The torrential rain still raged over Gotham. In the alley at 22 Lake Street, rain washed away the thick stench of blood, sending it surging back through the sewer grates.
Yang Ming stood in the mud.
After confirming that no members of the Rat Gang remained alive nearby, he raised his right hand. At the base of his index finger, the plain, dark silver ring glimmered faintly in the lightning.
His fingertip touched a corpse with a severed carotid artery.
"Whoosh."
There was no sound, no flash of light. The two-hundred-pound corpse vanished into thin air.
Expressionless, Yang Ming moved on. His leather shoes splashed through puddles as his fingertips touched one body after another.
The second. The fifth. The twelfth.
Along with the scattered Thompson submachine guns, Remington shotguns, and severed limbs mangled by buckshot, he swept them all into the hundred-cubic-meter subspace with flawless precision.
To a back-alley surgeon, these were no ill-omened corpses. They were excellent anatomy teaching aids-and hard currency for future negotiations and extortion involving the Falcone Family.
The alley was completely empty. Apart from the pale red puddles diluted by rain, nothing revealed that a one-sided session of live dissection had just taken place here.
Yang Ming turned, raised the roller shutter, and slipped into the clinic.
Inside the hyperbaric chamber, Maggie slept soundly. Selene lay slumped against the outside of the glass cover, breathing evenly.
Without a word, Yang Ming headed straight for the iron door deep inside the clinic, marked "Medical Supplies Warehouse." He pressed down the handle, and a blue vortex spun silently.
He stepped through.
A sensation of weightlessness swept through his semicircular canals. Gotham's damp chill gave way to the sour stink of Hell's Kitchen, a mixture of stale beer and rotting garbage.
Bang!
Just as Yang Ming emerged from the passage, a piece of rotten pork, covered in dense stitches like an ugly centipede, slammed into a stainless steel tray.
Jessica Jones slouched in the swivel chair behind the triage desk. The dark circles beneath her eyes were even heavier than Yang Ming's, and her hair looked like a bird's nest. Seven or eight high-carbon steel suture needles lay scattered across the tiles at her feet, snapped clean through by sheer force.
"Boss." Jessica gritted her teeth, her voice as hoarse as though she had swallowed sandpaper. "I finished stitching it. Make me touch this thing again, and I'll shove it down your throat."
Yang Ming took off his coat and casually slipped on a white lab coat. He put on sterile gloves, approached the tray, and picked up a pair of forceps to prod the pork.
The stitches were crooked and hideous. But when he probed the incision with the forceps, the underlying muscle and fat had indeed been brought together layer by layer, leaving no dead space.
Blue characters flickered at the edge of his vision.
[Long-term teaching mission: A physician's legacy.] [Current progress: 15%]
An almost imperceptible smile tugged at Yang Ming's lips. This human tyrannosaurus had a vicious temper, but she genuinely had the makings of a good surgeon. Once she could control her strength to the millimeter, the needle holder in her hand would be steadier than any precision instrument.
"A bare pass." Yang Ming dropped the forceps and removed his gloves. "But dead pork has no blood pressure or muscle spasms. It can only help you get a feel for it."
Jessica froze, a sense of foreboding creeping over her. "What do you mean?"
"I prepared some more realistic teaching materials for you."
As soon as he finished speaking, Yang Ming casually swept his right hand forward.
The dark silver ring flashed faintly.
Thud! Thud!
Two heavy bodies materialized out of thin air and slammed onto the cold concrete floor.
Water splashed everywhere. Gotham City's icy rainwater, mingled with the pungent smell of gunpowder and the thick reek of blood, rushed into Jessica's nostrils.
Jessica sprang out of her chair. Her superhuman strength erupted in an instant, and her thigh knocked the heavy triage desk half a foot off the floor with a shriek of scraping metal.
She stared at the two burly men on the floor, their faces deathly pale and dark red blood still seeping from their necks. Her pupils trembled violently.
"Y-you can do fucking magic?!" Jessica pointed at the corpses, her voice shooting up as she stumbled two steps backward into the medicine cabinet. "Or did you go out murdering people in the middle of the night?! They're still fucking warm!"
Yang Ming pulled over the swivel chair and sat down. He picked up the cold coffee from the desk and took a sip, his gaze as calm as though he were looking at two pieces of wood.
"Unlucky bastards caught in an Eastern European gang shootout. Found them." Yang Ming tossed out the lie casually and pointed at one of the corpses. "Go put on gloves. Open his chest. Find and ligate the subclavian artery within one minute."
Jessica swallowed as she stared at the man with the dark circles beneath his eyes. Suddenly, she felt as though she was risking her life for that five-thousand-dollar monthly paycheck.
At the same time, at Container Pier No. 47, owned by Kingpin, on the outskirts of Hell's Kitchen in New York.
The predawn sea fog was so thick that visibility was less than ten meters. The air felt oppressive enough to wring water from.
Along the edge of the pier, dozens of gangsters in black coats were hurriedly unloading cargo. The crane rumbled dully as it lowered enormous wooden crates from the freighter.
As the crates touched down, several gang leaders stepped forward and pried off the lids.
Half contained high-purity drugs from Mexico, wrapped in layer after layer of waterproof foil. The other half were green weapons crates stamped with the "STARK" logo.
Heavy weapons secretly leaked from Stark Industries. High-explosive grenades, armor-piercing ammunition, and even several man-portable missile launchers.
"Move faster! Everything has to be in the warehouse before dawn!" the bald gang leader barked in a low voice.
At the highest point of the pier, in the shadows of the hundred-meter-tall gantry crane.
Frank Castle lay like a god of death merged with the darkness. Prone on the cold steel beam, his gaze was icy. Beneath his broad tactical gloves, his hands assembled a disassembled Remington M24 heavy sniper rifle with terrifying proficiency.
"Click."
An almost inaudible sound of metal engaging. A round slid into the chamber.
Frank's breathing slowed to four breaths per minute. Through the sea fog, his crosshairs locked onto the green wooden crate below, packed with high-explosive ammunition.
All it would take was one armor-piercing incendiary round.
The entire pier would become a sea of fire. The drugs, the weapons, and the dozens of scumbags below would all be blasted into bloody scraps.
Evil needed no trial. Only eradication.
Frank placed his index finger on the trigger and slowly took up the slack.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pier, in a narrow gap between towering stacks of shipping containers.
Matt Murdock wore a dark red cowl and gripped his alloy baton tightly. Though his eyes were covered, his superhuman hearing constructed a three-dimensional radar image in his mind, clearer than anything visible to the naked eye.
Waves striking the rocks. Seagulls beating their wings.
The heartbeats of dozens of gangsters below. Their footsteps. The rustle of their clothes.
Matt's brow was tightly furrowed. His goal tonight was to sneak in silently, subdue a few leaders, obtain the ledger documenting Kingpin's arms smuggling, and hand it over to the police.
Procedural justice. As a lawyer, that was his bottom line.
Suddenly, Matt's ear twitched almost imperceptibly.
He filtered out the racket below and caught an extremely faint yet deadly scrape of metal from the top of the crane, a hundred meters away.
A round being chambered.
Accompanying it was an exceptionally steady, cold heartbeat, without the slightest emotional fluctuation.
"That lunatic..." Matt gritted his teeth.
He instantly recognized the man hidden in the darkness. The Punisher, who had recently unleashed a bloodbath across Hell's Kitchen and never left survivors.
If that man fired, this place would become a slaughterhouse. The explosion could even reach the civilian neighborhood beyond the pier.
I can't let him fire!