The remaining 10,000 points he left alone. He had healing and luck. That was enough for now.
He found a quiet side street and tried the Sabretooth claws.
The nails on his right hand began extending and he stopped it immediately, breathing through his teeth until the pain settled.
The wounds were already closing. Gone in seconds.
He’d always read that Wolverine felt it every single time—bone pushing through skin and muscle, the body registering it as damage no matter how fast it healed.
As he stepped out onto the street, he slowed near a signal junction, the light still red. Cars waited in a loose line, engines humming, nothing out of place.
His gaze drifted—then settled as he spotted the person he least expected to see, and a plan formed in his head.
In the car, Deep was having a good morning.
A new recruit was coming in. Female. And before anyone else got to her—before she found her footing or figured out how things actually worked at Vought—he was going to make sure she understood the hierarchy.
He leaned back in his seat, already rehearsing it. Mentorship. Guidance. The importance of connecting with a senior member of The Seven—
The back seat vanished.
One second he was in the car, the next he was airborne—no door, no window, nothing but open road rushing up to meet him.
He hit the asphalt shoulder-first, skidding and bouncing across lanes before friction dragged him to a stop.
Around him, cars slammed on their brakes all at once—tires screaming, vehicles fishtailing as they fought to avoid piling into the sudden chaos.
The Deep lay there for a second, processing.
He got up slowly, palms torn from the road, suit shredded at the shoulder, one side of his face already swelling. He looked at the stopped traffic. At the phones already out. At the wreckage of the back seat smoking in the middle of the road.
Then he looked at the figure standing twenty feet away, mask covering the lower half of his face, eyes carrying a faint red glow that hadn’t fully faded.
The driver got out of the car, took one look at Mark, and fired straight into his chest. The impact forced Mark a step back, his body reacting before anything else could register, the force of it settling deep.
Then something shifted.
His eyes brightened, sharp and sudden, and a blast struck the ground directly in front of the driver’s feet, concrete bursting upward in a violent spray. The driver recoiled instantly, scrambling back behind the car door, using it as cover.
"WHAT THE FUCK—"
Mark lowered his gaze to his chest, watching in silence as the bullet forced its way back out, dropping onto the road with a dull sound. The wound sealed itself immediately after, leaving no trace behind.
Behind him, someone in the stopped traffic had already started screaming. Others were out of their cars, phones up, not running—frozen in that particular way people freeze when something is happening that they know they should leave but can’t stop watching.
"He just got shot—"
"Is that the guy from the news—"
Mark started walking toward the Deep.
"Do you know me?" he asked.
The Deep stood his ground but his eyes were doing the math fast. The news that morning.
The park. The guy who’d announced he was coming for The Seven. He’d assumed whoever it was would need time to build up to something. He hadn’t expected to get pulled out of a moving car on a Tuesday.
"So why don’t we play?"
The Deep cursed under his breath and moved.
He cut hard left between the stopped vehicles, fast enough that the first blast took out the road where he’d been standing, asphalt splitting and fragmenting from the impact.
A woman behind a sedan shrieked and dropped flat. The second blast clipped the front of a parked SUV, the entire hood crumpling inward, the vehicle jumping two feet sideways from the force, setting off its alarm.
"MOVE MOVE MOVE—"
People were running now, properly running, the freeze breaking all at once as the blasts got closer to the crowd. But nobody dropped their phones.
The Deep was trying to close the gap, looking for one clean angle to get inside the blasts, but Mark wasn’t giving him the window.
Every time he cut left the next blast was already there, forcing him right, herding him back toward the open road where there was no cover left to use.
Then one caught him clean in the chest.
The force drove The Deep straight back into the building wall behind him, concrete cracking from the impact, dust dropping from the facade above. He slid down it and hit the ground hard.
Mark was already moving.
Before The Deep could get his bearings, Mark hit him again—two more blasts at close range, driving him back into the wall each time he tried to push off it.
"—the fuck is wrong with you—" Deep choked out, trying to get his footing and failing as another hit slammed him back.
Mark stepped in, closing the distance without slowing, looking down at him on the floor, his gaze dropping for a second to his crotch—this guy used that in ways that made a certain blonde feel disgusted, so it might as well take a temporary leave.
"...yeah, this should work."
Deep blinked up at him, pain and confusion mixing fast. "Wait—what the hell are you—"
Mark lifted his foot.
"Hey—HEY—don’t—!"
It came down.
The Deep made a sound that had never been recorded in any Vought promotional material and folded.
The crowd that had been running thirty seconds ago had stopped.
Every single phone was up.
One of The Seven—one of the most recognizable faces in the country, a man whose face was on energy drinks and endorsed by the President—was on the ground in a heap getting beaten by someone nobody had heard of forty eight hours ago.
Nobody was leaving.
Mark looked at the crowd, at the wall of phones pointed at him, and raised his middle finger.
"This is just the start," he said. "Soon all of The Seven will be in the same state."
The Deep grabbed the ground and started pulling himself up.
"You—"
Mark kicked him in the face.
*****
A/N: Advanced Chapters are available on Patreon.
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