Intense pain.
It felt like someone was taking a rusty, dull saw and sawing back and forth inside his brain.
Lucas snapped his eyes open.
His vision was blurry patches of color at first, then gradually came into focus.
Gray walls, broken bricks everywhere, and that acrid smell of sulfur in the air.
He coughed violently, a nauseating metallic taste rising in his throat.
He spat out a mouthful of blood-tinged saliva.
“Cough, cough…
What kind of hardcore comic con is this?”
He braced his hands against the cold, rough ground, trying to sit up.
His fingertips touched a sharp piece of glass; the stinging pain made him sober up instantly.
Sirens.
Screams.
And the roar of helicopter rotors tearing through the air.
The sounds were too real.
Too real to be a dream.
He leaned against the wall, gasping for breath, his chest heaving like a bellows.
His brain began to frantically search his memories.
A second ago, he was still in his rental apartment, eating instant noodles while rewatching that hardcore American TV show.
On the screen, that blonde pervert wearing a Stars and Stripes cape was using Laser Eyes to cut people in half.
The next second, the screen went black, and he was in this hellhole.
“No saving a little girl, no getting hit by a truck, not even a death animation for sudden death—is the transmigration business this lazy these days?”
He cursed under his breath, habitually reaching into his pocket for a cigarette, but found nothing.
His clothes were a worn-out jacket, definitely not the pilled pajamas he had been wearing.
A deafening cheer came from overhead.
Lucas looked up.
The sky was illuminated by the fire in the distance, turning a strange, dark red.
Against that dark red background, a figure was floating.
It was about two hundred meters away, but that person’s attire was too recognizable.
A dark blue tight-fitting combat suit outlined muscle lines that were exaggerated to the point of deformity.
A huge, golden eagle emblem on the chest.
And that cape, printed with the Stars and Stripes pattern, flapping loudly in the wind.
What was most lethal was that face.
Blonde hair, blue eyes, styled in a meticulous slicked-back hairdo.
He was facing the dense crowd below, wearing a perfect smile so standard it could be measured with a protractor.
“Citizens!
You are safe now!”
The voice, through some amplification device, or perhaps just because of his astonishing lung capacity, echoed clearly throughout the entire block.
“Those terrorists who tried to destroy our beautiful lives have been brought to justice!
Vought International will always be with you!”
The crowd erupted into even more frantic cheers.
Some were crying, others were screaming his name.
“Homelander!
Homelander!”
Lucas’s pupils shrank to the size of pinpricks.
He felt a layer of cold sweat crawl up his back.
A chill shot from his tailbone straight to the top of his skull.
“Holy sh*t…”
He instinctively shrank back into the shadows, trying his best to hide behind a trash can.
This was definitely not some comic con.
That suit, that face so hypocritical it was nauseating, and that name.
The Boys.
The Boys.
A world where all the Supes were perverts, scum, addicts, and serial killers.
A world where the lives of ordinary people were cheaper than grass, where you could be smashed into a bloody mist by some asshole running at super speed at any moment, or have your skull smashed by a piece of ice falling from the sky.
“God dammit, are you messing with me?”
Lucas gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw trembling from the intensity.
If he had transmigrated to Marvel or DC, even as an ordinary person, at least there would be a superhero who would go out of their way to avoid stepping on an ant.
But in this world?
That blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy flying in the sky was a complete, overgrown man-child with an antisocial personality.
He could be smiling at you one second, and the next, he might just cut your head off with his Laser Eyes because you were breathing too loudly.
“Calm down.
Lucas, you have to calm down.”
He took a deep breath, forcing himself not to think about those images of guts flying everywhere.
“The script is wrong.
Usually, this kind of opening is supposed to come with a ‘ding,’ right?”
He patted his cheeks.
“System?
Old man?
Even a brain-dead chat group would do.
Don’t tell me I’m really just a zero-stat weakling, thrown into this meat grinder to be a background character?”
There was no response.
All around, there was only the sound of the wind wailing through the ruins, and the sound of Homelander’s nauseating speech in the distance.
Lucas gave a bitter smile.
Fine, since I’m here, I’ll just have to deal with it.
Step one: figure out when this is.
He pricked up his ears, carefully trying to distinguish the content of Homelander’s speech.
“…The bomb threat at the mayor’s residence has been neutralized…
those scumbags who tried to destroy the peace of New York…”
Mayor’s residence?
Bomb?
Lucas quickly flipped through the plot of the original show in his mind.
Season 1?
Season 2?
Or that f*cking Season 3?
It didn’t seem like any major plot point perfectly matched the “mayor’s residence bomb” setup.
This was more like a “PR stunt” routinely arranged by Vought International.
Create a villain, let Homelander solve it, then accept the worship of the masses, and incidentally boost Vought International’s stock.
But he noticed a detail.
While Homelander was speaking, although his eyes were looking at the crowd below, his peripheral vision kept glancing at a black SUV below.
Standing next to the car was a woman in a professional suit, as capable and efficient as a robot.
Madelyn Stillwell.
An executive at Vought International, Homelander’s “master” with the twisted Oedipus complex.
“Madelyn is not dead yet.”
Lucas made his judgment.
As long as Madelyn was still alive and could control Homelander to some extent, it meant the timeline was still in Season 1.
That lunatic created by compound v hadn’t completely torn off his mask and spiraled into total loss of control.
This was considered good news.
At least, there was still a thin fig leaf of “rules” in this world right now.
Just as Lucas breathed a slight sigh of relief and prepared to think about how to sneak out of this alley unnoticed.
A sudden change occurred.
“Boom—rumble!”
There was no warning.
Above the alley, a five-story apartment building, teetering from the previous explosion, finally let out a moan of being unable to bear the load.
The steel bars of the load-bearing wall made a tooth-aching, twisting sound, and then the entire wall collapsed like an avalanche.
A huge shadow instantly enveloped Lucas.
He looked up sharply.
What came into view was a precast concrete slab the size of two trucks, mixed with twisted steel bars, broken glass, and half a rusted bathtub, hurtling toward him at free-fall speed.
“Holy sh*t—”
These two words only had time to roll halfway through his throat.
Run?
Impossible.
The coverage of that concrete slab was too large, and he was just an ordinary person; his speed couldn’t even compare to Bolt, let alone in this narrow dead-end alley.
Time seemed to be infinitely stretched at this moment.
He could clearly see the rough texture on the surface of the precast slab, could see the unknown stains on the broken steel bar, and could even feel the gale pushed by the high-speed falling concrete block, scraping against his face like a knife.
Fear?
It was already too late to feel fear.
His brain didn’t even have time to secrete adrenaline.
There was only a deep, absurd sense of powerlessness.
“Is this…
a wrap?”
“Bang!”
A deafening roar.
Immediately following was the dull sound of flesh being forcibly crushed and destroyed by absolute mass.
“Crack—clatter—”
That was the sound of bones shattering.
Not one or two, but all the bones in his body were broken and pulverized by the immense impact in an instant.
Lucas felt like a tomato being stepped on by an elephant.
He first felt a sharp pain in his skull, and then his pain nerves completely overloaded and simply shut down.
He couldn’t hear anything anymore.
He only felt an irresistible force pressing his body down hard, like kneading dough.
Cervical spine broken.
Sternum collapsed.
Sharp broken bones pierced his lungs and punctured his heart.
He could feel warm liquid—his blood—gushing out from his eyes, ears, mouth, and nose; he could even feel the slimy sensation of his internal organs being squeezed out of his body by the immense pressure.
His vision plunged into absolute darkness instantly.
No life flashing before his eyes.
No replay of life’s highlights.
Only endless, cold nothingness.
So, this is what it feels like to be smashed into pulp.
In this world ruled by Supes, the death of an ordinary person is really just a “pop.” Not even a splash.
Lucas’s consciousness quickly sank and dissipated in the darkness.
He died.
Dead completely.
Not even a single complete bone left.
Darkness.
Dead silence.
In this abyss with no time or spatial dimensions, Lucas didn’t know how long he had been floating.
One second?
Or ten thousand years?
Just when he thought this was the eternal ending.
“Ding—”
A crisp, mechanical electronic sound, devoid of any emotional color, like the first bolt of lightning cutting through the universe, suddenly rang out in the absolute dead silence.