Yes, Bullseye still had his left hand.
For a top-tier assassin who killed as easily as breathing, as long as anything on his body could still move, he could still kill.
And anyway, when you lived in the criminal underworld long enough, you saw every kind of situation.
If not, well, then this counted as experience.
"Die, you freak!"
Bullseye's left hand bent back with unnerving flexibility, reaching not for another coin or scalpel this time—
But for a high-explosive fragmentation grenade.
This was his final trump card, the thing he kept for either mutual destruction or for throwing a situation into total chaos.
He hooked the pin loose with his little finger.
Clark just watched this pathetic clown, curious to see whether there was anything more impressive left in him.
There wasn't.
It was just a grenade.
Bullseye hurled the armed grenade straight toward Eddie Brock, who was still only half-conscious in the hospital bed.
"Let's all go to hell together! Hahaha!"
Bullseye laughed hysterically, convinced he had won.
In his calculations, at this distance, the blast would not only turn the mechanic in the bed into meat paste, but the secondary explosion from the oxygen tanks would tear apart the ICU room and most of the surrounding floor.
Even if this monster could survive the blast, there was no way he could save the mechanic.
And yet the explosion Bullseye expected never came.
In Clark's vision, time had already slowed to something near total stillness.
The little angel, looking at Bullseye still stubbornly trying to kill someone, covered his eyes as if that somehow made it easier.
I want to tell you to be merciful... but this guy's hopeless. Don't leave him the left hand either. Otherwise next time he eats with it, he'll still be thinking about murder.
Clark silently agreed.
Though it wasn't just the left hand he intended to take.
The legs.
And the spine.
"You really don't know how to appreciate the chances I give you."
Clark's voice sounded in Bullseye's ear.
Bullseye's left hand had barely finished throwing the grenade.
It still hung in the air.
Clark reached out and caught the live grenade in one hand.
Then his fingers closed around it.
Pff—thump.
A dull, deeply muffled sound came from inside Clark's palm, like a firecracker going off under a blanket.
The grenade exploded.
Or rather, Clark crushed it into exploding.
White smoke curled out from between his fingers.
When he opened his hand, all that remained was metal dust and burnt explosive residue, which trickled down onto the floor.
Bullseye stared at what he had just seen.
His understanding of the world had been completely rewritten.
He knew his boss, Kingpin, that huge mountain of a man who looked soft but was packed with terrifying power, couldn't do anything like that.
Bullseye had accepted it now.
This was not an opponent he could beat.
Not one his boss could even afford to challenge.
The man in front of him had stepped beyond the category of "human."
Even Captain America, if he were standing here, wouldn't have dared claim he could do something like this.
Compared to this, Daredevil suddenly seemed almost ordinary. Just some blind fighter with sticks and heightened senses.
Though Bullseye had heard the blind man now had some stronger student or ally around him.
A pity.
It looked like Bullseye would die here before he ever got to beat them.
"Kill me..." Bullseye finally gave up resisting. His spirit had broken.
"I'm not going to kill you," Clark said, eyes settling on Bullseye's left hand. "You like throwing things too much. Since that hand can't learn to behave either, you can leave it here too."
Clark gave him no time to beg.
No time to strike again.
His left hand snapped out and clamped down around Bullseye's left wrist.
Crk... crk-crk-crk-crk-crk!
Another chorus of shattered bone echoed through the hospital room.
Clark repeated the process with the same terrifying precision, crushing the entire wrist joint into fragments.
"AAARRRGHHHHHHHHH!!!"
Bullseye had laughed through the destruction of the right hand, held up by pain, madness, and adrenaline.
But now?
Both hands were gone.
And layered on top of that was the soul-deep pressure of facing Clark, a power so absolute it made resistance meaningless.
This time, Bullseye's mind finally broke.
His knees gave out.
He collapsed in front of Clark like wet trash, forehead hitting the floor, his whole body shaking violently as the only sounds that came out of him were broken, meaningless cries of pain.
The "art" he was so proud of, the hands that had made the underworld of New York fear him, had been reduced to a joke in one night by a man whose face he hadn't even really seen.
Clark looked down at the twitching figure kneeling before him.
There wasn't a trace of pity in his eyes.
He knew men like Bullseye had enough innocent blood on their hands that killing them a hundred times still wouldn't balance the scales.
But he wasn't going to kill him.
He would leave this one to the police.
To the law.
Let him spend the rest of his life in pain, without hands, trapped with the memory of tonight.
That would be the cruelest punishment.
Still, Clark noted, the legs looked usable.
So he picked Bullseye up, careful not to kill him, and completed the process by snapping his back.
The legs didn't get spared either.
Some might ask why this was such a brutal punishment.
But people have empathy, don't they?
So perhaps Bullseye could spend the time before he lost consciousness discussing that question with the people he had murdered, instead of leaving Clark to think it through.
Clark's job was simple: make sure Bullseye started his path to atonement early, then leave him for public justice to finish.
After all, what Clark had done to Bullseye wasn't even one hundred-thousandth of the suffering Bullseye had inflicted on others.
If Clark's name were made public, some part of the government might have tried giving him a medal.
As Bullseye screamed in agony, a cough came from the bed.
All the noise had finally woken Sleeping Beauty.
Eddie struggled to open his eyes.
His vision was blurry. All he could really make out was one man on the floor who looked dead, and one tall figure standing nearby.
"Who... are you...?" Eddie asked weakly, still trying to focus. "Are you... one of Peter's friends...?"
Clark turned to look at him.
"Just an ordinary passerby," he said. "Rest, Eddie. You've still got a long road ahead of you. As for the people who hurt you, they'll pay for it. One by one."
Clark deliberately altered his voice so Eddie wouldn't recognize him.
The moment he finished speaking, he heard dense footsteps in the hall outside.
Commissioner Stacy was already charging up with a full tactical unit.
Clark glanced once at Bullseye, felt no need to linger, opened the window, and left.
Boom.
When George Stacy burst into the ICU with a fully armed SWAT team at his back, kicking the door open hard enough to shake the frame, all that remained inside was chaos.
Broken scalpels.
Crushed fragments.
A small scatter of powder and metal from the grenade.
And most importantly of all—
Bullseye.
The man who had once made half of New York's underworld tremble.
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