Night enveloped Queens.
Outside the window, the occasional wail of a siren echoed from the streets.
Zack Vance sat cross-legged on the Persian rug in his living room, a black wireless controller clutched in his hand.
On the television screen, the flashy combo effects of a fighting game flickered.
Thudding impacts of fist meeting flesh and the exaggerated roars of the game’s announcer blared from the speakers.
The events of the day had drained too much of his energy.
Butcher’s wolf-like probing, along with warnings from the dark web about Vought International beginning to search this airspace, weighed heavily on his chest like two massive stones.
He needed something to distract himself, to loosen his tightly wound nerves.
A faint disturbance in the air draft came from the balcony.
Right after, the sound of high-heeled combat boots stepping onto the hardwood floor echoed behind him.
A gust of chilly, stratospheric air mixed with a hint of expensive perfume silently invaded the living room.
Zack didn’t look back.
His eyes remained locked on the screen, thumbs flicking rapidly across the joystick and buttons as he controlled the fighter on the screen to unleash a beautiful aerial juggle combo.
“K.O.!”
A massive victory message popped up on the screen.
Zack let out a long breath before putting down his controller and turning around.
Joanne stood behind the sofa.
Today, she wasn’t wearing her flashy star-spangled suit.
Instead, she had changed into a gray turtleneck sweater and slim-fitting black trousers.
This casual, domestic outfit softened her divine aura, making her look more like a tired young girl who had just gotten off work.
Her gaze was fixed on the television screen, which was currently playing the post-match victory screen.
Her deep blue eyes held a condescending scrutiny, mixed with a faint, imperceptible curiosity.
“Is this the foolish toy you mortals use to kill time?” Joanne’s voice carried her usual arrogance.
“Controlling a few fake pixelated figures to beat each other up just to get a pathetic sense of achievement?”
Zack stood up from the rug, walked over to a nearby storage cabinet, and picked up a spare controller.
He tossed it twice in his hand.
“This is called e-sports—or rather, a way to decompress and temporarily forget the reality of life’s bullshit.” Zack looked at her smug expression, a smirk playing at the corner of his mouth.
“What’s the matter?
The all-powerful, number-one hero of Vought thinks a button-mashing game like this is too simple to deign to play?”
Joanne let out a cold snort.
She bypassed the sofa and sat directly down on the rug, her legs casually crossed.
She held out a hand, palm up.
“Give me that plastic shell.
I’ll show you that whether in reality or inside that glowing box, I can crush you into pieces.”
Zack handed the controller over, offering a casual warning.
“The plastic shell on this thing is very fragile.
The joystick won’t survive the kind of grip you use to crush bulletproof glass.
If it breaks, your midnight snack tonight is canceled.”
Joanne rolled her eyes and gripped the bulky controller with some awkwardness.
She looked down at the cluster of buttons, her brow furrowing slightly as if evaluating this completely illogical layout.
The game restarted.
The two selected their characters.
Zack chose an agile ninja, while Joanne took a liking to a heavily muscled, destructive-looking heavy brawler.
“You can move as soon as the countdown ends.
The left side controls movement, and the four buttons on the right are for punches and kicks.
You can combine them to perform skills,” Zack explained the rules simply.
“Are you ready?”
“Shut up, cut the crap.”
Joanne’s gaze locked onto the screen.
The moment the word “Fight!” flashed, her fingers pressed down heavily.
On the screen, her heavy brawler took a clumsy leap forward, throwing a completely meaningless heavy punch at empty air.
Zack didn’t hold back.
Sliding his thumb in a half-circle on the D-pad, his ninja instantly transformed into an afterimage—slide tackle, launch, aerial combo.
The sequence was smooth as running water.
Joanne’s character was kicked back and forth in mid-air like a punching bag, her health bar draining at a visible rate.
“Round one.
You’re dead.” Zack set down his controller and picked up his glass of water, taking a sip.
Joanne froze.
She stared at the fallen character on the screen, then down at the plastic controller in her hands.
A trace of confusion flashed through her deep blue eyes.
In the first twenty years of her life, the concept of “failure” had never existed.
Whether facing mutants or terrorists, she only needed to spare them a glance to reduce them to ashes.
“That one didn’t count.” Joanne gritted her teeth and sat up straight again.
“This character moves too slowly, and there’s a delay with these buttons.”
Zack set down his water glass, suppressing a smile as he hit the rematch button.
“Alright, let’s go again.”
Round two.
Five seconds in, Joanne’s character was cornered once more.
She began to grow anxious.
Her thumbs mashed the buttons in a frantic, chaotic frenzy, causing the controller’s casing to emit a painful groaning creak.
She tried to compensate for her lack of skill with real-world violence, but the game’s code only recognized inputs, not super strength.
The muscular character on screen flailed his arms wildly in place, leaving a gaping opening that Zack’s ninja exploited, finishing him off with an ultimate skill.
“K.O.!”
The system’s mechanical female voice echoed through the living room, sounding exceptionally grating.
Round three, a crushing defeat.
Round four, completely defenseless.
Round five…
As a succession of blood-red “YOU LOSE” screens flashed, the atmospheric pressure in the living room began to undergo a subtle shift.
The otherwise comfortable room temperature began rising at an abnormal rate.
The air grew dry, carrying a faint, subtle smell of singeing.
Zack stopped his button-pressing fingers.
He noticed that the poor plastic controller was groaning in agony inside her palm, hairline fractures already webbed across the seams of its casing.
Her breathing grew heavy, her chest heaving violently.
“This isn’t fair at all!”
Joanne suddenly snapped her head up, glaring intensely at the TV screen.
It was the first time Zack had ever seen such pure, sore-loser rage in someone’s eyes.
The skin around her eyes rapidly flushed with blood, and deep within her blue pupils, a destructive crimson glow surged forth like ignited magma without warning.
Blinding red light illuminated the dim living room.
The ambient temperature instantly spiked to a dangerous threshold.
Under the interference of the thermal radiation, static and distorted waves began blanketing the television screen.
The radar interface at the edge of Zack’s retina flashed a frantic deep-red warning.
[Current Emotion: Extreme frustration/rage/destructive urge.]
She was going to melt that television.
Just because she had lost five consecutive rounds in an ordinary fighting game, her fragile, twisted pride couldn’t handle it.
She was trying to erase all trace of her defeat by destroying the physical medium.
Zack’s mind raced.
A television worth a few hundred dollars didn’t matter.
What mattered was that if he let her vent her fury on inanimate objects now, the “civilian rules” she had just begun to establish in this apartment would completely collapse.
She would revert right back to being the high-and-mighty Homelander.
He couldn’t back down.
Zack paid no heed to the steel-melting heat emanating from her.
He leaned his body forward, reaching out with his right hand across the space between them.
*Smack.*
A crisp smack resounded through the living room.
Zack’s palm firmly and squarely slapped Joanne’s smooth forehead.
The force wasn’t great, but given the tense atmosphere, the sheer disrespect was off the charts.
It felt like hitting a solid steel plate; a wave of numbing, dull pain instantly radiated through Zack’s palm.
But the effect of this action was instantaneous.
The 2,000-degree heat vision about to erupt from Joanne’s eyes was snuffed out instantly, like a lightbulb unplugged from its socket.
The high temperature in the living room immediately dissipated.
The static on the TV screen flickered twice before returning to the normal game-over screen.
The air fell into a dead silence.
Joanne let go of the controller.
The shattered plastic casing dropped onto the thick rug with a dull thud.
She stiffly raised a hand to touch her forehead.
Not even a faint red mark remained there, but her expression was filled with as much utter disbelief as if she had witnessed the destruction of the Earth.
Turning her head, her deep blue eyes wide, she stared blankly at Zack’s hand, which hadn’t fully retracted yet.
“You…”
Joanne’s voice sounded dry, and even her usual lofty, oppressive pressure had vanished without a trace.
“You slapped me?”
In her mind, an ordinary person’s fists hitting her wouldn’t even count as a tickle.
But no one had ever dared to treat her with an action akin to scolding a child.
A mere mortal had slapped her on the forehead just as she was about to release her heat vision.
Zack withdrew his hand, subtly rubbing his numbed palm against his pant leg.
Looking at Joanne’s bewildered state, there wasn’t a hint of fear in his tone.
Instead, he radiated the sternness of someone frustrated by another’s failure to meet expectations.
“Damn right I did.”
Zack pointed at the half-broken controller on the rug.
“You can’t handle losing a game, so you want to smash the TV?
Is that how Vought’s PR department usually teaches you to handle setbacks?”
Joanne’s lips parted, seemingly wanting to counter with her “I am a god” rhetoric, but the faint, lingering sensation on her forehead kept her retort stuck in her throat.
The dark red warning on the radar interface quietly faded, shifting into a pale yellow that mixed confusion, grievance, and a trace of some strange, unfamiliar emotion.
“There’s a design flaw in this game,” she mumbled softly, lowering her head to avoid Zack’s eyes.
Her rebuttal was weak and powerless, completely lacking the world-destroying momentum she had displayed moments ago.
Seeing her look so much like a guilty, gaming-addicted teenage girl caught red-handed, Zack’s tight nerves finally relaxed completely.
“If you’re bad, practice more.
Don’t make excuses.”
Zack sat back up straight, picked up his controller, and pulled up the game’s character selection screen.
“One more round.
This time, I’ll pick the weakest character and play one-handed.
If you lose again and glare at me, I’m throwing you out of this apartment.”
Joanne snapped her head up, a stubborn, unyielding determination igniting in her clear blue eyes.
She scooped up the slightly cracked controller from the rug and slammed down the confirm button.
“Don’t look down on me!
I just hadn’t adjusted to the buttons.
This round, I am absolutely going to blast that ridiculous ninja of yours off the screen!”