Chapter 7.1
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Once upon a time, I genuinely wondered what it would feel like to stand among the greatest heroes in the world. To fight alongside them for something you believed was right. To save people from every kind of threat imaginable.
In my previous life, I couldn't have dreamed of anything like that. I lived quietly, without heroics, without anything out of the ordinary. A plain, ordinary human life—one of billions just like it. Which was exactly why I treasured every second of being a hero. Of being someone who actually mattered. Someone who truly deserved a second chance at life.
The first of us to arrive was, naturally, Patriot. He simply descended from the sky and drove himself through several meters of steel and concrete, then hovered there with a smirk, looking over the stunned Vought agents and assorted personnel. All they could do was stare up at the most powerful man on Earth floating above the floor and watch as the others began to arrive.
Second was Noir, who couldn't fly but possessed not only superhuman agility but extraordinary skill to match. He walked up to the thick metal door set into what looked at first glance like some abandoned warehouse, drew back his arm, and hit it hard enough to split the steel.
He tore out several chunks of metal, then punched through the gap in a single explosive burst. Noir tended to emphasize stealth and finesse, so it was easy to forget that in raw physical strength he was probably only outmatched by Patriot and Soldier Boy. Even I, Queen Maeve, and the escaped Thunderstrike didn't put up numbers like his.
Then I arrived. I didn't want to draw too much attention to myself, so I only went in once there was an opening. Shooting through the torn gate, I passed through it without any trouble. Blood wrapped around me and served as a second skin, which made things that had once been impossible feel almost effortless.
So when a dozen rifles swung toward me and opened fire, all I needed was the intention—and my body shifted in an instant, slipping away from every bullet. They wouldn't have scratched me anyway, but new tricks are always better tested in the field under real conditions.
Moving considerably faster than my old self, I controlled my own body like a puppet, scattering the entire security detail in under a second. When they tried to reach for those irritating sonic devices, a single thought was enough to send dozens of thin crimson needles flying into them.
Each one destroyed its target, but the blood didn't stop there. It answered to me completely—the moment it met a target and shattered into hundreds of drops, within a second it gathered itself back together and took a new shape.
That day I had decided to go all out. To put every idea I'd been sitting on into practice, even the ones that weren't necessarily the most efficient. A facility this important had a full complement of guards, which meant I had plenty of targets to work with.
Some were knocked flat by enormous red hammers. Others were caught in crimson threads that coiled around them and squeezed until they dropped unconscious. The guards' weapons crumbled to pieces when blood-forged bullets tore through them, and others simply came apart the moment they met my whip, which changed its shape, length, and angle of attack with every passing second.
I moved forward without stopping, paying the resistance no particular attention. Pushing off walls, running and half-flying through corridor stretches, I was reaching ordinary people before they could even bring their guns to bear. Not that it mattered much—none of their weapons posed any more threat to me than a child's toy.
Sage was the last to enter, moving at a leisurely pace and looking, frankly, like she was enjoying the show. Noir had already disappeared somewhere, and Patriot, judging by the sounds, was having a good time further in. Screaming and the crunch of breaking bones drifted back to me, but no new bodies.
Only when I swept through another group and knocked out a dozen members of the scientific staff did I finally reach the main laboratory—and stopped.
Dozens of people lay across the floor, groaning. Many of the reagent tables had been overturned. A hole roughly the size of a human body was punched through the ceiling. And there, of course, was the planet's greatest hero, carrying out his own version of a cleanup.
Watching Patriot throw people around and pass through steel and concrete like it was water, I couldn't help thinking of the photographs Grace had shown me. The massacre of special agents, carried out by some unknown super of immense strength who had left exactly this kind of destruction in their wake.
The question of increasing my own capabilities needed to be resolved as soon as possible.
"Not bad, rookie," Sage said, walking up and clapping me on the shoulder. I just nodded and kept watching the blond Superman work.
After scattering a dozen more guards in every direction and, by my estimation, breaking dozens of bones between them, Patriot drifted slowly toward a short man in a white lab coat who was looking up at the world's greatest hero without the faintest trace of fear in his eyes. Behind him stood rows of cages holding animals that were behaving in a way that was… wait, seriously?
"Doctor Shah, please don't be foolish. Be reasonable." Patriot was attempting to open a dialogue with the man, whose heart was hammering like a drum and whose pupils were visibly dilated. And his blood contained…
Without a word, the doctor simply screamed and flung his arm toward the blond man. Every metal object in the room launched itself at Patriot at once—enough force to knock even him, hovering a meter off the ground, sideways through the air. I managed to drop the man with a precisely placed blood hammer, but that wasn't the real problem—because the objects that had gone flying included the animal cages.
"Alright, now this is genuinely interesting," Sage managed to say before an enraged dog launched itself at her. Unlike an ordinary animal, this one was roughly ten times faster, stronger, and tougher than it had any right to be. It sank its teeth into her skin immediately, and only the crimson spear I drove through its skull stopped it from doing more.
But I had my own problem a second later when a maddened ram came hurtling at me at full speed, blew past me, and punched clean through the wall. Noir handled that one—he dropped out of the shadows, grabbed the ram by the horns, and snapped its neck with a single sharp motion.
I turned and swept the room with my blood-sight. Seven chickens hovering off the ground. A pig with flames pouring from its mouth. And one goose staring at me with a level of intelligence that had absolutely no business being in a goose. Taking it all in, my mind was full of only one question.
Why on earth did Vought get into this? What was the point? To use them as weapons against supers? Well. Perhaps it was worth demonstrating why even a horde like this was no help against a single strong individual.
I raised my hand, fixed my gaze on that bizarre barnyard, and took one second to feel every drop of blood in every body in the room. A second more to take control of it. And a single moment to finish the job.
A blazing red beam appeared as if from nowhere, sweeping through every animal in an instant and cutting them to pieces. I could still feel the blood coating most of the room's surfaces, but I had no intention of using it. It carried traces of the Compound V formula, but nothing like what I actually needed.
Far more interesting was the doctor, who lay on the floor with a cracked head, pretending to be unconscious. His blood contained some strange, clearly altered version of the serum, which had made his body considerably tougher than a normal human's. But the side effects were catastrophic.
He was a walking dead man who had only just begun to suspect it.
"Doctor, let's not waste time. We can simply talk through everything…"
Even when I crouched over him and began speaking, he didn't react. Fine. He'd asked for this.
I flicked my wrist. The man's body arched off the floor. His eyes snapped open and he let out a scream full of raw pain, then collapsed back down and stared up at me in dazed confusion. I stepped slightly to the side to give Sage room. She walked over with a smile, leaned down over the doctor, and began.
"Mr. Shah, you understand the position you're in? A criminal who conducted experiments on human beings and animals, many of whom died in horrific ways. Even if you had survived the legal consequences, the remainder of your existence would have been a very bleak affair. And yet you chose to take what you call… V24?"
"The side effects haven't been fully studied…" the man rasped, breaking off in the middle to cough—thick, black blood. Even without my abilities, anyone could have read that as a bad sign. A talented doctor and biologist understood it perfectly well.
"My friend here," Sage gestured toward me, "can attempt to save you. But first you need to hand over all documentation detailing the experiments and show us where every sample of the serum is being kept."
I stayed quiet with my arms folded, not wanting to interrupt our negotiator's performance. The man's condition was obviously dire, but I could see the full picture, and it was not good. This doctor was already dying, and even if I extracted the formula from his blood, the cellular breakdown had already begun.
He was a dead man walking who had only just started to understand his fate. But when he looked up at me, I could only nod in silence.
"I… I'll show you. I'll show you everything. I'm not to blame…"
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"Will this be enough for you?" Sage asked with a smirk.
"It'll be enough," I said thoughtfully, taking stock of what we'd found.
As best I could tell, V24 was still in development and not yet being synthesized from scratch—they were working from existing serum stocks instead. And since Vought had apparently become enamored with the idea of having pocket supers whose abilities depended on a steady supply of a proprietary compound, they'd been generous with the test samples.
The moment we stepped into the room, entire shelves and cabinets of small blue vials stretched out before us. Meanwhile, Patriot and Noir were somewhere behind us interrogating the doctor and collecting whatever documents they needed. Sage was supposed to be there for that too, but for some reason she'd come with me instead. And I somehow doubted it was purely to see my reaction to the collection.
The only strange thing was that we weren't alone in the room. That in itself wouldn't have been remarkable—except that I had knocked out every person in the area and knew with absolute precision where each of them was.
Yet the figure standing ahead of us seemed to not exist as far as my power was concerned. A complete blind spot. And his clothing was something out of a fever dream: wrapped head to toe in a black cloak with silver trim, hood drawn up over his head, with nothing standing out except an obsidian staff in his gloved hands.
He appeared to be searching through papers and examining vials with an odd intensity, muttering something under his breath. But when we appeared, the man spun around and fixed his gaze on us. A black-and-gold mask covered his face, and set into the center of his forehead was some kind of gemstone glowing with a soft violet light.
Looking more closely, I realized both of his eyes were giving off a faint light—but differently. The left was yellow, with an unnatural, animal-like slit pupil. The right looked like an empty blue vortex.
And… were those horns? Hard to make out beneath the hood, but yes—two long black horns, nearly thirty centimeters, were clearly visible.
"Hmm?" he said, sounding mildly surprised. "Ah yes, the 'superheroes.'" He paused. "Forgive me. I stepped onto your Page for just a moment and will be leaving shortly. I only need to…" He trailed off, then seemed to find what he was looking for. "Yes. These will do perfectly. What wonderfully curious things you create sometimes, hah. But don't worry—I intend to use them strictly for academic purposes."
He gave us an aristocratic bow, then fell into a thoughtful silence, tapping a gloved finger against his mask as he looked around the room. Sage and I exchanged glances. Neither of us had any idea what was happening.
About ten seconds passed. Then he swept his staff in a wide arc—and a dozen vials near us vanished. Without another word, he brought the staff down against the floor with a sharp crack, and simply dissolved into the air as though he had never been there at all.
Wait. Had someone been there?
I shook my head and pushed the strange thought aside, then got to work collecting what we'd come for. Getting all of this out of here wasn't going to be simple—but it would absolutely be worth it.
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