"Iridescent"
The night was dark and windy.
Butcher and his crew chose to park on a logging track two kilometers from Mangrove's outer checkpoint.
Mother's Milk had borrowed the car from a used-car dealer who had not had it inspected in three years.
Frenchie had specially soaked its license plate in chemical solvent until it became an illegible mess, ensuring their operation stayed covert.
John stood beside the car, leaning against the window and playing Tetris on his phone, but his tightly furrowed brows betrayed his inner unrest.
Really, he was impatient.
The reason was still that son of a bitch Butcher beside him, who had been reading out information for five minutes.
"The outer patrols operate in squads of twelve, changing shifts every four hours. There's a seven-minute, twelve-second blind spot between shifts.
Hughie checked the calculations repeatedly. The margin of error is no more than ten seconds.
The middle layer has access controls specifically for supes, requiring an iris scan. The system has an independent power supply, so it can keep running for a long time after a power cut.
Farther in, there's a blast door thirty centimeters thick and reinforced concrete walls. There are no cameras on the second and third levels..."
"Stop, stop, stop. Keep this up and my ears are going to grow calluses."
John finally put his phone down. If Butcher kept yammering, he really might not be able to resist giving him a blast of Heat Vision.
"I already told you, this security might as well be paper to me.
The only thing you need to do is handle the cameras inside and out. I don't want live footage of this place landing in that Black bastard at Vought's hands tomorrow."
"Secrecy. Understand?"
"The deal only starts once Becca is out. But if you lose her-"
"Give it a rest. Just wait outside. That unshaven face of yours looks like it's been fucked by a dog. You'll scare her."
"Fuck!"
Butcher flipped John off, then pulled a cigarette pack from his trench coat pocket, wanting a smoke, only to find it empty.
"You son of a bitch... you'd better pull this off."
He crushed the empty pack, tossed it into a corner by the wall, then walked to the driver's side and opened the door.
Meanwhile, Hughie and Frenchie had started loading equipment onto the car.
It was a large signal jammer bought on the black market at a steep price. Frenchie had traded three gold bars to a Russian arms dealer for it.
Cyrillic lettering was still spray-painted on its casing. As big as a small generator, it took two handcarts to move.
"This thing can cover every communications band at Red River, including Vought's encrypted channels and backup emergency lines.
Flip the switch and every signal within a kilometer gets jammed. Surveillance uploads, radio calls, infrared alarms-everything goes down."
As a tech geek, Frenchie rattled off the jammer's capabilities as though counting his family treasures, his face animated.
"But the Vought Security Department's monitoring center automatically triggers an alarm protocol if the signal goes down for more than ten seconds."
"We can't just shut off the cameras. We need to fool them with fake footage, preferably by hijacking the feeds in real time."
Frenchie pushed the jammer onto a dirt rise positioned to cover Red River's perimeter, then covered it with camouflage fabric, leaving only half an antenna exposed.
He straightened and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Just as he was about to launch into another lengthy explanation of the jammer's technical principles, Hughie interrupted him helplessly.
"Okay, Frenchie... we don't need to hijack the feeds in real time. That's too much work. We just need a fake video."
Hughie set his laptop on the car roof. Its screen showed footage of Red River's perimeter that he had recorded in advance.
The guard in the sentry booth was drinking coffee, the blast door was closed, and the corridor lights were on. Everything was business as usual, perfectly peaceful.
He had spent three days staking out Red River's perimeter at three every morning, using a telephoto lens to record complete night-shift footage from all six cameras.
So every frame here was real. The entire sequence had simply been shifted forward by a day.
"Hey, little Hughie, not bad-"
Frenchie glanced at the footage, then stared at Hughie with wide eyes and gave him a thumbs-up.
Hughie folded his arms and grinned smugly.
Butcher poked his head out from the driver's seat, glanced at the looping footage on Hughie's laptop, then at Frenchie's back as he crouched on the dirt rise adjusting the jammer.
He shifted the cigarette butt between his lips from left to right. He had not lit it, merely held it in his mouth. Then he opened the passenger door.
"Get in. Once the jammer's on and the camera feeds are swapped, Homelander goes in.
Frenchie, watch the jammer. I'll wait in the car on the logging track."
He paused after speaking, then turned and headed toward the driver's seat.
Seven that evening, inside Vought's internal information monitoring room.
The woman on duty was named Marlene. She had just made her third coffee of the evening. Vought's logo was printed on the mug, and a poorly cleaned lipstick mark remained on its rim.
Her job was to spend the entire night watching the monitors for anything unusual in the live footage of Red River's perimeter.
She had done this job for six years, and the images on those screens had stayed the same all six years.
The sentry booth, the blast door, the empty corridors-not even the wind had stirred a single leaf.
Just as she was about to set her mug on the desk, the screens suddenly went black, as though someone had severed every feed at once with an invisible knife.
What was going on?
Her fingers abruptly tightened around the mug's rim, nearly tipping the entire coffee onto her keyboard.
A blackout?
The first thought that flashed through her mind was a system malfunction.
But she did not dare gamble. Her hand had already reached instinctively toward the alarm button, her finger hovering over the red button, ready to press it.
The very next second, the screens came back on.
Everything was normal.
Marlene's finger lingered above the alarm button. After a moment's hesitation, she withdrew it.
She lifted her mug and took a large gulp, wiped the lipstick mark off the rim with her sleeve, and thought that the old server in the machine room was probably acting up again.
The screens had gone black last Wednesday too. IT had said aging wiring was to blame.
Fine. Forget it.
She yawned, set her mug back on the desk, and continued watching the screens.
Just two minutes earlier.
On a dirt rise outside the Red River settlement.
"Showtime!"
Frenchie flipped the jammer's switch. Its metal casing, spray-painted with Cyrillic letters, immediately emitted a low hum, jamming every communications band in an instant.
At the same time, Hughie pressed Enter, replacing every perimeter surveillance feed with the prerecorded loop.
"You're clear to move!"
John vanished from the spot.
The next second, he had circled around to the side of a warehouse and stopped in a camera blind spot.
To make moving around easier, John first used X-Ray Vision to scan the interior layout through the brick wall.
Corridors, blast doors, infrared detection zones. Farther inside should be the living quarters.
Then he spotted the twelve men.
Six were patrolling the outer sentry posts and corridors, wearing standard Vought Security Department gear.
Bulletproof vests, assault rifles, stun guns, and riot shields leaning in a corner.
Three were playing cards in the duty room, their guns resting against their chair backs, safeties still on.
Two more paced the corridor in the living quarters, reporting to the duty room at regular intervals.
The last was in the command room behind the blast door, facing a row of surveillance monitors.
Those screens were now all playing Hughie's looped footage. He could stare until he shit himself and never spot a thing.
"Very good..."
John committed each position to memory, then turned sideways and gently pressed his shoulder against the brick wall.
Then he abruptly exerted force.
Crack-
The mortar between the bricks burst under the sustained pressure, and the entire wall collapsed inward like a cookie crushed underfoot.
John simply stepped over the broken bricks and swaggered into the corridor.
Without surveillance, there was no need to hold back.
The first patrolman immediately tried to turn at the noise, but before he could raise his assault rifle, John was already in front of him.
It was almost purely instantaneous, so fast that the man saw only a dark blur before a hand clamped over his face.
"Urgh-"
John's five fingers tightened like an iron band, the pads pressing against his nose and cheekbones as he lifted him clear off the ground.
The patrolman's legs kicked wildly in the air. His gun slipped from his hands and hit the floor. Holding him aloft by the face, John walked toward the end of the corridor.
"Stop!"
The second patrolman rushed in from the flank, trying to smash his rifle butt into the back of John's head.
John did not even turn around. He merely transferred the man he was holding to his left hand, then drove his right elbow backward into the newcomer's chest.
(man!)
The force of that elbow shattered the ceramic plate inside his bulletproof vest on the spot, driving the fragments brutally into his chest cavity.
The patrolman flew backward like a kite with its string cut, slammed into the wall, slid down it, and passed out.
The third patrolman was clearly far smarter than his two companions.
He retreated to the duty-room entrance, shouldering the door open while shouting "Intruder!" inside, trying to alert his colleagues.
But kindhearted John did not let him finish. That would waste too many brain cells.
Instead, he hurled the patrolman in his hand straight at the duty room's glass window.
The man's body smashed through the double glazing like a cannonball. Shattered glass flew into the room along with the warped window frame, knocking all three card players to the floor.
Mini team wipe activated.
One quick-reacting man scrambled up and reached for a gun. John, watching like a tiger eyeing its prey, had already seen him. How could he let him succeed?
Even if he was impervious to blades and bullets, and gunfire only tickled his skin, his clothes could not take it.
The next second, John jumped through the shattered window and stamped on the man's outstretched wrist.
Crack~
"Aaaagh-"
The dull crunch of breaking bone sounded especially clear in the duty room. The man screamed in agony, then an impatient John knocked him unconscious.
"What're you screaming for? Shut up."
John glanced down at his wrist.
His hand hung twisted to one side, pale bone shards jutting through the skin. Blood ran downhill along the joints between the floor tiles.
Buddy, count yourself lucky you're alive. Use the other hand to jerk off from now on.
The fighting here was loud and had long since drawn the others' attention. They reacted quickly too.
The command-room door was locked from the inside.
Rapid breathing and the metallic clatter of a gun being chambered came from within.
Through John's X-Ray Vision, there was only one man there, looking extremely tense as he dialed the Vought Security Department's emergency communications frequency with trembling fingers.
But to his horror, he failed to connect after several attempts.
John politely knocked twice on the door.
"John, John~"
(Anyone who's seen "The Shining" should get the reference.)
The man inside shuddered and immediately held his breath.
As long as I don't open the door and hold out until headquarters sends backup...
But the idea was beautiful, and reality was cruel.
Soon, a beam of Heat Vision sliced forcefully in through the lock.
Under the extreme heat of Heat Vision, the alloy lock soon burned white-hot.
Molten metal ran down the door and dripped onto the floor with a sizzling hiss.
The door opened, along with a body hiding behind it that the Heat Vision had incidentally sliced in half.
Continuing forward, only one officer remained in the command room. The Vought Security Department's insignia adorned his epaulets. He held a pistol aimed toward the doorway.
"Hah, hah..."
His mouth hung open, his face covered in cold sweat. His finger rested on the trigger, but he could not pull it.
John strolled in at his leisure. Under the officer's utterly horrified gaze, he pinched the barrel between his thumb and forefinger and gently bent it.
The barrel folded to a right angle like a drinking straw.
Without exception, the officer also met the Virgin Mary beneath John's loving gaze.
"Quick! Hold the line!"
The last two patrolmen chose to block the blast door. It was three layers thick and could withstand an RPG round without collapsing.
Besides, the blast door was the settlement's final line of defense. Even if they wanted to flee, they had nowhere to go.
One was relatively young. His finger trembled against the trigger guard with a clattering sound as he muttered something over and over.
The other gritted his teeth and raised a riot shield in front of himself. Vought's logo was printed on its face. He stood guard before the door with that shield raised.
John approached from the end of the corridor, neither hurried nor slow, his hands hanging at his sides. A fine layer of brick dust and tiny spatters of blood covered his jacket.
"Aaaah! Die!"
The young man opened fire. Flame spat from the rifle's muzzle as bullets poured into John's chest.
But it was useless. The bullets deformed and shattered the instant they touched his skin, then ricocheted into the corridor walls, striking showers of sparks.
He emptied the entire magazine. Then the bolt locked back with a sharp click. Empty.
"You ruined my clothes."
Smiling, John walked up to him, red light gathering in his eyes. He took the rifle from the man's hands and set it on the floor, then placed one hand on his shoulder and flung him aside.
Being young was great. They could fall asleep the moment they hit the floor.
Watching John take a rain of bullets as though nothing had happened, the shield-bearer felt somewhat numb. His feet stayed rooted to the spot, his eyes vacant.
"Move."
John narrowed his eyes, his hands behind his back. His jacket had been stained deep red with blood, and he was getting a little tired.
The shield guard at least knew which way the wind was blowing. He promptly dropped his shield on the ground and, shouting, "I didn't see anything," raised both hands and took a big step back.
Seeing how cooperative he was, John felt too embarrassed to kill him, so he politely gave him a knife-hand strike instead. The shield guard dropped at once.
Now it was the blast door's turn.
John had once heard Jonathan say that blast doors generally had an emergency manual release valve on the inside, a physical failsafe provided for firefighters and emergency personnel.
And there was a mechanical linkage rod between this valve and the door panel, with a stress tolerance far lower than that of the panel itself.
At that thought, he pressed his palm against the door panel, located the linkage rod, and rapped the panel hard with the knuckle of his index finger.
The next second, the sound of snapping metal came from inside, and the lock cylinder sprang open.
Nice...
He pushed the door open and went in.
The first thing John saw was Mangrove's living quarters.
It was a corridor lit a stark, sickly white by fluorescent lights, with numbered apartment doors on either side.
At the end of the corridor, a door stood half-open, spilling warm yellow kitchen light and the faint hum of an induction cooker through the gap.
Ten minutes earlier, Becca had been cooking.
With an apron tied around her waist and her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, she had a pot of pasta boiling on the induction cooker.
The moment she heard the first gunshot, she stopped what she was doing, set the spatula on the counter, and switched off the induction cooker.
Then she turned and walked toward Ryan, who was playing with building blocks behind her.
"Ryan, go to the bedroom and lock the door. Remember, no matter what you hear, don't come out unless I call you."
Ryan looked up at his mother. She had never spoken to him in that tone before.
He opened his mouth to ask why, but Becca had already grabbed his shoulders and hauled him up from beside the coffee table, half-pushing, half-carrying him into the bedroom.
Before closing the door, she took one last look at him through the gap, then swallowed hard and pressed her back tightly against the bedroom door.
Her fingers clenched around the doorknob behind her, her eyes fixed intently on the bedroom door.