It was just him, now.

A '62 Buick Riviera, black and intimidating, shot through New York's neon-infused nightscape. The operative known as Sentinel-3 had one hand on the wheel, while the other was activating the car's built-in police-band scanner. The car was Agency-issue. It had a few bells and whistles, but it was basic compared to the prototype that Stark Industries was working on. One of the prototype's features seemed a little too overt for the CIA. He'd heard rumblings about a new, more public agency, though, so maybe the car would end up with them. Considering who he was up against, he would have given anything to have a flying car.

Sentinel-3 gunned it, swerved through traffic, and listened for anything that might be related to the mutant. The rest of his team had been unable to continue. Some were seriously wounded, and some were still waiting for the mutant's gravity-effect to wear off. Sentinel-3 hadn't been in a position to just sit around and wait. He'd patched up the worst ones, ran to the fastest vehicle they'd brought, and used the car's radio to send a coded message to the local comm-center. Agency clean-up men would extract his team; the FBI would seal the scene.

There wouldn't be any Agency backup coming. Not for a while, anyway. Contrary to popular belief, the CIA mainly did low-level work in America: surveillance, intel drops, black-bag gigs. Not the kind of stuff that they made movies about. Sentinel-3 had done a few elimination jobs in NYC, but they were few and far between. Unfortunately, there wasn't some backup squad of elite assassins sitting around in a Manhattan warehouse, waiting for a call. Groups like that existed, but they were found almost exclusively in war theaters and political hot-zones. Domestic operations usually required a softer touch. The Agency employed a number of hitters, but they were spread all over the world, with not that many being stateside at any given time. Putting a kill-squad together had been tough. Putting a second kill-squad together would be even tougher.

Of the Agency assets that were currently in the city, most of them specialized in infiltration and intelligence. In a pinch, they could be trusted to eliminate a normal target, but they didn't make their living by kicking in doors and getting in firefights. He did. There were other Sentinel-level men, but most of them were overseas. That was where the action usually was. He'd heard rumors that one was tracking down a "serial killer" in L.A., but, even with modern jet-equipped flight, it would take hours for him to get there. And this mutant needed to be put down now.

The plan had been sound, and it should have worked. Locate the target, keep him as pinned down/contained as possible (to negate his aerial advantage), and wait for the crossfire to do its work. If it didn't, they had a sniper waiting outside. Assuming that the mutant got away-or that they ran into problems and had to settle for flushing him out-the sniper would get him as soon as he emerged from the building. But it hadn't worked out that way. The mutant was just a civilian, some sickly teenager, but he'd been savvy. Crazy, yes; stupid, no. With powers like that, you didn't need training. Just brains and willpower. They'd underestimated how resourceful he was, and then their idiot sniper had missed. Sentinel-3 had never worked with the man before. There were other, better snipers, but they'd been unavailable, for some reason.

As he drove, he kept stealing glances at the sky...and whenever he hit a stoplight, he took a longer look. But the mutant was nowhere to be seen. Sentinel-3 shifted in his seat, making sure that the gravity-effect had worn off. It had only been a partial hit, but, for the first few minutes, it had taken all of his strength just to remain standing. He'd hidden in a closet, planning to shoot through the door when he heard footsteps close by. But the kid had chosen to book out. Whatever he cared about, it wasn't them.

Sentinel-3 kept hearing the mutant's words in his head. Not just what he'd said about the Sentinel of Liberty program, but the scarier part. "In a few hours, the world will be over, so none of it matters."

Was he talking about a nuclear war? He's only been on the loose for a few days, could the Russians have found him and turned him in such a short amount of time? No, no, even the KGB isn't that good. But maybe his mental issues were just a cover for his escape, and he's secretly been working with them for weeks or months. He could be helping them set up some kind of nuclear attack. Or maybe his mental issues are real, but they're taking advantage of them, and tricking him into working with them. Just imagine: they launch on us, but when we try to launch on them, he intercepts some of the missiles. Or maybe he'll shoot a hundred of those gravity rings into the White House and make it fly into space.

When Sentinel-3 sent the coded message to the comm-center, he'd mentioned the mutant's odd statement, but he hadn't heard back yet. Maybe the bosses didn't think that it meant anything, or maybe they were panicking and had no idea what to do.

Suddenly, a panicked voice came across the car's police-band scanner: it sounded like the officer was drowning in static, but Sentinel-3 got the gist of it. He heard "disturbance at the Barrington Arms" and "request immediate backup" and "locked in there with one of those super-freaks."

That was less than ten blocks away. Sentinel-3 floored it, making a hard right.

This is ridiculous. I'm finally back in America, I have a chance to start a new chapter in my life, and this nutcase might be trying to blow up the planet.

He was trying not to think about the other stuff that the mutant had said. How he'd never become the new Captain America, how he wasn't the right kind of person for the job. Sentinel-3 had met the other Sentinel candidates, and he knew that they weren't like him: they were younger, and most of them were still in the military. Also, they'd done outright heroic things for their country. So had he, in the past...but, since then, he'd been asked to do more questionable things. Despite that, Sentinel-3 knew that he was the most qualified one. He was hungrier for America than they were. During the years that he'd worked for the Agency, he'd seen too much darkness and ugliness, and it had only reinforced just how important it was to have a symbol of hope.

From the looks of it, the sixties are gonna be a chaotic time. There are a lot of painful truths that will have to be dealt with. When people see those truths, they'll be shocked and afraid...the world needs a Captain America that's already dealt with that kind of crap. Somebody that can stare at the monsters without flinching. I've seen the horrors that are hiding in the shadows, and the younger Sentinels haven't. Yeah, the original Cap was a kid, and he was amazing. But that was a lucky break for the military. He was an all-time legend; the average young war hero won't be as good as him. And it isn't fair to expect them to be. You can't take somebody that's barely old enough to drink, give them a mask and a shield, and expect them to deal with all the crazy stuff that's going on. I'm more experienced than they are, but I'm still young enough to handle the physical strain.

When Sentinel-3 pulled up outside the hotel, he pounded the steering wheel, cursing. It was a mess. Tuxedo-clad men and wobbly-in-heels women were pouring out of the building, and the uniformed cops on the scene were either very young or very old. They were waving their arms helplessly. It was against the law to leave the scene of a crime, and they kept saying that, but nobody cared. Sentinel-3 winced. There were too many witnesses around, and god only knew what they'd heard. The mutant could have been spouting off about his work for the space program, or what he was, or whatever the Russians had told him to say. As for the cops, at least they had the good sense to keep their distance. But they wouldn't be much use in a fight.

Sentinel-3 got out of the car, closed the door, and checked his weapons. He had three guns on his person, and he'd thrown more into the trunk. After the battle in the condemned building, well, it was clear that the others wouldn't be needing theirs for a while, so he'd grabbed everything with a mostly-full clip. He needed to go in and kill the mutant before he said anything more.

(Ironically, he was one of the few Agency hitters that didn't hate mutants. In fact, he'd worked with them, in the past. This Battaglia kid wasn't the only mutant that the government employed. A few years ago, Sentinel-3 had been part of an international unit that had carried out an operation on the Russian-Chinese border. The group had included an American mutant, a Canadian mutant, and a German mutant. Amazingly, the German had been the least-crazy one.)

The witnesses/hostages vanished into the night, and the few cops on the scene tried to stop them, but they weren't trying very hard. These were well-to-do white people, they weren't about to slam them against the hood of the nearest car. Sentinel-3 approached the hotel. The cops were distracted, and they didn't have any sort of cordon set up. That would make things a little easier for him. He had a fake FBI badge in his pocket, but he was still in his working-man disguise, and the two didn't really go together. Sentinel-3 might have been able to sell them on the idea that he was undercover; it would have taken too much time, though. While they pled with the socialites, he slipped past them unseen.

Panicky civilians were still coming out of the hotel's main entryway, and it was bathed in light, so he stuck to the shadows, going around the building and down an alley. Sentinel-3 looked for a service entrance. What he found could have been any service entrance in the world: an unsightly, industrial-type door, which was propped open by a tiny wooden wedge. Dead cigarettes were scattered on the ground. He drew one of his guns, peeked through the crack, and silently stepped inside.

A musty employees-only hallway led to a generic door, and lavish corridors were on the other side. Carpet, curtains, oak, brass. On the surface, it was quiet, but he heard muffled chaos coming from somewhere. Sentinel-3 had only taken a few steps when he heard doors slam shut. He walked in the direction of the noises, ready to fire at a moment's notice.

Some sort of electrical problem was spreading through the building: the lights were flickering, and some were actually going out. As he went deeper inside, the problem only got worse. The combination of the noises and the sputtering-or-dead lights created a trail for him to follow. They led him to a large, round room in the center of the first floor; the sign said that it was a banquet room. Given how dressed-up the civilians had been, the mutant had probably crashed some sort of shindig. It sounded like the action was inside. He heard shouts, crashes, and...flapping?

The circular hallway around the room seemed to be empty. Sentinel-3 gently tested one of the doors-predictably, they were unmovable. The mutant had messed with them. Just to be safe, he tested the other doors, as well. They were all as heavy as concrete slabs.

Well, now what? The room's in the middle of the building...there aren't any windows to go through. And you'd have to be a real beanpole to fit through the ducts. I could blow up one of the walls and go through the hole, but I'm not sure if that car has any explosives in i-

Footsteps echoed through the hall.

The lights were practically strobing, now, and it felt like something out of a nightmare. A shadow stretched around one of the curved corners. Sentinel-3 grabbed the person that it belonged to, throwing them against a wall.

It turned out to be one of the cooks. He looked Spanish, and, considering what was going on, he seemed pretty calm. That was good. The socialites had been too terrified to tell the cops anything, but this guy looked like he had a good head on his shoulders.

Sentinel-3 asked him a question in English, and then repeated it in Spanish. He'd been a desert kid, and he'd grown up with a lot of Mexicans, so he'd picked up some of the language. (Sentinel-3 also had some Mexicans further back in his family tree, though his grandparents had always tried to downplay that.)

Before the cook could answer, something metal object hit Sentinel-3 in the side of the head, and he nearly fell over.

"Get away from him."

The cook screamed in terror, running off. Sentinel-3 got his gun back up-he'd been holding it down against his leg, not wanting to scare the witness-but metal exploded against his hand, and he dropped it. He never dropped his weapons. Sentinel-3 reached for his backup pieces, only to be battered by a combination of metal and knuckles. Something jerked the guns away before he could get his hands on them. He lashed out with an elbow, felt it connect, and lurched to safety. Sentinel-3 heard clips pop out and bullets patter onto the floor.

He knew that the mutant was obsessed with Daredevil, so what he saw wasn't a complete surprise, but still...he felt like he was hallucinating. A pale yellow monster with red eyes was standing in the darkening room. His stance was part boxer, part martial artist, and part ready-to-pounce predator. He had a blood-red billy club in his right hand. When viewed against the backdrop of the luxurious hotel, he just seemed stomach-turning and wrong: he didn't belong in this civilized place, or even in reality...

The other heroes were relatively known quantities, at least in terms of their capabilities and power-levels. Daredevil, on the other hand, was a mystery. His CIA file was practically a blank sheet. Was he a bored millionaire playing dress-up, or was he an out-of-control ex-cop, some alcoholic with anger issues? The analysts had a lot of theories. Maybe he was one of the radioactive ones, or maybe he was something more supernatural.

Sentinel-3 shook his head and tried to focus. He pulled out his fake FBI badge, showing it to Daredevil. "Hey, hey, I'm FBI!"

"You're lying."

The quick, confident way that he'd said that...it sent a chill up Sentinel-3's spine. But he kept going. "Look, I don't want to fight you. We're both after the same guy. But you need to cooperate with me, okay?"

Daredevil didn't say anything.

"By authority of the 1942 Samaritan Act, I'm drafting you into service. Got it? You're a powered individual, and even if you aren't an American citizen, or aren't human,you're still on American soil. That's all it takes. I'm a government operative, and this is an emergency involving an extra-normal threat. I order you to unmask, turn over all relevant information, and assist me."

"If you want to help me, I won't stop you. If we're fighting him, and you have to kill him in self-defense, I still won't stop you. But can you promise me that you won't kill him once he's in custody?"

"I'd never do something like that," Sentinel-3 said.

"Lying again."

No, come on. I don't want to want to fight a hero. But I'm here to kill the mutant, and if he's gonna try to keep me from doing my job...

They lunged at each other. Sentinel-3 made two attempts at punching him, but both were blocked, and Daredevil flip-kicked him in the ribs. Sentinel-3 winced. He tried to kick Daredevil in the head, but he ducked it, giving him an uppercut in retaliation. Sentinel-3 bounced off of a wall. He'd never seen someone move so fast, or use such an eclectic fighting style. It was an unholy combination of boxing, martial arts, and acrobatics.

Sentinel-3 had been trained by some of the hand-to-hand masters that had taught the original Captain America. He'd fought-and killed-a number of men, but it was clear that this was going to be his greatest challenge. Until his rematch with the mutant, anyway.