Swordsman
The Swordsman is an infamous criminal, former circus entertainer, and naturally, a world-class fighter with a sword. He mentored a young Hawkeye into becoming a comparably great archer, but his intentions in that area were never anything but self-serving. Thanks to a plot devised by the Mandarin in 1965, Swordsman was briefly a member of the Avengers under false pretenses.
Biography
Early days
Around the 1950s, the Swordsman was working as a circus entertainer, wowing audiences with his impressive martial abilities. He began to mentor a young man named Clint Barton, training him in the ways of the bow and fostering Clint's burgeoning passion for archery. However, the Swordsman was simply grooming the boy to be his criminal apprentice. After stealing a great deal of money from the circus, he tried to coerce Clint into being his accomplice. Clint refused, and narrowly escaped Swordsman's ensuing attack. Barton continued to perform in the circus under the alias Hawkeye, avoiding the Swordsman as best as he could. For his part, Swordsman became an infamous swashbuckler across Europe, earning exile from a dozen different countries.
The Avengers ploy
In 1965, Swordsman came to New York City and hatched a plot to join the superteam known as the Avengers, and thereby gain enough public trust to essentially get away with anything. He infiltrated their headquarters, the mansion basement of Tony Stark, and confronted Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver: the Maximoff twins, Wanda and Pietro. He fought them, but after a few minutes called his attack off. He said that he in fact wanted to join the Avengers, and was merely testing their ability. Wanda was unsatisfied with this explanation, and sensed evil and dishonor in his demeanor. She knocked him out with a telekinetic pipe to the head as the team's leader Captain America arrived on the scene. As the three Avengers spoke, Swordsman cut the lights and escaped. Later, Swordsman acquired a letter Captain America had sent to Nick Fury inquiring about joining Fury's secret intelligence organization. The letter had been delivered to Fury's desk, but had gone unseen until Hydra agents found it, deemed it worthless, and discarded it. It ended up in the hands of a lowly mobster, who delivered it to the Swordsman in hopes of potential payment. Swordsman forged a return acceptance letter to Captain America, telling him to meet in an abandoned warehouse. The bait worked, as Cap showed up alone, and the two fought. They proved an appropriate match for each other, as Captain America's shield matched up against the Swordsman's sword. Swordsman got the better of Cap, using the crumbling boxes and infrastructure around them to his advantage. He bound the unconscious Cap up and took him to an adjacent building—a high-rise under construction—and left his shield behind. The Avengers arrived and searched the warehouse, but arrived on the roof and found nothing. Swordsman placed the awakened Cap on a plank extended out over the alley between the two buildings, and spoke to the Avengers from across the alleyway. He threatened to push Captain America off to his death unless the others made him the leader of the Avengers. Cap told the team not to accept the deal and to let him fall. Hawkeye and the Maximoffs hesitated, so Cap hurled himself from the plank.[1]
As Captain America fell through the air, his teammates used their combined powers to get him to land safely on a girder in the construction site. Quicksilver returned Cap's shield to him, and the team finally confronted the Swordsman at their full power, but Cap insisted on fighting him himself. However, before the fight could truly commence, the Swordsman suddenly faded away, for reasons even he didn't understand immediately. He was in fact being teleported away (or "molecularly transjected," scientifically speaking), and he emerged in the China palace of the powerful despot known as the Mandarin. Mandarin had a proposition for the Swordsman: he too wished for Swordsman to join the Avengers, but specifically, he wanted him to act as a sleeper agent of sorts until such a day should come that Iron Man rejoined the team. At that moment, Swordsman would strike with a concealed bomb, destroying Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers. Iron Man remained a long-standing nemesis of the Mandarin, and the latter sought his final revenge. Swordsman was less than eager to be someone's stooge, but the power of Mandarin's rings eventually convinced him that the alliance was the right move. Mandarin installed a series of buttons in the Swordsman's sword that gave it various powerful abilities similar to Mandarin's own rings. He warned him however that attempting to use the sword against him would backfire drastically.
With that settled, Mandarin initiated his plan. Using a long-range holographic signalling device, he sent a fabricated image of Iron Man to Avengers headquarters. He spoke through the hologram and convinced the team that Iron Man vouched for the Swordsman as a member of the Avengers. The team bought this ruse, and Mandarin warped Swordsman back to their base. Captain America officially welcomed him into the Avengers, much to the chagrin of Hawkeye. Over the next several days, Swordsman became acquainted with the team, but he was slow to gain their trust. He installed the bomb per Mandarin's orders, but that night Mandarin came and informed him that he warned the bomb to be detonated tonight, killing all of the Avengers. Doing so would in theory catch Iron Man's attention, allowing them to trap him more quickly. Swordsman found that he was attracted to Scarlet Witch, and hesitated to follow through on Mandarin's orders. The more he thought about it, Swordsman found the idea of assassination increasingly distasteful. He went to disarm the bomb, but he was caught in the act by the Avengers, who presumed that he was installing it. He tried to explain his intent, but they wouldn't listen. After some fighting, he fled with the bomb in hand, and threw it into the air outside when he sensed that the Mandarin was detonating it remotely. Swordsman regretted that it had come to this, and lamented the fact that he would likely now be on the run from both Mandarin and the Avengers.[2]