Even though it had been said more than once, the theory of a slapdash operation really was universally applicable.
Joey had assumed that if he wanted to look through Vought's confidential files, he would at least have to act like the hackers in movies and TV shows—furiously typing commands, breaking through five firewalls and slicing past six honeypots. Instead, he discovered that Vought's Wi-Fi was actually pretty fast.
These idiots, just so they could share printers and scanners, had practically connected every computer on the floor that could access the internet directly to the internal network, completely exposed. Joey almost felt like demanding a refund for the $6 he had spent on Amazon buying the ebook "Network Penetration: From Beginner to the Grave."
Some idiot in HR was already submitting her third OA request this month, asking IT to come take a look at her computer because it was "too slow."
Well, no shit. Joey looked at this genius who had dumped every piece of personnel data she had ever handled into a single folder on the desktop. The C drive's full 2TB had turned red—of course it was lagging.
She had even saved the company management system password directly in the browser. If Joey didn't click in and take a look, that would almost feel disrespectful.
"Oh, there you are!"
Speak of the devil. The HR genius herself—Ashley—walked into the meeting room hugging a stack of schedules. Joey made an extremely fast switch and flipped the screen over to Victoria 3.
"Translucent is absent today. There's an external event that was originally supposed to have him and The Deep appear together. How about you fill in for him?"
"Can't The Deep handle it by himself?"
Speaking of The Deep, Joey had just skimmed his file earlier. He was not some Atlantean, but an outstanding graduate of some place called Godolkin University. After graduation, he was directly selected into the Seven. He could move freely at depths of ten thousand meters underwater, and his physical durability was extremely high.
"It's just a drug-smuggling gang. Of course The Deep can handle it alone. But fans these days like seeing superheroes team up. What do they call it again—'a dream crossover'?"
"Okay..."
After the last banana incident, Joey honestly did not want to participate in any Vought activities. What this company was running felt less like superheroes and more like super idols.
Still, this show at least involved cracking down on drug trafficking, and that gave Joey some motivation. Sure, drug epidemics were largely self-inflicted by local administrations, but that didn't stop him from doing one good deed a day.
Using the excuse that he needed to wrap things up and close his game, he sent Ashley away, cleared his access logs one by one, and decided to come back to it another day.
Night fell.
"So you really can talk to fish? Even small ones?"
Joey had always been curious how The Deep managed to communicate with fish. From a physiological standpoint, most fish simply did not have the necessary hardware for human language.
Their brains were barely the size of a grain of rice. Communicating such simple minds with a complex being like a human felt like it would be more mentally devastating than humans gazing directly upon an eldritch god.
"If you want to laugh at me, just laugh. No need to beat around the bush."
The Deep's features were fairly well-proportioned, yet somehow he still looked shifty. At the moment, he could only reply weakly, offering no further explanation.
If it had been any other rookie, The Deep would at least have let them experience a bit of workplace bullying. But having long been used as Homelander's punching bag, when faced with Joey—who was clearly the same type as Homelander—he simply could not muster the courage to resist.
He didn't want to end up like A-Train, with his legs broken.
"I heard you graduated from Godogkin Institute? What kind of school is that?"
"It's Godolkin University! Godolkin! University! Not Godolkin Institute!"
At the mention of Godolkin Institute, The Deep suddenly perked up, reacting almost reflexively as he hurried to distance himself. He was a graduate of Godolkin University for Heroes, a top-ranked star student.
Not Professor John Godolkin's Godolkin Institute. That place was less an institute and more a zoo. The people there, frankly speaking, were nothing more than Professor G's personal animal companions—summoned at will and dismissed at whim.
"Okay."
Joey had no idea why The Deep reacted so strongly, but he made a mental note to look into it later—after beating the crap out of the drug dealers below.
The drug problem had always been a chronic disease of American society. Drug trafficking was almost always accompanied by guns, murder, and organized violent crime.
Joey ignored the bullets fired straight at his face, reached out, and crushed the gun in front of him into a lump of scrap metal. When the gangster saw the red glow light up in Joey's eyes, he immediately lost his nerve and dropped to his knees to beg.
The other two accomplices tried to flee, only to be blocked by The Deep coming from the other direction. He laid each of them out with a solid beating.
Hearing their familiar, distinctive Spanish accents, Joey was not surprised at all. After all, in his previous life he had been through countless battles, bouncing from one chaotic place in Central and South America to another. He knew perfectly well who was mainly running the cocaine business in the United States.
Seeing that the dust had settled, Ashley immediately raised her hand and ordered the camera crew to rush over, shoving long lenses and microphones into the scene, snapping photos nonstop and asking him to shout a few slogans.
Joey's face darkened at the sight, and he took off straight into the air.
In Joey's eyes, drug dealers all deserve to die. Even if he killed them on the spot, Vought's PR department could surely scrub it clean, and maybe he would even gain another wave of fans among the redneck crowd.
But he did not do it—not because of restraint, but because it would have been meaningless. The more places he had been, the more he felt that most of the world was, in fact, pretty fucked up.
Drug trafficking in the countries south of this 'city on a hill' was as common as weeds—endless and impossible to eradicate.
Beyond the greed of the locals, it was also a matter of cause and effect.
When giant corporations that controlled grain, oil, and fruit treated those regions as their own backyard, taking whatever they pleased, this outcome should have been expected.
These corporations swallowed up farmland, industrialized the mass production of primary agricultural goods, and naturally crushed local supply-demand balances. Small farmers who once survived by growing food and fruit had no choice but to step back and switch to higher-value crops just to live—like opium.
When the corporations continued devouring land, displaced farmers had nowhere left to retreat. Their only option was more extreme means of survival: taking up guns and heading north. Selling these Americans some high-tech poison was already a pretty decent trade.
Add to that organizations like the CIA—top-tier bastards willing to use drugs as tools to attack enemies and launder funds with zero moral bottom line—and the drug problem became impossible to contain.
With the DEA spending every day mixed in with these parasites, how could drug enforcement ever succeed?
Catching these few dealers felt to Joey like pruning branches from a tree already rotting from the roots. Without addressing the root cause, it was pointless.
Joey had gone out hoping to do a good deed and lift his mood, but instead he felt even more depressed.
Thinking it over carefully, he suspected that the intermittent unreliability of his super hearing and super vision might also be connected to his fragile heart, which seemed to overthink things for no reason.
Joey did not know how the real Superman selectively chose what he wanted to know. If he himself had senses that could cover the entire planet, it would be hard to stop himself from listening to and watching the places he had once visited and never forgotten.
Some things were unforgettable after just a distant glance—let alone witnessing them firsthand.
"A gentleman, when seeing animals alive, cannot bear to see them die."
If he truly could see, how was he supposed to ignore women and children clinging to life amid ruins, their lives liable to be ended at any moment by a single shell?
If he truly could hear, how was he supposed to convince himself not to answer the prayers rising from the rubble—prayers begging simply to survive and see the next sunrise with their families?
Ever since the warm harbor of his life in this world had been burned to ashes by a great fire, Joey had increasingly felt that, after dying once, something was seriously wrong with his mind.
Had more than ten years of farm life in Kansas really not changed him at all? Was he still the same daredevil war correspondent he used to be?
Back then, as a man of flesh and blood, he had dared to carry a reporter's cameras through war zones. So why was it that now, with a body of steel, he had not stepped outside Kansas even once in fifteen years?