Three silver streaks crossed the room.
Savin saw them clearly — Extremis had sharpened every sense he possessed. Each projectile started compact, no larger than a thick coin. Mid-flight, they unfolded — four curved saw-blade edges deploying from each disc, two spinning clockwise, two counter-clockwise. The result was three miniature buzzsaws screaming through the air at lethal velocity.
The blades arced inward from different angles, converging on Savin's upper body. No single dodge could avoid all three.
But they were slower than bullets. Savin had time.
He caught two — one in each hand, bare-palming the spinning edges. The saw teeth shredded his fingers, his palms, his wrists — grinding flesh to pulp on contact. But his superheated blood fouled the mechanisms, warping the metal, and both blades seized and died in his grip. Expensive scrap metal.
The third blade he ducked. It whistled past his ear and vanished into the corridor behind him.
Two hands destroyed. Thirty seconds to regenerate. And Kade was standing right there — out of weapons, out of tricks, close enough to touch.
Savin should have been savoring the moment. Instead, he saw something that sent ice through his burning veins.
Kade was smiling.
Every survival instinct Savin had ever possessed screamed at once. He lunged — kill the man, end whatever was coming — but he was already too late.
The third blade.
The one he'd dodged. The one that had flown past him into the dark.
It came back.
Auto-tracking. Target-locked. Returning to finish what it started.
The spinning saw teeth hit the back of Savin's neck at full velocity — biting through muscle, severing tendons, grinding into vertebrae. The cervical spine shattered. The blade buried itself in the wound, lodged between the fragments of bone like a key jammed in a lock.
Savin's body went limp. He dropped at Kade's feet like a puppet with its strings cut.
The spinal cord was completely severed. Extremis could regenerate flesh, bone, even organs — but it couldn't replace the function of a spine that was physically blocked from reconnecting. The blade was still embedded in the wound, its metal frame preventing the Extremis virus from bridging the gap. To heal, the virus would need to melt the blade down to liquid iron first — and that would take time Kade wasn't going to give him.
Savin was a plant. Alive — Extremis wouldn't let him die — but paralyzed from the neck down.
Kade activated the Sensory Gauntlet's heat insulation and grabbed Savin's head with both hands. The skin was scalding — several hundred degrees — but the gauntlet held. He twisted. Pulled.
The last strip of connective tissue tore free. The head came off.
Savin's headless body began cooling immediately. The red glow faded. The heat dissipated. Without a brain to direct the regeneration, the Extremis virus had nothing to work with.
Kade sprinted up the ramp to sublevel one, found a bathroom, dropped the head into a toilet, and slammed the lid shut.
"Good luck crawling up a flight of stairs to reattach that."
Three boomerang blades. All destroyed — two shredded by Savin's hands, one permanently embedded in his neck stump. Norman's prototypes, gone. Kade had been hoping to reverse-engineer them.
He briefly considered putting a pulse round through the toilet lid out of spite. Then decided it was unnecessary. Extremis could regenerate a lot — but it wasn't Deadpool. Without reattachment, Savin was finished.
Kade left the garage fast.
The firefight and explosions had been loud enough to wake the entire neighborhood. Police sirens were already audible in the distance. SHIELD would be close behind — an incident of this magnitude in their own backyard wouldn't go uninvestigated.
Kade had zero interest in explaining himself to American law enforcement.
Blitz and Masque were with Matt's group, escorting Harry and the old man to Oscorp Tower. Through the AllSpark link, Kade confirmed the convoy was moving smoothly — aside from Matt threatening physical violence if Blitz didn't turn off the music.
Normal operations, then.
No taxis came to Hell's Kitchen at this hour. No buses ran. Walking the streets meant running into a police cordon. So Kade did what he'd done before: pried open a manhole cover, held his breath, and dropped into the sewer.
Sparks. Controlled descent. Night vision.
He walked.
A few hundred meters into the tunnel system, Norman's call came through.
"Kade — are you all right? There are reports of massive explosions in Hell's Kitchen. Police have sealed off several blocks. Do you need help?"
"I'm fine. Just taking the scenic route home. Is Harry safe?"
Norman Osborn — future Green Goblin, current terrified father — had opened with concern for Kade before asking about his own son. That said something.
"Harry's home. He's safe. I can't... Kade, I can never repay what you've done tonight." Norman's voice was raw, stripped of every layer of corporate composure. "Your friend — the one who brought Harry back — he wouldn't stay. Left the moment Harry was inside. If you see him again, please tell him I owe him everything. Both of you. I mean that."
"That's just how he is. Don't take it personally." Kade could picture Matt — mission complete, no interest in gratitude, already back on a rooftop somewhere listening for the next person who needed help. "Harry's back. That's what matters. I'm going to go home and sleep for about sixteen hours. We can talk tomorrow."
He was about to hang up when a thought surfaced.
"Norman — the other hostage. The older man. Did you identify him?"
"Yes. I know him personally. His name is Edmund Hammer — Justin Hammer's father."
Kade stopped walking.
"They kidnapped your son and Hammer's father?"
"That's what it looks like. Two military-industrial families, both targeted simultaneously. Kade — I think this is connected to the weapons contracts that opened up when Stark Industries shut down its arms division. Someone is trying to force Oscorp and Hammer Industries out of the bidding."
Norman Osborn was a brilliant businessman. The panic of the kidnapping had scrambled his thinking, but with Harry safe and the second hostage identified, his analytical mind had snapped back online. The logic was clean: remove the two biggest competitors from the market, and whoever was behind this could swallow every contract Tony Stark had abandoned.
Kade saw it too. And what he saw went deeper than Norman's analysis.
AIM. Extremis soldiers. Stane's resources and connections. The kidnappings weren't random crime — they were corporate warfare conducted with superhuman assets. Stane was building a new weapons empire from the wreckage of Stark Industries, and he was willing to burn every bridge in the industry to do it.
But the part that made Kade's stomach tighten had nothing to do with business.
In the movies he'd watched in his previous life, none of this had happened. Stane's conspiracy had been contained — limited to Tony, limited to the Iron Monger suit, limited to a rooftop fight that ended with Stane dead and Tony triumphant.
Harry Osborn hadn't been kidnapped. Hammer's father hadn't been taken. AIM and Extremis hadn't entered the picture this early. The timeline Kade remembered — the sequence of events he'd been counting on to predict the future — was no longer reliable.
The butterfly effect.
His presence in this world — saving Tony, working at Stark Industries, creating AllSpark technology — had changed something. Shifted the balance. Given Stane new options, new allies, new reasons to escalate. The ripples were spreading, and the future Kade thought he knew was dissolving into uncertainty.
He stood alone in the dark sewer, the smell of Hell's Kitchen's plumbing filling his lungs, and felt the ground shift beneath his feet.
The script was gone. From here on out, he was improvising.