The door at the end of the hallway was solid wood, thick enough to muffle everything happening on the other side.
Klein raised one hand slightly.
A thread, near-invisible in the dim amber light, slithered silently under the door gap and curled around the inner handle. He felt the lock mechanism through it — simple spring latch, nothing serious — and applied the gentlest, most precise pressure.
Click.
Barely audible. The lock gave.
He didn't push the door open yet. Threads spread first, fanning out through the gap like a web, mapping the apartment room by room. Life signatures, breathing patterns, positions.
Two people in the bedroom — deep, slow breathing, the boneless quality of people who'd been thoroughly asleep for a while. Post-activity tiredness.
And eight bodyguards in the living room and adjacent spaces.
Eight. Klein blinked. Guy brings eight men to visit his girlfriend. Paranoid.
He pushed the door open without a sound, slipped inside, eased it shut behind him.
The eight guards were well-trained — they registered his presence the instant he was through the door, reactions already triggering. It didn't matter. Threads were faster than reaction time at this range. Eight precise, simultaneous movements, and eight people folded quietly — wrists locked, ankles bound, lowered to the floor before any of them could make a sound. He bound them with their own belts and zip-ties from his jacket pocket.
Thirty seconds, total.
He followed the scattered clothing trail from the living room to the bedroom door, which sat ajar. Warm yellow light leaked through the gap. Heavy snoring.
Klein pushed it open.
The bedroom smelled like expensive cigars, liquor, and too much cologne. On the oversized bed, a heavyset bald man with a tiger tattoo across his chest was sprawled out, mouth open, snoring at a volume that probably qualified as a noise complaint. A blonde woman lay curled beside him, her back to the door, deeply asleep.
A gold watch, a handgun, and several stacks of cash sat on the nightstand.
Klein studied them for a moment.
Then threads wrapped once around each of their wrists and ankles — light enough not to cut, tight enough to hold — and he pressed a thin thread across each of their faces, just long enough to deliver a brief, precisely measured pressure point to the carotid. Textbook unconsciousness. They'd wake up with a headache and nothing worse.
He stepped over the discarded clothing and went to work.
The walk-in closet had a wall safe with a combination lock. Klein pressed his palm against the metal door, sent a thread into the mechanism, and felt for the tumblers. The lock gave with a series of small clicks.
The safe door swung open.
Neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Several velvet bags — he opened one: gold bars, warm and heavy.
Klein did a rough count.
Three million in cash. A million-plus in gold.
He let out a slow breath through his nose.
Kingpin runs a tight operation. Even three tiers down, the money is real.
He unzipped the large sports duffel he'd brought and loaded it efficiently — cash first, then the velvet bags, the gold bars solid and satisfying against his palms. Swept the nightstand cash in too. Left the handgun.
He zipped the bag, shouldered it, and felt the weight settle.
Time to go.
He crossed back through the bedroom, through the living room past the eight trussed-up bodyguards, and was three steps from the floor-to-ceiling window in the center of the room—
The air tore.
Something punched through the rain-streaked glass before the sound of breaking even registered, crossing the room in a fraction of a second — a black throwing knife, serrated edges gleaming cold, aimed directly at his temple.
The Vajra Talisman activated on pure reflex.
Clang—!!
A faint golden membrane flared around him. The knife hit it with a force that shook the air in the room and punched Klein back half a step. It clattered to the floor at his feet, and the Vajra Talisman — which had stopped automatic rifle fire without difficulty — was now laced with hairline fractures across its surface, the protective light visibly dimmed.
Two more hits like that and it was gone.
Klein's mind went cold and sharp.
That was thrown. With enough force to crack a defense that stopped automatic weapons.
No time to look. He was already moving — body twisting, right index and middle fingers pressed together, targeting the trajectory the throw had come from by pure thread-sense.
"Swoosh—!"
A Bullet String launched from his fingertips, compressed to a needle point and accelerated to supersonic speed by the combined force of String-String Fruit and Sharp Metal infusion. It punched through the rain and darkness outside in a straight line.
Pfft.
The dull sound of impact. A sharply suppressed grunt.
Through his extended threads he felt it — a figure outside, pressed against the neighboring building's facade, fast in a way that most humans weren't, already mid-dodge when the string hit. The vital area cleared at the last instant. The string found lung instead of heart.
The figure absorbed it without going down. Then it was moving — retreating at speed, blending into the shadows and the rain and then simply gone.
Klein stood in the center of the ruined living room, rain blowing through the shattered window, and breathed.
He looked down at the throwing knife on the floor.
He picked it up. Heavy. Dense material he didn't immediately recognize — not standard steel, not tungsten. Custom design, blood grooves along the spine, the balance of something made by someone who thought of thrown weapons the way other people thought of precision instruments.
Definitely not a random assassin.
The system chimed in his mind.
[Ding!][Marvel key plot character detected: Lester — Bullseye.][Identity: Professional assassin. Kingpin's top enforcer. Future Dark Avengers roster — fake Hawkeye.][New plot character encountered. Reward: Lucky Draw count +1. Would you like to draw now?]
Not now.
Klein weighed the knife in his hand. Turned it once.
Bullseye. Kingpin's best. The man who could turn a paper clip into a lethal weapon and hit a moving target from three hundred meters.
He'd sent him to deal with the Ghost.
Which meant Kingpin had been paying attention.
Which meant Klein had graduated from a nuisance to a named problem.
He almost smiled.
He dropped the knife into the duffel bag — a souvenir, and a reminder — shouldered the weight, and moved toward the emergency stairwell. The rain through the broken window followed him halfway down the hall before the sound of it faded behind the fire door.
He was three blocks away before he let himself think clearly again.
Punctured lung. Bullseye would survive that. Men like him always did.
He'll be back, Klein noted with a kind of clinical interest. Better not be in the same place twice.
He adjusted the duffel strap and kept walking, rain running off his jacket, the heavy drag of several million dollars at his side.
Good night's work.
[End of Chapter 10]
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