The taxi came to a stop in a place that appeared on no map Hawk had studied. A remote, muddy track fifty kilometers north of Quantico Town, surrounded by a dense, silent forest. The air was thick with the smell of damp earth and decay. It was a place where things were brought to be forgotten. A dumping ground.
Hawk's Cosmo-enhanced memory, which held a perfect, eidetic image of the satellite maps he had studied, had registered the deviation from the route ten minutes ago. He had remained silent, curious to see the driver's endgame. Now he knew.
He got out of the car, his expression calm as he surveyed the grim, isolated clearing. A good place for a robbery, a murder, and a shallow grave. The driver had chosen his spot well.
Behind him, in the car, the man who had driven him here was bruised, broken, but still conscious, his whimpers of pain a pathetic sound in the oppressive silence. Hawk had not killed him. Not yet.
After a long moment, Hawk turned, yanked open the car door, and with a single, effortless pull, dragged the wailing man out of the vehicle. He tossed him onto the dirt road, where he landed with a wet smack in a muddy puddle.
Driven by a primal instinct to survive, the man scrambled up from the ground, his bravado completely shattered. He fell to his knees before Hawk, his voice a trembling, desperate plea. "Please, don't kill me, please, I know I was wrong, I won't do it again, I swear!"
Hawk looked down at the pathetic creature before him, a man whose arrogance had evaporated the instant he was no longer the one holding the gun. His voice was as cold and dead as the surrounding woods.
"You don't know you were wrong," Hawk stated, dissecting the man's plea with surgical precision. "You just know you're going to die."
The man's body went rigid, his begging becoming even more frantic.
Hawk narrowed his eyes, his gaze cutting into the man like a scalpel. "Give me one reason not to kill you."
The man's eyes darted around, searching for an escape, for a bargaining chip. "My car! It's yours! And my money, I have money, it's all yours!"
"Not good enough," Hawk replied, his expression unchanging. "If I kill you, your car and your money are still mine. Think again."
The man's desperation escalated. "You can't kill me! If you do, the cops will hunt you! You'll be a wanted man! Just let me go, I swear, I'll never tell anyone, I'll disappear! Please!"
Hawk listened, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes. He lowered his gaze, appearing to fall deep in thought, as if genuinely weighing the man's words, considering the risk of a manhunt versus the satisfaction of finishing this.
The man, kneeling in the mud, saw Hawk's introspection and made a fatal miscalculation. He saw hesitation. He saw weakness.
A surge of hope, twisted and venomous, flooded his senses. While still pleading in a whining voice, his right hand crept cautiously towards the small of his back.
In the next instant, he erupted.
"Die!" he shrieked, a feral, cornered-animal sound. He lunged forward, a hidden folding knife now clutched in his hand, aiming to plunge it into Hawk's gut.
Hawk's eyes snapped up, the brief flicker of consideration gone, replaced by an expression of absolute, glacial coldness. His hand moved, not in a punch, but in what looked like a simple, dismissive slap.
It connected with the side of the man's head.
The man's head began to spin. And spin. And spin. Like a top wound too tightly, it rotated on his neck with an impossible, sickening speed, twisting the flesh and sinew into a grotesque parody of itself.
Faster and tighter. Until…
SNAP!
With a wet, tearing sound, the neck, no longer able to withstand the torsional force, ripped apart. The man's head, its face still frozen in a mask of feral rage, flew from his shoulders and landed with a soft thud at Hawk's feet. The headless corpse stood for a bizarre, frozen second before collapsing, a geyser of blood erupting from the severed stump.
Hawk looked down at the head in the mud, then at the twitching body, and a mocking smile touched his lips.
"I was really going to let you go," he said softly to the dead man. "A pity." He crouched down, his gaze devoid of all emotion. "You couldn't comprehend mercy, only weakness. You don't fear doing wrong; you only fear a bigger predator. I gave you the one and only chance at grace this new life of mine might ever offer, and you mistook it for fear."
He wasn't lying. In that moment of hesitation, he had been wrestling with his own bottom line. The pragmatic need to avoid complications was at war with the final, irreversible act of taking a human life. He had been about to walk away.
But that was over now. He had killed the Chitauri, yes, but in his mind, they were just intelligent insects. This was a man. And as he looked at the gruesome scene, he analyzed his own reaction. There was no guilt. No nausea. No thrill. There was… nothing. The same clinical detachment he felt when squashing a bug.
In that moment, he felt a metaphysical click in the deepest part of his soul. A valve had been opened. The valve of killing. And he knew, with a chilling certainty, that it could never be closed again. The act was no longer a moral quandary; it was now, simply, a tool.
He stood up, his thoughts turning inward, forging a new code in the ruins of the old one. You can kill, he told himself. But you cannot be bloodthirsty. You can be a predator, but you must not be a monster. True power always retains a humble heart.
Without a backward glance at the head in the mud or the body still bleeding out onto the dirt road, he walked to the taxi, got in, and started the engine. He had no interest in burying the evidence. The old Hawk, the one who feared consequences, was gone. The new Hawk would face the ripples his actions created.
He found the correct road and drove towards Quantico Town. He didn't have a driver's license in this life, but that didn't mean he couldn't drive.
Half an hour after Hawk's vehicle disappeared down the road, the secluded path returned to its usual silence. Then, the sound of tires crunching on gravel broke the stillness. A black, unmarked sedan rolled to a stop.
The doors opened, and three men in identical dark sunglasses and suits stepped out. They moved with a quiet, professional precision, their eyes scanning the scene. They noted the car tracks, the churned-up mud, and then their gazes fell upon the head, and the headless corpse.
One of the men knelt, examining the body with a detached, clinical air. The other two fanned out, their expressions unreadable. Hawk's clean kill had not been so clean after all. He had left a trail, and the hunt had already begun.