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For the better part of a week, rumors had been circulating through the criminal circles of Hell’s Kitchen about equipment moving through the neighborhood at odd hours. Matt had tracked the shipments far enough to confirm a pattern, but not the cargo or the destination.
Tonight he’d managed to keep pace with one of the trucks longer than the others, following its route past the edge of the Kitchen before his footing ran out. He caught the driver’s voice as it pulled away, a complaint about the Midtown Tunnel and something about Exit 13. That narrowed it down, but not enough.
Sighing, Matt pulled out his burner to dictate a text to Spider-Man.
It was a matter of professional courtesy, even if he knew that Spider-Man wouldn’t object to him pursuing the lead alone. Matt could easily push through unfamiliar ground, but pulling in someone who already knew the area was the smarter play.
The call came through less than a minute later. “Double-D! What’s up?”
Matt heard the wind whipping past the receiver and the thwip of webs. Probably hard to text while swinging, but Matt preferred the call anyway.
“I’ve been following the trail of some equipment moving through the Kitchen. Not sure which gang they’re associated with yet, but I heard the driver mention Midtown Tunnel and Exit 13.”
“Tracks with what I’ve been picking up on patrol. Some weird stuff going on in LIC. I thought it was just the usual off-books tech runners, but it’s been ramping up. Wanna pool intel?”
“I’ve got a few more avenues to chase on my end, but I should have more by tomorrow. We can coordinate from there.”
The next evening, Matt’s burner vibrated as he was stepping through his apartment door. He leaned his cane against the wall and thumbed open the call, loosening his tie.
“It’s HYDRA!” Spider-Man’s words tumbled out of him in a rush. “Or some kind of offshoot? Not the main branch, I don’t think. Smaller, but definitely still HYDRA.”
His voice had cracked on the last word, and Matt spared a brief hope that the kid hadn’t skipped school to work on this. “Back up. Explain.”
Spider-Man took a deep breath. “Okay. So, I found the truck by… accessing… some street cams.”
More like ‘hacked’, Matt imagined.
“I caught the driver’s face, so I came to the Tower after I got out of—… work.”
Uh-huh. Sure.
“Facial recognition flagged him as a HYDRA 'facilitator’. Then I used the Tower’s feed access to follow the truck to a building in LIC. Once I had that, I could go back to other timestamps and find other shipments. It’s definitely their base. Small crew, though. Maybe a dozen people.”
Matt slipped off his shoes and removed his tie. “Do we know anything about the building?”
“Main floor is fronting as a commercial printing shop. There are three floors of apartments above it but I think they’re empty. Stuff in the windows looks staged.”
“I’m willing to bet a print shop like that doesn’t exactly invite casual shoppers either. And the machines are loud enough to mask whatever else they’re doing.”
“I swung out there, but it was still daylight so I couldn’t get too close. Didn’t see much, but when I was about to head back I saw one of the workers leaving. He looked… familiar? Might have seen him when I was scanning through the database. I followed him to a storage unit.”
Spider-Man’s voice picked up in excitement. He was practically vibrating through the phone.
“When he left, I got in there and found papers with the building’s address on them, and one of them had a name I recognized from some Avengers briefings. He’s part of HYDRA but has been known to run splinter cells.”
Matt had only tangled with HYDRA once, and that had landed him in the Tower for medical treatment. He wasn’t eager to repeat the experience, but he also didn’t want the Avengers tearing through Hell’s Kitchen to follow the trail.
Matt couldn’t remember if Spider-Man had ever been part of the news stories involving HYDRA, but the barely-contained anticipation in his voice said that he probably hadn’t. Matt understood the thrill of a job that went past their typical bank robberies and drug busts, but he’d learned the hard way why that feeling had to be tempered with caution.
“Send me the address. Let’s make our move tonight.”
Two texts came through while Matt packed his suit in a duffle. He could at least save himself some hassle by taking the 7 train over, then changing into the suit once he was closer.
Matt listened to the robotic text-to-speech voice read off the address that Spider-Man had sent over. The second message was another address, followed by “roof on jackson, good sightlines can watch wo spooking”.
~
The apartments were filled only by the hollow silence of empty rooms and the faint buzz of fluorescent lights left on in a few of them to suggest otherwise. But, beyond that, the rooftop Spider-Man had picked out was a little far for Matt to get a good read.
The streets below them were teeming with people, creating interference that was difficult to tune out from that distance.
Matt pushed up from his crouch. “Let’s start working our way closer. We’ll pause on the roof next to theirs before we commit to the infiltration.” A clear sightline was useless to Matt, and couching it in terms of a tactical approach was a safer explanation than ‘my senses have limits that I’d rather not advertise.’
They crossed rooftops and fire escapes under the cover of shadows and masked by the city’s noise. From the adjacent building, Matt could finally filter out everything else. He crouched low and let his senses fill in the gaps.
“The commercial front is basically empty.” Matt paused, tilting his head. While the rest of the Avengers only suspected enhanced senses, Spider-Man had seen Daredevil in action enough times to wait for more details. “Even the inventory boxes barely have anything in them.”
Matt extended his focus downward. There was only one heartbeat in the shop, slow and bored, but the basement hummed with activity.
Eight heartbeats were elevated with the focused tension of people working against a deadline. Footsteps scurried across concrete. Equipment was repositioned with a metallic scrape. A voice called out something about a calibration cycle.
And beneath all of it was a frequency that made his back teeth ache.
“Sub-level is definitely a lab of some kind. Open floor plan, and… same footprint as the building above?”
“Why do you sound so surprised?”
Matt shrugged. “Groups like this tend to dig out a bit, give themselves more space.”
“Front is seven, eight yards wide. How far back does it go?”
“About twelve or thirteen.”
Matt listened as Spider-Man mumbled a string of numbers.
“Seven twelve three three so seven fifty-six… high end… nine thirty-six… between a large two-car garage… MSST… chemistry room…” Spider-Man nodded. “It’s tight, but doable.”
The last part was spoken clearly, and Matt wasn’t sure the kid even realized he’d been saying the rest aloud.
Matt pointed to the ductwork along the roof. “That’s our best bet. When we open it, it’ll be a straight drop down to a maintenance corridor on the floor above the shop.” He pulled out his billy clubs then paused. “Actually, it gets a little narrow. If anything swings wrong with this, the sound would carry through the ductwork.”
“I can attach a web and lower us both down?”
Matt nodded. Solid plan. They made their way over to the vent on the roof. Spider-Man pried the grating loose with a soft metallic pop, the sound lost under the hum of the HVAC, and anchored a web line to the edge. “Clint would kill for this setup,” he muttered, half to himself. At Matt’s confused frown, he added. “The vents. He’s always complaining about—you know what, never mind. Later.”
He braced himself on the edge and grabbed Matt, telling him to hold on, and slowly lowered them down.
The shaft narrowed at the first juncture. Spider-Man let out some extra line, then pushed it into Matt’s hand to hold his own weight. Once Matt was secure, he flattened himself against the duct wall and crawled through. Matt followed, the fit tighter across his shoulders.
Spider-Man anchored another web on a reinforced section just under the juncture, and started the process again. At the bottom, another juncture crossed it, but below them was a grate instead of a continuation of the shaft. They settled on either side of the grate to regroup, listening.
They waited, but it was clear the maintenance corridor had not been entered in a very long time. When he was sure they wouldn’t be found, Matt nodded his head at the grate. “Let’s pull that up and drop down.”
Matt had to hold in a sneeze at the dust they kicked up from the maintenance room floor.
He walked around the room, touching the walls and crouching on the floor, mapping their approach. Matt stopped along the wall on the far side from where they’d done their external observation. The build was sloppy, and they’d had to add drywall on the storefront level to make up for the unevenness and square it out.
It left a significant interstitial space in the wall below them, one they could drop into from here. “If you can get us down there,” Matt whispered, “we can move sideways towards the back of the building. We’ll have to duck a little in some places, but this opens up again in the boiler room.”
Spider-Man nodded and anchored another web, lost among the cobwebs already cluttering the space.
The boiler room was next to the inventory storage. Matt listened, but the heartbeat in the front never moved toward the door from the front area. He never moved at all, actually, engrossed in something on his phone.
Matt led them to another vent grate near the floor, leading down into the basement. Spider-Man knelt to pop the grate when the HVAC kicked on and gave Matt a clearer picture. There was no way the lower ducts would support them, but…
He redirected Spider-Man with a tap on his shoulder and a tilt of his head, leading them across the storage area and to a metal cover. It led to a service ladder that would take them inside the ceiling itself, an access point for the electronics and plumbing that took up the space between the ground floor and the basement.
Past the insulation, the frequency from the basement grew worse. Matt’s jaw clenched and the muscles in his neck and shoulders tensed up. It reminded him of nails on a chalkboard.
He shook his head and kept going.
Matt led them to a disconnected vent. It would be a squeeze, but Spider-Man would be able to crawl down it enough to see into the room. It also gave Matt an excuse as to why he wouldn’t be able to see what was on the screens that everyone in the room seemed to be looking at.
He could tell the moment that Spider-Man figured out the plan. He crawled past Matt and silently lowered himself down.
While Matt waited, he took steadying breaths, trying to filter out the frequency.
Several minutes later, Spider-Man crawled out enough to safely whisper to Matt without it carrying down to the occupants below. “The documents on the screen look like some sort of bioreactor, but I haven’t gotten much more yet.”
Matt pulled himself out of the hunch he’d sunk into, like he was trying to pull his head down between his shoulders to escape the sound.
The frequency had gone from nails on a chalkboard to a dental drill against a nerve.
“DD?” Spider-Man prompted when Matt didn’t reply. “You okay?”
“That sound from the device is getting to me.” Matt knew it had to be bothering Spider-Man as well, but his hearing wasn’t nearly as sensitive as Matt’s. His fingers flexed and recurled as he tried to give himself other sensations to focus on.
“Need to find some earplugs?”
“No,” he said more tersely than he’d intended. He rolled his shoulders back and reset them, only for the tension to creep right back up.
Spider-Man nodded in understanding and crawled back down.
After another few minutes, Matt heard a gasp from the vent, followed quickly by Spider-Man scurrying back up the vent. “It’s Zola,” he whispered urgently. “It’s one of Zola’s designs!”
“Who’s—”
“HYDRA scientist. Like, Original Recipe. Worked with Red Skull. A lot of the stuff on the screen is talking about a ‘Cosmic Cube’ but what they have is using a bio-organic power source for a dimensional generator.”
They needed to get out. This was definitely Avengers territory.
Matt turned to lead them out, but paused.
“What?” Spider-Man asked.
“The frequency. It’s stabilizing. It was fluctuating before, but now it’s like it’s locked onto something.”
“… Is that good or bad?”
“I don’t know. Let’s get out of here. Call the Tower.”
Below them, a voice rose in pitch. A second voice answered, sharp with rebuke. Then a sound Matt recognized from a hundred failing machines: a pop, a crackle, the sizzle of electronics shorting.
The frequency hiccupped, skipping like a record needle dragged across a groove, and for a half-second Matt felt something give way behind his eyes.
Then the device activated.
The world tore along a seam that Matt hadn’t even known was there, parting with a sound that had no Earthly equivalent. The frequency was so low that it vibrated in his marrow, and layered above it was a shriek that climbed past the range of human hearing and kept going.
Matt’s legs buckled under him as his senses shattered, his hands flying uselessly to cover his ears.
A wrongness pressed against his perception like a thumb into a wound. His radar sense warped and doubled, showing him both the basement lab layered with another space.
Sound traveled wrong there. Echoes bent at angles that shouldn’t exist. Smells bled through with chemical compounds his brain couldn’t categorize, organic decay filtered through an alien biology.
The two spaces overlapped in his perception and he couldn’t separate them.
He vaguely heard Spider-Man calling out to him, shaking his shoulder with one hand while he floundered for his comm to the Tower with the other.
The rift yawned below them, and on the other side, something stirred.
The first creature through the rift died before it took three steps. A piece of failing equipment
near the generator exploded, shrapnel tearing through its torso, and it collapsed in a heap of twitching limbs and fluid that hissed when it hit the concrete.
Spider-Man yelled into his comms as it connected. HYDRA. Zola tech. Dimensional breach. Abandoned experiments. Mutates. Hostiles emerging.
The HYDRA personnel nearest the device didn’t have time to react before the second and third creatures were on them. Matt heard the screaming start, wet and abrupt, before it was cut short.
Spider-Man threw himself down the vent, kicking out the grate with a screech, and into the room.
The survivors ran, footsteps scattering in all directions and heartbeats spiking in terror. Voices shouted over each other in the scramble for the stairwell. The creatures not engaged with Spider-Man pursued the HYDRA survivors.
They were being ripped apart.
Matt forced himself upright. The first attempt failed, his inner ear protesting the doubled spatial input. He stumbled to the vent and gripped the edge, willing the nausea to pass. The second attempt was more successful as his body remembered how to move even when his senses were screaming.
He dropped through the vent and landed in the lab.
The creatures were smaller than he’d expected from the noise they made, but he could sense larger entities through the rift. Their compact bodies moved with a jerky, insectile speed that made them hard to track. Most had four limbs, though a few had six, and their claws scraped concrete as they moved.
They weren’t coordinated, weren’t fighting with any kind of strategy, but they didn’t need to. There were enough of them to overwhelm through sheer numbers.
Spider-Man was already in motion, webs crisscrossing the lab in thick lines meant to contain. One creature was pinned to a support beam, thrashing. Another had its legs bound together, toppled but still snapping at anything in reach. A third was climbing the wall, finding angles Spider-Man hadn’t webbed yet.
Matt took that one. A billy club to the skull knocked it loose. It hit the ground, scrambled up, and he broke its foreleg before it could lunge. The limb gave way with a crack.
“Welcome back,” he called out, flipping over a creature and webbing it mid-flight. “You good?”
“Good enough.”
Matt took point on the more grounded threats, the ones skittering across the floor or trying to flank. Spider-Man handled anything airborne or climbing, trying to come at them from above. When Spider-Man webbed a creature’s legs, or the wings of the few that had them, Matt swept it before it could tear free. When a creature tried to circle behind Spider-Man, Matt’s club ricocheted off a concrete pillar and caught it in the skull.
Spider-Man ducked without looking, already firing another web at a target in front of him. The bank shots didn’t surprise him anymore. They’d done this too many times already.
“Cover me,” he yelled at Matt, swinging over a cluster of creatures toward the generator. “Gonna try to shut it down.”
The creatures kept coming, pouring through the rift in twos and threes. He broke limbs and shattered jaws, aiming to incapacitate and move on.
He couldn’t bring himself to kill them. Whatever Zola had warped them into, they were still alive. He doubted that would continue once the Avengers arrived, but he also knew that this wasn’t his operation anymore either.
Claws raked across his arm as he pivoted, tearing through the suit. The pain was clarifying, a hot line of fire that cut through the background noise of the rift. He felt the blood well up, warm and wet against his skin. Not deep, but it would hurt later, when the adrenaline faded and his body remembered it was injured.
“No good,” Spider-Man called from the generator. “There’s a forcefield around it and I can’t get through.” A web shot past Matt’s shoulder, pinning a creature to the wall.
“We need to contain them until backup arrives.”
But the containment was already failing. The creatures were breaking past them, clawing their way up the stairs and pouring out into the streets. Matt heard the first civilian scream outside.
They followed the creatures up the stairs, keeping as many contained as possible. Matt broke one’s leg at the base of the stairs. Halfway up, Spider-Man webbed another to the wall, weaving a thick barrier of webs behind them. Even if they wouldn’t hold long, they hoped it would at least stem the tide.
The guard who’d been manning the storefront was already dead when they got there, his body slumped behind the counter and his heartbeat silent. By the time they burst through the front entrance and onto the street, the street was already a mess of overturned cars and shattered glass.
The arrival of the Avengers cut through the chaos. Iron Man’s repulsors flared overhead before he dropped closer to the street level. Captain America’s voice cut across the comms a moment before Matt registered the heavy rhythm of his boots and the faint hum of the shield already in motion. Black Widow and Hawkeye moved in alongside him, their footsteps joining the fight without breaking stride. Through the comms, Matt caught someone saying that Banner was still in the quinjet, held in reserve.
The new arrivals slotted into the fray around him.
Stark’s repulsor shots complicated tracking the ground-level threats before Matt adjusted to filtering them out.
The vibranium of Captain America’s shield sang at a frequency distinct from anything else on the battlefield as it slammed into creatures and rebounded off of surfaces. It wasn’t too dissimilar from how Matt would bounce his billy clubs.
Widow’s footwork reminded him of Elektra’s or his own, leaving fewer auditory cues than the others, though the electricity humming at her wrists made her easy enough to track.
It was more input to track, but he’d learn in the same way he’d adjusted to webs and arrows.
Barton found him first, falling into position on Matt’s left. “Nice of you to start the party without us.” An arrow took down a creature mid-lunge before Matt had needed to dodge.
Matt returned the favor by sweeping the legs out from under a mutate trying to circle behind them. “You’re late.”
Barton shrugged. “Traffic.”
“Something get in your way at two-thousand feet?”
“Well, you know what they say about New York pigeons.”
Matt snorted despite himself. He went to reply but was pulled away when Captain America moved to intercept a cluster of creatures surging toward a side street, and Matt found himself redirecting a family toward the evacuation route Barton was covering.
It was strange, sharing a battlefield with them. At first he’d framed it as them being a part of his world before realizing it was the other way around this time. He was infringing into theirs.
A mutate lunged at a teenager frozen against a bodega wall. Matt drove his club into the creature’s jaw, where it crumpled before being pinned by one of Spider-Man’s webs. Matt dragged the teenager forward and shoved him toward a route to safety.
His usual methods didn’t apply here.
He could only disable and move on, trusting the Avengers to handle the larger threat while he focused on the smaller one. The people. The ones who hadn’t signed up for any of this.
He was good at that part.
Widow fell in beside him as he cleared a path for a family trapped near an overturned food cart. He took the creature on the left, and she took the one on the right. When a third tried to flank, she was already there, her Widow’s Bite crackling.
He was surprised how well they flowed together.
“Watching you fight in person is different,” she said, shooting another creature from out of their path. “The grainy CCTV footage doesn’t do you justice.”
Matt had known they’d done their research, but felt a swell of pride at the compliment. Foggy and Karen both had given vivid descriptions of Widow’s fighting style. “Could say the same about you and news footage.”
She ducked under a mutate’s swinging arm and drove an electrified wrist into its ribcage. “I’m just glad you’re on our side.”
“Jury’s still out on that one.”
She laughed before running to support Barton, who had three mutates converging on his position.
Matt almost said “same” but realized he hadn’t quite decided if the Avengers were true allies yet. While Matt was familiar with Barton and Spider-Man, the Avengers as a unit were currently filed in the same mental category as Frank, Elektra, and Wade. Although, Spider-Man seemed to trust them.
Spider-Man swung past overhead as he filled in the team through the comms. The intel came rapid-fire, woven between aerial takedowns and webs that pinned creatures to walls and lampposts.
Iron Man adjusted his flight path around each web without being asked, the two of them moving through the same airspace like they’d drilled it. When Spider-Man dropped lower, Barton and Widow covered his dive with a barrage of arrows and shots. When Captain America threw a cluster of mutates off of him and into the air, Spider-Man was already webbing them down.
Then he swung back toward Matt, falling into position on his right like he’d never left. A creature tried to flank and found itself webbed at the knees, Matt’s club already in motion to finish the takedown.
The rhythm was different with the Avengers in the mix, but Spider-Man shifted between them seamlessly. He belonged alongside both heroes and vigilantes in a way Matt didn’t.
“They’re pouring through the rift!” Stark called out.
“See if you can shut down that generator,” came Captain America’s reply.
Matt tracked the Iron Man suit into the basement, approaching the generator. The frequency was still humming at the base of his skull like a second heartbeat.
He shook his head to focus, snapping back to his immediate surroundings just in time for a creature to slam into him. Matt registered claws, the smell of whatever passed for blood in its biology, and then he was airborne.
He twisted mid-flight, trying to orient, trying to find something to grab, but there was nothing. His back hit the side of a parked sedan with a crunch that he felt in his ribs. The window shattered and the car alarm screamed.
He rolled off the hood and hit the pavement on his feet… mostly. His ribs protested the movement with a grinding pain that made his breath catch. He’d managed to deflect the worst of it, turning what should have been a direct hit into a glancing blow, but the impact with the car had given him at least two cracked ribs.
Natasha was there before he’d finished the thought, covering his position while he steadied himself against the car. “You okay?”
“I’ll live.” He pushed off the car as he compartmentalized the pain. There would be time to feel it later. Matt went back to the fight, his breathing a fraction shallower.
The tide was turning against them.
The creatures’ movements became harder to track as more of them poured through the rift. He’d cleared three civilians from a corner store and was guiding a fourth toward the evacuation line when Widow’s voice cut through the Avengers’ comms.
“We’re getting overrun. It’s time.”
Matt had begun to ask Spider-Man what exactly it was ‘time’ for, when he sensed the rear hatch of the quinjet opening. He heard Dr. Banner move toward the fight, his steps as steady as his heartbeat.
Then, the heart rate spiked.
Banner carried the same chemical base note as Captain America, but as his form began to bulge and distort, that scent changed. It… burned, gave way to something acrid that sizzled against Matt’s sinuses.
The smell of blood assaulted him, so thick that Matt could taste it in the back of his throat. Cells split and reformed as the body that had been Dr. Bruce Banner expanded into something that was not. Matt had smelled blood as arterial spray, slow seepage from a wound too deep to clot, even coughed up as a lung filled with fluid. But this was violence such that he’d never perceived it, as the body turned against itself.
Bones cracked and restructured, wet and grinding as calcium and collagen were unmade and remade in the span of a heartbeat. Muscle fibres tore and regenerated so rapidly it blurred into a single, sustained squelch.
And beneath it all, Banner’s heart had become something thunderous, a thrum that vibrated through the asphalt and up through Matt’s boots.
The roar that followed shook glass three blocks away.
Matt had heard the stories. Everyone had. From the ‘Harlem Terror’ to ‘The Incident’. Foggy had described the footage that played on every news channel of a green giant tearing through alien invaders like wet paper. He’d heard the way people talked about the Hulk with both fear and awe, the way they said ‘monster’ like it was the only word that fit.
Banner landed twenty yards from Matt’s position, and the impact cratered the street.
Matt stood at the edge of that crater and understood, with a clarity that settled into his bones, that he was no longer fighting the same fight.
He’d spent his entire vigilante career being one of the more dangerous things in any given room. He knew what it was to be outmatched, knew the humility of taking a hit from someone stronger and getting back up anyway.
This was different. This was a category of power that didn’t intersect with his world at all.
His fights were about individual lives and specific neighborhoods. He fought muggers and traffickers and crime lords. He bled in alleys and rooftops. The scale of his war was measured in city blocks.
The Avengers’ wars were measured in disasters.
“Hulk!” Captain America called out. When Banner swung his head to face him, he pointed to a cluster of mutates. “Attack the creatures.”
He took off, the ground shaking under each stride. No argument or hesitation, only destruction, aimed exactly where the Captain had pointed.
It was like watching a hurricane response team deploy while you stood there with a bucket and a first aid kit.
Banner grabbed a mutate the size of a delivery truck and threw it through the front of the HYDRA building. Matt pulled a young woman out from under a collapsed awning and pointed her toward the evacuation line. Different tools for different disasters.
“Two more on the south corner, Big Guy,” Widow called out. And Banner changed direction mid-stride, his fists already in motion before Matt could track the new targets.
Banner—‘The Hulk’—whoever he was like this… he was responding to tactical direction and prioritizing threats. Listening. Whatever the news had made of him, the creature in front of Matt wasn’t a mindless, raging beast.
Dangerous? Certainly. Unpredictable? Perhaps. But not a heedless monster.
Matt could think about all that later. Right now there were people in the way, and he was still standing between them and the things that wanted to hurt them.
The fight was a mess of moving bodies and Matt found himself pushed toward Banner by the sheer physics of the battlefield, the crush of creatures forcing them into the same twenty-foot radius. He was close enough to feel the displacement of air every time those massive arms swung, tracking his violence by impacts that had no finesse but needed none.
Where Banner in this form was a wrecking ball, Matt was a scalpel.
Matt worked in the spaces Banner left behind. He slid into the gaps between one smash and the next, taking down the creatures that tried to flank while Banner handled the ones directly in front.
Their styles shouldn’t have complemented, yet they did.
Matt had spent years learning to read bodies in motion, and Banner’s movements in this form were honest in a way that made them easy to predict. Large, destructive, and entirely imprecise, but not chaotic or lashing out at civilians or teammates. So, Matt was able to work around him and through him.
Matt still wasn’t sure what to call him like this.
The others called him “Hulk” or other nicknames, like Widow’s “Big Guy”, but these were all people who used multiple names. Captain America alone responded to half a dozen variations on both his ‘hero name’ and real name.
A winged mutate dove at Matt from above, claws grazing the armor along his shoulder before he could twist aside. It stayed airborne, diving and pulling up just out of reach. Its movements were twitchy in a way Matt didn’t often encounter, and his billy clubs kept striking only air. It dove again, and before Matt could adjust, a green hand snatched the creature and flung it aside to tumble across the asphalt.
Matt straightened, still catching his breath. “Thank you… Doctor Banner,” the name landing as more of a question.
Banner’s shoulders hunched and his head swung toward Matt. “No Banner!” he growled. “Only Hulk!”
“Understood,” Matt said cautiously, holding his hands up in placation. “Hulk. My apologies.”
Hulk snorted a gust of air out of his nostrils, then turned and put his fist through a mutate’s ribs.
The battle pulled them apart after that.
Matt found Barton again near the bodega, falling into a familiar flow. Barton’s arrows provided cover. Matt provided ground support. The communication between them was slowly becoming less and less necessary. Matt knew where Barton would aim before the bowstring twanged, and Barton had begun to anticipate where Daredevil would move by how his weight shifted.
Spider-Man joined them a few minutes later, adding webs into the mix from above.
Matt paused as he heard a cluster of heartbeats trapped in an alley nearby. Three people were cornered as several creatures closed in.
He took off, followed closely by Spider-Man, who was far more used to this side of Daredevil than Barton was. Daredevil and Hawkeye encountered each other in the field, but Daredevil and Spider-Man patrolled together. Barton let out a confused noise, then shrugged before following as well.
The alley was narrow, barely wide enough for two people to fight side by side. Three civilians were pressed against a dumpster at the far end, with four mutates between them and rescue. Matt took the first one before it registered his presence, club driving up under its jaw. Spider-Man webbed the second. Barton put an arrow through the third’s shoulder, and Matt finished it with a strike to the skull. The fourth tried to bolt and Spider-Man webbed it to the alley wall.
Matt ushered the civilians out of the alley and directed them to a safe path out of the crossfire. As he tracked their footsteps to the evacuation line, they made their way to another pocket of creatures.
“Hey,” Barton said, gesturing vaguely up and down Matt’s body. “You good? You’re looking a little… shredded.”
Matt grinned. “Still standing, aren’t I?” He was amused further at the slight uptick in Barton’s heartbeat. Smiling always seemed to unsettle people when he was in the suit, even after they’d gotten to know him better.
Barton held up his hands. “Just checking. Non-super to non-super.”
Before Matt could answer, his senses flared. A mutate was coming at Hulk from the left, low and fast, aiming for the back of his knee where the tendons bunched. Hulk was facing the other direction, both fists buried in a creature three times his size.
“Hulk, left!”
Hulk turned. Without hesitation or questioning the source of the warning, his fist came around in a backhand that caught the mutate mid-lunge and sent it through the window of the bodega. Matt couldn’t be sure, already taking on more creatures of his own, but he could have sworn he sensed Hulk turn back around and nod at him.
Matt and Captain America passed through each other's orbits more than fighting side-by-side.
Matt noted through his periphery that the Captain had an understanding of combat that bordered on the preternatural, a mind that processed a battlefield faster than most people processed a single opponent.
Matt couldn’t match it, not in the way he applied it, but he could appreciate the craft.
A mutate lunged at Captain America from an angle he couldn’t cover. Since he couldn’t block, he redirected instead. He grabbed the creature by its forelimb and, with a twist of his hips that spoke to years of training, redirected its momentum and hurled it toward Daredevil.
Matt read the trajectory in the fraction of a second before the creature reached him. He sidestepped, caught its arm, and used its own velocity to swing its head into a light post.
Captain America nodded once at him. Matt returned the gesture, then launched himself at another mutate to give some trapped civilians a chance to escape.
This one was bigger than many of the others, scattering debris and smaller creatures in its wake. It moved on four legs, low to the ground, and its shoulders were broad enough to block half of the street. And it was squarely between the civilians and a safe route away from the fighting.
It outweighed Matt by at least a factor of ten, and Matt was already fighting with maybe seventy percent of his usual mobility. He could hold it off, buy time, but he couldn’t put it down alone. At least not quickly enough.
He cast around his senses to find that Captain America was already on the far side of the fray, and the others weren’t much closer. But ten yards away, Hulk burst from beneath a pile of creatures, roaring as he ripped one of them in half.
“Hulk!” Matt pitched his voice to carry over the noise. “Could use a hand if you get a chance!”
Spider-Man turned toward Matt’s shout, his arc shifting mid-swing. “On my way, DD! That’s not really how Hulk—”
Hulk dropped the creature he was holding and ran. The mutate that had been bearing down on Matt was suddenly airborne, lifted by its hindquarters and swung into the side of a brick building with a crunch that shook mortar loose from the third floor.
“Huh,” Matt heard Spider-Man say, redirecting back to another cluster of creatures. “I guess it is.”
Matt herded the civilians toward the perimeter, thinking of the panicked certainty in Spider-Man’s voice as he’d tried to correct him, like he was explaining something obvious to someone who hadn’t learned the rules yet.
Everyone was wary of Hulk, enough that Matt began to think that maybe there was something to the stories. They spoke to him in simple language, treated him like a variable or a risk to be managed. Matt didn’t have the experiences with Hulk that the others had, hadn’t been on the receiving end of whatever made them flinch.
All he knew was what was in front of him. Hulk had answered when he’d called, and had listened when he’d given a warning.
He heard Widow mumble under her breath that maybe the ‘Man Without Fear’ should show a little more fear in this case.
As far as Matt had experienced, the Hulk was just a person. A very large person who wasn’t particularly articulate and managed to make Matt’s own anger issues look mild, but still a person. And Matt wasn’t going to treat him as anything less until Hulk gave him a reason to.
The others could keep their wariness. Matt had spent too many years being treated like something broken to inflict that on someone else.
The explosion came from below.
The pressure wave traveled up through the asphalt and hit him in the chest, shattering windows for a block in every direction. The HYDRA building’s ground floor blew outward and upward, glass and brick and twisted steel spraying across the street.
Iron Man flew out with the debris cloud, repulsors sputtering and armor shedding spark as he skidded across the asphalt.
A piece of debris caught Matt across the temple before he could dodge, though his helmet deflected the worst of it. Matt shook his head, trying to clear the ringing.
The street above the basement had split open, exposing the lab below, and the upper floors began to collapse into the newly opened cavity.
Stark coughed. “Ow.”
Matt reined in his senses, but he could feel the blood already beginning to run down the side of his face. It tracked through the dust on his skin, following the line of his jaw before dripping onto his suit. Head wounds always bled badly, but the actual damage seemed minimal.
He helped Iron Man stand, surprised when the suit was lighter than expected, then turned to the rift. The creatures now had a direct path out of the building.
Stark was barking out an explanation on his comm, but Matt was focused on the adjacent roof, and the three terrified heartbeats filtering down. Why did scared people always go to the roof instead of the street?
The explosion had drawn the attention of the creatures, and one of them was moving toward the roof-bound civilians.
The building was similar construction to HYDRA’s building, but the front had been modernized in the sleek style that had become popularized since the Tower had been built. The sides had been flush, so no escape ladders on the side either. There was nothing for Matt to use to vault up there, and he wasn’t sure he’d have time to run through the building itself, or to swing up the escape ladders that were along the back of the building.
“Spider-Man, I need a lift!” But Spider-Man had his hands full with three mutates. Literally.
Iron Man’s repulsors were still sputtering.
Matt sighed. Escape ladders in the back, then.
He began to take off but was stopped short at a low grunt behind him, followed by the thunder of heavy footsteps closing fast. Matt spun, casting out his senses to search for whatever threat he’d missed. But there was nothing. Just Hulk, bearing down on him with no enemy in sight.
Before he could react, Hulk’s hand closed around his middle and lifted him off the ground. It wasn’t exactly gentle, but it was still controlled. Matt’s brain stuttered between alarm and confusion, his hands bracing against the massive fingers wrapped around his ribs.
Then Hulk threw him.
Matt was suddenly airborne, the street dropping away beneath him with a speed that stole his breath. The wind screamed past his ears and the blood on his temple streamed backward into his hair. Below him, Hulk was already driving another mutate into the asphalt.
The throw had put Matt exactly where he needed to be.
Well, he had asked for a lift…
He reached the apex of the arc and his grapple was already in his hand, the line snapping out to catch hold of a pipe on the roof. Matt swung, using the momentum from Hulk’s throw, and his arc carried him up and over the building’s edge.
Using the force of the swing, he slammed his boot across the creature’s skull, rolling to a stop in front of the civilians and recalling the other half of his billy clubs back to his hand.
He caught a fragment of comm chatter as he straightened, directing the civilians to the fire escape on the back side. It was Stark’s voice, tinged with what might have been grudging respect, muttering something about him “pulling a Spider-Man.”
Matt lowered himself back to street-level as he tracked the civilians’ progress, hearing more confusion on the comms from Widow and Barton.
“Sorry, Stark,” Matt said, clapping Iron Man on the shoulder as he passed, “but I’m pretty sure Devil-Spider is already taken.”
Stark was about to reply when something on his gauntlet chirped. He waved his hand above it, presumably across a holoscreen of some sort. “Cap, your shield might have better luck. The vibranium could disrupt the frequency.”
“On it,” he called as he headed down.
The civilians were almost clear. Widow was covering some of the remaining stragglers. Matt heard her position shift as she moved to intercept a mutate trying to circle behind them. The creature went down, twitching from the Widow’s Bites embedded in its cerebral cortex.
Then another came at her from the side. This time, she didn’t shift.
She was focused on the civilians.
Matt ran toward her. “Widow—” Before he could finish calling out the warning, the mutate slammed into her. Claws raked across her right leg, ripping through muscle. She spun out of its grip before it could scrape bone, but she came down on the foot wrong. Something definitely snapped.
The creature swung down at her, going in for the kill while she was stunned.
Matt caught its claws with his club as Widow rolled out of the fall. She came up on one knee, with her sidearm drawn. Matt could hear the muscle trembling, the way her body was trying to compensate, and failing.
Then her bullet whizzed past his ear and between the mutate’s eyes.
Matt stayed between her and the fight as she dragged herself backward against a wall, her injured leg leaving a wet trail on the concrete. She winced and her breath came in quick pants, interrupted by hisses of pain as she told the civilians to shelter near her. She wasn’t getting back up any time soon, not on that leg.
“I’m down,” she said into her comm. “Stable but don’t count on me for back up.”
The comm crackled with acknowledgements from the others, tight with concern but staying on-mission. Barton said he was on his way.
Matt kept position as she prepped her other sidearm.
When Barton finally dropped down beside them, he helped clear a path to safety. He glanced back at Widow to take in her injuries, then at Daredevil’s. “Jeez, man,” his voice was pitched low, meant only for him. “You don’t look much better than she does.”
Matt hoped they wouldn’t try to use it as an excuse to get him back to the Tower for medical, though he was comforted that Widow's injuries would be well cared-for. He could smell the blood covering Barton too, could hear it dripping off of him onto the street below them. “Back at you… You know, non-super to non-super.”
Barton laughed and helped Matt finish clearing a path. “Get them out of here!”
Widow and Barton covered them while Matt guided the civilians the last block to the perimeter.
Captain America emerged from the basement, tapping his comm. “Shield’s not getting through.” He was already pivoting to engage a mutate trying to flank Stark. “The forcefield just absorbs it and disperses the energy.”
“That leaves brute force.” Stark’s voice was tight with frustration. Spider-Man and Hulk were equidistant from the basement, though Spider-Man was tangled up with a handful of mutates, his webs crisscrossing the street in a lattice meant to slow them down.
Hulk had his fist buried in a creature the same size as himself, already limp.
“Hulk!” Iron Man’s repulsors flared as he gained altitude. “Drop it!”
Hulk growled at Stark, and Matt didn’t blame him. Rude.
The mutate in his hands was still twitching, its limbs scrabbling against his forearms. For a moment Matt thought he wouldn’t comply, that the rage would win out and the command would go ignored. Then Hulk roared and hurled the creature aside.
Stark pointed at the generator still humming at the heart of the ruined structure. “Smash!”
And smash he did. Matt felt the impacts through the ground as Hulk’s fists came down on the forcefield and the barrier screamed. The frequency spiked into Matt’s skull like an icepick. The third hit sent cracks spiderwebbing through the air, fissures in the rift. The fourth hit shattered the generator.
The sound it made was almost anticlimactic, a grinding of metal and the wet pop of the bio-organic components rupturing. The frequency that had been gnawing at Matt’s skull since he entered the building stuttered and died.
The rift finally faded.
The remaining creatures kept fighting, driven by whatever instincts Zola had coded into their biology, but the flood had stopped. Matt counted as their numbers slowly dwindled.
Heartbeats were steadying. Voices were shifting from tactical to something looser, the first edges of relief creeping in around the exhaustion.
They didn’t need him anymore.
Matt faded into a nearby alley.
Spider-Man was slowly coaxing Hulk toward Widow. His voice was calm and gentle, the same one he’d use on patrols to soothe a scared victim. He used short sentences and simple language, but it lacked the Captain’s clipped tone or Stark’s brashness.
With nothing left to attack, Hulk was growing restless. This was the side of Hulk that Matt hadn’t experienced yet. The violence that he had fought alongside was still coiled beneath the surface, but now there was nowhere for it to go. Listening to Spider-Man navigate the aftermath and comedown, the others’ wariness began to make a little more sense.
At least the kid could handle himself if Hulk lashed out. Matt wasn’t sure how the two compared in raw strength, but it had to be close. He’d been able to tell early on that Spider-Man was constantly holding back a significant portion of his strength by the shift of muscle and sinew mid-punch. His tricep pushed out with barely any help from his chest, while the bicep and back muscles tightened early to bleed off the force.
Matt gathered from what Spider-Man was saying that Widow was the one who talked Hulk down and back into Banner.
The others were also regrouping around Widow. “Where's Daredevil?” she asked.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Spider-Man sighed. Matt couldn’t tell if the uptick in his heart was from worry about if Matt really would be fine, or if he’d seen Daredevil slip away and decided not to mention it to anyone.
He heard Barton spin around, likely looking for him. But Matt was well outside his line of sight. Even Barton couldn’t see through walls. “Why does he always disappear like that?”
Spider-Man shrugged. “It’s kind of his thing.”
Barton waved off whatever Captain America was about to say. “He’s a big boy. Probably halfway back to Hell’s Kitchen by now.”
The gash on his arm had stopped bleeding but the suit was stiff with dried blood, the fabric pulling against the wound with every movement. His ribs creaked with each breath, the hairline fractures sending sharp reminders through his side whenever he twisted wrong. The cut on his temple was still oozing.
He’d need Claire for the stitches. For the ribs, there wasn’t much to do except wrap them and wait.
At least since he’d come to Queens as a civilian, he could leave as one. And with an Avengers fight nearby, no one would think twice about his injuries.
The subway would be a mess right now from disrupted service. A cab could work. Half the drivers in Queens would be fleeing the area, but the other half would be looking to make a buck off it.
The place he’d stashed his clothes was already outside the perimeter. Then all he’d have to do was change and track a cab down to get him back to the Kitchen.
He pulled out his burner as he picked his way to his bag. His fingers left a smear of blood on the keys.
Claire answered on the second ring. “What did you do?”
“I need stitches. Maybe an x-ray.”
“Of course you do… Don’t tell me you were caught up in that Avengers mess?” When Matt didn’t answer, she sighed. “I’m on Mask Unit duty tonight. How bad?”
“I’ve had worse.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“… I’m taking a cab.”
“Dammit, Matt.”
Matt had the cab drop him off three blocks away from Metro-General and he changed back into his suit. It was easier to use the vigilante entrance as Daredevil than checking in as Matt Murdock. After briefly contemplating the roof entrance, he opted instead for the secure elevator that would take him directly to the Mask Unit. More eyes on him that way, but he wasn’t in the mood to climb.
Claire brought him to a room before prying his mask off to examine the gash along his temple. “We’ll want to image this too.”
“The ribs are worse.”
“I’ll be the judge of that… How’s the arm?”
“Nothing broken.”
She peeled away the sleeve and made a small sound at the back of her throat. “This is going to need more than a few stitches. You’ve got muscle damage here.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
Claire didn’t push. She was just glad he’d come in. “You tell Foggy and Karen already?”
Matt didn’t call her out on the subject change. “Yeah.”
From somewhere down the corridor, a television was playing news coverage of the Queens incursion. The anchor narrated the footage, stating that casualties were still being assessed. Matt stopped paying attention when he was mentioned.
Claire finished assessing the arm, mumbling about Dr. Palmer taking a look at it, and moved on to his ribs. Matt breathed through it as her fingers probed the swelling.
“I still want to get some imaging done, but you definitely cracked something. Nothing seems to be displaced though. Rest, ice, you know the drill. Try to avoid going out until it feels better.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“No you won’t.” But she knew that arguing with him about recovery time was like arguing with gravity. He’d rest when his body forced him to.
Just another night. Just another fight. Just another set of scars to add to the collection.