Chapter 32: Vought’s Counterattack
The video of the beach interview blew up that very night.
Holander standing before the microphones saying "the hijackers destroyed the cockpit console," the reporter pressing with "is this a ticulously engineered publicity stunt," followed by Soldier Boy’s line: "Keep talking that goddamn shit, and I’ll rip your fucking heads off right now and dump them in the ocean."
The clip was chopped into countless versions, spreading like wildfire across Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. Six out of the top ten trending topics were related to the incident.
Public opinion was currently split into two factions.
One side believed it absolutely wasn’t a stunt. Soldier Boy was right—Holander could have easily ignored those hundred-plus people, but he saved them, not a single one missing, and handled the arrangents perfectly. Vought was even providing compensation; everything was fine. Soldier Boy’s tirade against the reporters was coarse and volatile, violating every single public relations guideline. Yet it was precisely this raw authenticity that countless fans found incredibly satisfying.
However, the other side was much louder. They believed all the suspicious details pointed to one single fact: Soldier Boy deploying The Deep ahead of ti proved they knew the plane would encounter trouble long before it happened. If it weren’t a publicity stunt, it would be flatly impossible to anticipate the issue. Having one hundred and twenty-three people walk right up to death’s door only to be forced to show imnse gratitude to their saviors was, in itself, a form of manipulated terror. This faction relentlessly blasted Holander and Maeve on social dia.
Holander and Maeve’s approval ratings began to plumt. Even The Deep was completely dumbfounded; he was supposed to be returning to The Seven, yet his already abysmal approval ratings had dropped even further.
Benjamin’s approval rating remained practically unshifting. His remarks to the reporters made one segnt of the public view him as authentic, while another saw him as vulgar; the two factions were roughly equal in number, neutralizing each other out.
But there was one thing everyone agreed on: you couldn’t do a damn thing about Soldier Boy. He refused to play the PR ga, wouldn’t cooperate with dia manipulation, and didn’t care what anyone said about him. He had no exploitable weakness because he simply didn’t give a shit how anyone perceived him.
At 2:00 AM, tragic news broke. Two of the rescued passengers, an elderly couple in their seventies, had been rushed to the hospital for examination that evening, only to suffer sudden cardiac arrest at different tis. Resuscitation efforts failed, and both passed away. The doctors’ preliminary diagnosis was an overloaded heart caused by extre terror during the high-altitude descent.
This news acted like a depth charge dropped into an already churning ocean of public opinion. Every dia outlet that had been holding back caught fire instantly. CNN’s late-night news anchor delivered the opening line that would later be quoted repeatedly in a solemn tone: "One hundred and twenty-three rescued, two dead. Is this the price of heroism, or the casualties of a publicity stunt?"
On social dia, the voices of condemnation completely overwheld any defense. Soone dug up a photo of Mia, the little girl who had wrapped her arms around Holander’s neck on the plane. They photoshopped her face into black-and-white, captioning it: "What if this publicity stunt had caused her death instead?" By 3:00 AM, the post had been shared twenty thousand tis, the comnt section dissolving into a sea of tears. The deaths of the two elderly passengers transford the prior skepticism of a publicity stunt from a "conspiracy theory" into "ironclad proof."
If a mission wasn’t a stunt, why deploy rescue forces in advance? If it wasn’t a stunt, why did people still die even when rescue forces were in position?
Holander’s approval rating data updated at 3:17 AM. A drop of six percentage points... The PR intern working the night shift thought the system had glitched when he saw the number, refreshing it three tis only to get the exact sa result every ti.
Holander sat on the floor of his apartnt, his back resting against the base of the sofa, his phone clutched in his hand. The data curve of his approval rating was displayed on the screen. The red line, plumting off a cliff, stabbed straight downward like a wound burned clean through by Heat Vision... He had been staring at that curve for twenty full minutes.
To save those people, Holander had shuttled back and forth between the high altitude and the ocean surface sixty goddamn tis. He had held Mia in his arms, placed her mother onto the back of a dolphin... and then two elderly people died. It wasn’t his fault... The doctors said it was an overloaded heart.
But everyone was saying... if Holander hadn’t staged a publicity stunt, if he hadn’t blown the whole thing out of proportion, if he had notified the passengers in advance, those two elderly people wouldn’t have spent those agonizing two hours in sheer terror, wouldn’t have suffered cardiac arrest, wouldn’t have died.
Holander parted his lips, murmuring to himself, "I did my best." He spoke to the empty air...
Then Holander buried his face in his knees, his back resting against the base of the sofa, his cape pinned beneath his body and crumpled into a ss. His phone screen dimd, and the plumting red line faded into darkness... along with all the words of condemnation. Holander felt himself starting to suffocate. He even wondered if it would have been better if he had just abandoned all of them in the first place.
Benjamin hadn’t slept, because the trajectory of public opinion was clearly wrong. The sudden deaths of the elderly passengers was a tragedy, but the dia had pinned both lives entirely on the "publicity stunt" narrative, focusing all their firepower square on Holander. The narrative frawork of this incident was too neat. Too neat to be organic public reaction. Soone was pushing this from behind.
Vought explicitly needed to get Supes into the military and explicitly needed the public to maintain a positive impression of superheroes, yet at a ti like this, they were permitting or even driving a dia assassination campaign targeting Holander... They would rather let the company’s short-term interests take a hit just to screw over Holander and himself.
No, the main goal was still to go after him—to drive a wedge between him and Holander, purely to make Holander suffer, because if it weren’t for him, Holander wouldn’t have dropped so much in approval ratings. Interesting. Willing to self-mutilate? Why? "Is it because I’m too much of a fucking threat?" Benjamin snorted coldly.
Outside the window, the New York night sky was dyed a murky orange-red by countless lights, the Vought logo atop Vought Tower still burning tirelessly. Soon, he dialed Holander’s number.
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A/N: Next goal: 400 Power Stones = 1 bonus Chapter!
And if you want to read ahead and find out what happens next right away, you can get up to 20 Chapters ahead on my p@tr~on:
/ForgottenDaoist (@ = a, link is in my profile).
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