Tony’s Mark I was still crawling through its self-diagnostic.
Between the scrap-built hardware and Sherlock’s surprise flood interrupting the startup sequence, even Sherlock’s alchemy couldn’t make the primitive system run quickly.
Which suited Sherlock just fine.
It gave him plenty of time to handle the other reason he’d come here.
Rescuing Tony was only part of the job.
Sherlock also wanted to test the Holy Lance.
And more importantly— he wanted to send Hydra a message.
Sherlock had grown up Chinese in his previous life.
So if you asked him what the most effective way to terrify an enemy was, one rather ancient answer came immediately to mind.
A mountain of corpses.
Historically effective.
Visually unforgettable.
Politically…
not ideal.
If Sherlock actually started stacking severed heads into monuments, Hydra would probably come after him later while waving banners about exterminating an evil monster.
And right now, Hydra still wore S.H.I.E.L.D.’s skin.
That mattered.
Sherlock wanted to frighten them badly enough that they would think twice before touching him.
He did not want to hand them the moral high ground.
Fortunately, history had provided another option.
Something less politically radioactive.
Still horrifying.
Still memorable.
And, most importantly, ridiculously easy to accomplish with alchemy.
Impalement.
If that word alone didn’t make the reference obvious, the name behind it certainly would.
Vlad III.
Vlad the Impaler.
The historical figure who would later inspire one of fiction’s most famous monsters.
Dracula.
Sherlock had decided to borrow the aesthetic.
Turn the valley into hell.
Let S.H.I.E.L.D.
see it.
Let Hydra see it.
Let anyone stupid enough to consider digging into his life understand one simple rule:
Leave Sherlock Flamel alone.
And from a technical standpoint?
Impaling people with stone spikes was almost insultingly easy.
Sherlock left Tony behind and stepped out of the foul-smelling cave.
He barely made it around the first bend before spotting John and Yinsen.
Yinsen was practically folded in half behind John, terrified out of his mind.
Understandable.
The man had possessed enough courage to pick up a rifle and run out to buy Tony time.
That didn’t mean he was immune to fear.
Especially when bullets were cracking past him every few seconds.
An untrained civilian dropped into an active firefight wasn’t going to magically become Rambo.
John, on the other hand…
John Wick was proving exactly why half the underworld treated his name like a natural disaster.
He had an AK in his hands.
And he was firing three-round bursts with such precise rhythm that the weapon might as well have been part of his body.
Every burst meant another man dropped.
One man.
One rifle.
And somehow John had pinned down enough terrorists that they barely dared peek out from cover.
Sherlock emerged from the cave.
John fired one final burst.
Empty.
He tossed the AK aside, drew his handgun, and gave Sherlock a vicious glare.
“If you’d taken any longer, I would’ve had to drag the doctor back inside!”
Another burst of gunfire cracked nearby.
“There are too many of them!”
Sherlock didn’t look concerned.
“Relax.”
John narrowed his eyes.
Sherlock smiled.
“I’ll handle the rest.”
He nodded toward Yinsen.
“You keep Dr.
Yinsen alive.”
Then Sherlock lightly tapped himself twice with the Holy Lance.
And walked straight out into the open.
Yinsen’s eyes widened.
“Wait—!”
Too late.
Sherlock stepped into the kill zone.
And the valley erupted.
Gunfire came from everywhere.
Dozens of rifles opened up at once.
Bullets tore through the air toward Sherlock like a swarm of locusts.
Yinsen froze.
John stared.
Then the first bullet reached Sherlock.
It never touched him.
The metal distorted.
Shifted.
Transmuted.
And became a pure white flower petal.
Another bullet followed.
Another.
Another.
Every projectile entering the space around Sherlock transformed before it could reach his body.
Metal became petals.
Death became flowers.
Hundreds of white petals brushed harmlessly past Sherlock’s clothes and drifted toward the ground.
He kept walking.
Step after step.
Behind him, a trail of white petals slowly formed across the bloodstained earth.
It would’ve been beautiful.
If Sherlock had stopped there.
He didn’t.
The Holy Lance moved in his hand.
A weapon designed for close combat became something entirely different.
A scythe that harvested lives from a distance.
Sherlock swept the spearhead sideways.
The ground answered.
Crack.
Stone spikes exploded upward.
A gunman vanished from behind cover with a scream, lifted into the air on a pillar of rock.
Sherlock flicked the lance again.
More spikes erupted.
Men firing at him were pierced.
Men running were pierced.
Men hiding too close to the wrong patch of ground were pierced.
And Sherlock didn’t make the spikes immediately lethal. Get faster updates on g.com.
That was deliberate.
The valley filled with screams.
Blood splashed across the white petals scattered behind him.
Scarlet stained ivory.
Gunfire mixed with agony.
Sherlock continued forward through the middle of it all, untouched.
White petals drifting around him.
Red spreading beneath them.
Stone spikes rising in his wake.
From where John and Yinsen stood, the scene looked less like a battle and more like some grotesquely beautiful painting of hell coming to life.
Gradually, the gunfire inside the cave complex faded.
One weapon after another fell silent.
Soon there was almost nothing left.
Only Sherlock’s footsteps.
And the cries of men who had not yet died.
Yinsen’s face had gone pale.
Even John felt the hairs rise along the back of his neck.
John had killed more people than most soldiers would ever see.
To him, killing itself wasn’t mystical.
It wasn’t sacred.
It was a job.
A bullet.
A knife.
A broken neck.
Someone died.
That was it.
Sherlock wasn’t doing that.
This was theater.
Terror as a weapon.
A deliberate attempt to make every surviving witness remember him.
John had understood from the beginning that Sherlock had accepted this mission partly to intimidate the people watching from the shadows.
But understanding that in theory was one thing.
Watching Sherlock actually carry it out was another.
Yinsen’s teeth were chattering.
“W-w-what…”
He swallowed.
“W-what are we supposed to do now?”
Despite his terror, he still asked John.
The man had just saved his life.
That was enough to earn Yinsen’s trust.
John stared at Sherlock’s retreating back.
Thought for several seconds.
Then clenched his jaw.
“Follow him.”
Yinsen’s trembling immediately got worse.
Follow that?
He didn’t even know who Sherlock was.
For all Yinsen knew, the smiling lunatic ahead of them might decide to skewer him too for no reason at all.
And if that happened…
Yinsen would genuinely prefer a bullet.
At least getting shot was quick.
The men hanging from Sherlock’s stone spikes couldn’t say the same.
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