Three weeks.
That’s how long I let the whole thing simmer.
Every Tuesday, right on the dot at midnight, there’d be a titanium cylinder taped up under a maintenance grate somewhere in the Hell’s Kitchen subway tunnels.
Every Tuesday at 12:05, I’d swoop down there, crack it open, crush the vial of Compound V in my hand, and watch the blue glow mix with my own blood.
[Passive Point Generation: +5,000 System Points] [Current Points: 32,500] It was slow work, sure, but I was inching forward.
A-Train was scared out of his mind, so he always made the drop on time.
But after a few weeks, I stopped caring about the points.
All I noticed was the silence.
Living with an Viltrumite Bloodline isn’t just about raw power.
It shifts everything.
It warps your view of the world.
You look down at New York from your glass box in the sky and you don’t see people anymore.
You see glass walking around, so easy to shatter you wonder how the planet hasn’t turned to dust.
Some days, I’d remember the version of me who was scraping together rent money.
The me with bruised ribs and hospital bills after that truck accident.
But that memory faded, swallowed up by all this alien power.
And the arrogance that comes with it, humming just below the skin.
It was like watching the last human pieces of me give up, day by day.
I was turning into a god, and there’s nothing lonelier than that.
Thursday.
Midtown.
A four-alarm fire ripped up a forty-story high-rise.
The NYPD tried to keep people back, and the fire crews just stared up, helpless.
The top floors were belching black smoke.
Windows shattered one after another.
I didn’t bother waiting for Ashley Barrett’s PR team or anybody’s blessing.
Honestly, I just wanted to feel something—anything.
So I dropped out of the sky, landed dead-center on a fire engine, and watched the whole thing rattle under me.
Firefighters flinched; a few nearly fell off the rig.
There was no time for camera waves or heroic poses.
I locked eyes with the chief, jerked my thumb toward the roof, and shot straight up.
I punched through the 38th floor at Mach 1.
The heat inside was insane—two thousand degrees, easy.
The air should’ve burned out lungs in a heartbeat.
Walls melted around me.
Steel glowed so bright it looked angry.
Fire crawled over my suit but there was nothing.
I closed my eyes and tried to feel it—just a flicker of adrenaline, some kind of danger.
Maybe a reason for my heart to race, prove I was still alive.
Still nothing.
The Viltrumite part of me was untouched, cool, indifferent to the flames.
It was hollow.
Maybe that’s what immortality is—just standing alone in the middle of a dying world, bored out of your mind.
Then I heard a cough, buried under the roaring fire.
I opened my eyes.
In the far corner, pinned behind a wrecked, burning beam, were a dozen office workers.
Faces streaked with soot.
Tears.
Terror.
The way they looked at me—it hit.
I was no savior.
I was some demon, standing calm in hell.
For a second something real, something raw, broke through all that Viltrumite cold.
I was wasting time, wrapped up in my god complex, while they suffered.
I bent down, grabbed the support beam with one hand, and lobbed it out the window like it was nothing.
“Hold your breath,” I told them, as softly as that voice lets me.
I yanked a server tarp off a nearby desk, draped it over the group, scooped all twelve up, and flew them down to safety, easy as picking up groceries.
Dropped them behind the EMT lines, turned, and jumped back into the fire.
Seven more trips.
Four minutes total.
Saved eighty-two people.
Not a single casualty.
When the fire was out, the news anchors looked two seconds from crying on camera.
A block away, floating where the air was clean, I spotted Homelander and Queen Maeve.
They’d arrived too late.
All they could do was watch while the crowd chanted my name.
Homelander kept his smile, but his jaw was clenched so tight I could hear the grinding from here.
His eyes burned holes right through me.
I didn’t feel humble.
I felt good.
Vindicated, almost.
I hated him.
Hated everything Vought stood for.
All their fake heroics while real people suffered and died.
Stealing Homelander’s spotlight started out as gaming the System, but now?
Now it was war on a false idol.
It was Friday night.
I sat alone in the dark penthouse, gazing out at the sea of lights below—a city full of people I no longer felt a part of.
I closed my eyes and let my hearing expand, stretching far beyond city noise, helicopters, sirens.
I tuned in to one Brooklyn block.
Popclaw’s place.
A-Train was up and running again—literally—thanks to my steady supply of V.
He was trying to hang onto his job, and, just like canon, leaning on his secret girlfriend to keep from breaking down.
Outside Popclaw’s apartment, I zeroed in on a sound.
Soft, repetitive clicks—a cheap keyboard inside a van.
Three heartbeats.
One solid and scratchy, smoke in every beat: Billy Butcher.
One smooth, steady: Frenchie.
The third?
Stumbling, wild, full of panic: Hughie Campbell.
He hadn’t walked away after all.
On day one, I saved Robin’s life—kept A-Train from turning her into a smear on the street.
But in that moment, Hughie saw everything.
He saw a god on drugs hurling toward the woman he loved, reckless, uncaring.
He saw the truth behind Supes—monsters with no reason to care.
And Butcher found him.
Fed his anger, turned that terror into action.
He didn’t join The Boys out of grief in my timeline.
He joined because he’d lived through it, held his panic in his fists, and decided never again.
“I got the cameras up,” I heard Hughie whisper, shaky but determined.
“We have visuals on the hallway and living room.” “Good lad,” Butcher muttered.
“Now we wait.
Fast bastard’ll pop in soon enough.” I opened my eyes.
The game board was set.
Butcher and his crew were about to crash into Popclaw’s life.
I could end it right here.
Fly to Brooklyn, tear out the hidden cameras, drop all the evidence in Butcher’s lap.
Save everybody from this turning point.
Prevent the blood.
But if I do, I break the story too soon.
Homelander never finds Popclaw’s slip.
A-Train never feels the pressure that pushes him over the line.
The big moment never happens, and I’m stuck—thirty-two thousand points and change, nowhere near what I need to survive the endgame in this world.
So I have to let Popclaw dangle at the edge.
I have to let A-Train’s terror grow.
Set all the pieces, and wait.
I stepped out onto the balcony, facing the cold night.
“Alright, let’s see what you’ve got,” I said to the wind.
I wasn’t a hero.
I was a farmer, and this story was almost ready for harvest.