Marvel's whitewashing cop, you want me to save the world?

Chapter 31 Defying the Heavens: Cleansing the Razor Gang

Li En stood at the edge of the dock, with the last Amick Group member lying at his feet.

The man lay on his back with a bullet hole between his eyebrows. His arm was still in the position of reaching for the gun, his fingers curled in mid-air, already stiff.

He didn't rush to leave. He stepped onto a section of the bombed-over barbed wire fence, climbed over the gangway railing, and jumped onto the deck of the cruise ship on the outermost side of the berth.

The anti-slip coating on the deck had aged, and the combat boots made a rough, sandpaper-like sound when stepped on.

He stood at the bow of the boat, his back to the still-burning wreckage of the police car, and began the countdown.

About two minutes later, I felt a slight tremor under my feet.

The vibrations traveled upwards from the bottom of the ship, and the welds between the steel plates began to press against each other under certain stress.

Snap, sizzle.

The fire started in the lower decks.

First, black smoke billowed out of several portholes at the same time, with plumes of smoke climbing up the hull.

Immediately afterwards, flames licked out of the porthole, recoiled sharply upon contact with the sea breeze, and then shot out again, now half a meter higher than before.

boom.

The engine room was blown open.

The middle section of the ship bulged upwards, and two of the container fasteners on the deck popped off, splashing into the sea and creating two small sprays of water.

The fire spread upwards along the ventilation ducts faster than a person could climb stairs, reaching the upper deck cabins within seconds.

The second explosion followed immediately, and the lifeboat at the stern was overturned by the blast wave. It swayed twice on the crane arm and then crashed onto the ship's side, breaking in two.

Li En jumped off the deck before the third explosion.

The combat boots landed on the dock, leaving two shallow footprints.

Without looking back, he ran directly to the second cruise ship on the other side of the berth, climbed over the gangway railing, and stood on top of the bridge.

Two minutes later, the second ship also began to burn from the keel upwards.

Brock crouched next to the red container, one knee on the ground.

He was wiping the dust off a girl's face with a handkerchief that had been soaked in a mineral water bottle and wrung out until it was half-dry. The girl's eyelashes were covered in dust.

He wiped his eyes slowly, from the corner of his left eye to his temple, then used a clean handkerchief to wipe his right eye.

When the explosion came, he turned his head and saw that the bridge of the second cruise ship was half engulfed in flames.

The steel plates on the ship's hull began to twist and deform under the high temperature, and the splashing water was blown away by the sea breeze before it could even land.

The firelight illuminated the sea in a vibrant orange-red hue, even making the rust on the metal shipping containers shine.

He pulled the handkerchief from between his fingers and placed it on his knee.

"Fuck, how did that kid do that?"

To sink a cruise ship of this size, hand grenades won't work, and neither will high-explosive bombs.

The steel cables swung from the port cranes would at most break through one deck.

He worked as a policeman his whole life. He had seen dockworkers accidentally smash containers into the ship's hold, and he had seen smuggled gasoline set ablaze in the hold by cigarette butts, burning half of a cargo ship.

But I've never seen a cruise ship burn from its keel to its bridge in two minutes.

Moreover, there are two ships.

He looked up at the clouds, which were tinged with a dark red by the firelight, their edges swirling in the sea breeze.

"Hell's Kitchen is going to be quite lively now."

He turned around and squatted down again, facing the group of children huddled together in the container.

After Li En blew up the second ship, he did not go to the third one.

He jumped back onto the shore from the dock and started running toward West 35th Street.

On those two ships, he basically figured out the boundaries of the trigger mechanism for the "vehicle killer" keyword.

The police car was parked outside the port. He fell asleep in the car, and then the car exploded.

This means the vehicle doesn't need to be moving; simply entering the area during the mission counts, although the timeframe will be relatively long.

The cruise ship was anchored at its berth, with its hull below the waterline still submerged in seawater, and the waves were gently rocking it.

This degree of positional change was determined to be while the vehicle was in motion, so the fire started much faster than that of a police car, approximately two minutes, with an error margin of no more than ten seconds.

As I ran, a thought popped into my head.

Does Earth count as a means of transportation?

If vehicle killers broaden their horizons to the cosmic level, will they one day in the future...

He was patrolling the street when he suddenly felt that familiar tremor beneath his feet...

He shook his head, dismissing the thought.

Now is not the time to think about such things.

Just as I turned onto Twelfth Avenue, a dark figure descended from the fire escape ladder on the side of the road and blocked the middle of the road.

Matt Murdoch stands next to a lamppost.

He couldn't lift his right arm at all, so he switched the short stick to his left hand, using the stick to support his body's center of gravity.

He could barely stand upright on his left leg, while his right knee was still trembling.

The black headscarf was mostly soaked with sweat and blood, clinging to the lower half of his face.

He raised his left hand, pointing the iron rod at Li En.

The stick tip wobbled twice in the air before stabilizing.

"Why... did you kill them?"

His voice was squeezed out of his lungs, his throat hoarse from the smoke and rust of gunpowder.

"These people...should be put on trial."

Li En didn't slow down, only stopping when he reached Matt.

Looking down at the lawyer, who was covered in wounds, the shadow of his bulletproof helmet pressed against his brow bone, obscuring the expression on the upper half of his face.

"They have already been judged."

Li En paused for a moment.

"The batch of criminals you sent over six months ago have already been released on bail."

"Those guys recovered from their injuries in prison and went back to doing business in Hell's Kitchen."

"Drug trafficking, intentional assault, it's still the same old stuff."

"The judgment stated three to ten years, but they were all released after only six months."

While tracking down the hunter in the dark room, he also took the opportunity to look through the police department's release records.

The prisoner files Matt sent were among that pile of data, and every copy of the bail papers bore the same stamp.

At that time, he had no time to think about these things; all he could think about was how to survive the unseen hunter.

Matt's throat moved.

He certainly knew what the bail system was like in Hell's Kitchen.

He had stood in court too many times and seen too many people walk out of the dock, go straight to the bail officer's office to sign the papers, and then reappear on the streets the next day.

He's a lawyer; he knows these procedures better than the police.

"I know." He lifted the iron bar off the ground, gripped it tightly again, and swollen right arm swayed at his side.

He gritted his teeth and shifted his weight back to his left leg.

"But if we don't let them face legal judgment, then what's the difference between us and them?"

Li En glanced at the injuries on Matt's body.

My right arm is so swollen that the skin is almost transparent, my left leg is tilted at more than ten degrees, and I may have a broken rib.

Such an injury would have caused shock to an average person.

The man was still standing there, pointing an iron rod at him, asking for the difference.

Do you play games?

"……Um?"

Matt looked up.

Li En turned around and started walking again.

"Leveling up is a tedious and boring process, but once it's over, it's time to make yourself happy."

tread.

He pushed off with both feet, his combat boots creating two shallow dents in the asphalt road.

He darted forward, covering several meters in a single stride, and disappeared at the end of Twelfth Avenue in just a few leaps.

Matt stood facing the direction where Lee had disappeared for a moment, then turned and dragged himself away.

West 35th Street.

This row of warehouses was built in the 1930s, with red brick walls, wooden beams, and tin roofs.

Only two or three streetlights were lit on both sides of the street, the bulbs covered with a thick layer of dust, and the lampshades were filled with withered shells filled with the corpses of moths.

Wild grass, about waist-high, grew in the cracks of the sidewalk; some plants had already withered and turned yellow, their stems broken and lying across the cracks between the bricks.

The windows of the surrounding residential buildings were all dark, some of the glass was broken, and damp plywood was nailed to the window frames.

But the largest warehouse in the center was brightly lit.

The warehouse's exterior walls had been painted with a layer of white paint, which had almost completely peeled off, revealing the dark red bricks underneath that had been eroded by the sea wind for decades.

The metal gate was closed, with the Razor Gang's logo sprayed on it.

A razor outline drawn with a spray paint can, blade facing down.

The warehouse interior is divided into sections by plywood partitions.

The outermost area is the rest area, furnished with a few old sofas and a TV that's always showing a football match.

The ashtray on the coffee table was overflowing, and next to it lay a deck of cards missing and several crushed beer cans.

Further inside is the goods area, piled with cardboard boxes filled with smuggled electrical appliances, with only a narrow passageway between the boxes, requiring one to squeeze through sideways.

The two innermost compartments are used to temporarily detain people.

Ventilation holes were cut into the plywood, and the edges of the holes had been scratched by fingernails, with some of the scratches containing broken pieces of fingernails.

The second floor is an office partitioned off with tempered glass.

The fluorescent lights illuminated the inside in a stark white light.

Jeremiah Cross leaned back in his swivel chair, his feet propped up on the edge of his desk, toying with a folding razor in his left hand.

The razor handle was polished to a shine, and the blade flipped back and forth between his fingers, producing a crisp metallic click with each opening and closing.

Click, click.

"Don't worry, these are all lambs that meet the requirements. They'll set off for the island tomorrow morning."

"Haha, thank you, I'll definitely attend the party next month."

He put the phone receiver back on the stand, picked up the still-smoking Cuban cigar from the ashtray, cut off the charred end with scissors, lit it with a lighter, and leaned back in his chair to take a puff.

The smoke dispersed under the ceiling lights, filtering the cold white light into a grayish-blue hue.

Amick helped him get the goods today.

He had heard about that private island in his circle for a long time.

The guests were all celebrities, politicians, tycoons, and entertainment moguls.

Each person on the list has a net worth followed by a string of zeros.

As long as this batch of goods satisfies the other party, he can squeeze into that circle.

He was fed up with hundreds of people crammed into a warehouse to divide the profits from smuggled electronics, and fed up with the bloody fights between the port and the people of Amick across the harbor over berths for a ship's cargo.

Even the most powerful gangsters are still gangsters, and they can't compare to those guys who play golf on islands, soak in hot springs, and turn living people into commodities without even getting their fingers dirty.

He now has a ladder to climb.

Now, if we seize this opportunity...

Ding ding.

A cacophony of shouting and the clanging of metal came from downstairs.

Jeremiah frowned, took the cigar out of his mouth, got up, walked to the glass window, and opened it.

"Shut up, you fucking idiot! Don't fucking ruin the goods, you fucking idiot!"

There was a moment of silence below.

He snorted and turned around.

He flipped the razor in his left hand again, the blade popping out and gripping it in his palm.

He's had this knife for almost twenty years.

On the floor of the juvenile detention center's canteen, he used the knife to stab the man, who was a head taller than him, through the throat.

From then on, he practiced every day, and within his arm span radius, he could swing the blade faster than most people could draw a gun.

It was with this knife that he transformed from a juvenile delinquent on the cafeteria floor into the master of the docks.

But a dock is just a dock.

The people on that island don't stab people on the cafeteria floor.

They sign contracts on golf courses and negotiate deals in hot springs, without even getting their fingers dirty.

He wants to be that kind of person.

boom.

Gunshots rang out in the warehouse.

Someone downstairs shouted at the top of their lungs.

Immediately afterwards, hundreds of feet stepped onto the concrete ground at the same time.

The sounds of footsteps, the cocking of guns, and the click of magazines hitting their barrels blended together as everyone surged toward the door.

Jeremiah stood in front of the glass window, put the cigar back in his mouth, and began to spin the razor in his left hand faster and faster.

Click-clack-click-clack.

The knife handle flew between his fingers.

Gunshots rang out again downstairs.

Tap tap tap tap, bang, tap tap tap.

He couldn't determine how many people were attacking, nor did he need to.

With hundreds of men and automatic firearms, unless it's an army, they're all asking for death.

The gunshot rang out, and when the cigar was half-burned, all was quiet.

Jeremiah took off his cigar with satisfaction, exhaled a large smoke ring towards the ceiling, and the smoke spread out in front of the glass window.

He turned around, ready to go back to his chair and take a couple more puffs.

I caught a glimpse of something outside the window.

He stopped, turned around, and looked down.

The ground floor of the warehouse was full of people.

There is only one person standing.

He was dressed in full black combat gear, with his bulletproof helmet pulled down to his brow bone, his goggles pushed up and secured to the front edge of the helmet, and the Velcro straps on his tactical vest fastened tightly.

He stood under the fluorescent light in the center of the warehouse, the light cutting him into two distinct black and white halves, from his helmet to his combat boots.

He held a Glock in his right hand, the muzzle pointing downwards towards the ground.

Jeremiah's pupils contracted sharply.

"Who are you!"

The person looked up and met his gaze through the tempered glass.

Then he raised the pistol and pulled the trigger.

boom.

The bullet struck the tempered glass, causing a radial crack to appear at the point of impact.

The crack extended a few centimeters outward from the center and then stopped; the glass wasn't pierced.

The man glanced down at the muzzle of his gun and put the Glock away.

He turned and walked towards the stairwell, his combat boots crunching on the concrete floor, each step slow and steady, each movement in the same rhythm.

Jeremiah gripped the razor; the handle was icy cold.

He listened to the footsteps coming from the stairs.

One step, two steps, three steps, not fast.

The footsteps reached the second-floor platform.

He took two steps and stood at the door, his eyes fixed on what was in front of him.

As soon as a black figure appeared in his field of vision, Jeremiah swung his right hand.

"Fuck, die!"

Suddenly, a bright white light shot upwards, slicing past Jeremiah's folding knife and across his neck.

clang!

A crisp sound.

puff.

Blood spurting.

Jeremiah stood there, eyes wide, and incredulously reached up to wipe his throat, feeling a familiar warmth in his palm.

He lost all strength and slowly fell backward.

……