Marvel Monkey King: CH 10 (Patreon)

From the next dawn onward, the routine set into the marrow of Jack's bones.

The alarm was the sound of Luke's heavy knuckles rapping on the bedroom doorframe at five in the morning, followed by the icy bite of wind cut by the Grand National as they tore across the Hudson into New Jersey.

The cavernous warehouse in Greenville Yard became a second skin.

Luke was not a gentle instructor, but he was a patient one. He laid down the bedrock: the tight, economic guard of the Marines, the slip-and-counter cadence of Golden Gloves boxing, how to pivot on the ball of the foot so that power flowed from the hips rather than wild shoulders.

Whenever Jack fell back into sloppy street brawling, Luke adjusted the drill on the fly, finding ways to channel the boy's erratic ferocity instead of trying to stamp it out.

"Don't fight like wounded beast," Luke told him, parrying a wild left and guiding the momentum into an off-balance spin. "Fight like you're trying to take their breath away before they realize the room has no air."

Jack was an unnerving student. Violence was a language he had spoken for lifetimes, and his body adapted with frightening speed. Techniques that took prize fighters months to burn into muscle memory settled into Jack's limbs within days. His reflexes sharpened until he could anticipate the big man's shoulder twitches before the punch even left the chamber.

At night, when the tavern fell silent and the only noise was the distant groan of subway trains beneath 125th Street, Jack lay awake in his cot upstairs.

He stared up at the water-stained plaster ceiling, his mind drifting into ancient myth.

Sun Wukong. The Great Sage Equal to Heaven.

What was the god's power?

Jack plucked a coarse golden hair from his forearm, held it between his fingertips, and blew on it softly, half-expecting a duplicate of himself to tumble onto the blanket.

Nothing happened. Just a loose hair drifting onto the floorboards.

He closed his eyes, trying to command the cold air to condense into cloud vapor beneath his heels. Nothing.

He tried to envision his skin turning into impervious granite, or shifting his form into an eagle, a tiger, a cricket. None of it responded.

Yet he kept trying. Every single night, sitting cross-legged in the dark while the city slept.

Because as his body grew and the daily beatings from Luke forced his muscle fibers to tear and knit back together, Jack could sense it: a faint, buried hum deep within him, waiting like embers banked under cold ash.

Days turned into weeks.

Luke watched the making of a truly unhinged fighter before his eyes.

Jack stopped treating his golden tail like an awkward appendage to tuck inside his denim. It was muscle, bone, and sinew. Ever so slowly, conditioned through daily pull-ups and inverted hangs, the tail gained tensile strength until it could comfortably support half his body weight.

One afternoon in the Jersey hangar, Jack leaped eighteen feet into the rafters, caught a rusted iron ceiling girder with the curled tip of his tail, and dangled upside down with his arms crossed.

He held it. Five seconds. Seven. Ten.

His face flushed scarlet, the veins in his neck bulging, until the tail gave out and he dropped fifteen feet, crashing flat on his backside in the concrete dust.

"Ow, fuck!" Jack hissed, rubbing his tailbone with a grimace.

Luke leaned against a wooden crate, sipping black coffee from a metal thermos. "How was that?"

"Felt like doing a triple pull-up with a penis," Jack groaned, rolling onto his side. "Ten out of ten, do not recommend."

Luke stared at him for three full seconds, his expression completely flat. "You have a bizarre way with words, kid."

"It's called poetry, big man," Jack retorted, springing back to his feet with a feral grin. "And it works."

It did. Within weeks, Jack was using the tail as an aerial pivot, hooking girders mid-leap, altering his trajectory in midair, vaulting between the high ceiling beams with terrifying agility. Another brutal dimension added to his repertoire.

Weeks turned into months.

With his physical conditioning reaching new heights, the threshold of Ruyi Jingu Bang expanded in tandem.

The black iron rod no longer stalled at two meters. Jack could stretch it to four meters in length, sweeping across the hangar with the whistling crack of a downed power line. Its density deepened until Jack could dial its weight upward, the celestial iron pulverizing scrap machinery as if it packed fifty tons of kinetic force.

Luke watched the boy crumple an abandoned forklift frame with a single downward tap, shaking his head in quiet disbelief.

"What kind of mutation is this?" Luke asked, inspecting the crushed steel. "Superhuman density, prehensile limb, weapon conjuration... None of that fits into one box."

Jack spun the staff until it blurred, then let it snap back into the needle in his ear. "I don't think I'm a mutant."

Luke raised an eyebrow. "Is it from that earring?"

Jack shrugged, leaning back against the forklift tire. "Maybe."

"What if you lose that earring?" Luke asked, his voice dead serious. "You get disarmed, knocked out, drop it in a river... What then?"

Jack paused.

He had never actually thought about that.

Back in his old life, a gun was just a tool; if you dropped one, you pulled another from your waistband. But the iron needle had become a part of his existence.

"Let's see," Jack said.

He unclipped the needle from his right ear and placed it on an upturned wooden crate in the far corner of the warehouse. Then he turned and jogged fifty yards to the opposite wall, turning back with his hands resting on his hips.

Luke walked over to the crate, looking down at the tiny sliver of black and gold. He picked it up with two fingers. It was light as a feather, cool to the touch, harmless as a sewing pin. It was impossible to fathom that this tiny speck of metal could weigh in tons.

"Call it," Luke said.

Fifty yards away, Jack took a slow breath. He reached out his right hand, splayed his fingers, and focused his intent on the needle.

Come here.

In Luke's fingers, the needle flared with sudden, blistering heat.

Luke loosened his grip as the metal sizzled against his calloused skin. The needle ripped itself free from his hand with a high, piercing screech of displaced air, streaking across the warehouse like a glowing black-and-gold bullet.

Fifty yards vanished in a fraction of a heartbeat.

The needle slapped squarely into Jack's open palm. With a heavy, concussive rush, it expanded into a two-meter staff, Jack's fingers locking around the golden grip as the draft from its arrival ruffled his blond hair.

Luke rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, looking across the cavernous room.

"Convenient," Luke said.

"Told you," Jack grinned back, spinning the staff behind his back. "Loyal as a dog."

And so the training continued, carved out day after day.

Seven months passed in total.

The winter frost of early 2002 melted into spring rains, which in turn gave way to the muggy, vibrant heat of late summer.

By August, Luke's tavern in Harlem was fully up and running. The scent of fresh paint and sawdust had been replaced by polished mahogany, seasoned gumbo, and cold draft beer. Neon beer signs hummed in the front windows, and the evening air was filled with jazz and steady neighborhood chatter.

Upstairs in his small room, Jack stood shirtless before the cracked bathroom mirror.

The scrawny, hollow-eyed kid who had woken up freezing in a January alley was gone.

Seven months of continuous cellular repair and unrelenting physical punishment had rebuilt him from the inside out. His frame had filled out with lean, corded muscle. His shoulders were broader, his chest firm, and his forearms cut with vascular definition. His golden tail swished behind him, thick and heavy with coiled power.

The oversized flannel and the red-and-black varsity jacket, which once swallowed him like a tent, now fit his chest and shoulders with tailored precision.

Jack flexed his arms, turned to inspect the tight muscles along his back, and let out a low, satisfied snicker.

"Kekekeke," Jack muttered to his reflection, running a hand through his sun-kissed hair. "Look at that. Forget a starving stray... I have a god's body now."

…

Jack pulled on a fresh black undershirt, zippered his red-and-black varsity jacket halfway up his chest, and carefully coiled his golden tail against his spine before buttoning his dark cargo trousers.

He clattered down the back stairs into the bustling warmth of the tavern.

It was nearly eight in the evening. A thick, humid late-summer haze clung to the city outside, tinting the sky an oily shade of bruised plum and amber. Inside, four brass ceiling fans churned the sticky air, competing with the smooth, lazy trumpet riffs of Miles Davis drifting from the corner jukebox.

As Jack passed the open door of the dry-storage room, Roy Healy's raspy bark cut through the clatter of silverware.

"Hey, kid! Get your ass in here and give me a hand!"

Jack leaned against the jamb, grinning at the sweaty old bartender who was currently wrestling with a heavy stainless-steel half-barrel. "Drained already, pops? The sun hasn't even completely drowned in the river yet."

"It's August, boy," Roy grumbled, wiping his bald brow with an oily rag. "A cold draft is practically screaming for people's souls out there. Quit admiring your cheekbones and grab the rim."

Jack chuckled, stepped in, and casually hoisted the hundred-and-sixty-pound keg under one arm like a bag of dirty laundry.

He strolled past the packed tables, nodding and dropping his usual unhinged greetings to the neighborhood regulars.

"Evening, Frank, try not to choke on your salted peanuts tonight!"

"Looking sharp, Mrs. Gable, you ready to divorce your husband for a younger model yet?"

The regulars met his greetings with laughter, waving coasters and flicking pretzel pieces at him. Over the past seven months, Jack's sharp tongue and feral charisma had made him a neighborhood fixture, an eccentric kid who talked like a 1930s mobster trapped in a teenager's body.

Jack ducked behind the mahogany counter, squeezing past Luke's mountain of a frame.

"Excuse me, bald man," Jack said, sliding the heavy keg into the lower draft cooler. "Fresh keg for the coupler."

With practiced speed, Jack lined up the valve, clicked the brass coupler into place, and locked the lever down with a sharp, satisfying hiss of pressurized carbon dioxide.

"There," Jack said, dusting off his denim and heading straight for the rear exit. "All yours. I'm off."

Luke didn't look up from the beer glass he was polishing, but his low baritone carried effortlessly over the room's chatter. "Don't forget your keys."

"Got 'em," Jack called back, patting his front pocket as the metal door swung shut behind him.

The heavy evening heat of Harlem wrapped around him like a wet wool blanket.

The scent of melting asphalt, diesel bus exhaust, and charred jerk chicken from a nearby corner barrel-grill hung thick in the air. Kids danced under the misty spray of an open fire hydrant at the end of the block, their shouts mixing with the click-clack of dominoes slammed onto folding card tables by elderly men in sleeveless undershirts.

Several familiar faces nodded as Jack cut past the stoops.

"Hey, young blood."

"Evening, Jack."

To the neighborhood, he was just a hardworking orphan Luke had taken off the street to bus tables and scrub floorboards. Nobody noticed how quietly his sneakers struck the cracked sidewalk.

Jack did not take the direct route.

In his previous life in Chinatown, walking in a straight line was the quickest way to end up in a shallow grave. Paranoia was basic hygiene.

He cut down 124th, slipped through an overgrown alley between two pre-war brownstones, crossed an asphalt playground, and doubled back across Eighth Avenue through the steam-vent shadows of an all-night laundromat. His ears twitched beneath his hair, parsing the rhythm of footsteps, the slow crawl of suspicious sedan tires, the glint of side-view mirrors.

Nothing. The street was clean.

Ten minutes later, he slipped down a short flight of stone steps into the recessed entrance of a weathered brick brownstone on 122nd Street.

Jack stepped up to the door and rapped his knuckles against the chipped green paint in a sharp, syncopated eight-count: two rapid taps, three slow thumps, three rapid taps.

Inside, a heavy deadbolt slid back with a dull metallic clack.

The door cracked open two inches, held by a thick brass chain. Turk Barrett's bloodshot, twitchy eyes peered through the gap.

Recognizing Jack, Turk quickly slipped the chain off and pulled the door open, ushering the teenager inside before slamming it shut and locking both deadbolts.

"Nobody follow you?" Turk whispered, wiping a sheen of anxious sweat from his upper lip.

"Kekekeke, like always," Jack laughed, giving Turk a firm pat on the shoulder that made the man stumble. "You think some fat slob in a squad car has the wheels to tail me?"

Turk rubbed his neck, grimacing. "Just checking, alright? Unlike you, I got a delicate body."

Turk turned and led the way down a creaking set of narrow stairs into the unfinished basement.

He reached up and yanked a hanging beaded cord. A single bare incandescent bulb flared to life, casting harsh, swinging shadows over damp stone foundation walls and a cluttered workbench.

Covering the entire far wall was a massive corkboard, pinned with a detailed street map of New York City.

Tangled skeins of blue and red yarn crisscrossed the avenues like broken veins.

The blue pins were clustered tightly across upper Manhattan, charting Cornell Stokes' territory: liquor fronts, warehouse docks along the Harlem River, numbers dens, and known stash locations.

The red pins dominated the rest of the city, bleeding down through Hell's Kitchen, Midtown, and the southern piers. Wilson Fisk's vast, shadowy footprint, encroaching steadily on Harlem's borders.

Jack shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, his golden eyes scanning the tangled web.

"So why the bat-signal, Turk?" Jack asked.

Turk leaned back against a rusty metal tool chest, crossing his arms. "You said you wanted an opening, didn't you? A loose thread to pull."

"Yeah," Jack replied, tilting his head. "I figured Stokes was staying in his hole for the summer. After that alley mess in January, everything's been quiet."

"Well, get used to it," Turk muttered, rolling his eyes. "Shit moves fast like a grandma with seizures."

Jack blinked, then threw his head back, letting out a wild, raspy cackle. "Kekekeke! Holy shit, Turk."

Turk groaned, burying his face in his palms with a shudder of genuine self-loathing. "God help me. What have you done to my head? I'm starting to sound like a degenerate."

Seven months of surviving Jack's brand of chaotic persuasion had slowly rewired the petty hustler's brain. Whether that was an improvement or a curse was entirely up for debate.

Turk cleared his throat, pushing his glasses up his nose, and tapped his finger against the lower southwest quadrant of Manhattan.

"Anyway. Trade is going down tonight at Pier 45."

Jack's gaze sharpened. "Whose trade?"

"Cornell's," Turk said.

Jack's mind turned the pieces over like dominoes. Pier 45. The long wooden finger stretching out into the Hudson River off Christopher Street. Far enough from Harlem that local beat cops and Luke wouldn't smell the gunpowder, but neutral enough on the water that Fisk's street hitters wouldn't swarm it on sight.

"What is he moving?" Jack asked.

"Hardware," Turk answered in a low murmur. "Unregistered military surplus coming off a private freighter. Cash going out in hard cases."

"How legit is this?"

Turk shifted on his feet, looking uneasy. "I can't give you a lifetime guarantee, kid. This is hot news that's about to stale."

Jack narrowed his eyes, his voice dropping into quiet menace. "How close to stale?"

"Tonight stale," Turk said bluntly. "Hours from now. If nobody hits it before ten, the crates are loaded on flatbeds and scattered across five different boroughs."

Jack stared at the map. A slow, hungry smirk curled the corners of his mouth.

He reached onto the workbench, picked up a thick red grease pencil, and rolled it between his calloused fingers.

"I'll take it," Jack said. "I need cash to keep this little operation running anyway. We go poke them first."

Jack stepped up to the corkboard.

Right above the tangled threads, scrawled across an index card in messy block letters, sat the title of their mutual venture: Poke the Fish.

Jack raised the grease pencil and drew a heavy, jagged circle right over Pier 45, with a cool 'S' and a dick beside it.