REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 67: Bullseye, Known as the Little Hawkeye
In the wreckage of the office, an Ivan Tyrant bent down and picked up his black cowboy hat from where it had been shot to the floor.
As if they had just taken care of something entirely unremarkable, both Tyrants walked out without looking back, showing no reaction whatsoever to Fisk's shouts and roaring behind them.
Fisk watched the two figures recede down the corridor, his eyes full of fury.
Then that fury was displaced by something else entirely.
Pain.
A deep ringing detonated in his ears. The dizziness hit immediately after, cutting off the motion of getting to his feet before it could complete.
"Bastards." Fisk's hand went to his forehead. "What is this. What's happening to me..." The whites of his eyes had gone dark with broken blood vessels.
Every muscle in his body was seizing in waves. Pain and a burning sensation spread from the back of his skull outward through his entire frame.
He used everything he had to grip the arm of the nearest chair and try to get upright.
Every attempt ended the same way. His limbs had nothing behind them.
Poison. His mind kept cycling back to it.
But he threw the idea out almost immediately.
Because the Ivan Tyrants didn't need poison to kill him.
"Then what did they inject me with?!"
"What did you do to me?!" he roared.
No one answered.
Fisk spent everything he had getting himself into the chair.
His suit was soaked through with cold sweat. The pain hammered at his mind without pause, worse than childbirth, worse than anything he had a frame of reference for, and it didn't stop for a single second.
Eventually, the physical symptoms began to recede.
What replaced them was a different kind of trial. One that lived inside his head.
It was like watching a Call of Cthulhu game's SAN meter drop through the floor. Fragmented, incomprehensible whispers started rising through his mind, layered one on top of the next. The scene in front of him shifted without warning.
Without knowing how, he was standing on a mountain range of black mist and bare rock.
Whispers washed over him in waves.
He looked up.
At the summit stood a massive black silhouette, vast enough to blot out the sky, staring down at him without moving. Black mist churned furiously through that figure, lightning coiling and flickering inside the darkness. Like some nameless deity that shouldn't exist.
Their eyes met.
A pressure that had no name in any physical science swept out from that gaze. Fisk's shoulders were driven downward as if two mountains had been placed on them. He went to his knees without deciding to.
New York's underground king could not bring himself to look up again. He could not point his eyes at something that could reduce him to nothing without any particular effort.
"Submit."
"I will grant you power beyond imagination."
A voice vast enough to crack the world apart detonated in his ears. It came from every direction at once and from none of them, and it drove into his skull like something with physical mass.
In an instant, Fisk's will came apart and bent.
"Submit..."
"Offer your loyalty to the deity..."
His eyes went briefly blank.
When clarity returned, the hallucination was gone.
In its place: a conviction and a faith that bordered on the fanatical.
In the corridor.
Bullseye stuck his head out of the lounge and looked toward Fisk's office with a vaguely curious expression. A half-finished cigarette was still between his fingers.
"Looks like the boss ran into some trouble." He glanced back at Marina.
Marina peeked carefully in the same direction, then immediately looked away.
"Mr. Bullseye, if the boss has actually met with some kind of accident, your paycheck isn't going to be coming from anywhere."
"..."
"Damn it." Without turning around, Bullseye snapped the cigarette butt over his shoulder. It bounced off the wall and landed precisely in the ashtray on the table.
"Hey. You two." He called down the corridor toward the Ivan Tyrants heading for the stairs.
The Tyrants paused and turned toward the sound.
In the half-second it took them to turn, two throwing knives were already in the air.
Snap.
Both Tyrants caught them simultaneously. Then crumpled them into balls without any particular effort.
Bullseye's expression shifted slightly.
That reaction speed wasn't achievable by a normal person. Since when did New York have people like this?
While he was still turning this over, the Tyrants walked straight toward him.
Steady pace. Neither face showed anything.
Bullseye read this correctly. He had walked into something difficult.
No warning. No visible aiming process. Three throwing knives left his hand in the time it took to blink, cutting three silver-white lines through the air.
Throwing was what he did. From birth, he had never needed to aim. Whatever he threw already knew where it was going, down to the millimeter.
But the Tyrant swatted all three incoming knives out of the air like swatting flies.
"Seriously?!" Something sharp moved behind Bullseye's eyes.
His hand was already inside his jacket, finding the handles of more knives. He didn't get to throw them. The Tyrant was already charging.
The first step was slow, the heavy boot pressing the red carpet down into a deep groove. The second was faster, the overcoat swinging high with the motion. Third step. Fourth. By the fifth, the massive black shape was coming at him like a derailed locomotive, trailing a low freight-train sound of displaced air.
"What the fuck IS this thing?!"
Bullseye swore and didn't move. Not because he chose to hold his ground. Because he had nowhere to go. The lounge was directly behind him. Dead end, with windows fifty floors above the street on the other side. Left and right was corridor, and at that charge speed the corridor just meant getting run over. The only move was to put down what was coming.
No time to think about it.
Both hands moved at once. Dozens of throwing knives fanned out across a wide arc, covering every vital point on the Tyrant from head to foot. More than ten knives left his hands in under half a second, each one enough to kill a normal person.
Against those eight knives, the Ivan Tyrant didn't break stride. Didn't even bother blocking. Just kept coming straight ahead.
Ding. Ding. Clang.
The knives hit what felt like a steel plate and scattered in every direction.
Bullseye's pupils contracted sharply.
He had run into a lot of dangerous people in his time. He'd fought Daredevil. Gone up against Spider-Man. He'd even sparred with Fisk himself.
But whatever was in front of him now wasn't in any of those categories. A monster at least bled. This thing didn't.
The charging Tyrant reached him and clamped a hand over his face. The palm was wide enough to cover it entirely, fingers closing around his skull.
Just as the Tyrant was about to close that grip—
A voice reached its mind, clear and absolute, leaving no room for interpretation.
"Bring him back. I still have use for him."
The hand that had been about to close gradually released.
Bullseye blinked in the sudden return of daylight. He hadn't finished working out what had just happened when the same Tyrant raised its other hand and flicked one finger at his forehead.
A single muffled crack.
Bullseye went peacefully to sleep.
His sleep quality, this time, was excellent. He would not be waking up anytime soon.