Those words snapped him out of it.
Frenchie froze for three full seconds. A terrifying fervor suddenly erupted in his clouded eyes.
"My God..."
He sprang off the floor like a spring, kicked an abandoned gear out of his way, and lunged toward the equipment piled at the back of the secret room.
He yanked off a heavy, dust-covered canvas tarp.
He hauled out a portable X-ray flaw detector, pulling and dragging it.
He roughly plugged it in and aimed the high-frequency radiation probe straight at Translucent's torso.
Bzz-
The machine started up with a low hum.
The connected monitor beside it flickered twice, then lit up an intense, eerie blue.
A clear black-and-white skeleton appeared in the center of the screen.
The beating heart, the expanding lungs, even a mass of partially digested mush in his stomach. Everything was exposed in perfect clarity.
"Soft! The flesh inside is soft!"
Frenchie waved his arms in excitement and slapped the monitor's casing. "The carbonization only extends to the surface of his skin! All his internal organs are normal, soft flesh!"
The situation reversed in an instant.
Frenchie turned and rushed toward a heavy, army-green metal box.
Prying open the latch, he pulled out a block of C4 plastic explosive the size of an adult's palm and deftly produced an electronic detonator.
"The rectum, or the throat. Shove this little beauty inside."
Frenchie tossed the explosive in his hand, grinning with utter madness. "One press of the remote, boom! The soft flesh inside turns into a pot of thoroughly cooked sludge."
Lucian eyed the C4 in his hand coldly and cut him off.
"Too much noise."
Frenchie's movements halted.
"The walls of this room have ten-centimeter-thick lead plates sandwiched inside. They can block radiation, but they definitely can't stop the low-frequency vibrations from a C4 explosion."
Lucian walked over to the chemical storage rack, his gaze sweeping across rows of hazardous substances.
"Low-frequency sound waves will travel along the sewer pipes to the street. If Homelander turns on his super hearing, you should know how sharp his ears are."
Frenchie's hand stopped in midair, still holding the explosive.
Lucian's finger stopped on a black plastic drum bearing a huge skull.
The label had yellowed and grown brittle. Several lines of bold black lettering read: High-concentration industrial hydrofluoric acid.
He lifted the full twenty-liter drum of strong acid with one hand and set it down heavily on the titanium-alloy workbench.
The dull thud made Hughie's entire body flinch.
"Since the shell is hard," Lucian said, tapping the plastic lid, "we just need to wash out what's inside."
Hughie stared at the skull-marked drum of strong acid, his mind exploding with a boom.
He shot to his feet, his knee knocking over an empty metal bucket beside him with a deafening clang.
"No!"
Hughie's voice trembled badly. "This is too sick! We can't do this!"
The entire secret room instantly fell silent.
Butcher had been leaning against a load-bearing pillar. With his eyelids drooping, he strode toward Hughie. His heavy, broad-toed leather shoes slapped through the mixture of motor oil and standing water.
His broad shoulders were like an oppressive black wall, instantly blocking out the light above Hughie's head.
He seized Hughie's tie.
Butcher's arm muscles suddenly flexed, hauling Hughie clean off his feet.
Hughie's toes reached futilely for the floor, his face flushing red as he struggled for breath.
"Sick?"
"While you were getting ready to take forty-five grand in hush money and hide in some cheap apartment, clutching a photo and crying, those animals at Vought were sitting in a top-floor restaurant drinking chilled champagne, joking about the shredded meat of your woman."
Butcher pointed at Translucent on the operating table, his voice extremely low, yet carrying a bone-deep chill.
"The moment he opens his eyes, he'll crush your windpipe within five seconds. Then he'll spend ten minutes finding your dad's place and rip every inch of that poor old man's guts out."
Butcher let go.
With nothing supporting him, Hughie hit the floor hard, gasping for breath.
"This is called war, kid."
Butcher looked down at him from above. "This is a war fought without evening dress, stabbing each other in the mud. If it's too dirty for you, crawl back to your electronics shop right now and wait to be slaughtered."
Hughie braced both hands against the cold floor and bit his lip, unable to utter another word of protest. The cowardice in his eyes was torn to pieces by reality.
"Get to work." Butcher turned away, no longer looking at Hughie.
Frenchie put on a heavy military gas mask and pulled over an acid-resistant rubber hose.
He forced Translucent's jaw open and shoved the rubber hose deep into his windpipe.
The funnel was set in place.
The black plastic drum tilted.
Thick, pale-yellow hydrofluoric acid slid down the tubing without obstruction.
As soon as the pungent acidic fumes spread, the air throughout the secret room became scorching and painfully irritating.
Translucent, unconscious on the table, suddenly opened his eyes.
His eyes instantly became bloodshot, so red they looked ready to drip blood, nearly bulging out of their sockets.
The agonizing chemical burns instantly tore through his nerves.
He thrashed wildly, his powerful limbs clamping hard against the titanium-alloy tabletop.
He wanted to scream.
But he couldn't make a sound.
The concentrated hydrofluoric acid had already burned his vocal cords to ashes as it poured into his windpipe.
Only a leaking hiss remained deep in his throat. Masses of bloody bubbles welled from the corners of his mouth through the gaps around the hose.
Dense white toxic smoke blasted from his nose and mouth.
The acid triggered a horrifying corrosive reaction inside his chest cavity.
Hughie clamped his hands over his ears, squeezed his eyes shut, and buried his head between his knees, trembling.
Butcher stood where he was, expressionlessly admiring the gruesome sight before him, the corner of his mouth even lifting with a trace of cruel satisfaction.
Lucian stepped half a pace back, avoiding the splattering bloody foam.
The struggle lasted only a few minutes.
Translucent's thick arms fell limply, striking the edge of the table.
His once-burly shell began rapidly collapsing, its supporting internal skeleton already completely dissolved.
Scarlet bloody fluid mixed with scraps of internal organs poured down the operating table's drainage channels. The pungent, scorched stench was suffocating.
On the table, that two-hundred-pound body had vanished completely.
Only a few translucent scraps of carbon skin of varying sizes remained, their edges ragged and serrated, scattered amid the blood and filth covering the table.
Frenchie tore off his gas mask and braced himself against the edge of the workbench, panting heavily.
Butcher walked over, his gaze sweeping across the carnage on the workbench before finally settling on Lucian's face.
"You're one sharp blade." Butcher took out his crushed pack of cigarettes, tapped one out, and clenched it between his lips. "Just don't know what kind of wood you're used to chopping. You're pretty handy at this sort of work."
Lucian turned his head and looked straight into those hawklike, intensely aggressive eyes.
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