Hawkeye set down his fork and began recounting the days before, his tone level but carrying an edge of something harder to name.
"First few days after the outbreak, Falcon and I ran into a group in central Manhattan." He paused. "Street-level heroes. The Defenders. Daredevil, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage."
Veyric set his fork down, eyes fixed on Clint's face.
"We were trading intel on food sources at first. But when we suggested joining up, pooling resources..."
He stopped. A flicker of something crossed his expression, a lingering discomfort with what he'd been during those days.
"They told us there wasn't enough food to go around. Then they told us to leave."
Veyric's pupils contracted. His chewing slowed to a crawl.
Food?
He turned the word over in his mind.
This was the apocalypse. New York's streets were overrun with zombies. Ordinary survivors were nearly impossible to find, and superhuman metabolisms burned through calories far faster than a normal person's.
He ran through the Defenders' roster in his head.
A squad maxed out on close-quarters combat, backed by Daredevil's long-range sensory net, with years of teamwork already baked in. In the tight alleys and tangled streets of New York, they'd be the most dangerous opponents Veyric had encountered since crossing into this world. A tier above anything else.
And these people had said "not enough food to go around."
He lowered his gaze, speared a slice of salmon, and placed it slowly in his mouth.
"Where's their base?"
"No idea," Falcon said, shaking his head. "They led us in circles. Said it was a security measure. Didn't want us knowing the location."
Veyric didn't push. He nodded and picked up his fork again.
"Got it. Thanks, both of you."
Peter noticed something turning behind Veyric's eyes and leaned in close, voice low. "Did you figure something out?"
No immediate answer. Veyric cut through the last piece of steak on his plate, rolling his fork between his fingers.
In his mind, he was flipping through the Marvel Zombies comic lore at speed.
In the original comics, some of the zombified heroes didn't roam around hunting aimlessly. From the very beginning, certain ones had been smarter than that. They'd penned their food supply in.
He remembered one plotline where Ant-Man had secretly imprisoned Black Panther. When the surface-level food ran out, he'd started eating T'Challa's limbs, piece by piece. Sustainable feeding.
The finer details had gone fuzzy, but the logic behind it was burned into his memory.
The Defenders had grown up on the bottom. They were forged in Hell's Kitchen, shaped by its streets.
People like that understood survival in desperate conditions better than anyone.
"Not enough food to go around..."
He repeated the phrase internally, his expression perfectly composed. Not a twitch.
There was a real chance their "food" was some captured hero they'd hidden away and were keeping alive. That would explain why they'd been so hostile about Hawkeye and Falcon getting close.
"Veyric."
Hawkeye's voice pulled him back.
"One more thing." Clint paused, as though retrieving an image he wasn't entirely sure of. "Before we left, I spotted someone in their camp from a distance. Gun holstered at the hip, long black coat. Looked like tactical personnel."
Veyric waited.
"One of his arms was completely wrapped in something black." Clint's brow creased. "Identical to what you've got."
The cafeteria went dead silent for a beat.
Veyric set his fork down gently. From the collar of his shirt, a round black head poked out. Venom. Two white eyes stared at the tabletop without blinking, quieter than it had any right to be.
He glanced down at it.
"What do you think?"
"A black symbiote. It should be one of my other fragments." Venom's voice was barely above a whisper, but a tremor of excitement ran through it. "Finding them could strengthen me. And it might lead to information about Eddie..."
Oh, wonderful. Calls me the best host in the world, but you're still hung up on your ex.
Veyric swallowed the thought, then looked up at Clint.
"Gun on the hip. Long black coat..."
He ran through candidates at speed. Someone matching that description, with ties to the Defenders' circle.
"Did he have close-cropped hair? Big white skull on his chest?"
Clint and Sam exchanged a glance.
"He was far away, facing the other direction," Falcon said. "But I caught his reflection in a shard of broken glass further out. There was definitely something white on his clothing."
"A shard of glass from even further away? Mr. Barton, your eyesight is that sharp even as a zombie?" Peter cut in, genuinely impressed.
Veyric leaned back in his chair. Two seconds of silence.
"I'm guessing that's the Punisher."
The Punisher. Frank Castle. Former U.S. Marine special operator. The single most relentless combatant in the entire Marvel Universe. No powers, no enhancements, pure flesh and blood, yet his kill count and sheer combat output were off the charts. Brutally efficient, mercilessly violent, the kind of character who could only exist in R-rated programming. A walking slaughter machine.
And someone that dangerous now had a symbiote bonded to him.
Veyric rubbed his chin. This particular set of opponents was going to be a serious problem.
"So where are they?" he asked. His tone stayed flat.
"By the river," Clint said. "West side of Manhattan. Somewhere around... Hell's Kitchen."
Hell's Kitchen.
The name rolled through his mind.
A battered stretch of old city on Manhattan's west flank, pressed up against the Hudson. Decades ago it had been the poorest, roughest, most dangerous neighborhood in New York. Gang territory, where lives were cheap and nobody who grew up there came out soft.
The Defenders making camp there made perfect sense.
"Alright." Veyric nodded. "Good to know."
He picked up his fork and pushed the remaining salad around his plate.
"But I'd recommend we hold off for now."
Peter looked up, surprised.
"Why?"
"We just came out of a high-intensity fight." Veyric scanned the faces around the table. "I can tell everyone's running on fumes. We need time to recover."
"The Defenders are formidable on their own, and we don't know if they have hidden members we haven't accounted for."
"So we wait two days." He set the fork down. "Rest up, build our strength, then move."
Nods went around the table. No objections.
"That's the plan, then." He leaned back. "Finish eating, get some rest. Everyone earned it tonight."
Plates cleared one by one. Conversation thinned and scattered.
Peter walked Hawkeye and Falcon out, pointing them toward the empty rooms.
Colossus helped Beast clear the trays, the two of them talking in low voices about what sounded like expanding the base.
Venom, meanwhile, quietly swiped the last piece of chocolate off the table and acted as though nothing had happened.
Veyric stood, tugged at his sleeves, and headed for his room.
"Veyric."
Natasha's voice came from behind him. They fell into step side by side down the corridor toward the sleeping quarters.
"How are the injuries?" she asked casually, her gaze passing over his hands.
"Fine. Venom took care of it." He kept it honest. "Tired, mostly. A good night's sleep will fix that."
She gave a small nod.
"Training's still on tomorrow. Don't think you're weaseling out of it."
"Tough as ever, coach." He grinned and shrugged.
"You're the one who said there's a hard fight coming." She spread her hands, her voice carrying a rare note of resignation.
"Yes ma'am, whatever coach says."
His gaze drifted sideways, lingering for a moment on her profile.
He pulled his gaze back without a trace and let out a quiet breath.
Before he'd transmigrated, this woman had been projected across cinema screens worldwide. The top-tier super-spy that every Marvel fan put on a pedestal.
And now here he was, walking shoulder to shoulder with her through a secret bunker, surviving her training from hell, trading barbs like old friends.
The sheer unreality of it, the wall between fiction and reality crumbling around him, hit harder than getting bitten by a zombified Spider-Man.
They reached the door to his quarters. Natasha stopped.
Her hand went to the tactical pouch at her hip and came back with a small box, edges slightly worn. She held it out to him.
"Found it in the ruins of an office building. Seemed like a waste to leave it there."
He took it, glanced down, and blinked.
Premium chocolate.
The packaging still bore one of those cheesy pre-apocalypse gold-foil taglines: "One True Love."
His hand froze in midair.
"Natasha, this is..."
She caught the text on the wrapper. Not a flicker of reaction crossed her face, but the faintest ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
One finger rose and tapped his chest. "Don't get the wrong idea. It's for your little friend in there."
"Ah. Right, of course." Relief washed through him for reasons he couldn't quite pin down. He covered it with a laugh.
"Thanks, Natasha."
"Natasha's fine, but you can call me Nat."
He scratched the back of his head, sheepish. "Then... thanks, Nat."
"You're welcome. See you tomorrow."
"Yeah. See you tomorrow."
He pushed the door open, stepped inside, and pulled it shut behind him.
His back hit the door, and only then did he notice how hard his heart was pounding.