The attack came three weeks after Jessica learned my secret.
I was in the underground facility with Felicia and Maya, working on expanding my skill set. I'd discovered that my skill transfer ability worked best through sustained physical contact and deep mental connection—which meant I'd been spending hours each day training with Maya, literally downloading her combat knowledge into my brain.
It was exhausting work. Each skill transfer left me with splitting headaches and required days of practice to integrate the knowledge properly. I wasn't just copying her muscle memory—I was rewiring my own neural pathways to accommodate decades of training she'd accumulated.
So far, I'd absorbed:
- Basic hand-to-hand combat (Muay Thai, boxing fundamentals)
- Weapons handling (knives, batons, firearms)
- Situational awareness and threat assessment
- Her photographic reflexes (though mine were much weaker—I needed multiple exposures to copy a technique)
I was better than an untrained fighter now, but nowhere near Maya's level. And each skill took time—weeks of integration and practice.
"Again," Maya signed, her face expressionless as she swept my legs out from under me for the tenth time that hour.
I hit the mat hard, groaning. "Fuck. I thought I downloaded your skills."
She signed: "You downloaded knowledge. Not experience. Your body needs to learn what your mind knows."
"She's right," Felicia called from her workstation. "You know the moves intellectually, but your muscles need time to develop the actual capability."
"How long?" I asked, pulling myself up.
"At the rate you're going? Maya spent twenty years perfecting these skills. You might get to eighty percent of her level in six months. Maybe." Felicia grinned. "Of course, that's still superhuman progress."
Before I could respond, the alarms screamed.
Red lights flashed throughout the base. My mental senses immediately detected the intrusion—multiple minds entering the perimeter. More disciplined than last time. More dangerous.
"We've got company," I announced. "Twenty hostiles this time. Moving in four teams."
"The Hand again?" Felicia asked, already grabbing weapons.
I reached out with my mind, touching the intruders. What I found made my blood run cold.
"Worse. These aren't just ninjas—they've got enhanced. I'm sensing at least three minds with… augmentations. Cybernetic or chemical, can't tell yet. And someone's leading them. Someone whose mind I can't touch."
"Elektra?" Maya signed.
"Maybe. Or someone worse."
The first breach came at the north entrance. They'd brought shaped charges this time—military grade explosives that tore through our reinforced door like paper.
"Maya, you're with me," I ordered. "Felicia, secure the server room and be ready to purge everything if we're overrun. Jessica's at SHIELD—I'll call her in if needed."
We moved to defensive positions. Through my mental link to the facility's cameras, I watched the attackers pour in. Hand ninjas in black, moving with deadly precision. But among them were three figures that moved differently—faster, stronger, more aggressive.
Enhanced soldiers. Probably Hydra or AIM augmentation.
This wasn't just an attack. This was an extermination attempt.
The first ninja team hit our position with coordinated precision.
I reached out with my mind, attempting the same mass control I'd used before. *Stop. Freeze. Don't move.*
Four of them locked up immediately, their bodies betraying them as I seized control of their motor functions. But the other six… they resisted. Their training let them push through the initial command, though their movements were sluggish, delayed.
And the enhanced soldiers? My power slid off them like water off oil. Whatever augmentations they had included mental shielding.
"Shit," I muttered. "I can't control the enhanced ones."
"Then we do it the old way," Maya signed, and moved.
She was a blur of motion, using the techniques I'd been trying to learn. But watching her in real combat was different from training—she was poetry in motion, every move efficient and lethal.
The first ninja went down with a crushed windpipe. The second took an elbow to the temple that dropped him instantly. Maya's photographic reflexes let her adapt to each opponent in real-time, copying their style and countering it perfectly.
I tried to help, using the combat skills I'd absorbed. I managed to take down one ninja—barely—using a combination of strikes that Maya had drilled into me. But I was slow, clumsy compared to her. My punches lacked the weight she could put behind them. My blocks were a fraction too late.
One of the enhanced soldiers rushed me. He was fast—impossibly fast. I tried to dodge but he caught me with a backhand that sent me flying into the wall. Pain exploded through my ribs.
"Marcus!" Maya was there, engaging the enhanced soldier before he could follow up.
But this one was different. He matched her speed, countered her techniques. And he wasn't alone—the other two enhanced soldiers were moving to flank us.
I reached out with my mind, trying a different approach. If I couldn't control them, maybe I could disrupt them. I pushed into the nearest enhanced soldier's mind, not trying to command but to interfere—scrambling his sensory input, making up seem down, left seem right.
He stumbled, confused. Maya capitalized immediately, her strike connecting with his jaw. He went down hard.
One down. Two to go.
But I was already feeling the strain. Holding four ninjas in place while disrupting another mind while trying to fight—it was too much. Blood trickled from my nose.
"I can't hold them much longer!"
"Don't need you to!" Felicia's voice came through the comms. "Initiating defense protocol sigma."
The facility's automated systems came online. Blast doors sealed off sections, channeling the attackers into kill zones. Gas dispensers released sedatives into the corridors. And the lights went out, replaced by emergency reds.
We had home field advantage. Time to use it.
The battle turned into a brutal slog through the facility.
The Hand ninjas were skilled, but they were fighting on our terms now. I took control of groups where I could, sent them against their own allies. Maya picked off stragglers with ruthless efficiency. Felicia coordinated everything from the security room, using the facility's systems to herd the attackers into disadvantageous positions.
But the last enhanced soldier was proving to be a nightmare.
He'd cornered Maya in the training room, and even with all her skills, she was being pushed back. He was stronger, faster, and his augmentations gave him an edge she couldn't overcome.
I entered the room just in time to see him land a brutal kick that sent Maya crashing into the equipment rack. She didn't get up.
"Maya!" I rushed forward, but the soldier was already turning toward me.
"Marcus Cole," he said, his voice distorted by some kind of modulator. "The telepath. Kingpin sends his regards."
Kingpin. So this was his response to my interference.
The soldier moved faster than I could react, his fist connecting with my stomach. The air rushed out of my lungs. Another strike to my face sent me reeling.
I tried to use my powers—pushed, commanded, disrupted. But his shields were too strong. I might as well have been pushing against concrete.
He grabbed me by the throat and lifted me off the ground. "You should have stayed out of his business."
I was going to die. Despite all my power, despite my growing abilities, I was about to be killed by a thug with good augmentations.
Then Maya's staff cracked across the back of his head.
He dropped me, turning to face her. She was bleeding from a cut above her eye, favoring her left side, but her expression was pure determination.
She signed quickly: "His left knee. Saw him favor it. Weakness."
The soldier laughed. "Did the cripple just try to talk?"
That was his mistake.
Maya's face went cold. I'd never seen her truly angry before, but the slur had done it. She moved with a fury I hadn't witnessed in training, her strikes targeted and vicious.
And I saw it—the way he shifted his weight away from his left knee. A old injury, probably from before the augmentations. His shields protected his mind, but his body still had vulnerabilities.
I pushed myself up, focusing every ounce of my psychic power on one specific target. Not his mind—his knee. The damaged tissue, the pain receptors, the nerves.
I amplified them. Made the old injury feel fresh, excruciating, impossible to ignore.
The soldier's stance shifted. Just for a moment. Just enough.
Maya's strike hit his knee with surgical precision. Something crunched. He went down, screaming.
She finished it with a brutal strike to his throat. He stopped moving.
We sat in the medical bay afterward, getting patched up.
Maya had two cracked ribs and a concussion. I had a broken nose, bruised organs, and a splitting headache from psychic overexertion. Felicia had stayed in the security room but was shaken from watching us nearly die.
"Twenty attackers," Felicia said, reviewing the footage. "We took down eighteen. Two escaped—standard ninjas who ran when their enhanced backup failed."
"They'll report back to Kingpin," I said, wincing as Jessica (who'd arrived midway through the fight with SHIELD backup) set my nose. "He knows about us now. About the facility, our capabilities, everything."
"So what do we do?" Jessica asked.
"We can't hide anymore," Felicia replied. "Kingpin controls half the city's underworld. If he wants us dead, he'll keep sending people until we're overwhelmed."
"Then we take the fight to him," I said. "But we need to be smarter about it. Stronger."
"You used your skill transfer on Maya," Jessica observed. "That's how you knew some of those techniques. Can you do more?"
"Yes. But it takes time. Weeks per skillset to integrate properly." I looked at Maya. "I need more combat skills. Advanced stuff. And I need to learn from multiple sources—different styles, different approaches."
Maya signed: "Elektra. She's still in SHIELD custody. Catatonic from what you did to her."
"Can you fix her?" Jessica asked me.
"Maybe. If I reversed what I did, restored her mind… she'd remember me breaking her. She'd want revenge."
"Or," Felicia said thoughtfully, "you could offer her something better. You saw inside her when you broke her. You know what drives her, what she wants. If you could give her that…"
"You want me to recruit the woman I mind-raped?"
"I want you to make amends and turn an enemy into an ally. Elektra is one of the most skilled fighters alive. With her training and your skill transfer, you could become a legitimate threat to Kingpin's enhanced soldiers."
It wasn't a bad idea. Risky, but not bad.
"There's something else," I said. "During the fight, I realized I'm not using my powers creatively enough. I couldn't control that soldier's mind because of his shields. But I could affect his body—his pain receptors, his nerves. There's more I can do. Physical manipulation, not just mental."
"That's new," Jessica said.
"Or maybe it's always been there and I just never tried." I stood, testing my injuries. "We need to step up everything. My training, our security, our resources. Kingpin just declared war. We need to be ready to win it."
"Agreed," Felicia said. "But first—rest. All of us. We barely survived this. Next time, we need to be better."
As they left me alone in the medical bay, I couldn't stop thinking about the enhanced soldier's words.
*Kingpin sends his regards.*
This was just the opening move. And I had a feeling things were about to get much worse before they got better.