New York was the city that never sleeps. Even now, as the sun set, the city was a hive of life and activity. Here, in the seedy underbelly, far from the hotel Mordred and I stayed in, it was particularly active.
Matt Murduck had done as I asked and helped the poor people who had been imprisoned in that cursed factory. I could have healed them all, it would have been easy, but I didn't.
There was a world of difference between a hundred blinded dying people being rescued and totally healthy people who claimed to have been blinded and kept locked up for months.
And to change this city, it would need to be forced to change.
So the people needed to know the darkness, see it. Only when they knew just how dark it was under their feet would they be willing to act.
Saving a life was easy, but saving a nation was not.
Once more, Mordred and I found ourselves on the hunt, having spent the day going over the information we recovered, we had a few clues we could follow up on. And now that night had fallen, it was time to get moving.
The rooftop overlooked a stretch of concrete and neon. Beneath us, Hell's Kitchen stirred with unease.
There were sirens on every street corner, flashing red and blue like warning lights on a dying machine. Police cars clustered near alleyways. Officers knocked on warehouse doors. Civilians whispered behind closed curtains. Criminals vanished like ghosts into cracks too narrow for justice to follow.
Even though Hell's Kitchen was a place the police liked to ignore, a place where crime rules, after yesterday, the world paid attention, and as it did, so did the law.
"Feels different," she muttered. "Like the whole place is holding its breath."
"It is," I said softly. "The truth crawled out of the shadows last night—and now the city doesn't know what to do with it."
Below us, news vans were parked at the far end of the docks. Police tape flapped in the breeze. Someone had found the warehouse.
Mordred squinted. "Think they'll figure it out? What was going on down there?"
"No," I said honestly. "I think they will just find someone else to blame, and then forget about it. They don't want to admit something like that happened here, so they likely won't, unless they are forced to."
She gave a low, frustrated grunt. She didn't like it, but she also knew that there was little we could do about it.
The air shifted behind us.
I didn't turn. "You're quiet, Daredevil. But you're not invisible."
From the edge of the roof, Daredevil climbed up, having hidden himself out of view, and listened in on our discussion.
He rose smoothly, his red suit catching the faint orange of the city's dying light.
"I didn't come to fight," Matt said quietly. "I came because I couldn't stop thinking about them."
Mordred tilted her head, one hand resting casually on her hip. "The ninjas or the victims?"
"The victims," he said without pause. "I couldn't sleep. Every time I tried I heard them, their confusion, their fear. The way they tried to avoid every touch. I can only imagine the suffering that led to that."
He stepped forward, toward the ledge where we stood. His jaw was clenched, voice low but steady. "I still remember when my sight was stolen from me, how I was thrown into darkness. And to think someone did that to so many… I want in."
Mordred studied him, her expression unreadable. Her fists, still wrapped in loose cloth from the night before, clenched once—then relaxed.
"You sure about that?" she asked. "This isn't some rooftop mugger we're chasing. It's bigger. Bloodier. And I'm not dialing it back."
Matt nodded once. "I'm not asking you to."
I watched the two of them, fire and ice. The knight who was forged in battle. The devil who hunted in the dark. So different. And yet, at this moment, aligned.
I turned my gaze back to the city below, to the flickering lights, to the chaos and silence holding hands in uneasy balance.
"Then we move together," I said. "We follow the trail."
Daredevil tilted his head. "What's the next step?"
Mordred grinned. "We picked up a thread from one of the bastards downstairs. Shipment manifests, dates, coded routes. Gao's little empire moves a lot more than powder and poison."
"And tonight," I added, "there's a transfer. A convoy leaving the garment district in under an hour. If we're lucky, it'll lead us to a supply line—or a bigger name."
Matt didn't need to speak. He simply nodded, slipping back into motion, already preparing for the hunt.
Beneath our feet, New York held its breath.
Above it, three predators prepared to leap.
The convoy moved like a serpent through the veins of New York.
Four black trucks. Unmarked. Windows blacked out. Their tires hummed low against the asphalt as they rolled through the industrial district—slow, cautious, but not slow enough.
They had guards.
Motorcycles flanked the front and rear. Men in dark gear with visors and suppressed weapons. Professionals. Not street punks.
Too bad for them, we weren't street punks either.
We struck just as they turned onto a narrow stretch behind a line of crumbling factories. Streetlamps flickered above, casting long shadows across the cracked road. The ambush was timed to the second.
Mordred landed first.
She dropped from the roof like thunder incarnate, slamming into the frontmost motorcycle with both boots and sending it flipping into the side of a truck in a burst of sparks and shattered glass.
Screams erupted. Chaos followed.
The trucks braked hard. The guards shouted, weapons raised.
Too slow.
Daredevil was already among them, batons spinning. He disarmed one man with a wrist flick and drove his knee into another's ribs before they even realized he was there. The third barely had time to pull the trigger before Mordred shoulder-checked him into a wall with a sound like breaking plaster.
I moved in last, silent and composed, sweeping my arm in a crescent that bent the air. One of the back doors snapped off its hinges, flying open to reveal rows upon rows of crates marked with strange seals—not just drugs, not just supplies.
Something worse.
Mordred was already ripping another truck open, grinning like a lunatic.
"Hope you brought spares!" she yelled, throwing a guard through a windshield. "Because I'm gonna break every single one!"
"I'm starting to think you enjoy this," Daredevil muttered as he ducked beneath a burst of gunfire and slammed an elbow into a gunman's temple.
"You think?" she shouted, tackling a man off his bike and rolling with him into the pavement.
More guards poured out of the back. One had a blade—not a gun. That caught my attention.
A Hand elite. Finally.
He moved like a liquid shadow, blade cutting arcs through the air toward Daredevil's exposed side.
I raised a hand, but before acting, I lowered it again; he didn't need help.
The blade never touched him. He turned it aside with a perfectly timed block, then disarmed the man with a fluid twist. The elite ninja didn't go down easy, but Daredevil fought smarter—not harder. He didn't need to be stronger.
He needed only a moment.
And he took it.
The elite dropped. Breathing, but broken.
We were winning.
But the real question was: why were they transporting this much gear this deep into Manhattan?
Mordred slammed open the final truck, frowning for the first time. "Uh… Father? You might want to see this."
I crossed the distance in an instant.
Inside the truck—beneath the crates—were cages.
Small, iron-barred cages.
And inside them?
Children.
-----
"So Father? What do we do now?" Mordred asked as we got back to the hotel.
"Don't speak with your mouth full." I admonished her as she made a mess of her clothes.
"Bahh, never mind that," she said around a mouthful. "We can't just let them get away with that."
I didn't answer immediately.
The moment we opened the final truck still lingered in my mind. The cages. The children. The silence that followed. Even Mordred, for all her fire and fury, hadn't spoken much after that.
They were asleep—some drugged, others just too tired to cry anymore. The smell of ammonia and sweat, the too-thin limbs, the little fingers curled around rusted bars…
I had lived through the time of Rome, back when slavery was legal, and even slaves were treated better than those kids.
"I know that, Mordred," I said at last, sitting down heavily at the edge of the bed. "But we have no more clues. Not unless we dig through the mountain of confiscated materials. And we don't have time for that. We meet with Stark tomorrow."
Mordred made a frustrated noise, slamming her takeout on the nightstand. "I hate it. I hate just walking away."
"You think I enjoy it?" My voice was sharper than intended. I softened it. "You saw what I saw. We've done what we could for tonight. Those children are safe now. That matters."
She didn't speak. Just slouched in the chair by the window, arms crossed.
A beat passed.
"Just eat Mordred. This isn't Albion, we can't change this place." I felt tired, the last few days had tired me out. I had forgotten just how cruel humans could be.
"It isn't right, though. It just isn't," Mordred mumbled as she threw away the empty noodle box and grabbed a burger.
I couldn't agree more.
Yet, it wasn't my place to act. I wasn't the king of this land, of these people. And while I was a god, this wasn't the age of gods, but the age of men.
It wouldn't be right for me to throw divine judgment down everywhere. No, this was a problem the people of this nation had to deal with. And they weren't without their own heroes either.
Knock knock.
A sudden knock on the door broke my line of thought.
"Did you order more food?" I asked, glancing at Mordred, who looked halfway through her burger and equally confused.
"No?" she said, mouth half-full. "Not unless someone figured out I need dessert."
"Just go get it," I muttered, too drained to care.
Mordred rolled her eyes, wiped her fingers on the bedspread—again—and padded toward the door in her socks.
The knock came again. Softer. Slower. Too polite for a delivery guy.
Didn't really matter, it was getting suspicious, though.
Mordred feared nothing and opened the door widely.
Standing on the other side was a woman. Disheveled dark hair. Cold, dead eyes. Her expression was blank, face slack like a puppet waiting for strings.
And behind her—
"Hello," said the man in the purple suit, stepping into view with the kind of arrogant casualness that only true monsters possess. "Hope we're not interrupting anything too... indulgent."
Mordred didn't react at first. Not until she noticed the way the woman behind him wasn't blinking.
Then her hand started to close the door.
"Ah-ah," the man in purple said gently. "Jessica, dear, be a love and hold the door."
The woman moved without hesitation. A hand slammed against the door and held it in place. Mordred blinked, caught off guard by the sudden strength.
"I insist," the man said, stepping closer. His smile was too wide. "After all, I've come to make a generous offer. And you're going to want to hear it."
Mordred looked them both over closely, seeing nothing that hinted they were from The Hand, and with the example of Daredevil, she didn't immediately treat them like bad guys, even though she really felt like smashing the guy's annoying face in.
"Father," she said carefully, "we've got a problem."
"Oh," he said, eyes lighting up as he caught sight of me. "You're even lovelier than they said. Honestly, you're both works of art. It's exhausting, really—beauty and power, wrapped up in one package."
His voice was velvet and oil. It slithered.
"I've heard about you," he continued. "Two enhanced women, making quite the mess of Hell's Kitchen. It was only a matter of time before we crossed paths."
(End of chapter)
So, another chapter, another attempt at finding the Hand ended in finding misery.
As to why finding the Hand is difficult. I ask you, where would you find them?
Where would you look? Because personally, I have no idea where they hide at this point in time. Which means, the only way to find them is doing what they do, make a mess and hope they come running for revenge.
So yeah, that is why someone this strong, struggles with that, just because Arthuria doesn't have true clairvoyance.
And a guest, who is this strange pair?