Still, there was no way they could have imagined it.
All of this was about to be overturned.
Stepping out of Edgar’s office, Alex silently observed for a while.
But he didn’t manage to glean any more information from the man’s mouth.
Granted, with his current strength, extracting a confession through torture would have been simple enough.
However.
Edgar, that wily old fox, wasn’t someone whose lips were so easily pried open.
You could tell as much from how he had carried himself when facing Homelander in the original story.
If he wanted to get concrete information out of the man, the best method was either to get his hands on some truth serum, or to wait until Edgar spoke of his own accord.
Not that Alex was in any hurry.
Having already injected himself with the original compound, what was there left for him to fear?
After keeping watch until Edgar had gone to sleep in the suite adjoining his office, Alex left Vought Tower.
His biggest objective was settled now; what remained was to put his energy toward the golden finger.
Vought Tower was situated in Manhattan, the most bustling part of all of New York, and the public security here was naturally far better than in the other four boroughs.
But that didn’t mean crime never happened here.
Flying out from the tower, Alex merely circled around the surrounding area once, and his super hearing already picked up plenty of sounds.
They were the sounds of crimes in progress.
Robbery, theft, r*pe…
Listening to these sounds, the corners of Alex’s mouth lifted slightly.
His figure flickered and vanished in midair, streaking past at high speed.
Soon enough.
Some unlucky bastards were caught in the net.
[Prevented a crime, gained Hero Points +1!]
[Saved a life, gained Hero Points +10!]
[Stopped a car accident, gained Hero Points +15!]
…
In just a short while, after this little warm-up, the system—which until now had shown no activity whatsoever—finally responded.
One notification after another kept popping up on the system panel, displaying the Hero Points he had earned, batch after batch.
Based on Alex’s observations, these Hero Points were calculated exactly as the system had described: according to the level of threat faced by the victim.
A threat to someone’s life was worth 10 points, mere loss of property was 1 point, and minor to serious injuries fell somewhere between 2 and 9 points.
Without spending too much time, after roughly one patrol around Manhattan,
Alex had stopped seven crimes and one car accident.
In under an hour total, he had sent quite a few people off to the police station.
The expression on the officer manning the front desk—from his initial surprise at seeing Alex, to astonishment, and finally to numbness—was all something that happened within that single hour.
Without a doubt, thanks to Alex, the on-duty officer’s workload had spiked sharply.
Making a single circuit, he had properly played the hero for once.
Feeling the worshipful gazes of those around him, along with their heartfelt gratitude.
Honestly, for Alex, the feeling was rather nice—a bit exhilarating, even.
Except.
After checking his system panel, that sense of exhilaration quickly began to fade.
An hour of bustling about—though it couldn’t really be called giving it his all—
had netted him a mere 75 Hero Points.
And those 75 points were thanks to fairly good luck, having run into several cases where lives were actually threatened.
If it had all been things like robbery and theft, he’d have busied himself for ages and probably come away with very little.
If that were all there was to it, then as long as the value of Hero Points was high enough, it wouldn’t be unacceptable.
But!
In the system’s shop, even the lowest-tier Wolf-class exchange list required Hero Points starting at 1,000 points.
One thousand points.
Going by this rate, even he would have to work without sleep or rest for a good ten-odd hours.
And his luck would have to hold, too.
If he ran into something like a chain-reaction pileup, the points would rack up fast.
But there was another thing—the stuff in these lower-tier exchange lists, he had absolutely no need for.
No use to him at all.
“It seems that, except in certain special situations, I’ll still have to make building up a faction my main focus.”
Looking at the Hero Points he had gathered, Alex thought seriously.
Still, there was one thing he had to give a try.
And that was whether Hero Points could be farmed through deliberate, artificial means!
Soon.
Alex found two fellows who had teamed up to ride out as a motorcycle gang and commit robberies.
While they were in the middle of their criminal activity, Alex apprehended them directly, then hauled them straight into a back alley with no surveillance cameras.
“Today, only one of you two gets to live.”
As Alex spoke, amid the despair in the two men’s eyes, he tossed a handgun—one he had casually grabbed off a criminal earlier—onto the ground.
“Whoever grabs it, whoever fires first, gets to live.”
Having said this, Alex stepped aside and watched the two of them with a grinning smile.
Granted, a setup like this, along with words like those, really didn’t sound like anything a good person would do—it was purely a villain’s speech.
But there was no helping it; to run an experiment, someone always had to be sacrificed.
After their pleas came to nothing, and seeing a faint red glow begin to surface in Alex’s eyes, one of the two black youths simply couldn’t bear the pressure any longer and lunged straight for the handgun on the ground.
The moment the gun was in hand, gunshots rang out.
Several in a row, until the magazine was completely emptied and let out a “click-click-click” sound—only then did he stop.
However, the scene he had imagined, of his companion collapsing in a pool of blood, did not appear.
Because that towering figure, the one like a devil from just moments ago, had at some unknown point appeared in front of the two of them, blocking every single one of those bullets.
“Tch.”
Alex, who had staged and directed this whole thing himself, now looked at the utterly motionless system panel, and the last shred of wishful hope in his heart was extinguished.
It seemed his system was far more intelligent than he had thought.
If even this wouldn’t work, then it meant that anything he had a hand in driving—or rather, any crime that involved his own subjective intent—could not earn him Hero Points.
“Then I’ll just have to do it the dumbest way possible.”
The so-called dumbest way was to clean up this wicked nation bit by bit.
“Alright, the two of you have no further use.”
Alex waved a hand at the two black youths, who were trembling, not daring to run and not daring to move.
These two fellows had, after all, helped him verify his hypothesis, so this once he’d be merciful and magnanimous and let them off—too lazy even to send them to the police station.
The two exchanged a glance and, without another word, turned and bolted, running off in two different directions with remarkable coordination.
As if they figured that by doing so, Alex wouldn’t be able to catch up to them.
Alex shook his head, not bothering to deal with such petty schemes.
So Hero Points were hard to come by—so be it.
Going a little slower was no big deal.
In any case, this world posed no threat to him whatsoever.
He could take it slow; he had all the time and patience in the world.
“The road is long and the burden heavy.
Best to work at it diligently.”
Stretching lazily, Alex flew off in the direction of Vought Tower.
____
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🔥 New history: Homelander: