As the hot water cascaded down, Ross Vance stood with his eyes closed for a long time.
After cleaning up those scum from the Three-Face Gang today, he felt as though the metallic stench of blood had seeped deep into his nostrils.
It took several thorough rinses before he finally felt clean.
Slipping into a newly bought pair of clean pajamas, he threw himself onto the bed.
The spring mattress creaked loudly beneath him.
Comfortable.
So damn comfortable.
Right now, he felt a plain old mattress was humanity’s greatest invention.
Downstairs, Griffin and the others were packing up their gear, the heavy thud of combat boots echoing intermittently against the wooden floorboards.
Griffin had originally intended to come upstairs for an after-action debrief.
Through the door, Ross had simply told him to get washed up and sleep.
A few dozen small-time thugs plus a mutant with a wind-up time longer than an old lady crossing the street—ten Cadian veterans averaged fewer than four targets apiece.
The opposition hadn’t even drawn their guns before getting impaled.
If he demanded a formal debrief for *that*, would he need to prepare a PowerPoint presentation when they fought Thanos in the future?
He didn’t have the mental energy to care about that right now.
The psionic energy inside his body was still pulsing.
Ross leaned against the headboard, closed his eyes, and tried to channel the psionic energy within.
This wave of enhancement was crucial for him.
Not only was his physical constitution buffed—though not yet at the level of tanking bullets with raw flesh, he could already shrug off ordinary cold weapons.
On the way back, he had tested his stamina and endurance.
Both had improved immensely.
Now he didn’t pant, his legs didn’t waver, and running ten kilometers was a walk in the park.
Moreover, he could coat his entire body in psionic energy, making blocking bullets trivial—the only drawback being a rather steep psionic drain.
“Let’s try something else.”
He sat up and reached out toward the glass cup on the nightstand.
A pale gold light enveloped the glass.
With a gentle twitch, it floated into the air.
He controlled the glass, maneuvering it back and forth through the air, taking it in a loop before gently setting it back down.
Glass met wood with a clean, sharp clack.
“That easy?”
He turned his gaze toward the desk.
An iron desk, easily weighing thirty to forty pounds.
Psionic energy surged forward, lifting it steadily into midair.
He felt a slight resistance, but it was far from exhausting.
He put it back and locked his eyes on the bed he was sitting on.
An iron-framed bed.
With the mattress, it weighed well over a hundred pounds.
Ross rubbed his hands together, extending both palms as psionic energy poured forth from his hands.
Taking a deep breath, he heaved upward, and the bed legs instantly left the floor.
The iron frame groaned and creaked.
Pressure traveled from his arms to his forehead, but it remained entirely within his control.
He raised the bed a meter off the ground, then cranked up the difficulty.
He made the bed rotate slowly in midair.
The corner of the blanket swayed gently as it spun—an utterly surreal sight.
Ross let out a laugh.
Glorious.
A week ago, he was in a cramped apartment, pulling his hair out over his thesis edits.
Now, he was levitating an iron bed in midair for fun.
Defenses, plagiarism checks, formatting errors…
were any of those half as fun as psionic power?
He lowered the bed back down softly, without making a sound.
Then he began messing around with other applications.
He tried conjuring a bolt of psionic lightning from his fingertips, condensing a psionic shield in front of him, and closing his eyes to sense what Griffin was doing next door.
Aside from making a few extra sparks of golden electricity crackle around his fingers, none of it worked.
Fair enough.
It seemed his current psionic mastery was limited to this.
As for lightning, shields, precognition, and spiritual combat—those were high-tier goods.
With his current psionic level, he hadn’t even crossed the threshold.
Converted into Warhammer terms, he was roughly a novice psiker capable of stable external projections.
Nothing special in the Warhammer universe, but compared to most ordinary humans in the Marvel Universe, he was already sitting pretty.
And he possessed an advantage no one else had.
His psionic power welled up directly from the Psionic Source within his body, rather than being drawn from the Warp.
This meant that, in theory, he was unaffected by the Ruinous Powers.
He wouldn’t suddenly hear a succubus whispering in his ear mid-cast.
Of course, that was just in theory.
Whether the seed given by the Emperor was completely pristine was something probably only the Golden Man himself knew.
He needed to grow stronger as quickly as possible, using actual combat to test this hypothesis.
And there were only two paths to growing stronger:
Train his psionics.
Purge heretics.
Every time he eliminated a heretic, the Psionic Source provided feedback.
Ordinary thugs were mere mosquito legs, but a third-rate mutant like Three-Face had doubled his psionic reserves instantly.
What about those higher up?
Kingpin, Bullseye, The Hand, Green Goblin…
And further up?
The Inhumans, the Three Intergalactic Empires, Thanos?
Anything beyond that was outside his current scope of consideration.
Ross lay back against the pillow, resting his head on his hands as he stared at the ceiling.
Training starts tomorrow.
The purge of heretics needed to proceed in tandem.
The Three-Face Gang had been wiped out.
The next task was outward expansion—hunting down those heretics lurking in the shadows one by one.
A few days ago, he was gnawing on rotten apples under a bridge.
Now he had a roof over his head, subordinates, his first pot of gold, and psionic powers.
Life was finally becoming manageable.
Yet he knew deep down that this modest foundation was far from enough to secure a firm footing.
Hell’s Kitchen was just the starter village.
He knew better than anyone how deep the waters of the Marvel Universe really ran.
Information—what he lacked most right now was intelligence.
*Knock, knock, knock.* A sudden tap on the door.
“My Lord, I bought the laptop.”
Ross didn’t move.
With a flick of his finger, telepathic force clicked the door lock open and pulled the door wide.
He was becoming increasingly adept at these minor tricks; it was easier than lifting an arm.
Griffin walked in carrying a laptop and a cell phone, his facial expression far less stern than before.
“Good work, Voss.
Got the network set up?”
“Everything’s set up.”
Griffin handed over the items and added, “My Lord, if there are no other orders, I’ll take two men out in disguise in a bit to secure more funds and purge a few heretics along the way.
According to the scale of the base you mentioned last time, the money we have on hand falls quite short.”
Ross nodded.
The base was something he had brought up casually over dinner last night.
This three-story building was fine for now, but it was ultimately a temporary stop.
For long-term development, he needed a truly reliable sanctuary.
Hidden, secure, capable of storing gear, conducting training, and ideally housing a proper intelligence hub.
Hell’s Kitchen had places like that, but they all required serious cash.
The four million-plus Griffin had seized through gang extortion sounded like a lot, but spent according to military base standards, it was barely seed money.
“Go ahead.
Keep a low profile as the priority.
Only target small fry.
Leave The Hand and Kingpin’s people alone for now.”
“Understood.”
Griffin thumped his chest in a salute and turned to head downstairs.
Before long, the muffled sounds of Griffin coordinating with the others drifted up from below.
Then three pairs of combat boots clattered down the stairs and out the back door, the noise quickly fading into the alleyway.
Ross opened the laptop, connected to the network, and his first search was for mutants.
Information in mainstream media was sparse to a ridiculous degree, with headlines worded so cautiously it seemed everyone was terrified of offending someone.
Only after veering into several dark web forums did he uncover useful intel.
Magneto existed.
Professor X existed.
Both The Brotherhood of Mutants and the X-Men were searchable, their core setups matching his memory closely.
Magneto was the radical leader who had stirred up trouble in Europe a few months back;
Professor X owned a private school in upstate New York, known publicly as “Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,” which was actually the base for the X-Men.
The Mutant Registration Act was being bickered over endlessly in Congress, while societal panic and ostracization were identical to what was depicted in the movies.
He spent over an hour sifting through all this information, saving high-credibility entries into an encrypted document.
The dark web was naturally littered with endless nonsense posts.
Some claimed Magneto was an alien; others swore under oath that they had been mind-controlled by Professor X.
He filtered those out automatically.
Having searched mutants, he moved on to other superheroes.
The result was two words: completely clean.
Searching for Iron Man brought up a rock band; searching for Captain America yielded nothing but museum archives; searching for “Thor” was even more absurd, pulling up a heap of academic papers on Norse mythology.
He tried a few more keywords:
Super Soldier Serum, Green Monster, Arc Reactor.
The first two yielded nothing, but the last one hit paydirt.
An official Stark Industries press release titled *Breakthrough in Clean Energy Project*, accompanied by a photo of Tony Stark himself holding a champagne glass, grinning with a thoroughly punchable expression.
In the background, a massive, glowing machine was faintly visible.
Ross stared at the photo for a long while.
That was right—still that playboy persona, not yet kidnapped, no hole in his chest, and no miniature Arc Reactor embedded in his torso.
He flipped through three months of Stark news, all filled with corporate acquisitions, stock fluctuations, and charity gala gossip.
There was zero reporting about an ambush in Afghanistan or Stark going missing.
This gave him immense peace of mind.
Iron Man hadn’t been born yet.
The curtains on the Marvel saga had not yet been drawn.
Final bosses like Ultron, Thanos, and Dormammu were still sleeping in the mists of the future.
He had time.
Though how much time, he didn’t know.
When would Tony be kidnapped?
Next week?
Next month?
Six months from now?
Had his transmigration triggered a butterfly effect, shifting the timeline forward or backward?
None of it could be determined.
And most critically of all, he had no idea which version of the Marvel Universe he had dropped into.
The coexistence of mutants and the Avengers already overturned the Cinematic Universe canon.
Either this was a hybrid world centered on comic canon, or the movies and comics had been mashed together here.
Either scenario meant he couldn’t use any single movie timeline to predict the future.
What would come would come, but the order and scale might be completely scrambled.
Thinking too much gave him a headache.
Ross tossed the computer aside and lay flat with his arms behind his head.
Since he couldn’t predict it, he might as well stop guessing.
Get stronger—grind himself to death getting stronger—until he could beat Thanos when Thanos showed up, judge the Celestials when the Celestials arrived, and if he couldn’t beat them, lay low until he could.
Didn’t the Big E say that dying means returning to Terra anyway?
What if the Imperium actually possessed resurrection technology?
Ross caught himself laughing at the thought.
Before crossing over, he had been terrified of dying, but afterward, he was strangely less afraid.
After all, under these circumstances, the more afraid of death you were, the faster you’d die.
As Ross was leaning back on the bed mapping out his next moves, a sudden warmth flared in his chest.
A fresh surge of power welled up from deep within the Psionic Source.
The boost wasn’t huge, but the sensation was unmistakable.
Griffin and his crew had succeeded.
Separated by who knows how many streets, he was sitting at home soaking up the XP.
“Having minions really is sweet—leveling up while lying in bed.
Heavenly.”
Ross lay back, crossed his legs, and his smile stretched almost from ear to ear.
Before long, the back door creaked open.
Griffin led his men into the living room.
The three wore jackets and hoodies bought from a thrift store; their faces weren’t spattered with blood, but a faint scent of gunpowder hovered around them.
Griffin set a bulging duffel bag on the coffee table and pulled open the zipper.
Inside were stacked bundles of rubber-banded US dollars, interspersed with a few gleaming yellow gold bars.
“My Lord, tonight’s haul was good.
About forty kilograms of gold.
Purity hasn’t been tested yet, but at market price, it’s worth at least two million.
Eight point five million in cash, all used bills, non-sequential.
We also ran into an arms deal going down, but the shipment was just handguns and shotguns—useless to us, so I left them.”
“Great job.”
Ross picked up a gold bar and weighed it in his hand.
It felt heavy and solid, much more substantial than paper cash.
“Leaving the guns was the right call.
Our current warehouse is already packed just storing your standard-issue kit; if we pile up more junk, we won’t even have room to turn around.
A few more runs and we’ll have enough seed money for the secret base.
Renting places isn’t a long-term solution.
If I suddenly summoned an Astartes right now, the ceiling of this building couldn’t even handle him standing up, let alone housing him.”
Griffin nodded, and after finishing his official report, his tone shifted.
“My Lord, there’s one more thing.
During tonight’s operation, we ran into someone unusual.
Dressed in a dark red night suit, he tailed us from the East Side until we spotted him.
It took us four alleys to shake him off.
The man was highly skilled, moving extremely fast in urban terrain, but he isn’t a trained soldier—he looks like someone trained in street fighting.
Furthermore, he carries no stench of Chaos.
He’s just an ordinary human; no heretical traits detected for now.”
Hell’s Kitchen.
Dark red night suit.
Capable of tailing a Cadian veteran like Griffin through four alleys before being shaken off in the dead of night.
Skilled, but not military.
Not a heretic.
He recognized this person.
“Are you sure he was wearing dark red?”
“Certain.
A streetlamp caught him once—dark crimson leaning toward deep red, not black.”
Ross fell silent for a few seconds, his fingers tapping slowly against the coffee table.
A dark red suit in Hell’s Kitchen—there was only one person.
Matt Murdock.
Daredevil.
A blind lawyer defending the poor by day, leaping across rooftops in Hell’s Kitchen to fight Kingpin by night.
Top-tier among Marvel’s ordinary combatants.
Though he didn’t kill, no gang he targeted ever came out unscathed.
“Leave him alone for now.”
Ross raised his head, his tone shifting from lazy casualness to a sharp, formal command.
“However, he poses a threat to us—not a combat threat, but an intelligence threat.
He knows our crew has arrived in Hell’s Kitchen, and sooner or later, he’ll dig up the truth.
Before he figures us out, we’ll figure him out first.
Shadow him discreetly.
Uncover his true identity, his daily routine, the location of his base—the more detailed, the better.
Remember, do not get caught.
This man’s perception is extremely sharp.
He may be blind, but his hearing can catch your heartbeat.”
Griffin’s eyes narrowed slightly.
He clearly didn’t think much of a guy in a night suit, but since Ross said his perception was extremely sharp, Griffin wouldn’t underestimate him.
“Understood, my Lord.
We’ll make the arrangements immediately.”