Chapter 7.2
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Despite having hundreds of ampules of serum in my hands, I couldn't simply inject them and permanently enhance my abilities. Even setting aside the standard testing every formula required to screen for potential defects, I needed to prepare for a genuinely unique experiment on my own body. And that was nothing close to simple.
A straight injection would give me only a temporary boost that would hit my system hard—my heart especially. For me that wasn't as critical, since I could correct even those kinds of consequences, but it still wouldn't be enough. I needed something far greater.
There was another method. Theoretically, any super could be strengthened by a transfusion of blood from someone more powerful. Patriot or Soldier Boy, for example, would work perfectly for that kind of enhancement—you could produce a new Queen Maeve or a new Noir. But that sort of boost wouldn't meaningfully change my position. The heavy hitters of this world would still be a head above me.
What I needed was a fundamental leap. A jump from being a tough and capable super who won fights purely through years of accumulated training, to a level that left the most powerful superhumans on the planet behind entirely.
Whatever Sage said, that was the only thing that could genuinely shift the balance of the world. A third force was needed—something to establish equilibrium and create a counterweight against the governments of the entire planet, all of them hungry to seize control of a personal superhuman army, and against superheroes who had developed a far too inflated sense of their own importance.
As for Patriot—I still had no hard evidence of his guilt, but the circumstantial case was mounting. His speeches seemed too vague as well. He promised good things specifically for supers, but in all his words, he hadn't said a single thing about the fate of ordinary citizens.
Besides, if the CIA and I turned out to be wrong, then a new power on the board would only strengthen Patriot's hand—and nothing truly terrible would come of it. A strong person and a real hero could handle the knowledge that someone walking the earth surpassed them.
But if we were right, and it was Patriot who had arranged that massacre to free that madwoman—then I needed an argument against that kind of power. I seriously doubted I was worthy of that role, but there was no other option. Running an operation like this on anyone else was simply impossible, and even doing it on myself came with a lethal risk.
Just surviving it would require going over every calculation ten times, running several experiments, and acquiring enough compounds to keep me from dying of shock during the changes. I was criminally short on time—Vought, the government, and Patriot were all already positioning themselves for open conflict, which meant every second counted.
So for the next two days I worked like a man possessed, making full use of the Vought laboratory that Patriot had "borrowed" and placed under his patronage for us. It was the same location as the raid—Sage had simply broken through the security system and somehow gained access to all of Vought's data without their knowledge. There was some blood to clean up and unconscious bodies to move out, but the facility itself turned out to be excellent.
It was actually fairly amusing that it was Patriot himself who provided me with the space and resources to run the operation. I didn't even try to hide anything from someone capable of hearing a leaf fall from a kilometer away—he simply clapped me on the shoulder with a smile, wished me luck, and clearly didn't believe for a moment that anyone could surpass him. I didn't have any particular plans to argue the point.
What bothered me most was that Vought had made no response whatsoever to our raid on one of their facilities. No news, no scandal, not even a call from Margie. After what had happened at Godolkin and with Brink, she had essentially gone silent—stopped talking to me entirely and stopped answering my messages. Sage responded to this with an amused remark that it was simply the calm before the storm, but knowing that didn't make me feel any better.
Sage herself was a remarkable person. She understood every branch of science better than any specialist and grasped the most complex principles from half an explanation. A genius in every sense—who, after my first rundown of the experiment, smiled and called it madness. Then immediately wanted to help me pull it off.
Only with her assistance was I able to compress what would have taken months into two days. Two days and nights without sleep, at the end of which only one small but enormously important step remained—the operation itself.
But before I could perform it, I needed to sleep, clear my head, and recover my sharpness—I couldn't afford a mistake at the very last moment. And to properly rest, I decided to go see Indira. After everything that had happened at the university, she'd been moved to another location, and she was planning to leave the country soon altogether—off to Britain, to Paul and Lily.
But when I approached the address—an unremarkable single-story house on the outskirts of the city—I stopped in my tracks, not trusting what I was sensing. My blood perception could feel everyone within several hundred meters, and I was recognizing a presence that had absolutely no business being anywhere near people I cared about.
I exhaled and expanded the range of my perception. Inside the building I found two people—one super and one ordinary human—along with ten corpses who had passed from this world a couple of hours ago. Which meant what waited ahead of me was a trap, built specifically for me.
Without a second's hesitation, I moved forward, gathering my power for a single precise strike. I opened the door, stepped inside, and walked directly toward the source of a voice I found deeply unpleasant.
"Finally, you show up! You know, for a hero you're awfully slow! I barely managed to hold myself back from starting the fun early. Barely," sang a pale woman with a scar beside her eye, draped across a soft armchair and watching me with hungry eyes.
The unhinged villain I had faced before had made herself at home in the living room. She sat directly in front of the fireplace, holding a weeping Indira—covered in someone else's blood—by the throat. The whole scene looked like something out of a surrealist horror film, and with every passing second I liked it less.
"Don't worry, I won't hurt anyone. We're heroes, aren't we? We're supposed to save people—especially pitiful little subhumans like this one." The woman's smile twisted. "Isn't that right, 'gorgeous?' Such pretty eyes wasted on some brown little freak…"
Indira was trying to say something, but the villainess had her throat in an iron grip, not allowing so much as a word. I clenched my hands, barely holding back the urge to simply detonate her skull. I could do that any time—but first I needed information. I needed to know what she was doing here and how she'd gotten out of prison.
"I'd strongly advise you not to do anything, unless you'd like your brain turned into paste. For me it would be easier than lifting a finger," I said in a cold tone, keeping my eyes on the woman while occasionally glancing at the television on beside her.
Patriot was on the screen, alongside, of all people, Victoria Neuman and the President himself. They were on some talk show, discussing the latest legislation on tightening control of superhumans and the upcoming congressional elections, sitting calmly at a table and talking. That was not what I was focused on right now.
"You can't even imagine what a pathetic little bitch he is in his personal life," the woman said, shaking her head and watching Patriot on the screen. "Seems so strong and unbreakable, so devoted to 'his' people—but I see right through him. For all his resemblance to some embodiment of our ideals, inside he's just a child nobody ever wanted, desperate for approval from anyone at all. Such a waste, isn't it? Oh well. At least the fun is about to begin."
"You worked all that out from meeting him in person? Shouldn't you be a little more grateful to your rescuer?" I asked with a smirk, fishing for information.
It was a weak attempt, but nothing better was coming to me in a moment this tense. Strangely enough, the deranged maniac took the opening and ran with it.
"Oh yes, Patriot saved me, slaughtered a few dozen government rats, and is generally for everything bad and against everything good," the woman said, rolling her eyes with a grimace. "That black bitch wanted me to pass that along to you. She agreed to release me and tell me how to catch you—but only if I ratted out our little blondie. I would have lied to spite her, obviously, but I'm certain she's watching us right now through hidden cameras. And that lunatic can make my life very difficult if she wants to."
"What?…" I stared at her in genuine confusion. The strange revelation had pushed aside my anger and replaced it with bewilderment, and the maniac was making full use of that.
"That's right. Sage only looks like an ordinary idiot. In reality she's far more unhinged than me—or anyone I've ever dealt with, for that matter. And trust me, when I say that, it means something. She doesn't want power, or fame, or influence—she just wants to burn the world down to ash and watch it burn. And she couldn't care less how many people and supers die in the nuclear fire of whatever bloodbath is coming. People like her never care…"
With each word she spoke, I moved closer, watching the madwoman's every move. I was registering every word she said and running it against my sense of her sincerity. But an unhinged villain was far from a reliable narrator, and making sense of what someone mentally unwell was saying was genuinely difficult.
"You know, I can read you like an open book," the woman said, tilting her head sharply. "You're trying to be something you're not—which is exactly why you can't truly change anything. You pretend to be so great and powerful, but what are you really? Weak in body and weak in spirit. So now I'm going to snap this little quail's neck and come for you next. I promise you'll die in agony. You'll be begging me for a quick death. You'll kiss my feet and beg for my mercy. Because you're pathetic—and you won't be able to kill me even when everything you care about is on the line."
Lightning crackled between the woman's fingers. Her eyes changed—the whites going black, the pupils blazing with electricity. I exhaled, looked at her hard, and answered with every ounce of cold fury I had.
"That's where you're wrong. I try not to kill anyone. But that doesn't mean I can't. I just haven't had the right motivation until now."
The smiling villainess didn't have time to understand what was happening. And since there was no exploding skull or blood spear, Indira almost certainly didn't understand it either. The woman's hands simply went slack. The awareness vanished from her eyes.
I had been able to control only a single drop of that woman's blood—blood saturated to the limit with Compound V—but it was enough. Even minor damage to the frontal cortex is enough to turn a person into an empty shell. Super or not, destroyed neural connections don't come back with regeneration.
One small jab from a tiny blood needle, and the villainess was gone. Only a hollow husk remained.
I crossed to Indira immediately and helped her out of the chair. She was still shaking and had her hands at her throat, which was already darkening with bruises—but fortunately, no permanent damage. I began trying to calm her, but she was staring past me at the television screen with wide, fixed eyes.
On screen, the President was in the middle of a heated back-and-forth with Patriot while Neuman sat smiling beside them. Patriot was looking directly into the camera. And there was something in his gaze that wasn't particularly heroic. Some unspoken threat. Some kind of warning.
"…Which is why I believe the superhuman control legislation is so necessary. We cannot allow any individual to walk into Congress or the White House and carry out a massacre. What if someone decided they wanted to kill any one of us? Who could stop a superhuman if they chose to destroy our country? And so…"
He was forced to stop. From seemingly nowhere, past every layer of security, a man burst into the frame—wild-eyed, wearing a shirt that bulged unnaturally over something underneath. Before his end, he managed to shout only one thing.
"Death to all Vought spawn!…"
Six shots reached him before he could do anything else. But a second later, the entire screen blazed white with a burst of flame—and the live broadcast cut out.
Indira and I looked at each other instantly. No words were necessary. We both knew exactly what we were thinking.
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