*Not his agent, either.
None of the people with clearance to enter this safe house.*
*An enemy…
a damn spy, or…*
*Whatever it is, if they know my secret, they’re dead!*
A-Train didn’t waste time trying to verify his guess.
He planted his left foot and launched himself forward.
For an unarmed speedster, the body was the ultimate weapon.
When combined with extreme acceleration, the resulting destructive force was absolute.
He could tear a human being to shreds just by running through them.
And against a dead man, A-Train never held back.
*Boom!*
The air in the safe house ruptured with a sonic boom behind him.
The syringes and empty vials scattered on the coffee table were instantly blasted away by the shockwave, shattering against the walls.
The sofa slid backward nearly a meter, plowing a deep groove into the carpet.
Under this insane acceleration, everything in the room slowed to a crawl.
Only A-Train, wearing his goggles, locked onto the intruder and propelled himself forward like a missile.
“Only dead men keep secrets.”
In an instant, he collided with John’s hand.
To be precise, he slammed into a hand that John had pulled from his pocket faster than anything A-Train had ever seen in his life.
Those five fingers had already spread wide before the impact.
They clamped down hard on A-Train’s cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, his fingertips sinking into the skin near A-Train’s temples.
Just like that, A-Train’s entire face was locked in a brutal, iron-clad grip, frozen in place like a billiard ball squeezed in a vice.
When his body hit that hand, the kinetic energy didn’t just vanish; it transformed.
*Boom!*
The shockwave rippled outward from the point of contact, shattering every light fixture on the ceiling.
Glass shards rained down like water.
Before A-Train could recover from the deafening ringing in his ears and the severe concussion rattling his skull, he felt his body being hoisted into the air.
Like a stray cat grabbed by the scruff of its neck, he was lifted completely off the ground.
John’s hand remained clamped over his face, his grip unyielding.
With no leverage, A-Train could only kick his legs wildly in the air, trying to find a footing to regain his balance.
But in his utter terror, A-Train realized with despair that his kicks against John’s knees felt like striking steel pillars.
Aside from numbing his own toes, they did absolutely nothing.
Next, he tried his hands.
A-Train instinctively clawed and tore at the hand clamping his face.
But that hand was like an iron clamp, completely pinning his movements.
His struggles didn’t loosen the grip even a fraction of an inch.
“Ah…
fuck, it hurts!
Let go!”
“Hmm?”
John looked at A-Train with cold, indifferent eyes, then twisted his hand to the right.
A-Train’s face was forced to follow the motion, his neck twisting to a near-breaking angle before John slammed him hard into the wall.
A-Train’s back took the brunt of the impact. New chapters come out on g.com first.
The drywall buckled inward under his weight, shattering like an eggshell, followed by the metal studs behind it.
He felt his spine collide violently with the edge of an I-beam.
The entire wall shifted backward about an inch from the impact, snapping the connecting screws as a metallic dent perfectly matching his body’s outline formed on the surface.
Drywall dust and insulation fibers poured from the hole, scattering across the floor.
Then came his limbs.
*Crack…*
A-Train’s left tibia snapped with a sharp, clean sound, the fracture spiderwebbing from the middle of the bone.
The pain finally reached his brain.
It started from his left lower leg, racing up his sciatic nerve.
It shot through his lumbar, thoracic, and cervical vertebrae before exploding like a bomb at the base of his skull.
He opened his mouth to scream, but his vocal cords spasmed, and the sound was cut off by a mouthful of bloody froth.
“Now that I look at you, you seem more like the useless one.”
“Look at you, begging like a dog.
Pathetic, cowardly.
You’re nothing but a whimpering loser.”
Watching A-Train grovel before him was the polar opposite of the defiant front A-Train had put up before his death in John’s past life.
The sight disgusted John.
So, he threw A-Train’s own words right back at him.
“And did you just try to ram me?”
John looked down at him.
Beneath his mask, his eyes flared with a menacing, brilliant red glow.
“Looks like you wanted to kill me.”
A-Train opened his mouth to answer, but he didn’t know what to say.
Yes?
No?
His lips trembled, his pupils dilated rapidly, and his left leg spasmed repeatedly from the excruciating pain.
“Cough…
Listen, man, I’m sorry…
I can give you whatever you want…”
“Please, don’t kill me…
I have a family, I have…
I’m a member of The Seven!
If you kill me, Homelander will find you!”
“Homelander?
It’s been a while since I heard that name…”
John squatted, grabbed A-Train by his collar as if lifting a bag of trash, and turned toward the door.
A-Train’s back dragged a long smear of blood across the carpet.
Every time his leg caught on the fibers, the fractured tibia grated together, sending relentless, bone-deep agony through his body.
“You can’t do this to me…
Damn it!
He knows someone is messing with his Seven on his turf.
“He’ll rip you in half!
He threw a terrorist out of the sky over the Atlantic last time—”
Hearing A-Train’s desperate threats, John dropped him and silently stared down at his bloodied, mangled face.
“If I had the balls to come find you, do you really think I care?”
“Cough…
Who the fuck are you, anyway—”
“Who am I?
The Compound V you injected, the batch you stole last month directly from Vought’s R&D cold storage…
It’s not the first time you’ve run errands for him through the special passage connecting Red River to Vought Tower’s third basement level, is it?
Even Edgar doesn’t know.
You’re his private courier, aren’t you?”
The moment A-Train heard John’s words, his pupils shrank to pinpricks.
Not even his agent knew about this.
Not even Vought’s R&D department knew.
Homelander had told him that if anyone ever found out about this shipment, the courier—A-Train—would be the first to die.
Had the secret gotten out?
Had it reached a third party?
Did Homelander want to keep his own hands clean and have him killed?
No, that was impossible.
If that were the case, Homelander would have flown here himself to snap his neck.
So…
“Who…
who are you…
How do you know—”
A-Train’s voice squeezed out from the depths of his throat, trembling with both physical agony and absolute despair.
“Do you really want to know?”
John slowly reached up, gripped the lower edge of his mask, and pulled it upward.
He removed the mask completely, revealing the face beneath.
Blond hair, blue eyes, a clean jawline, under twenty years old…
yet sharing the exact same face as the devil in A-Train’s memory.
The only difference was that the person standing in front of him looked twenty years younger than the face plastered on the sixty-foot billboards in Times Square.
“Heh…
cough…”
The moment A-Train saw that face, his pupils dilated to their limits.
His mouth opened, closed, and opened again.
He looked like a fish thrown onto dry land, gasping for air that wasn’t there.
His brain worked faster than his legs ever could, desperately coming up with wild, absurd possibilities.
*Is it a fucking Vought clone project?*
*No, Edgar would never let such an anti-human liability exist in the company.*
*A long-lost son?*
*No, Homelander and Maeve never had…*
A-Train sifted through every scientific explanation, every conspiracy theory, and every laboratory rumor in his mind.
But none of them could explain why Homelander was standing right in front of him, looking twenty years younger.