*Cake by the Ocean*
Late at night.
John parked the rented—or rather, stolen—gray Ford under an apartment building and rolled down the window.
*Phew—*
The hydraulic fluid of a garbage truck, the greasy smoke from a corner fast-food joint, and the rusty smell wafting up from the subway ventilation shafts rushed into John’s nostrils.
Compared to the faint scent of grass and wildflowers at Kent Farm, this place was no different from a cesspool.
To be honest, he missed home a little.
He missed Martha and Pa Kent, who was currently in a coma.
John emptied his mind for a moment, suppressed his messy thoughts, and then summoned his information panel with a thought.
Soon, the translucent interface floated onto his retina.
John noticed that in the top left corner, where there had been nothing before, a line of data had suddenly appeared.
[Current World Distortion: 8% (Baseline is the deviation of the worldline from the original script when the host first arrived)]
Only fucking eight percent?
John stared at the number for a long time.
This was far worse than what he had expected.
He had forced A-Train to kneel to Hughie in the street, beaten Butcher half to death, and chained him with Becca’s name.
By all logic, the “vengeful obsession” at the core of the Boys should have been shattered.
Without this main plotline, most of the subsequent events would surely veer off course.
And yet, the world’s distortion had only shifted by a measly eight percent?
This pitiful amount of World Power couldn’t even budge one-tenth of the membrane on Jonathan’s heart.
Fuck, what son of a bitch wrote this world’s script?
What kind of bullshit logic was this!
And what the hell was up with the timeline!
He had caused such a massive shift and only got eight percent.
At this rate, how long would it take to completely warp the worldline?
Three months!
Lucifer had only given him three months!
He leaned back against the seat, suppressing his rising frustration.
Ever since his encounter with Lucifer, he had felt a desperate urgency to find any way to grow stronger.
With Homelander’s physical constitution, he could easily tank A-Train’s supersonic collision and take multiple heavy blows from Butcher’s crowbar without even breaking his skin.
But these minor tricks meant absolutely nothing in front of Satan himself, Lucifer.
Most absurd of all, even a Lord of Hell who could pause time could only preserve the black mist around Jonathan’s heart for a mere three months.
Right now, he wasn’t even sure where his path to strength lay.
The information panel could only identify who possessed world weight; it couldn’t directly pinpoint where the world’s primary weight was hidden.
So for now, John could only grab whatever he could get his hands on.
Compound V, V1, Vought’s security system, and the internal clearance of the Seven.
According to John’s deduction, Compound V and V1 were likely the lifeblood of this world.
Whoever held them held the power to define what a Supe was.
But he wasn’t sure if these highly familiar chemical agents would have any effect on his own body.
His body in this life had basked in the Kansas sun for eighteen years.
The foundation of V1 and the residues of Compound V had all melted together, cooking into a stew whose composition even he didn’t fully understand.
In his previous life, he had never spared a glance for such things.
He was the ultimate weapon on his own and required no external support.
But this life was different.
Compound V and V1 were not just products; they were the source and lifeblood of the entire superhuman industry.
Whoever held this lifeline could decide who became a Supe, who lived, and who died.
It was a massive web of interests, with every link connected.
Each link could pull a crowd along.
If he could use them as stepping stones to sway those who were still on the fence…
Use them to supply firepower to the Boys, use them as bait to reel in fresh talent from Godolkin University who hadn’t been tainted by Vought, and use them as bargaining chips to make deals with the military.
To make them swing to his side at critical moments.
This was far more effective than relying purely on fear to make people kneel.
Fear only made people bend their backs.
It was far more durable than any superpower.
Today, he had driven the first nail into Hughie’s heart, and Butcher would eventually oppose Vought for Becca’s sake.
But that alone was not enough.
The Boys could get peripheral intel, but what was the real core?
It was the R&D files, the original formula of Compound V, and the sealed records of V1.
These had to be secured through someone with internal clearance at Vought.
Leaning back against the seat, John scrolled through the roster of the Seven in his mind.
Maeve wouldn’t work.
She was too stubborn, and she had zero trust in anyone with Homelander’s face.
A-Train was currently crippled.
He couldn’t even stand up straight in the short term and would need at least a week to recover.
Translucent, that peeping tom of an old dog, had already been taken out by Hughie.
Black Noir, the backstabbing traitor, was ruled out immediately.
That left…
A face slowly floated up in his mind.
Sleazy.
Always shrinking into the furthest edge of the table during meetings.
A smile that looked like a blooming chrysanthemum, with gills on both sides of his abdomen opening and closing in a way that would trigger anyone’s trypophobia.
And that dog-shit green suit, tight as a wetsuit, giving off a rancid, dead-fish stench that could be smelled from three meters away.
It was The Deep, Kevin Mosier.
Yet, it was this smelly fish who had floated in Vought’s muddy waters for so many years, falling from the peak of hero-dom to rock bottom, only to be dragged back up by the cultists of the Church of the Collective.
He had seen every dirty deed and handled every secret.
That was why someone like him was the easiest to crack.
Not because he was cautious or brave.
It was precisely because he was a coward to his very bones.
As long as he believed that following John had a brighter future, he would prostrate himself to beg for mercy and then immediately spill everything—both what John knew and what he didn’t.
A slap in the face followed by a sweet treat, and this stinky fish could be easily handled.
With this in mind, John adjusted the rearview mirror and turned off the engine.
The streetlights outside flickered from dim to bright, then back to dark.
His tall shadow gradually vanished from the spot.
In an eighth-floor apartment.
The Deep lay semi-reclined on the sofa, his face flushed.
Ambrosia lay draped across his chest, her eight tentacles wrapped around his waist, left arm, and abdomen.
Oh, right, Ambrosia was a female octopus from the North Pacific.
Her suction cups left shallow circular marks on his body, sucking and releasing in sync with his heartbeat.
The TV screen was on, but The Deep had manually muted it.
The late-night news on the screen was broadcasting Vought’s third statement regarding Translucent’s disappearance.
Changing from “temporarily stepped away from the public eye due to personal reasons” to “lost contact while executing a classified mission.”
The anchor was a blonde woman, her bright red, sexy lips parting and closing, but The Deep wasn’t watching.
He closed his eyes, feeling the gentle touch of the suction cups on his skin.
Ambrosia extended a tentacle, using its tip to lightly stroke his earlobe.
This was something he had taught her.
In the world of octopuses, touching the earlobe meant “I’m listening.” Once she learned it, she used it constantly, whether he was speaking or not.
But right then, Ambrosia’s tentacle suddenly snapped away from his earlobe.
As if scalded by boiling water, her skin flashed from deep crimson to bright white in less than a second, all eight tentacles releasing their grip on him simultaneously.
Soon, the entire octopus plastered itself against the wall behind the sofa as if blown by an invisible wind, curling into a tight ball.
The Deep felt a sudden emptiness in his chest, a chill seeping into his skin from where she had just been lying.
He opened his eyes in a daze, and before he could even ask, a scent drifted into his nostrils.
It wasn’t a smell that belonged in the living room.
The salty sea tang belonged to him, while Ambrosia’s mucus protein carried a faint scent of iodine.
These were scents he had inhaled for countless nights, incredibly familiar, but this was different.
Sniffing out the source, The Deep quickly discovered that the unfamiliar scent came from a blind spot in the living room next to the television.
The floor lamp in that corner was turned off.
Only the dim glow from the TV’s standby light illuminated the edge of a human face.
“Fuck!
Who’s there!”
The Deep’s abs reacted faster than his brain.
He vaulted up from the sofa, his knees slamming into the edge of the coffee table, knocking the remote to the floor.
He stumbled to his feet, turned around, and saw what the face actually looked like.
Blonde hair, blue eyes, no older than twenty, with a clean, sharp jawline.
Fuck!
Shit!
The Deep almost had a PTSD flare-up.
He stared at the face in the corner; it was extremely familiar, but a completely different version.
Twenty years ago, during the first week of freshman orientation at Godolkin University, he and A-Train had been putting up posters in the student union.
At the time, he was holding the ladder, handing over thumbtacks with half a slice of pizza in his mouth.
The face printed on that poster was this exact face—
Homelander’s earliest promotional photo, a young version before it was airbrushed by the PR department.
But a young version of Homelander could never appear at this absurd point in time.
Then again, ever since he moved, the Doppelganger who used to hang out with him hadn’t visited in a long time.
But that dumbass always turned into other Supes for fun just to mess with him, so he didn’t like the prick.
“Fuck, it’s you.”
The Deep’s legs were still shaking, but his lips curled into a smile that looked worse than crying.
He took two steps toward the corner, tilting his head with a highly annoyed tone.
“I fucking thought it was the boss…
What’s up, changing up your tastes today?
Finally got the balls to turn into the boss?
Aren’t you afraid he’ll laser you into caviar?”
The Deep stood in place, waiting a few seconds for the Doppelganger to change his face back.
That guy loved pulling these stunts.
After a while, his facial muscles would reshape like play-dough back into that sleazy, pointed face with dark circles and a neurotic grin.
He waited to hear that familiar, raspy voice say, “Kevin, you stinky fish, scared you again.”
But the young man in the corner didn’t laugh, didn’t move, and didn’t even take the bait.
He just leaned against the wall, watching him with cold, indifferent eyes.
“Kevin.”
John finally spoke, his tone carrying a rare hint of teasing.
“I’ve been standing in the corner watching you for ten minutes.
You and that octopus…
it’s disgusting, but you’re actually quite durable.”
Hearing John’s words, The Deep froze.
As a close friend of the Doppelganger, he knew the guy’s transformation limit was only eight minutes.
Beyond eight minutes, his facial muscles would start experiencing neuropathic spasms.
Past twelve, he would go straight into neurogenic shock.
Yet the man before him was expressionless, relaxed, with no signs of twitching on his face.
Furthermore, he only now noticed the scent—like hay, mixed with the dry smell of old cotton sheets baked in the sun.
His sense of smell was quite keen compared to other Supes in Vought, with the sole exception of that dog.
The Doppelganger always smelled of cheap tobacco and the residue of his solo sessions, but the person before him didn’t have a trace of that scent.
The Doppelganger couldn’t mimic scents.
So the person standing in front of him…
was not the Doppelganger at all.
The Deep’s smile suddenly froze on his face.