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Two black SUVs pulled up at the parking garage entrance. The bodies were impossible to miss — two corpses sprawled across the concrete, the stench of blood cutting through even the vehicle's closed cabin.
The man in the passenger seat leaned out the window, glanced at the dead, and sneered.
"Useless. No wonder they're stuck in this slum. Can't even handle a simple babysitting job."
He made a phone call. Brief. Clipped.
"Boss, the Russians had a problem... understood, the hostages are priority... I'll bring them back."
He hung up and turned to the driver. "Drive in."
"Mr. Savin, the barrier gate is still —"
"Did I stutter? Drive in."
A flicker of red light in the dark cabin. A pulse of heat.
The engines roared. Both SUVs smashed through the barrier gate and rolled over the corpses without slowing down, tires crushing what was left into something that no longer resembled human remains.
Savin didn't know that the moment his vehicles had entered camera range, Violet had locked on. Every feed in the garage was hers. Every frame was being relayed in real-time to Kade's Tactical Optics.
Kade was behind a support column on sublevel one. Matt, Harry, and the old man were already gone — out the secondary exit, heading for Oscorp Tower under Matt's radar-guided protection.
He watched the two SUVs barrel down the entry ramp on his Optics display and exhaled.
"Good. They came in the front. Either they're stupid, or they don't know there's a second way out."
Either worked. It meant Matt's group was clear.
The SUVs reached sublevel one. As they crossed the threshold, every light in the garage died at once.
Total darkness.
Violet's work. Overloading the main breaker was trivial — a controlled power surge that fried the fuse box in under a second.
The vehicles' headlights flared to life — and Kade was already moving. He burst from behind the pillar, Pulse Pistol raised, and put four rounds into the four headlights in rapid succession. Glass shattered. Bulbs exploded. Darkness swallowed the garage again.
His playing field. His rules.
The occupants had no choice but to dismount. Doors opened. Tactical flashlights clicked on — narrow beams sweeping the dark like searchlights over a prison yard.
They fired at everything. Every shadow, every shape, every hint of movement. The paralyzed Russian guards on the floor — Masque's handiwork from minutes ago — were caught in the crossfire. Flashlight beams found their prone bodies and automatic weapons turned them into shredded meat.
Killed by their own reinforcements. Not by the people who'd come to save a child.
Kade watched from behind the pillar, Optics in X-ray mode, reading the scene through solid concrete.
Ten men. Full combat loadout — body armor, automatic weapons, tactical gear. They moved with discipline: covering angles, maintaining spacing, communicating with hand signals. Professional mercenaries or ex-special forces. The kind of men who killed for a living and were very good at it.
In his previous life, Kade's entire SASR unit going up against a team like this would have been a coin flip at best. Heavy casualties guaranteed either way.
But Kade wasn't fighting with his previous life's equipment anymore.
During the minutes before the SUVs arrived, he'd disassembled half an abandoned car in the garage and forged a replacement Sensory Gauntlet — the one he'd given to Connors left him one hand short. Now both arms were armored again. Both hands could grip the weight of a Pulse Pistol. And with two pistols, he had eighty rounds of pulse energy before needing to reload.
Eighty rounds at full auto would slag a tank. Against flesh and Kevlar, it was overkill by a factor of ten.
Kade holstered both pistols and drove his gauntleted fingers into the concrete column. Hand over hand, he climbed — three meters up, boots braced against the pillar, moving fast. Below, the mercenaries heard the scraping and opened fire on the column. Bullets sparked off the concrete, chewing divots out of the surface, but the pillar was structural — designed to hold up the building above. Small-arms fire wasn't getting through.
At three meters, Kade kicked off.
His body arced backward through the air — a full backflip off the column, inverted, both pistols drawn in the same motion. At the apex of the rotation, hanging upside down in the dark with nothing but the Tactical Optics between him and blindness, he opened fire.
Gaze-lock engaged.
His hands became instruments of the targeting system — vibrating at frequencies no human wrist could achieve, the magnetic fields in both gauntlets adjusting aim dozens of times per second. Every flash of his eyes tagged a target. Every trigger pull found its mark.
Pulse energy screamed out in twin streams of blue-white light, turning the darkness into a strobe-lit nightmare. Nearly forty rounds in under two seconds, distributed across ten targets with mechanical precision.
Kade landed on his feet. The garage fell silent.
Where ten armed men had been standing, there was now a crater of scorched concrete and organic debris that bore no resemblance to human beings. Forty pulse rounds concentrated on a ten-man cluster had the combined effect of a cluster bomb detonation.
Kade checked the Optics. All targets down. Injuries incompatible with human survival. Beyond medical intervention. Beyond recognition.
He allowed himself half a second of satisfaction. Started to lower his pistols —
Then the darkness lit up.
Red. Bright, searing, volcanic red — emanating from somewhere in the pile of destroyed bodies. The Optics registered the temperature: over a thousand degrees and climbing.
"Extremis," Kade said immediately.
He was already reloading — thumbing fresh energy cells into both pistols, racing to finish before the thing in the fire could reconstitute itself. He'd seen this before, in the Afghan desert. The glowing cracks, the impossible heat, the regeneration that laughed at conventional damage.
But the Extremis soldier — Savin, the buzz-cut man — was burning too hot. The thousand-degree heat ignited everything around him: the dead mercenaries' clothing, their body fat, their ammunition.
The pile of corpses became a bonfire. And then the bonfire became a bomb.
Gunpowder in the magazines cooked off first — sharp, staccato pops like fireworks. Then a grenade detonated. Then another. Normal fire couldn't reach the ignition temperatures needed to set off military ordnance — but Extremis wasn't normal fire. It burned hotter than a steel foundry.
The chain reaction was instantaneous.
Kade ran.
He made it to the ramp leading to sublevel two just as the first major detonation ripped through sublevel one. The shockwave caught him mid-stride — a wall of superheated air that picked him up and hurled him down the ramp like a ragdoll. He hit the concrete hard, rolled, and lay still for several seconds while the world rang like a bell.
Dust. Smoke. The groan of stressed concrete. The sprinkler system — what was left of it — hissed to life overhead, accomplishing nothing against the inferno above.
Kade pushed himself to his feet. Ears ringing. Ribs bruised. Alive.
Above him, in the heart of the fire, something moved.
A shape — barely human, half its body still missing, the remaining half glowing like molten iron. Flesh regenerated in real time: muscle fibers knitting over exposed bone, skin flowing like liquid across raw tissue. Limbs that had been blown apart were regrowing.
The shape solidified. Stood. Became a man.
Buzz cut. Lazy grin. Five thousand degrees of walking death.
Savin cracked his neck, rolled his newly regenerated shoulders, and looked down into the darkness of sublevel two.