Chapter 4: The Hell's Kitchen Years
Night fell.
Ethan stepped out the front door of the Lucky Dragon and hung the OPEN sign on its hook.
"Evening, Wilson." He crouched down beside the scarred-up mutt lying to the right of the entrance. "Hold down the fort tonight, yeah?"
Deadpool Dog looked up at him, rolled his eyes in a disturbingly human fashion, stretched one paw forward, and went right back to lying down.
Ethan straightened up and took a slow look around the block.
Clean sidewalks. No broken glass. No needles. A streetlight that actually worked.
He allowed himself a small, satisfied nod.
Hell's Kitchen had always been one of Marvel New York's defining features — and not in a way the tourism board would ever put on a brochure. If you didn't have to come here, the recommendation was simple: don't. Ever. For the rest of your natural life.
The place was basically Gotham City's scrappy little cousin — only twenty-five blocks of concentrated misery, but packed with enough criminals per square foot to give any DC hellhole a run for its money.
Walking the streets of Hell's Kitchen in broad daylight, you could expect the mild version: some twitchy junkie asking if you had spare change or knew where to score. The less mild version involved a guy in a hoodie pressing something cold and metallic against your ribs and strongly suggesting you empty your pockets.
Pro tip for tourists: always carry cash in Hell's Kitchen. If you had cash, the locals would settle for your wallet. If you didn't? Well, then the transaction got a lot more personal.
Put it this way — if God Himself walked through Hell's Kitchen, even He'd have to pay a toll.
Where there were criminals, of course, there were also the heroes who punished them. Daredevil. Spider-Man. Iron Fist. Luke Cage. Over the years, they'd all taken their turns trying to clean up this neighborhood — with varying degrees of success.
Once upon a time, after dark, Hell's Kitchen belonged to the pimps, the gangs, and every flavor of lowlife in between. No sane person walked these streets at night unless they had a death wish or a superpower.
But in recent years — ever since Ethan had taken over the Lucky Dragon — things had started to change. At least on this block.
The stretch of sidewalk around the restaurant had become something almost unheard of in Hell's Kitchen: safe. You could occasionally spot regular, non-superpowered civilians strolling in for dinner. Not many — but enough to matter.
It was a small change. A tiny ripple in the vast, chaotic ocean of the Marvel Universe.
But it was his ripple.
"Heh." Ethan leaned against the doorframe and shook his head with a self-deprecating smile. "Twenty-three years in this universe and I still haven't even conquered one neighborhood. And the alien invasion's right around the corner."
He gazed up at the night sky — the same sky that would, in a few short years, tear open above Midtown to pour out a Chitauri army.
The thing about being an isekai protagonist in the Marvel Universe was that it wasn't nearly as glamorous as the webnovels made it sound.
He hadn't transmigrated into the body of some Kamar-Taj prodigy destined to become the next Sorcerer Supreme. He hadn't woken up with the body of a Kryptonian and immediately started punching cosmic-level threats. He hadn't even gotten a cool backstory.
Back in his previous life, Ethan's situation had been... aggressively normal. No cheating girlfriend. No failed business empire. No blood feud. No "elite special forces soldier betrayed by his own squad" origin story.
His parents were alive and well. He had a cute little sister. The family was comfortable — solidly middle class. He'd even studied abroad.
And then one night he went to sleep and woke up as a newborn in Hell's Kitchen.
A Chinese-American kid at the very bottom of the social ladder in the roughest neighborhood in New York. If he could somehow get back to his original world's version of America, his language skills and cultural knowledge would make him a unicorn. But here? He was just another face in the Kitchen, scraping by.
Without the plot doing him a favor, a penthouse billionaire like Tony Stark might as well have lived on another planet. People like Ethan didn't just bump into people like that.
But Ethan wasn't the type to sit around feeling sorry for himself. Right now, the plan was simple: protect his turf. Keep building up this little corner of Hell's Kitchen. And maybe — just maybe — change this place for the better.
And if someday, somehow, he could break the Fourth Wall and find a way back to his original world? Even just for a visit? Just to see his parents one more time?
That would be enough.
He shook off the sentimentality and refocused.
Step one: rescue Tony Stark and make friends. Step two: see if the man's interested in investing in Hell's Kitchen. Stark's got more money than God and a guilt complex the size of Manhattan — urban renewal might be right up his alley.
Step three: have a sit-down with Fisk.
That's right — Wilson Fisk. The Kingpin. The undisputed boss of Hell's Kitchen's underworld. Also, as it happened, his late father's childhood best friend.
Ethan's old man had died in a gang war — caught a bullet meant for Fisk back when the Kingpin was still a young man who hadn't yet cultivated his current... physique. The body fat percentage had been a lot lower back then.
That history bought Ethan a certain amount of goodwill. Enough, maybe, to have a real conversation about the future. About taking the Kitchen legitimate.
If Fisk would listen. Big "if."
While Ethan stood in the doorway running through his mental checklist, he didn't notice the pair of eyes watching him from across the street.
"Target showing no unusual activity."
"Copy. Maintaining surveillance."
A shadow shifted in the window of the apartment building opposite the restaurant.
Natasha Romanoff. The woman who was supposed to have left hours ago.
"Woof."
Deadpool Dog lifted his head and let out a low, pointed bark that cut through Ethan's thoughts.
"Ethan. Someone's watching us." The dog's voice echoed in Ethan's mind — gravelly, matter-of-fact, and utterly unbothered. "Across the street. And other positions too. More than one. One of the scents is familiar — same person from this afternoon."
Ethan's eyes narrowed. A cold smile flickered across his face.
He said nothing. Just turned and walked back inside.
S.H.I.E.L.D.
He'd disliked them in his previous life, and direct experience wasn't changing his mind.
Surveillance. Monitoring. "For the protection of Earth" — that was the sales pitch, anyway. Strip away the noble language and what you had was a spy organization with a God complex, convinced that everything and everyone needed to be under their control.
And the agents? Walking around like they were the main characters of everyone else's story. The arrogance was suffocating.
Ethan didn't care how attractive Black Widow was. You didn't just show up and start running surveillance on law-abiding Hell's Kitchen residents because they happened to cross paths with your precious asset.
This was the part that really got under his skin. He'd just made contact with the Stark case — literally that afternoon — and S.H.I.E.L.D. was already parked outside his restaurant with binoculars.
Today it was surveillance. Tomorrow they'd be flashing fake FBI badges and hauling him in on some made-up charge.
If they try anything, Ethan thought, his jaw tightening, I'll show them exactly how Hell's Kitchen welcomes uninvited guests.
As the evening wore on, the block came to life.
People trickled out of their apartments. Couples walked arm in arm. A few regulars pushed through the Lucky Dragon's front door, nodding hello. The street hummed with the quiet energy of a neighborhood that felt — against all odds — safe.
From her vantage point, Natasha watched it all with genuine surprise.
If I didn't know for certain I was in Hell's Kitchen, I'd never believe it. The scene in front of her looked like any ordinary residential street in Brooklyn or Queens — families out for a stroll, warm light spilling from restaurant windows, the low murmur of conversation.
In normal Hell's Kitchen, the streets were dead by eight o'clock. Anywhere else in the neighborhood, this scene would be unthinkable.
And she could feel it — this one-block pocket of peace radiated outward from the Lucky Dragon like body heat from a campfire. The young man she'd met that afternoon was at the center of it.
She noticed something else, too. Nearly every person who passed the restaurant slowed down to greet the dog lying by the door.
"Hey, Wilson."
"Evening, Wilson."
"Who's a good boy, Wilson?"
A faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She hadn't expected an undercover assignment babysitting the Stark case to turn up anything this... interesting.
A gravelly voice crackled through her earpiece.
"Keep eyes on them, Natasha. I want to know how they plan to find Stark. We're still at least a week out from locating him ourselves."
A pause.
"The one called Ethan Cross — he's got two mutants in his circle. That makes him dangerous. And according to the file, he's got a history of... let's say, ethically questionable fieldwork. If necessary, you're authorized to intervene."
"I'm sending two more surveillance teams to your position. But your primary objective hasn't changed — Stark comes first. He's a critical piece of what I'm building. Leave the rest to the other agents."
"Understood, Director."
The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Nick Fury.