Front page.
Luke Vance put his phone on the desk and walked over to the panel simulating natural sunlight by the window, standing there for ten seconds.
The panel was displaying the preset color temperature for four in the afternoon, casting a warm orange light onto his shirt collar.
He returned to his desk and opened the real-time dashboard of the internal public opinion monitoring system.
The Deep’s keyword search volume had surged four hundred times over the past twenty minutes.
The topic tag had rocketed straight from outside the top two hundred into the top three.
In the associated dropdown metrics, the brand favorability index for The Seven was already being dragged downward alongside it.
In the bottom left corner of the page, a number highlighted in red flashed: *HL-001 Public Approval Rating Real-Time Fluctuation: -3.2%.* Collateral damage.
In the eyes of the public, The Seven was a single entity.
When one member ran into trouble, the trust rating of the others would inevitably be diluted.
He closed the dashboard, picked up the internal line, and dialed Ashley’s extension.
“Dr.
Vance, I was just about to look for you,” Ashley’s speech was twice as fast as usual.
“Madelyn just finished an emergency meeting.
The entire PR department is working overtime, and all seven of my lines are ringing at once—” “Does HL-001 know about the approval rating yet?” “He knows.” There was a distinct swallowing sound over the phone line.
“She sent a real-time data packet to The Seven’s internal group chat forty minutes ago, containing the approval rating fluctuations for everyone.” “Who do you mean by ‘she’?” “Madelyn.” Vance’s fingers tightened once around the receiver.
He hung up the phone, pulled up floor camera permissions from the security center, and typed *HL-001* into the search bar.
The real-time location refreshed after two seconds.
Floor 72, Private Floor, Zone C Corridor.
When the camera feed cut in, the corridor was completely empty.
Unnaturally empty.
There was a fresh black scorch mark on the wall, stretching from the middle of the hallway all the way to the fire hydrant box next to the elevator door at the end.
The sheet metal casing of the fire hydrant had a fist-sized hole burned clean through it.
Vance switched cameras.
Inside the elevator feed—a black screen.
The camera had been destroyed.
He exited the surveillance system and checked the operational status of the elevators on that floor.
Floor 72 had three dedicated elevators, one of which showed a stopped status, stuck between the 72nd and 71st floors with its doors half-open.
Someone was trapped inside.
Vance stuffed his phone into his pocket and pushed open his office door.
It took him twelve seconds to cover the distance from his hallway to the elevator bank.
When he pressed the up button, the adjacent elevator happened to arrive.
The doors slid open; it was empty.
He pressed 72.
There was no elevator music during the ascent, only the low-frequency vibration of steel cables pulling the cabin, echoing up through the soles of his shoes.
Thirty-seven seconds to reach the floor.
The moment the doors opened, a acrid burnt smell rushed over him.
Two-thirds of the light fixtures in the hallway had been destroyed by heat.
The remaining few flickered sporadically, casting erratic light over the scorch marks on the walls.
A sound echoed from the direction of the elevator lobby.
It wasn’t talking—it was breathing.
Two distinct frequencies of breathing.
One was rapid and frantic, interspersed with hissing sounds squeezed out from between teeth—the rapid hyperventilation caused by diaphragm spasms during extreme terror.
The other was deep and steady, every inhalation ending with a slight tremor as the chest expanded to its absolute limit.
Vance walked down the corridor, the broken glass from destroyed light tubes crunching beneath his shoes.
The sounds ahead didn’t change at all in response to his footsteps.
He reached the corner of the elevator lobby and saw the scene.
The stalled elevator doors were jammed half-open, leaving a gap about sixty centimeters wide.
The lights inside the elevator cabin were completely dead.
Only the lingering light from the hallway fixtures filtered in, cutting out a small, pale area of visibility inside.
Homelander stood outside the elevator doors, his body angled toward the interior, his right hand propped against the doorframe, fingers sunk deep into the metal.
His eye sockets were red.
Not bloodshot red.
It was the crimson of energy gathering at the edges of his irises, bleeding outward from the center of his pupils.
Dark red beams cast two tiny spots of light onto the interior wall of the elevator.
There was a person inside the elevator.
In a gray uniform, a man crouched in the corner of the cabin, hands clutching his head, his whole body curled into a ball.
The back of his uniform was soaked through, the sweat stain spreading all the way from his shoulder blades down to his waistline.
The hissing breath was leaking out from between his clenched teeth.
Homelander’s face was completely devoid of expression.
No smile, no rage, none of his signature tilted-head scrutiny.
Blank.
A face washed completely clean.
Vance had seen this blankness before; he had read about it five times in the behavioral logs.
Whenever Homelander’s emotional state overloaded past a certain critical threshold, all the muscle groups on his face would simultaneously cease working, entering a state of expression-freeze akin to dissociation.
Out of those five records, four had ended in murder.
Vance walked over, stopping about three meters behind Homelander.
“John.” Homelander didn’t turn around.
There was a tiny, subtle shift in his shoulders.
He had heard.
Vance took another step forward.
“That man is terrified.” “He should be afraid.” Homelander’s voice resonated from the depths of his chest, every word carrying a metallic, reverberating echo.
“Everyone should be afraid.
Especially the ones sitting online typing on their phones.” “Do you want me to be afraid?” Homelander’s fingers dug deeper into the metal frame, causing the steel to groan in sharp distortion.
“You’re not afraid.
You’re never afraid.” Vance walked up beside him, closing the distance to less than a meter.
The staff member inside the elevator let out a broken sound, something between a sob and a dry heave.
The intensity of the red light in Homelander’s right eye began to rise.
Vance didn’t look at the staff member; his gaze remained fixed entirely on Homelander’s profile.
He spoke.
“If you incinerate him right now, tomorrow’s front page won’t be about The Deep.” The pulsating frequency of the crimson light missed a beat.
“It’ll be about you.” Vance’s voice carried no pressure, no pleading; its volume was identical to when he sat in the evaluation room telling him, *Next time, see me here.* A well-trained neutrality.
“Your approval rating won’t drop another three points.
It will drop thirty.” The muscles along Homelander’s jawline twitched.
“And then what?
They’ll start discussing whether to keep you as the leader of The Seven.
Ashley will be replaced.
The new PR director won’t call you Homelander—they’ll call you HL-001.
Every single press conference will have crowd control barriers, with two rows of security forever standing between you and the cameras.” The red glow began to dim.
“If you kill him, you’ll lose a hundred times more than what that news story took from The Deep.” “THEN WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO!” The sheer volume of his voice caused a layer of dust to rattle down from the hallway walls.
The hissing sound from the man inside the elevator cut off into absolute silence—he had likely lost the ability to make a sound out of sheer terror.
Vance stood firmly in place, his back unbent, the fading yellowish bruise on his neck faintly visible above his collar.
“Let go.” When he uttered those two words, his tone was identical to a mother telling a child to put down a chipped glass cup.
Homelander’s fingers froze in the metal frame for the duration of a single heartbeat.
Then, with a dull thud of metal rebounding under structural stress, he let go.
Five deep finger holes remained carved into the doorframe.
Homelander turned around to face Vance.
The red light had completely retreated from his irises, revealing the washed-clean blue beneath.
His lips moved.
No sound came out.
Vance read his lips.
Three words.
*Don’t walk away.* “I’m right here,” Vance said.
The man in the gray uniform inside the elevator finally moved.
He stumbled out from the corner, squeezing his body through the half-open door gap, snagging his shirt on the jagged metal edge of the bent frame and tearing a strip open.
Scuffling footsteps dragged away into the distance down the hall, accompanied by muffled crying.
Silence reclaimed the corridor.
Homelander leaned back against the elevator frame, facing Vance with his back to the pitch-black interior of the cabin.
His right hand clenched at his side, loosened, clenched again, and loosened once more.
“You said you wouldn’t leave.” “I did.” “You didn’t lie to me?” Vance met his gaze.
The old injury on his neck tightened in the cold air.
“I didn’t lie to you.” Homelander stared into his eyes for a very long time—so long that the last flickering light fixture in the hallway finally died out completely.
In the dark, the sounds of their breathing intertwined.
Then, Homelander’s voice floated through the darkness, as light as turning paper.
“That number.
Minus three point two.” “Yeah.” “Someone is deliberately fucking with us.” Vance blinked once in the dark.
*Us.* He had used the word “us.” “You’re right,” Vance’s voice anchored steadily into the fabric of the dark.
“Someone is deliberately fucking with us.” At the end of the hall, the emergency backup lights snapped on with a loud click.
A surge of fluorescent green light poured in, stretching their shadows long against the wall.
Homelander’s face revealed no expression under the cold green light.
But he moved half a step closer to Vance, reducing the distance between their shoulders to less than fifteen centimeters.
“Help me find this person.”