The situation had escalated beyond his initial parameters, and Sylux found himself genuinely uncertain about how he felt regarding this development.
The job had seemed straightforward when he accepted it: a mid-level crime boss named Antonio Vargas had been expanding his territory through methods that had drawn the attention of parties who preferred he stop breathing. The contract specified elimination rather than capture, which Sylux had been avoiding since his arrival in this universe, but the details of Vargas's operation had convinced him to make an exception. The man ran a network that specialized in acquiring vulnerable individuals—runaways, undocumented immigrants, people who wouldn't be missed—and selling them to clients whose preferences ran toward the deeply criminal.
Some people did not deserve the consideration of non-lethal resolution.
The complication arose when his surveillance of Vargas's primary residence revealed that the crime boss had recently acquired new protection: a figure in a black costume with a distinctive white spider symbol, moving with the kind of fluid aggression that suggested superhuman capability.
Not Spider-Gwen. The proportions were wrong, the movement patterns different, the overall aesthetic significantly more threatening. This was someone else, someone his databases had limited information on, someone who registered as a moderate-to-high threat on his tactical assessment protocols.
He observed for three days, mapping patrol patterns and security protocols, and during that time he witnessed the black-suited figure engage in acts of violence that went well beyond what would be necessary to deter ordinary threats. A delivery driver who took a wrong turn was hospitalized with injuries that would require months of recovery. A curious teenager who got too close to the property perimeter was found the next morning with psychological trauma so severe that she couldn't speak coherently about what had happened.
The symbiote—because that's what it had to be, based on his knowledge of Marvel lore—was not a proportionate security measure. It was a statement, a declaration that Vargas had acquired something dangerous and was more than willing to let it off its leash.
Sylux adjusted his approach accordingly.
He entered the property at 3:47 AM on a Tuesday, moving through the outer security perimeter with the same silent efficiency that had characterized his previous operations. The human guards were dispatched without incident—unconscious, restrained, hidden in locations where they wouldn't be discovered until morning—and within twelve minutes he had reached the main house.
The symbiote found him before he found it.
One moment he was moving through a darkened corridor, tracking Vargas's location via thermal imaging, and the next moment something massive and dark slammed into him with enough force to send him through a wall and into what appeared to be an expensive home office. Furniture shattered under the impact, decorative items scattered across the floor, and Sylux found himself in the unusual position of having been genuinely surprised by an attack.
His armor had absorbed the kinetic energy without significant damage—its defensive capabilities were, he was beginning to realize, substantially beyond what most opponents in this universe could threaten—but the psychological impact of being ambushed was more significant than the physical one. He had grown accustomed to being the predator in every encounter, and the sudden reminder that this universe contained things that could challenge him was... not unwelcome, actually.
The symbiote-host emerged through the hole in the wall, a mass of writhing black tendrils and exposed teeth that grinned with an enthusiasm that suggested genuine pleasure in violence. The white spider symbol on its chest seemed to pulse with its own internal light, and its voice when it spoke was layered with harmonic frequencies that indicated multiple entities sharing the same vocal apparatus.
"WELL, WELL. SOMEONE NEW TO PLAY WITH. THE LAST FEW WERE SO BORING—BROKE TOO QUICKLY, SCREAMED TOO MUCH. MAYBE YOU'LL BE DIFFERENT."
Sylux rose from the debris, running damage assessments that came back green across the board, and regarded the creature with what he hoped was appropriately intimidating silence.
"NOT MUCH OF A TALKER? THAT'S FINE. WE DON'T NEED YOU TO TALK. WE JUST NEED YOU TO SURVIVE LONG ENOUGH TO MAKE THIS INTERESTING."
The symbiote attacked again, faster this time, and Sylux discovered that his combat reflexes were significantly more capable than he had previously tested. His body moved before conscious thought could direct it, sidestepping the charge with millimeters to spare, and his counterattack—a precise strike to what should have been a vulnerable joint—connected with enough force to stagger the creature.
It recovered almost instantly, tendrils reforming around the point of impact, but the moment of vulnerability had been real. The symbiote could be hurt. It could be affected. It was not invincible.
"OKAY. OKAY, THAT WAS GOOD. THAT WAS BETTER THAN GOOD. MAYBE YOU ARE DIFFERENT."
The fight that followed was the most intense physical engagement Sylux had experienced since his arrival in this universe. The symbiote was fast, strong, adaptive, and absolutely relentless in its aggression, pressing attacks from angles that should have been impossible and regenerating from damage that would have incapacitated any normal opponent. Sylux found himself pushed to utilize capabilities he hadn't known he possessed, his armor's systems responding to the escalating threat by unlocking combat protocols that felt less like programming and more like instinct made manifest.
He was stronger than he had realized. Much stronger.
When the symbiote wrapped tendrils around his arms and attempted to restrain him, he simply flexed and the tendrils tore. When it tried to engulf him completely, some kind of energy field activated across his armor's surface and the symbiotic material recoiled as if burned. When it opened its massive jaws and lunged for his head, he caught it by what passed for a throat and squeezed until something inside made a sound that wasn't quite biological.
"WHAT... WHAT ARE YOU?"
He didn't answer. He never answered.
Instead, he threw the symbiote through another wall, followed it into the next room, and continued the systematic process of demonstrating that he was not prey.
The symbiote—he would later learn it was calling itself Tombstone in this configuration, having bonded with a criminal enforcer who had already been formidable before the alien enhancement—began to show signs of what he could only interpret as fear. Its attacks became more desperate, less coordinated, the confidence that had characterized its initial assault eroding with each exchange that ended in its disadvantage.
"OKAY. OKAY, WE CAN TALK ABOUT THIS. VARGAS ISN'T WORTH THIS. HE'S JUST A PAYCHECK. WE CAN WALK AWAY, BOTH OF US, AND—"
Sylux closed the distance between them in a single motion and delivered a blow to the symbiote's center mass that would have pulverized concrete. The creature rocketed backward, crashed through an exterior wall, and landed in the manicured garden outside with enough force to crater the lawn.
He followed, stepping through the hole he had created, and found the symbiote struggling to reform itself. The black material was rippling, unstable, the host's body visible in patches where the coverage had been disrupted. The human underneath—a large man with pale skin and features that suggested Eastern European ancestry—was bleeding from multiple locations and appeared to be barely conscious.
"Please," the man said, and his voice was his own now, the symbiote too damaged to contribute to the vocalization. "Please, I'll leave. I'll go somewhere else. I won't—"
Sylux crouched down, bringing his visor to within inches of the man's face, and stared at him with the full weight of attention that Spider-Gwen had found so significant. The symbiote, recovering enough to perceive its host's terror, began trying to pull away, to abandon the failing partnership for something with better survival prospects.
He let them go.
Not because he felt mercy—he wasn't sure he felt anything at the moment, his emotional processing muted by combat hormones and tactical focus—but because the symbiote and its host were not his target. They were obstacles, security measures, means to an end that had been thoroughly neutralized. Killing them would serve no purpose beyond the satisfaction of completion, and he had already established that he preferred non-lethal solutions when the targets weren't specifically designated for elimination.
The man scrambled away, the symbiote flowing around him in a protective cocoon that was more about retreat than defense, and within seconds they had disappeared into the darkness beyond the property's perimeter.
Sylux watched them go, noted the trajectory for future reference, and turned his attention back to the main house.
Antonio Vargas was waiting for him in the master bedroom, surrounded by the last of his personal security: six men armed with military-grade weapons and expressions that suggested they knew exactly how outmatched they were but had made peace with their choices.
"You got through Tombstone," Vargas said, and his voice was steady despite the circumstances. He was an older man, silver-haired and dignified in a way that made his profession even more obscene. "I didn't think that was possible. He was supposed to be the best."
Sylux stepped through the bedroom door and stopped, assessing the tactical situation. Six guards, arranged in a semicircle around their employer, all with their weapons trained on his center mass. The room was large but not large enough to provide significant maneuvering space, and the windows behind Vargas were reinforced glass that would slow but not stop his exit if necessary.
"I'll triple whatever they're paying you," Vargas continued. "I have resources. Connections. I can make you very wealthy, very quickly, and I can ensure that no one ever comes looking for you again."
The offer was predictable. They always offered money, power, protection, as if the beings who hunted them could be bought off with the same currency that had purchased their victims.
Sylux raised the Shock Coil.
The guards opened fire.
The bullets impacted his armor and accomplished nothing. His defensive systems barely registered the kinetic energy, shunting it into capacitors that converted the force into stored power, and his HUD displayed a series of damage reports that were universally dismissive of the threat level represented by conventional firearms.
He fired the Shock Coil.
The weapon activated with a sound that was half electrical discharge and half something else, something that existed at the edge of audible frequencies and suggested energies that were not entirely conventional. A beam of crackling power lanced out toward the nearest guard, connected with his center mass, and began doing something that Sylux had not previously witnessed in direct application.
The Shock Coil was designed to drain energy from targets and transfer it to the user. In the Metroid universe, this meant shields and health and the abstract resource pools that video game mechanics represented. In this universe, in reality, it meant something more visceral: the guard's body spasmed, his weapon falling from nerveless fingers, and he collapsed to the ground with an expression of absolute agony frozen on his features.
He was still alive. Sylux could see the shallow breathing, the weak pulse visible in the neck. But something fundamental had been taken from him, some essential vitality that the human body required to function, and what remained was a husk that would probably never fully recover.
The other guards watched their colleague fall, and for a moment the room was silent except for the continued hum of the Shock Coil as it recharged from the absorbed energy.
Then they ran.
Three of them made it to the door before Sylux decided that fleeing security personnel weren't worth the ammunition. The remaining two, frozen by terror or loyalty or simple inability to process what they had just witnessed, stayed in their positions and continued pointing their useless weapons at him.
He turned the Shock Coil on them.
The process was the same: connection, drainage, collapse. Two more bodies on the floor, two more husks that might eventually recover or might not, and Sylux felt... nothing. There was no satisfaction in their defeat, no guilt over the harm he had caused them, no moral weight to the decision he had made. They had been obstacles between him and his target, and now they were not.
His previous self would have been horrified by this. Marcus from Ohio, who felt bad about stepping on insects and apologized to furniture when he bumped into it, would have been absolutely devastated by the casual violence he had just inflicted on human beings who were, at worst, guilty of taking the wrong job.
Sylux felt nothing.
He wasn't sure if this was a function of his new body, his new mind, or simply the result of repeated exposure to situations that required violence. Perhaps he was becoming desensitized. Perhaps the person he had been was fading, being replaced by something that was purely Sylux, purely the hunter, purely the silent predator that his existence seemed to demand.
He wasn't sure how he felt about not feeling anything about this.
That was probably significant, in a philosophical sense he didn't have time to explore.
Vargas had used the distraction of his guards' defeat to attempt escape through a hidden door behind a bookshelf—because of course there was a hidden door behind a bookshelf, this was exactly the kind of clichéd architecture that wealthy criminals seemed to favor—and Sylux tracked his movement through the wall with thermal imaging before following.
The hidden passage led to a garage containing several high-end vehicles, and Vargas was in the process of starting a car when Sylux emerged from the passage and made his presence known by putting his fist through the driver's side window.
Glass shattered. Vargas screamed. The car's engine stuttered and died as Sylux's armor interfaced with its electronics and simply turned it off.
"Please," Vargas said, and now his composure was gone, replaced by the raw terror of a man who had finally understood that he was not going to survive this encounter. "Please, I have information. I know things. I can tell you about the people I work with, the supply chains, the clients—"
Sylux grabbed him by the throat and pulled him through the shattered window, ignoring the cuts the broken glass inflicted on the man's expensive suit. He held Vargas at eye level, visor to face, and let the silence stretch.
"I'll tell you everything," Vargas babbled. "Names, locations, account numbers, everything. You can take down the whole network. Isn't that worth more than my life? Isn't that—"
The Shock Coil activated.
Vargas's body arched, his mouth opening in a scream that never quite materialized, and Sylux watched with clinical detachment as the weapon did its work. This was not like the guards, not a partial drainage that left the target alive but diminished. This was complete, thorough, absolute—the Shock Coil operating at full capacity for the first time since he had arrived in this universe, drawing out everything that Antonio Vargas had been and converting it into energy that flowed into Sylux's own systems.
When it was done, when the flow of power ceased because there was nothing left to drain, Sylux dropped the body and noted that his armor's energy reserves were at levels they had never previously achieved.
He felt nothing.
The contract was complete. The evidence of Vargas's network—the names and locations and account numbers the man had promised—was stored in the house's computer systems, which Sylux accessed and copied before beginning his withdrawal. This information would be useful, either for future contracts or for simply dismantling an operation that the world would be better off without.
He left through the same route he had entered, moving through the property with the same silent efficiency that had characterized his approach. The guards he had incapacitated earlier were beginning to stir, and he ignored them because they were no longer relevant to his mission parameters.
Spider-Gwen was waiting for him at the perimeter.
"I saw Tombstone running," she said, and her voice was different than usual, quieter, more uncertain. "He looked... I've never seen him scared like that. What did you do?"
Sylux walked past her without acknowledgment.
"Hey. Hey!" She swung around to block his path, landing in front of him with her hands raised in a gesture that was probably meant to be placating. "I need to know what happened in there. There were reports of energy discharges, weird stuff on the scanners, and now you're walking out covered in..."
She trailed off, looking at his armor. He followed her gaze and noted that there were traces of biological material on his gauntlets—blood, probably, from the guards or from Vargas himself—that he had not noticed in the aftermath of the operation.
"Did you kill someone?"
He considered the question. The guards were alive, technically, though their quality of life going forward was questionable. Vargas was definitively dead. The mission had required lethal resolution, and lethal resolution had been achieved.
He nodded once.
Spider-Gwen was silent for a long moment, and he could see her processing this information, reconciling it with whatever image of him she had constructed over their previous encounters. The mysterious bounty hunter who captured criminals and handed them over to justice was one thing; the killer who left bodies behind was something else entirely.
"Was it... did they deserve it?"
He considered how to answer without speaking, then raised his arm and projected a holographic display from his gauntlet—a capability he hadn't known he had until the moment he needed it—showing images and data from Vargas's operation. The files he had copied, the evidence of what the man had done, the scope of suffering his network had inflicted.
Spider-Gwen looked at the display, and he watched her expression shift from uncertainty to horror to something cold and hard that he hadn't seen from her before.
"Oh," she said quietly. "Yeah. Yeah, he deserved it."
She stepped aside, letting him pass, and he continued into the darkness without looking back.
"Sylux?"
He paused.
"I'm still going to follow you around. But... maybe sometimes the bad guys don't get to live. Maybe that's okay."
He didn't respond. He didn't know how to respond, because he wasn't sure he agreed with her assessment. Killing should not be easy. It should not feel like nothing. The fact that he could execute a human being and experience no emotional consequence was probably a warning sign about what he was becoming.
But he also couldn't bring himself to regret Vargas's death. The world was better without him. The people he would have hurt were now safe. The network he had built would be dismantled using the information Sylux had recovered.
Maybe that was enough justification. Maybe it wasn't.
He walked into the darkness, Spider-Gwen's presence a familiar weight in his peripheral awareness, and allowed himself to wonder if the part of him that had once been Marcus from Ohio was still in there somewhere, or if it had been lost entirely to the silence and the violence and the cold efficiency of what Sylux had become.
He hoped it was still there.
He wasn't sure how to check.
The job paid well, and the information he had recovered led to seventeen additional targets who were subsequently eliminated by various parties interested in seeing the network destroyed. His reputation grew, mutating from "mysterious bounty hunter" to "extremely dangerous entity that should not be engaged under any circumstances."
The thigh thing continued, and he remained confused by it.
Spider-Gwen continued following him, and he found that he didn't mind as much as he probably should have.
The silence continued, and it was comfortable.