I leaned on the balcony of my penthouse, watching the faint glow from Newark over the water.
Twenty miles away, everything had gone sideways at the port.
If I really listened, I could separate the noise—Triad submachine guns bursting in short, ugly spurts; Hughie Campbell’s shrieks, high and desperate; and Kimiko, just letting loose with those raw, animal howls as she ripped through her captors.
Of course Butcher and his crew found the cage.
And, true to form, they popped it open without a clue, just like always.
Now, they were outnumbered and way out of their depth, fighting for survival against a volatile, V-amped nightmare.
I didn’t stick around to watch.
I walked off to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and tried not to think about it.
I’m not their guardian angel.
I didn’t send Butcher after the Triads to show up and bail him out.
I sent him there to stir things up.
That’s what I needed—Butcher as the wild card, the chaos agent.
Sure enough, the emergency lights in my penthouse started flashing.
My encrypted Vought phone rattled across the counter.
One glance told me everything: building-wide alert, straight from Madelyn Stillwell.
CODE BLACK.
UNAUTHORIZED BREACH AT SECTOR 4 BLACK SITE.
ALL TIER-1 SECURITY PERSONNEL DIVERT TO TRANSPORT.
I took a sip.
Vought was losing it.
The Triad warehouse was a vault stacked with dirty secrets and disappearing money, and now a black-ops team had just cracked it open.
Down in the heart of Vought Tower, squads of corporate mercs were grabbing rifles and rushing to the motor pool and the helipad, ditching their posts to chase the Newark debacle.
That meant the fortress inside Vought Tower—the one room nobody ever gets near—was basically unguarded.
I left my water on the counter, my white tactical suit adjusting to my skin, and slipped out the front door.
No elevators.
I walked to the big central maintenance shaft, yanked the grating right off its hinges, and let gravity do the rest.
Sixty stories straight down.
Right before I splatted, I kicked on the gravity drive—dead stop.
Absolutely silent.
Landed on the concrete floor deep in Sub-Level 50.
The Pharmacy.
This was where they made Compound V.
Usually, you’d find top-tier security—scanners, lasers, and thirty commandos with orders to shoot anyone who looked wrong.
Not tonight.
Because all the action was in Jersey, only four unlucky guards stood outside the gigantic titanium vault.
Game over if they saw me.
I didn’t want to kill them—dead guards meant blood, forensics, and hours of questions—but I couldn’t let them spot Invincible robbing the place either.
I didn’t walk out of the darkness, not really.
I slid between human moments, slipping beneath their awareness.
To the guards, there was just a sudden gust of air.
Whoosh.
The first one never saw a thing.
One flick to the neck—out cold.
Second, third, fourth, all down in a blink, untouched, nothing broken.
Just nap time.
No IDs, no messy evidence.
Then I glanced at the security cameras.
Four in the corners.
At Mach 2, I launched four ball bearings from my pocket—shattered glass, fried the network before it even got a look at me.
Now I really was a ghost.
The vault loomed huge: titanium, three feet thick, coded lock, retinal scanner.
Didn’t have the code.
And I really didn’t care.
I sunk my fingers into the door—the metal bent like clay—braced, and ripped with everything I had.
The hydraulics wailed.
The hinges exploded.
I tossed that massive slab halfway down the corridor.
Stepped into the cold room, blue-lit and lined with glass cases.
Jackpot.
Rows and rows of pure Compound V.
Not the street stuff, not the black market vials.
This was the reserve.
The heart of the next generation of Supes.
I strode up, shattered a case with my elbow, and plucked out a handful of glowing vials.
“System,” I said.
“Convert.” Didn’t even bother to break them open.
The pale blue glow filled my eyes, and the System just slurped up that volatile energy, burning away the liquid inside.
Foreign Genetic Material Detected: Compound V (Pure Strain).
Conversion Successful.
5 Vials Absorbed = 25,000 System Points.
Felt good.
I grinned, grabbed more.
5 Vials Absorbed = 25,000 System Points.
Shelf by shelf, I wiped them out.
Not everything—I wasn’t here to torch the canon completely—but enough to really hurt.
By the time the second-tier alarms started howling, I’d drained twenty vials.
The interface in my vision was on fire.
CRITICAL CANON FRACTURE DETECTED.
Vought Primary Reserves Depleted.
Corporate Expansion Severely Delayed.
The Hierarchy of Power Altered.
Calculating Rewards…
Reward for Major Infrastructure Sabotage: 50,000 System Points.
I backed out of the vault, watching fat lines of numbers dance in my vision.
Total Absorbed V: 100,000 Points.
Fracture Reward: 50,000 Points.
Current Points: 242,500.
A quarter of a million points for five minutes’ work, all thanks to Butcher getting torn apart by a Supe on the docks.
The guards would wake up in an hour.
Stillwell would find the vault torn open.
Homelander would lose his mind, too much brawn and not enough brain to figure out who ripped off a titanium door without leaving a burn mark.
Nobody would suspect the quiet neighbor living on the 85th floor.
I lifted off, gravity drive humming, and floated back up the shaft.
Let The Boys deal with their bloody brawl.
I had my own plan—a bigger one.
Something they would never even see coming.
The long game is something else.