[Target detected: A-Train.]
[Status: Substance dependency, power decline anxiety.]
[Defense break possible.]
The icy system prompt faded from Lynn’s mind.
His gaze fell calmly on the man frantically cleaning up the glass shards.
Eddie, the resident speedster of The Seven, known as “A-Train.”
He was the fastest man alive.
But what Lynn’s super-hearing caught was a very different story.
A-Train’s heart was beating like a metronome gone haywire, wildly fluctuating between insanely fast and completely erratic.
His breathing was shallow and frantic, and when he bent over, the bones in his knee gave a faint, abnormal grinding noise.
This wasn’t the physical condition of an elite athlete.
It was more like an engine pushed far past its limits, on the verge of blowing itself apart.
People were filing out of the conference room.
As Starlight brushed past Lynn, she threw him a complicated look, seemingly unsettled by the earlier confrontation in the meeting.
Lynn merely gave a subtle nod, his focus remaining squarely on A-Train.
Sensing Lynn’s stare, A-Train hastily let the cleaning robot handle the rest of the mess, then walked toward the door with a dark expression.
He didn’t like Lynn.
Not one bit.
Where did this shrink even come from?
What gave him the right to sit in The Seven’s conference room?
How had he gotten Homelander to treat him with actual regard?
In A-Train’s eyes, Lynn’s very presence was an insult to the status of The Seven.
As he passed Lynn, he halted.
“What are you looking at?” A-Train asked, hostility dripping from his voice.
“Nothing,” Lynn replied.
“Is that so?” A-Train sneered.
The next second, he vanished from his spot.
A powerful gust swept over Lynn.
Using the speed he prided himself on, A-Train looped around Lynn before reappearing right in front of him, less than half a meter away.
It was his signature move to flex his dominance, usually enough to give an ordinary person a heart attack.
“You gonna analyze me too, Doc?” He leaned in close with a contemptuous smirk.
“Or can you only kiss Homelander’s ass?”
Lynn’s expression didn’t flicker.
With his newly enhanced hearing and heightened neural reaction speed, A-Train was fast, but far from uncatchable.
He could clearly hear every step: A-Train’s left foot landed a fraction of a microsecond heavier than his right—an involuntary compensatory habit to mask a knee injury.
“It’s not that you’re running too fast,” Lynn said calmly.
A-Train’s smile froze.
Lynn looked him dead in the eye, pronouncing every word with deliberate clarity.
“It’s that you’re barely able to run anymore.”
The words cut into A-Train like a red-hot blade, stabbing straight into his deepest, darkest nightmare.
His prized speed—everything he relied on to keep his status—was fading.
It was a secret he could never allow anyone to discover.
“What the fuck did you just say?” A-Train’s face flushed crimson, fury practically bursting from his eyes.
Ignoring the curse, Lynn delivered a deeper diagnosis in a tone that was calmly brutal.
“You’re not afraid of losing a race.”
“You’re afraid that one day, when a newcomer steps up, the crowd will realize you can’t even outrun your own persona anymore.”
[Mild emotional volatility detected in target ‘A-Train’!]
[Defense-Break Points +15!]
[Reward: Neural Reaction Speed Fragment × 1.]
A cool sensation immediately rippled through Lynn’s nervous system.
The lag between his mind and body seemed to collapse, and the world around him appeared to slow to half speed.
A-Train’s composure shattered completely.
Lynn’s words had torn away every layer of his disguise.
What he feared most wasn’t losing.
It was being forgotten, replaced, discarded as a washed-up joke who couldn’t run anymore.
A-Train roared and unleashed his speed once more.
This time, he moved faster, more wildly than before.
Like a blue cannonball, he rocketed back and forth across the corridor around Lynn, kicking up sharp sonic booms and suffocating gales, attempting to crush Lynn’s nerves with sheer brute force.
He wanted to see Lynn terrified, begging for mercy.
Yet Lynn merely stood at the eye of the storm, his face entirely unruffled.
The moment A-Train flashed to his left, Lynn spoke up.
His voice wasn’t loud, but it pierced the howling gale like a bullet.
“Your left knee is half a beat behind.”
*Screeech!*
Blasting along at high speed, A-Train slammed the brakes, his shoes screeching against the polished floor as he skidded to a halt a few meters away.
He stared at Lynn in utter disbelief, his anger transformed into pure shock.
Because Lynn was right.
His left knee had an old injury; whenever he used Compound V to force his speed higher, there was a brief lag.
That was a detail Vought’s most precise instruments might not even pick up.
And this shrink had seen right through it with his bare eyes.
In that instant, all of A-Train’s pride and rage collapsed into naked terror at being completely exposed.
He shot Lynn a panicked look, unable to utter a single word, before spinning around and sprinting down the adjoining hall, vanishing around the corner.
Lynn’s super-hearing clearly tracked his fleeing footsteps.
He heard A-Train duck into an empty utility closet, followed by the rustle of clothing, and then the muffled squelch of a needle penetrating flesh.
Lynn’s eyes chilled.
Compound V.
Just as he made to follow, a figure stepped out from the side, blocking his path.
It was Queen Maeve.
She was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, having quietly watched the entire scene from start to finish.
Her gaze lingered in the direction A-Train had vanished, a mocking smirk playing at the corner of her lips.
Then she looked at Lynn and spoke dryly.
“Leave him be.”
“Nobody in this place is clean.”