Chapter 1: Man-God
Gladiator
Well-known member
Chapter 1: Man-God
"What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under..."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It came as a surprise. I never met anyone that was this fast.
It wasn't a blur though. Not to someone like me. I could see every detail. The sweat trickling down his face. The subtle twitch of some sort of exhilarating high. His goggles hid his eyes but I am sure they were dilated.
The man was on drugs. He could barely contain himself.
I hold her hands. I try to pull her towards me but I had to be careful. My l'amoureux didn't have the same advantages that I did. The world could break her. The sort of acceleration I needed? The amount of gees? It would break every bone in her body. It would tear the skin from her muscles. It would liquefy her internal organs.
It was that caution that prevented me from saving her. It was her mortality that forced me to stay my hand.
When he crashes into her? I see every excruciating moment. The look of shock on her face? There wasn't even enough time for her to register any pain. Just surprise. Her body rippling before rupturing, and then exploding against his invulnerable frame. Her viscera pours onto the street, and splatters across my face. Her life-blood painting the road a dire crimson.
It reminded me of another day. A day long, long past. How many years had it been since I was in the trenches? How many decades since I lost my closest friend? The round from that howitzer crashing against my body but failing to penetrate it entirely.
Her hands were all that were left. Her body was in shreds.
Nothing could have survived that.
The man stops in the street, and that's when I finally recognize him.
A-Train.
One of The Seven. The world's greatest superheroes.
I clench her hands tightly.
“I c-can't stop--”
I didn't give him enough time to finish. I had nothing holding me back anymore. The burst of speed surprises the metahuman. He didn't expect it from me.
He was still faster of course but that didn't matter.
I hit him at over four-hundred miles per hour. His state of shock was enough to allow me to catch him off-guard. He tries to fight back, and when his left leg sweeps into my ribs? There is a resounding clang. It had done nothing.
When my fist connects with his sternum it breaks. He is sent sprawling through the air. He was faster but somehow I was more powerful. I hit harder than he did.
It didn't make particular sense but when it came to powers like ours? Few things ever did. This was a world where a man could fly. A world where the sky was no longer the limit.
“W-What the h-hell?”
A-Train didn't know who I was. I wasn't one of Vought International's pet projects. He didn't have time to think. He had a delivery to make. He had to be on time.
He was more afraid of his employer than anything else.
There is a crack in the air as he shoots past the speed of sound, and he escapes my grasp just as I was about to reach him again.
He was faster especially now considering whatever he was on.
I give chase, and leap onto buildings. I clear a hundred yards in a jump but he had already made it past the horizon.
I could no longer see him.
When I land? I scream. I spew venomous curses. There are people around me who take pictures. Who had seen everything.
“Get that camera out of my face!” I push them aside, and make my way back to the scene of the crime.
They recoil in fear. They had seen what I did to A-Train. They didn't want to be on the receiving end of what I had in store for that junkie.
"This wasn't supposed to happen!"
It wasn't supposed to end like this.
It was all over the news the next day.
A-Train was giving his empty platitudes to every reporter that would interrogate him on the subject.
“Well, she shouldn't have been in the middle of the street--”
I crush the remote controller in my hand.
Of course. Junkies never did take any responsibility. It was their victims. It was never them. It was the drug. It was never them.
A single step from the side-walk is not in the middle of the street. Anyone could see that.
“You lying piece of shit!” I rip the television off the wall, and hurl it out of the window. It hits a parked car, and I could hear an alarm start blaring. "Mother fucker!"
I was taking it surprisingly well.
The last time something like this happened I brought about one of the greatest massacres in War World I.
“Uh, Hugo. I am gonna have to ask that you don't throw any more of my stuff out of the window.”
Oh, right. This wasn't my house.
“Eat a dick, Charlie.” Charlie Shayne. He was a red-head. A ginger in every sense of the word. A bit of a wimp. No real muscles what to speak of. The last living relative of the best friend I ever had. His family was in dire straits so naturally I helped them out. I owed them that much for starting my fortune. Thomas “Matthew” Shayne's father gave me a whole million after the war.
That generosity secured my livelihood.
“I am gonna let that slide." He takes a deep breath. "I know you're trying to deal with something right now but--”
“That junkie murdered my girlfriend! He murdered her, and he is acting like it was her fault!”
I punch another hole in his wall.
That was the tenth time that I did that today. I managed to connect the four diagonally and vertically at this point.
“You know, I think we're both lucky that you're rich. The amount of property damage that you do would have left us homeless a long time ago.” The benefit of living as long as I have was that I had accumulated a lot of wealth. Due in part thanks to my extraordinary abilities. In no uncertain terms? I was a millionaire.
I invested in that money Mr. Shayne had given me, and then I became even richer over the century. It was a chore to excavate sunken wrecks, and unveil treasures buried beneath the dunes.
“There's another problem I should mention. People know that you're a metahuman or whatever. Someone recorded what happened, and the video went viral.”
I groan.
“Yeah, I saw. I have been getting texts nonstop.” I reach for my smartphone. A thousand messages since yesterday. How did they even get my number? “Block, block, instantly blocked. Fuck off, I am not a superhero!” I delete a few more of them.
A bunch of vultures. Probably a few people who wanted to recruit me for a scam.
I really should have been more careful for what I wished for. A few decades back I was mopping around, and isolating myself from humanity. I had no real attachments. I was alone. I was angry to say the least. Considered going on a murderous rampage at one point but thought better of it. Then met a bunch of lunatics who wanted to make an entire civilization of people like me.
I killed them all.
Then kaboom. They show up in droves out of nowhere. As if my efforts were for naught. I had my suspicions but I wasn't sure.
I wasn't a peculiar specimen anymore. I was just another one of them, and boy were they were a bunch of babies. They had it good. The support of the media, their friends and family, other people like them they could be themselves around, and they were popular.
When I was struck down by that lightning bolt it was only the beginning. It was like Zeus had it out for me.
“Did I fuck your daughter? Is that it? She was a whore, Zeus! Strike me down, branleur!”
Nothing.
Perhaps, in my melancholy all those years ago that was the only time god did hear my prayers. He was silent ever since.
I was a lost cause to him.
“Have you been drinking, Hugo?”
“No.”
That's when I grab the flask in my coat pocket, and down the whole thing. Bruichladdich.
One of my favorite spirits.
“Now I am.”
Charlie Shayne gives me a disappointed frown. I remember when I still changed his diapers.
Now here he was a grown man. Sometimes I feel like he is the adult here. I wasn't exactly the mature type. Over a hundred years old, and I still felt like that boy who couldn't find his place in the world.
I failed miserably. I didn't become that shining example. I wasn't the hero. I was just another maniac. Another cautionary tale to tell children at their bedside.
“How did her parents take it?” He tried to change the subject. It's what he always did when I started cussing in french. It wasn't my mother tongue but it quickly became a part of me after I had joined the French Foreign Legion.
“Her father shot me in the face with buckshot. I don't blame him.” I grab another flask, and start drinking. “Her mother fainted I think.”
I wasn't going to have much of a relationship with them now. They never approved of us being together to begin with. They thought I was just a playboy with too much money.
They were right about the money part at least. I offered to pay for the funeral arrangements but they wouldn't accept a dime from me.
“What are you going to do?” There was a seriousness in the boy's voice. He knew me a bit too well.
“Kill him.”
“He's one of The Seven. You can't just kill him.”
“I can. He's not the only person who can rout an army.”
“That's besides the point. You would become the most wanted man in America. There is one of you, and hundreds of them. Vought International has every person like you in their pocket.”
That was true enough.
“So, what? I get a lawyer, and try to sue Vought International? They're just gonna settle. I don't want money. I want A-Train's head on a platter.” I toss another flask aside. I could barely feel anything. The buzz just wasn't there. My metabolism worked harder than it had any right to.
That strange concoction my father injected me with as a fetus in my mother's womb working without fail.
“Considering what happened with George Floyd they would just label you a racist, and a radical.” I twitch at that. Another junkie. A man who held a defenseless woman at gunpoint in order to have his fix. A victim of police brutality. How sad. I will just play for him the world's smallest violin.
“I don't doubt it.” I concede. The media was like that these days. “They would probably try to cancel me, or give me some on the nose supervillain name like Stormfront.”
“She is actually a superheroine.”
“Wait, really?” I laugh. “The world these days...”
I take a seat on the couch.
“What am I going to do?” I was beginning to calm down. Who was I fooling? “It isn't right what happened. The coward doesn't even give a damn! None of them do. The world sees her, and then they say it's just collateral damage!”
Nobody cared. They were only worried about their own validation. Their own haphazard narrative. Their own machiavellian plots, and their islands that were to the brim filled with sex slaves. Children no less, and they didn't even try to be subtle about it.
“What exactly is it worth anymore?”
I came to that conclusion decades ago. I made my peace with that, and for all that I could do? I could only bear witness to change.
The world would become what it would, and the people would let it.
That's how it has always been.
In light of that? I could only keep the people I cared about safe. I had to protect them at least from the coming upheaval.
“You didn't say that during the Hong Kong protests.”
I guffaw at that. How did he know about that?
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“That unsanctioned masked vigilante calling himself Hēilóng?”
I sheepishly look away from him at that.
“I had a few friends there.” I don't try to deny it. “I did what I had to do, and they tried to smear Hēilóng with libel. So, I murdered their military dogs? They were boot-lickers the lot of them! Back in my day? That would be called justice.” The CCP were still rounding up the Turkic Uighurs, and putting them into concentration camps. The only thing I could do was secure Hong Kong's independence as Hēilóng, and half of the world despises him regardless.
I got chewed out by every celebrity in the CCP's fold. They called me a murderer. A criminal. A vile, and rotten neerdowell. Lebron James tried to raise his dukes. Shameless sellout he was. He wasn't so brave when I payed him a visit, burst through a wall, threw him through a table, and choke-slammed Stephen Colbert in front of a studio audience.
The people of Hong Kong loved me. Now they were patriots. The CCP couldn't do anything short of wiping Hong Kong from the map if they wanted to stop me. Then I discovered their lab in Wuhan, and prevented a mutate strain of SARS from spreading around the world that would have destroyed millions of lives.
After that reveal people still had the nerve to defend the CCP, and the rest who didn't tried to hand-wave it. “Oh, but it's not real communism.” The same tired excuse. That's all they had.
“I got an idea.” The red-head grabs his laptop, and takes a seat next to me. “Why don't you join them?”
“What?” I look at him like he grew another head. “Why?”
“There is a saying I believe. That a person should keep their friends close but their enemies even closer?” He puts on his glasses. “You're famous after what you did, and nobody is giving you flack for decking him. Well, except for Shaun King but he was always crazy. In fact, a lot of people want you on their payroll. You're basically like Queen Maeve. Besides Homelander, I don't think there is anyone who could pose a threat to you.”
That was true. I was probably one of the more powerful metahumans out there.
“I could take him.” I snort, and lean back into the couch. “He has a few more tricks than I do but he is sloppy.” I saw how he fought. He just relied on his heat vision mostly. His martial prowess was nonexistent, and he didn't have experience in either guerrilla or trench warfare like I did. He was a cocky tête de nœud. An arrogant prick that never got the chance to be humbled.
What he could do was public knowledge. They said he had no weaknesses but that was wrong. His hearing, and his sight? They were no boon. I think of all the ways I could exploit that. How sensitive were they exactly?
“I suggest you learn everything you can. You need evidence against A-Train. The best place to get that would be...” He switches to a particular web page.
The Lamplighter Retires From Heroism! The Seven needs new heroes to save the day! Are you up to the challenge? Sign up today for a chance to have an interview.
“There is a position open, and technically they're The Six right now.”
Charlie Shayne gives me a cheeky look. “Think about it for a minute. A-Train's race with Shockwave is coming up soon. What do you think he cares about most in the world?”
“Being fast.” I answer him. “No, being the fastest.” Maybe that's what it was. A performance enhancer. It would explain a lot. He didn't usually blow past the speed of sound. Typically, his last track record pinned him at seven-hundred miles per hour. I could only reach six-hundred miles per hour on my best days. He was moving at least twice as fast as I was yesterday. “I could sabotage that. I could knock him out of The Seven. Shockwave would replace him...”
I smirk as the gears start turning in my head.
“Vought International wouldn't care about protecting him then.” There is something absolutely demonic about my countenance. “How diabolic.”
“Say he has an accident, and dies. An overdose.”
I was growing more fond of this idea by the second.
“You're a roundabout snake, you know that?” I shake my head. “Humiliate him, crush his ambition, turn the world against him, and then leave him in the gutter? Another piece of refuse dead and forgotten?”
“He would be no George Floyd then. There would be no way for them to make him a martyr. He would just be another embarrassment people would do their best to forget. A failure.”
It was absolutely perfect.
“There is a problem of course. They're not just gonna let you on the team. You got to prove yourself. You need a name. An identity. A symbol. You need a costume.” He begins typing, and searching for designs.
“I am not wearing tights.”
“You don't have to but I do suggest that you choose something fashionable.” He tilts his head. “I suggest showing something for the people to gawk about. Sex sells...”
“I'm not a manwhore either.” I shake my head. “At best, I might go shirtless but I can't promise anything else.”
“Hēilóng is out of the question. He is considered something of a wild card. They're not calling him a supervillain but no way is he showing up on their radar.” The red-head ruffles his hair. “Do you have any ideas?”
I think about it for a moment.
“How about... Gladiator? Simple, and to the point. I could base the costume off that idea. I'm sure people would enjoy the look.”
“It could work.” He nods his head. “A blast from the past. What about your origin story as it were?”
“How about the truth? A portion of it at least. I'm immortal. I can't grow old. I can make that work in my favor. I can get a lot of positive reception if people know that I fought as a soldier in the first world war.”
“Ah, so an actual gladiator who has been in countless battles over the centuries? That's actually an excellent idea. A half-truth will make your abilities easier to explain.” He closes his laptop. “I am guessing you will be giving them your real name?”
“Hugo Danner is about to hit prime time, baby!” I lean forward, and reach for the table. Grabbing a pack of cigarettes. “I'm coming for them all.” I put a cigarette in my mouth. I snap my fingers. A spark ignites it.
Life as a superhero?
It would be something different at least.
“I'm coming for you... junkie.”
Revenge was cruel, and unrelenting.
It made demons out of men.
"What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under..."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It came as a surprise. I never met anyone that was this fast.
It wasn't a blur though. Not to someone like me. I could see every detail. The sweat trickling down his face. The subtle twitch of some sort of exhilarating high. His goggles hid his eyes but I am sure they were dilated.
The man was on drugs. He could barely contain himself.
I hold her hands. I try to pull her towards me but I had to be careful. My l'amoureux didn't have the same advantages that I did. The world could break her. The sort of acceleration I needed? The amount of gees? It would break every bone in her body. It would tear the skin from her muscles. It would liquefy her internal organs.
It was that caution that prevented me from saving her. It was her mortality that forced me to stay my hand.
When he crashes into her? I see every excruciating moment. The look of shock on her face? There wasn't even enough time for her to register any pain. Just surprise. Her body rippling before rupturing, and then exploding against his invulnerable frame. Her viscera pours onto the street, and splatters across my face. Her life-blood painting the road a dire crimson.
It reminded me of another day. A day long, long past. How many years had it been since I was in the trenches? How many decades since I lost my closest friend? The round from that howitzer crashing against my body but failing to penetrate it entirely.
Her hands were all that were left. Her body was in shreds.
Nothing could have survived that.
The man stops in the street, and that's when I finally recognize him.
A-Train.
One of The Seven. The world's greatest superheroes.
I clench her hands tightly.
“I c-can't stop--”
I didn't give him enough time to finish. I had nothing holding me back anymore. The burst of speed surprises the metahuman. He didn't expect it from me.
He was still faster of course but that didn't matter.
I hit him at over four-hundred miles per hour. His state of shock was enough to allow me to catch him off-guard. He tries to fight back, and when his left leg sweeps into my ribs? There is a resounding clang. It had done nothing.
When my fist connects with his sternum it breaks. He is sent sprawling through the air. He was faster but somehow I was more powerful. I hit harder than he did.
It didn't make particular sense but when it came to powers like ours? Few things ever did. This was a world where a man could fly. A world where the sky was no longer the limit.
“W-What the h-hell?”
A-Train didn't know who I was. I wasn't one of Vought International's pet projects. He didn't have time to think. He had a delivery to make. He had to be on time.
He was more afraid of his employer than anything else.
There is a crack in the air as he shoots past the speed of sound, and he escapes my grasp just as I was about to reach him again.
He was faster especially now considering whatever he was on.
I give chase, and leap onto buildings. I clear a hundred yards in a jump but he had already made it past the horizon.
I could no longer see him.
When I land? I scream. I spew venomous curses. There are people around me who take pictures. Who had seen everything.
“Get that camera out of my face!” I push them aside, and make my way back to the scene of the crime.
They recoil in fear. They had seen what I did to A-Train. They didn't want to be on the receiving end of what I had in store for that junkie.
"This wasn't supposed to happen!"
It wasn't supposed to end like this.
Robin Ward was dead. Another victim of superheroism. It was all over the news the next day.
A-Train was giving his empty platitudes to every reporter that would interrogate him on the subject.
“Well, she shouldn't have been in the middle of the street--”
I crush the remote controller in my hand.
Of course. Junkies never did take any responsibility. It was their victims. It was never them. It was the drug. It was never them.
A single step from the side-walk is not in the middle of the street. Anyone could see that.
“You lying piece of shit!” I rip the television off the wall, and hurl it out of the window. It hits a parked car, and I could hear an alarm start blaring. "Mother fucker!"
I was taking it surprisingly well.
The last time something like this happened I brought about one of the greatest massacres in War World I.
“Uh, Hugo. I am gonna have to ask that you don't throw any more of my stuff out of the window.”
Oh, right. This wasn't my house.
“Eat a dick, Charlie.” Charlie Shayne. He was a red-head. A ginger in every sense of the word. A bit of a wimp. No real muscles what to speak of. The last living relative of the best friend I ever had. His family was in dire straits so naturally I helped them out. I owed them that much for starting my fortune. Thomas “Matthew” Shayne's father gave me a whole million after the war.
That generosity secured my livelihood.
“I am gonna let that slide." He takes a deep breath. "I know you're trying to deal with something right now but--”
“That junkie murdered my girlfriend! He murdered her, and he is acting like it was her fault!”
I punch another hole in his wall.
That was the tenth time that I did that today. I managed to connect the four diagonally and vertically at this point.
“You know, I think we're both lucky that you're rich. The amount of property damage that you do would have left us homeless a long time ago.” The benefit of living as long as I have was that I had accumulated a lot of wealth. Due in part thanks to my extraordinary abilities. In no uncertain terms? I was a millionaire.
I invested in that money Mr. Shayne had given me, and then I became even richer over the century. It was a chore to excavate sunken wrecks, and unveil treasures buried beneath the dunes.
“There's another problem I should mention. People know that you're a metahuman or whatever. Someone recorded what happened, and the video went viral.”
I groan.
“Yeah, I saw. I have been getting texts nonstop.” I reach for my smartphone. A thousand messages since yesterday. How did they even get my number? “Block, block, instantly blocked. Fuck off, I am not a superhero!” I delete a few more of them.
A bunch of vultures. Probably a few people who wanted to recruit me for a scam.
I really should have been more careful for what I wished for. A few decades back I was mopping around, and isolating myself from humanity. I had no real attachments. I was alone. I was angry to say the least. Considered going on a murderous rampage at one point but thought better of it. Then met a bunch of lunatics who wanted to make an entire civilization of people like me.
I killed them all.
Then kaboom. They show up in droves out of nowhere. As if my efforts were for naught. I had my suspicions but I wasn't sure.
I wasn't a peculiar specimen anymore. I was just another one of them, and boy were they were a bunch of babies. They had it good. The support of the media, their friends and family, other people like them they could be themselves around, and they were popular.
When I was struck down by that lightning bolt it was only the beginning. It was like Zeus had it out for me.
“Did I fuck your daughter? Is that it? She was a whore, Zeus! Strike me down, branleur!”
Nothing.
Perhaps, in my melancholy all those years ago that was the only time god did hear my prayers. He was silent ever since.
I was a lost cause to him.
“Have you been drinking, Hugo?”
“No.”
That's when I grab the flask in my coat pocket, and down the whole thing. Bruichladdich.
One of my favorite spirits.
“Now I am.”
Charlie Shayne gives me a disappointed frown. I remember when I still changed his diapers.
Now here he was a grown man. Sometimes I feel like he is the adult here. I wasn't exactly the mature type. Over a hundred years old, and I still felt like that boy who couldn't find his place in the world.
I failed miserably. I didn't become that shining example. I wasn't the hero. I was just another maniac. Another cautionary tale to tell children at their bedside.
“How did her parents take it?” He tried to change the subject. It's what he always did when I started cussing in french. It wasn't my mother tongue but it quickly became a part of me after I had joined the French Foreign Legion.
“Her father shot me in the face with buckshot. I don't blame him.” I grab another flask, and start drinking. “Her mother fainted I think.”
I wasn't going to have much of a relationship with them now. They never approved of us being together to begin with. They thought I was just a playboy with too much money.
They were right about the money part at least. I offered to pay for the funeral arrangements but they wouldn't accept a dime from me.
“What are you going to do?” There was a seriousness in the boy's voice. He knew me a bit too well.
“Kill him.”
“He's one of The Seven. You can't just kill him.”
“I can. He's not the only person who can rout an army.”
“That's besides the point. You would become the most wanted man in America. There is one of you, and hundreds of them. Vought International has every person like you in their pocket.”
That was true enough.
“So, what? I get a lawyer, and try to sue Vought International? They're just gonna settle. I don't want money. I want A-Train's head on a platter.” I toss another flask aside. I could barely feel anything. The buzz just wasn't there. My metabolism worked harder than it had any right to.
That strange concoction my father injected me with as a fetus in my mother's womb working without fail.
“Considering what happened with George Floyd they would just label you a racist, and a radical.” I twitch at that. Another junkie. A man who held a defenseless woman at gunpoint in order to have his fix. A victim of police brutality. How sad. I will just play for him the world's smallest violin.
“I don't doubt it.” I concede. The media was like that these days. “They would probably try to cancel me, or give me some on the nose supervillain name like Stormfront.”
“She is actually a superheroine.”
“Wait, really?” I laugh. “The world these days...”
I take a seat on the couch.
“What am I going to do?” I was beginning to calm down. Who was I fooling? “It isn't right what happened. The coward doesn't even give a damn! None of them do. The world sees her, and then they say it's just collateral damage!”
Nobody cared. They were only worried about their own validation. Their own haphazard narrative. Their own machiavellian plots, and their islands that were to the brim filled with sex slaves. Children no less, and they didn't even try to be subtle about it.
“What exactly is it worth anymore?”
I came to that conclusion decades ago. I made my peace with that, and for all that I could do? I could only bear witness to change.
The world would become what it would, and the people would let it.
That's how it has always been.
In light of that? I could only keep the people I cared about safe. I had to protect them at least from the coming upheaval.
“You didn't say that during the Hong Kong protests.”
I guffaw at that. How did he know about that?
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“That unsanctioned masked vigilante calling himself Hēilóng?”
I sheepishly look away from him at that.
“I had a few friends there.” I don't try to deny it. “I did what I had to do, and they tried to smear Hēilóng with libel. So, I murdered their military dogs? They were boot-lickers the lot of them! Back in my day? That would be called justice.” The CCP were still rounding up the Turkic Uighurs, and putting them into concentration camps. The only thing I could do was secure Hong Kong's independence as Hēilóng, and half of the world despises him regardless.
I got chewed out by every celebrity in the CCP's fold. They called me a murderer. A criminal. A vile, and rotten neerdowell. Lebron James tried to raise his dukes. Shameless sellout he was. He wasn't so brave when I payed him a visit, burst through a wall, threw him through a table, and choke-slammed Stephen Colbert in front of a studio audience.
The people of Hong Kong loved me. Now they were patriots. The CCP couldn't do anything short of wiping Hong Kong from the map if they wanted to stop me. Then I discovered their lab in Wuhan, and prevented a mutate strain of SARS from spreading around the world that would have destroyed millions of lives.
After that reveal people still had the nerve to defend the CCP, and the rest who didn't tried to hand-wave it. “Oh, but it's not real communism.” The same tired excuse. That's all they had.
“I got an idea.” The red-head grabs his laptop, and takes a seat next to me. “Why don't you join them?”
“What?” I look at him like he grew another head. “Why?”
“There is a saying I believe. That a person should keep their friends close but their enemies even closer?” He puts on his glasses. “You're famous after what you did, and nobody is giving you flack for decking him. Well, except for Shaun King but he was always crazy. In fact, a lot of people want you on their payroll. You're basically like Queen Maeve. Besides Homelander, I don't think there is anyone who could pose a threat to you.”
That was true. I was probably one of the more powerful metahumans out there.
“I could take him.” I snort, and lean back into the couch. “He has a few more tricks than I do but he is sloppy.” I saw how he fought. He just relied on his heat vision mostly. His martial prowess was nonexistent, and he didn't have experience in either guerrilla or trench warfare like I did. He was a cocky tête de nœud. An arrogant prick that never got the chance to be humbled.
What he could do was public knowledge. They said he had no weaknesses but that was wrong. His hearing, and his sight? They were no boon. I think of all the ways I could exploit that. How sensitive were they exactly?
“I suggest you learn everything you can. You need evidence against A-Train. The best place to get that would be...” He switches to a particular web page.
The Lamplighter Retires From Heroism! The Seven needs new heroes to save the day! Are you up to the challenge? Sign up today for a chance to have an interview.
“There is a position open, and technically they're The Six right now.”
Charlie Shayne gives me a cheeky look. “Think about it for a minute. A-Train's race with Shockwave is coming up soon. What do you think he cares about most in the world?”
“Being fast.” I answer him. “No, being the fastest.” Maybe that's what it was. A performance enhancer. It would explain a lot. He didn't usually blow past the speed of sound. Typically, his last track record pinned him at seven-hundred miles per hour. I could only reach six-hundred miles per hour on my best days. He was moving at least twice as fast as I was yesterday. “I could sabotage that. I could knock him out of The Seven. Shockwave would replace him...”
I smirk as the gears start turning in my head.
“Vought International wouldn't care about protecting him then.” There is something absolutely demonic about my countenance. “How diabolic.”
“Say he has an accident, and dies. An overdose.”
I was growing more fond of this idea by the second.
“You're a roundabout snake, you know that?” I shake my head. “Humiliate him, crush his ambition, turn the world against him, and then leave him in the gutter? Another piece of refuse dead and forgotten?”
“He would be no George Floyd then. There would be no way for them to make him a martyr. He would just be another embarrassment people would do their best to forget. A failure.”
It was absolutely perfect.
“There is a problem of course. They're not just gonna let you on the team. You got to prove yourself. You need a name. An identity. A symbol. You need a costume.” He begins typing, and searching for designs.
“I am not wearing tights.”
“You don't have to but I do suggest that you choose something fashionable.” He tilts his head. “I suggest showing something for the people to gawk about. Sex sells...”
“I'm not a manwhore either.” I shake my head. “At best, I might go shirtless but I can't promise anything else.”
“Hēilóng is out of the question. He is considered something of a wild card. They're not calling him a supervillain but no way is he showing up on their radar.” The red-head ruffles his hair. “Do you have any ideas?”
I think about it for a moment.
“How about... Gladiator? Simple, and to the point. I could base the costume off that idea. I'm sure people would enjoy the look.”
“It could work.” He nods his head. “A blast from the past. What about your origin story as it were?”
“How about the truth? A portion of it at least. I'm immortal. I can't grow old. I can make that work in my favor. I can get a lot of positive reception if people know that I fought as a soldier in the first world war.”
“Ah, so an actual gladiator who has been in countless battles over the centuries? That's actually an excellent idea. A half-truth will make your abilities easier to explain.” He closes his laptop. “I am guessing you will be giving them your real name?”
“Hugo Danner is about to hit prime time, baby!” I lean forward, and reach for the table. Grabbing a pack of cigarettes. “I'm coming for them all.” I put a cigarette in my mouth. I snap my fingers. A spark ignites it.
Life as a superhero?
It would be something different at least.
“I'm coming for you... junkie.”
Revenge was cruel, and unrelenting.
It made demons out of men.
