The wind was as cold as a knife.
Lucas turned up the collar of his tattered jacket and walked along the base of the wall.
Helicopter searchlights swept overhead from time to time.
Sirens wailed in the distance, forming a cacophony.
He didn’t dare take the main roads.
Instead, he specifically chose to duck into dead-end alleys without cameras and fire lanes that reeked of urine.
Twenty minutes later.
He pried open a rusted iron door and slipped into the basement of an unfinished building.
It was pitch black inside.
Only a few slivers of moonlight leaked in from the high vents, illuminating the dust floating in the air.
Lucas slid down to a sitting position against a concrete pillar.
The cold sensation seeped through his pants onto his skin, helping him calm down completely.
“Hoo—”
He let out a long, heavy breath.
It’s good to be alive.
Although the feeling of being smashed into a pulp just moments ago was total bullshit, the vitality surging through this body now was real.
He closed his eyes.
A deep blue system interface appeared in his mind.
[ Available Free Attribute Points: 10 ]
“10 points.”
Lucas rubbed his fingers together in the darkness.
Too few.
Pathetically few.
Compared to those monsters that have tens of thousands, adding these 10 points anywhere would be like throwing a grain of sand into the ocean.
But he had to add them.
And he had to use them where they counted.
“Physical strength?
I can’t die right now, so no matter how high my physical strength is, I’ll still turn to ash if Homelander glares at me.
It’s meaningless.
Even if I add it to 100, at best, I’d just be at the level of taking a baseball bat hit without breaking a bone.”
“Mental Power?
This stuff sounds pretty mysterious; it’s probably related to resisting hallucinations or mind control.
But I won’t encounter those high-level psychic types early on, so I don’t need it for now.”
That leaves only Strength and Speed.
In all martial arts, only speed is invincible.
In this world where you could lose your life at any moment, running fast is more important than anything else.
“Add 5 points to Speed.”
With a thought, the numbers on the panel jumped.
[ Speed: 10 → 15 ]
A faint current of heat spread through the muscles of his lower legs.
Lucas kicked his legs, feeling his body become a bit lighter.
“The remaining 5 points…”
He hesitated for a moment.
“Add them to Strength.”
[ Strength: 10 → 15 ]
The heat flowed into the muscle groups of his arms and back.
He casually picked up a piece of rusted steel pipe from the ground and bent it with force.
“Creak.”
The steel pipe bent slightly into an arc.
Lucas curled his lip.
“Still a weakling.
But it’s much better than the shut-in state I was in before, where I couldn’t even unscrew a mineral water bottle cap.”
His current attributes were roughly equivalent to an adult male who exercises regularly and has decent physical fitness.
But in front of Supes, he was still an ant that couldn’t withstand a single blow.
The only way to truly become stronger was through that damn “Kill and Loot” rule.
“Kill a Supe with my own hands…”
Lucas muttered this to himself.
In this New York City, which is under the tight surveillance of Vought International, killing a Supe is no different than pulling teeth from a tiger’s mouth.
But it wasn’t completely impossible.
He closed his eyes and began to frantically search through the ruins of his memory for plot clues from the first season of “The Boys”.
“The bombing incident at the Mayor’s residence has just ended.”
“That means Hughie’s girlfriend, Robin, should have just been smashed into a bloody pulp by A-Train not long ago.”
“That madman Butcher is probably taking the surveillance footage from Vought International to the electronics store to find Hughie and trick him into joining ‘The Boys’.”
Lucas’s eyes snapped open, and a sharp glint flashed in the darkness.
Translucent.
The sleaziest pervert in “The Seven” who loves hiding in women’s restrooms to peep.
He was also the one who died the most miserably and frustratingly in the entire first season.
“Metacarbon Skin.
It can change the refractive index of light to achieve complete invisibility.”
“The skin is incredibly hard.
Even large-caliber armor-piercing rounds can’t penetrate it, and chainsaws can’t cut it.”
“Sounds invincible.”
Lucas sneered, fished a piece of gravel out of his pocket, and scratched it mindlessly on the concrete floor.
“But his weakness is too obvious.
His insides are just as fragile as any normal person’s.”
How did Butcher and Hughie deal with him in the original show?
First, they stunned him with high-voltage electricity.
Then, that French guy Frenchie came up with a dirty trick.
He shoved a high-explosive bomb into Translucent’s backyard.
Finally, it was Hughie, that seemingly weak and pushover electronics store clerk, who pressed the detonator.
With a “bang”.
The indestructible Metacarbon Skin became the perfect container for the explosion.
Translucent was blown into a shower of flesh and blood fragments, not even leaving a single intact bone behind.
“What if…”
Lucas gnawed on his knuckles.
“What if I were the one to press the detonator?”
According to the system’s rules, as long as he personally lands the “final kill,” he can 100% loot the ability, and it will be an enhanced version.
Invisibility.
Combined with the indestructible Metacarbon Skin.
If he could obtain this ability, his survival chances would increase exponentially!
In this city full of surveillance, invisibility is the ultimate stealth skill.
Furthermore, the enhanced Metacarbon Skin might allow him to tank attacks from some conventional weapons, so he wouldn’t have to experience the pain of being headshot or crushed into pulp every time.
This was practically a starter pack tailor-made for him!
“Target locked.
Translucent.”
Lucas punched the concrete floor.
But the problem is, how to find him?
Translucent is elusive; usually, besides attending meetings at Vought Tower, he’s just peeping everywhere.
Trying to run into him on the street is harder than winning the jackpot in the lottery.
“The only clue is Hughie.”
In the original show, Translucent tracked Hughie all the way to the electronics store where he worked because he discovered Hughie planting a listening device at Vought Tower.
Then, at the electronics store, Translucent was rammed through the display window by Butcher’s car, and the two worked together to stun him and stuff him into the trunk of the car.
“As long as I can find Hughie, or find that electronics store, I can intervene in the plot.”
Lucas’s brain spun rapidly.
“Electronics store…
electronics store…
what was the name again?”
He scratched his hair in frustration.
He really couldn’t remember those messy English names from the American TV show.
He only remembered it was in some neighborhood in New York.
A cold gust of wind blew in through the vent, picking up a few scraps of waste paper on the ground.
One of the tattered newspaper scraps spun in the air a few times and drifted down to land at Lucas’s feet.
He hadn’t paid any attention to it at first.
But on that newspaper, a line of bold black text, aided by the faint moonlight, pierced into his line of sight.
[ 50% Off Everything!
Brighton Electronics Store Anniversary Sale!
]
Below it was a blurry image, seemingly the storefront of an electronics shop.
Brighton Electronics Store.
Lucas’s pupils constricted sharply.
“Brighton…
Yes, that’s the name!”
He snatched up the newspaper scrap and held it up to his eyes, staring at it intently.
The floodgates of his memory opened instantly.
The image of Hughie wearing that green uniform, selling TVs to customers in the electronics store, appeared clearly in his mind.
“Talk about finding something without even looking for it.”
Lucas couldn’t help but grin.
He looked up at the dark vent.
“Looks like God doesn’t intend to finish me off just yet.”
Of course, he didn’t know that in the shadows of this world, that intangible existence known as [The Boys] had just gently nudged the direction of the airflow.
Everything seemed so natural, so coincidental.