Chapter 5: Vought’s Reaction
Benjamin’s tall silhouette completely blended into the crowds of the New York streets. Naturally, the surveillance caras had also recorded this one-sided beatdown.
"Wail—wail—wail—"
Piercing sirens from police cars and ambulances echoed as several vehicles with flashing red and blue lights screeched to a halt at the scene.
A crowd of onlookers had already gathered on the surrounding sidewalks, boldly craning their necks to see what was happening.
In this world thoroughly brainwashed by Vought International and flooded with superhero culture, many people held a near-fanatical, blind adoration for Supes. Even if a few had just witnessed the truth, there were plenty of latecors who didn’t understand the context and only saw Benjamin brutally beating A-Train.
"Oh my God! Is that... is that A-Train?!"
"Jesus, he’s bleeding so much! That guy in the green jacket must be a psycho. He actually dared to attack a superhero!"
"He must be so supervillain hiding in the shadows! Quick, take pictures and tweet this—Vought will definitely hunt that thug down!"
Several young bystanders, oblivious to the truth, held up their phones to snap frantic photos of A-Train, who was twitching on a stretcher like a dead dog. Their chatter was filled with vicious condemnation of Benjamin and intense sympathy for A-Train. In their warped reality, superheroes were the eternal embodints of justice, aning anyone who hit a Supe had to be an unmitigated villain.
"Shut up! You idiots don’t know shit!"
An angry roar cut through the crowd.
It was Hughie.
This was a kid who usually kept his head down, too timid to even ask his boss for a raise. But right now, his eyes were bloodshot as he stepped in front of the people taking photos like an infuriated lion.
"An attack? A supervillain? Open your fucking eyes and look at the skid marks and the blood on the ground!" Hughie pointed at the exact spot where Robin had been standing, his voice trembling with lingering terror. "If that man hadn’t stepped in, A-Train would have already run my girlfriend over and turned her into a pile of minced at!"
Robin clutched Hughie’s coat tightly, yelling, "He didn’t even slow down! He was charging like an out-of-control missile! That man saved my life... A-Train tried to kill !"
Hughie and Robin’s raw, imdiate accusations, combined with the glaring physical evidence on the street, instantly silenced the clueless onlookers. The crowd exchanged uneasy glances.
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anwhile.
Vought International Tower, Midtown Manhattan, Crisis Managent Center.
This was the operational brain of Vought, housing the largest and most sophisticated information monitoring network in the entire United States. Right now, a massive curved screen spanning an entire wall of the crisis room was flashing with blinding red alarms.
In the center of the display, a short video stitched together from street surveillance and bystander footage played on a continuous loop. In the footage, a burly man used lubricant to trip A-Train, acting as if he had known exactly when the speedster would pass through the area. A dozen senior tech analysts in the departnt were currently panicking like ants on a hot skillet, the frantic clacking of their keyboards echoing through the room.
The sharp clack of high heels hitting the polished marble floor rang out, instantly silencing the noisy room.
Madelyn Stillwell, Senior Vice President of Vought International who held absolute authority over The Seven, walked in with an icy expression, holding a warm cup of coffee.
"Can anyone tell why, ten minutes ago, the ’fastest man alive’ suddenly slipped and got his face pulverized on a Brooklyn street?" Madelyn’s voice wasn’t loud, but it carried a chilling edge that made throats go dry. No one dared to answer.
She walked up to the giant screen, her brow furrowing as she studied the man in the footage, whose face wasn’t even fully visible. The longer she looked, the deeper the suspicion and dread grew in her eyes.
"Who is this man?" Madelyn demanded sharply. "His physical durability is off the charts—he completely dismantled A-Train with his bare hands. He even predicted exactly which street A-Train would be running down."
A senior technical director wearing black-rimd glasses swallowed hard and stood up trembling, clutching a freshly printed cross-reference report.
"Ms. Stillwell... the preliminary results from facial recognition and skeletal feature scans... are in," the director said, his voice shaking. "The system indicates... this man appears to be... Soldier Boy."
"What did you say?" Madelyn’s hand froze mid-air, her coffee cup instantly halting.
"Based on a cross-reference with Vought’s internal, top-secret database..." The tech director wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, his voice sounding increasingly hopeless. "Skeletal density, muscular profile, gait analysis, combined with facial sh capture... the accuracy rate is 99%."
Madelyn’s face, usually pristine and masked behind a flawless veneer of corporate elegance, twitched violently for a brief mont.
"Ridiculous!" she snapped, slamming her coffee cup onto the desk. "What kind of a sick joke is this? Could it be so hardcore fan playing dress-up? Or a shapeshifting Supe?"
"T-The forr is impossible, ma’am." The director pulled up a high-definition, magnified freeze-fra on the display, showing Benjamin’s cold, rebellious face clearly. "No matter how perfect the cosplay or transformation is, it’s impossible to perfectly duplicate biological markers like interpupillary distance and dermal micro-expression textures. More importantly..."
The director’s voice carried a chilling trace of absolute disbelief: "Compared to the photos in our database from forty years ago... he hasn’t aged a single day."
The entire crisis room fell into a tomb-like silence.
Shock washed over Madelyn’s features. Her eyes widened as she stared fixedly at the man on the screen, her breathing growing rapid, her chest heaving heavily.
Impossible... this is absolutely impossible! Madelyn scread internally.
As a mber of Vought’s core executive circle, she knew all too well the filthy history that had been scrubbed clean forty years ago. That man—the original superhero leader who once embodied the Arican spirit and held absolute leverage within Vought International—hadn’t he been handed over to the Soviets long ago?
Back then, to prop up a brand-new, entirely controllable generation of superheroes and clear the throne for a young Holander growing up in a lab, the current CEO, Stan Edgar, had personally masterminded that betrayal. They had covertly turned Payback, leveraging the team mbers who were regularly abused by Soldier Boy, and worked alongside Black Noir—who was at the peak of his combat prowess—to execute a lethal trap. They used Soldier Boy as a political bargaining chip and lab rat, secretly selling him off to the Soviet KGB, while fabricating a global lie claiming he had tragically sacrificed his life to prevent a nuclear ltdown.
It had been nearly forty years. Madelyn assud Soldier Boy was long gone, trapped forever deep inside so frozen, subterranean Siberian research facility, never to see the light of day again. Who could have imagined... he had actually broken out of the Soviet cage alive?!
Not only that, but he had returned to the United States, right back to New York, using an overwhelming display of dominance to completely cripple a mber of The Seven right under Vought’s nose. It was a slap to the face, and it was a declaration of revenge.
"Listen to !" Madelyn took a deep breath, her eyes cold. "Contain every single piece of information coming out of Brooklyn imdiately! Wipe the cloud data! Send out the highest-level PR non-disclosure agreents to every single bystander who was at the scene today, including that goddamn couple!"
"We need to notify Holander imdiately! Tell him to drop whatever the hell he’s doing, gather the rest of The Seven, activate maximum authorization protocol... and bring Soldier Boy back to ! Dead or alive!" Madelyn spat out the words through gritted teeth.
She had no idea that at this exact mont, several floors higher up in Vought Tower, right in front of his floor-to-ceiling windows, the Holander she took such pride in had just hung up the phone with that very man—and was currently sitting on the edge of a complete emotional breakdown, his entire reality completely shattered.
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A/n: If you want to read ahead and find out what happens next right away, you can read up to 20 Chapters ahead on my p@tr~on: /ForgottenDaoist (@ = a, link is in my profile).
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