The warehouse was still a mess.
Police lights flashed across the ground. Officers moved around marking evidence, taking photos, talking to witnesses. The smell of oil and burnt metal was still in the air.
The hostages sat nearby wrapped in blankets, still shaken, all talking at once.
"It was too fast—"
"He just disappeared—"
"No there were two of them!"
"The other one — the one shooting from Somewhere—"
Captain George Stacy walked through the scene slowly. His eyes moved across the broken ground, the oil, the blast marks on the walls. He crouched down and touched the edge of one of the marks.
Still warm.
He stood back up and kept walking.
His officers had already gathered all the witness statements. He had read through them twice. The story was the same across every single one — the vigilante got trapped, the oil slowed him down, someone else came in from above firing energy blasts, and nobody saw who it was or where they went after.
New York was getting complicated. He had felt it for a while now. But this was something else. People with powers operating in his city with no identification, no agency, no oversight. Just showing up, doing whatever they wanted and disappearing.
He stopped at the table where his officer had laid out the witness sketches.
He picked one up.
The face wasn't human. Not even close. Sharp, completely alien, nothing like anything normal. The witnesses all described it the same way. This wasn't a mask. This wasn't a costume. This was just what it looked like.
He set it down.
Human experiment. Mutation. Some kind of animal. He didn't know. But whatever it was, it was walking around his city.
"Sir."
He turned.
An officer walked up with a notebook.
"Doctors gave an update on the suspects."
"How bad?"
"Bad. Some need surgery. A few of them…" the officer paused. "Might not fully recover."
Stacy was quiet for a moment.
"He seems angry," he said.
"Sir?"
"The vigilante. He didn't kill anyone — he could have but he didn't. But he didn't hold back either." He looked at the officer. "And he went for the hostages first. Before anything else. Even with the oil slowing him down, that was the first thing he did."
The officer nodded.
Stacy looked back at the sketch.
"Whatever this thing is — it cares about people."
"Sir."
Another officer came up.
"There's a woman at the entrance. Says she's FBI."
Stacy turned and walked over.
A junior officer was blocking her at the entrance. She wasn't arguing. Just standing there waiting, completely calm.
Stacy looked at her.
"What's the problem here?."
"Captain Stacy." She held out a badge. "FBI. We're taking jurisdiction on this case."
Stacy took the badge and looked at it. Then back at her. His face wasn't happy about it.
"Officer Natasha."
"That's right."
He handed it back.
"We've been grinding on this case since day one. Talked to every witness, chased every lead… and now the FBI shows up? For what?"
"Can we talk privately, Captain."
Stacy looked at her for a moment.
Then nodded.
They stepped away from the entrance and the noise. Neither spoke for a second.
Then she said —
"I'm not FBI."
Stacy waited.
She looked at him directly.
"Natasha Romanoff. Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division."
Stacy didn't say anything right away. He had heard of them. Not officially. But enough to know they were real and they were serious.
"You don't say that name casually," he said.
"I'm not."
She glanced back toward the scene.
"You already know this isn't a normal case. Someone studied the vigilante carefully enough to find a weakness and set a trap around it. A second person firing energy blasts from above and vanishing without leaving a single trace." She stopped. "This is bigger than a gang case."
Stacy crossed his arms.
"So your people come in and we step aside?."
"No. Your team stays on it."
"But?"
"This isn't NYPD level anymore."
Stacy looked at her for a moment. Then back at his officers still working the scene.
"My team stays fully involved," he said. "Nobody pulls us off."
She took a second to think.
"Agreed."
"And I want everything your people have."
A faint smile touched her lips.
"You'll get it."
Stacy looked at her one more time.
"We'll see."
Natasha gave a small nod.
"Yeah. We will."
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