The night wind was cold and clammy.
Lucian pulled out his bank card and tucked it into his coat's inner pocket. With the hush money included, he now had sixty-two thousand dollars to work with.
He did not return to his drafty rental.
He paid cash for a room at a shabby motel two blocks away.
He pushed open the wooden door with its peeling paint. The air reeked of old mildew mixed with cheap disinfectant.
Lucian took off his bloodstained coat and tossed it into the trash.
He took a hot shower. The cracks around his shoulder blade were healing at a speed that defied medical understanding. His LV1 super physique was working steadily within him.
He leaned against the headboard, took out his phone, and opened a midnight podcast livestream called "True New York."
The screen was split in two.
On the left was a slick-haired, powdered host. On the right was an uneasy young white man.
"I'm Hughie, Hughie Campbell." The young man swallowed in front of the low-quality camera.
He was thin and wore a dark gray suit with a subtle pattern, his tie crooked. Behind him stood a row of convenience store shelves piled with power strips.
Nervous, he clutched the second button of his suit jacket with his left hand. His light-colored eyes were filled with exhaustion and fear.
"Robin... my girlfriend, she was standing right on the curb." Hughie's voice trembled slightly, carrying undisguised timidity and grief. "A-Train smashed right through her. All I had left in my hands were her two arms... but Vought International only sent someone over with a nondisclosure agreement. Forty-five thousand dollars for her life."
The host gave a perfunctory yawn. "Mr. Campbell, we're all very sorry. But the police report says A-Train was pursuing bank robbers at the time-"
"There weren't any robbers!" Hughie suddenly raised his voice, then immediately shrank back. "I swear I didn't see any robbery. I just want an apology... really, even if it's just one public 'sorry'..."
The screen suddenly flickered twice.
The livestream instantly went black.
A line of red text popped up: [This channel has been forcibly shut down for violating community guidelines.]
Lucian closed the app without expression and tossed his phone beside the yellowed pillow.
Vought's PR department worked fast.
Hughie was already in the game. That trench-coated, F-bomb-dropping Butcher would probably be knocking on the back door of Hughie's electronics store soon.
The Boys were about to take shape. A storm was coming.
Lucian closed his eyes, separating and piecing together the memories of his two lives once more.
The plot from his previous life. The opening of this one.
He focused on the place name that had flooded his mind during his awakening in the first chapter.
"Mercy Hospital."
That was where the nightmare of this life had begun. A welfare institution operating under the banner of charity, secretly wholly owned by Vought. He had been abandoned at birth, then sent there as a lab rat.
Those doctors in white coats had injected different batches of Compound V into his veins as though it were sugar water.
After Vought discovered that he had absorbed the drug without showing any reaction, they deemed him a waste product and dumped him in an affiliated orphanage to fend for himself.
Now that he had the system, he was certain he had devoured all that Compound V back then and converted it into the system's foundation.
To find out the limits of what this body could withstand, to discover whether the system had any hidden permissions, or even to obtain highly pure, undiluted Compound V.
He had to find that hospital again.
Lucian got up, opened his rusty laptop, and connected to the motel's intermittent public Wi-Fi.
He entered "St. Andrew's Mercy Hospital" on the dark web and several encrypted forums.
Enter.
Nothing.
There were only a few press releases from twelve years ago about Vought funding welfare programs, and all the addresses had been deliberately obscured. The deeper IP addresses immediately brought up red warnings from Vought's cybersecurity department.
Ordinary hacking methods could not even get close.
This was a black site erased both physically and online. To uncover its location, he would have to access Vought's internal S-class database.
Vought Tower in Manhattan was heavily guarded. One casual glance from Homelander could leave him without an intact corpse.
He needed an institution directly under Vought with lax security but extremely high network access privileges.
At the same time, he needed large numbers of superhumans as material to quickly max out his means of survival.
The cursor slid across the screen before finally stopping on a pop-up advertisement.
It showed a gold-and-red shield-shaped school crest.
[Godolkin University-shaping tomorrow's heroes.]
The only superpower university in the United States, a shelter for privileged brats and a star-making factory built entirely with Vought's money.
It had research-grade network nodes connected directly to Vought headquarters.
More importantly, it was packed with young superhumans whose powers were unstable, who were arrogant and overbearing, and who were exceptionally stupid.
A trace of coldness appeared in Lucian's eyes.
He opened the admissions page.
"This year's tuition has been reduced to an affordable $77,000 per year. Vought's 'Star of Hope' student loans are available."
Seventy-seven thousand bucks.
Lucian glanced at the bank balance he had just checked. Sixty-two thousand dollars was not even enough to get a foot in the door.
But he opened the student loan application without hesitation.
A loan like this was nothing short of an indenture contract, with graduates forcibly assigned to work for Vought.
He had no intention of graduating, much less paying it back.
He uploaded his excellent transcript from a Queens public high school. He filled in his background information.
In the [Superpower type] field, he typed two words.
"Physical enhancement."
Click. Submit.
[Application received. Please await your assessment notification.]
Closing the laptop, Lucian drew the curtains and lay down fully clothed.
Ten o'clock the next morning.
His phone vibrated.
"Dear applicant: to assess your abilities, please report to Godolkin's main campus before noon today for an on-site test."
An hour and a half later.
An old taxi stopped in the countryside of upstate New York.
Lucian pushed open the door and tossed the Black driver a bill.
The driver whistled, gazing in awe at the thirty-foot steel arch ahead. The blue eagle emblem atop it was dazzling in the sunlight.
"Heading in there? Man, are you one of those superhumans on TV too?"
"Just here to make a living." Lucian casually shut down the conversation.
With his backpack slung over one shoulder, he walked across grass trimmed to the millimeter and entered the atrium hall.
Inside and outside the doors were two different worlds.
The ceiling soared overhead, hung with enormous posters of various celebrity alumni.
The hall was filled with raging hormones and superpowers spilling everywhere.
On the left, a young Latino man spun a fireball around his fingertips, its sparks nearly singeing the hair of the girl in front of him.
On the right, a fat girl huddled nervously in a corner, the tiles beneath her feet frosting over inch by inch.
Chaos. Swagger. Stupidity.
Lucian stood in the shadows, coldly surveying his chattering peers.
To others, these were Vought's promising future recruits.
To him, they were an imperial banquet yet to be served.
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