Max_Striker
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Chapter 11: The Mantis Stalks the Cicada
🕑 Added 2025-08-03 11:01:12 +0000 UTCJay stepped off the Metro-North train at Grand Central, letting the Tuesday morning rush hour swallow him whole. The commuter crowd flowed around him—suits heading to Midtown offices, tourists clutching subway maps, students rushing toward Columbia. Perfect camouflage for someone who needed to disappear into the city's background noise.
He'd spent the ride from Bayville thinking about scale. Claire's payment had padded his accounts nicely, but he was still thinking too small. Playing it safe in the suburbs, taking one client at a time—that wasn't freedom. That was just a prettier cage.
'If you want powered individuals in bulk, you go where powered people are broke. And in Marvel? That's always New York.'
The city hit him like a physical force. The smell of hot dog carts mixed with exhaust and that indefinable urban musk of eight million people living on top of each other. Car horns created a symphony of barely controlled chaos while construction crews jackhammered through another "essential infrastructure project."
Jay loved it immediately.
He started in Hell's Kitchen, walking narrow streets between tenements that looked like they'd been standing since the city was founded. This was ground zero for the street-level superhero community—Daredevil's territory, though the blind lawyer was still just a blind lawyer for now.
He was walking past Josie's Bar when he saw her.
Tall woman in a leather jacket, dark hair hanging loose around her shoulders. She was walking out of Golden Dragon Chinese Takeout with a plastic bag. Her posture was casual but alert, like someone who'd learned to be ready for trouble without looking like she was expecting it.
Jay's Comic knowledge kicked in like a searchlight cutting through fog.
'Jessica Jones.'
He forced himself to keep walking, but his mind was already racing. Jessica Jones meant Luke Cage was somewhere in the city. It meant there was an entire underground community of powered individuals living paycheck to paycheck.
More importantly, it meant somewhere out there was Kilgrave.
Jay ducked into a newspaper stand, pretending to browse while he processed the implications. The Purple Man—the mind controller who could make anyone do anything with a few spoken words. In the comics and show, he'd controlled Jessica for months, turning her into his puppet.
'I can't be mind-controlled,' Jay realized, touching the mental shield perk he'd chosen. 'Purple Man is the perfect first real villain. And his power will be a great weapon for my arsenal.'
It was strategic brilliance. Kilgrave was terrifying on a personal level but operated small-scale. He was psychological horror that most heroes couldn't touch. But Jay could. His mind shield made him immune, and power theft would let him turn Kilgrave's greatest strength against him.
Jay pushed the thought away. First things first—he needed to upgrade his infrastructure.
The forger worked out of a massage parlor in Little Odessa, Brighton Beach. Jay had gotten the contact from Bobby, who'd gotten it from someone who knew someone who'd once needed to disappear from some very unfriendly creditors.
The parlor's waiting room was decorated in aggressive tackiness—red velvet everything, gold-framed mirrors. The clientele looked like extras from a mob movie: men in expensive tracksuits, women with hair that defied gravity.
"You here for Dmitri?" The receptionist was a blonde with an accent thick enough to cut with a knife.
She led him to a back office where sat Dmitri—a man who looked like he'd been assembled from spare parts of other, larger men, even Kingpin would look thin compared to him.
"You need papers?" Dmitri's English was precise but heavily accented.
"Multiple identities. High quality. Medical credentials for one, courier license for another."
"Expensive."
"I figured."
Within an hour, Jay walked out with two driver's licenses, a medical assistant certification, and a courier ID that would pass anything short of federal scrutiny. He also left with three prepaid burner phones and a storage locker key for Queens.
The gun dealer operated out of a fishing boat moored near the South Street Seaport. Which would have been more intimidating if the boat wasn't called "Sea Ya Later" and painted in colors that made it visible from orbit.
Toby—not his real name, obviously—was a Vietnam vet who'd discovered that selling firearms to people who couldn't buy them legally was considerably more profitable than actually fishing.
"Say, do you also kiss your girlfriend upside-down in the rain, or...?" Jay asked.
"What? You messing with me?" Toby barked.
Jay appeased him, "Nah, man, just nervous, that's all."
"You ever actually fire one of these?" Toby asked, watching Jay examine a compact Glock 19.
"Some." Jay had spent quite a bit of time at shooting ranges during his residency. Stress relief, he'd told himself, though honestly it had just been another way to avoid going home to his empty apartment.
Toby led him to the boat's hold, converted into a surprisingly professional shooting range. The sound suppression was so good that the gun's report was barely louder than a handclap.
"Nice grouping," Toby admitted after Jay put six rounds into the center of a target at fifteen yards. "You want the suppressor?"
"Yes. And something non-lethal. Taser, maybe pepper spray."
"Planning to take down some superheroes?" Toby's grin suggested he was joking, but his eyes suggested he really wasn't.
"Just covering all the bases."
Jay left with the Glock, two magazines, a quality suppressor, and a tactical pen that was really a disguised taser.
His phone buzzed as he walked back toward the subway. Bobby's number.
"How's the city treating you?" Bobby's voice carried background noise of traffic and construction.
"Like it's trying to mug me, but in a charming way. What's the word from the network?"
"It's grown, Jay. A lot. We've got people in Queens, the Bronx, Hell's Kitchen, Harlem. Word gets around about a guy who heals people and asks for nothing but information. Folks are starting to call you 'The Doc.'"
Jay winced. "Please tell me that's not catching on."
"Little late for that. But here's the interesting part—we're seeing more enhanced individuals who don't want to be enhanced. People hiding from things that normal cops can't handle."
"Perfect." Jay found a relatively quiet corner near a hot dog cart. "I need you to start tracking someone. Woman, tall, dark hair, leather jacket. Name's Jessica Jones." He texted Bobby a photo he'd discretely snapped. "She's been spotted in Hell's Kitchen and the Lower East Side."
"You want her found?"
"I don't care about her. I care about who's watching her. There's a man who's interested in her—very interested. Goes by Kilgrave. He's... dangerous."
Bobby was quiet for a moment. "You sure you want to tangle with this guy? There's stories, Jay. People who cross certain lines in this city, they don't come back the same. Some don't come back at all."
Jay watched the crowd flow around him—workers heading home, couples on dates, families navigating the subway system. Normal people living normal lives, completely unaware that there were predators who could rewrite their minds with a whisper. But Jay knew his weakness was a range of 80 feet of his pheromones and a time limit of 12 hours before the command needed to be reset.
"Just tell whoever's tracking them to keep a distance of at least a hundred feet. And report back every twelve hours. I want to know where they go, who they talk to, what they do."
"And if this Kilgrave guy notices he's being watched?"
"Then we'll know exactly how dangerous he really is."
After hanging up, Jay stood in the growing twilight, watching the city light up around him. Somewhere out there, Jessica Jones was probably drinking herself into unconsciousness, trying to forget months of violation and control. Somewhere else, Kilgrave was planning his next move, confident in his ability to bend anyone to his will.
But Jay had something neither of them knew about—absolute immunity to mental influence and the ability to steal powers from their source.
The mantis stalks the cicada, but the sparrow stalks them both.
Time to find out which one he really was.
