"Dehors"
The winter in Kansas was not exactly harsh, but the cold February wind still managed to drill right into a person's bone-seaming gaps.
And so, thoughtful Martha had specifically wrapped John in a cotton-padded jacket like a little boy-style mummy, placing him on the rocking chair in the yard to sunbathe.
According to her, little children needed to sunbathe more so that their bones would grow sturdy.
Only, John clearly sneered with contempt at such "womenly views"-
The majestic Homelander's bones couldn't even be shattered by missiles or pierced by steel bars, what the fuck did that have to do with the sun?
However, grumbling was grumbling.
At the Kent Family, John had always been the most sensible and home-loving good baby.
If he thrashed and resisted indiscriminately, it would make Martha display that heart-wrenching kind of worry.
He would be heartbroken.
Since he couldn't move around wildly, he might as well thoroughly enjoy this sunbath!
The sunlight spread warmly over his body, like a blanket just taken out of the dryer.
John half-squinted his eyes, his consciousness floating up and down on the edge of sleepiness.
Yet right at that moment, he seemed to sense something.
An extremely faint warm current slowly seeped in from the Baihui acupoint at the top of his head, then flowed all the way down along his spine, gathering at his chest.
This felt different from ordinary times.
It was as if there were a lamp inside his body, and the sun happened to be a match, striking gently-dry firewood and raging fire, the lampwick instantly lit up!
Power!
In pleasant surprise, John snapped his eyes wide open.
Yet the warm current vanished at this moment, the lamp went out, as if everything just now had merely been a hallucination caused by oxygen deprivation.
No...
That fucking thing was definitely not a hallucination!
In his past life, he had dealt with Compound V for a full forty-plus years, knowing better than anyone else the feeling of that power surging in his blood vessels-
Scorching, manic, filling every capillary like magma.
Shit... what the fuck was this actually?
John laboriously raised his hand in front of his eyes, opening his wide eyes to observe it carefully.
Within his line of sight, it was still that rosy, wrinkled fist.
The five fingers were curled, completely indistinguishable from any other baby who only wore diapers and pissed or shat wherever they pleased.
He stared at that little hand for a long time, then slowly uncurled his fist, tentatively aiming his palm directly at the sun.
And then...
Power!
Poo you... obviously, absolutely nothing happened.
Later, an unwilling John, after undergoing several attempts, finally managed to grope onto a trace of a clue...
Turns out this feeling wasn't accidental.
Whenever Martha placed him in the yard to sunbathe, that warm current would start up right on schedule.
Like a warm tip of a tongue, slowly licking upward along his spine, inch by inch.
Tingling, moist, making him instinctively want to curl his toes at that very instant.
Holy shit, this felt way too good...
No, fuck!
What the actual fuck was this situation?
As if realizing something, John began spending more and more time pondering this problem.
But a one-year-old child's brain clearly couldn't handle concentration for very long.
Often, as he thought about it, he would fall asleep, waking up with a pacifier in his mouth while Martha hummed a song and changed his diaper.
Yet during those waking intervals, in those afternoons Martha thought he was just blanking out.
His brain kept turning, like a rusted machine.
Slowly, stubbornly grinding through every single detail of the White House decisive battle from his previous life.
He wanted to figure out how the hell he had flipped his car right on the eve of the battle, given that he had injected V1 himself?
A low-IQ way of dying like "having his head smashed in by Butcher with a crowbar" was too brain-dead; up to now, he still couldn't accept it.
Don't fucking bullshit me...
This dogshit-like plot absolutely couldn't have happened.
Something must have gone wrong somewhere!
He was Homelander, after all; his skin could withstand missiles, and his bones were sturdier than any alloy.
Some mere broken crowbar?
Taking a step back, even if that stinking bitch Kimiko had forcefully eliminated the superpowers inside his body using her breast cannon, and Butcher had struck again.
That crowbar would at best have bent into a U-shape against his forehead instead of easily piercing his skull like a watermelon.
What's more, hadn't Butcher also been hit by the aftermath of the breast cannon?
Then that fucking thing would have had even less force.
So... was this right? Was it reasonable?
Where on earth did it start?
Right from V1.
The more he thought about it now, the more John felt this was a trap insidious to the extreme.
His biological dad, um... Soldier Boy.
(Now John only had one acknowledged real dad, and that was Jonathan.)
He had handed the first-generation V1 to him, saying this thing could make him stronger.
He had believed it.
Was it because of that pitiful little bit of father-son trust toward Soldier Boy?
Not entirely.
Although John extremely craved fatherly love, Soldier Boy had backstabbed him before; he couldn't completely trust him.
When it all came down to it, it was because he truly needed a booster shot at that time.
Back then, he had already entered a mid-life crisis; not only did he frequently suffer setbacks in battles, but he also had gray hair.
And Soldier Boy, as the first-generation recipient of Compound V1, came with his own immortality buff, and even his strength in superpowers was extremely terrifying.
Therefore.
Whether it was the temptation of immortality, or the panic brought by his aging crisis, or even the anxiety brought by insufficient firepower...
All of them were sufficient reasons for him to inject V1.
And also!
He was getting stronger, while this pack of lingering hyenas led by Butcher was also getting stronger, and the nominal Seven had long since split apart.
Good son Ryan, whom he had cherished sincerely and who carried his own pure bloodline.
Not only had he wavered and backstabbed him time and again, but at the critical moment he had actually made a lethal move against his own biological dad?
Just think about it, what would be left of a beast that murdered its own biological father decades later?
Ten years, twenty years?
John never knew why the world actually held such deep malice toward him.
Almost the entire world had conspired to back him into a corner!
Therefore, he craved an unknown trump card, a trump card that could turn the tables at the very last moment and overturn the gambling table!
Thus, without the slightest hesitation, right in front of Soldier Boy, he personally shot that tube of V1.
At that moment, he had indeed felt the power.
Power Max!
It was like someone had detonated a star inside his chest.
An exaggerated metaphor?
No, this was genuine physiological perception, a terrifying force fiercer than any moment in the past forty years.
The Heat Vision in his eye sockets didn't even need deliberate charging before that dark red, blazing light gushed out uncontrollably.
In the blink of an eye, they pierced through layers of cumulonimbus clouds, like two crimson javelins forged personally by deities, savagely tearing apart the entire firmament.
They dyed the canopy of heaven into a startling, scorching hue.
The great might he had personally experienced could not be faked.
Yet all of this evolved into an absurd, farcical comedy on the day of the decisive battle.
He still remembered that his flight speed had broken through the theoretical two hundred Mach!
This number was something he had silently calculated in his heart many times; it couldn't be wrong.
It took merely a single kun-second of time for him to successfully send the richest tech development man to go see his favorite space-man mom and dad, and then safely return to his original spot.
Yet right there in that damned presidential palace, good big son Ryan merely made a lateral move, spreading his arms, and managed to block him?
No, was Ryan's physical strength really that high?
So you're telling me a brat who had only just learned to fly a few years ago could physically block an impact of two hundred Mach?
Wouldn't he have turned into a mist of blood right then and there, huh?
How was this possible?
His speed-when on earth had it been weakened to such a state?
Why did he turn as limp as a soft-legged shrimp the moment a fight started?
And then after that, it was that son-of-a-bitch bastard Butcher, who had injected some Compound V he stole from who knows where into his body.
And there was additionally some disgusting octopus tentacle like The Deep's ex-lover, a thing that logically speaking shouldn't have broken his defenses at all.
Yet the day Butcher's fist smashed against his face, he had genuinely and truly felt the pain.
Compared to that superficial minor trauma of getting a bloody nose from Maeve, that was instead a pain originating from the depths of his bone marrow.
The V1 perfect superhuman had in that instant reverted back to an ordinary person who could only play around with a few circus tricks.
No, what the fuck...
Then what about his reaction speed after injecting V1?
What about his super perception?
What about his Super power?
He could see the rifling on a bullet head the exact instant it emerged from the muzzle, yet when Butcher threw a punch, even his consciousness started to daze.
And furthermore, Heat Vision at maximum output still couldn't fucking break through the defenses of Butcher and Kimiko?
Was this right?
It wasn't until John retrospectively reviewed everything now that he belatedly realized-
Every single day since he finished shooting V1 had been completely abnormal!
He had thought he was getting stronger, but looking back now.
That kind of "strength" was more like a false fever; the fiercer it burned, the more hollow the foundation became.
Who the fuck did this?
Sister Sage... it could only be her.
Later on, Soldier Boy had obscurely hinted to him that Bombsight had accessed a channel through Sister Sage's interface.
That strange tube of V1 had flowed precisely out of Bombsight's hands.
And in John's impression, Sister Sage-who looked no different from a female chimpanzee-never made a plan without a backup.
Nominally, she had given him a gun, but she had filled the chamber with blank rounds that would self-detonate the moment he pulled the trigger.
Thinking up to here, baby John yawned, taking the memories of that period apart piece by piece and then splicing them back together.
If he hadn't guessed wrong, V1 and the original Compound V inside his body had produced some kind of conflict he couldn't understand.
One compound tried to erase and devour the other.
On the surface he was stronger, but his internal structure was being hollowed out bit by bit.
Much like a foundation hollowed out by termites.
The house on top still looked complete, but the moment a strong gust of wind blew by, it would collapse entirely.
Or in short, a shoddy tofu-dreg project.
And so when the decisive battle arrived that day, the moment he forced all his power to the limit at once, the hollowed-out part finally faced a deficit.
That was why he had lost so quickly, losing in such a spineless manner.
A single crowbar could smash his skull in; his death was truly fucking unjust.
Faack!!!!
Right that afternoon when he figured this matter out, the Kansas sun happened to shine right through the gaps of the crib's rails, casting a bright streak of light across his face.
He stared at that streak of light, the corner of his twitching slightly.
He hadn't expected that after all Sister Sage's scheming and plotting, in the end it would benefit that lunatic Butcher.
She probably hadn't expected that the "poison" she meticulously concocted would finally have its final blow delivered by some Englishman holding a crowbar.
(At this time John did not know the plot, so subconsciously he thought all of this was orchestrated by Sister Sage.)
(Yet he would never guess that Sister Sage had already turned into an idiot who liked to play with Harry Potter magic wands at Disney.)
Heh... ironic, how fucking ironic.
Irony aside though, after dying once, one matter instead became clear.
And that was that inside his current body, the fragments of both compounds were still there.
V1, and the fragments of Compound V.
They hadn't vanished; they were merely in a temporary state of dormancy.
Like two streams of frozen magma, they had temporarily halted devouring each other, quietly lurking within every single cell.
The sun was the match, highly flammable.
Every time he felt that warm current in the sunlight, it had been no illusion.
It was the fragments of the two compounds fusing back together under the stimulus of solar radiation, in an extremely slow, gentle way.
The sunlight had catalyzed them into something new.
In his previous life, he had been Vought's product. His power had come from Compound V and the laboratory.
Every increase in strength had come with extreme experimentation and abuse.
But in this life, everything was completely different.
Now he lay peacefully in the wheat fields of Kansas, where the sunlight was free and the air was sweet and fresh.
Martha was hanging laundry nearby, humming that song whose name he still couldn't remember.
All he had to do was bask in the sun every day, and he could feel the tiny lamp inside his body growing brighter, little by little.
He still sneaked out late at night to dig up that iron box.
But over the past few days, he had been running to the old oak tree less often.
Those so-called "proofs" seemed to matter less and less.
As long as the sunlight overhead was real, Martha's apron was real, and Jonathan's arms were real.
All that crap-who cared?
Just then, Jonathan's loud, clear voice suddenly rang out from the yard:
"Martha, get everything ready! Smallville's holding the biggest agricultural fair in the county tomorrow. Let's take little John along!"
John slowly opened his eyes in the cradle, a smile curling his lips.
Great, another family road trip-his favorite!
But he would never know that this seemingly ordinary trip to Smallville would be the first time in four years that he tore through the facade of peace...