"Clang, clang, clang, clang-!"
Dense shotgun pellets hammered the stainless-steel surgical bed like a raging storm. Dazzling sparks burst through the rainy night, illuminating the twisted, utterly horrified face of Fiss, the Rat Gang's boss.
The three-hundred-pound solid metal base absorbed the Remington's full kinetic force at point-blank range without budging.
Fiss's pupils shrank to pinpoints. His Adam's apple bobbed in his throat, but he couldn't make a sound.
A surgical bed? Out of thin air?
In the half second his brain completely froze, the air beside the surgical bed suddenly distorted in an eerie ripple.
The silver blanket was flung aside.
Yang Ming sprang out like a black panther that had been lying in wait, keeping low against the muddy asphalt. Less than two meters separated them.
Acting on a street thug's instincts, Fiss tried to rack the pump-action fore-end, ejecting the shell and chambering another round.
But a hand wearing black Kevlar cut-resistant gloves clamped onto the Remington's scorching barrel like a hydraulic vise.
Rain struck the hot barrel with a hiss, sending white vapor billowing up.
Fiss yanked backward with all his strength. It wouldn't budge. The arms of this somewhat sickly-looking Asian doctor seemed to have steel bars embedded in them.
Before Fiss could let go, a dark gray blur swept through the rainy night without warning.
Oscorp's high-carbon Titanium alloy blade sliced into Fiss's right wrist.
There was no resistance from striking bone. The blade slipped into the carpal tunnel with absolute precision, severed the median nerve, then flicked upward. All nine flexor tendons snapped cleanly apart.
"Squelch."
Blood sprayed into the rain.
Fiss hadn't even felt the pain before his right hand lost all its grip strength, like a piece of rotten wood that had suddenly broken off. The heavy Remington shotgun fell into a puddle with a clang.
Then the blade traced an exceedingly small arc through the air and sliced backhanded into his left wrist.
The same anatomical location. The same clean severing of the nerve.
Two seconds. Two cuts.
The Rat Gang boss's hands were utterly ruined.
"Aaaah-!"
The delayed agony finally shot along his nerve endings into his cerebral cortex. Fiss's knees buckled, and he dropped heavily into the muddy water. Holding up his two wildly bleeding wrists, he screamed like a pig being slaughtered.
Yang Ming released the barrel and straightened, looking down at him. Rain streamed down his black trench coat. Not a ripple of emotion stirred in his eyes, ringed by heavy dark circles.
The remaining Rat Gang thugs in the alley watched their boss get crippled in an instant, then looked at the surgical bed blocking the street. Their nerve shattered completely.
"Monster... he's a monster!"
Someone screamed. The remaining men threw down their Thompson submachine guns and scrambled out of Lake Street, disappearing into the East End's darkness.
Yang Ming didn't pursue them. Small fry couldn't make waves.
He lowered his hand, letting the downpour wash the blood off the Titanium alloy blade.
"You... you can't kill me!" Fiss knelt on the ground, blood from his slashed wrists staining the water beneath him red. He looked up, his face covered in mud, rain, and the cold sweat of absolute terror.
Facing death, he screamed frantically, as though clutching at his last lifeline.
"I work for the Falcone Family! The middleman at the East End Underground Organ Black Market is an officer of the Falcone Family!" Fiss shouted himself hoarse, trying to crush the underground doctor before him beneath the weight of Gotham City's largest mafia empire.
"Lay a finger on me, and Mr. Falcone will skin you alive! This lousy clinic of yours, and that woman inside it-you'll all be stuffed into barrels of concrete and sunk in Gotham Bay!"
Yang Ming didn't so much as lift his eyelids.
The Titanium alloy blade spun deftly between his long fingers.
"Falcone?" Yang Ming savored the name. The Roman, the underworld emperor of Gotham's old era.
Fiss thought Yang Ming was afraid, because nobody in Gotham wasn't afraid of Falcone. His fleshy face contorted into a vicious grin uglier than tears. "That's right! Falcone! Let me go, and I'll pretend tonight never happened..."
"On my operating table."
Yang Ming interrupted him. His voice wasn't loud, but it cut through the roar of the downpour with perfect clarity.
"Whether you're mafia or the mayor of Gotham City," Yang Ming said, stepping forward, his leather shoe shattering the reflection in a puddle, "you're just a pile of carbon-based matter made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Sever his carotid artery with one cut, and even Falcone's blood can only spray two meters high."
The smile froze on Fiss's face. In those black eyes, he saw something colder than death.
Yang Ming seized Fiss's leather jacket collar with his left hand and hauled the nearly two-meter-tall brute off the ground.
"You trafficked homeless people and harvested their organs to sell on the black market. That seriously violates my medical ethics." Yang Ming's voice was as cold as a morgue freezer.
"Death would be too easy for you. I want you to spend the rest of your life in fear and lucid agony. Consider it a little interest paid to the innocent people you took apart for spare parts."
Before he finished speaking, the scalpel in Yang Ming's right hand stabbed forward.
Target: the back of the neck.
The tip pierced the gap between the third cervical vertebra (C3) and the fourth (C4) with extraordinary precision.
This was a lethal danger zone in the human body.
Yang Ming turned his wrist slightly. The blade avoided the respiratory center in the medulla oblongata and, with brutal precision, severed the spinal cord's motor nerve tracts below it.
"Crack."
A faint sound of cartilage splitting.
Fiss's eyes instantly widened as far as they could, blood vessels flooding their surfaces.
He opened his mouth wide but couldn't make a sound.
From the neck down, he had completely lost control of his body. His sphincter relaxed instantly, and foul-smelling urine flowed down with the rain.
Yang Ming let go.
Fiss collapsed into the puddle like a heap of sludge stripped of its bones.
He could still breathe on his own. His eyes could still dart around frantically. His brain remained painfully lucid, feeling the cold rain strike his face.
But he couldn't move even his little finger.
High-level quadriplegia.
From that moment on, the Rat Gang's vicious boss would be imprisoned inside his own flesh for life, unable even to kill himself.
Yang Ming wiped the blood from the Titanium alloy blade on Fiss's clothes. With a thought, he returned the blade to the Storage Ring.
He turned, his gaze sweeping across the dark alleys of Lake Street.
More than a dozen Rat Gang members lay dead in the muddy water, their bodies strewn everywhere. Even the downpour couldn't wash away the stench of blood. If he didn't deal with them, patrol cars from the GCPD (Gotham Police Department) would seal the place off by morning.
Yang Ming walked over to the nearest corpse.
He removed the Kevlar glove from his left hand. The dark silver ring at the base of his index finger touched the corpse's cold forehead.
"Whoosh."
The corpse on the ground vanished into thin air.
A satisfied smile curled Yang Ming's lips. One hundred cubic meters of subspace. A dozen or so corpses wouldn't even fill a corner.
He walked toward the next corpse.
The Falcone Family? The organ black market?
Yang Ming stuffed the corpses into the ring one by one. He had been worrying about where to obtain large quantities of illicit medical equipment.
Since an officer of the Falcone Family was running an organ-smuggling operation, the man was bound to have a highly developed underground medical supply chain.
Here was a first-rate supplier delivered right to his door.