The Town

The car kept moving down the road.

Beneath its wheels ran a gray-white road barely wide enough for one person to pass. Trees lined both sides.

The Forest Sea was dense enough to film an episode of a wilderness survival show. As far as the eye could see, there were green leaves and black branches.

Ryan rested one hand on the steering wheel and called up his status panel.

(Name: Ryan)

(Superpowers: Laser Eyes lv3

Long-Distance Vision: lv3

X-Ray Vision: lv3

Steel Body lv3)

The panel looked the same as ever. Ryan felt the power flowing through him; crossing into another world did not seem to have weakened his abilities at all.

That put him considerably more at ease. Whatever happened, this enhanced version of Homelander's powers was what he would rely on in this unfamiliar world.

The Forest Sea outside reminded Ryan of home. Not Becca's home, but the one across the ocean.

There had once been plenty of trees there, too. People had called for environmental protection and for the rare insects and ecosystems in the woods to be preserved. Then development arrived.

Excavators flattened the dense Forest Sea. Cement and gravel were hauled onto land that had become a plain, where seedlings of steel and concrete gradually took shape.

A few years later, factories and high-rises stood there, and the sky was no longer clear. The elderly reminisced about the past and sighed over the blue skies they remembered, even as they enjoyed convenient buses and danced in paved squares.

If development came for the Forest Sea outside the car, it would probably meet the same fate, surviving only in people's memories.

Ryan let his mind wander as he drove straight down the road.

The road ended at a tree. Ryan stopped the car.

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