he had taken from an underling for protection.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Three shots rang out in quick succession, but the transparent barrier showed no sign of breaking. The bullets ricocheted away.

Bzzzz~

A mosquito flew forward, beating its wings in ignorance. The transparent barrier blocked its path, and it landed on the surface, rubbing its legs together in confusion.

To Okamoto Taichi, he was no different from that mosquito.

"No!!"

Hell's Kitchen.

In this choice patch of Manhattan's West Side known as "Little Gotham," gang wars were as punctual as rush-hour trains.

Every week, a new gang rose, and every week, an old one was wiped out.

Gunfire, police sirens, and the wail of ambulances formed the neighborhood's round-the-clock soundtrack.

But one person taking on an entire gang—even in the rough-and-tumble Hell's Kitchen, that was unheard of.

At least, it had been until today.

The masked street heroes who spent their days fighting crime here—Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Punisher—couldn't claim they could storm a gang's headquarters alone.

To slaughter all two hundred or so members would be enough to scare the life out of anyone.

But today, someone had done what even those street heroes wouldn't have imagined.

He had done it alone, fighting his way through an entire gang and killing everyone in his path.

Rumble!

Rat-a-tat! Bang! Bang!

The terrifying slaughter wore away at the Nipponese gang members' resolve.

Daredevil sensed the killing force drawing steadily closer to the casino. His commitment to the law would not let him stand by any longer.

"Stop right there."