The Bronx, four years ago…
There was a man by the name of Maxim Lazovsky who was once a part of the Russian Mob, and during his time in their ranks, he had tried many many times to infiltrate the state of New York as it it was the perfect breeding ground for corruption, drugs, smuggling, and all manner of unruly things.
For nearly ten years, he had sent his fellow Bratva into New York to hole up and start various pockets of business but many of them either ended up forced out or killed outright.
And the single greatest source of resistance in New York came from one person whose true identity still remained a mystery, even to the Bratva.
The Enderman.
Though the source of that name was childish, taken from that ridiculous computer game that the Americans were so obsessed with, for those who had been in the criminal underworld for long enough to know of his reputation, that name instilled a deep fear into the hearts of men.
But then, suddenly, any mention of him had disappeared for two years, which both caused a sense of different sense of relief as well as a sense of dread.
Many were grateful that such a man had disappeared and made their lives much easier, but there were some that were concerned about what the cause was for the Enderman’s disappearance.
Was there someone more ferocious and bloodthirsty than he? Were the FBI able to catch him and take him down?
Could there have been a personal reason for drawing him out of the business, and if that were the case, would there be a man foolish enough to hunt the Enderman down and provoke him back into the fight?
Relief of his disappearance caused many of the Bratva to act more reckless and open about their business while those who were paranoid about his possible return were too nervous to take any further risks.
Maxim was not like either of these men. He knew better than to leave himself vulnerable if the Enderman were to return, but with such a golden opportunity presented before him, he had to take it.
In the last two and a half years, he had spend many of the Bratva’s resources to establish solid ground and already they had begun turning a grand profit.
However, less than a few weeks ago, he had heard a rumor that the Mohr family had been attacked and more than half of the guards that the Bratva had hired to protect them had been slaughtered. Only a handful of guards and the child Cole Mohr had survived the assault.
After speaking to the child, he was able to tell them that the person who had killed his parents was a man with pitch black hair and bright blue eyes, wearing armor and a cloth mask over his nose and mouth.
Aside from the black hair and blue eyes, the description was mostly unfamiliar to him as The Enderman did not usually wear armor or a mask when he had fought against them in the past.
Maxim had assumed that maybe it was a new enforcer from the Castellano family or the Moroni family, but not the Romano family as they had been focused purely on entrenching themselves in deeper business ventures.
But that didn’t make any sense either since the identity of the Castellano enforcer, Lucas Witiker, was already well known as well as his past with the marines.
The Moroni family however didn’t have any one enforcer, but rather multiple groups of them as they had been involved in New York’s criminal underworld for decades longer than anyone else. They had built themselves an empire in New York, and the Bratva knew they could never wipe them out as they had become too large.
This had meant that the Mohr family’s murderer was likely someone entirely new and dangerous.
Could he have been the one to kill the Enderman and merely taken his place? Maybe he was taking on the identity as well to resurface the fear that people had of that man.
Regardless of who this man really was, it would only be a matter of time before he too was killed.
The Bratva’s presence in New York had become too large for any of the old crime families to remove them anymore.
They would need to bring in the national guard to bring them down, or at the very least, a force equivalent to them.
Maxim had been pouring over these thoughts for nearly an hour as his pen hovered over a stack of paperwork that he was supposed to be filing to keep record of the Bratva’s dealings in New York.
For all the time they had spent trying to worm their way in, he had no idea just how draining it would be once they had finally succeeded and they had to do such menial tasks like this.
As he leaned back in his desk due to his back feeling sword from bending over for hours on end, he looked out the window of his office into the chop shop.
In this place, they stole cars and stripped them apart so they could resell the parts for a cheaper price back to the American people who needed them.
Among the various businesses the Bratva had set up in the city, this was by far the least likely to draw too much attention as they also offered legitimate auto repair services as a cover.
The shop was usually so loud that it made it impossible for him to concentrate on anything, so he wore noise canceling headphones and loud music to drown out the sound of power tools in the background.
However, the more he looked out the window and failed to notice the sight of shadows moving, to show that his men were working like they were supposed to, he realized that things were too still.
What’s more, as he took off his headphones, he found that he failed to notice the absence of power tools causing the usual racket.
He then heard hurried footsteps as they made their way to his office and the familiar panting of the assistant manager of the building came running towards the door and opened it.
His face was covered with sweat, he was pale, his left hand was covered in blood, and he had a look of terror in his eyes.
“что там происходит? (What’s going on there?” Maxim asked in Russian.
Before the assistant manager could answer, a hole exploded from the center of his head and a fine mist of blood sprayed the entirety of the room.
The bullet had torn through his skull and grazed the side of Maxim’s head as blood got in his mouth and eyes, causing him to flinch back and fall out of his chair.
The sound of a body falling to the floor was followed by heavy booted footsteps as his killer walked into the office and stopped in front of the desk.
Maybe he didn’t see me…? Perhaps he didn’t hear me either?
Both of those hopeful thoughts vanished as an armored hand gripped the side of the desk firmly and tossed it aside, revealing the man who had taken his life.
It was the very same who had snuffed the lives of the Mohr family and their guards.
A titan wearing titanium plated armor, holding a tactical sword in his right hand and a silenced pistol in his left, all the while being drenched in the blood of his men.
He looked down upon Maxim’s helpless form without mercy or sympathy or pity, but rather with a deep and profound rage that no amount of words would be able to dampen.
“Ой блять (Oh fuck)…,” Maxim cursed under his breath.
The man in front of him did not move to kill him, but instead took a shuddering breath that disturbed Maxim.
He did not seem out of breath, or disgusted by what he had done, rather it seemed as if he were enjoying himself. Like he was taking relief in taking their lives; as if the act of slaughtering them were relieving him of some kind of burden he had.
The man tightened his grip on his blade, but before he could take a step forward, Maxim held out his hand to try and buy himself some time as he asked, “кто ты? Ты бы не стал настоящим Эндерменом, верно? (Who are you? You wouldn’t be the real Enderman, right?)”
The man tilted his head in confusion before letting out a laugh as he reached out his arm, grabbed Maxim by the throat and raised him off the ground.
He then slammed him against the wall as he said, “Действительно, Я (Indeed, I am.)”
“Боже, помоги нам (God, help us),” were Maxim’s last words before The Enderman thrust his sword into his heard and took his life.
Lucas…
Two days after he had met with Marcus in the bar and he had shown Lucas the armor he was developing, he called him out of the blue with a tone of voice that bothered him.
“Yeah?” he answered.
“...Lucas...I want to meet with you. Meet me at...Oil Works in East Harlem,” Marcus said before hanging up.
“I...what...fine,” he sighed as he got into his car and made his way there.
Although it was close to the end of the day, he figured that the auto shop would still be open and active, but much to his surprise, the doors were shut closed and he couldn’t hear a thing.
Did they close early or something…?
There were cars parked around which showed that the employees were definitely there, but he heard no sign of work being done inside.
A man who appeared to be a barber from a ways down the street was standing around as he had noticed the silence of the auto shop but Lucas told him he’ll look into it, so he walked off.
As he walked closer to the entrance, he expected the door to be locked, but it was still open and he walked inside.
As he did, he was hit right away with the metallic scent of freshly spilled blood as he covered his nose and walked inside.
The first body his eyes fell on had been decapitated while another had its arm severed at the shoulder and a large gash in the top of their head, as if a blade had cleaved right through the top of their skull.
What the hell happened here…?
He then found his way to the office as he noticed someone was in there through the blinds as he opened the door and walked inside.
As soon as he entered, his heart sunk in his chest in shock at the sight of Marcus, wearing blood soaked armor, sitting in the office chair with a silenced pistol in his left hand while fiddling with an empty bullet casing in the other.
He looked up at Lucas as he entered and said, “Took you long enough.”
“Jesus Christ Marcus...what did you...why did you kill these people?” he asked as he looked around and nearly jumped out of his skin as he found the body of a man basically nailed to the wall, held up only by a sword buried through his chest and stuck in the wall behind him.
“They were Bratva. Its my job to kill them,” he said as if it was only natural.
“They were…? Well...okay, but why didn’t you just wait until after dark to do this? This seems...unprofessional,” Lucas said as he tried to make sense of what was going on.
“I wasn’t paid or told to kill them, I just wanted to,” Marcus answered as he flicked the bullet casing at the head of the man stuck to the wall.
When it bounced off of his forehead, Marcus let out a slightly amused laugh and Lucas stared at him, only now realizing just how volatile his mood had become.
“This...this isn’t a hit anymore, this is flat out murder. This isn’t business, this is pleasure. Why did you do this?” he asked.
Marcus pulled down the cloth mask covering his mouth and forehead as he looked Lucas in the eyes and said, “I did what you asked. I looked for any records regarding my mother’s murder and whether Romano was tied to it. Turns out, he really did kill her himself.”
Lucas went silent as he watched the man in front of him drop his head and smile, but it wasn’t until he started laughing to himself that his blood went cold.
He kept on laughing quietly until it turned into hysterical cackling as he held his arms against his chest like he was having trouble breathing.
“Lucas! Isn’t this...just the funniest fuckin thing you ever heard?! Huh?! Me! The guy who watched his own mother die in front of him! Then, somehow, raised by the same motherfucker that killed her and trained to be his weapon! Its hilarious! Come on! Laugh with me!” he said as his smile dropped and he stared at Lucas with a cold intensity that made him want to run for his life.
When Marcus realized that he was too freaked out to say anything, he waved him off and stood up from his seat as he walked over to the corpse stuck to the wall.
He stood in front of the body and reached with his right hand as he pulled up the head to look in its dead eyes.
“You know...when I read the file, I couldn’t bring myself to trust what I saw. I read it again, and again, and again to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating and that I really hadn’t been used this entire time, but that was just the sick, cruel reality of it. So once I accepted that to be the truth, the only thing that filled my mind at the time was a seething rage. Naturally, I couldn’t just walk around the Romano estate with all that anger, otherwise people would catch on. So instead, I hunted down a group of Bratva and took my anger out on them. I gutted them, cut off their heads, bled them dry, and looked into this man’s eyes when I snuffed out his life. You wouldn’t believe it, but he asked me if I was the real Enderman. Apparently they thought that I was a pretender or something, that they were finally rid of me. In reality, I just came back far worse than they could have imagined, and I could see that when I witnessed his last moments,” Marcus elaborated before he pulled out the sword from the wall and the body fell to the ground.
“I couldn’t have my sister see me like this...and I certainly couldn’t bring this kind of anger to my fiance. I don’t want to scare them the same way I’m scaring you, a grown man and marine. No, I need to make sure their lives are filled with happiness and not the gritty horror that mine is made up of. They don’t deserve that for treating me so well,” he said as he looked down at the body on the ground.
Only now did Lucas truly understand what he was going through.
Marcus didn’t have any suitable coping mechanism to deal with the truth or the anger that came with it, so he took it out on these men that he eventually would have been sent to kill anyways.
Just as Lucas thought he had calmed down, Marcus grit his teeth once again in rage as he raised his right boot off the ground and slammed it into the man’s head.
He then did this over and over and over and over again until it had been reduced to a pile of crushed bone fragments, blood, and brain matter.
Lucas wanted to vomit from the sight of what he was doing but forced himself to hold it in until Marcus had finished venting out his anger.
He then turned his head to look at him and asked, “Do you want to know what the really shitty part of all of this is?”
Forcing himself to answer, he asked, “Sure. What is it?”
“Throughout all my time as Romano’s enforcer, I’ve always felt sick to my stomach from killing all the people he paid me to. Every time I came home, I’d vomit in the toilet because the smell of blood was always stuck in my nose. Only now, I don’t feel sick anymore. I feel...relieved. I don’t know why, but for some reason, knowing that Romano killed my mother makes me feel relieved. All this time, I couldn’t put the blame at anyone for why I was stuck in this mess, but now that I know, I finally have a goal. I can kill him, the Castellanos, the Moronis, the Bratva and anyone else and eventually, it’ll all be over. Won’t it? Won’t it be over once they’re all dead?”
Lucas thought about whether it was a wise decision after all to try and recruit Marcus to his cause, but that worry was quickly dashed.
If he didn’t take him in, then he would very quickly become the worst kind of enemy they would ever see.
He was far greater a potential ally than he was an enemy.
“Yeah. It’ll all be over once they’re all dead. I promise,” Lucas said to him, hoping to God that he wasn’t lying.