Chapter 8: Getting the Results
Benjamin looked at him.
He looked at the streaks of blood on that young face, at the bloodshot veins tracing through those blue eyes. He looked at this kid who had grown up in a lab from childhood, suffering the sa horrific torture as he had.
Perhaps there was at least a reason for his own torture. After all, the original owner of this body had brutally abused his teammates first, pushing Black Noir and the others to their limits until Stan Edgar coerced them into mutiny. But Holander? What the fuck did he do wrong? From the ti he was a child, Holander had no choice but to endure that horrific agony. Though it wasn’t as long—spanning only a single childhood—Benjamin felt that this pain weighed heavier than the forty years he had endured.
He fell silent for a mont, then reached up and yanked a few strands of hair from his own head. The roots still carried the follicles as he thrust the hair right in front of Holander.
"If you can’t access the files, look sowhere else. Don’t tell Arica’s top Supe doesn’t even know how to get a goddamn paternity test at a hospital?"
Holander’s gaze dropped to the strands of hair. He carefully gripped them in his palm, then pushed himself up off the shattered concrete. His suit was coated in cent dust and debris, and though the wound on his left cheek had stopped bleeding, the streak of blood still stained his face.
"Once you find out the truth, don’t do anything reckless," Benjamin said, patting him on the shoulder. The gesture wasn’t heavy, but the mont his palm landed, Holander’s body stiffened slightly. "Show the report to Edgar. He’ll know how to contact . I’ll get my revenge sooner or later, but not today."
Holander didn’t say a word. He just clenched the hair even tighter, turned around, bent his knees slightly, and suddenly blasted straight into the air. A shockwave exploded as his silhouette shrank rapidly against the high New York sky, turning into a dull red speck before vanishing over the Manhattan skyline.
Benjamin watched Holander vanish. At the sa ti, the system’s notification chi rang in his ears.
[Ding!]
[You have made Holander feel the heavy weight of a strict father’s love. Although he isn’t certain you are his father yet, he has never been beaten or disciplined by a biological parent before. Experiencing your discipline has actually given Holander a strange, unfamiliar sensation. Reward acquired: Super Speed Lv1.]
[Current Abilities:
Nuclear Energy Blast Lv3 (Can release high-intensity radioactive energy capable of incinerating anything and burning away the Compound V inside a target’s body.)
Super Strength Lv5 (Possesses the top-tier super strength of elite Supes.)
Super Defense Lv5 (Invulnerable, immune to conventional firearms and most Supe attacks.)
Self-Healing Lv5 (Extrely high cellular activity, capable of rapidly repairing fatal wounds.)
Radiation Resistance Lv5 (Completely immune to nuclear radiation and all harmful rays.)
Super Speed Lv1 (Possesses the speed of a standard Supe.)
Eternal Youth (Physical form permanently remains at its peak.)]
To tell the truth, given Soldier Boy’s physical conditioning, his speed shouldn’t have been this slow according to standard physics. Yet, his actual speed performance had been exactly like an ordinary human’s—any regular person on a rental bike could run circles around him. Perhaps it was so kind of restriction, or perhaps a failsafe left behind by Vought. Regardless, that limitation was now broken. Benjamin possessed the speed of a normal Supe. He would never be run around like a dog again.
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Soti after 3:00 PM, the Genetics Testing Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
A man wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, dressed in a loose-fitting hoodie, walked into the first-floor lobby. His slow, deliberate pace stood in stark contrast to the hurried patients and dical staff around him. His cap was pulled low and his sunglasses masked most of his face, but if anyone were to recognize the face hidden beneath those shades, it would detonate Arican social dia within five minutes.
Holander had lived for nearly thirty years, but he had never done anything like this. Pressing a button on the automated ticket dispenser in the waiting area, he sat on a plastic chair for twenty full minutes before saying to a visibly exhausted front desk nurse, "I’d like to request a paternity test." The tone was so polite that it sounded foreign even to his own ears.
Without lifting her head, the nurse handed him a form and two collection tubes. The sampling process was brief. He placed Benjamin’s strands of hair into one of the tubes, pulled a few hairs from his own head to put into the other, filled out the paperwork, paid the fee, and sat right back down on that plastic chair to wait.
The fluorescent light tubes in the corridor humd with a low buzz. A young mother holding a child sat on the bench opposite him, the kid busy using a crayon to draw a red flower on the waiting area wall. The sll of disinfectant mixed with the burnt odor of a coffee machine, making everything feel surreal in its sheer ordinariness. Holander stared at the mother holding her child, his mind completely unreadable.
He waited for two hours. Maybe longer. Then the nurse called his number. Not the na Holander, but John—the identity on the fake ID he’d had soone forge. Accepting the manila envelope, he walked into the stairwell, pushed the door shut, and only after ensuring no one was around did he rip open the seal.
The report wasn’t long—three pages filled with dense dical jargon and data tables. Shifting his gaze past all the genetic loci analysis and technical descriptions he couldn’t comprehend, his eyes landed directly on the conclusion section at the very bottom of the final page. Three lines of text stood out in bold print:
"Test Result: The probability of paternity between Sample A and Sample B (John) is greater than 99.9%."
"Conclusion: Sample A is the biological father of Sample B."
"Testing Facility: Genetics Testing Center, New York-Presbyterian Hospital."
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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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