[The One Who Lies First]
After Butcher was pinned against the wall and beaten half-unconscious by John outside the convenience store, Hughie had forced him directly into an ambulance.
For a whole week, Butcher didn’t take a single step out of this three-square-meter private hospital room.
Worried about Butcher’s safety, Hughie followed Butcher’s previous instructions and tracked down Mother’s Milk, who was working at a juvenile detention center.
After a lot of persuasion from Hughie, Mother’s Milk finally agreed to visit Butcher, that manipulative bastard.
When Mother’s Milk pushed open the hospital room door, he was greeted by the suffocating smell of hospital disinfectant mixed with the cloying sweetness of cheap air freshener.
And a hint of cigarette smoke and strong liquor that couldn’t be hidden.
Butcher, the stubborn bastard, had cracked the window just enough to slide a cigarette butt through.
The outdoor AC unit was already covered with a thick layer of white ash and cigarette filters.
The bottom drawer of the nightstand was half-open, revealing a half-empty bottle of bourbon.
The alcoholic had just poured half a cup into a disposable paper cup, coffee stains still visible on its rim.
“Nurse just left ten minutes ago.”
Mother’s Milk closed the door behind him, tossing a plastic bag onto the bed.
Inside were two packs of cigarettes and a sandwich.
“Fucking hell, the nurses here watch you closer than Vought security, asking if you took your meds.
I told her you were asleep from the pain, and she stared through the glass for half a minute before she finally walked off.”
Butcher didn’t say a word.
He didn’t even look up.
The bed had been pushed to the corner, the white sheets crumpled like a piece of paper that had been stepped on.
The folding overbed table, normally used for food trays, was raised to its highest position, covered with photocopies of Becca’s files.
The edges of the papers were blackened from Butcher’s repeated handling, and Becca’s smiling face in the photo was slightly blurred.
Butcher used a stainless-steel thermos filled with cold water to weigh down a corner of the files.
He sat on a hard plastic chair, his spine straight as a steel rod driven into concrete.
The nurse had come to change his dressings three times, and he had cursed her out every time.
Looking at Butcher’s face now.
Well, it was a bit…
hard to look at.
His nose was visibly crooked, smashed by a punch from John, and the deep, bone-deep gash on his lip had seven stitches.
The black threads stood out starkly on his pale lips, pulling painfully with every movement.
The bruising around his left eye had faded from its initial purple-black to a nasty greenish-yellow, looking like a piece of cured meat that had been repeatedly beaten and left out in the sun for half a day.
The only relatively intact part was his right eye, which he could barely keep open.
Aside from Becca’s files, other things were scattered messily on the small table.
They were the 3D architectural blueprints he had brought over a few days ago.
The blueprints of the Mangrove facility were pulled by Mother’s Milk after pulling three consecutive all-nighters, digging them out of a dusty old server in Vought’s infrastructure department. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
As for the internal Vought security rotation schedule, Hughie had bought it from a fired former security clerk, costing him three months of savings and two cases of cold beer.
During the trade, Hughie was so nervous his palms were sweating, and he almost dropped the beer cases.
The logistics records were hacked by Frenchie from Vought’s logistics system, which cost him three burned encrypted flash drives and almost got him localized by Vought’s anti-tracking system.
Among all the records, one item stood out glaringly:
Pediatric nutritional vitamins.
Mangrove was a secret property surrounded by a dozen-meter-high wall, heavily monitored and guarded by armed security.
It was so tightly guarded that not even a fly could get in.
There shouldn’t be any children there.
So it was clear that the place hid some dirty secret.
Butcher laid these scattered pieces of paper out on the white tabletop, piecing the clues together.
Then he got an answer that almost stopped his heart:
Becca was still alive.
She was at Red River, with a child.
Butcher reached out, took the thermos off the files, and pulled the crowbar that had kept him going for half his life from under the bed.
This emotional support tool had been smuggled into the hospital by Hughie, wrapped in his trench coat and taped to his back.
It went undetected by security and had been stuffed in the gap between the bedboard and the mattress ever since.
He recalled what that bastard who looked exactly like Homelander had said when he pinned him against the cold convenience store wall.
At the time, he thought it was Vought, or some second-rate organization’s new trick.
But now, the files, the blueprints, the rotation schedules, the logistics lists—all the evidence lay before him.
Though he hated to admit it, every word and every clue confirmed that the bastard was right.
After thinking for a long time, driven by his obsession to see Becca again, Butcher finally decided to compromise.
During these days, Frenchie had also been persuaded by Butcher’s silver tongue and joined them.
Frenchie’s help was undoubtedly massive.
Through layers of analysis, the Boys quickly obtained the distribution map of all surveillance cameras around Red River through various special channels.
With this, they could black out the cameras before the operation, preventing the information from being uploaded in real-time to Vought’s system terminals.
As for who would carry out the action…
“Hughie, you can call that son of a bitch twin.”
“The deal is fine, but he has to get Becca out for me first.”
Butcher contacted John using the burner number Hughie had left, scheduling a meeting in the abandoned parking lot behind the hospital.
It was remote, had no cameras, and few people ever came.
At 2:00 AM, the only sound in the parking lot was the wind whistling against the sheet metal of abandoned cars.
John had actually arrived very early.
He leaned against the door of a rusty old van.
His newly bought black mask covered his face, and with his hoodie pulled up, his entire body was almost hidden in the darkness.
At this moment, Butcher and Hughie walked in from the entrance of the parking lot.
The swelling on Butcher’s face hadn’t fully subsided, and the greenish-yellow bruising around his left eye looked exceptionally gruesome in the dim light.
He stopped three paces in front of John, skipping the pleasantries.
He pulled the Red River security rotation schedule from his coat’s inner pocket and got straight to the point.
“There are three layers of defense at Mangrove.”
“The outer layer is standard patrol by Vought’s security department—a twelve-man squad, rotating every four hours.
There is a blind spot of seven minutes and twelve seconds during the shift change.
Hughie calculated it, and the error shouldn’t exceed ten seconds.”
“The middle layer is a Supe-exclusive gate, requiring retinal scans and a Level 5 clearance card.”
“The inner layer is the physical lockdown of the facility itself—fingerprint locks plus a thirty-centimeter-thick blast door.
The walls are reinforced concrete, enough to withstand an RPG.”
“And…”
“Stop.”
John pulled a hand out of his pocket, snatched the rotation schedule from Butcher’s hand, stood up from the car door, and walked up to Butcher.
“A twelve-man squad, retinal scans, a blast door…”
John tilted his head slightly, his blue eyes behind the mask’s eyeholes looking exceptionally calm in the dim light.
“Do you think those weaklings can stop me?
Or do you think that paper-thin blast door can take more than a few hits from me?”
“Like I said, a deal is a deal.
I’ll get you Becca and the kid, but you have to deliver on my terms.”
“Two weeks—no, one week.
I want to see Becca within a week.”
Butcher gritted his teeth, staring hard at John.
“Otherwise, even if I die, you won’t get a single hair off of me, you son of a bitch.”
Then, Butcher pulled another document from his inner pocket.
This was a handwritten list from Hughie, detailing the technical milestones required for Compound V:
Chromatographic analysis parameters, reverse-engineering pathways of the molecular structure, and a comparison model of known ingredients versus the unknown base chain.