Marvel Monkey King: CH 13 (Patreon)

"Kekekeke," Jack rolled his shoulders, a raspy cackle rattling in his chest as his golden tail flicked behind his denim. "Well, well. If it isn't Bullshit."

Bullseye tucked his chin down into his dark collar, his pupils narrowing as he locked onto Jack with the clinical coldness of an executioner.

"And here I thought you had lost your mind after changing your name and burning our warehouses," Bullseye said smoothly.

Jack scratched the side of his nose, his lips curling into an easy, mocking grin. "What can I say? I have a flair for theatrics. Did you know it's illegal to say Macbeth in a theater? Brings bad luck, kekekeke."

Bullseye blinked, momentarily thrown off balance.

The psychological dossier on Sean had painted a completely different creature. A terrified street runaway: soft-spoken, timid, paralyzed by panic after his mutation sprouted in an alley. The syndicate's behavioral team had theorized the trauma might have fractured his mind into dissociative identity disorder. The other test subjects from the program had either complied or broken quietly; perhaps this brat had simply unraveled under the strain.

It was an irritating headache. Things would have been far simpler if the boss had authorized him to only bring corpse.

Bullseye exhaled a weary sigh, rolling his neck until the vertebrae popped like dry kindling.

"Alright, whatever," Bullseye said, spreading his empty palms. "We know you're pissed at the scientist. Don't sweat it. They won't lay another finger on you. For now, just come with me."

Jack tilted his head, his slit-pupil golden eyes narrowing in genuine bewilderment.

"The fuck are you even talking about?" Jack asked.

Scientist? Program? The boy whose skin he wore had died seven months ago in the freezing slush of Tenth Avenue.

Bullseye shook his head with exaggerated pity. "You leave me no choice, then."

His hands blurred.

From concealed sheaths along his chest and thighs, four silver throwing knives snapped into the air.

They didn't fly toward Jack's vitals. Bullseye had been ordered to bring the boy in breathing, so the blades flew on cruel, calculated trajectories meant to incapacitate: pinning shoulder sockets, severing Achilles tendons, shearing through quadriceps.

The steel screamed through the gloom.

Jack began to move. His animal reflexes ignited, his body dropping into a flat, horizontal slide across the concrete.

Shink! Shink!

Two blades sparked violently against the floor, while the remaining two sliced through the empty air where his legs had been half a second prior.

"Missed me, cyclops!" Jack cackled, planting his palms and vaulting ten feet straight up onto an overhead iron hoist. "You throw like a blind nun with arthritis!"

Bullseye's jaw tightened, his posture dropping into a tighter, predatory stance as he drew another pair of heavy tactical daggers.

Thwip! Clang!

Bullseye didn't throw directly at the hoist. He banked the first dagger off a steel support column at an impossible acute angle. The blade ricocheted with frightening speed, whistling straight for Jack's inner thigh.

Jack lashed his golden tail against a hanging meat hook, swinging his entire body out of the ricochet's path.

Tear!

The steel grazed his cargo pants, slicing a clean tear through the fabric before embedding into the ceiling timber.

Jack sprang from beam to beam, his tail acting as a living rudder to alter his trajectory in mid-air. He used the maze of hanging chains, rusted conveyor tracks, and industrial shelving to stay in erratic, unpredictable motion, closing the distance toward the catwalk.

Yet Bullseye was a seasoned professional. He refused to let the gap close.

Whenever Jack vaulted forward, Bullseye backpedaled with flawless spatial awareness, maintaining twenty paces of clear kill-zone between them. Every step was measured; every throw was calculated to herd the boy into corners.

Both men sized each other up as the metal flew.

Jack watched the assassin's gear and posture through narrowed eyes. In his previous life, he had consumed enough comic books to know the variants. This wasn't the leather-trench-coated movie killer; this was the genuine article from the inked pages.

A dark blue and black tactical suit, reinforced ballistic weave, and the white concentric target stamped dead center on his forehead. Jack began assembling his own mental dossier, cross-referencing his past knowledge against the lethal reality standing before him.

Bullseye's mind worked in parallel, rapidly recalculating Sean's threat level.

The intelligence file was complete garbage. The records described minor agility, basic regenerative tissue, and a mammalian tail. Nothing in the paperwork accounted for this terrifying kinetic acceleration, this inhuman reaction time, or this absolute absence of mortal fear. Was this an accelerated secondary mutation? Or had the boy been hiding this all along?

Jack landed on a high steel platform, panting slightly as two more knives shattered the brickwork inches from his ribs.

He was tired of dancing around throwing knives.

"Alright, asshole," Jack muttered. "Playtime is over."

Jack reached up to his right ear.

His fingers pinched the tiny black-and-gold needle.

Ruyi Jingu Bang.

With a deep, resonant hum that vibrated the concrete floor, the earring detached and expanded in a blur of black iron, locking into a polished, two-meter quarterstaff. The celestial weight settled into Jack's grip, its golden bands gleaming beneath the sodium lights.

The air in the cold-storage hangar instantly grew dense, chilled by ancient, suffocating pressure.

Bullseye's eyes widened behind his cowl.

That wasn't biological, nor it was a mutant power manifesting from altered genetics.

It was an artifact. A weapon.

A slow, sickening smirk spread across Bullseye's lips. His shoulders relaxed, his posture shifting from cautious restraint to predatory glee.

"So..." Bullseye drawled, his fingers curling around two serrated combat knives. "Your newfound strength came from that weapon, huh?"

Internally, Bullseye felt like laughing out loud.

If the boy's power belonged to an external relic rather than an unstable mutant physiology, then keeping Sean breathing was no longer a requirement. He could butcher the kid right here, pry the iron staff from his dead fingers, deliver it to Wilson Fisk, and collect a double bounty.

Jack heard the murderous shift in the assassin's voice.

He rested the heavy staff across his shoulders, his golden eyes blazing with feral, unhinged amusement.

"Kekekeke! Want it?" Jack asked, his laughter echoing through the cavernous rafters. "You've got to take it from my cold hands, Bullshit!"

He exploded forward off the balls of his feet, the steel catwalk groaning under his acceleration as he drove a sweeping horizontal arc.

The black rod tore through the humid warehouse air with a deep, howling bass note that rattled the corrugated roof.

Bullseye's pupils shrank to pinpricks. He threw his upper body backward into a desperate bridge, the golden tip of the celestial rod whistling an inch above his throat. The sheer atmospheric displacement shredded the collar of his tactical cowl.

"What kind of circus freak swings are you?!" Bullseye snarled, rolling backward across the grated catwalk and springing to his feet. "Fucking mutie monkey!"

The assassin's hands blurred into mechanical repetition. Throwing knives, carbon-steel darts, and ball bearings sprayed from his gauntlets with the cadence of an automated turret. Yet the geometry of the battle had fundamentally flipped.

Ruyi Jingu Bang gave Jack a two-meter perimeter of absolute denial. Every sweep of the celestial mass threatened to pulverize bone and sever steel railings, forcing Bullseye into frantic, undignified retreats as he cursed in sharp, vicious bursts.

Jack felt the fire in his chest flare into life.

Adrenaline rushed through his veins, thick and electric. For seven months, Luke had held him to rigid boxing discipline and defensive economy, teaching him how to avoid destroying the neighborhood. But here, against a certified sociopath who treated human anatomy like target paper, the feral itch in his marrow broke free.

He wanted more. He wanted to see how far his technique could push the legendary killer.

Bullseye adapted with terrifying speed. A lifetime of professional slaughter had made him a savant of kinetic angles. As Jack lunged with a diagonal strike, Bullseye slid flat beneath the arc, flicking a serrated boot dagger upward with surgical malice.

Slash.

A clean line of crimson parted the skin along Jack's forearm.

Jack grinned, his slit-pupil golden eyes widening with manic delight.

Bullseye banked another dagger off an overhead steam pipe. The blade ricocheted down at an impossible trajectory, biting deep into the meat of Jack's left shoulder.

Hot blood soaked into the fabric of his varsity jacket.

The danger was intoxicating. Unlike the predictable brawlers of Chinatown or Harlem, every projectile this man hurled defied common sense. Jack laughed out loud, parrying a titanium flechette with the butt of the staff before using his golden tail to whip himself around an iron support beam in a dizzying aerial pirouette.

He was having the time of his life.

"Is that all you've got in your pockets, Bullcrap?" Jack cackled, dropping from the beam.

In mid-descent, Jack thrust the staff forward like a spear, aimed dead center at Bullseye's forehead.

Bullseye sneered, shifting his chin half an inch to slip the point.

Grow.

A silent spark of intent flared from Jack's core.

Mid-thrust, the staff extended another two feet with the instantaneous crack of a rifle shot.

Bullseye's instincts saved his life. He threw his entire torso into a violent, dislocating backward twist.

Crack!

The blunt iron didn't land flush, but the sudden extension brushed the assassin's left temple. The glancing impact split his skin to the bone, spraying blood across his cowl and hurling Bullseye six feet backward onto the iron grating.

Bullseye scrambled to his knees, pressing a trembling hand against the gash above his ear.

His heart hammered in his ears like a trip-hammer.

'He held back.'

The realization slammed into Bullseye's gut with sickening weight. The boy had extended the weapon to test his reaction speed. The brat was holding back an ocean of violence, treating a lethal contract like an amusement park ride.

Jack dropped onto the catwalk, blood flowing steadily from the cuts along his arms and ribs.

Yet as the blood leaked out, an unfamiliar sensation took root beneath Jack's dermis. With every puncture, every sting of cold steel, the dormant heat in his marrow pushed outward. A dense, ancient resonance began hardening beneath the surface of his flesh, like granite forming beneath mountain soil.

Jack dashed forward, his movements suddenly shifting into pure, unbridled pressure.

The fight became an absolute rout. Bullseye was forced into panicked, frantic evasion. He couldn't even block; putting his forearms against that staff would turn his radius and ulna into chalk. He could only dance backward, his boots skidding across the concrete as Jack hammered him from all angles.

What infuriated the assassin most was the look on the boy's face.

Jack was playing. He treated every laceration as an arbitrary score in an unseen game. Knives aimed at his throat or femoral artery were deflected by fractions of an inch, turned into shallow flesh wounds by reflexes that bordered on precognition.

Then, Bullseye saw the opening.

Jack drove an overhand smash into the catwalk floor, burying the staff slightly into the twisted grating. For a sliver of a second, the boy's chest was left unguarded.

Bullseye didn't hesitate.

His right hand drew a custom diamond-tipped dagger from his collar. Putting the full torque of his hips and shoulder into the release, he whipped the steel on a dead-straight, flawless trajectory.

Straight toward Jack's heart.

Bullseye knew the feeling of a perfect kill before the weapon even arrived. He could already picture the steel piercing the pericardium.

Ting.

A clear, ringing sound echoed across the empty warehouse.

Instead of the wet squelch of parted muscle, a sharp metallic ping vibrated through the air. It's like hardened steel striking solid granite.

The diamond-tipped dagger bounced cleanly off Jack's chest, spinning away into the shadows before clattering harmlessly onto the concrete floor.

Bullseye stood paralyzed, his jaw dropping behind his mask. He leaped backward three times in sheer disbelief, his boots sliding ten paces across the grit.

Jack remained frozen in place beneath the amber floodlights.

He slowly reached up, pulling aside the torn, bloody fabric of his black undershirt.

Right over his sternum and heart, where the lethal point should have punctured his lung, the skin had turned the pale, unyielding color of polished marble. It was cold to the touch, impenetrable as a mountain slab.

Jack pressed his fingers against it, feeling the dormant Stone Body spell hum softly beneath his ribs before the pale color receded, melting back into warm mortal flesh.

Jack looked across the floor at the terrified hitman.

A slow, radiant smirk curved his mouth.

"Thanks, Bullshit," Jack murmured. "I needed that."

Jack didn't give him another heartbeat to think.

He kicked the base of Ruyi Jingu Bang upward, caught the grip in both hands, and unleashed the full, unyielding weight of the weapon.

The staff blurred into a howling vortex of black iron.

Bullseye raised his arms in a hopeless guard, but his consciousness detached from his senses. Time dilated into thick, syrupy molasses. In that frozen fraction of a second, Bullseye finally understood what mercenaries whispered about death's final gift: the human brain slowing reality to a crawl, granting a dying man time to process his mistakes.

He saw the golden dragons engraved on the staff's collar. He saw the black iron warping the air around it.

Then came the impact.

BOOM!

The celestial staff slammed into Bullseye's flank with astronomical concussive fury.

His ribs caved inward like dry birch twigs. The sheer kinetic shockwave lifted the assassin off his feet, propelling his body thirty feet through the air in a horizontal blur.

CRASH!

Bullseye punched clean through the exterior brick-and-mortar wall of the warehouse, blasting a gaping hole into the rainy alleyway outside before collapsing into a mound of shattered cinderblocks and sodden trash.

Rain drifted through the breached wall, cooling the dust in the air.

Jack walked through the jagged opening with slow, measured strides.

His body was soaked in blood from a dozen shallow cuts, with two throwing knives still firmly embedded in his flesh: one through the meat of his left shoulder, the other piercing his outer right thigh.

His golden eyes blazed with terrifying majesty, and the grin across his lips was one of deep, serene contentment.

He stopped beside the mound of rubble, looking down at the mangled assassin.

Bullseye lay broken in the gravel, his chest caved in, bloody froth bubbling at the corners of his mouth as he stared up at the teenager with wide, trembling pupils.

Jack leaned against the staff, tilting his head with innocent curiosity.

"Kekekeke," Jack laughed, his voice blending with the gentle patter of rain on cobblestone. "Which hand do you use to wipe your ass?"

Jack paused, blinking down as if genuinely expecting an answer to the question.

Bullseye could only produce a wet, choked rattle from his throat.

"Kekeke, alright. You're still mad," Jack chuckled, shaking his head with mild pity. "I'll assume it's your left."

Jack lifted the staff and brought the heavy golden butt down onto Bullseye's right hand.

Crunch.

Carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges were pulverized into flat paste against the wet stone.

Bullseye arched his spine, throwing his head back in a silent, strangled shriek of agony before passing out cold.

"Don't say I don't have a heart," Jack smiled, resting the staff back over his shoulder. "I left your left one intact so you can still wipe your ass. Kekekeke."

With a faint metallic hum, Ruyi Jingu Bang shrank, snapping back into the small needle dangling from Jack's right ear.

Without a backward glance, Jack reached up, yanked both knives from his own shoulder and thigh with a quiet grunt, tossed the bloody steel into the trash, and walked out into the rain.

…

Deep beneath the bedrock of Lower Manhattan, cold fluorescent light buzzed behind reinforced steel bulkheads.

A subterranean corridor stretched into the sterile gloom, lined with double-sided observation glass.

Wilson Fisk walked the polished concrete hallway, his massive four-hundred-pound frame clad in an immaculate three-piece ivory suit, his heavy diamond-topped cane clicking with measured, rhythmic authority against the floor.

Through the glass on his left, silent test subjects slept in pressurized pods, monitors tracing their neural rhythms. Through the glass on his right, young men and women in matching white tracksuits sparred inside reinforced blast pens, hurling kinetic bursts and thermal arcs against ballistic dummies as if their survival hung on every breath.

Power took countless shapes in this shifting world.

As mutants manifested across the city with increasing frequency, Fisk had provided them with shelter, discipline, and purpose. A private haven to grant them a sense of normalcy, while forging living instruments to cleanse New York of chaos and bend the boroughs to his vision of absolute order.

Yet tonight, Fisk didn't spare them a single glance.

He reached the heavy airlock at the end of the hall, sliding a keycard through the digital reader.

The pneumatic seals hissed open with a rush of pressurized air.

Inside the private surgical bay, reeking of antiseptic and burnt flesh, Lester lay strapped to a hydraulic operating table.

The assassin was barely recognizable beneath layers of surgical gauze, traction braces, and life-support lines. His right hand was a swollen, shattered mass of pulverized bone, his chest wrapped tight in a rigid carbon-fiber cast holding splintered ribs in place.

A chief biomedical researcher in a sterile lab coat looked up from a digital monitor, nervously adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles.

Fisk stopped at the foot of the bed, his broad silhouette casting a long shadow over the broken killer.

"Can he be used?" Fisk asked, his deep baritone rolling through the chamber like distant thunder.

The scientist swallowed hard, shaking his head. "Unlikely, sir. The nerve trauma in his primary hand is catastrophic, and his spine suffered multiple micro-fractures from immense blunt-force impact. More importantly, he lacks the X-gene. Our cellular regenerative therapies can't interface with his baseline human physiology."

Fisk ignored the doctor completely.

He stepped forward, leaning over the hydraulic bed until his cold, heavy gaze locked directly onto Lester's bloodshot pupils.

"Do you wish to be useful, Lester?"

Lester couldn't move, trapped beneath paralytic nerve blockers and heavy sedative drips.

Yet beneath those bruised, swollen eyelids, a suffocating, venomous hatred burned with the intensity of an open furnace. A feral resolve that refused to let death claim him before he could rip the golden monkey apart with his bare hands.

Fisk saw that burning ember. A faint, approving smirk curved the corner of his mouth.

"A man's true strength is defined by the hunger that refuses to let him perish, regardless of the flesh he was born with," Fisk murmured, his voice low, magnetic, and heavy with conviction. "You were broken by a mutated creature, Lester. A wild animal who mocked your craft. But in my city, even gods bleed when confronted by order."

Fisk leaned closer, resting his massive gloved palm upon the edge of the operating frame.

"Give me your unyielding loyalty, and I will give you your equalizer. We will rebuild your bones. We will forge you into an instrument of destruction, and you will tear that beast limb from limb."

Beneath the clear oxygen mask, Lester's pupils flared wide, blazing with unholy, manic vengeance.

…

Four miles to the north, perched atop the brick ledge of a water tower in Hell's Kitchen, the night was loud and alive.

The late-August air hung warm and humid, carrying the distant wail of police sirens down Ninth Avenue and the steady hum of late-night delivery trucks.

Jack sat with his sneakers dangling over a fifty-foot drop, a yellow Styrofoam container balanced comfortably on his knees.

Between his fingers, he twirled the custom diamond-tipped dagger he had plucked from the warehouse floor. The polished steel caught the ambient neon from the avenue below, shimmering like a pristine souvenir.

Jack scooped up a plastic forkful of spiced lamb, yellow rice, and glowing red chili sauce from his halal platter, shoving it into his mouth.

He chewed, swallowed, and instantly began furiously fanning his open mouth with his hand, his eyes watering.

"Ah, ah, ah! Fuck!" Jack hissed, his golden tail thrashing violently behind his cargo pants in distress. "Way too much red sauce!"

He snatched a cold glass bottle of peach Snapple from beside his boot, twisted the metal cap off with a sharp snap, and chugged half the sweet liquid in one desperate, cooling gulp.

He exhaled a long, frosty sigh of relief, wiping his chin with the sleeve of his varsity jacket.

"Much better," Jack muttered.

He set the bottle down, turning his focus inward toward his chest.

Jack tapped two fingers against his left pectoral. The skin beneath his black undershirt felt soft, ordinary, and human. Yet he could still vividly recall the sensation from an hour ago: the sudden, cold density of ancient granite manifesting the exact millisecond before the dagger struck his heart.

Stone Body.

The recollection brought a low, raspy chuckle bubbling from his throat.

"Kekekeke."

Jack tilted his head back, looking south across the vast ocean of Manhattan lights.

Rising high into the midnight sky, untouched, pristine, and majestic, the twin monoliths of the World Trade Center stood illuminated by floodlights, piercing the summer haze.

Jack looked at the towers, his golden eyes narrowing with quiet introspection.

Tonight had been a victory, but it had been a reckless one.

He had let the intoxicating rush of violence drag him into unnecessary danger, relying on split-second luck when a single mistimed dodge could have put steel through his skull. In a city crawling with unpredictable monsters and syndicate kings, arrogance without caution was an open invitation to an early grave.

Next time, he would be sharper. More patient.

Yet as he spun the diamond blade and watched it catch the moonlight, a slow, wicked grin spread across his face.

The hot blood pumping through his veins. The bone-crushing weight of Ruyi Jingu Bang. The thrilling rush of staring into the face of death and walking away laughing.

It was simply too good.

"Kekekeke," Jack laughed quietly, digging his fork back into the yellow rice.

For now, he would enjoy his food, watch the city breathe, and take his time.