2019.
The Boys universe.
New York.
It was afternoon, and traffic was thickening by the minute toward the coast.
Los flagged down a cab near the shoreline and got out ahead of the crowd already starting to descend on the scene.
The cab’s radio was live with breaking news: a passenger flight hijacked by terrorists, and Homelander’s extraordinary feat of holding the wreckage aloft for a safe landing.
“Hey man, you just came from the beach,” the driver said, glancing in the rearview.
“Did you actually see Homelander hold up that plane?”
Los was staring out at the crawl of traffic and nodded without thinking.
See it?
He’d been part of it.
The driver turned the volume up.
“This rescue is going to shake the whole country, maybe the world.
A senator’s already giving interviews: apparently this could be the push that gets the supes-in-the-military bill across the line.”
In the back seat, Los turned a nickel over in his fingers, the coin catching the afternoon sun with each flip, flashing.
He looked at his reflection in the cab window: a young Asian face, sharp and unfamiliar.
He came back to himself slowly.
He had actually transmigrated.
Into a world with Homelander in it, a world straight out of American comics.
And he had already changed the original timeline: the plane that was supposed to go down with no survivors had just landed with nearly everyone alive.
The original history might have shifted because of that.
But it didn’t matter now.
He was new here.
He could only take it one step at a time.
He watched the nickel spin on his index finger, the control coming more naturally with each rotation, smooth and almost effortless.
Compared to his original [Enhance] and [Degrade] abilities, the [Bio-Force Field] he had received from Injustice Superman gave him a far more tangible sense of possessing something genuinely extraordinary.
His original abilities could only act on non-living objects.
But the Bio-Force Field let him feel changes within himself, subtle but real.
The Bio-Force Field allowed him to perfectly direct the force behind any of his physical actions, and to layer a uniform distribution of pressure across anything he touched.
In other words.
It was Superman’s foundation.
His baseline passive ability.
The thing that pushed Superman toward something almost divine.
It was what let Superman lift an aircraft or a skyscraper without tearing them apart, and what kept the clothes on his back from shredding.
Borderline miraculous.
And as his own physical strength grew, the Bio-Force Field’s effect would grow with it.
Push it far enough, and it could eventually free him from gravity entirely.
‘But honestly, this time around, knowledge helped me more than any of the powers did.’
The nickel flicked off his fingertip and he snatched it out of the air, closing his fist around it.
He hadn’t forgotten.
Without the specialized knowledge Tony Stark had transferred to him, without his prior understanding of Homelander as the hero on the surface and the overgrown child underneath, and without knowing exactly how to play Homelander’s ego at the right moment, the powers alone would have counted for nothing.
Coming back from the edge required knowledge and ability in equal measure.
Even Injustice Superman, with everything he had, had lost it all in the end.
Looking at how both Tony Stark and Injustice Superman went out, Los had a rough sense of the road he wanted to walk.
Omniscience.
Omnipotence.
Of course.
Right now, the more pressing problem was how to stay alive in an America where Homelander existed and the kill zones were everywhere.
Los pressed a hand to his empty stomach, then checked his wallet, which was even emptier.
His expression said everything his mouth didn’t.
“End of the line, buddy.”
The cab stopped.
Los got out, paid with most of what he had left, slung his backpack, and looked up at the university sitting in the middle of New York City.
Lush greenery surrounded a cluster of modern buildings.
A fountain caught the sunlight and scattered it in every direction.
Metal statues of The Seven stood among the architecture.
Godolkin University.
The introduction he had given Homelander and Queen Maeve on the plane wasn’t a lie.
Los was a supe who had grown up in a group home, a state-run juvenile facility for superpowered minors.
He had just turned eighteen when Godolkin sent him a full acceptance, tuition and housing covered.
He was starting as a new student.
In this world, Godolkin University was a specialized institution that recruited newly adult supes and trained them to become crime-fighting superheroes.
On paper.
But this wasn’t a world where Superman flew over New York.
It was Homelander’s sky.
Crime-fighting and superheroes were just a massively profitable business.
Vought International had never been interested in saving the world.
What Vought wanted was an empire.
As a Vought-owned institution, Godolkin projected the image of an elite school dedicated to producing gifted supe graduates ready to join The Seven.
The reality almost certainly hid something darker and more calculated underneath.
Los had a vague recollection from his previous life of a spinoff series called Gen V, set right here at Godolkin.
He hadn’t known much about it.
Given the choice, he never would have come here.
But he had no choice.
Drop out, and the local government would forcibly transfer him to an adult facility for supes with his freedom severely restricted.
Withdraw this soon after arriving and there was a real chance of drawing attention from the school administration, or worse, Homelander himself.
“I can’t drop out.
But I need to build real strength and real resources, fast.”
Los turned it over in his head.
In The Boys universe, the law of the jungle was fully in effect with no soft edges and no ceiling.
Strong enough powers and you could move through New York, through the entire world, doing exactly as you pleased.
Money, reputation, influence: winner takes everything.
Strong enough and even Wall Street money and the White House would come to you.
Homelander was the clearest working example of that principle.
The souls of Injustice Superman and Tony Stark crossed his mind.
Once he was settled, it was time for a real conversation with those two.
Los walked the campus.
It had everything any university had: lecture halls, a library, a gym, a dining hall, a communications tower, and carefully maintained lawns and gardens throughout.
A proper ivory-tower institution ticking every box a college student could imagine.
It also had things other universities didn’t.
He watched a student doing morning drills on the track field vanish without warning, as if teleporting, then reappear a few seconds later holding a bottle of Coke.
Elsewhere: a student shooting fire out of his nostrils.
Another doing her hair with electricity generated from her own palms.
And then one who appeared to be using a very specific part of their anatomy to suck an entire bucket of water dry.
Wait.
He needed to unsee that.
Los was doing his best to adjust to a campus where extraordinary abilities were the most ordinary thing in the world.
After a quick walk to get the layout down.
Los completed his enrollment, downloaded the school’s dedicated app on his smartphone, linked his student ID, and found everything he needed, including his assigned dorm room.
Following the campus map, he found his room on the third floor of one of the residential buildings: a two-person shared room.
He pushed the door open.
Los’s eyes got considerably more than they were expecting.
In the amber evening light coming through the dorm window, an asian girl was in the middle of changing her top.
The light caught her figure: graceful and shapely, and without any fabric to speak of currently in the way of a complete view.
The full picture of youth.
Entirely unobstructed.