The Hell's Kitchen gangsters were not stupid.
After being massacred, they scattered overnight.
These days, people joined gangs for money, not for martyrdom. If a situation looked like certain death, most of them still valued their own necks enough to run.
Johnny Blaze didn't care that his prey had fled.
He had a soul radar now. He could see the sin clinging to a person's soul at a glance. No one could hide from him.
The Ghost Rider Drex Valen had reshaped was packed with abilities: an arsenal of supernatural weapons, an immortal body, soul radar, the Eye of Death, and black hellfire hot enough to devour anything it touched.
More importantly, he could use all of it in daylight, and he could shift in and out of the transformation whenever he wanted.
That was why Johnny had so much confidence.
At the sa ti, Drex went looking for soone even more promising.
In the antihero category, there were a few nas he liked, but Frank Castle stood above most of them. Venom, Deadpool, all of those were amusing at best.
And frankly, Drex had no interest in letting Deadpool contaminate his Black Hole Dinsion.
Inside a bar, a man sat alone with a drink.
He had thick black hair slicked straight back, a dense beard running from his temples down to his jaw, and a face carved out of hard edges and cold purpose. His black combat suit bore a white skull on the chest, and the brown trench coat over it concealed more weapons than most n could carry.
Frank Castle.
The Punisher.
No mutation. No augntation. Just a completely ordinary human being.
A forr Marine special operations instructor.
An expert in hand-to-hand combat and every kind of weapon, lethal or otherwise.
Ambushes, raids, explosives, infiltration, espionage, he excelled at all of it. Nick Fury himself had rated him a Level Ten agent, calling him the upper limit of what a normal human could achieve in combat.
Frank Castle was a hero.
But he was a dark kind of hero, nothing like the bright, clean figures people usually imagined.
His creed was simple.
You are guilty, so you deserve to die.
"Frank Castle."
Drex didn't bother with phisto's kind of drawn-out temptation. He simply spoke the Punisher's na and, the mont Frank looked up, swallowed him whole into the Black Hole Dinsion.
Once Castle entered that void, sothing deeper than darkness swallowed him.
Before him, the black hole began to take shape.
Then the featureless black sun shifted, as if mud had been sculpted by invisible hands, slowly hardening into a new form.
A giant god.
Armor, body, face, presence.
Everything about it was black.
Not rely dark, but black in a way that seed older than shadow itself. Black armor. Black flesh. Even the flas burning across its body were black, with only the eyes and the lines of its features catching the faintest trace of light.
To Frank, the giant god felt like an abyss large enough to swallow heaven and earth.
A being like that should never have existed in the world.
The instant it appeared, the entire universe seed to fall silent.
Countless forms of matter, light, and shadow all flowed toward it like rivers returning to the sea.
The giant god lowered its gaze onto Frank, and he felt his mind slip out of his own control.
Then Drex branded the Punisher and turned him into a new Ghost Rider.
Frank Castle was, in Drex's opinion, the perfect man to wield this altered version of the Rider's power.
After that, the Punisher rode through the city atop a mount granted by the Black Hole Dinsion, a Fenrir-like heavy motorcycle wreathed in black fire that had no business existing in nature.
He beca a skull-faced rider as well.
The first thing the Punisher did after becoming a Ghost Rider was settle accounts with the Stanich family.
...
The next day, Drex turned on the television and switched to the news.
The broadcast was already covering last night's events.
"Earlier this morning, a severe gang conflict occurred in Queens' Sixth District," the reporter said solemnly.
"The two sides engaged in heavy fighting throughout the area. Police have recovered thousands of spent shell casings from the scene."
"Fortunately, there have been no confird civilian casualties so far. According to our investigation, one side was the Stanton gang, which has long operated in the Sixth District. The opposing side is believed to be the notorious Stanich family."
The footage shifted to the aftermath of the attack. Wild Swan Bar and several other Stanton gang properties had been reduced to ruins.
"At this ti, the exact cause of the conflict remains unclear. What is known is that the fighting has resulted in approximately one hundred deaths among Stanton gang mbers. anwhile, according to sources, the Stanich family has also suffered more than two hundred fatalities."
Drex was satisfied.
The rider he had chosen had turned out to be very efficient.
Last night alone, the Punisher had harvested more than three hundred souls stained with sin, to the point that the Black Hole Dinsion had visibly grown stronger.
Johnny Blaze was a little behind him.
Johnny had soul radar, but he wasn't as practiced at finding sinners as the Punisher was. Frank Castle knew exactly where to go and exactly how to clean a room.
Of course, Frank's original motive had been revenge.
At the sa ti, in a building belonging to the Holand Security Strategic Defense Response and Logistics Agency on the outskirts of New York, Nick Fury was watching the sa Queens news broadcast.
"Based on the information our people sent back, this was most likely done by Frank Castle," Agent Hill reported from Fury's side.
"Earlier, Castle also hit multiple Stanich family outposts and black-market operations."
"Don't bother him," Fury said with a shake of his head. "What about Johnny Blaze?"
"As of last night, he's killed more than twenty gang mbers."
Fury gave a short nod.
"Keep monitoring him."
Over the next few days, the entire Arican underworld seed to catch fire.
One of the country's top cri families, the Stanich family, had its business attacked again and again.
And every single ti, the attacker was the sa man.
Frank Castle.
Whether it was cocaine trafficking, gun-running, or smuggling, whenever the Stanich family prepared a major deal, Frank Castle showed up to ruin it.
Within only a few days, the family had already lost tens of millions of dollars.
At this point, the Stanich family had placed a nationwide kill order on him.
Whoever killed Frank Castle would receive thirty million dollars.
...
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