Blade moved on instinct.
Vampire reflexes kicked in before thought could catch up, his vision sharpening until the whole world narrowed to the falling edge above him.
Both hands snapped up. The silver sword flashed through the red-lit room and met the descending strike dead-on.
CLANG.
The sound hit like a grenade in the tight operating room. Sparks burst between the blades, and the air slapped outward hard enough to stir the hanging hooks overhead.
Whoever had jumped him had gravity, momentum, and a whole lot of murder behind that swing. Blade had blocked from a bad angle, and his arms paid for it. Numbness shot down to his wrists. His boots skidded back through the blood-slick floor, cutting two ugly tracks half a meter long.
Only then did he get a good look at her.
Asian woman. White martial arts gi, or it used to be white. Now it was crusted with old black blood, stiff in places, brown in others. Her eyes were the same dead grey-white he had seen on every zombie he had put down. Her jaw hung wrong, loosened by months of feeding, showing sharp teeth clogged with scraps of meat.
In her hands was a Japanese katana.
Beautiful weapon. Shame about the gore baked into the edge.
Colleen Wing.
Defenders ally. Once one of the nastiest swordswomen in New York.
A wet, whistling snarl tore out of her throat.
She gave him no time to process it.
Her wrists turned, and the katana became a blur. Steel spun into a tight net of cutting edges, fast enough to make the emergency lights stutter across it, and she brought it straight down at his skull.
The virus had not taken her skill.
If anything, it had made her worse. All the little limits the brain kept in place to stop a body from tearing itself apart were gone. No pain. No fear. No fatigue. Just muscle, technique, and a dead woman's rage.
Every swing cracked through the air. Every cut came in too hard, too fast, with the kind of recklessness only the dead could afford.
Blade planted his feet, locked both hands around his hilt, and blocked.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Steel rang against steel in a furious drumroll, almost like automatic fire. Sparks sprayed from titanium alloy and folded katana steel, flashing under the pulsing red lights. For an instant the hooks overhead appeared, rusted and crooked. The next instant they vanished back into shadow.
The place looked like hell
Colleen drove a low thrust at his gut. Blade knocked it aside, stepped in tight, and hammered a reverse elbow into her jaw.
Crunch.
Her mandible shattered. Her face twisted at an angle no living person could survive, her head snapping sideways toward her shoulder.
She did not even blink.
Instead, she used the twist of her own broken head to feed a spinning heel kick that caught him square in the chest.
Blade flew back. His boots hit, slipped, caught again. Two rough steps later, the small of his back slammed into the surgical table hard enough to rattle the metal frame.
He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth.
Across from him stood a killing machine wearing Colleen Wing's skin, holding Colleen Wing's sword.
Behind the dark red lenses, Blade's expression did not change. No panic. No hesitation.
Something colder woke up instead.
Recognition.
One master of edged weapons staring across a blood-soaked room at another.
Blade reached up, unsnapped the collar of his tactical coat, and shrugged it off in one smooth motion. The coat hit the floor with a wet slap.
Next came the submachine gun at his hip. Then the tactical grenades. One by one, he unclipped the extra gear and let it drop. Metal clattered into the blood.
When he was done, he stood bare from the waist up under the red lights.
No guns. No tricks.
Swords only.
"Wow! Old-school steel-on-steel! A cowboy-samurai deathmatch!" Deadpool pushed himself upright on the table, delighted beyond reason, and clapped his tiny hands. "If I weren't still technically an infant, I'd pull out my own twin katanas and jump in!"
"Natasha." Blade reset his grip and settled into stance without looking back. "Take the loud mouth and go."
Then, quieter, "This one's mine."
Natasha did not argue. Good operatives knew when sentiment became dead weight.
She grabbed Deadpool by the loose flesh at the back of his neck and hauled him up like a plucked turkey.
"Hey! Careful! I'm not wearing a diaper!" Deadpool kicked and flailed in the air. "This smooth baby skin needs Johnson's Baby Lotion at minimum! Oh, and while you're at it, could you grab my two katanas from the corner? And my favorite little knife?"
Natasha had a pistol in her free hand and exactly zero interest in his commentary. Her eyes swept the exit once, and then she charged out of the basement.
"Oh... fine. I can tell from that ice-cold face that you're too busy for quality childcare right now."
The door swallowed them.
Inside the slaughter room, only two figures remained.
The blood under their boots had been churned into thick, dark mud. The air between them felt packed tight, pressed down by two different kinds of killing intent.
"Come on."
Blade spat blood onto the floor, rolled his sword through a clean reverse flourish, and let the tip settle toward the red pool at his feet.
Colleen answered with a sound that should not have come from any human throat.
Then she raised the gore-slick katana and launched herself forward, a white blur with a blade at its center.
Their swords collided again.
This time the sparks were blinding.
---
Outside the sealed room, Natasha sprinted down the underground passage with one hand clamped around the back of Deadpool's neck.
"Hey! Slow down!" Wade's half-grown body swung wildly from her grip. "My brand-new baby vertebrae are gonna snap! Child Protective Services would have a whole binder on you!"
Natasha did not look at him.
She ran faster.
The zombie swordswoman was dangerous, no question. But Eric was half vampire. He could survive a duel like that.
Probably.
The priority was getting this obnoxious little food supply back to the surface. Veyric and the others were up there holding back the full weight of the Defenders, and that line would not hold forever.
She was halfway down the corridor, closing in on a ventilation junction, when the trap sprung.
BOOM.
Behind her, the operating room door dropped out of its housing and slammed into the floor. The impact shook the passage. One second the way back existed. The next, Blade and zombie Colleen were sealed inside the blood-soaked chamber like meat in a vault.
Before Natasha could turn fully, the motor above her head groaned.
BANG.
A blast door twenty centimeters thick dropped in front of her like a guillotine. Dust burst up from the floor. The path ahead disappeared behind a solid wall of metal.
"Damn it!"
Natasha skidded, let the momentum carry into her hips, and drove a vicious kick into the door.
The boom was dull and heavy.
The door did not move a millimeter.
She spun back toward the operating room, now dozens of meters away and sealed off by another slab of metal. "Eric?!"
Nothing.
Not even an echo.
Vault-grade blast doors. Full acoustic isolation.
Of course.
Her gaze cut across the walls, floor, and ceiling. No maintenance hatch. No vent grille. No panel loose enough to pry open.
No way out.
"These zombies know how to set traps?"
Cold sweat gathered at her temples. She drew the tactical knife from the sheath on the outside of her thigh.
"Ooh, an escape room!" Deadpool dangled from her grip, his baby face practically vibrating with excitement. "My favorite reality TV format! Although, according to standard Hollywood trash, once the villain traps the hero, this is where they pump in aphrodisiac gas or deadly neurotoxin. Honestly, my underdeveloped little body can't handle anything too intense..."
He was still talking when four or five hidden valves along the base of both walls hissed open at once.
Pale violet gas blasted into the corridor from every direction, hard and fast like water from a pressure hose. In less than a second, the small sealed space was flooded.
Natasha's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
She held her breath and reached for her earpiece, left hand lifting to open the comm channel.
"Vey..."
Too late.
The gas hit faster than anything she had ever trained against. One heartbeat, and it felt like someone had dropped a building-sized hammer on her brain.
"Oh! God! You're crushing my peanut! It was small enough already! This is attempted murder of the future American mega..."
Deadpool's muffled voice faded as the purple fog thickened around them.
Then even he went quiet.
Silence.