The news of the Deep being sidelined spread quickly within The Seven.
Although there was no official announcement, the Deep’s name vanished from all core activities on the next day’s schedule.
In its place was a series of ocean charity tours, aquarium ribbon-cuttings, and voiceover recordings for environmental documentaries.
It was packed so tight that anyone who didn’t know better would think the Deep was incredibly popular, but in reality, his sphere of activity had already moved away from the core area.
He had essentially been banished to the fringes of power.
Ashley’s execution was fast enough, at least.
Lucas stood in front of the French windows of Vought Tower, watching the Deep walk out of the lobby carrying a suitcase and get into a black business van.
Before getting into the car, the Deep looked up at the tower.
His eyes were filled with resentment and regret.
[The Deep — Emotion Change: Humiliation/Resentment/Fear]
[Evolution Points Obtained: +312]
He’s been humiliated to this extent, and he only contributed this few emotion points?
This Deep is indeed a useless piece of trash!
...
Over the next two days, Lucas’s life settled back into a stable rhythm.
By day, he dealt with the Supe crimes assigned by Vought, and by night, he played the friendly neighborhood hero of Brooklyn.
His Evolution Points grew steadily.
Current Evolution Points: 63,541 / 100,000
Lucas scrolled through the list of key characters on his panel.
The list of contacted individuals was growing longer: Hughie, Homelander, Queen Maeve, A-Train, Madelyn, Ashley, and Starlight.
In the uncontacted list, several names were still grayed out and would not trigger for the time being.
But one name caught Lucas’s attention.
[Billy Butcher — Status: Active, currently investigating Vought]
[Estimated Contact Window: Within three days]
Butcher.
The most dangerous ordinary human in the world of The Boys.
Because his wife was violated by Homelander, he hated all superpowered individuals.
He was paranoid and crazed, willing to drag the entire world down with him just to eliminate Supes.
Lucas didn’t think he would be an exception; he actually wanted to be a good person.
But Butcher wouldn’t care about any of that—he’d wipe them all out!
"Guardian! Found you at last, brother!"
A voice came from the end of the hallway.
The voice sounded warm and full of goodwill—he must be a good person!
Lucas looked over, and sure enough... it was Homelander!
Homelander stood at the other end of the hallway, hands behind his back, his cape draping down to his ankles.
So elegant, peaceful, and gentlemanly.
Lucas glanced around and noticed that the hallway’s surveillance camera had been broken for three days, and no one had come to fix it yet.
Quite a coincidence!
"Haven’t seen you in a while, bro. Where have you been making your fortune lately?" Lucas asked with a smile.
Homelander smiled as well.
"Just did a few promotional gigs, running around all over the place. But after getting back, I heard you had the Deep reassigned?"
"I can’t reassign members of The Seven. That was Edgar’s order."
"But you made the suggestion, and Edgar thought you were right!"
Homelander tilted his head and said seriously, "The Deep is a member of The Seven. Even if something happens, it should be up to me to decide. Do you understand?"
"Oh, I understand, I understand!"
Lucas made an OK gesture, indicating he got it.
"So next time..."
"Next time, I’ll do it again!"
Homelander, thinking he had reached an understanding with Lucas, was about to shake his hand, but stopped halfway as the words finally registered.
What did he just say?
"Listen, bro, keeping someone like the Deep around you is not a good thing. Think about it, if he gets horny one day and decides to screw a couple of fans... of course..."
"...screwing fans is normal enough, but this kid is not careful at all. If it gets leaked, wouldn’t you, as the leader of The Seven, have to take the fall?"
Homelander was about to speak, but Lucas cut him off.
"What is your current approval rating?"
"Nine... ninety..."
"Do you want to raise your public approval rating?"
Homelander was stunned.
He had clearly come to demand answers, so how had he ended up being the one interrogated?
To Lucas’s question, Homelander had only one answer.
Of course he did!
He dreamed of raising his approval rating.
He wished all billions of people in the world would cheer ’Long live Homelander’ every single day.
If there was even a single negative comment under his account, he would feel miserable all day, and even want to crawl through the internet to chop off all ten of that commenter’s fingers.
"You, with an approval rating under seventy percent, want to teach me how to play social media? Nobody knows social media better than me!"
Homelander was utterly disdainful.
No matter how bad he might be at it, he was still the patriot, the savior in the eyes of the public.
How could a newcomer be qualified to lecture him!
"Brother, that’s not how you should think about it. Sure, my approval rating is only seventy percent, but have you considered how many days it took me to achieve this? Has it even been a week?"
"When you first debuted, did you have a seventy percent approval rating in your first week?"
Homelander froze upon hearing this; he was actually stumped.
When he first debuted, he had indeed faced quite a few obstacles, with many people feeling worried about his existence.
Vought had spent a long time building his image back then, requiring constant polling and fine-tuning...
In short, it took him over half a year to reach a seventy percent approval rating.
And to reach ninety percent, it took even longer—at least several years.
"That’s not important..."
"It is extremely important!"
Lucas didn’t give Homelander time to react. He knew Homelander’s understanding of public opinion had always been quite limited.
What was Homelander’s method of controlling public opinion in the original show? High-handed tactics.
He actually ended up creating a concentration camp for speech, throwing anyone who spoke against him into prison.
"Your current approval rating has hit a bottleneck. People have grown accustomed to your presence, and you can’t pull off any new tricks. If you want to convert bystanders into fans and raise your approval rating, you have to give them something new!"
What is the biggest taboo in the internet age? Having no bottom line? Clickbaiting?
Neither.
It’s running out of gimmicks.
No gimmicks means you’re dead. No, actually, it’s worse than being dead!
If Homelander were to drop dead right now, his approval rating might actually shoot up even higher.
"W-what kind of new things?"
Homelander wasn’t easily fooled, but he was willing to listen to Lucas for now to see what brilliant ideas he had.
"Take the Deep’s situation this time, for example. Vought’s usual PR tactic is to suppress the story, which only treats the symptoms and not the root cause. The internal issues of The Seven have always been there."
"Garbage like A-Train and the Deep... they never deserved to be in this team in the first place. Sure, they are obedient, but if they suddenly pull off some major disaster, they will drag you down sooner or later..."
"When that time comes, forget about raising your approval rating; even maintaining your current level will be extremely difficult!"
Homelander curled his lip. "Alarmist talk. Do you think Vought’s PR department is useless? Look at A-Train’s incident—wasn’t that resolved perfectly?"
Lucas immediately took out his phone and showed his comment section to Homelander.
Three seconds after reading it, Homelander turned red with rage.
Because the comment section was filled with people criticizing Vought for being overly commercialized and calling the inside of The Seven a complete mess.
The spearhead was pointed directly at A-Train. Not everyone could be fooled by PR tactics.
Netizens’ immunity to BS was increasing day by day, and those formulaic whitewashing methods had long stopped working.
Some even went so far as to call Homelander the biggest cancer of them all because of this.
Since he was the leader of The Seven, if the members had issues, could he, the leader, really be completely clean and untainted?
"Fake! It’s all fake!" Homelander clenched his fist, directly crushing Lucas’s cheap phone into pieces.