The Most Wanted Killer's Return

The coffee machine buzzes.

Noah Wilson grabbed his cup, poured himself a full cup of coffee, and walked straight towards the study.

It had been a full year since that damn accident left him badly injured and his Metahuman Ability gone quiet. He'd been living a civilian life ever since, in this suburban house, day after unremarkable day.

For someone who'd once made the entire underground world tremble, this kind of life was dull enough to make him feel like he was rusting from the inside out.

He'd barely sat down when his computer screen lit up on its own.

Noah's expression shifted instantly. The lazy look in his eyes turned sharp, and his muscles tensed reflexively.

His computer's firewall was military-grade, personally modified by a top-tier engineer. Even Pentagon hackers couldn't have slipped through without leaving a trace.

In the center of the screen sat a single new email.

No sender. No IP address to trace.

Noah set his coffee mug down hard on the desk, tapped the keyboard, and opened the email.

The content is straightforward and straightforward.

[Noah, take care of my daughter, Sophia. All my hidden Swiss bank accounts, my shares in the black-water company, and every resource the Black family has -- it's all yours now. The password is the day we drank vodka in Siberia.]

Brian Black.

He was Noah's old partner who could risk everything for each other, and also the half teacher who led him into the killer profession.

Noah had retired, but Brian was still active on the front lines.

Brian was sharp as a fox. He would never send something like this -- something that read like a dying man's last words -- without a damn good reason.

And the fact that he'd bypassed his own daughter entirely, handing everything over to Noah instead, meant only one thing: Brian was in a situation so hopeless that he couldn't trust a single person around him. The only one left he could count on was Noah -- a friend who'd already walked away from all of it.

As he watched these words, Noah's face instantly darkened, and his killing intent silently spread throughout the room.

"Brian, what the hell did you get yourself into..."

Without a second's hesitation, Noah walked to the closet, pulled a Glock 19 from the hidden compartment with practiced ease, tucked it into the back of his waistband, and grabbed two full magazines.

Fifteen minutes later, a black Dodge Ram roared out of the garage and tore toward the Black Estate in Beverly Hills.

Noah drove with one hand on the wheel, his eyes cold and focused.

He'd already prepared for the worst.

If Brian were in trouble, the Black Estate might already be compromised.

But when the Dodge pulled up to the estate's iron gate, there was no ambush waiting for him.

A uniformed guard walked over and knocked on the window.

Noah's right hand had quietly touched the handle of the gun in his lower back, and if this gatekeeper made any abnormal movements, he would shatter his head in 0.1 seconds.

The window rolled down.

"Sir, may I see your ID?" The guard looked at him without a hint of suspicion.

Noah handed over his driver's license without a word.

The guard glanced at the name -- Noah Wilson -- and handed it back with both hands, almost deferentially, then spoke into his radio: "Open the gate. Mr. Wilson is here."

The iron gate slowly swung open on both sides.

Noah narrowed his eyes.

No obstruction?

No questioning?

Not even the most basic body search?

It went too smoothly.

A cold, humorless smile crossed his face.

So what if his Metahuman Ability was gone?

With his brain that crushes ordinary people and his killing skills, no matter what is hidden inside, he doesn't mind turning this place into a slaughterhouse.

He hit the gas and drove straight in, pulling up in front of the main building.

The car door had barely swung open when an elderly man with white hair and a tailcoat came hurrying down the front steps.

"Mr. Wilson! You're finally here!"

Gerald Foster, the Black family's longtime butler, reached Noah, and his eyes immediately went red. His voice cracked with what sounded like grief.

"Mr. Black... Mr. Black has gone missing! No one's been able to reach him for three whole days! And Ms. Black -- she... she..."

Gerald covered his face, his shoulders shaking violently, as if he were barely holding himself together. "Ms. Black suddenly fell into a coma. The doctors say... they say she's become a vegetable!"

Noah stood there, hands in his jacket pockets, watching the old butler cry. Not a single thing inside him moved.

To anyone else, Gerald looked like a loyal, heartbroken old servant. To Noah -- a former top-tier killer -- the performance was so bad it was almost insulting.

The man was absolutely acting.

Gerald's shoulders were shaking, sure. But through the gaps between the fingers covering his face, his eyes were completely dry. Not a single tear.

More telling than that: the pulse in Gerald's carotid artery was perfectly steady. Relaxed, even.

When a person is genuinely devastated or terrified, adrenaline spikes. Heart rate and breathing are things you simply cannot fake.

Noah's eyes narrowed slightly. Brian's disappearance and Sophia's coma -- this old butler had something to do with both, and so did whoever was pulling his strings.

"Is that so?" Noah didn't call him out. Instead, he arranged his face into the perfect expression of a shocked, helpless old friend. He said, with just the right amount of urgency, "Take me to see Sophia."

He wanted to see exactly what these people were playing at.

"Of course, follow me, quickly."

Gerald wiped at tears that weren't there, then turned around. The moment his back was to Noah, every trace of grief vanished from his face, replaced by a thin, contemptuous smirk.

Noah caught every small shift in the man's muscles, but he kept his expression neutral and followed without a word.

They walked down the hallway. Gerald pushed open a set of double wooden doors at the far end of the second floor.

The sharp smell of disinfectant hit him immediately.

What had once been a bedroom with a young woman's touch had been turned into a state-of-the-art ICU. Advanced medical equipment filled the room, each machine beeping in its own steady rhythm.

Noah stepped inside, and his gaze went straight to the girl lying in the bed at the center of the room.

Sophia Black.

She has soft blonde hair and a beautiful face with an oxygen mask on it. She closes her eyes and her complexion is as pale as paper. She is covered in various monitoring pipelines and lies there lifeless, like a corpse.

When Noah walked to the bedside and saw the extremely strange data indicators on the vital signs monitor, his heart sank suddenly and his pupils contracted suddenly!

This is definitely not an ordinary coma!