*Somebody That I Used To Know*
*(Insert sarcastic doge face here.)*
Hughie Campbell hadn’t slept for more than three hours a night for a whole month.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to.
But the moment he closed his eyes, the horrific image of his girlfriend, Robin, being run through and turned into a mist of blood by A-Train would play on repeat.
And each time he dreamed of it, the image was far clearer than the last.
She was standing right in the middle of the road, holding his hand tightly, and in the very next second, her organs exploded into a red mist under the kinetic shockwave.
Not even her fucking head was left.
He could still clearly remember the sensation of her fingers growing cold in his palm.
In a single instant, they were separated by life and death.
He didn’t know how he had made it home after that.
He only remembered curling up on the floor in a daze for the entire night.
He put Robin’s earring on the nightstand every night, and stared at it every morning.
After staring, he would wash his face, and then sit on the edge of the bed and cry.
Once he sobered up, the powerless Hughie decided he had to do something.
And after that…
his life completely shattered into a series of disjointed fragments.
A funeral, Translucent, an explosion, and a corpse blown into meat paste.
After the explosion, he had crouched by the side of the road and puked for fifteen minutes.
That cold-blooded bastard Butcher had told him that everyone’s first kill was like that.
But he knew it wasn’t just a matter of killing someone.
Everything he did was for Robin, but every single step he took seemed to push him further away from her death.
And closer to a stranger he didn’t recognize at all.
It felt like…
there was no going back.
…
Twenty-four hours ago, when John first stepped out of the rift, his feet landed on the concrete of a back alley somewhere in New York.
Ugh…
the stench was a rancid ferment of weed and food scraps.
John pinched his nose in disgust as the temporal rift collapsed behind him.
It looked like he had crash-landed in some old neighborhood…
Before coming here, John had done some basic planning.
Arriving in the world of the Boys, the two most important things were:
Money and information.
Why did money come first?
If it were the John of his past life, he wouldn’t have to worry about money at all—after all, it was just a number to him back then.
All his food, drink, lodging, and travel had been managed by Ashley.
If he wanted to buy something, Vought would foot the bill.
But this life was different.
The Kent family could only be described as dirt poor.
Their farm was rented, and that beat-up pickup truck was bought on a loan.
What’s more, Pa Kent had set a strict three-rule agreement with him: he wasn’t allowed to do anything illegal or break the rules.
You’ve already seen the consequences of that—the mighty Homelander had actually stooped to working as a bartender in a pub. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
The second priority was information.
Because the timeline chosen for his world-crossing was unstable, John could only deduce the current stage of development based on existing information.
Fine.
John searched his pockets in the alleyway.
There were only a few coins brought from the Kansas farm.
It was probably just enough to buy a bottle of water, not even enough for a night in a cheap motel.
At this thought, John curled his lip, put the coins back in his pocket, and leaned into the shadow of a convenience store’s outer wall.
Before long, three thugs stumbled out of a bar’s back door, reeking of alcohol.
If they could afford to drink, they definitely had cash on them, right?
Seeing the plump lambs, John put his hands behind his back and flashed his signature fake smile once again.
An hour later.
John bought a change of clothes—a T-shirt, jeans, and a dark hoodie—at a 24-hour discount clothing store.
Then, to hide his identity, he specifically bought a solid black mask.
It had a matte texture and cost five dollars, the cheapest option on the rack.
Yes, John didn’t plan to show his face at this stage.
After all, Vought’s surveillance cameras were all over the streets.
If a young version of “Homelander” was spotted, it would likely trigger a Vought manhunt and arouse the suspicions of the original Homelander himself.
Next was gathering information.
John had spent forty years in this world in his past life.
But those forty years had been buried under a thick layer of non-Vought memories from his eighteen years in Kansas.
The specific dates, house numbers, and who said what on which day—those details had grown blurry after his farm life.
He currently only remembered the general framework:
After Translucent’s death, the internal dynamics of The Seven began to unravel, and A-Train abused Compound V more and more heavily in private.
The Deep backed up the flight recorder’s black box at some point.
But John wasn’t sure of the exact timeline or date.
He needed to cross-reference with information from the streets.
Thus, John stood in front of a digital electronics store for about ten minutes, listening to the morning news broadcast on the cash register’s TV.
The news was reporting a few insignificant local stories, but the scrolling ticker at the bottom mentioned Vought.
“A Vought spokesperson declined to comment on the disappearance of Translucent.”
It seemed Translucent was still in the “missing” phase, which meant his death hadn’t been made public yet.
Vought’s PR department was still weighing whether to hush the matter up or package it as a heroic death in the line of duty.
This time window was very narrow.
From Translucent’s death to Vought’s official announcement, there was a gap of two weeks at most.
With this in mind, John left the convenience store and walked down the block.
At three in the morning, the bars had just closed.
A few low-level employees wearing Vought Security uniforms were smoking by a back door, grumbling about overtime.
After a night of scouting, John had locked onto this group early on.
“Translucent is fucking dead, and I had to pull an all-night shift to alter the security footage.”
“Keep your mouth shut.
Management said we’re not allowed to talk about it.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
“Hey, I heard A-Train has been acting weird lately.
Yesterday, someone saw him kicking his own car door several times in the parking lot.”
“Stop talking, watch out for ears.
A-Train is a petty bastard…
Let’s finish up and get back to work.
Tomorrow we have to arrange media training for that new girl, Starlight.”
“I’ve been working three days straight.
What does Translucent’s death have to do with me?
But tell me, does Homelander know?
He doesn’t seem to care at all.”
“Homelander doesn’t give a shit.
He only cares about his screen time.”
“Fuck, keep it down.
You know how many bugs that old witch Ashley put in the hallways.”
“Shut up and let’s get back.”
John listened to this with an expressionless face.
He casually tossed his crushed soda can into the trash bin, shaving off the bin’s rim in the process.
That was enough.
Piecing these fragments together, the timeline became clear.
Translucent was dead, Starlight had just joined the team, and it looked like that bastard Butcher was currently putting his crew together.
With that in mind, John put on his mask.
It was time to find the exact location of this crew.
For this, he had to rely on his information panel.
The memory playback data stored in the panel could help him locate key anchor points:
The timestamp of when The Deep backed up the black box, and the approximate date of A-Train’s drug abuse.
Since the data was based on memory playback, it could only calculate based on things John already knew.
There was some information he clearly didn’t possess.
For instance, Hughie Campbell’s exact address.
He only knew the general area.
The specific apartment number had to be locked down using the panel’s anchor scanning function.
The panel could track corresponding coordinates in the real timeline based on the secondary anchors he had marked during his memory playbacks.
Soon, as John recalled Hughie’s appearance, the information panel lit up like a navigation system.
It then locked onto Hughie Campbell’s address based on the playback data: an old apartment building in Brooklyn.
The New York streets in the early morning still carried the chill of the season.
Pedestrians were scarce, with only the occasional garbage truck rumbling across the pavement.
As John walked, he settled old scores in his head.
He had analyzed his past-life defeat to the Boys countless times during his eighteen years in Kansas.
The conclusion had nothing to do with emotional bonds or grudges.
He had lost to a clash of interests.
Human emotions were complex, and similarly, their needs were the internal driving force behind their decisions.
Just take Butcher’s ragtag team—every single one of them had their own agenda.