"cake by the ocean"
It was late at night.
John parked the gray Ford he had rented (stolen) beneath an apartment building and rolled down the window.
"Whew-"
Hydraulic oil from garbage trucks, greasy fumes from the fast-food joint on the corner, and the smell of rust rising from the subway vents all flooded John's nostrils.
Compared to the faint scent of grass and flowers at Kent Farm, this place was practically a cesspit.
Honestly, he was a little homesick.
He missed Martha. He missed Old Joe, lying unconscious.
John let his mind go blank for a while, suppressed the jumble of thoughts in his head, then summoned the information panel with a thought.
Soon, a translucent interface appeared on his retinas. John noticed that a line of data had suddenly appeared in the previously empty upper-left corner.
[Current world distortion: 8%] (Baseline: the worldline's degree of deviation from the original script upon the host's first arrival.)
Only fucking 8%?
John stared at the number for a long time. It was far lower than what he had imagined.
He had forced A-Train to kneel before Hughie right in the street, beaten Butcher half to death, then tethered him with Becca's name.
By all rights, he had shattered the core of the Boys' original "obsession with revenge." With that main plotline gone, most subsequent events should have veered off course.
Yet this world's distortion had only moved by eight percent?
That pitiful amount of world power couldn't even budge a tenth of the membrane over Jonathan's heart.
Fuck, what son of a bitch wrote this world's script? What kind of bullshit logic was this!
And what the hell was a timeline, anyway!
All that deviation had only earned him eight percent. How long would it take to build up enough to twist it completely around?
Three months! Lucifer had only given him three months!
He leaned back in his seat and pushed down some of his irritation.
Ever since his encounter with Lucifer, he had felt an urgent need for every possible means of growing stronger.
With Homelander's physique, he could certainly withstand A-Train's supersonic collision and take a few savage blows from Butcher's crowbar without even breaking the skin.
But those obvious little tricks weren't worth a fart before that Satan, Lucifer.
Most outrageous of all, even a lord of Hell who could stop time could only keep that mass of black energy on Jonathan's heart in check for three months.
Now he wasn't even sure where his path to greater strength lay.
The information panel could only determine who possessed world weight; it couldn't directly locate where the world's greatest weight was hidden.
So for now, John could only get his hands on everything within his grasp.
Compound V, V1, Vought's security systems, the Seven's internal access privileges.
According to John's deductions, Compound V and V1 should be this world's lifeblood. Whoever held them held the right to define superhumans.
But he wasn't certain whether those exceptionally familiar drugs would still have any effect on his own body.
His body in this life had spent eighteen years soaking up the Kansas sun. Its V1 foundation and residual Compound V had all churned together, cooking into a stew whose ingredients even he couldn't identify.
There were many things he had never spared a glance in his previous life. He alone had been the strongest weapon, needing no outside support.
But this life was different.
Compound V and V1 weren't merely products. They were the source and lifeblood of the entire superhuman industry.
Whoever held that lifeline could decide who became superhuman, who lived, and who died.
It was an enormous chain of interests, link interlocking with link, each capable of pulling along a whole group of people.
If he could use them as a foot in the door to move those who were still sitting on the fence.
Use them to supply the Boys with firepower, as bait to hook those newcomers at Godolkin University who hadn't yet been tainted by Vought, as bargaining chips in deals with the military.
Have them come over to his side at the crucial moment.
That would work far better than simply forcing people to their knees through fear. Fear could only make people bow.
But profit could make them move, make them willingly risk their lives for you. It lasted longer than any superpower.
Today, he had driven the first nail into Hughie's heart. Sooner or later, Butcher would also turn against Vought for Becca.
Those alone weren't enough. The Boys could obtain peripheral intelligence, but what lay at the real core?
The R&D department's files, Compound V's original formula, V1's sealed records.
Those required someone inside Vought with the necessary clearance.
Leaning back in his seat, John ran through the Seven's roster in his head.
Maeve wouldn't work. Her bones were too hard, and she had no faith whatsoever in anyone wearing Homelander's face.
He had already beaten A-Train into a wreck. For the time being, he couldn't even stand steadily; he would need at least a week to recover.
Hughie had already killed that voyeuristic old dog Translucent. Black Noir, that backstabbing turncoat, was ruled out outright. That left...
A face slowly surfaced in his mind.
Sleazy, always huddled at the very end of the table during meetings, his smile blooming like a chrysanthemum, the gills on either side of his abdomen opening and closing in a sight that could give anyone trypophobia.
Then there was that shit-green suit, tight as a wetsuit. You could smell the dead-fish stink from three meters away.
The Deep, Kevin Moskowitz.
But this very same rotten fish had soaked in Vought's murky waters for so many years, fallen from the pinnacle of heroism to rock bottom, then been hoisted back up by the cultists of the Church of the Collective.
He had seen every kind of dirty business and handled every kind of secret.
That was precisely why someone like him would be the easiest to crack-not because he was particularly cautious or brave.
Quite the opposite: he was a coward down to his bones. As long as you made him believe that following you offered better prospects, the very next second after groveling for mercy, he would volunteer everything you knew and everything you didn't.
A slap followed by a sweet date, and this rotten fish would be eating out of his hand.
At that thought, John pushed the rearview mirror back into place and killed the engine.
The streetlight outside the window flickered twice, going from dim to bright and back to dim. The tall figure gradually vanished from the spot.
Inside an eighth-floor apartment.
The Deep reclined on the couch, his face flushed. Ambrosius lay on his chest, her eight tentacles wrapped around his waist, left arm, and abdomen.
Right, Ambrosius was a female octopus from the North Pacific Ocean.
Her suckers left shallow circular marks on his body, sucking and releasing in time with his heartbeat.
The television was on, but the Deep had manually muted it.
The evening news on the screen was broadcasting Vought's third statement regarding Translucent's disappearance.
It had changed from "temporarily stepping away from the public eye for personal reasons" to "lost contact during a classified mission."
The anchor was a blonde woman whose sexy, scarlet lips opened and closed, but the Deep wasn't watching.
His eyes were closed as he felt the faint touch of suckers against his skin. Ambrosius extended a tentacle and gently toyed with his earlobe using its tip.
He had taught her that. In an octopus's world, touching an earlobe meant "I'm listening." Ever since learning it, she had kept doing it, whether he was talking or not.
But just then, Ambrosius's tentacle suddenly sprang away from his earlobe.
As though scalded by boiling water, her skin flashed from deep red to brilliant white in less than a second, and all eight tentacles released him at once.
An instant later, the entire octopus was plastered against the wall behind the couch, as though swept away by an invisible gust, curling into a ball.
The Deep felt his chest suddenly go empty, a chill seeping into his skin where she had just been lying.
He opened his eyes in bewilderment. Before he could ask anything, a scent entered his nose.
It wasn't a smell that belonged in the living room. The salty tang of seawater was his own, and Ambrosius's mucus proteins carried a faint iodine scent.
There was also the lingering dampness on the couch, brought out of the tank.
He had smelled those scents on countless nights and knew them well. This definitely wasn't among them.
Following the scent, the Deep soon discovered that the unfamiliar smell came from a blind spot beside the television in the living room.
The floor lamp in that corner was off. Only the faint glow of the television's standby light caught the edge of a face.
"Fuck! Who's there!"
The Deep's abdominal muscles reacted before his brain. His whole body sprang from the couch, his knee struck the edge of the coffee table, and the remote was knocked onto the floor.
He staggered upright, turned, and saw the face itself.
Blond hair, blue eyes, no older than twenty, with a clean, sharp jawline.
Fuck! Shit!
The Deep nearly had a PTSD episode. He stared at the face in the corner. It was familiar, but the version was completely different.
Twenty years ago, during their first week as freshmen at Godolkin University, he and A-Train had been putting up posters in the student activity center.
Back then, he had held the ladder and passed up thumbtacks with half a slice of pizza between his teeth. The poster had featured this very face-
Homelander's earliest publicity photo, a young version that the PR department hadn't yet fine-tuned.
But there was absolutely no way a young version of Homelander could appear at this absurd point in time.
Come to think of it, since he had moved, the shapeshifter who used to come over and hang out hadn't visited in ages.
But that asshole always turned into other superhumans to mess with his head for fun, so he didn't like the prick.
"Fuck, it's you."
The Deep's legs were still trembling, but he had already pulled his lips into a smile uglier than tears.
He took two steps toward the corner, tilted his head, and spoke in a tone full of complaint.
"I fucking thought the boss was here... What, trying something different today? Finally got the balls to turn into the boss? Aren't you afraid he'll blast you into caviar?"
The Deep stood there for a few seconds, waiting for the shapeshifter to change his face back.
The guy loved this routine. When time was up, the muscles in his face would reshape themselves like modeling clay, returning to that sleazy, pointed face with its dark circles and twitchy grin.
He waited to hear that familiar raspy voice say, "Kevin, you dead fish, scared you again."
But the young man in the corner didn't smile, didn't move, and didn't even rise to the bait. He simply leaned against the wall and watched him with indifferent eyes.
"Kevin."
John finally spoke, his level tone carrying a rare hint of teasing.
"I've been standing in this corner watching you for ten minutes. You and that octopus-disgusting, sure, but you've actually got some stamina."
At John's words, the Deep froze for a moment.
As the shapeshifter's friend, he knew the other man's transformations could only last eight minutes.
Past eight minutes, his facial muscles would begin suffering nervous spasms. Past twelve, he would go straight into neurogenic shock.
But the man before him had a steady expression and a relaxed posture, with no trace of a twitch on his face.
Only now did he notice that scent, like dry grass mixed with the dry smell of old cotton fabric left out in the sun.
Among all of Vought's superhumans, his sense of smell was fairly keen, apart from that dog's.
The shapeshifter reeked of cheap tobacco and the lingering smell of hand jobs, but the person before him didn't carry the slightest trace of the shapeshifter's scent.
The shapeshifter couldn't imitate smells.
So the man before him... wasn't a shapeshifter at all.
The Deep's smile suddenly froze on his face.