The drunk man could barely keep himself upright, but once he latched onto Locke's leg, the words came pouring out in a flood. His speech slurred, his eyes were glassy, and his whole body smelled like stale liquor and old grief, but the core of his story was surprisingly clear.
He had once been an intelligence analyst with the Department of Homeland Security. During a routine review, he had stumbled across footage of a military execution in Afghanistan, and something about it had immediately felt wrong. The man being killed had identified himself as a member of the Afghan National Police, but the soldiers in the video had shot him anyway, efficiently and without hesitation.
He had reported what he found.
That was the beginning of the end.
Instead of being thanked, he was marked. The people around him, the same colleagues and agencies he had trusted, had turned on him. He had been taken out onto a bridge, shot in the chest, and dumped into the river like a bag of trash.
He should have died there.
But somehow, by sheer luck or sheer spite, he had survived.
For the sake of his wife and children, he had erased himself. He abandoned his identity, disappeared from official records, and hid in the shadows while the people who wanted him dead went on living like nothing had happened.
The man's fingers tightened around Locke's pants as tears ran down his face. He kept talking, sometimes clearly, sometimes in broken fragments, but the shape of his life emerged anyway. He had survived because the phone in his chest had softened the bullet enough to save him. After that, he had gone underground, living off his hacking skills and building some kind of hidden surveillance and intelligence setup of his own.
He monitored people.
Tracked movements.
Chased scraps of truth.
And all the while, he watched his own family from a distance through cameras and screens, never able to walk through the door and hold them again. That had been his life for months. Tonight, the weight of it had finally crushed him, so he got drunk, wandered to the church, and started begging God for answers.
Locke stood there listening, his expression blank, but inside, his thoughts were moving much faster.
The story was familiar.
Very familiar.
When the man finished one of his broken, rambling sentences, Locke asked quietly, "What's your name?"
The man sniffed hard, wiped his face, and answered, "David Lieberman."
Locke's eyes flickered.
Of course.
It really was him.
David Lieberman, the man in the shadows behind Frank Castle. Super hacker. Intelligence analyst. Operations brain. A resource so valuable it was almost absurd that he had stumbled into the church while Locke was in the middle of burying bodies.
And setting aside everything else, David was useful in ways Locke badly needed.
The previous night had already taught him something important. Killing wasn't the hard part. Covering it up was. In Hell's Kitchen, every move carried risks. It wasn't just gangs and crooked cops he had to worry about. There were vigilantes too, and if Daredevil ever found real proof of what he was doing, Locke had no doubt the man would drag him into prison personally.
But David changed the equation.
A hacker with surveillance capabilities, drone control, technical expertise, and the ability to see the battlefield from above was more than useful. He was a force multiplier. He was the kind of piece that could turn reckless violence into controlled operations.
The only problem was getting him under control.
After a moment of thought, Locke made his choice. He raised a hand and brought it down sharply against the back of David's neck.
The chattering stopped instantly.
David crumpled to the floor.
Locke looked down at him for a second, then bent over, picked him up, and carried him upstairs to one of the guest rooms. After tossing him onto the bed, he headed right back outside.
The bodies in the garden still needed to be dealt with.
…
Half an hour later, the system chimed in his mind.
[Mission Complete.]
A translucent panel unfolded before his eyes, sharp and cold in the darkness.
[Target Level: Black Iron.Upgrade Status: Not Upgraded.Method of Death: Buried Alive.Freshness: Five Stars.Final Emotions: Fear, Regret.Emotional Rating: Five Stars.Comprehensive Mission Evaluation: Five Stars!Special Five-Star Reward Triggered. Gift Pack Upgrading...Reward: Black Iron Five-Star Gift Pack. Double Luck.]
Locke opened it immediately.
[Congratulations. Reward received: Night Vision.]
His breath caught for a second.
This one was good. Very good.
Human vision was the most important sense in a fight, and this ability would turn the dark itself into an advantage. In Hell's Kitchen, on rooftops, in alleys, in abandoned buildings, in every place where violence liked to hide, night vision would make him into something close to a predator.
For the first time, the system's design felt even clearer.
It didn't just want him to kill. It wanted variety. It wanted style. It wanted fear, regret, despair, and carefully tailored deaths that squeezed every drop of emotional intensity out of the prey before the end.
And if he delivered, it paid well.
He reopened the mission progress and saw that his Black Iron prey count had advanced to 1/5. That told him something too. The reward milestones at each level didn't rise linearly. They followed odd-numbered steps.
One.
Three.
Five.
Seven.
Nine.
That meant the best opportunities for high-quality rewards came in the early stages of each tier. Once the kill count climbed too high, it would be much harder to maintain perfect mission quality unless he managed some large-scale operation that let him control multiple targets at once.
So the first one, the first three, the first five of any level—those had to be handled with care.
Right now, he needed four more five-star Black Iron kills to claim the second high-tier gift pack.
Which meant the Flame Crips story still wasn't finished.
…
Pain woke David before the sunlight did.
He groaned, sat up, and clutched the back of his head, his face twisting as the memory of being struck returned in fragments. He looked around wildly, trying to place where he was, then stumbled out of bed and hurried downstairs.
He stopped the moment he saw the church hall.
Confusion gave way to alarm.
A voice drifted in from the backyard. "You're awake. Come over here."
David followed it cautiously.
In the little church garden, Locke stood among the flower beds wearing black clerical clothes, white collar in place, a silver cross resting on his chest. He had a pair of rubber gloves on and was gently working fresh soil around a cluster of weak, half-dead plants.
He looked up and smiled warmly.
"The previous priest neglected these flowers," he said. "Most of them were dying. I added some fertilizer this morning, so maybe they'll bloom again in a few days."
David stared at him.
Everything about the image should have felt harmless. Young priest. Calm expression. Clean voice. Sunlight in the garden. But for some reason, standing in front of this man, David felt the same instinctive pressure he used to feel around top-tier field operatives and intelligence predators.
Not a priest.
Not even close.
Something was off.
He forced a laugh and rubbed the back of his head. "I must've been really drunk last night. Sorry about that, Father. My name's… Frank. I'm a fiction writer, and I've been going through a rough patch. Drank too much, got carried away, probably started mixing my stories with real life. I'm sure I said a lot of nonsense."
Locke looked at him for a moment, then smiled again.
"David Lieberman," he said softly. "You don't need to hide from me."
David's face changed instantly.
"My name is Frank," he said quickly. "David Lieberman is a character in one of my novels. I was just drunk and too deep in my own head—"
"Your wife's name is Sarah Lieberman," Locke said. "You have a son and a daughter, Zach and Leo."
The blood drained from David's face.
His family was the one line that couldn't be crossed. Panic flared in his eyes, and he rushed forward, grabbing Locke by the collar.
"Who are you?" he shouted. "Who the hell are you?"
His movement was all emotion, no structure.
Locke drove a fist into his stomach.
David folded instantly, gasping and staggering back as pain ripped the air from his lungs. Locke caught him by the shoulder, dragged him into the church hall, and brought him beneath the cross at the altar.
Then he stepped back.
His face grew solemn.
His voice deepened.
"I am a knight of God," he said, spreading his arms beneath the cross. "A knight who punishes evil. Under God's guidance, I will cleanse this world. I am His second sword of destruction. I am... the Great Flood."
David knelt there holding his stomach, glaring upward through pain and disbelief.
Locke crouched in front of him, his gaze steady and grave.
"Follow me," he said, "and you'll witness the darkness buried in this world. You'll also witness the light that can still exist in the deepest despair. The flood is destruction, but it is also salvation. It is despair, but it is also hope. This world will either be purified by me, or destroyed by me."
For one dramatic second, the church fell silent.
David stared at him.
Then he said flatly, "That's bullshit."
Inside, Locke sighed.
So much for the grand entrance.
Still, he had expected resistance. That was why he had prepared a second approach.
"Last night," Locke said calmly, "God told me everything."
David's expression hardened.
"David Lieberman. Intelligence analyst. You discovered video evidence connected to Operation Cerberus. After that, senior agent Carson Wolfe shot you in the street and threw you into the river. The only reason you survived is because the phone in your chest took part of the impact. After that, you vanished and started planning revenge."
David froze.
One detail hit harder than the rest.
Operation Cerberus.
He had never told anyone that codename.
For the first time, uncertainty appeared in his eyes.
Locke kept going.
"And now you're thinking about finding Frank Castle and trying to work with him."
David jerked slightly at that.
That thought had never left his head. He hadn't spoken it aloud. He hadn't written it down. It was just a possibility he had turned over in private, one more desperate option in a life full of dead ends.
But even then, he still shook his head stubbornly. "I don't believe you."
"Fine," Locke said. "Then let's skip the mysticism."
He stood up, his voice flattening into something colder and more precise.
"During the war in Afghanistan, the CIA planted poppies in remote mountain regions and turned the conflict into a drug pipeline. They smuggled narcotics back into the United States using the bodies of dead American soldiers as cover. Operation Cerberus was a cleanup mission meant to erase evidence and silence everyone who could connect the dots. Wolfe was one of the people involved."
David stopped breathing for a moment.
"The man behind it," Locke continued, "is the current head of clandestine operations at the CIA. Agent Orange. William Rawlins."
David stared at him in shock.
"So what now?" Locke asked. "You're going after them? You think Frank Castle is enough? Don't be stupid. This isn't a comic book. This isn't a movie. He's not protected by plot armor. He can die just like anyone else."
David finally found his voice again. "And you can fight them?"
"Of course."
Locke stepped back beneath the cross and spread his arms again. Sunlight streamed in through the church windows at just that moment, cutting across his black clothes and outlining him in gold.
"I'm not human," he said. "I'm a god. A god who punishes all sin."
David, lifelong atheist, stared up at him with his mind slipping out of focus.
"How… how is this possible?"