In a two-story apartment near the river in Hell's Kitchen.
The apartment had been vacant for a long time. The original tenants had vanished one day, leaving behind a fully renovated home and furniture, waiting for someone lucky enough to move in.
Perhaps they had taken their families on a one-way trip to the bottom of the Hudson River. Such occurrences were common in Hell's Kitchen and hardly a surprise.
Currently, the small apartment was occupied by a gang. In reality, there were only six of them—black brothers who had grown up in the same neighborhood. Lacking any real skills and unwilling to work hard, they had chosen the 'lucrative' profession of mugging.
Later, they found that mugging was too risky. This group noticed several familiar gang members nearby who seemed to be childhood friends from the neighborhood. They hit it off and started a business acting as middlemen and brokers.
The gang that had killed Makiya's parents had received their assignment from these very men.
Boom!
A man smashed through the door, his body flying uncontrollably through the air before slamming hard against the interior wall.
The shoddy wooden wall couldn't withstand the massive impact. The man's upper body was wedged into a large hole he created, his arms dangling limply.
"Fuck, who the hell are you!" an panicked roar erupted from the adjacent room, followed by a rapid succession of gunshots. Bullets tore through the wall, flying toward Makiya.
The man firing blindly didn't care if he hit anything; he just frantically pulled the trigger to vent his rage and mask his inner dread.
Though his accuracy was atrocious, the semi-automatic's fire rate was decent. Under the hail of lead, several bullets flew toward Makiya, only to be stopped by a transparent, spherical barrier. The stray rounds ricocheted harmlessly in all directions.
This was a skill from the DNF Crusader—Divine Shield. Holy power formed a transparent barrier that blocked all incoming damage from every direction. The impact of ordinary bullets wasn't even enough to make it flicker.
A flaming flying sword appeared in Makiya's hand. Under his control, it zipped through the apartment like the Reaper's scythe, precisely reaping the lives of the gang members.
"Ah! What the hell is—"
"Help! Where's Daredevil? There's a maniac here!"
"Please, let me go! I know where the boss keeps the money, I'll take you there!"
"Damn you, just die!"
Bang!
"Ah! Boss, what are you doing?"
The entire apartment was in chaos. The golden flying sword ignored the obstructions of walls and doors, unerringly finding the men hiding in the corners. As the blade pierced their dark skin, flames instantly spread through their bodies. Raging golden fire erupted from their pressure points, incinerating their internal organs into ash in an instant.
Watching his subordinates being burned alive one by one, the leader had long since lost his nerve. He pulled the pistol's trigger frantically, not realizing the magazine had long been empty.
The longsword hovered in the air, radiating intense heat. It sliced through the wall as easily as a hot knife through butter, creating a massive gap. The surrounding wooden panels ignited, and a fierce fire began to roar.
Makiya stepped slowly out of the flames. An invisible force compelled the gang leader to his knees. An illusion invaded his mind, and Makiya smoothly extracted the information he sought.
The gang that killed his parents had indeed received the contract from him. The price was twenty thousand dollars per target, totaling forty thousand.
But this guy had pocketed a significant portion of the money. He had received the task from another, larger gang for fifty thousand dollars per target. With just a bit of talk, he had made a sixty-thousand-dollar profit for doing nothing.
After torturing the address out of him, Makiya clenched his hand. Invisible power surged through the air, and the gang leader let out a heart-wrenching scream before his head exploded in the next second.
Tongues of fire spread through the small apartment, sending billows of thick smoke into the sky. Makiya kindly conjured a gust of wind to ensure the fire spread across the entire unit.
Wherever these gangs existed, there were bound to be drugs. Makiya carefully collected the stashes, intending to destroy them centrally. If he let them be consumed by the fire, the residents of this area wouldn't be able to sleep tonight from the fumes.
Makiya rushed to the next location without pause. Following the route from the leader's memory, he successfully found the gang entrenched in a certain factory building.
This gang was larger, more numerous, and even used fully automatic weapons. In principle, automatic firearms weren't sold to the public and were strictly regulated from the factory, but rules were made to be broken. The chain of interests behind this ran deeper than most could imagine.
The bullets from the rifles were powerful. A sufficiently dense barrage could break Makiya's Divine Shield, but he wasn't a fool. He didn't stand still to be a target. Flickering like a ghost, he quickly slaughtered the entire gang.
They also hadn't dealt directly with the employer. The leader of this gang had also performed an outsourcing maneuver. The task they received was one hundred thousand dollars per person, totaling two hundred thousand.
Makiya's mouth twitched. After seizing all the drugs here, he burned the factory down as well. Since this gang used drug production as their source of wealth, destroying the factory was an act of merit.
Alarms blared on the distant streets as the fire department finally entered Hell's Kitchen to start extinguishing the first fire.
They were destined to work overtime tonight. Makiya silently offered an apology, carefully controlling the fires he set so they wouldn't spread to neighboring buildings.
The third gang stronghold was even larger—a bar on the west side of Hell's Kitchen. They had a stable source of income and a network of connections.
But Makiya didn't care. Anyone involved in this matter had to die. The flaming flying sword streaked across the sky, leaving a brilliant golden trail of death as the heat consumed life after life.
The bar descended into madness. Countless patrons fled in terror. Makiya's sword accurately reaped the gang members mixed in the crowd while letting the civilians escape.
Boom!
A violent explosion engulfed the bar as shrapnel sprayed in every direction. This was the result of a grenade thrown by the gang, but it posed no threat to Makiya.
The terrified gang leader couldn't escape Makiya's pursuit. Unfortunately, this guy was also a black-hearted middleman. The price for the task he had accepted was six hundred thousand dollars to kill two people.
After searching his memory thoroughly, Makiya couldn't find any information on the person who issued the task. The other party was extremely cautious, contacting the gang leader solely through a burner phone and never appearing in person.
Taking the phone in hand, Makiya finished off the remaining gang members in the bar. He let the flames consume their corpses and then slowly vanished into the darkness.
Tonight was destined to be sleepless.
Although murders never truly stopped in Hell's Kitchen, the total massacre of three gangs in a single night was big news even here. Fearless reporters drove to the scenes, aiming their long lenses and cameras to capture the aftermath.
Once the news broke, it caused a stir among the public. People speculated whether it was related to 'Origin Continent.' For instance, perhaps a young man oppressed by gangs had suddenly gained superpowers from the game and sought revenge.
This kind of trope wasn't new. Whether it was gang violence or school bullying, these were common social issues. Countless ordinary people who had been bullied had fantasized about gaining powers and making their tormentors pay.
While the fame of the VR game and 'Origin Continent' continued to ferment, Makiya returned to his laboratory, using his data manipulation abilities to investigate the clues within the phone.
The opposing phone number was easy to find, but upon investigation, Makiya discovered the registration info belonged to an ordinary urban office worker. It was clearly a stolen SIM card—or perhaps the entire phone was stolen—and it had likely been discarded after a short period of use.
The investigation hit a stalemate, but the advantage of the information age was that everything was interconnected. By tracing the time and location data of the sent and received messages, he could eventually pin down the suspect.
It would just take a little time.
Two weeks passed in a flash. Late one night, Makiya was tracing information in the digital world, following the origin of a text message bit by bit back to the source device.
"Hmm?" Within the digital data stream, Makiya suddenly felt a sensation and looked in a certain direction.
'Strange, someone else seems to be here.' A unique fluctuation came from the distance of the data world. Moreover, it wasn't just one, but two. One felt somewhat rigid, while the other was more flexible and vivid, almost like a real human being.
Before transmigrating, Makiya had only seen the mainstream movies and didn't know much about other Marvel works. He guessed that one of the fluctuations was the signal from Tony's intelligent butler, Jarvis. As for the other, he had no idea for now.
After a moment of thought, Makiya gave up the idea of contacting them, focusing first on the matter at hand.
There weren't as many surveillance cameras in America, and Hell's Kitchen practically had none. If the camera density were as high as in future China, the investigation would be much easier.
But it was finally reaching the end. After reaching the source, Makiya quietly activated the location tracking in the phone's background, finally pinning down the mastermind's position.
Combining this with a map, he saw it was located right in the center of Hell's Kitchen.
There stood the tallest building in all of Hell's Kitchen. It was the headquarters of the master of Hell's Kitchen, Kingpin, and his criminal syndicate.
The phone's camera had been physically blocked, but based on internal data, the person holding it was at least a middle-to-high-level member of Kingpin's organization.
'Kingpin, huh...' Makiya thought for a moment, pulling information about this man from the corners of his memory.
Kingpin seemed to be an ordinary person without any powers, yet he managed to become one of the premier supervillains. He was the biggest crime lord in New York and the entire US, and the arch-enemy of Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the Punisher. His peers called him the Underground Emperor.
"Quite a reputation," Makiya stood up and stretched his muscles. "Kingpin, is it? Tonight, your empire falls."
Since it could be any one of the high-ranking members, he would just kill them all.
"Kingpin, tonight is the night you die!"
In a bedroom somewhere in Hell's Kitchen, Matt Murdock, the Daredevil, was wiping a short, broad-bladed sword, muttering to himself.
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