In Frenchie's filthy underground room that looked like a goddamn rat's nest, the air was thick and suffocating.
It hadn't even been a full week since their last forced shot of Compound V.
Butcher, Hughie, and Frenchie were still barely coping with the brutal leftover pain ripping through their bodies and the wild, half-broken powers that felt like untamed horses kicking around inside them.
They were like men with the worst flu of their lives — weak, drained, every breath leaving them hollow and shaky.
Then the nightmare walked in again without a sound.
Ryan was still wearing that Vought security guard disguise, face cold and dead-eyed like a butcher fresh out of hell coming to collect.
The second they saw him, all three jumped up like cats getting their tails stomped.
Butcher's eyes burned with raw hate and murder. He clenched his fists so hard the new power made his knuckles pop.
Hughie looked fucking terrified and stumbled backward, staring like Ryan wasn't even human anymore — just a monster ready to eat them alive.
Frenchie, the most level-headed of the bunch, immediately started yelling in his thick accent.
"What the fuck do you want now? You said once every two weeks!"
"Shooting us up this soon is gonna kill us! Our bodies can't fucking handle it!"
Ryan didn't give a shit about their whining.
He just walked over to the table and slammed a metal briefcase full of dark blue syringes down with a heavy thud.
"I don't care if you live or die," he said in that flat, processed electronic voice.
"I only care if you get stronger."
He scanned their faces — rage, fear, desperation — and a cruel little smile twisted his lips.
"Besides, you're just leeks I'm growing so I can keep cutting you down."
Those words lit a fire in Butcher's chest.
But they also killed whatever tiny hope they had left of fighting back.
For the next hour, Frenchie's underground room turned into a screaming torture chamber.
Ryan once again showed his absolute, god-like power that none of them could fight.
He ignored Butcher's animalistic curses, Hughie's pathetic begging, and Frenchie's desperate attempts to talk him down with science bullshit.
He went straight for Butcher, the one resisting the hardest.
Butcher roared and threw everything he had into a punch aimed at Ryan's face. The kind of hit that would turn a bull's skull into red mush.
A similar thing happened. Ryan just lazily raised one finger and stopped the punch like it was nothing.
Butcher felt like he'd punched solid diamond. Ryan's grip was an iron vise that locked him in place, completely helpless.
With cold eyes full of humiliation and rage, Butcher watched Ryan jam a much larger dose of higher-purity second-round Compound V straight into his neck.
Then it was Hughie and Frenchie's turn.
Against this kind of overwhelming force, they had zero chance.
A new wave of pain, ten times worse than before, slammed into all three of them like hellfire.
Hughie felt like his body had been tossed into a cosmic blender on high speed. He was stretched out to infinity one second, crushed into nothing the next. The world around him twisted and flickered, and he could actually "see" countless spatial cracks ripping open and snapping shut all around him.
The soul-tearing agony ripped a high-pitched scream out of his throat.
Butcher felt something alive writhing and growing under the skin of his back and arms, like dozens of hungry aliens trying to claw their way out. The sickening feeling of his own flesh being invaded and rewritten made even this hardened bastard cry real, painful tears.
Frenchie got the worst mental torture.
His brain got flooded with billions of data streams at once — insane inspirations, impossible chemical formulas, and weapon designs way ahead of their time all crashing together inside his skull. He felt like his head was a balloon pumped full of air, one second away from popping and sending him straight into permanent darkness.
After what felt like forever, the hellish screaming finally died down.
The three of them slowly came back to consciousness, soaked in sweat like they'd been dragged out of the ocean, chests heaving, eyes wide with the dazed terror of people who just barely survived hell.
Ryan stood over them, cold and clinical, like a scientist checking on his lab rats. Not a single drop of pity in his eyes.
Hughie tried to stand up first, but the brutal aftereffects of the second dose hit him with a wave of dizzy vertigo. His body swayed hard and he stumbled.
Then something insane happened.
His body blinked out of existence where he stood and reappeared with a heavy thud in a pile of junk at the far end of the room.
He had just performed his first real spatial jump.
Even though the landing was completely random and he immediately dropped to his knees, dry-heaving from the nausea, that weird feeling of slipping through space was burned into his brain.
His power had truly awakened.
On the other side, Butcher pushed himself off the floor.
He glared at the person he hated more than anything in the world, and fresh rage took over.
"Ahhh!!! I'm more powerful now! You stupid cunt!"
He roared and charged at Ryan again.
This time, thick black fleshy tentacles exploded out from under the skin of his back and arms.
They were slick with mucus, tipped with sharp bone spurs, and moved like living things. They whipped through the air with a nasty whistle, slashing at Ryan from every direction.
What he awakened wasn't some clean Homelander copy. It was something far more unstable, grotesque, and fucked up.
Frenchie, meanwhile, was completely lost in his own head.
His eyes were glowing. He muttered nonstop to himself as he rushed to his workbench, ignoring the chaos of Butcher's tentacles behind him.
He grabbed tools and parts with frantic, almost artistic movements and started building a brand-new weapon straight from the storm of ideas in his mind — complex, weird-shaped, and completely new to this world.
Ryan moved like a ghost between the wildly thrashing black tentacles, dodging them with ease.
He looked at the three "monsters" who had all stepped way beyond humanity.
A cowardly space-jumper, a half-human half-beast avenger, and a mad scientist drowning in creation.
A satisfied grin spread across Ryan's face as he thought to himself.
"Very good."
"One more round and you three should be just about ripe."
"Then it'll be time to harvest you."
Right then, the encrypted phone in his pocket buzzed.
He slipped past another one of Butcher's heavy swings without even looking, pulled out the phone, and checked the message.
It was from his cheap-ass father, Homelander.
Short and packed with info.
"The Company has already made its move. An elite unit led by Blindspot is heading to Brooklyn right now to grab Hughie and the 'terrorist organization' behind him."
"You've also been put on the highest-level capture list. Watch your back."
Ryan read the message and the innocent little kid smile on his face instantly twisted into something excited and bloodthirsty.
He looked up at the three unstable new freaks in front of him — The Boys — who had just gotten their powers and were still shaking from it.
Then he thought about the incoming Vought kill squad and Blindspot with his freakish senses.
The corner of his mouth curled into a cruel smirk, like a shark that just smelled fresh blood in the water.
"Looks like I'm getting new abilities sooner than I thought."
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12 advanced chapters- P@t: slept01