The girl wasn't dead yet. But if Maya didn't move right now, she'd be gone for good.
Running across the Hudson, Maya had made herself a rule: follow Batman's example — incapacitate, don't kill. Leave judgment to the police. Leave it to the law.
She threw that rule out completely.
These men have to die.
A coldness settled into Maya's eyes that had never been there before. And in that moment, she finally understood it — truly understood it — deep in her bones: she had been reborn. Reborn into the extraordinary world of Marvel. This wasn't a game. This wasn't a dream. This was Maya Hansen's new life.
She snapped two kunai out of their holsters, clamped one between her teeth, held the other in her left hand, and dropped low. Short as she was, the shadows swallowed her completely. She circled wide to the stern of the vessel. The ship's propellers churned the water below into a roar — more than loud enough to cover her. Maya broke into a sprint along the river's surface, accelerating to nearly one hundred feet per second (30 m/s), each footfall a sharp crack against the water.
No one heard a thing.
At the churning wake near the stern, Maya launched herself upward, planted her right hand on the railing, and vaulted onto the deck in a single motion.
She swept her senses through the entire vessel. Thirty-five captives. Eight traffickers. Thirty-four of the captives were locked in cages at the bottom of the hold. One — a dark-haired young woman — was currently being carried toward the deck by two of the men.
Those two were just stepping out of the first-floor cabin door, heading topside with the girl. Two more men were still inside the first-floor cabin, talking and laughing, gesturing at the pair carrying the girl. Three men were up in the second-floor bridge. One more was posted alone in the deepest part of the hold as a guard.
The tactically sound plan was obvious: start at the top. Clear the bridge first, then work down deck by deck, eliminating the threat of being caught between floors. Maximum safety for herself.
But that wasn't an option.
The girl's life was measured in seconds.
Even if Maya — fast as her idol Spider-Man — cleared the traffickers in a heartbeat and then hauled the girl out of the water, she couldn't know whether a body soaked in that freezing river would ever come back from it.
There was only one choice. Save the girl first.
Maya drew a third kunai, one in each hand now, and sank into a low crouch. She was small enough for the cabin's shadow to swallow her completely.
"Heh — this little thing had some fight in her, I'll give her that. Just not enough stamina."
"That's your fault for being so rough. We've still got four, five days ahead of us — she was the only one on the manifest without an assignment, and now she's gone to waste. The rest of the trip is going to be—"
"Who's there?! Ah—"
The moment the two men passed by with the girl, Maya materialized behind the rear one like smoke. The chakra-infused kunai slid through his back with a quiet shick, clean as a hot blade through butter.
Before she could pull it free, the front man felt the weight shift and turned. He looked directly at the arc of cold light sweeping toward him — had just enough time to scream once — and then his head toppled from his shoulders with a dull thud.
Maya twisted away from the arterial spray, caught the falling girl one-handed, and in the same motion snapped the kunai from her other hand at the second-floor bridge window, where a face had just leaned out to look. The throw was true: it punched through the man's skull before he could make a sound.
She didn't wait to confirm the kill. Clutching the girl to her chest, she threw herself flat across the deck as a burst of rounds from the first-floor cabin tore through the air where she'd just been standing.
Start to finish, from the first kill to the third, to pressing her back against the steel bulkhead: under four seconds.
The two men in the first-floor cabin had been watching their colleagues carry the girl the whole time. The moment Maya moved, they reacted. But Maya had never stopped tracking them. The instant she read their trigger fingers, she'd already calculated the angles. In the gaps between dodges, she took the head shot on the bridge without breaking stride.
Short as the sequence was, it had cost her. Maya tucked the girl into a sheltered corner of the deck, pulled the kunai from between her teeth, and caught her breath in two hard gasps.
One kunai was lodged in a dead man's back. One was buried in the bridge man's eye socket. Only the one she'd had clamped in her mouth remained. She had no choice but to reach for the last two on her belt.
From inside the first-floor cabin, a man was shouting: "We're under attack! Someone's out there — who the hell are you?! Come out! You want to die?!"
He punctuated it by sweeping his AK-47 across the darkness of the deck in a wild arc.
Maya curled her lip, pulled out one of her remaining kunai, and wrapped a paper bomb around its tail.
She exhaled slowly, gathered her chakra into her right hand, and hurled it sideways and behind her in one sharp motion.
The kunai rang off the steel railing with a bright spark — ting — then changed direction and sliced across the throat of the shooting man at almost undiminished speed.
The other man, sheltered behind the steel cabin door, watched his partner stop firing, clutch at the blood fountaining from his neck, and slide down the wall.
He still hadn't pieced together what had happened when he noticed it: a strange throwing blade was buried in the table across from him, with a scrap of paper wrapped around the handle. Before he could get a better look, the paper caught.
Then there was nothing more to see.
BOOM. The fireball swallowed him whole.
Up in the bridge, a man with a thick gold chain and an expensive watch — clearly the one in charge — spotted the kunai buried in his crewman's eye socket and let out a shriek: "Kunai! That's a kunai! We've got a ninja — it's the Hand! The Hand hit us!"
Maya was already moving, running up the wall toward the second floor to finish the last two men in the bridge.
She stopped cold when she heard it.
This guy knows what a kunai looks like? That was... surprisingly sharp. This was her first time in the field.
Then the boss screamed again: "Damn it — it's the Hand! It's Wilson Fisk, he's finally made his move on us!"
He didn't wait for the bewildered stares from his last remaining crewman. He charged straight at the bridge's glass window, punched through it, and threw himself toward the Hudson River.
Unfortunately, he had badly misjudged his own weight.
Under Maya's stunned gaze, he dropped straight down and smacked onto the deck.
He hadn't died from it. He was just lying there clutching a leg bent at a very wrong angle, wailing, his face smeared with snot and tears.
Still standing on the steel wall, Maya stepped over and introduced a kunai to his skull.
The screaming stopped at once.