The mugger on the fire escape had a knife, a terrible plan, and an excellent memory for street rumors.
"Oh, come on," the man groaned, backing into the brick wall as Adrian dropped onto the metal landing without making a single sound. "Blue eyes. You're the blue-eyed guy. Marcus said you were just a story."
Adrian's Six Eyes processed everything in a fraction of a second: the angle of the knife hand, the weight shifting onto the mugger's back foot, and the fine tremor in the guy's thumb. The man had never stabbed anyone and was praying he wouldn't have to start tonight.
It was six seconds of a fight, max. None of them interesting.
Adrian held out an empty palm. "Knife."
"Marcus said you don't kill people."
"Marcus got that part right." Adrian let the cerulean light behind his eyes flare—just a flicker, the same chilling courtesy he'd extended to Mr. Kowalski's extortionists. "But he didn't say I'd be gentle about the knife."
The blade hit the grating with a sharp clatter. The mugger slid down the brick wall, laced his hands over his head, and asked in a small, terrified voice, "Are you gonna do the thing with the wall?"
"What thing with the wall?"
"The thing where you put a guy through a wall. Everybody's talking about it."
Everybody is talking about it. Adrian stared at him. He had put exactly one man through exactly one wall, way back in October. Clearly, that guy survived and had been generously embellishing the story ever since.
"Not tonight," Adrian said.
He pulled a bundle of heavy-duty cable ties from his jacket—an "emergency orange" bulk pack Sophia had found on discount. He fastened the mugger's wrist to the railing, kicked the knife down a storm drain, and used a burner phone to call in an anonymous tip.
Out of pure gamer habit, he checked the corner of his vision.
Nothing. No EXP. No notification. No card drop.
Non-cursed conflict resolution pays nothing. Same as always.
He leaped back up to the roof, standing in the biting cold. Three months ago, nobody in this city knew his face. Tonight, a random mugger made him.
Fame, it turned out, was just street gossip with a worse survival instinct.
His phone buzzed before he could cross two rooftops.
[Reyes]: Print shop on Third, the one you dropped a loading dock on last night. Someone is walking the scene right now. Not DODC and also not from my office.
[Reyes]: Thought you'd want to know before you decided to go back and admire your own handiwork.
Adrian changed direction immediately.
The print shop sat on a dead-end street. The loading dock he'd destroyed was exactly where he'd left it—a massive, cleanly severed slab of concrete. He dropped flat onto a rooftop across the street, peering over the parapet.
There was only one person in the rubble.
A woman in her mid-forties wearing a gray peacoat. She crouched beside the wreckage with a hard-shell case open and a sleek, screenless device in her hand.
Six Eyes scanned her instantly. No cursed energy. Blank. She was as ordinary as Sophia.
But her device wasn't. It projected a faint, orderly pattern into the air, tracing thermal residue, electromagnetic spikes, and—unexpectedly—a lingering trace of something alien clinging to the concrete.
She's checking for a Chitauri signature, Adrian realized. She's comparing my cursed energy damage to the alien database. And finding zero matches.
The woman stood, snapped three photos from precise angles, and jotted something in a notepad. When she tucked the pad into her coat, Adrian saw it.
Stitched into the inner lining of her case. Small, black, and unmistakable.
An eagle.
Adrian stopped breathing.
SHIELD.
The realization hit him in two rapid waves. The first was pure, unadulterated fanboy shock. The kid who had read comics in a past life was currently staring at an honest-to-God SHIELD agent.
The second wave was ice-cold dread.
SHIELD. Which means HYDRA is rotting inside it right now. Which they won't figure out for another year and a half. Which I can't warn anyone about without explaining how I know.
He shoved both feelings down and clamped his jaw shut.
It was the same brutal discipline he'd used the night he met that masked kid in Queens. He had almost blurted out the name Peter. He'd bitten his tongue so hard it bled, walking away with a bad joke instead of blowing his timeline knowledge. Keep the mouth shut. Survive.
Down in the rubble, the woman capped her pen.
"Forty-one seconds," she called out. Her voice was perfectly conversational, aimed at nothing. "That's how long the roof across the street has been holding its breath."
Adrian froze.
"I can't see you, to be clear," she continued, not even looking up. "I'm guessing. Guessing is most of my job. But whoever dropped this loading dock missed the gas main on purpose. You did it in the dark, and you didn't leave a single footprint. Careful people always watch the scene afterward."
Not bad, Adrian admitted grimly.
"My name is Marsh. I write reports nobody reads," she said, clicking her case shut. "This is my twelfth 'structural failure' report of the season. At thirteen, my boss starts asking if I'm getting sloppy."
She finally glanced up toward the roofline. Not directly at him, but close enough.
"I'm not here to arrest anyone. I'm not recruiting. I'm here because I want to know who's cleaning up this borough's messes. So, I'm going to keep writing 'structural failure.' For now."
She picked up her case. "Other people file paperwork on you, too. They aren't as tidy as I am."
She walked away without looking back.
Adrian didn't move a muscle until she rounded the corner. Right before she vanished, her scanner had swept over his rooftop and paused for three agonizing seconds.
Even his Six Eyes couldn't tell if the machine had actually read his cursed energy, or if it just picked up his body heat.
He really didn't like the feeling of not knowing.
Sophia was at the stove when he climbed through the window, stirring a pot while glaring at a chemistry textbook.
Adrian didn't even take off his jacket. "So. SHIELD."
The wooden spoon stopped moving.
"You promised full honesty," Sophia said, "and you are delivering it with your boots still on."
"Figured it beat ruining dinner."
"Fair enough." She lowered the heat and crossed her arms. "Spill."
He told her everything. The mugger, Reyes's text, the SHIELD agent, the eagle logo, and the forty-one seconds. He kept it totally unfiltered.
When he finished, Sophia stared at him.
"A federal agent," she said slowly. "Walked up to your scene, talked to an empty roof, basically said she's covering for you, and bounced."
"Pretty much."
"And you think this is fine."
"I think it beats a strike team kicking our door in." Adrian dragged a hand through his hair. "She's buying time. I just don't know why."
Sophia walked over to their hazard-zone corkboard—the chaotic map that had basically become the blueprint of his double life. She grabbed a blank index card, uncapped a sharpie, and wrote in bold letters:
SHIELD. Agent Marsh. "Tidy."
She pinned it next to the others. DODC (Reyes). STREET RUMORS (Marcus/Wall Guy).
Three factions. Three completely different pieces of the same puzzle, drawn by people who didn't communicate with each other.
"Three," Sophia said, stepping back. "Three different groups know you exist. And one of them is the government's shadow government."
"It's more like the government's other shadow government."
"You aren't helping, Adrian."
"My bad."
She sighed, her expression softening just a fraction. "Thanks for telling me immediately."
Adrian nodded. He was keeping his promise. Total honesty about his actions—even if he still had to keep the door locked on how he knew about the MCU's future.
His phone vibrated.
[Reyes]: Marsh is real. Field analyst. If she's burying this as a structural failure, someone above her is either blind, or letting it happen. Be careful.
He flashed the screen to Sophia.
She read it, reached out, and adjusted the SHIELD card so it aligned perfectly with the others.
"Alright," Sophia said, switching to her tactical voice. "She goes into the rotation. Same rules as Reyes. We watch, we assume nothing, and you absolutely do not go looking for her."
"Deal."
"Good. Now sit. It's lentils, and I'm not negotiating about the lentils."
He sat. Against all odds, the lentils were great.
Halfway through his second bowl, Sophia spoke up without looking away from her textbook. "Oh. By the way. Mr. Kowalski asked if the blue-eyed guy could fix his metal shutter."
Adrian choked on his food. "His... shutter?"
"The one the extortion guys kicked in. His landlord is dodging him. He said he'd pay in sandwiches."
"Sophia, I punch curses. I am not a handyman."
"You can lift a delivery van with one hand."
"Different skill set entirely!"
"Sandwiches, Adrian."
He put his spoon down. He looked at the corkboard, at the strings converging on the center pin. He wasn't an invisible shadow anymore. He was on SHIELD's radar.
And apparently, he was a guy who fixed shutters.
"...What kind of sandwiches?" he asked.
Sophia just smirked into her bowl.