The bounty hunting business on Earth, Sylux discovered after three weeks of careful observation and strategic data gathering from his orbital position, was significantly less organized than he had anticipated. There was no central guild, no standardized contract system, no official infrastructure that allowed hunters to accept jobs and collect payments with any degree of professionalism. Instead, there was a chaotic mess of bail bondsmen, private military contractors, underground criminal networks offering hits on rivals, and government agencies that occasionally outsourced their more deniable operations to freelancers with flexible moralities.
It was, in a word, primitive.
But primitive did not mean unusable, and after extensive analysis of the various options available to him, he had identified several potential revenue streams that would allow him to operate without either starving to death or compromising whatever remained of his ethical standards. The criminal underworld offered the most lucrative opportunities—there were dozens of individuals with significant bounties on their heads, placed there by rival organizations or aggrieved parties who wanted justice that the legal system couldn't or wouldn't provide. Many of these targets were genuinely terrible people: human traffickers, drug lords who poisoned communities, murderers who had escaped prosecution through wealth or connections.
He could hunt them without guilt. He could deliver them to whoever was paying—alive, when possible, though his research suggested that many contractors preferred the alternative—and he could build a reputation that would eventually allow him to be selective about his jobs.
The first step was making contact with someone who could actually connect him to paying work, which meant descending from orbit and re-entering a world that was actively looking for him.
SHIELD had not been idle in the three weeks since his appearance. His ship's monitoring systems had intercepted numerous communications regarding "the Manhattan Entity," as they had apparently designated him, and the level of resources being dedicated to his location was frankly flattering. Satellite surveillance had been increased over the Eastern Seaboard. Agents had been deployed to interview witnesses, including the muggers whose encounter with him had been significantly embellished in the retelling. His image—captured from those phone recordings he had allowed to happen—had been analyzed by every expert SHIELD could access, and the consensus seemed to be a confused mixture of "definitely alien" and "we have no idea what we're looking at."
Good. Confusion was useful. Confusion meant they couldn't predict him.
He chose to make his re-entry in the early hours of the morning, dropping from orbit with a controlled descent that his ship's systems handled with the kind of casual precision that suggested this was barely worth computing power. He landed the Delano 7 in an abandoned industrial complex in New Jersey—far enough from Manhattan to avoid immediate detection, close enough to operate in the city when necessary—and activated the ship's full stealth protocols before disembarking.
The night air was cold against his armor, which regulated his internal temperature so efficiently that he barely noticed, and the industrial complex was suitably decrepit: rusted machinery, collapsed sections of roof, the general aesthetic of economic decline that characterized so many formerly productive spaces in this part of the country. It would serve as a temporary base while he established himself, though he would need to relocate regularly to avoid pattern recognition by the various parties who would soon be very interested in finding him.
His first target was a man named Victor Cranston, who operated a human trafficking ring out of the New York harbor and had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head placed by a consortium of families whose children had disappeared into his network. The bounty was being managed through a dark web marketplace that his ship's systems had accessed with contemptuous ease, and the terms were simple: proof of death or delivery to a specified location, payment in cryptocurrency that could be converted to more useful resources.
He preferred delivery. Death was permanent and often unnecessary, and while Victor Cranston was certainly deserving of permanent solutions, there was something satisfying about the idea of handing him over to people who had very personal reasons to want him alive and accessible.
The hunt began at midnight.
Cranston's operation was based out of a warehouse near the docks, protected by approximately fifteen armed guards and a security system that his armor's sensors dismissed as "inadequate" in a tone that somehow conveyed digital contempt. He approached from the water, moving through the darkness with a silence that would have been impossible for his old body but felt natural now, and within minutes he had a complete tactical picture of the facility: guard positions, patrol patterns, blind spots, entry points.
He chose the roof.
The guards never saw him coming. The first indication they had that something was wrong was when one of their perimeter sentries simply stopped responding to radio checks, and by the time they organized a team to investigate, three more had joined him in unconsciousness. Sylux moved through the facility like a ghost made of violence, and every encounter ended the same way: a brief moment of terrified recognition as guards realized they were facing something far beyond their capability to handle, followed by the application of precisely calibrated force that left them alive but thoroughly incapacitated.
He didn't use the Shock Coil. He didn't need to. His armor's physical capabilities were more than sufficient to handle unaugmented humans, and there was something almost meditative about the process of systematically dismantling Cranston's security without resorting to his more devastating options.
Cranston himself was found in an office on the second floor, surrounded by the evidence of his crimes: financial records, photographs, communications that detailed the scope of his operation in terms that made Sylux's borrowed instincts surge with something that felt remarkably like righteous anger. The man was middle-aged, overweight, wearing a suit that probably cost more than some of his victims would earn in their lifetimes, and his expression when Sylux entered the room was a study in rapidly evolving terror.
"What—who the hell are—security! SECURITY!"
His security was not coming. His security was scattered across the facility in various states of unconsciousness, and the ones who had managed to flee—there had been three, who had apparently decided that whatever they were being paid was not worth dying for—were probably still running.
Sylux crossed the room in three strides, grabbed Cranston by the front of his expensive shirt, and lifted him off the ground with one hand. The man weighed probably two hundred and fifty pounds, and Sylux held him like he weighed nothing, because to his enhanced musculature and armor-assisted strength, he essentially did.
Cranston babbled. He offered money, protection, information about competitors, anything and everything that might convince the nightmare holding him aloft to show mercy. Sylux listened to none of it because none of it mattered and also because responding would require speaking, and he had discovered over the past three weeks that he genuinely didn't want to speak.
It wasn't just that Sylux was canonically silent and mysterious—though that was part of it—but rather that his new existence seemed to have fundamentally altered his relationship with verbal communication. Words felt unnecessary, inefficient, a waste of effort when his actions could convey everything that needed to be conveyed. Why explain himself when he could simply demonstrate? Why justify his presence when his presence was its own justification?
He carried Cranston out of the warehouse like a piece of luggage, ignoring the man's increasingly desperate pleas and threats and offers, and deposited him at the delivery location specified by the contract: an abandoned building in Brooklyn where representatives of the families he had wronged were waiting.
The handoff was brief and wordless. He presented Cranston, bound and gagged with materials he had found in the warehouse, and received confirmation that the payment had been transferred to the account he had specified. The family representatives—three women and two men, all wearing expressions that promised Cranston a future of significant unpleasantness—barely seemed to register his presence beyond the practical matter of accepting delivery.
One of them, an older woman with gray hair and eyes that had seen too much grief, looked at him as he turned to leave.
"Thank you," she said, and her voice was thick with emotion that went beyond simple gratitude.
He paused. He considered responding, considered offering some acknowledgment of her thanks, some indication that he understood the weight of what he had done for them.
Instead, he simply nodded once and walked away into the darkness.
The word spread faster than he had anticipated.
Within a week, the underground networks that facilitated the kind of work he was doing were buzzing with rumors about the new player in the field: an armored figure who appeared without warning, completed jobs with terrifying efficiency, and never spoke a single word. The descriptions varied wildly—some claimed he was eight feet tall, others insisted he was actually a robot, a few theorized he was some kind of advanced AI—but the core facts remained consistent. He took contracts. He delivered results. He did not negotiate, did not explain, did not engage in any of the social rituals that normally characterized interactions between contractors and clients.
He just appeared, did the job, and vanished.
The criminal underworld, which was used to dealing with professionals who had personalities and quirks and exploitable weaknesses, found this deeply unsettling. Here was someone who couldn't be bribed because he never stuck around long enough to receive offers. He couldn't be threatened because no one knew where he came from or where he went. He couldn't be predicted because his methodology changed based on the requirements of each job, suggesting an adaptability that went beyond simple training.
He was, in the parlance of those who discussed such things in encrypted chat rooms and back-alley meetings, "something else entirely."
His fourth job brought him into contact with Spider-Gwen, though he didn't know that was her name at the time.
The target was a weapons dealer named Marcus Webb—and the irony of hunting someone who shared his former first name was not lost on him—who was selling Chitauri-derived technology to various buyers who should absolutely not have access to alien weaponry. The Battle of New York had happened two weeks prior, while Sylux had been establishing his operations, and the aftermath had flooded the black market with salvaged extraterrestrial materials that were being reverse-engineered into weapons that could punch through military-grade armor.
This was, in his assessment, a problem that would only grow worse if left unchecked, and conveniently there was a substantial bounty on Webb offered by parties who preferred that Chitauri tech not proliferate beyond their control. He suspected SHIELD involvement in the contract's origins, laundered through enough intermediaries to maintain deniability, but he didn't particularly care who was paying as long as the payment was genuine and the target was legitimate.
Webb operated out of a facility in Queens that was significantly better protected than Cranston's warehouse had been. The weapons dealer had apparently learned from the fates of others in his profession and had invested heavily in security measures that included automated turrets, reinforced walls, and a small army of mercenaries equipped with some of the very weapons he was selling.
It was the most resistance Sylux had faced since arriving in this universe, and he found that some part of him was almost grateful for the challenge.
He had disabled the outer perimeter and was in the process of working his way through the mercenary response when she appeared.
The first indication of her presence was a strand of webbing that attached to his arm mid-motion, not strong enough to actually restrain him but surprising enough that he paused for a fraction of a second to identify the source. His sensors tracked the trajectory back to a figure perched on the edge of a nearby rooftop: humanoid, female based on body structure, wearing a costume that was predominantly white with pink and blue accents.
"Hey! Hey, armored guy!"
He stared at her. His HUD was running threat assessment, categorizing her as a low-to-moderate threat based on observed capabilities, and noting the spider-themed aesthetic that suggested some connection to the Spider-Man who had been making headlines in this city for the past several months.
"Are you—okay, you're not responding, that's fine, but I need to know if you're one of the good guys or the bad guys because I've been tracking this weapons dealer for like three weeks and I really don't want to have to fight you if you're here to like, buy stuff from him or something."
He continued staring. The mercenary he had been about to incapacitate was using the distraction to slowly back away, which he noted with peripheral awareness but didn't immediately act on because the spider-person was more interesting than another hired gun.
"Strong silent type, got it. Okay, well, I'm going to assume you're here to do something about the illegal alien weapon thing because you're clearly fighting the guards and not, you know, negotiating with them, so maybe we could like... team up? Temporarily? Because there's a lot of them and only one of me and you seem really competent based on the—" she gestured at the unconscious mercenaries scattered around the area "—all of this."
He considered the offer for approximately two seconds before dismissing it. He didn't need help, and working with an unknown variable introduced complications he would prefer to avoid. Instead of responding, he simply turned back to the task at hand and resumed his systematic dismantling of Webb's security forces.
"Okay, or you could just ignore me. That's cool. That's totally fine. I'll just... follow you, I guess? Make sure you're not going to do anything, you know, murdery?"
She followed him.
She followed him through the entire operation, webbing occasionally to provide assistance that he didn't request and didn't acknowledge, offering a running commentary on the situation that he completely ignored, and generally being present in a way that was more confusing than annoying. Why was she doing this? What did she hope to accomplish? If she had been tracking Webb for weeks, she could have simply let him complete the job and then dealt with whatever aftermath she found objectionable.
Instead, she was swinging alongside him, fighting mercenaries that got too close to her position, and narrating everything in a way that suggested she was deeply uncomfortable with silence and felt compelled to fill it.
"—so I'm pretty new to this whole hero thing, I mean not new new, I've been doing it for like six months, but I'm still figuring out the rules and apparently there are a lot of unspoken rules that no one actually tells you about—"
He disabled an automated turret with a precisely placed shot from his arm cannon, moving through the facility with the same relentless efficiency he had demonstrated in his previous jobs.
"—and I don't know if you're from another dimension or space or what, because your armor is definitely not from around here, I've seen Stark tech and this isn't that, this is something else—"
Webb's panic room was on the third floor, protected by a vault door that would have taken conventional forces hours to breach. Sylux's Shock Coil cut through it in approximately fifteen seconds.
"—oh wow, okay, that's terrifying, what even is that weapon, it looks like it's draining the energy right out of the—yep, yep it is, the door is just gone now, that's fine, this is all completely normal—"
Marcus Webb was inside, trying desperately to activate some kind of Chitauri-derived device that was probably meant to be a last resort weapon. Sylux crossed the room before he could complete the activation sequence, disabled the device with a precise application of force, and grabbed Webb by the throat with the same casual ease he had shown with Cranston.
"Don't kill him!"
He turned his head slightly to look at the spider-person, who had followed him into the panic room and was now standing in a stance that suggested she was prepared to intervene if he decided to execute the weapons dealer.
He wasn't going to kill him. The contract specified live capture, and even if it hadn't, he had already established a preference for non-lethal resolutions when possible. But she didn't know that, and he felt no particular urge to explain himself.
Instead, he simply secured Webb with the same restraint methods he had used on previous targets and began moving toward the exit.
"So that's it? You're just going to take him somewhere and... what? What happens to him?"
He didn't answer.
"You're really committed to this whole silence thing, huh? Not even a grunt? A head shake? Anything?"
Nothing.
"Fine. Fine! But I'm coming with you, because I need to know where he ends up and whether I need to worry about you being some kind of assassin or bounty hunter or whatever."
She followed him out of the facility, across the rooftops of Queens, to the delivery location for this particular contract. She watched as he handed Webb over to a group of individuals in tactical gear who were almost certainly SHIELD-adjacent, and she watched as he received confirmation of payment through his armor's communication systems.
"So you are a bounty hunter. Okay. That's... actually kind of cool? I mean, it's ethically complicated, but if you're taking down guys like Webb and the people I saw on the news last week—that human trafficking guy?—then maybe it's not the worst thing."
He turned to leave.
"Wait! Can you at least tell me your name? Something to call you? Because 'armored silent guy' is kind of a mouthful and I feel like we're going to run into each other again."
He paused. This was a reasonable request, actually, and providing a name wouldn't compromise his operational security in any meaningful way. He could use Sylux—it was his name now, as much as any name could be—and it wasn't like anyone on this Earth would recognize it.
But speaking felt wrong. It felt like breaking something he had been carefully constructing, this persona of absolute silence and inscrutability. His reputation was built on his refusal to communicate verbally, and that refusal was as much a part of his identity now as his armor or his weapons.
Instead of speaking, he raised one hand and traced letters in the air, using a finger-mounted laser that was technically meant for precision cutting but worked perfectly well for writing.
S-Y-L-U-X
"Sylux," she read aloud. "That's your name? Sylux. Okay. I'm Spider-Woman, but most people call me Spider-Gwen because there's like... multiple Spider-people now and it gets confusing."
He gave the slightest nod of acknowledgment, then turned and walked away.
"See you around, Sylux!"
He would, as it turned out, see her around far more often than he had anticipated or wanted.
She appeared during his next job—an arms dealer with connections to HYDRA—swinging in halfway through his assault on the facility and offering "backup" that he had not requested. She appeared during the job after that, tracking him somehow even though he had been careful to vary his approach patterns and target selection. She appeared during a job in Hell's Kitchen where he was hunting a serial killer who had evaded police for months, and she stayed for the entire operation, offering commentary that ranged from observations about his combat technique to personal anecdotes about her own experiences to questions that he never answered.
It was during this third encounter that he began to notice something strange.
When he looked at her—which he did periodically, because situational awareness was important and she was a variable in his operational environment—she reacted in ways that his limited social processing couldn't quite categorize. Her body language shifted, her voice changed pitch slightly, and there was a particular movement she made with her legs that his HUD flagged as a physiological stress response but that didn't seem to correlate with any actual threat in the environment.
His confusion deepened during their fourth encounter, when he caught her staring at him during a lull in combat and she immediately looked away while making a sound that his audio processors classified as "embarrassed vocalization."
By the fifth encounter, the pattern was undeniable. Every time he directed his attention toward her—really looked at her, focusing the full weight of his visor's sensor suite in her direction—she did... something. Adjusted her posture. Pressed her thighs together. Made small unconscious movements that suggested heightened physiological arousal according to the biological analysis subroutines running in his armor.
This made absolutely no sense.
He was a seven-foot-tall armored figure of unknown origin who had never spoken a word to her, who had given no indication of personality beyond "efficient" and "violent toward criminals," and who had actively discouraged her continued presence through his refusal to engage with any of her attempts at conversation.
Why would any of that produce the physical responses he was observing?
Humans were confusing. He remembered being human, remembered the basic principles of attraction and social interaction, but those memories felt like they belonged to someone else, and even when they had been fresh, he hadn't been particularly skilled at interpreting subtle social cues. His previous life had been characterized by missed signals and awkward misunderstandings and a general confusion about why people did the things they did.
Apparently dying and being reborn as an alien bounty hunter had not improved his social cognition.
He filed the observations away as anomalies to be monitored but not acted upon, and continued with his operations.
Spider-Gwen continued to appear.
"You know," she said during their seventh encounter, while they were both waiting for a target to emerge from a building they had under surveillance, "I keep coming back because I can't figure you out. Everyone else in this business—heroes, villains, whatever—they all talk. They monologue, they quip, they explain their motivations and backstories and reasons for being. But you? Nothing. Not a word. And it's driving me absolutely crazy because I don't know if you're like, an alien, or a robot, or a regular human in really advanced armor, or something else entirely."
He continued watching the building.
"And the thing is, the silence shouldn't work. People who don't talk are usually boring, or creepy, or just rude. But somehow you make it... I don't know. Intense? Like every moment of your attention is significant because you're choosing to give it instead of just defaulting to social autopilot."
He had no idea how to respond to this, so he didn't.
"Plus you have a really nice silhouette. Very dramatic. Very brooding. The whole 'mysterious hunter of the night' aesthetic really works for you."
He turned his head slightly to look at her, which was a mistake because she immediately made that thigh-pressing movement again and looked away with a nervous laugh.
"Anyway! Point is, I'm going to keep showing up, because someone needs to make sure you're staying on the right side of the law—mostly, at least—and I've apparently elected myself for that job. So you might as well get used to having company on your brooding rooftop stakeouts."
The target emerged from the building, and Sylux moved to intercept, shelving the conversation—could it even be called a conversation when only one party was speaking?—for later analysis.
Spider-Gwen followed, as she always did.
He was beginning to suspect she would never stop.
The tenth time she appeared, he finally acknowledged her presence by nodding in her direction before she even announced herself, and the small surprised sound she made suggested this was somehow significant.
"Did you just... you acknowledged me. That's new. That's growth. Character development from the mysterious bounty hunter."
He ignored her subsequent chatter and focused on the job, but some part of him—the part that was still human, still capable of appreciating companionship even when he didn't seek it—registered something that might have been satisfaction at her continued presence.
Maybe company wasn't the worst thing.
He still didn't understand the thigh thing, though. That remained a complete mystery.