— Broadcast —
The look Vegapunk was directing at Garou was the look of a man who has identified a subject of study and is struggling with the very reasonable knowledge that the subject will break his nose if he continues.
He continued for approximately four seconds.
Garou hit him on the head.
The bump that resulted joined the previous one in a small cluster above his left temple. Vegapunk absorbed this without crying out, which Ada, watching from a safe distance, found funnier than she expected. The great scientist — sought by every major power in the world, courted by Marine and World Government alike, accustomed to the particular deference that his professional value generated in every room he entered — was standing with his arms slightly raised in the defensive posture of someone who has learned, recently, that the normal social insulations do not apply.
She had not seen Vegapunk deflated before. It suited him, in a way she found difficult to explain politely.
"I need to get out of this building," Garou said. "That means getting through the black fog without knowing where it takes me. Old man — you have approximately thirty seconds to be useful before I stop asking."
The look he gave Vegapunk communicated, without ambiguity, that vagueness would be treated as lying, and lying had physical consequences.
The problem was the Domain's outer membrane. Garou had entered Rome as part of the chaos window the Infinity Castle's approach had opened — operating independently of the pirate alliance's main force, using a map and the advantage of not having any official Marine records in this city. Getting in had been straightforward. Getting out with a live Vegapunk in tow required navigating through the black fog, and the fog's interior was unpredictable in ways that made improvisation risky.
Vegapunk's useful thought arrived: Caesar Clown had mentioned, in passing, a large signal receiver somewhere in the facility. If it existed, and if it could be reached, combining it with Garou's communication device might produce a signal capable of penetrating the interference.
He said as much. He also said that he didn't know where in the facility the receiver was, and that the people who did know were currently either merged with an alien symbiote or unavailable in related ways.
Garou reached into the interior pocket at his waist and produced the device.
It was conspicuously not a natural creature. The metallic surface and precise engineering were immediately identifiable as manufactured — an Illuminati product, designed ally to cut through World Government and Marine encryption and shielding protocols. The organization's engineers had explained this with considerable confidence before he departed.
Since the Domain had descended over Rome, the device had not received a single signal. It had not transmitted one either. It was an expensive weight in his pocket.
"Between the two of you, you're going to help me find it," Garou said. He pointed at Vegapunk and then at Ada with the economy of someone who has decided that phrasing things as requests wastes time. "Move."
They moved through the laboratory in an arrangement that had not been negotiated: Vegapunk and Ada in front, Garou behind them both, his crisis instincts running a continuous assessment of the space. Something in the building felt wrong in a way that wasn't localized. A sensation of being observed from a direction he couldn't pin.
He heard the high heels first.
Every muscle group that had been on standby came online simultaneously. He turned.
Stussy was at the far end of the corridor.
Her dress was torn, the white fabric marked with laboratory-floor damage and the residue of whatever she had passed through on her way back. The tears did not detract from her appearance in the way damage usually detracted from things. Her arm — the one he had snapped — was straight and functional at her side, the skin over it smooth and unmarked. Whatever she had been doing in the wreckage of the walls she'd traveled through, it had included repairing herself.
The pace of her recovery was not, Garou noted, much slower than his own.
"When a man hits a woman," she said, "he should first consider whether he has the standing to do so." Her smile had returned, but the temperature behind it had changed. "I've been holding back. You've earned the full version."
Garou set his stance. His own style of boxing — self-taught in structure, shaped by a thousand fights rather than a single school — settled into its ready configuration. He had not, he realized, been entirely sure what she was capable of until now. The prior exchange had told him she was dangerous. The way she was standing told him she'd been measuring him the whole time.
He was interested.
"Don't hold it against me if I stop being polite," he said.
Her figure left the spot.
Not fast — gone. One position, then another, no visible interval. By the time his perceptions caught up with where she was, she was behind him.
The punch landed at the base of his skull.
The force behind it was not the force of a person his size. It was the force of something that had been given considerably more physical capacity than its frame suggested. The floor came up. His vision did what vision does when the brain is subjected to the kind of impact that interrupts its usual operations: it went white, then grey, then meaningless for approximately two seconds.
He hit the floor. The blow had landed before he had managed to produce a response.
Stussy looked at him without mercy.
The follow-up strike hit the lumbar vertebrae.
The force traveled through him like a column, converting his body's mass into a tool for its own delivery. He didn't fall so much as descend — vertically, through the laboratory floor, through the foundation beneath it, the impact generating a crater that kept deepening past the point where the ambient light reached. Dust and pulverized material spread from the edges in a slow, even ring. The hole was deep enough that the sound of him landing, somewhere far below, was delayed.
Silence.
Stussy straightened up. The smile that came back to her face had a different quality — warmer, genuine, the satisfaction of someone who has been waiting to do exactly that for a reasonable period of time and has now done it correctly.
"I forget, sometimes," she said to the hole, "how good this feels."
Ada was looking at the space where the floor had been.
Then she looked at Vegapunk.
The old man had watched the entire sequence with the steady expression of someone who had known, in advance, approximately how it would end.
"How much did you put into her?" Ada asked.
"Everything I could think of," Vegapunk said. He said it without particular guilt, which was its own answer. Humans were, from a research standpoint, excellent experimental material — the architecture was proven, the baseline was established, and the margin for enhancement was well-documented. Stussy had been a willing subject. Her recovery speed, her physical output, her structural durability: all of it the result of years of systematic enhancement, each layer tested and adjusted.
He paused, then added the piece that made the rest of it make sense:
"The strength you're seeing comes from the Chikara Chikara no Mi (Strength-Strength Fruit). To be direct about it — Stussy is the first-generation prototype of Homelander."
Ada absorbed this.
The second-generation Seraph — the artificial god, the endpoint Vegapunk's research had been building toward — had a first-generation test version, and the test version was standing three meters away looking pleasantly into a very deep hole. That this had been walking around inside a CP0 operative's body for years, supervised and functional, was either reassuring proof that the design worked, or deeply unsettling evidence of how much Vegapunk had built into people without announcing it.
Possibly both.