And yet, just two centimeters from Eddie's eye—
Snap!
A sharp, impossibly crisp sound rang out.
The pen, flying fast enough to kill, stopped dead in midair as if it had struck an invisible wall.
No.
Not hanging in midair.
It had been caught.
In the shadows, a large hand had intercepted it with nothing more than thumb and forefinger, stopping the barrel as casually as if it were plucking lint from the air.
That force, enough to kill a man instantly, failed to create even the slightest ripple between those two fingers.
Not a bit of wasted motion.
Not a hint of strain.
"How... is that possible?"
For the first time in his life as a professional killer, that thought crossed Bullseye's mind.
He followed the hand upward.
In the shadowed corner of the room stood a man.
He wore a plain black hoodie with no emblem on it, and a black medical mask that covered most of his face.
Only his eyes were visible.
They were calm.
Too calm.
The kind of eyes that looked as if they could see straight through a person's soul.
Clark Parker.
He stood there quietly, without taking any kind of fighting stance at all. From top to bottom, his posture looked full of openings.
But to Bullseye's animal instincts, the man in front of him wasn't human.
He was a beast that could kill him at any moment.
He was the abyss in the middle of the sea.
And Bullseye was already drowning in it.
Inside Clark's head, the little devil was pounding on drums and cymbals in delight.
Look at his face! He's about to wet himself! Crush him! Like snapping an Oreo in half!
The little angel, meanwhile, grabbed the devil and tried to haul him back.
No! Clark! Just disable the hand! That's enough!
"You know, you've got potential," the little devil said approvingly to the angel. "You could join my side someday."
Clark sighed inwardly.
He hated killers like this most of all, the kind who treated human life like trash.
And he hadn't only just arrived.
He had already been here while Bullseye was cutting through the police detail.
Using super-speed, he had moved through the scene, altering every fatal strike into something survivable. By the time Bullseye entered the room, everyone outside had already been relocated to emergency care, and Clark had fed each of them a little of his own energy.
Enough to stabilize them.
Enough that, later, they'd likely come out stronger than before.
Clark wasn't someone who could just watch and do nothing.
If he saw people who needed help, his first instinct was always to help.
That came from Ben, and from something deeper in his own nature.
But refusing to kill men like this?
That part still didn't come naturally to him.
"Your skills are incredible," Clark said, a little sadly. "So why do this with them? You could've been something better."
Bullseye was human potential sharpened to an absurd degree.
He had just chosen the worst possible road.
Before the sentence had even fully settled, Clark's fingers tightened slightly.
Crack!
The hard plastic pen crumbled between his fingers into powder, drifting down in soft grains onto the white hospital sheets.
Bullseye was still a top-tier killer.
Shock only held him for an instant before instinct took over.
Without a word, he exploded backward, opening distance.
At the same time, both hands swept to his waist, and eight scalpels flashed between his fingers.
"You don't get to judge my life, freak!" Bullseye snarled. He hated people like this more than anything, people who thought they could tell him what he should have been.
Hearing him shout, Eddie even stirred slightly on the bed, half-conscious and furious despite barely being alive.
For fuck's sake, I'm trying to sleep here and people are screaming again? Does nobody have any manners?!
Tsst, tsst, tsst, tsst!
Eight scalpels cut through the air on eight completely different trajectories, sealing off every possible direction Clark might dodge.
The targets were brutally precise.
Eyes.
Throat.
Heart.
The tendons behind the knees.
This was Bullseye's signature move.
No one had ever dodged it at this range.
No one.
He was absolutely certain of that.
Clark watched the scalpels scream toward him.
His expression didn't change at all.
He didn't try to dodge.
He didn't even bother lifting a hand.
Ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting!
A rapid series of sharp metallic impacts rang through the room.
The instant the blades came close to Clark's clothes, they hit something that might as well have been solid steel.
The recoil shattered the metal blades on impact, snapping them into fragments before they clattered uselessly to the floor.
Clark's bio-electric field alone was enough to turn cold steel into trash.
At this point, there probably wasn't anything on Earth that could truly hurt him.
Bullseye's breathing started to quicken.
His greatest skill, his so-called art of murder, looked pathetic in front of this man, like a child waving a plastic toy.
"What... are you?" Bullseye's voice trembled.
He remembered what Gargan had raved about in custody.
The devil that couldn't be hurt.
The thing with the steel-breaking tail and the eyes that glowed red.
"What I am isn't important."
Clark took a step forward.
Just one step.
But in Bullseye's eyes, the man seemed to expand instantly, filling the entire room, sucking the air out of the world around him.
That was the suffocating pressure Bullseye felt.
He tried to turn and run, but the command from his brain to his legs was laughably slow compared to Clark.
Clark extended his right hand.
The motion didn't even look fast.
If anything, it looked lazy.
But Bullseye realized with a surge of panic that no matter how he moved, no matter how he tried to dodge, he remained locked in that man's gaze.
There was no escape.
Smack!
Clark's hand closed steadily around Bullseye's right wrist.
That was the hand Bullseye used to throw with.
The hand that killed.
"You're too dangerous," Clark said, looking calmly at Bullseye's fear-distorted face. "To ordinary people, you're a bomb waiting to go off."
He tilted his head slightly.
"So for my friend's safety, and for a little peace and quiet in this city... you don't get to keep this hand."
Clark's five fingers began to close inward.
Crk... crk-crk-crk-crk...
A sickening series of cracks echoed through the hospital room.
Clark remained completely composed.
He felt no pity at all for men like this.
This wasn't a simple break.
It was total destruction, from the root of the wrist through the entire structure of the bone.
Clark's control was absurdly precise. He didn't rip Bullseye's arm off.
Instead, he used absolute force to crush every bone in Bullseye's right wrist into shards.
"AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!"
The pain hit Bullseye's nervous system like fire.
He let out a scream so raw it seemed to tear his throat apart. His whole face flushed dark red from agony, veins bulging across his forehead, cold sweat soaking through his clothes instantly.
But he was still a lunatic forged in blood and bodies.
The pain didn't make the madness leave his eyes.
If anything, it made it burn brighter.
He didn't beg.
He didn't pass out.
"Monster... you monster! Hahahahaha!"
Bullseye screamed and laughed at the same time, hysterical and broken.
His right hand was gone, limp and useless in Clark's grip.
But he still had his left.