Chapter 146: The Original Avengers Go Down
Near the Hell's Kitchen community school, the situation had already been decided.
Hawkeye and Natasha were face-down on the pavement, not moving. Steve Rogers was still upright — barely, breathing hard, every muscle in his body arguing with him — and staring at the figure standing in the school doorway.
How, he thought. One man took down three of us. And Ethan has dozens of these people.
The figure in the doorway was Caine — Master Ip — a large Chinese man, blind, standing with the complete stillness of someone who had nothing to prove and nowhere to be.
"You're not my opponents," he said. His voice was the same temperature as the air. "And you're out of fighting capacity. The Principal isn't here today. I'd ask you to leave."
Steve made himself stand up straighter. "Not happening. I know Fisk is in there. I'm not leaving until I find him."
He could see it clearly — Bucky's face, the footage, the file. Wilson Fisk. He'd been carrying that name for weeks. He wasn't walking away from this doorway.
He moved toward Caine.
Caine exhaled quietly. "Stubborn."
The gravity hit Steve before he'd covered half the distance. Not a blow — a weight, total and immediate, pressing down from every direction simultaneously. His knees hit the ground. He pushed against it and found nothing to push against. The force wasn't coming from any direction he could address.
He knelt there, unable to rise, and watched Caine turn away.
"The children are waiting for me," Caine said, already moving. "Stay there. Think about what you've done to this neighborhood."
His footsteps faded toward the school interior.
Steve's jaw set. He kept trying to stand. His legs wouldn't respond.
The roar arrived before the footsteps did.
Something large and green came around the corner at speed, and the pavement cracked under each stride. Banner — not Banner anymore, not really — had been on his way to the school for entirely different reasons. He'd wanted to talk to Doc Ock, to Yinsen, to whoever among the school's faculty might have insight into his condition. He'd been walking calmly.
Then he'd turned a corner and seen Natasha on the ground.
The rest had happened in the usual way.
The Hulk's fist came down at Caine's retreating back with the force of something structural.
Caine turned his head slightly and stepped to one side. The fist hit pavement. The street buckled.
He stopped walking and regarded the Hulk with an expression that suggested he was reassessing the situation.
I felt him coming, Caine thought. I didn't account for the transformation being that fast. And this force— He tracked the crater in the ground. If that had connected, it might have been a problem.
He turned to face the Hulk fully.
What happened next happened very fast.
Something hit the Hulk from the side — not a blow, exactly, more like being moved — and the Hulk went into the ground fist-first. When the dust cleared, Kingpin was standing over him, one hand pressed against the Hulk's back, that hand fully diamond.
The Hulk strained. Didn't get up.
Fisk straightened his cuffs with his other hand.
"Master Ip," he said. "Go back to the children. I'll handle this."
He was already loosening his tie. He handed his jacket to no one in particular — it just fell, and he left it there.
Caine considered the scene for a moment, then nodded and walked back toward the school.
Steve had managed to get upright by the time Fisk turned around.
He looked at Fisk's face.
It was the face from the footage. The face that had been in his head every day since he'd seen what was left of Bucky in those files. He felt the rage organize itself into something clean and focused.
"You know who I am," he said.
Fisk looked him over with the unhurried attention of a man who had dealt with a great many dangerous people and developed a calibrated sense of which ones required serious consideration.
"Captain America," he said. "Yes."
"Then you know why I'm here."
Fisk tilted his head. "I don't, actually. What's the connection between us?"
"Bucky," Steve said. "James Barnes. You killed him."
Fisk was quiet for a moment.
"I don't know anyone by that name."
The honest answer was that Fisk had, in the course of a long and complicated career, killed a number of people. He didn't track all of them by name. The ones he remembered were the ones who had tried to kill him first, or who had been significant enough to remember. Someone named Bucky didn't surface.
Steve's expression told Fisk everything about how that answer had landed.
He came forward. Both fists. Everything he had.
The first punch connected with Fisk's torso and the recoil traveled up Steve's arm like hitting architecture. Fisk was fully diamond now — every surface, every inch.
Steve's hand went numb.
"My turn," Fisk said.
The counter-punch went into Steve's midsection and Steve went backward and didn't get up immediately.
Fisk looked at the scene — Steve on the ground, Natasha and Clint still down, the Hulk pinned — with something that might have been the faintest trace of entertainment.
He looked up at the sky.
Somewhere above Hell's Kitchen, the light of Ethan's Ultra Instinct was bright enough to be visible from the street.
"He's working hard up there," Fisk said. He cracked his knuckles. The diamond sound of it carried across the street. "I suppose I should do my part. He did make me Godfather, after all."
He looked back down at Steve, Natasha, Clint, and the struggling Hulk.
"Come on then," he said. "Show me what you've got."
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