Benjamin’s tall, upright figure blended completely into the flow of people on the streets of New York.
Of course, the surveillance recordings had also captured this one-sided beating.
“Woo—woo—woo—”
The shrill sound of police sirens and ambulance sirens could be heard.
Several vehicles with flashing red and blue police lights screeched to a halt at the scene.
By then, quite a few curious onlookers had already gathered on the surrounding streets, emboldened enough to peek.
In this world, completely brainwashed by Vought International and flooded with superhero culture, many people professed an almost fanatical and blind worship of superheroes.
Although some people had just learned the truth, there were those who hadn’t understood the sequence of events and had only seen Benjamin beating A-Train.
“Oh my God!
Is that…
is that A-Train?!”
“Oh my God, he’s bleeding a lot!
That man in the green jacket earlier must be crazy, right?
How dare he attack a superhero!”
“He must be some supervillain hiding in the shadows!
Hurry, take photos and post them on Twitter; Vought International will surely catch that thug!”
Several young passersby, not knowing what was happening, raised their phones and frantically took photos of A-Train writhing on the stretcher like a dead dog.
Their words were full of fierce condemnation of Benjamin and sympathy for A-Train.
In their blind view, superheroes were always the embodiment of justice, and anyone who hit a superhero must be a heinous villain.
“Shut up!
You idiots, you don’t know anything at all!”
A roar, suppressing extreme anger, came from the crowd.
It was Hughie Campbell.
This young man, who used to be meek and wouldn’t even dare to ask his boss for a raise…
now stood in front of the people taking photos, his eyes bloodshot, like an enraged lion.
“Attack?
Supervillain?
Open your eyes and look at the ground, the skid marks and A-Train’s bloodstains!”
Hughie Campbell pointed to where Robin had been standing, his voice trembling with the fear he still felt: “If that man hadn’t intervened, A-Train would have already turned my girlfriend into paste!”
Robin also tightly gripped Hughie Campbell’s shirt and shouted: “He didn’t slow down at all!
He charged at me like an out-of-control missile!
That man saved me…
A-Train tried to kill me!”
The spontaneous accusation from Hughie Campbell and Robin, combined with the obvious marks at the scene, instantly silenced the curious onlookers who were unaware of the truth.
The crowd looked at each other in consternation.
…
…
At the same time.
New York, Manhattan, Vought Tower, Risk Monitoring and Control Center.
This was the brain of Vought International’s operations and the largest and most rigorous information surveillance network in all of the United States.
At that moment, on the giant curved screen that covered an entire wall of the risk control room, intense red alerts were flashing frantically.
In the center of the screen, a short video composed of fragments recorded by street surveillance cameras and bystander footage was playing on a loop.
In the footage, a burly man uses lubricant to facilitate A-Train’s journey, as if he knew in advance that A-Train would pass through that spot.
The dozen senior technicians in the risk control department were like ants on a hot skillet, with the clatter of keyboards interweaving densely.
“Da-da-da—”
The crisp sound of high heels stepping on the polished marble floor echoed in the room.
The previously noisy risk control room fell silent instantly.
Madelyn Stillwell, Vice President of Vought International and the one pulling the strings of The Seven, entered with a cup of hot coffee in her hand and an icy face.
“Can anyone explain to me why, ten minutes ago, our ‘fastest superhero in the world’ suddenly tripped and then got beaten up on the streets of Brooklyn?”
Madelyn Stillwell’s voice wasn’t loud, but it had a chilling sharpness that made one’s skin crawl.
No one dared to respond.
She walked over to the giant screen.
She frowned slightly as she carefully examined the man in the footage, whose face wasn’t even fully visible.
The more she looked, the more suspicion appeared in her eyes.
“Who is this man?” Madelyn Stillwell asked sharply.
“He has incredible physical strength, able to take down A-Train with his bare hands…
and he even anticipated the street A-Train would take.”
A senior technical supervisor, wearing black-rimmed glasses, swallowed with difficulty and then stood up trembling, clutching a comparative report that had just been printed.
“Ms.
Stillwell…
the preliminary results of facial recognition and skeletal structure scanning…
are available.” The technical supervisor said fearfully: “The system indicates…
that this person appears to be Soldier Boy.”
“What did you say?” The hand holding the coffee cup froze in mid-air.
“By comparing with Vought International’s top-secret database…” The technical supervisor wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, his voice growing more desperate, “Bone density, muscle contour, gait analysis, plus facial grid capture…
the accuracy rate reaches 99%.”
Madelyn Stillwell’s face, always impeccable and with an elegant mask, briefly contorted at that moment.
“Ridiculous!” she shouted, slamming the coffee cup on the table.
“What kind of joke are you playing on me?
Could it be some extreme fan doing cosplay?
Or a superhero with shape-shifting abilities?”
“The former is impossible, ma’am.” The technical supervisor showed a high-definition image, paused it, and zoomed in; on the screen was Benjamin’s cold, impassive face.
“Even with the most perfect cosplay or metamorphosis, it’s impossible for the interpupillary distance and the texture of the dermal micro-expressions to be exactly the same.
And more importantly…”
The technical supervisor’s voice carried a hint of disbelief and fear: “If compared to the photo from forty years ago in the database…
he hasn’t aged.”
In the risk control room, there was a deathly silence.
An expression of astonishment appeared on Madelyn Stillwell’s face.
She stared wide-eyed at the man on the screen, her breathing quickened, and her chest heaved violently.
“Impossible…
this is absolutely impossible!” Madelyn Stillwell screamed inwardly.
As a key executive of Vought International, she knew very well about that dark past from forty years ago that had been completely erased.
Wasn’t that man, the first-generation superhero leader who once represented the American spirit and enjoyed absolute prestige at Vought International, kidnapped by the Soviet Union long ago?
At that time, to support a new generation of fully controllable superheroes and to pave the way for Homelander, who was about to grow up in the laboratory, the then CEO, Stan Edgar, personally orchestrated that betrayal.
In secret, they turned Payback against him, allowing those members who used to be bullied by Soldier Boy to join forces with Black Noir, who was at the peak of his combat power at that time, to set a deadly trap.
They used Soldier Boy as political currency and a test subject, secretly selling him to the KGB of the Soviet Union.
And they announced to the whole world the lie that he had died heroically while preventing a nuclear leak.
More than thirty years had passed.
Madelyn Stillwell had assumed that Soldier Boy had long been trapped in a cold underground experimental base in Siberia, with no chance of ever getting out.
Who would have thought…
he would manage to escape alive from the Soviet cage?!
And he returned to the United States, returned to New York, and with an overwhelming and unparalleled posture, crippled a member of The Seven right under Vought International’s nose!
This was a slap in the face, and it was revenge!
“Listen up!” Madelyn Stillwell took a deep breath and said: “Immediately block all news related to the Brooklyn streets!
Delete the cloud data!
Send the highest-level PR gag order to everyone present today, including that damn couple!”
“We must inform Homelander!
Tell Homelander to stop everything he’s doing immediately, take all the other members of The Seven, activate maximum authority…
and go capture Soldier Boy for me!
Dead or alive!” Madelyn Stillwell said through gritted teeth.
She didn’t know…
that at that very moment, in front of the floor-to-ceiling window on an upper floor of Vought Tower, her pride and joy, Homelander, had just hung up the phone with that man and was on the verge of a mental breakdown, his worldview completely shattered.