Tony Stark had never thought of himself as the kind of man who could be talked into anything. He was too smart, too rich, too arrogant to let someone else's words get under his skin that easily. But Locke's little speech had hit somewhere uncomfortably deep, and the effect lingered long after the conversation should have ended.
He had originally arranged a romantic evening with the Penthouse twins, the kind of glamorous distraction he usually enjoyed without a second thought. Now, though, the whole plan felt strangely hollow. For the first time in a long while, he couldn't work up any real interest.
He stared at Locke for a long moment, his expression tense and unreadable. "You want me to join you?" he finally asked, the question coming out more serious than he intended.
Locke looked back at him in silence, as if carefully weighing something. Then, without warning, a smile spread across his face. "Sorry," he said lightly, "but we're not taking unqualified applicants right now. That said, we can still accept your support in another form."
The phrase unqualified applicants immediately rubbed Stark the wrong way. His pride flared at once, but curiosity rose even faster, pushing the irritation aside. He narrowed his eyes and asked, "What other form?"
"Money," Locke said without hesitation. "A lot of money."
For a second, Stark just stood there. His jaw tightened, and he felt a ridiculous amount of indignation surge up in his chest. In his mind, he was the smartest man on Earth, a once-in-a-generation genius whose brain was worth more than entire industries, and yet this bastard had just priced him below a pile of cash.
That stung far more than it should have.
He raised a middle finger at Locke, turned on his heel, and headed for the exit. "What a dump," he said with open contempt. "Do you really think I'd want to spend time in a place like this? I make millions every minute. Why the hell would I come play vigilante make-believe with people like you?"
Locke didn't look offended in the slightest. He followed him to the door with the same infuriating calm, as if Stark's complaints were nothing more than a passing breeze. "Tony," he said, his tone unexpectedly steady, "when you really understand what I said, you'll be a hero."
The answer he got was the roar of a sports car engine. Stark slammed on the accelerator hard enough to make the tires scream, then sent another raised middle finger out the window as he sped off.
Watching the car disappear, Locke only shrugged.
The timing was all wrong anyway. Stark was about to head to Afghanistan, and once that happened, the tracks of fate would keep rolling forward no matter what anyone said right now. Besides, without that cave, without the humiliation, the fear, the helplessness, and the long inhuman stretch of suffering that broke him apart and forced him to rebuild himself, would Tony Stark still become the same Iron Man?
Probably not.
That thought made Locke pause for a second. Then a new one surfaced, and it nearly made him laugh. At some point, he absolutely needed to plant the name Iron Man in Stark's head.
That way, Locke would be the first Iron Man, and Tony would only be the second.
Even better, he could let the filthy-rich Stark buy the name back from him later. And if the man refused, then fine—Locke would pay the Daily Bugle to start calling him something much uglier on live television.
Human Canned Man sounded perfect.
…
The vampires' lives had become miserable beyond words.
Once the footage hit the airwaves, the networks replayed it for days without mercy. Panic spread with unbelievable speed, and the reaction across America was far more violent than even Locke had expected. Tens of millions of people flooded the streets in protest, demanding answers, demanding action, demanding blood.
The pressure was so intense that the entire country nearly ground to a halt.
At last, the Chocolate President was forced to step forward and act. He officially declared all vampires illegal within the United States and announced the creation of a specialized enforcement body: the Vampire Removal Unit. The White House even released a so-called Vampire Hunting Manual, while police departments nationwide began receiving anti-vampire weapons and tactical guidance.
Those measures triggered a full-scale killing wave.
In another era, people had traded scalps for bounties. Now, vampire fangs had become a new kind of hard currency in black-market circles, and the hunt itself quickly turned into the latest twisted craze among thrill-seeking young idiots. To some people, killing vampires had become less a matter of survival and more a fashionable game.
Under those conditions, the bloodsuckers' obvious weaknesses became fatal. Vampire nests were hit one after another, and those who survived abandoned their old arrogance and burrowed deeper into the shadows.
Locke and David had been monitoring the situation closely from the start. From Locke's perspective, the result was excellent. Public attention had shifted almost entirely away from Devil Face, which meant his unfinished business in Hell's Kitchen could finally move to the top of the list.
Then an unexpected visitor came knocking.
Wesley.
The poor bastard looked like a man who had been chewed up by life and spit out only halfway alive. His eyes were unfocused, his posture stiff, and his hands were clasped tightly together as if he were protecting something fragile—or dangerous.
When he arrived at Emma Church, he didn't say a word at first. He simply sat there on the bench in silence, looking dazed, until Locke approached him and spoke first.
Locke frowned slightly. "Wesley, what happened to you?"
Since their first meeting, Wesley had come by several times. Every visit had ended the same way, with Locke offering him comfort, encouragement, and just enough confidence to keep him from completely collapsing under the weight of his own miserable life.
To Wesley, Locke had long since become more than a priest.
He was the closest thing to a life mentor the man had ever had.
Wesley slowly lifted his clasped hands and opened them in front of Locke. Resting in his palms were two flies with their wings missing. He must have held them too tightly on the way over, because one of them was twitching weakly, half dead already.
"Father," Wesley said, his voice trembling with a mix of fear and excitement, "the change you predicted has really started. You can't imagine what's happening. I… I shot the wings off a fly."
Locke paused, but only for the briefest moment. He knew exactly what stage this was. The plot he'd been expecting was finally starting to move.
The whole thing, stripped down to its bones, was simple enough. The Assassin Brotherhood claimed to receive the will of fate through a loom. From the woven threads, they read the names of those who were meant to die, then sent killers to remove them in order to preserve the world's balance.
That was the story, anyway.
The truth was filthier.
The Brotherhood's current leader, Sloan, had already rotted from the inside out. Drunk on money and power, he no longer cared about balance or order and had turned the organization's legendary assassins into tools for profit. Wesley's father, Carlos, had discovered the truth, and Sloan had tried to silence him.
The problem was that Carlos was too dangerous to erase directly.
So Sloan had turned his eyes to Wesley instead. He intended to mold the son into a weapon, then use that weapon to kill the father.
Locke patted Wesley on the shoulder, his voice calm and measured. "Did you meet a lot of people today?"
Wesley nodded. "Yeah. A black man, a beautiful woman, and… others."
"What did you think of them?"
Wesley's excitement cooled a little. He raised his head and looked at Locke with surprising firmness. "My life is garbage. They can give me a different one. I want to try."
Locke gave a small shrug. "Then go try it."
Wesley went quiet immediately.
That answer clearly wasn't what he had expected. Locke had warned him over and over before not to make reckless decisions, not to let desperation push him into something he couldn't understand. So why was he letting him walk straight into it now?
Locke smiled faintly, as if he could read every thought passing across the man's face. "I'm telling you to go because you need to learn from them. They'll train you into a top-tier killer. But when they send you on a real mission, come see me first."
His expression sharpened slightly.
"Especially when they tell you to avenge your father."
Wesley jerked upright in shock. "Avenge my father's murder? What are you talking about?"
Locke shook his head and pointed toward the image of God behind him. "Destiny can't be predicted clearly. But salvation always leaves a path behind. The next time you come back here, you'll understand everything."
…
Locke's revenge officially began that night.
After days of investigation, he had a complete picture of the forces responsible for the bounty on Devil Face. Six major players had been the real backbone behind it all: the Russian mob, the Algerian mob, the Gambino family, the Irish mob, Kingpin, and the Hand.
One by one, they would all pay.
With David providing support remotely, Locke slipped into a lavish estate in New Jersey under cover of darkness. The manor sat near the Hudson, separated from Manhattan by only a river, but the atmosphere couldn't have been more different. Compared to Manhattan's endless neon, roaring traffic, and luxury on display, this place was quiet, restrained, and expensive in a colder way.
This was where the Gambino family lived.
During the Devil Face hunting frenzy, they had put up a very respectable sum—eight hundred thousand dollars—and assembled more than a dozen armed men to help claim the reward. More importantly, their biggest business at the moment was weapons smuggling, and the RPG that had blasted toward Locke that night had come from them.
That alone had signed their death warrant.
The moment he entered the estate, Locke moved like a shadow with teeth. He was fast, silent, and utterly ruthless, cutting through guards and lookouts before they could even register what was happening. It wasn't that nobody noticed him.
It was that by the time they noticed, they were already dead.
Bodies fell in hallways, beside hedges, near fountain paths, and at the edges of courtyards. By the time he reached the main building, the estate already looked less like a home and more like the aftermath of a slaughterhouse.
Inside, the lights remained dim.
Too dim.
But Locke had infrared vision now, and walls meant very little to him. Through concrete and plaster, he could see the glowing outlines of people hiding in ambush, waiting with guns raised and nerves stretched thin. The family clearly knew he was here.
He drew the weapon at his waist and discarded his standard sidearm.
Whistler had built this one for him personally.
Calling it a handgun was almost insulting. It was closer to a handheld cannon: single-shot loaded, twenty-millimeter caliber, double-charged, and designed to fire specialized spiral armor-piercing rounds. In ordinary hands, the recoil alone would shatter a wrist.
Locke had given it a simple, fitting name.
The Executioner.
Boom.
The first shot punched through the concrete wall as if it barely existed and obliterated the skull of the man hiding behind it. Blood and bone painted the far side of the room before the others even understood what kind of weapon they were facing.
Boom.
Boom.
He kept firing with mechanical precision, each shot killing someone who thought a wall, a staircase, or a support pillar could save him. The manor shook with each blast, and panic spread faster than the gun smoke.
Nine shots later, the Gambino family was gone.
The servants hiding together in their quarters spent the entire massacre trembling in silence, hearing only the heavy blasts and the measured sound of footsteps moving through the house. By the time it ended, they were still alive, but they knew less about what had happened than the police would.
When officers questioned them later, they could offer nothing but fear and confusion.
The case was quickly pushed up to George Stacy. The moment he saw the report, a vague suspicion rose in his heart that Devil Face had returned to settle accounts. But after staring at the files piled on his desk, he closed his eyes, clenched his jaw, and tossed the case back to his subordinates.
"Handle it quietly," he said.
After that, he lowered his head and went right back to the mountain of vampire-related paperwork in front of him. Those powerful bastards in government had hidden the existence of vampires for profit, and now that the public was enraged, the burden somehow still landed on the police.
What a joke.
....
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