[Current Balance: 330 Merit Points.]
A knock came a few minutes later.
The same guard from before opened the door.
“This way,” he said, nothing more, already turning to lead him out.
Marcus followed, hands loose at his sides, no zip-ties this time.
Talked my way out of a locked room and a corporate telepath with a small army.
That’s… genuinely insane, when I actually think about it.
He turned it over as he walked, still half-surprised at himself.
Where did that even come from? sitting across from Emma Frost, laying out terms like I do this for a living.
Combat training doesn’t explain confidence.
Unless… does it?
Maybe knowing you can actually handle yourself physically changes how you carry yourself in a room, even when nobody’s throwing punches.
Or maybe I’m just built different now.
Who knows.
The guard led him down a final hallway, stopping outside a door with a keypad instead of a lock.
“Yours,” the guard said, tapping in a code.
The door clicked open.
“Her room’s one floor down — you can visit anytime you like. Your code is 0000. Hers is 1111.”
“Thanks.”
The guard’s face stayed plain, no expression visible at all — the look of someone genuinely well-trained to mind his own business and nothing else.
He turned and walked away without a word, no goodbye’s.
The door clicked shut behind him, followed immediately by the heavy, muffled thud of a magnetic lock engaging.
Marcus didn’t bother checking the handle.
He knew it was sealed.
He took a few steps inside and slowly scanned the space.
Recessed lighting, a massive flat-screen, and a leather sectional that probably cost more than his apartment.
No visible cameras, which just meant they were pinholes hidden in the smoke detectors or behind the mirrors.
He dropped backward onto the memory-foam mattress, staring up at the immaculate white ceiling.
Still a cage.
Just a nicer one. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Still, as far as setups went, he’d take it.
Buying time had been the entire goal.
He needed a minute to figure out Marie and forge actual, genuine trust rather than the brittle compliance Emma was pushing for.
Whatever the System required to fully cement their bond.
Emma Frost was ultimately just a local problem.
She was a CEO with a telepathic god complex and a manageable agenda.
The real issue was the wider board.
In a world where Stark tech and mutant politics shared the same news cycle, the actual nightmares hadn’t even shown their faces yet.
Mad Titans.
Latverian dictators.
Cosmic threats he couldn’t even name.
Surviving a handful of corporate thugs was one thing, but whatever baseline skills he currently had wouldn’t scratch the surface of what was coming.
His survivability rating was still practically a rounding error.
The smart play was to stay put, let Frost foot the bill for his protection, and quietly drain every single drop of advantage out of this arrangement.
Closing his eyes, Marcus brought up the glowing blue interface in the dark.
“System. When is the next refresh of the shop?” he muttered into the quiet room.
The blue interface rippled, shifting from his status screen to a new, compartmentalized layout.
[MERIT SHOP — TIER 1]
[Current Balance: 330 Merit Points]
[Next Inventory Refresh: 14 Hours, 12 Minutes.]
…
Emma sat behind her desk, the city lights spread out below the window behind her, a folder open in front of her that should have told her everything and somehow told her nothing at all.
Across from her, one of her research analysts stood with a tablet in hand, waiting for permission to speak.
“Go ahead.”
“Marcus Cole. Nineteen years old, born and raised in Queens.” The analyst scrolled through the file.
“Public school, unremarkable grades, no criminal record. Parents both deceased, no other family listed. He’s been on his own since he was seventeen, working odd jobs.”
“No red flags,” the analyst continued.
“Frankly, ma’am, there’s nothing here that would explain—”
She let the silence stretch for a long moment before raising a single, dismissive hand.
The analyst gave a stiff nod and quickly saw himself out.
Once the heavy door clicked shut, leaving her completely alone, Emma planted one heel against the floor.
With a slight push of her leg, she spun her high-backed leather chair away from the marble desk, turning to face the floor-to-ceiling glass.
…
Two hundred miles away, in an underground sub-level of a classified S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, the lighting was equally dim, though far less luxurious.
A massive holographic display illuminated the center of the room, casting a pale blue glow over the face of Nick Fury.
He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his single eye fixed on the footage looping on the main screen.
It was a shaky, amateur cell phone video from Monaco.
A man in a scorched orange jumpsuit—Ivan Vanko—was walking calmly down the race track, twin whips of crackling, superheated plasma tearing through million-dollar Formula One cars like tissue paper.
The glowing ring of an Arc Reactor was clearly visible beneath his burned clothes.
The door behind Fury hissed open.
“The Pentagon is losing their minds,” Agent Phil Coulson said, stepping into the blue light of the monitors.
He held a secure tablet tucked under one arm.
“Senator Stern is using the Monaco footage to push the Mutant Registration Act harder than ever. He’s arguing that if a Russian convict can build an Arc Reactor in a cave and attack Tony Stark in broad daylight, the government needs absolute control over enhanced individuals to compensate for the security risk.”
“Stern is an opportunist,” Fury said, eyes still fixed on the footage.
Vanko swung a whip; a car flipped violently through the air.
“Which brings us to the secondary issue,” Coulson said, his tone shifting.
He tapped his tablet, and the footage of Monaco shrank, replaced by a series of high-resolution satellite images.
Four black, unmarked SUVs sitting outside a cheap motel in Queens.
“Hours ago,” Coulson reported.
“An unauthorized, heavily armed paramilitary snatch-and-grab on US soil. The comms encryption was military-grade, but our algorithms cracked the routing. It belongs to Frost International.”
Fury finally turned away from the screen, his heavy leather coat sweeping around his ankles.
“Emma Frost sent a tactical hit squad to a two-star motel in Queens? Why?”
“To pick up someone.” Coulson swiped the tablet again.
A grainy DMV photo of Marie appeared on the screen, alongside a flashing red genetic marker.
“Marie D’Ancanto. Eighteen. Fled Mississippi days ago after putting her boyfriend in a coma. S.H.I.E.L.D. automated systems flagged a Class-3 mutant energy spike, but we lost her trail in New York.”
…
Frost Tower, Marcus Room
He closed his eyes, sinking deeper into the mattress, the events of the entire day finally catching up with him all at once — the rooftop, the raid, the car, Emma’s office, all of it collapsing into the kind of heavy, dreamless exhaustion that didn’t care how comfortable the bed was.
He didn’t know how long he was out.
Minutes, maybe an hour.
A knock at the door dragged him back.
Marcus’s eyes snapped open, every trace of sleep gone in an instant.
He sat up slowly, glancing at the door, at the keypad glowing faint green beside it.