Marvel: The Enlightened One#29+30: Hawk Opens the Floodgates, Gwen's Unintentional GPS Tracker

A remote backroad, thirty miles north of Quantico Town.

Hawk had studied the satellite maps. He knew the general layout of the area and the route he was supposed to take from the airport.

So, the moment the young driver had veered off the main road, Hawk knew something was wrong.

His memory was already sharp, but after awakening his Cosmo, it had become flawless.

Hawk got out of the car and scanned his surroundings.

Remote.

Muddy.

A perfect place to rob, murder, and bury a body. No wonder the kid had driven him out here.

Behind him, still in the car, the young driver was bruised and bloodied, but alive. He was still screaming.

Hawk hadn't killed him.

Not yet.

After a moment, Hawk turned, opened the car door, and with a single, effortless motion, dragged the whimpering driver out of the car. He tossed him onto the muddy dirt road.

"Splat."

The driver, dizzy and disoriented, scrambled to his feet, driven by pure survival instinct. He fell to his knees in front of Hawk, his voice trembling. "Please, don't kill me. Please. I'm sorry. I was wrong."

Hawk looked down at him—the man who had been so arrogant just minutes ago, now so pathetic.

His voice was cold.

"You're not sorry you were wrong. You're just sorry you're about to die."

"..."

The driver's body went rigid, his pleas becoming even more desperate.

Hawk's eyes narrowed. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you."

The driver's mind raced.

He looked up at Hawk, his face a swollen mess, and babbled, "You can have the car. My money. I have money. You can have all my money."

"Not good enough. If I kill you, the car and the money are mine anyway."

Hawk shook his head, his expression unchanged.

"Try again."

"...You can't kill me. If you do, you'll be a wanted man. If you let me go, I swear, I won't tell anyone. I won't say a word. Please, don't kill me."

The driver's words tumbled out, his eyes wide with a desperate will to live.

Hawk glanced at him, then looked down, as if considering it.

He seemed to be weighing the odds of the man keeping his word.

The driver, seeing Hawk's gaze shift, felt a flicker of hope.

He kept begging, his voice cracking, while his right hand slowly, carefully, crept toward the small of his back.

The next second.

"Hyaah!"

He whipped a folding knife from his waistband and, with a guttural cry, lunged at Hawk, his face twisted in a snarl. "DIE!"

Hawk looked up. His eyes were like ice. He didn't even flinch. He just slapped him.

Whump-whump-whump!

The driver's head began to spin, as if it were a top that had just been wound.

Faster and faster.

Tighter and tighter.

Until—

SQUELCH!

His neck, twisted into an impossible shape, tore loose from his shoulders.

Splat.

Thump.

Hawk looked down at the head that had just rolled to a stop at his feet, the snarl still frozen on its face. A contemptuous smile touched his lips.

"I was actually going to let you go."

"A pity."

"I gave you the one and only chance I might ever have for weakness in this life, and you thought it was fear."

Hawk's gaze shifted to the headless body, which was now gushing blood onto the muddy ground.

He hadn't been lying. He had actually considered letting the man live.

It wasn't just because he had business to attend to and didn't want any complications.

There was another, more important reason.

The line.

Just as he had thought, once that line was crossed, he had no idea what he would become.

Killing is like a valve.

Once it's opened, the sanctity of life is gone.

This was especially true for a transmigrator, someone who already had a flexible moral compass.

The Chitauri had been different.

Hawk had seen them without their helmets. They were insects.

A human doesn't feel guilt for killing a bug. And Hawk wasn't about to apply his moral code to a race of overgrown cockroaches.

But this man was different.

And yet—

Just as Hawk had suspected.

Even though this was the first time he had truly killed a human, as he looked at the headless corpse, he felt nothing. No revulsion, no guilt. Not even a flicker of emotion.

No, wait.

He did feel something.

This feels no different from killing a Chitauri.

Hawk closed his eyes for a moment.

He had no intention of trying to close the valve again.

Some things, once done, can't be undone.

The floodgates were open. Whether he liked it or not, from this day forward, killing would no longer be something he shied away from.

...

With that final thought, Hawk turned away from the head in the mud and the bleeding corpse. He got into the taxi, glanced up at the clear blue sky, then started the engine and drove away.

He didn't bother to bury the body.

The valve was open, and it wasn't closing. Whether the body was found or not was no longer his problem.

Killing one is still killing.

Killing another, or another hundred, was just a matter of numbers now.

However—

"I can kill."

"But I must not revel in it."

"A true warrior always maintains a humble heart."

Hawk thought to himself, steering the taxi back onto the main road. He glanced around, got his bearings, and headed toward Quantico Town.

He might not have a driver's license in this life, but that didn't mean he didn't know how to drive.

As the taxi disappeared down the road, the backroad returned to its usual quiet, desolate state.

About half an hour later.

A footstep broke the silence.

Then a second, and a third.

Soon.

Three men in dark sunglasses walked onto the scene. Their eyes fell on the head in the mud and the headless corpse, its bleeding finally stopped.

<><><><><><><><>

Hawk didn't drive the stolen taxi all the way into Quantico Town.

About ten miles out, he veered off the road, sent the taxi plunging into a reservoir, and started walking.

But his luck was holding.

After about a mile, a car pulled over. The driver was a military wife who lived in the town, on her way back from a supply run.

When she heard where he was headed, she cheerfully offered him a ride.

Hawk didn't refuse.

Once they got to town, there was no awkward drama. She didn't find it strange that he was alone or invite him to stay at her place.

She just dropped him off in front of a clothing store, and from there, it was a short walk to the town's motel.

Hawk paid for the room, got his key, and went up to the second floor.

Before he went inside, he paused and looked out over the town. He could see it from here, not too far in the distance: the main gate of the Quantico Military Base.

The entrance was heavily guarded by soldiers.

Every vehicle, every pedestrian, had to stop and be searched.

Hawk only looked for a moment before turning away.

It was too late today.

Tomorrow.

Recon during the day.

Strike at night.

And then—

Get the hell out. By the time the driver's body was discovered and the investigation eventually led back to him, it would be weeks, if not months.

In some countries, a murder might be a big deal, a case to be solved overnight.

But here, there were a lot of nobodies.

Hawk figured that by the time the authorities even had a name, he'd already be wearing his Saint Armor.

And at that point...

I am inevitable.

Besides, Hawk didn't think they'd ever track him down.

Here's a joke: the security camera at the airport taxi stand was broken.

Hawk had seen it when he got in the cab. The one and only camera that might have recorded him had been decapitated.

That was another reason he hadn't bothered to hide the body.

He didn't care, and he had a very realistic understanding of federal law enforcement's efficiency.

The different agencies didn't talk to each other.

To put it simply, if you committed a crime in New York and left fingerprints, and then committed another crime in California and left fingerprints, the authorities in California would have no way of matching them.

The state databases weren't connected.

And more importantly...

Hawk had been a model citizen in this life. He had no criminal record. His fingerprints weren't in any database, not even New York's.

So even if they found the body and his prints all over it, they'd have no one to match them to.

...

Half an hour later.

After completing his ten-thousand-punch routine in the motel room, Hawk took a shower.

When he got out, he saw his phone, which he'd left on the bed, ringing. He had just picked it up, before he could even see who was calling, when the screen went black and the ringing stopped.

"Huh?"

"Dead battery?"

Hawk shrugged. He didn't give it another thought. He didn't bother looking for a charger.

Just like before, he had no one he needed to talk to.

And no one who needed to talk to him.

He tossed the dead phone aside, pulled back the covers, and got into bed.

Time to sleep. Big day tomorrow.

Within three minutes, he was fast asleep, a soft snore filling the quiet room.

...

New York City.

In her bedroom, Gwen frowned as her call to Hawk went straight to a "this number is no longer in service" message. She put her phone down, tapped it against her chin, and then turned to her laptop. She opened a website, glanced at a two-factor authentication code on her phone, and typed it in.

A moment later, a map appeared on her screen.

There was a single, pulsing dot on it.

But the dot wasn't in New York City.

It was—

Washington, D.C.?

Why is Hawk's phone in D.C.?

Did it get stolen?

Gwen thought to herself.

She swore she hadn't meant to track him.

When she'd gotten home, she had received an automated text from her phone provider, a security alert stating that a device linked to her account had logged in from an unusual location.

That's when she remembered.

When she'd given Hawk her old phone, she had wiped all the data, but apparently never logged out of her account.

Now, seeing that the phone's last known location before it died was in Washington, D.C, her first thought was that it had been stolen.

After all, New York City had a lot of thieves.

Gwen thought back to the first phone she'd ever bought, the one that had been stolen less than three days after she got it. A wave of resentment washed over her.

Whatever. I'll just give him another one when school starts.

She shook her head, closed the tracking website, and then pulled up a different page: a digital copy of a newspaper.

It was an article published right after the Battle of New York.

It had a picture.

A picture of a block in Jackson Heights, Queens, that had been completely leveled.

Gwen scrolled through the article, reading the details.

Just then, she heard footsteps in the hallway.

She looked up.

The next second, her eyes lit up. An idea struck her. She closed the webpage, jumped up from her chair, and ran to her bedroom door, pulling it open.

"Dad!"

"..."

George Stacy, who made it a point to check on his daughter every night when he got home, was startled by the sudden appearance of Gwen, her eyes shining with excitement.

A slow smile spread across his face. "Sorry, kiddo. No new intel on Spider-Man for you tonight."

Recently, a masked vigilante in a ridiculous red and blue suit had been swinging around the city, playing hero.

The NYPD was not amused.

Their official stance: if vigilantes were so effective, what was the point of having police?

But everyone else was fascinated.

The media loved it. They had a new headline.

The internet was buzzing, with forums and message boards dedicated to figuring out who the man behind the mask was.

Gwen was curious too.

Especially since her father was a police captain.

Gwen shook her head. "I'm not interested in Spider-Man, Dad."

George chuckled.

"Then yesterday you..."

"That was Mary Jane. She was the one who was curious, not me."

Gwen cut him off, then got to the point. She looked up at him, her eyes wide.

"Dad, can I ask you for a favor?"

"..."