Sepsis 6.1
The tension was building. I was getting ready to sit down with Soldier Boy and work through our next move when a sudden phone call forced me to change plans. And what I read there left me seriously unsettled.
"Annie, can you keep an eye on our new weirdo and our hero for a while?" I said, turning to her. "I need to step out — my dad's texting me about some kind of problem at home and wants to meet somewhere safe to talk."
She watched me for a couple of seconds with visible anxiety, then gave a quick nod and said just one thing before I left:
"I hope everything's okay… Are you sure it's not a trap?" The worry in her voice was hard to miss.
"Don't worry. If Vought decides to come at me in one of the most prestigious and expensive restaurants in New York, they're going to attract way too much attention." I smiled and gave her a wave goodbye, already pulling up the taxi app. "And let them try — I'll show them firsthand why you don't underestimate doctors."
Inside, though, it felt like a storm was raging. The feelings pulling at me were complicated, and for good reason.
It wasn't Paul who had texted me.
***
"I'll be honest — I didn't expect to meet you in person under circumstances like these," I said carefully, extending my hand to the superhero sitting across from me and taking him in quickly. And, of course, running my analysis ability at full capacity. Right now, that was a matter of survival.
The moment I'd learned who had called me in for this meeting — and specifically asked me not to tell anyone about it — every instinct I had screamed at me to run. But reason won out. There was no running from this man.
"That's exactly why I invited you, Mark — to fix the crisis we're in," Homelander replied with a smirk, shaking my hand. And based on the force he applied, he could have ripped it clean off right then and there. I had no intention of flinching, though. I held my face steady no matter what.
Homelander. The greatest and most powerful superhero on Earth. Without question, without debate, he was an order of magnitude beyond anyone I had ever encountered. Even Soldier Boy and the lightning mistress simply faded into the background next to him. Honestly, I had serious doubts that even the two of them together could take down this invincible blond.
The gap between an ordinary person and a regular superhero felt trivial compared to the gap between those heroes and Homelander. His body was impossibly dense. Unknown reactions were constantly occurring inside him, and the structure of his blood was unlike anything I had ever seen.
The Compound V in him was remarkably pure — but also slightly different, as though it had been refined. Which made sense, given the sheer number of powers in his arsenal, any one of which would have been enough to put someone at the top of the world. But the way they all worked together turned an ordinary man into something genuinely close to a god.
The funniest part? I could tell his muscular system was barely developed. His suit had padding built in, and underneath it was just a regular male body for his age. I suspected he'd never once had to push himself to his absolute limit, which would make real training nearly impossible.
Still, there was something darkly funny about the fact that the most powerful superhero on earth — this world's Superman — hadn't even come close to reaching his full potential.
"Well?" the hero asked with his blinding white smile, settling into his chair and lacing his fingers together. "Impressed?"
"Reasonably so," I said, giving a mild shrug as I sat down. "And you?" I shifted my gaze to the other person at the table. "I'm afraid we haven't met."
The woman was Black, somewhere around thirty, sitting at the far end. She was sipping something through a straw and watching me in complete silence. I'd never seen this hero before, even though she was clearly carrying something interesting.
Her regeneration was phenomenal — among the strongest I'd ever read. But what really caught my attention was her brain. The capillary network inside it was developed to a degree that was simply impossible for a normal human being. And that put me on alert immediately.
That was how the biology of telekinetics and telepaths manifested. I'd spent years training my mind against exactly that kind of intrusion, but nothing could ever be pushed to an absolute.
"Jessica Bradley, but you can call me Sage." She nodded in Homelander's direction. "I'm something of a consultant to our hero here, and I help him make the right decisions."
He rolled his eyes at that but said nothing.
We placed our orders with the server who came by, and finally got down to the real conversation. Homelander did most of the talking while Sage continued to study me with a quiet, knowing smile.
I started my breathing technique and focused my thoughts on pink bananas. Telepaths were the most dangerous enemies in existence. Taking her out wasn't an option right now — so I'd just have to put those months of mental training to the test and find out whether any of it had been worth a damn.
"Straight to business, then?" the hero asked with a smile.
"I invited you here, Mark, to talk about our future. Not yours specifically, or mine — the future of every supe on this planet." He leaned forward slightly. "Tell me what you think it looks like."
I glanced at Homelander, then at the silent Sage, and took a few seconds before answering.
"That's not a simple question," I began, choosing every word with care. I could have softened things, dressed it up — but I didn't think that was what anyone here was expecting from me. "After the Compound V formula went public, the way people see us changed overnight. We went from being messengers of the gods to lab specimens. And I think that's just the beginning of the slide. The number of lawsuits against supes is already growing exponentially. People are uncovering crimes that heroes committed and that everyone stayed quiet about for years. And the government response — there's nothing good to say about that. The moment the secret of a formula that grants superpowers got out, it became obvious that every nation on Earth would race to get their hands on it. And none of that is going to end well."
"Exactly." Homelander snapped his fingers, visibly satisfied with my answer. "Very soon they'll be hunting us in earnest — just to take us apart and understand how we work. Those senile dinosaurs in power still think they can control us, dictate our every move, and they can't even hold onto their own chairs. They're thinking in the categories of the last century, where all power comes out of a rifle barrel." He shook his head. "Take you, for example. What do they have to stop you? Threats against your family? A missile strike? That's the full extent of their toolkit. While the power in our hands is greater by orders of magnitude."
He spread his hands wide. I kept every shred of my attention on him, not letting a single movement slip past me.
"I'll be honest — I've had my eye on you for a while," the hero said with a smirk. "Seriously. Translucent's been useless to me for a long time now, so I need a replacement. Someone young, someone with potential, and most importantly, someone with a working brain. I need a real team to change the world and save our kind."
He finished and glanced at Sage, who finally set down her glass and turned to face me directly.
"What my leader's characteristically persuasive speech was trying to say," she began, "is that we are deeply concerned about the fate of humanity's next evolutionary leap — which is us. When Vought was lobbying on our behalf and managing our image, working with them was at least viable. But we can already see the end of that era. The board of directors, Edgar at the head of it, cares only about their own profit — and for that profit, they are prepared to hand us over to the government right now and pivot to selling the formula itself. It's become completely clear: to them, we are not people and not heroes. We are a product. One that has already gone out of fashion." She paused. "And an obsolete product, as everyone knows, gets disposed of."
Without warning she set a folder of papers on the table and slid it toward me.
"Here's one example of what we mean to them — a revenue stream, for which morality and basic humanity are optional. Vought worked hard to keep projects like this hidden. But they never had a chance against me."
I looked at the papers immediately. They were reports documenting the care and development of a subject designated Facility Number Forty-Two, with details about the subject's upbringing and behavioral profile. I recognized what they were in an instant — reports compiled on my own development. And judging by whose name was on them, Indira had written them.
The level of detail, the specific information that only the two of us could have known — it confirmed these weren't fabrications. Although in a world with telepaths, you could never be fully certain of that.
My life was laid out in dry bureaucratic language, from my entry into school through the start of my television work. There were only a handful of reports, each one covering a stretch of several years.
What struck me as most interesting, though, was that the documents didn't seem especially substantive. They described nothing genuinely useful and conveyed only the most surface-level information about me. No details about my training, no specifics about how I used my ability, for example.
A very interesting omission.
"Now let's go ahead and address the elephant in the room," the woman said, her expression warm and just slightly mischievous. "We know perfectly well that you're working with Grace and the CIA — that you want to bring Vought down and put supes under your own form of control. Your 'Butcher' has extraordinary rage and remarkably little intellect. I compiled all the evidence and learned everything about you in a couple of hours. You hid yourselves reasonably well, I'll give you that — but no cover survives contact with genuinely great superpowers."
She tapped her temple with one finger. Homelander quietly sipped a coffee with milk.
"I'll go further: Vought would have found you long ago, the moment they actually wanted to. The only reason Tek Knight and the other private investigators with specialized abilities never tracked you down is that Stan Edgar has been dreaming of dragging supes through the mud for years — and the six-figure deposits hitting those investigators' accounts turned out to be a rather effective speck of dust in their eyes." She smirked. "But that's irrelevant to us, because it didn't interfere with our plans in the slightest. If anything, it accelerated the fall of the senile old men who had been keeping every supe comfortable in a pot of warm, pleasant water that nobody wanted to climb out of. Except the water turned out to be boiling, and we're all frogs. We all die unless we unite and take power into our own hands. To save everyone, we have to become the heroes people already believe we are."
Sage winked at me, then turned to Homelander, who had been listening quietly throughout.
"We're not forcing anyone to join us," she continued, leaning in slightly as she noticed the doubt on my face. "We're simply offering you a seat at the head of the table among the future victors. Vought still has a long list of secret projects aimed at controlling us — and in some cases, eliminating us entirely. Did you know they're currently developing a biological weapon that would kill every supe on Earth while leaving ordinary people untouched? Or a serum that grants temporary powers? These projects aren't finished yet — still in development — but in a few years, they will wage total war against us. And either we unite now—"
"—or we disappear, each of us alone, later." Homelander looked at me with something like genuine curiosity. "What do you say, Mark? Will you fight for your kind — or against it?"
I looked at them both one more time, then let myself sink into my thoughts.
There was a great deal of information here. Far more than could be properly processed in so short a time. And the choice I was facing mattered enormously.
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