Nick Fury's POV

"What do you mean he gave you the slip," I barked at the dumbass agent who'd had the balls to deliver bad news over a video call. "The Motherfucker is a low-level wannabe mercenary who got the jump on an agent on leave. He shouldn't be that hard to track down."

"He's nothing like his file described, Sir," the agent said in a panicked voice. "After leaving Los Angeles, he moved like he knew we'd be coming after him. Even the people who knew him swear he's different. And apparently, the changes started when he woke up that morning."

"So, your excuse is he woke up different," I scoffed and watched the agent squirm and got to thinking. Before yesterday, the kid would've been perfect for the Avenger initiative. Intelligence gathered told us his primary weapon is a sword he can summon. He also has a superhuman physiology and decent marksmanship skills.

If only he hadn't done something monumentally stupid like murdering an Agent of SHIELD and running. There was no coming back from that, not without extreme concessions.

"What do you want me to do, Sir?"

"Send me a report of everything he did. Leave nothing out," Fury ordered and ended the call. "I'll put Natasha on it."

---

After evading the G men Shield or Hydra sent after me, I took things nice and slow. I traded buses until I found myself in Sin City. A valid I.D. was the last thing I needed to disappear, and the best forger Dante knew was in Vegas. So, here I was.

The city was a lot different than I remembered. Granted, I didn't remember much of 2003. In my timeline, I spent much of the year training and getting into underground amateur fights to rapidly gain experience and gather the money I needed to compete at the highest level.

I haven't been in an underground fight since 2008, but with the body I had now, I knew I could clean house if I wanted to.

I sighed. It was a shame I had to keep a low profile. I could do with a good workout. I supposed that would have to wait until I got a private gym.

I'd stolen about 657,631 dollars from the stash house minus expenses.

I counted.

It was enough to tide me over for years if I was frugal, and I planned to invest most of it in companies I knew were going to pop off. But that was only the beginning. If I managed to keep my head for long enough, I planned to hit up other stash houses and start a few businesses to launder and clean my money.

All this was to position me exactly where I needed to be when shit started going down. I made my way to a payphone and rang Donnie's number but only got the answering machine.

Strange.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and Donnie knew the type of people who called this number. He always picked up.

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Something was wrong. Knowing I could be headed for some serious shit, I stole a car and drove far into the desert. From there, I walked a few miles north before I chose an inconspicuous rock under which to store my money.

It was mid-afternoon when I made it to Donnie's spot with 30k in my jacket. It was about the amount I reckoned the full identity package would cost me.

Donnie had a small grocery shop as a front, and It'd been trashed when I walked in. A slow hum filled the room. The freezer was open, and half of the content was splayed and leaking on the ground. The entire aisle had been shredded through, and large sections of the drywall were missing. I summoned Ebony and Ivory. Whoever did this was not ordinary.

I took quiet steps deeper into the shop, then heard a gargle and froze.

"Come on, man!" Donnie pleaded, "I swear I'll get you your money. I need a little more time."

"No more time," a voice hissed, and then there was a crash.

Gods damn it, why do I have such rotten luck?

"He better be breathing, or you're going to wish you weren't," I yelled as I barged into the room, guns first. I froze when I saw what I was up against.

It was a guy with sickly green skin with an inhumanly long tongue, draped in a suit of all things. And he wasn't the only person in the room. He had brought half a dozen guys with him, all strapped with guns and dressed similarly.

"What's with the tongue?"

He hissed at me.

"Who are you?"

"Dante?" Donnie practically wept. "Why's your hair black?" Donnie was a tattooed, scrawny man with horn-rimmed glasses and greasy black hair. He'd grown a small beard since the last time I saw him.

"You know him?" One of the men asked. He was tall, bald, and looked like he was hella trigger-happy.

"He's an asshole I some time to business with," I quickly said while eyeing the lineup carefully. I could probably take all of them, but not without sustaining a few bullet wounds and nearly being split in two from a tongue-lashing of all things.

I needed the I.D., but I was not ready to get in the middle of whatever this was.

Sorry Donnie.

"Come on, Dante. We're practically brothers," Donnie insisted. That rat bastard.

"I'll shoot you myself if you try and pull that shit, Donnie. Fix your own damn life. I've enough on my plate as is."

I slowly took both of my fingers off the triggers of my guns. "Gents, I'll let you get back to whatever it is you were doing."

"Not so fast," green skin hissed. "You stay."

"I'd rather not," I said, setting my jaw.

"I wasn't a suggestion," his long tongue licked his lips ravenously, and I puked a little in my mouth. "You've seen us, and you know him. $100,000. That is how much he owes. Pay it, and you can continue with whatever business you came here for."

Looking around once more, I sighed. "Fucking hell. How the hell did he rack up that kind of debt?" I shot Donnie a look, and he let out a nervous laugh.

"I might've gotten a bit too excited at the fighting pits."

"You run fights in Vegas?" I said to green skin, a bit impressed.

"The money is good, and it helps us find people with…unique talents," he said. "I wonder If you have a unique talent yourself. Your guns, they're not ordinary."

"Oh, Dante is—" I shut Donnie up with a hard look before he got me into even deeper shit.

"How about I pay a quarter of what he owes? It's about what I would've owed him for what I needed done in the first place."

I was a little slow on the uptake, but it was obvious now. Green Skin was a mutant, and the fighting ring was probably some scheme to recruit promising mutants into their organization. It was surreal seeing one so up close. If the SHIELD raid had me on the fence about the whole transmigration into Marvel thing, Green Skin tipped me right over.

He suspected I was one of him, and Donnie's big mouth might've just given me away.

Green skin had a calculating look in his eyes. "I am Toad," he said. "And I have a deal for you, Dante. Fight one match, and I forgive your friend's debt if you win."

"And if I lose?"

Toad smirked. "I am confident you won't."

I considered my options. Getting on the mutant radar was not something I was particularly interested in. If he was connected to Magneto, Sinister, or any other big hitters in the mutant world, I'd be fucked.

Whatever happened to staying underground and quietly building my strength?