Alex performed his assignments solo from then on, but he found his personal life further muddied when he and Sandi spent a night together. He became disillusioned with his work and decided to shut down the agency, but found himself unable to tell Sandi, who by then had set up a job for him and Taskmaster to act as bodyguards to Higashi as a final act of ceasefire. While on their way to a meeting between the Four Winds families, Alex's group was attacked by a pair of over-cheerful assassins, but after a frantic battle, they arrived safely to find one of the Four Winds families had ordered the hit on Higashi. Now that Higashi was indebted to them, Alex, Taskmaster and Sandi returned to Sandi's apartment to find Black Swan and a tabula rasa Deadpool waiting. It turned out that all three had partially merged during the explosion when Black Swan used his powers in an act of desperation to save himself. Black Swan psionically acquired Deadpool's healing factor but accidentally made contact with Nijo and personal traits had been mixed around. Swan had also given Nijo's corpse Deadpool's regenerative powers (restoring him to a form of life 5 minutes after his death), as well as part of his personality, while Nijo also gained Swan's firearms talents, ambition, some of his refined tastes, preferences and biases, and also the bodily scarring and outrage he'd received from Deadpool throwing him face first into a white hot fireplace griddle at his home.