Chapter 7.5
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Despite my heart having stopped—unable to withstand the flood of pure Compound V—I was still thinking clearly. Blood continued moving through my body, sustaining life in my tissues, and only the absence of a heartbeat indicated that something was wrong.
I was capable of controlling dozens of liters of blood at a range of a hundred meters, but every bit of my ability—already amplified by the new dose of Compound V—was barely enough to keep me from dying. My consciousness had spread across dozens of separate streams, each one responsible for maintaining a different part of me.
Under ordinary circumstances that wouldn't have been so difficult, but sustaining my own life while incomprehensible mutations and transformations were simultaneously occurring inside my body? Even with all my experience and the temporary boost, it was impossibly complex. Evidently super-strength wasn't quite designed for this kind of self-amplification.
The greatest mystery that had occupied me in this life, through everything, remained the phenomenon of superpowers themselves. It seemed that the longer I thought about it, the more experiments I ran, the less sense superpowers made. And this wasn't just about the insane, physics-defying things—the ability to shrink to a hundredth of your size or move at the speed of sound.
Even in the simplest, most basic aspects of the powers, there were questions with no answers. Every hero, for instance, possessed enhanced perception—including hypersensitive hearing capable of picking up a falling leaf a hundred meters away.
So why had none of them gone deaf from the constant thundering of their own heartbeat, which ought to sound like a bell? Why hadn't we all lost our minds from the noise of blood moving through our veins? Our hearing could focus when we wanted it to, somehow—but if you didn't think about consequences like that, you simply never noticed them.
Or why could supers throw themselves in front of speeding cars every day and walk away without significant harm, yet a punch from another hero would do far more damage? Where did the body draw the resources to generate that kind of toughness without increasing mass or complicating regeneration? And that wasn't even touching on the material requirements for accelerated healing.
I had been studying this question practically from the moment I'd arrived in this world, but the answer had always slipped away. Then again, if the best scientists at Vought hadn't found it in nearly eighty years of trying, it was unlikely I was special enough or brilliant enough to just crack it. Even Sage, whose power was a superhuman intellect, had found no answer and simply made peace with the unknowable nature of heroes.
Over time, though, an idea had come to me—that the answer needed to be approached not from the direction of physics or biology. The root mechanism of Compound V might remain beyond my understanding, but a method for expanding my own capabilities to their absolute limit was enough. Once I reached a completely new level, I could revisit the question with the benefit of that new strength.
Because what did all the strangeness surrounding superpowers have in common? It always provided convenience to its users—as though it were specifically adjusting itself to suit them.
Even after gaining access to Vought's secret documents through Sage, I hadn't found a single super known for regeneration who had aged too rapidly or died drowning in cancerous tumors. Not a single speedster who had died from a particle of dust at terminal velocity or slipped and shattered. Not even a single teleporter who had rematerialized inside a wall.
But how many cases were there of powers changing specifically because of something that had happened to the person? The clearest example was Soldier Boy, who had become a walking nuclear bomb after someone had tried to kill him with radiation.
Whatever power a person had, it seemed their abilities also worked to protect them from themselves—keeping them from accidentally causing their own death. And that was precisely what I intended to exploit. Even now, strangely enough, my abilities were providing exactly—and only—what was needed to not die and survive the lethal procedure. No more, no less. Just enough to live.
But that wasn't the only foundation of my experiment, of course. The theory alone was too speculative—supers weren't immortal, and every power had limits to how flexible it could be. The other pillar was a separate idea, connected to how exactly the serum was introduced into the body.
I had also always wondered why almost every child could survive Compound V, while adults had odds of one in ten on a good day. Why couldn't you inject it into your arm to make that arm superhumanly strong? If there was no rational explanation for how the powers actually worked, why did scientists adhere to any particular method? And how, in God's name, had Frederick Vought ever invented the formula in the first place?
The injection was delivered directly into the liver—an organ whose function in the body was filtration. The fact that it was children, the most biologically adaptable to mutation, who survived most reliably was clearly not a coincidence. My theory was that the injection first transformed the body's primary filtering organ, which then drove the transformation of everything else.
Amusingly, in pure theory this meant Compound V didn't need to be injected at all—you could simply drink it. The chances of dying would be dramatically higher, but the powers could still be acquired. An interesting detail.
More importantly, this also explained why a second injection of the serum would only strengthen a hero temporarily. The body had already adapted to the changes, and the necessary mutations were already present—meaning any further intervention would need to be qualitatively or at least quantitatively stronger to overcome a system whose capacity to filter chemicals from the blood had only improved. This aspect of physical endurance was also developed in every super.
But what if the serum were introduced after first reducing the body's filtering capacity to an absolute minimum? What if the Compound V immediately began triggering changes throughout the system? Compounds that accomplished this existed, if not widely—and I had already taken one of them.
I was certain Vought's scientists had reached the same conclusion, but the implementation posed an enormous real-world problem. The liver existed in the human body for a reason, and the cascade of mutations caused by an excessively high concentration of Compound V in the system would kill the vast majority of people—and even supers—before completion.
But a stopped heart didn't concern me. And even the other complications would resolve in me far more easily than in any other person or super—I could stay alive for a time even after the progressive shutdown of individual organs. The critical thing was keeping the brain and lungs functioning. Though even without the latter, I could last a while longer. In theory, at least.
Ideally I would have run experiments in advance and verified every step, but time had been critically short. As it was, the transformation was begun at the very last moment, and I had managed to close most of the remaining questions with Sage's help. Even if she had simply led me into a suicidal experiment as a way of disposing of me… I didn't see another path.
Even if she had deceived me, only one option remained: win or die.
The flow of my thoughts was cut off abruptly when a sharp pain suddenly tore through my body. Every cell felt as though it had caught fire, the sensation building with every second. My temperature began to spike sharply, and my body fell into convulsions.
I tried immediately to use my ability to calm myself and improve the situation, but my consciousness began to cloud over—a fog rolling in, carrying a torrent of hundreds of disjointed thoughts. The experience felt disturbingly like a telepathic assault, except it seemed to come from all directions at once, and from inside my own head as well.
One moment my awareness felt like it was being stretched in a hundred different directions; the next it began to contract, until there wasn't room for a single coherent thought. With every second it worsened, my mind lurching from side to side, unable to understand what was happening to it.
There was no telling what would have become of me if I had kept spinning in that stream of incoherent thought tearing my mind apart. I would likely have died—but a small sensation appeared at the edge of my consciousness and changed everything. Something perfectly familiar to me, something no other sense could replicate.
I began to feel blood. The sense of command over it had been embedded in my nature through years of constant use, to the point where I could locate a single drop of red liquid from kilometers away. And so, desperate for a single point of focus, I began concentrating on that sensation, pushing everything else aside.
For a while there was no effect. Then, gradually, the other images began to recede. The flickering of consciousness slowed, and slowed further, until my entire mind was submerged in a red haze. The radius of my blood perception seemed to expand without limit as my brain struggled to manage the incoming flow of information. The pain was staggering—but I held on, clinging to the last threads of my will.
I sank into pure, mind-dissolving agony… which then vanished just as suddenly. It was as though my new sight had reached its limit, the expansion stopped, and calm arrived. And with it came light.
When I opened my eyes, I didn't immediately understand what had happened. My mind was still in a fog, and my vision seemed covered by a film.
"…I'm genuinely sorry it came to this. You had a chance to rise to the top of this world alongside me. To become my right hand. But you flew too close to the sun, Mark."
I looked down. One of Patriot's hands held me by the throat while the other was inside my chest, directly over where my heart should have been. There was no pain. Even when he closed his fist and what remained of my heart became a mass of shredded tissue, I felt nothing.
"Ha? Kid, you're tougher than you look. Or you've completely lost your mind? What was even the point of coming here…" He pulled his hand from the torn cavity in my chest. His eyes blazed red. Two crimson beams severed my arm at the elbow. I watched this with complete calm and equanimity. Awareness was slowly returning to me, though at the moment it was struggling against a flood of new sensations filling my consciousness to overflowing.
"No."
The moment I spoke the single word, a surprised Patriot carefully set me down and stepped back several meters. His rapid, stunned eyes made it clear he had not wanted to do that. The body of the greatest hero on earth had, for some reason, betrayed him.
"What is this?…"
A mask of absolute fury and hatred crossed his face—directed at me—but I genuinely didn't care. I was still taking stock of the new scope of my power, which was drowning me in information. Before, I could sense every person within a radius of a few kilometers, but had been unable to lift even a single drop of blood sitting at the edge of my perception. Now… now all life within hundreds of kilometers was within my reach.
My brain was barely managing the weight of it, but I had been wielding this power for years. Even though it had grown orders of magnitude stronger, the old skills still had weight. So I just needed to clear my head and focus on a single point.
Narrowing the radius of an ability always produced a qualitative improvement in its precision. Before, within four or five meters I could heal many conditions and analyze a human body better than any instrument. Now… I felt like a god.
I looked down at my severed arm, then at the stump. One thought—and the stream of blood flowing from it shaped itself into a crimson cord that reached out and pulled the severed limb toward me. I brought it to the stump, pressed it into place, and within seconds it had knit back together, indistinguishable from before.
A second after that, I remembered that my heart had been torn out and that I should have been dead long ago. Choosing to correct this oversight, I simply willed it—and crimson fluid covered me entirely. A few seconds of reshaping the blood according to my intention, and my body was whole again.
Only now did it occur to me how narrowly I had been thinking. My power allowed me to control blood—but why limit it to spears and shields? Blood was the foundation of existence for every complex organism, and with it, infinitely more was possible. Control over blood was control over life itself.
"What did you do to me, you bastard! You're nobody! I am a god!…" Patriot raged, his eyes blazing, screaming in incomprehension at why his powers weren't responding. He had clearly wanted to incinerate me a dozen times by now, but his body kept betraying him.
"Be quiet. You're making it hard to think."
I waved my hand. The blond man arched with pain and began screaming—a sound of genuine agony—as a black-red fluid poured from his mouth. Stunned, he stared forward in disbelief, feeling true weakness for the first time in his life. His hearing had gone dull. The red light had faded from his eyes.
I stopped paying attention to the screaming of the unhinged hero who had just lost the most important thing in his life, and looked around instead. Something was still wrong, but my mind kept slipping. Ah. Right. I was a hero. Heroes wore costumes.
What I had on was only the white uniform with the crescent moon symbol—no cape. My entire network of blood storage had been shattered by the blond man's assault, painting most of the room in red. And there was an ugly hole in my chest.
A moment later, all the blood rose from the floor and walls and drew toward me. As it wrapped around my body, a crimson cape formed behind me, composed entirely of the red liquid. At the center of my chest, a black crescent moon took shape against a field of red.
I walked out of the room calmly. Immediately I spotted several bodies—two wounded supers, and one ordinary human who was nearly dead. Hmm. That was not good. I didn't like it when people died. The brain was fortunately undamaged. Only about two thirds of the bones were broken.
I raised Butcher's body off the floor with a gesture, then began working on him—converting the blood, restoring what had been broken. Before the experiment, the limit of my ability had been a basic analysis of the red fluid. Now I could reshape it at the cellular level by an act of will. Healing the man was not a problem. Within about ten seconds his eyes opened, and he began looking around in stunned bewilderment.
"Butcher, Patriot is in the next room," I said calmly. "He's been stripped of his powers. He's no longer a threat. You can speak with him personally."
The man kept staring at me without comprehension—then a wild light appeared in his eyes as he looked toward the motionless former super with obvious intent. I moved on, restoring life to the rest of my allies.
I healed Soldier Boy and Annie as well, though for some reason I had no desire to face them just yet. Something inside my head was preventing me from concentrating, screaming that there were more pressing matters right now. Other enemies still out there, right. The power was making it difficult to even think—constantly feeding me information about the cellular composition of the blood around me, and the countless ways it could be altered, the countless new things it could become. Thoughts I didn't need right now.
"Mark?"
Annie's voice was the last thing I heard before I left the bunker. I simply looked upward, lifted my body into the air, and shot toward the remaining threats at tremendous speed.
It was time to change the world.
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