"Wow! You planning to blow up the Pentagon or something? If you want to die, don't drag me into it…" Judy's voice blasted through the phone like she was spitting right in his face from hundreds of miles away.
Butcher instinctively wiped his face and pulled the phone farther away. "What? Bad signal here, beautiful lady. I'll come visit you in a couple days."
"You little sh—" Judy didn't get to finish before Butcher hung up.
...
"I already contacted him. He agreed to work with you, but he has one small request." The next morning, Ivan walked into The Seven's meeting room and found Homelander sitting there with a face like thunder, barely holding back his rage.
On the screen in the room, memes about Stormfront were scrolling nonstop.
One had her name taking up ninety percent of a newspaper while Homelander was crammed into a tiny corner with the caption "Haven't heard of Stormfront yet? Get with the times, okay?"
Another was a laughing Stormfront meme with the text "Laughing at Homelander."
There were tons more.
One swapped Stormfront's head onto the Statue of Liberty, her torch replaced with the Vought logo.
Some troublemaker even took a photo of someone covering their face and crying with emotion and captioned it "Stormfront actually replied to my comment."
But the best one was a Vought promo poster.
Originally it showed Homelander front and center with the rest of The Seven around him.
After some editing, Homelander and the others had vanished.
Stormfront stood front and center with her hands on her hips. Red arrows pointed to where the others used to be.
Their faces were now smaller than Stormfront's nostrils. The creator even helpfully added bold black text: "Homelandgirl is here."
Sizzle! The entire screen got sliced in half by Homelander's heat vision.
"The leader of The Seven can only be me! Not her!" Homelander's eyes burned red, jaw muscles twitching. "I will never let anyone take it from me!"
If rage could catch fire, Homelander would have burned the entire Vought Tower to the ground.
"Agree to whatever he wants! If he can't kill Stormfront, I'll make him understand what it feels like to be chopped into pieces!" Homelander clenched his fists, barely keeping his voice under control.
"Tell him the people I'm sending will arrive the day after tomorrow. I don't care how he does it. I want one result: to personally attend Stormfront's funeral and mourn her there!"
"Understood." Ivan nodded slightly and left the meeting room.
...
On the other side,
Hughie and Mother's Milk had taken a red-eye flight back to New York.
In the underground hideout less than a kilometer from Vought Tower, Butcher and the crew sat around the table listening to Hughie recount what they found in North Carolina.
"When we got to the address, we found out it wasn't Liberty living there. It was a family. They were super wary of Vought. After we swore up and down that we weren't with them, the woman finally let us in. Her name is Valerie. She's about fifty or sixty."
"At first she didn't want to talk about Liberty. So Mother's Milk and I pretended to be FBI agents and said the Bureau was very interested in the case."
"Not bad," Butcher praised.
"All thanks to your teaching. I used to be a good guy."
Hughie shot him a dirty look and pulled out a newspaper. "Under our threats, she finally told us what happened forty-eight years ago. It was a rainy night. Her brother was driving her home when Liberty stopped the car. Because of their ethnicity, she accused him of being involved in a robbery. No matter how much her brother tried to explain, Liberty wouldn't listen."
"In the end, she beat him ...to death on the spot. Afterward, Vought only paid Valerie two thousand dollars and made her sign an NDA."
"Sounds exactly like how supes operate. Vought's response is pretty standard too. What's the problem?" Butcher took the newspaper and looked at it. "Hmm? Isn't this Stormfront? 'The Storm Looming Over Criminals.' Not a bad headline."
"The problem is this. Even though decades have passed and it should have been forgotten, Valerie still looks terrified. When she talked to us she was so nervous she could barely speak. She also handed us a newspaper. The one you're holding right now."
After hearing Hughie's story, Butcher frowned.
He picked up the newspaper and said heavily, "You're saying… Stormfront is Liberty? No way. If she was still alive she'd be in her seventies, but Stormfront looks like she's in her twenties."
Mother's Milk, sitting beside him, reminded him, "Don't forget Compound V affects everyone differently. Maybe her powers besides controlling lightning also let her live longer."
"Not impossible."
Butcher nodded, agreeing with the idea.
"Doesn't matter though. She's going to be dead soon anyway. Who gives a fuck if she's Liberty or not." Butcher gave a contemptuous smile, then told them about the deal he made last night.
When they heard Butcher had agreed to work with Homelander to kill Stormfront, Frenchie and the others nearly fell out of their chairs.
Kimiko, on the other hand, nodded excitedly. She wanted in too. Frenchie still couldn't talk to her normally, but under her teaching he had learned to understand some of her signs.
"Just us?" Hughie looked conflicted.
It sounded as ridiculous as someone telling him to go kill Homelander.
"Homelander is sending a few helpers to work with us. But in my opinion they're more dangerous than Stormfront. Once we kill her, they might try to tie up loose ends. So we'll just blow them up along with her." Butcher always assumed the worst about people, especially Homelander.
"Alright, boys. Pack your shit. We're going to my aunt's place. She's got the ingredients for chewing gum."
"Chewing gum?" Hughie looked confused.
Frenchie explained, "C4. Extremely powerful plastic explosive. It's really stable so you can stick it anywhere like chewed gum. That's why they call it chewing gum."
"How much material did you get?" Frenchie asked Butcher.
A crazy glint flashed in Butcher's eyes. "Not much. Heh. Just a few dozen kilos."
"A few dozen kilos?!" Frenchie shot up from his chair in shock.
Five kilos of that stuff could completely level a two-story house. Dozens of kilos could bring down half of Vought Tower.
"That's just a conservative estimate, mate. How much we end up with depends on how fast you work before the mission starts. You're the expert on this." Butcher patted Frenchie's thigh and made him sit back down.
"Oi, Hughie. I've got a job for you. Contact the mysterious gentleman. No matter what it takes, get him to agree to help us." Butcher's plan was simple. Since they were killing supes anyway, they might as well use Ivan first, then blow him up along with Stormfront.
Hughie didn't overthink it. He assumed Butcher just wanted the guy's help.
"Should I ask him for some Compound Six? Might come in handy at a critical moment."
"Unless I'm dead, you're never touching that shit again in your life." Butcher wasn't desperate enough yet to consider using something like Compound V to gain powers.
"Fine, I'll contact him right now."
...
Inside a steakhouse on a New York street, Ivan Greevs took a call from Hughie.
"You guys are planning to kill Stormfront? Got some serious balls. Wanting my help isn't a problem. Ten million dollars." Ivan held a steak knife in one hand, slowly slicing through the meat on his plate before spearing a piece and popping it into his mouth.
"No problem. Ten million after it's done. Also, I want another vial of Compound Six. The same kind you gave me last time." In the small, dark room, Hughie covered the phone and spoke quietly, afraid Butcher might hear.
"Fine. Send me the address when it's time."
After hanging up, Ivan put down his knife and wiped the grease from the corner of his mouth with a napkin.
Perfect timing.
The effects of the Compound V in his body were about to wear off. As for when Stormfront died, it all depended on her power's fusion conditions.
If it was simple, like just killing her, then she had only a few days left.
If the conditions were complicated, like needing to touch her for two hours or more, Ivan didn't mind crippling the Nazi bitch first.
"Check, please."
After leaving a twenty-dollar tip, Ivan walked out of the steakhouse.
___
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Read 12 Advance Chapters—P@t- Captain69