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Kade had no interest in a death match with an Extremis soldier. Tonight's objective was Harry Osborn — and Harry was already safe, heading to Oscorp Tower under Matt's protection.
Mission accomplished. Time to leave.
But leaving was the problem. Sublevels one and two were connected by a single ramp, and every exit was on sublevel one — currently occupied by a thousand-degree walking furnace.
Kade moved toward the ramp. Savin moved faster.
The Extremis soldier had his own calculus: the hostages were gone, which meant someone had taken them. If Savin let that someone escape too, he'd have nothing to show his employer — no leverage, no prisoner, no body. At minimum, he needed Kade's corpse.
Savin came down the ramp trailing fire like a comet, the concrete blackening beneath his feet.
Kade was waiting around the first corner. The Pulse Pistol barked — four rounds aimed center mass, each one a miniature bomb designed to blow a human body apart.
The first two rounds connected. Savin staggered.
Then he opened his mouth and breathed fire.
A jet of superheated plasma — three meters long, bright enough to bleach the walls white — roared out of Savin's throat and met the remaining pulse rounds mid-flight. The energy projectiles were inherently unstable — high-density packets of force that detonated on impact. Temperatures north of five thousand degrees triggered them prematurely, and the rounds exploded in the air between them, accomplishing nothing.
Savin grinned through the flames. His face was already healing from the first two hits.
Kade's advantage — range, darkness, precision — had just been neutralized. The Pulse Pistol couldn't reach Savin if he could detonate the rounds before they arrived. And at close range, the heat alone would kill Kade before a punch was ever thrown. Extremis soldiers had superhuman strength, speed, and durability on top of the regeneration. In every physical category, Kade was outmatched.
He ran.
Not in panic. In calculation.
He sprinted back through sublevel two, past the paralyzed guards, through the corridor, and into the hostage room where Harry had been held. He pulled the door shut behind him — and reached up to the frame.
The grenade. The booby trap Masque had disarmed earlier. The pin was still in place, the tripwire still attached. Masque had cut the wire, not removed the device.
Kade re-rigged it. Thirty seconds of work with steady hands.
Then he dragged the sofa to the position where the guards had been sitting — the safe zone, out of the blast radius — and crouched behind it.
Savin arrived seconds later. He didn't slow down. He didn't check the door. He kicked it open with the confidence of a man who'd stopped worrying about conventional weapons the day he'd injected himself with a serum that made him functionally immortal.
The confidence of fire. When you were the most dangerous thing in the room, caution felt unnecessary. When every wound healed in seconds and every weapon bounced off, vigilance eroded. The military instincts Savin had once possessed — the training that would have told him to check a doorframe before breaching — had been burned away by the certainty that nothing could hurt him.
The grenade detonated six inches from his face.
The blast hurled Savin backward into the corridor wall. Shrapnel embedded in his chest, his arms, his skull. For a normal human, this was death three times over.
For Savin, it was fifteen seconds of inconvenience.
Kade didn't give him fifteen seconds.
He vaulted the sofa, Pulse Pistol aimed, and opened fire at point-blank range — directly into Savin's face. Round after round of pulse energy detonated against the Extremis soldier's skull, turning his features into a molten gold-and-red crater.
Can't breathe fire without a mouth. Can't aim without eyes.
Kade kept firing and kept advancing, closing the distance. Savin's hands came up — blind, desperate, trying to shield his ruined face long enough for his eyes to regenerate.
The gauntlet blade deployed.
One slash. Savin's right arm separated at the elbow and hit the floor.
Savin reached with his left. Same result — the alloy blade sheered through Extremis-enhanced flesh and bone like it wasn't there. The left arm dropped.
Kade glanced at the blade. The metal was glowing cherry-red from the heat of Savin's body — but it hadn't softened. Hadn't warped. The Sensory Gauntlet's heat insulation wasn't just marketing.
He was winding up to take the head when the Tactical Optics screamed a warning.
The severed arms. Both of them. Pulsing with red light — energy building, temperature spiking, the flesh distorting as the Extremis virus destabilized without a host body to regulate it.
They were about to explode.
Kade didn't have time to swear. He threw himself back into the hostage room and pressed flat against the interior wall just as both arms detonated.
The blast was enormous — concentrated Extremis energy releasing in an uncontrolled chain reaction. Fire rolled through the doorway like a breaking wave, superheated air scorching the walls, the ceiling, everything within reach. Kade pressed his face against the concrete and held his breath — one lungful of air at that temperature would cook him from the inside out.
The fire passed. Kade gasped, sucking in air that was still painfully hot but no longer lethal.
"Extremis limbs explode when severed?" he spat. "That's not in any file I've read."
He knew the virus was unstable — Extremis users sometimes detonated spontaneously, their bodies unable to contain the energy. But he'd never heard of amputated parts going off while the host survived. Severed tissue losing its connection to the central nervous system, going critical, and detonating like a biological grenade — that was new. And it meant the obvious tactic of cutting Savin apart piece by piece would get Kade killed before it killed Savin.
He'd lost his window. The momentum was gone.
And sure enough, before the heat had fully dissipated, Savin walked through the doorway. Both arms regrown. Face restored. Eyes burning with fury.
He spotted Kade in the corner and smiled — the lazy, predatory smile of a cat that had cornered a mouse.
"Creative," Savin said. "I'll give you that. Grenade trap, face shots, arm removal — you've got a bag of tricks. But I'm curious." He cracked his newly regenerated knuckles. "Have you got anything left?"
Kade's back was against the wall. His Pulse Pistol was empty. The grenade was spent. Both arms had already been tried and literally blown up in his face.
But his voice was steady.
"Actually," Kade said, "I was saving these."
Three silver streaks launched from his hands — fast, silent, and razor-sharp.
The boomerang blades.