Sirens wailed.
They were three blocks away and getting closer—fast.
That shrill sound cut right through the ringing in my ears.
I blinked.
The adrenaline rush was fading, but I forced myself to scan the intersection.
It was just pure chaos.
Robin was gasping for air, crumpled on the soaked asphalt, hands clutching her chest.
Hughie hadn’t moved—still stuck on his knees, his mouth working soundlessly.
He kept looking from A-Train, who was a mess—groaning, half-folded in the gutter—back to me, eyes wide, absolutely lost.
I didn’t help him up.
I didn’t have anything to say.
People stood right at the blast’s edge, every one of them holding up their phones, ignoring the rain.
Those little red recording lights looked right at me.
My face was already all over the internet, spreading to the cloud before I’d even finished catching my breath.
Cops would show up first, but Vought’s cleanup team wouldn’t be far behind.
I needed to vanish—fast.
I glanced up at the storm-thick sky.
No big windup, no bending my knees.
I just flipped on the Viltrumite gravity and shoved the ground away from me.
The sonic boom blew the rest of the block’s windows to dust.
I shot upward so fast the rain stopped feeling wet and switched to a barrage of stinging needles.
I punched through the city’s layer of smog and left the sirens and the blue-and-red flashers behind, buried down in the concrete maze.
I didn’t slow down until I hit cloud cover.
There, I hovered, high up in the freezing air.
Below me, New York looked unreal, nothing but a giant, tangled circuit board of light.
I took a breath—thin, icy air—and my lungs just worked, no problem.
Now I needed somewhere to hide, somewhere out of sight.
And I needed to cook.
Off to the east, I spotted it: an unfinished skyscraper, skeletal and empty, smack in Midtown.
Sixty stories of steel, dust, and darkness—nobody up there but me.
I dropped down, landing on a wide, cold I-beam at the top.
Wind ripped through the open girders, howling, but honestly, it felt like nothing to me.
No time to think.
I brought up the blue System screen.
Current Points: 12,500.
No hesitation, no saving for tomorrow.
Power’s the only thing that actually does any work in this world.
I skimmed past the million-point god abilities and tapped the one that mattered.
Purchase: Soldier Viltrumite Bloodline?
Cost: 10,000 Points.
Yes.
Transaction Complete.
Points: 2,500.
Warning: Host physiology undergoing extreme overhaul.
Brace for integration.
No time for anything.
It hit before I could even lie down.
The first upgrade hurt—a lot.
That was nothing.
This felt like being shoved directly into the sun.
White noise exploded behind my eyes.
I hit the beam hard, whole body convulsing.
Every cell lit up, burning from the inside out.
I tried to scream, but the air in my chest vaporized—superheated plasma instead of lungs.
Blood burst from my nose and hissed away in the cold.
The heat pouring off me was unreal.
The steel I-beam literally started to glow, shifting from gray to a slow orange burn.
My heart didn’t beat—it detonated.
Thud.
The whole building’s skeleton shook.
Thud.
My muscles tore themselves down, breaking up and reweaving into something that didn’t feel human anymore.
Suddenly, I could feel my organs shifting, toughening, flattening out—ready to handle impacts big enough to wipe out a city block.
My skin pulled tight, hardening up into something that could take a beating from a bulldozer.
Then my mind just…
split open.
Memories.
Not just fighting.
Instincts.
The confidence—no, the arrogance.
Like, apex predator carved into my DNA.
I knew, deep down, I wasn’t the kind of thing that adapted to the world.
The world adapted to me—or snapped.
Pain kept getting louder.
And then it just stopped, all at once.
It wasn’t pain anymore, it was silence.
I waited, eyes closed, listening.
Reality wasn’t what it had been a second ago.
The wind was a song—currents drifting past, layer by layer.
Steel groaned and sighed under the building’s weight, the noise clear as anything.
Three miles off, a helicopter’s rotors thumped through the air.
I could hear everything.
I opened my eyes.
The clouds looked sharp enough to cut.
I could see droplets freezing to hail, miles overhead.
I sat up.
Turns out my body wasn’t even touching the steel beam.
I hung, floating, maybe two inches above it—gravity was for someone else, now.
I lowered my boots back to the metal.
It felt like stepping on wet paper.
If I didn’t make an effort to hold back, I’d smash anything I touched.
I rolled my shoulders, shrugged the remains of my jacket off, and walked to the edge.
Neon poured over the city.
All that light, all that energy.
Soldier Bloodline.
I wasn’t some punk brawler, not anymore.
I wasn’t the guy who dented dumpsters.
Now I was a problem that could wipe out blocks.
I flexed.
Looked down at my fist—clenched it—and threw a jab at the air just to see.
Bang.
A little sonic boom snapped through the sky, punching a ten-foot hole in the rain clouds.
My hand had thrown a cannon shot by accident.
I grinned.
Not a nervous smile—a real one.
Homelander was quick, sure.
He was strong.
But he’d never sweated in a fight.
Never had to bleed, never learned to adapt.
But me?
I had three decades of memory behind every muscle.
My body was built for war.
Time to see how much of a mess I’d made.
I stepped off the edge, just let myself fall.
Didn’t even bother flying, not yet—I let the freefall whip the air past me for fifty stories before catching myself just above a dark alley.
Nobody saw.
I pulled my collar up, shoved my hands in my pockets.
Then I walked out into the city.
I found a 24-hour electronics store on 7th and stopped outside.
Store was locked up tight, metal grates down.
But inside, a whole wall of TVs beamed news out into the rain.
I stood there, soaked, and watched.
It was everywhere.
Not the clean, polished Vought propaganda.
Shaky footage, all vertical and grainy, every jitter caught by a cell phone.
Each screen showed the same loop.
A blue blur rips through the intersection.
Me, standing in front of a girl.
That instant when A-Train crashes into me, crumples, bounces away like a toy hitting a brick wall.
At the bottom, the news ticker flickered in angry red: BREAKING: ROGUE SUPE ATTACKS A-TRAIN IN NYC?
A-TRAIN HOSPITALIZED.
CONDITION CRITICAL.
WHO IS THE ALLEYWAY GUARDIAN?
Then, a jump to some press conference in front of Vought Tower.
Ashley Barrett, their PR director, looked seconds from collapse under the lights.
Reporters fired questions from every angle.
“Vought International is currently investigating the deepfake video circulating online,” Ashley lied, deadpan.
Vein popping in her forehead, though.
“A-Train was involved in a high-speed pursuit of a dangerous superhuman terrorist and suffered a minor tactical setback.
He is recovering comfortably.” I snorted.
Tactical setback?
He was lucky to be alive.
I’d heard his femur snap and could’ve diagnosed his internal bleeding standing next to him.
But whatever Vought said, nobody outside cared.
The footage was everywhere.
Raw and real.
The System agreed.
A blue text box popped quietly at the edge of my vision.
[Passive Timeline Disruption Detected.] [Public Perception of Vought Fractured: +10 Points.] [Confidence in The Seven Damaged: +25 Points.] [Hughie Campbell Timeline Altered: +50 Points.] Small numbers, but they kept clicking upwards.
A steady drip of new Points.
Just standing up to A-Train hadn’t only saved a girl—it slipped a crowbar into Vought’s whole fake mythology.
Every time someone watched, I got paid.
I turned, saw my reflection in the glass.
Rain clung to my hair.
My shirt was shredded, torn by friction and the hit.
I looked like every other nobody.
But underneath, I could feel the Viltrumite blood humming.
I’d cashed in.
Now, I was a player on the board.
And upstairs in that tower, I knew exactly what was going down.
Stan Edgar would already be crunching numbers.
Stillwell would be panicking about stocks.
And Homelander?
He’d be staring at that video.
Seeing someone who didn’t flinch.
And suddenly, for the first time since his lab days, he’d remember what it felt like to be scared.
The hunt would kick off by sunrise.
Satellites, facial recognition, every Supe in Vought they’d throw everything at finding me.
Good.
Let them try.
I turned up my collar, shoved my hands deep in my pockets, and disappeared into the night.