For the record, once more, and for whoever’s keeping one: the small terror in the purple wig was Hit-Girl.
Mindy Macready, straight out of Kick-Ass, which, yes, also belongs to Marvel.
— “Tsk.
Ninjas, now.” Trist surveyed the red circle closing around them and felt his grasp of the Marvel comics universe loosen another notch.
The movie continuity looked positively sober next to whatever this was.
And then a thought wandered in and set up shop: if the summon function ever produced somebody out of Naruto, wouldn’t that be a show worth tickets?
“Who are you?!” Damon had backpedaled fast and planted himself beside Mindy, and the instinct running him was the oldest one he had: protect the daughter.
Never mind that he’d trained the daughter into a small weapon of war.
A dozen-plus figures ringed them at close range, and even across that short distance he could feel the killing intent coming off each one like cold off ice.
Every single body in that circle was a top-grade killer.
The floor went silent.
Frank hadn’t spoken, because Frank was busy exhaling.
The instant the red uniforms had materialized, the vise around his chest had released: his life was purchased.
Even if the Hand’s people couldn’t kill this monster of a kid, at absolute worst they could extract him, and as long as Frank D’Amico drew breath one more day, today’s debt would be collected with interest.
First order of business: that comic company goes bankrupt.
His eyes came up vicious and fixed on Trist.
The ninjas themselves answered Damon with nothing.
They stood like a ring of puppets, eyes forward through the masks, as if the question had never been asked, and the look in those eyes sorted everyone present into a single category: the dead.
Mindy and Damon went tight and stayed put; pressure like this punished rash movement, and both of them knew it.
“You think you’re escaping?” Trist read Frank’s face and knew the whole plan at a glance.
His actual curiosity ran elsewhere.
Could these ninjas do ninjutsu?
“Heh.
Heh heh.” Frank spread his hands, magnanimous with borrowed confidence.
“I’ll admit it, your strength is real.
But killing me, you’d want to think that through.
We could absolutely shake hands and…” “You’re already dead.” Trist handed it back without a shred of courtesy.
Men like this lied so fluently they billed themselves for it.
Frank’s smile turned over into something fierce.
“Waste him.” The order was still landing when the air at Trist’s side began to shriek.
Katanas materialized out of nowhere, bright and cold and already falling, angles no honest eye could have tracked.
Trist didn’t track them.
He also didn’t move, because he’d been wanting exactly this data point: what could Lv2 Toughness actually take?
CLANG.
The crisp ring of metal on something harder rolled across the floor.
A katana sat against the crown of his skull, meant to split him to the chin, and the arm behind it bulged with effort and bought not one hair’s width of progress.
An ordinary man would have gaped the way the killer Kane had gaped.
The Hand’s ninjas didn’t blink.
The Hand ran on five leaders, called the Five Fingers, close-combat monsters to a man, and the ninjas under them had met superhumans and mutants on missions often enough to file them under routine.
Thick skin?
Fine.
Then you struck more, from more angles, and probed for where the limit lived.
Red afterimages flickered.
A chain-sickle whipped around at his neck; a fan of shuriken followed, their edges wet with a poison that killed on the smallest cut.
Everything rang, and everything failed.
The sickle’s blade curled up against his skin like foil.
The shuriken hit and dropped with their points snapped off.
“Ninjas who can’t do ninjutsu,” Trist said, and shook his head with honest disappointment.
“A disgrace to the title.” He’d watched the whole repertoire hoping for something out of his memories, hand seals, shadow clones, anything, and gotten cutlery.
The lead ninja’s eyes flared above the mask, pride bleeding, and he spun his weapon into a storm of steel that accomplished, in total, nothing.
Trist stood in the middle of it untouched and unbothered, spectating the performance like a man at a circus.
Frank’s face collapsed by degrees.
The situation had stopped being ambiguous: the Hand was not beating this thing.
“Get me OUT of here!” he screamed.
The one who read as captain flicked a glance around the floor, and whatever pride said, the odds won; he fell back to Frank’s side, hatred radiating off him, and coiled to move.
Trist was doing his own thinking in the same beat.
His skills were crude and he knew it; everything these ninjas had that he lacked lived in refined technique and that eerie, ghosting footwork.
If they got Frank out, finding him again would cost weeks.
So.
Next moment.
BOOM.
He swung one fist through empty air, and the air lost.
The blast shoved everything standing away from the impact line, thunder detonated inside the room, and a tidal wall of pressure poured forward faster than reaction.
The captain had already gathered Frank and turned for the shadows, ghost-step loading, and the wall of air took them both mid-stride.
It did not merely stop the exit.
It picked the ninja up like a kite with a cut string and drove him into the wall hard enough to crater it, and the rubble came pattering down over the pair of them, and when the dust settled they lay wretched in it, laced head to foot with fine lacerations.
Trist walked over at an easy stroll.
On the way, white spheres snapped off his shoulders like released hounds and streaked across the floor, each finding one of the remaining red uniforms dead-on.
Under the bursting crimson curtain that followed, his face stayed frost, and the look he turned down on the two survivors belonged on an Asura.
The honest truth, which he kept to himself: if the ninjas had simply run, he couldn’t have caught them.
Nothing in his kit did speed.
But these were death-soldiers, built to complete the mission or die inside it, and the mission was Frank, which meant flight was never on their table; and Frank’s civilian reflexes ran half a beat behind his bodyguard’s.
That half beat was the entire opening, and Trist had spent it on both of them at once.
The red circle was gone.
“Kuh.” Frank propped himself on one arm and produced a smile with blood in it.
“All these years running the coast, and I fall to a brat.
Fine.
Kill me and be done.” The very picture of a man resigned.
“Now I’ve changed my mind again.” Trist said it while patting down his own clothes, which the evening had ventilated thoroughly; the ninja steel had been good for that much.
He’d genuinely like to know, someday, who manufactured the Hulk’s pants, and whether the factory took custom orders.
“You…
won’t kill me?” Hope detonated across Frank’s face.
Escaped!
From that!
The ninja captain, dying in the rubble a few feet away, twisted his face around words he no longer had the strength to push out.
The words, roughly: are you KIDDING me?
Damon and Mindy had gone ugly around the eyes at the same moment, because it had come this far and the man still wasn’t dying.
Then the next second arrived, both of them caught up, and joy climbed their brows.
“You two do it.
I’m off.” Trist turned for the elevator with a loose wave over his shoulder, and somewhere outside, the first sirens began to wind up around the building.
“No.
No.
IMPOSSIBLE!” Death to life, heaven to hell, and back down the whole slope in ninety seconds; the ride broke something in the crime lord’s voice.
“Frank.” Damon set the gun against his forehead, and the smile he wore was cruel and the voice underneath it came out almost gentle.
“Remember.
It was me who killed you.” BANG.
A second shot cracked in the same breath: Mindy, tidy as ever, finishing the ninja beside them who’d still had air in him.
“Let’s go, Mindy.” “Mm.
Big Daddy, where to now?” Damon stood a moment with the question.
The wish of years, paid in full, by his own hand, and behind the exhilaration the road simply…
ended.
Blank ground ahead.
He was quiet long enough for the sirens to get louder, and then his answer came out with no give in it at all.
“You’re going to school.”