Being first-years didn’t mean Los and Jordan shared a schedule.
With Jordan’s ranking, she could apply for the specialized crime-fighting track courses.
Students ranked lower, like Los, were limited to the general curriculum: performing arts, marketing, support functions, logistics-adjacent coursework.
Los didn’t particularly care.
Whatever Godolkin could teach him was nowhere near the Stark Industries knowledge base by comparison.
He had only ever intended to treat the school as a temporary base while he found his footing.
Of course.
After making his deal with Injustice Superman, that goal had shifted.
Now he was working toward taking control of the school entirely, and using it as the foundation for building his own power in The Boys universe.
By morning, Godolkin had resumed its usual appearance: a bright, youthful ivory-tower campus full of energy and promise.
None of the students knew that beneath the polished surface, underneath the ground they walked on, there were laboratories where human experiments had been running through the night.
After breakfast in the dining hall, Los and Jordan split off toward their separate classes.
Los had been planning to skip his entirely and head back to the dorm to keep working on his matter-conversion ability.
Then something caught the edge of his vision as he passed through the residential block’s hallway.
He didn’t hesitate.
He turned and walked into the building next door.
Second floor.
Los knocked on a dorm room with its door pulled shut.
“Who is it?
I’m busy, so if you don’t want to get hurt you’ll walk away right now.”
An irritated voice from behind the door.
“Open up, or I’ll kick it in.”
Los kept knocking regardless.
His right hand rested on the door handle and he quietly degraded the structural integrity of the metal inside.
“Son of a bitch.”
The guy inside swore under his breath and had no choice but to crack the door open, his large frame blocking the gap and whatever was happening inside the room.
“You.”
Rufus registered Los standing there and went still for a moment.
Then his tongue ran over his lips and his expression went from surprise to cold contempt.
“Three-hundreds ranking, garbage-tier ability.
You’re nothing.”
After last night’s standoff, he had done his homework on Los and confirmed what he’d suspected: near the bottom of the rankings, a support-type ability.
Completely non-threatening.
Rufus held grudges.
He had been planning to find an opportunity this weekend to make Los’s life difficult.
He hadn’t expected Los to come to him.
And the timing couldn’t be worse.
“I’m busy.
If you leave right now, I might be willing to let this go.”
Before he finished the sentence, Los brought one foot up and kicked the door straight into him.
The sudden impact drove the wooden door hard into Rufus’s eye socket.
Blood immediately. This story is hosted at g.com.
Rufus let out a grunt of pain and staggered back several steps.
The door swung fully open.
Los looked inside.
The curtains were drawn.
In the dim light.
A tall girl was slumped in the desk chair, motionless, a fall of gold hair covering her face.
Cate.
The same girl who had stepped in to help Los and Jordan last night.
Her hands lay limp on the desk.
Her breathing was shallow and even.
She was completely unconscious.
Los had already seen this through his X-ray vision.
Rufus had used his mind control at close range, incapacitating her through physical contact.
Their abilities were similar enough that whoever struck first had the advantage, and Rufus had struck first.
Los walked into the room.
“Jordan was right about you,” he said, without much heat behind it.
“You really are a piece of work, Rufus.”
Rufus pressed a hand to his bleeding eye socket, blood seeping between his fingers, his expression going from pain to something colder and uglier.
He had been so close.
Rufus glanced past Los toward the hallway behind him.
Los read the thought before it finished forming.
“Jordan’s not here.”
“You worthless nobody, you think you can stop me?”
Rufus lunged at Los, his blood-covered right fist swinging hard at Los’s face.
No half measures now.
Los’s eyes sharpened.
Through his X-ray vision, the flow of blood through Rufus’s body was visible in detail.
He could see exactly where the force was loading before each movement committed.
It was like fighting someone who had already telegraphed every punch.
Los had the angle read before the fist arrived.
He sidestepped and closed his left hand around Rufus’s wrist, locking the punch out before it landed.
The moment Rufus felt his wrist caught, his expression shifted from fury to satisfaction.
The one weakness of his mental control ability was that it required physical contact to activate.
Los had just handed him exactly that.
Rufus activated his ability the way he always did, running a command through the point of contact at Rufus’s wrist: the instruction to fall unconscious.
Then Los drove his knee up hard between Rufus’s legs.
The sound of something giving way.
Rufus’s legs went out from under him.
He folded and dropped to his knees, cold sweat breaking across a face that had gone paper-white.
“Why?” he managed.
In every previous encounter, even Cate, a mental ability user like himself, had gone under the moment he made contact.
“Yeah.
Why is that.”
Los looked down at Rufus kneeling in front of him and unhurriedly took a pen from his pocket.
The night before, in the conversation with Stark and Injustice Superman, he had learned something important.
His mind and soul were permanently linked to the souls of Iron Man and Injustice Superman.
That connection was constant and couldn’t be severed.
For any psychic ability user to control Los, they would need to simultaneously exert control over both of those souls.
In The Boys universe, no one could do that.
In other words, Los was naturally immune to every mental and psychic ability in this world.
“Want to see exactly what a pen can do?”
Los pushed a hand against Rufus’s forehead, forcing his head up despite the veins standing out across it.
A cold flash of light.
The pen went into Rufus’s right shoulder like a precision blade.
Under matter conversion, the pen’s tip had become a forged steel edge, and it went in without resistance.
Rufus’s breath hissed in sharply.
The pain pulled a short scream out of him against his will.
He opened his bloodshot eyes and looked up at Los with open hatred.
“I’ll kill you for this.
I’m going to kill you.”
Los said nothing.
He pulled the pen from Rufus’s shoulder, the bloodied tip coming to rest against the side of Rufus’s neck.
Feeling the cold metal at his throat, Rufus’s expression twisted into something between a snarl and a grin.
“Do it then.
You don’t have the guts to kill me on school grounds.
If you do, you’re finished here too.”
Los narrowed his eyes.
Better to act first than spend his time being hunted by a grudge-holding psychic.
Letting this walk away was a worse problem.
The only cost was probably having to leave the school for a while.
“Nobody in this school has the nerve to kill me!”
Rufus was still talking when the dorm room door opened behind Los.
Someone had just walked in.
Rufus, still on his knees, looked past Los at the person who had entered the room.
The American flag cape.
The distinctive blue combat suit.
The face that was, by this point, genuinely iconic.
Every inch of Rufus’s body started shaking with barely contained relief and excitement.
“Sir, please, help me, this person is trying to kill me.”
Los picked up the bloodied pen, stood up, and turned around with a steady expression to face whoever had just arrived.
Homelander.