*Dehors*
Kansas winters weren’t exactly harsh, but the cold winds of February could still chill a person to the bone.
Case in point: the ever-thoughtful Martha had bundled John up in a heavy cotton coat like a little boy mummy and set him out in a rocking chair in the yard to soak up the sun.
According to her, babies needed plenty of sunlight to grow strong bones.
John, however, thoroughly scoffed at such “old wives’ wisdom.”
The bones of the great Homelander couldn’t even be shattered by missiles or pierced by steel rebar.
What the hell did that have to do with the sun?
But grousing aside.
In the Kent household, John had always been the most sensible, sweet-tempered good boy.
If he thrashed or resisted, it would make Martha look heart-wrenchingly worried.
And that would break his heart.
Since he couldn’t move around, he might as well enjoy the sunbath.
The warm sunlight draped over him like a blanket fresh out of the dryer.
With his eyes half-squinted, John drifted on the edge of sleep.
But right then, he felt something.
A microscopic current of warmth slowly seeped in through his crown, trickled down his spine, and pooled in his chest.
This felt different from his usual sensations.
It was as if there were a lamp inside his body, and the sun happened to be a match.
A gentle strike—sparks caught dry wood, and the wick flared to life instantly!
Power!
In his pleasant surprise, John snapped his eyes open.
But the warm current vanished instantly.
The lamp went out, as if it had all been a mere hallucination brought on by a temporary lack of oxygen.
No…
that was absolutely not a hallucination!
In his previous life, he had dealt with Compound V for over forty years.
He knew better than anyone what that surge of power felt like in his veins—scalding, violent, filling every capillary like flowing magma.
Shit…
what the hell was this?
John struggled to raise his hand before his eyes, staring wide-eyed at it.
In his line of sight was still that pink, wrinkled little fist.
Five curled fingers, no different from any other diaper-wearing infant who peed and pooped everywhere.
He stared at the tiny hand for a long time, then slowly unclenched his fist and experimentally pointed his palm toward the sun.
And then…
Power…
Nope, absolutely nothing happened.
Refusing to give up, John tried several more times before he finally grasped a clue…
It turned out this feeling wasn’t a fluke.
Every time Martha put him in the yard to sunbathe, that warm current would start right on schedule.
Like a warm tongue, it slowly licked its way up his spine, inch by inch.
Tingling, moist, making him instinctively want to curl his toes in that moment.
Damn, this felt too good…
Wait, fuck!
What the hell was going on?
Realizing something might be afoot, John began to spend more and more time pondering the issue.
But the brain of a one-year-old baby was clearly incapable of sustained focus.
Often, he would fall asleep mid-thought, waking up with a pacifier in his mouth and Martha humming a tune while changing his diaper.
But in those brief gaps of clarity, on those afternoons when Martha thought he was just daydreaming.
His brain was constantly churning like a rusty engine.
Slowly and stubbornly, it ground through every detail of the final battle at the White House in his previous life.
He wanted to figure out how the hell he had failed so catastrophically when he had clearly injected V1 right before the battle.
A death as idiotic as “having his skull crushed by Butcher with a crowbar” was far too moronic.
Even now, he refused to accept it.
Give me a fucking break…
There was no way that absolute bullshit of a scenario could have happened.
Something must have gone wrong somewhere!
He was the Homelander.
His skin could withstand missiles, and his bones were stronger than any alloy.
A measly crowbar?
Even if, by some miracle, that bitch Kimiko had used her chest blast to strip away his powers before Butcher made his move.
At worst, that crowbar should have bent into a U-shape against his forehead instead of easily piercing his skull like a ripe watermelon.
Besides, hadn’t Butcher also been hit by the blast’s aftershock?
That meant he would have had even less strength.
So…
was that right?
Did that make any sense?
Where did it all begin?
It started with the V1.
The more he thought about it now, the more John felt it was a deeply insidious trap.
His biological father…
right, Soldier Boy.
(Now John only recognized one true father, and that was Jonathan).
He had handed him the original V1 compound, claiming it would make him stronger.
And he had believed it.
Was it out of some pathetic father-son trust in Soldier Boy?
Not entirely.
Although John desperately craved paternal love, Soldier Boy had backstabbed him before.
He couldn’t trust him completely.
When it came down to it, he had desperately needed a shot in the arm back then.
He was already entering a midlife crisis at the time.
Not only was he constantly suffering setbacks in battle, but he was also getting gray hairs.
Meanwhile, as the original recipient of the V1 compound, Soldier Boy came with an immortality buff, and his raw power was terrifyingly formidable.
Thus, whether it was the temptation of immortality, the panic of an aging crisis, or the anxiety of insufficient firepower…
…they were all perfectly valid reasons for him to inject the V1.
And that wasn’t all!
While he was growing stronger, the relentless pack of hyenas led by Butcher was also gaining power, and The Seven—now existing in name only—had long since fractured.
Meanwhile, his beloved biological son, Ryan, whom he had cherished with all his heart…
…had not only wavered and betrayed him time and again, but had actually dealt his own father a lethal blow at the critical moment?
Think about it.
An animal who murders his own father—what would be left of him in a few decades?
Ten years?
Twenty years?
John had never understood why this world harbored such immense malice toward him.
It was as if the entire world was conspiring to back him into a corner!
Therefore, he had desperately craved a hidden trump card—one that could turn the tables at the final moment and flip the entire board!
So, without a moment’s hesitation, he had personally injected that vial of V1 right in front of Soldier Boy.
In that moment, he had indeed felt power.
Power Max!
It was as if someone had detonated a star inside his chest cavity.
An exaggeration?
No, it was a tangible physical perception—a terrifying strength more intense than anything he had felt in the past forty years.
He didn’t even need to charge up his heat vision; the dark crimson glare surged out, unable to contain itself.
In the blink of an eye, it pierced through layers of cumulus clouds like two crimson spears forged by the gods themselves, fiercely tearing open the sky.
Dyeing the heavens a shocking, searing red.
The immense power he had personally experienced could not be faked.
Yet on the day of the final battle, all of this degenerated into an absurd, ridiculous farce.
He still remembered that his flight speed had surpassed a theoretical Mach 200!
He had calculated that number in his head countless times; there was no mistake.
In a mere fraction of a second, he could have successfully sent the tech-tycoon billionaire to meet his beloved astronaut parents and returned safely to his spot.
But right there in that goddamned presidential palace, his dear son Ryan had simply sidestepped, spread his arms, and managed to block him?
No, wait—was Ryan’s physical durability really that high?
So you’re telling me a brat who had only learned to fly a few years ago could physically block an impact of Mach 200?
He would have been turned into a bloody mist, okay?
How was that even possible?
When had his speed been nerfed to such a degree?
Why did he go completely limp like a wet noodle the moment the actual fight started?
And then there was that son of a bitch Butcher, who had injected Compound V stolen from God knows where.
He had even sprouted disgusting octopus tentacles, like something out of The Deep’s ex-lover’s nightmares.
Logically speaking, that crap shouldn’t have been able to bypass his defenses at all.
Yet when Butcher’s fist slammed into his face that day, he felt actual, genuine pain.
Unlike the superficial, minor trauma of Maeve giving him a bloody nose, this was a deep pain that radiated from his very marrow.
The perfect V1-enhanced super-being had, in an instant, reverted to a common mortal who could only perform a few circus tricks.
What the absolute fuck…
Where was his reaction speed after injecting the V1?
Where was his super-sensory perception?
Where was his superpower?
He used to be able to see the rifling on a bullet the instant it left the barrel.
Yet when Butcher swung his fist, even his consciousness had begun to slip.
And his full-power heat vision couldn’t even penetrate the defenses of Butcher and Kimiko?
Was that right?
Only now, as John reconstructed the events, did hindsight hit him like a truck—
Every single day after he took the V1 had been completely, utterly abnormal!
He had thought he was growing stronger.
But looking back, that “strength” was more like a false fire; the brighter it burned, the hollower his foundation became.
Who the hell did this?
Sister Sage…
it could only be her.
Later on, Soldier Boy had cryptically hinted to him that Firecracker had established contact through Sister Sage.
That strange vial of V1 was precisely what had passed through Firecracker’s hands.
And in John’s memory, Sister Sage—who looked no different from a female gorilla—never made a plan without a backup.
On paper, she had handed him a gun, but she had loaded the chamber with blank rounds designed to backfire.
Thinking up to this point, John yawned in his cradle, dismantling his memories of that period piece by piece and putting them back together.
If he wasn’t mistaken, the V1 had caused some kind of incomprehensible conflict with the Compound V already in his body.
One compound was trying to erase and consume the other.
On the surface, he was stronger, but his internal structure was being hollowed out bit by bit.
Like a foundation eaten away by termites.
The house on top still looked perfectly intact, but a single gust of strong wind would bring the entire structure crashing down.
A textbook example of shoddy construction.
Thus, when the day of the final battle arrived and he pushed all his power to the absolute limit in one go, the hollowed-out foundation finally gave way.
That was why he had lost so quickly, and so pathetically.
A single crowbar was all it took to shatter his skull.
What a fucking joke of a death.
Fuck!!!!
On the very afternoon he figured this out, the Kansas sun shone right through the gaps of his cradle’s slats, casting a bright stripe of light across his face.
He stared at the stripe of light, his lips twitching slightly.
Who would have thought that after all of Sister Sage’s scheming, that lunatic Butcher would end up reaping the rewards.
She probably hadn’t expected that the “poison” she had meticulously brewed would ultimately have its final blow delivered by a Brit with a crowbar.
(At this point, John didn’t know the actual plot, so in his subconscious, he assumed Sister Sage had orchestrated all of this.)
(But he could never have guessed that Sister Sage had actually turned into a total moron who loved playing with Harry Potter wands at Disneyland.)
Heh…
ironic.
How fucking ironic.
But irony aside, having died once made one thing abundantly clear.
The remnants of both compounds were still inside his current body.
The remnants of V1 and Compound V.
They hadn’t vanished; they were merely in a state of temporary dormancy.
Like two streams of frozen magma, they had temporarily ceased their mutual consumption and lay quietly dormant in every single cell.
The sun was the match, highly ignitable.
Every time he felt that warm current under the sunlight, it wasn’t an illusion.
It was the remnants of the two compounds slowly and gently recombining under the stimulation of solar radiation.
They were being catalyzed by the sunlight into something entirely new.
In his past life, he was a product of Vought, his power stemming from Compound V and laboratory experiments.
Every increase in strength had been accompanied by extreme experimentation and torture.
But in this life, everything was completely different.
Now, he lay peacefully amid the Kansas wheat fields, where the sunshine was free and the air was sweet.
Martha was not far away hanging laundry, humming that song whose name he still couldn’t remember.
All he had to do was bask in the sun every day, and he could feel that tiny lamp inside his body growing brighter and brighter, bit by bit.
He would still slip out in the dead of night to dig up that tin box.
But lately, the frequency of his runs to the old oak tree had been decreasing.
Those so-called “proofs” seemed to have lost their importance.
As long as the sunshine overhead was real, Martha’s apron was real, and Jonathan’s embrace was real…
who gave a shit about any of that other crap?
Right then, Jonathan’s booming voice rang out from the yard:
“Martha, pack up!
Tomorrow is the county’s biggest agricultural fair in Smallville.
Let’s take little John to the market!”
In his cradle, John slowly opened his eyes, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
Excellent.
Another of his favorite family road trips!
But he had no way of knowing that this seemingly ordinary trip to Smallville would be the first time in four years he would tear away his peaceful disguise…