The obsidian surface of my desk reflected the cool blue light of a dozen floating monitors.
I took a slow sip of black coffee. The bitter liquid washed over my tongue, my Tier 2 Enhanced Senses dissecting the flavor profile into its base chemical components.
I set the mug down without making a sound and leaned back in my high backed leather chair, my eyes locked on the decrypted files salvaged from the ashes of Project Odessa.
General Raddock was a convenient scapegoat and Stan Edgar was currently chasing his own shadow, tearing Vought's internal structure apart looking for a traitor who did not exist.
The board was exactly as I had arranged it. But true power wasn't just about misdirection, it was about the continuous acquisition of assets.
And the files staring back at me from the primary monitor were the most valuable assets Vought had ever inadvertently created.
The Moreau sisters. Marie and Annabeth.
I scrolled through the heavily redacted medical logs, the clinical observations recorded by Dr. Cardosa and his team before I had erased them from the earth.
Project Odessa was the birthplace of Homelander, but he was not their only success story. He was merely their most public one.
The files detailed a highly classified initiative: fetal V injections. Administering Compound V to a subject before birth, allowing the chemical to rewrite the genetic code at the embryonic level.
It had an astronomically high failure rate. Most subjects dissolved in the womb or miscarried as horrific mutations.
Marie Moreau was the sole survivor of that specific cohort.
I brought up her power profile using the system interface.
[Target Profile: Marie Moreau. Power: Biokinesis (Tier 1), Resurrection (Tier 1), Hemokinesis (Tier 2), Super Defence (Tier 1). Super Strength (Tier 2), Regeneration (Tier 2), Enhanced Senses (Tier 3)]
The data was staggering, a testament to the terrifying potential of Compound V when perfectly integrated into a human genome.
She was a god masquerading as a teenager. A walking miracle of biological supremacy.
I tapped the screen, bringing up the secondary file.
The system interface displays the power profile.
[Target Profile: Annabeth Moreau, Power: Precognition (Tier 2)]
I steepled my fingers, resting my chin on my hands. The power sets were formidable, perhaps some of the most potent utility and defensive abilities on the planet.
But the files revealed a critical flaw in their design. Their powers were deeply tethered to their endocrine systems.
If they were calm, unaware, or suppressed, their access to their maximum power output was bottlenecked.
They required an emotional induction (fear, rage and profound grief) to unlock the absolute peak of their Tier 1 capabilities.
If Marie Moreau knew I was coming, if she had a fraction of a second to feel the terror of her impending death, her Tier 1 Super Defence and her biokinetic manipulation of her own blood would make her a nearly impossible target to put down cleanly.
If she panicked, she could theoretically trigger a biokinetic surge that would turn the suburban block into a crater.
She had to die without knowing she was in danger. She had to be erased from existence in the space between her heartbeats.
I dragged a separate window to the center of my screen.
My fingers blurred across the mechanical keyboard. I bypassed the standard ISP nodes, diving into the dark web architecture Vought used to track their monitored assets.
Marie was a high value subject, which meant she had a dedicated tracker. I found the encrypted ping disguised as a background update in her phone's operating system.
I sliced through the AES 256 encryption, I traced the ping. It bounced off a cell tower in an affluent suburb in upstate New York.
Asset Location: 42 Elm Street, Roslyn, New York.
Red River Institute had recently released her. She was staying at a transition home, preparing for her heavily publicized enrollment at Godolkin University.
I pulled up the satellite imagery of the address.
A two story suburban house. A manicured lawn. A quiet street. And a mundane setting for an execution.
I stood up from the desk. The glow of the monitors reflected in my eyes. I wore my dark fitting clothes, the fabric silent against my skin.
I focused on my physical mass.
Size Alteration (Tier 3).
The walls of my office shot upward into the stratosphere. The fibers of the Persian rug beneath my boots swelled into tangled trunks of wool.
The air pressure shifted as my mass condensed into a form no larger than a grain of rice… exactly 0.1 inches tall.
I closed my eyes, tuning out the sensory overload. I pictured the satellite map of the upstate New York suburb.
Teleportation (Tier 2).
Snap.
The air conditioned world of my penthouse vanished, replaced by the damp air of the night. I was on a shingled roof, the city a distant glow on the horizon. The ten kilometer jump had been effortless.
I repeated the process, a series of silent jumps, each one bringing me closer.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
Finally, I materialized on the roof of a house directly across the street from my target. I crawled to the edge, a tiny observer.
The group home was quiet, its windows dark save for a single light on the second floor. Marie's room.
Enhanced Senses (Tier 2)
I focused my vision, piercing the darkness. I could see the faint glow of a Vought installed security camera mounted under the eaves of the front porch.
I made my size a little bigger. I pulled out my phone from the system inventory.
I linked it to the local Wi Fi, an unprotected residential network and used it as a bridge to access the Vought camera's IP address.
I caught the feed, looped a static three minute recording of the empty street and fed it back into the camera's output. I put back my phone in the system inventory. I made my size 0.1 inches again
I prepared to make the jump across the street into her bedroom.
But then, my Enhanced Senses caught something.
PS: This is the first bonus chapter of the week. Come on guys, this novel is already completed, so use more Power Stones and let's finish it as soon as possible, haha.
PS: The novel is already completed on Patreon. If you want to read the whole story at once, there are 50+ advance chapters available. www.patreon. com/Drrajnovel