Level 25, Umbrella Manhattan. Training floor.
HUNK arrived exactly on time, fully kitted out the way he always was. The pay increase had given him the opportunity to visit the equipment department on his way out the previous evening, and he'd come back with a fresh set of gear. Fresh in the sense of unworn, anyway. The loadout itself was identical to his previous one down to the last detail. He'd bought three copies of the gas mask alone, which said everything about his relationship with that particular piece of equipment.
He stepped off the elevator and stopped.
Gunfire was already coming from inside the range.
In all the weeks he'd been training Matthew, HUNK had always been the one waiting. Matthew showing up first had never happened. He filed the observation away and walked in.
What he didn't know was that Matthew had injected the T-Virus the previous night, and sleep had become largely optional. Not impossible, just unnecessary, more habit than biological requirement. With nothing else to do and none of Tony Stark's particular methods of filling an evening, training had been the obvious choice. The long hours had passed without him noticing.
"You're here," Matthew said, not turning from the target.
HUNK gave a short acknowledgment and took up a position beside him, raised his submachine gun, and began his own warmup without comment.
The range filled with gunfire.
Behind the red lenses of his mask, HUNK found his attention drifting back to Matthew every few seconds. Not obviously. Just the kind of measured observation that had kept him alive through operations where everyone else died. Something was different today. He couldn't put his finger on what.
He waited until a magazine change gave him a natural reason to shift position, and started moving closer.
He got within ten feet.
Every hair on his forearm stood up.
HUNK stopped walking. His hand had already found the handle of the knife at his hip before he'd consciously decided to reach for it. The feeling was clear and specific: danger, coming from the person standing in front of him. From Matthew, who was just standing there shooting targets with his back turned, not doing anything threatening at all.
HUNK stood very still and looked at that unremarkable back for a long moment.
"Something wrong?" Matthew glanced over his shoulder.
HUNK let go of the knife and slid it back into the sheath. "Nothing." A beat. "Sir, your practical combat experience is still the weak point. Want to run another session today?"
The rifle clicked empty. Matthew set it down and checked his watch.
Thirteen hours until the board meeting. Plenty of time.
"Sure. Let's go." He turned to face HUNK. "And this time, don't hold back."
HUNK nodded without a word. He swapped in a fresh magazine, then reached into the equipment locker and pulled out two flashbang grenades. HUNK had a philosophy about loadouts: bring the right tool for every possible problem, and bring it before you need it.
Matthew picked up an M4, stepped back, and pulled a small remote from his pocket.
He pressed the button.
The training floor went completely dark.
In the same motion, Matthew brought his night vision monocular down from his helmet and disappeared into the black, moving low and fast, quiet as a cat.
On the other side of the room, HUNK's mask wasn't a consumer product. It was a piece of military hardware developed in-house by Umbrella's weapons division, built for prolonged field operations. Oxygen recycling, gas filtration, ballistic resistance, and integrated night vision. The night vision was functional but limited compared to high-end four-tube equipment: workable range, significant noise in the image, the kind of setup that turned a dark room into a field of green fog with vague shapes inside it.
Night combat drill, HUNK thought, settling behind a concrete pillar. Or he's using the dark to close the gap on my vision advantage.
Either way, the math wasn't in his favor at range. He knew it. He adjusted.
The floor was completely silent. The kind of silence where your own heartbeat becomes audible. Nobody was going to use a light source in this environment. Lighting yourself up was the same as handing the other person a target.
HUNK pressed his back against the pillar and listened.
Time passed in the dark.
Then, from directly ahead, a sound. Faint. The scrape of a sole against grit, or a weapon making contact with something. Small enough that most people wouldn't catch it.
HUNK didn't deliberate. He leaned out from cover and fired in the direction of the sound, three rounds, fast.
The muzzle flash lit the space for a fraction of a second.
He saw what had made the noise.
A single spent casing, sitting on the floor.
Decoy.
He was already moving. The flashbang came off his belt, cleared the cover, and detonated.
Even filtered through the mask, the blast hit his senses hard. The bang rattled his ears. The light overloaded the night vision completely.
Before the white cleared, shooting started from a completely different direction.
Three rounds, spaced. One passed close enough that HUNK felt the displacement of air.
From his position in the dark, Matthew exhaled in quiet frustration. The flashbang's blast had knocked his aim off just enough. Those shots should have hit center mass.
HUNK was already returning fire, full suppression, his body moving in a hard zigzag between cover positions. The casing rain hitting the floor was almost musical.
Then the magazine ran dry, and a fraction of a second after the shooting stopped, rapid footsteps closed in from the left.
Matthew was coming in through the reload gap.
HUNK didn't reload.
He let the submachine gun hang on its sling and drew the knife instead. He pressed flat against the edge of the cover and waited, completely still.
The bet was simple: Matthew had been taught a specific protocol for approaching a position that had gone silent. He would come in to check the downed target. That was the training. And the training was what you fell back on in the dark, under pressure, when there wasn't time to think.
The bet paid off.
Matthew came around the edge exactly where HUNK expected him. One hand shot up and caught the muzzle of the incoming rifle, redirecting it skyward. The other hand went to the magazine release by pure muscle memory, dropped it clean, and stripped the chambered round out of the breach in the same motion.
Matthew stared at the now-empty weapon in his hands.
He had to admit it. Experience was experience. HUNK was slower than him now, physically, in every measurable way. But knowing what was coming before it arrived was its own kind of speed.
He dropped the rifle.
The fight shifted from a gunfight to a close-quarters brawl, and the darkness swallowed them both.