Chapter 153: Matthew: Wait, Where Did This Guy Come From?
On the order, the armed personnel pulled syringes from their sides and pressed them into the necks of the assembled executives.
As the compound entered them, their bodies began convulsing involuntarily. Beneath the skin, fine vein-like tendrils surfaced briefly across their faces and arms.
Then the tendrils faded and disappeared.
About half an hour later, everyone who had been slumped on the table slowly straightened up.
They looked at each other.
A moment of silence.
Then, in unison:
"Hail HYDRA!"
Ikorela's mouth curved into a satisfied smile.
HYDRA's internal contacts inside Umbrella Corporation had been systematically removed by Matthew. With that avenue closed, they had redirected their attention to the Tri-Corporation, which had maintained a long-running competitive relationship with Umbrella. The two organizations had been operating quietly together for three months already. It was only now, with Umbrella's growth threatening to monopolize the market entirely, that HYDRA's leadership had finally issued Ikorela a clear directive.
Consolidate the smaller competitor companies. Use whatever means necessary to absorb them in one operation.
The means in question required some background.
Saddler had previously supplied HYDRA with quantities of Las Plagas larvae, along with a modified strain engineered to function similarly to a loyalty-imprint. A portion of these had already been deployed as a covert mechanism for controlling government figures at the highest levels. The majority had been held in reserve.
Today, that reserve was being used. The goal: build a competitor with sufficient market capitalization to genuinely challenge Umbrella Corporation.
HYDRA would not tolerate a single company dominating the market, particularly one that was actively supplying super-soldiers to their opponents, and particularly one that operated entirely outside their control.
Ikorela waited until she had confirmed the characteristic dark patterning of Las Plagas parasitic infection had appeared in every person's eyes, then laid out the instructions from above.
"Now that everyone here is genuinely one of us, I can share what our superiors have directed us to do." She picked up her wine glass and took a measured sip.
"The first directive is to consolidate our existing resources and capabilities. In plain terms: merge your companies into the Tri-Corporation. Give the Tri-Corporation the scale to continue competing with Umbrella." She let her gaze move around the table, catching the questions in several faces.
"Mr. Keller. You look like you have something to ask."
He did. He nodded. "I fully support the directive from above." He put his position on the record first, then continued. "But what I don't understand is this: even if we consolidate everything, without core technology and real innovation capacity, we'll eventually lose the ability to compete again regardless. Does Miss Ikorela already have a way to take their market?"
Ikorela smiled and snapped her fingers. "Mr. Keller is exactly right to ask."
"Though my approach isn't to compete for the market they currently hold. It's to open an entirely new one."
"A new market?" The room responded together.
"Which market, specifically?" Keller pressed.
Rather than answering directly, Ikorela released a piece of internal intelligence. "I imagine none of you are aware of what the government recently excavated in the Arctic."
She let the pause do its work.
The room's interest sharpened immediately.
"The Arctic? What would they find there?"
"Alien technology?"
"Some ancient virus?"
"A treasure of some kind?"
The speculation went around the table.
Once the atmosphere was where she wanted it, Ikorela continued. "It is, in a sense, a treasure for us."
"According to internal intelligence, the government recovered three individuals from the ice. They were: Captain America, Steve Rogers. Captain Carter, Peggy Carter. And a soldier known as Benjamin."
She read the blank faces around the table and elaborated. "Captain America, I imagine most of you have at least heard of."
"He's an American hero. Someone who stood directly against the Axis powers."
"The two names you genuinely don't recognize are Captain Carter and the Soldier Boy."
"To understand them, you need to go back to a history that was never made public."
She shifted her tone and delivered it as a formal account. "During that period, what people came to call 'Captain America' was, in practical terms, an enhanced soldier produced by the United States military as a weapon against the Nazi-aligned Axis powers. The legend came after the war. The reality was an experimental subject."
"What most people don't know is that Steve Rogers wasn't the only participant in the super-soldier program. Two others were involved."
"Peggy Carter was one. Benjamin was the other."
"Captain Carter's involvement was in the military-directed super-soldier program. The Soldier Boy, Benjamin, was a product of a private company attempting to win the government contract for super-soldier development."
"That company was called Vought."
"At the time, Vought had developed a compound called Compound V. Its function was to activate human potential and produce substantial physical enhancement."
"The original version of Compound V had severe compatibility issues. Only one in a thousand subjects could successfully integrate it."
"This produced an extremely high failure rate and a casualty figure the program couldn't sustain. By the time any real progress was being made, the war was already in its final stage."
"When the war ended, the government shut down Vought's super-soldier program. The company itself was investigated and dissolved on charges including unauthorized human experimentation."
Keller had been listening through all of this, and his confusion had only grown. "So. How does any of this connect to how we compete with Umbrella?"
Ikorela rose from her chair with a composed confidence. "It connects directly. When Vought dissolved, HYDRA quietly acquired the complete Compound V formula and all associated research. They also brought the core research team in."
"HYDRA has never stopped developing Compound V. Significant progress has been made. Two months ago, our superiors transferred the latest Compound V formula to the Tri-Corporation. Quiet mass production has already begun."
Keller's expression shifted. "Miss Ikorela is saying we can use Compound V to compete for Umbrella's super-soldier market?"
"No, no, no." Ikorela picked up the remote on the table and pressed a button.
The projection screen displayed two words.
SUPER HEROES.
"We don't just compete for their market. We build an entirely new one." Her eyes carried real confidence.
"Here's the approach. We use capital and media to take individuals enhanced with Compound V and package them as superheroes. Managed like entertainment talent. Their public image of defending justice generates enormous commercial revenue. And behind the scenes, we build a superhero industry infrastructure with Compound V at the center. A supply chain touching every stakeholder in the system."
"I've already decided on the name for this group."
"The Seven."
"That's an excellent pitch. But." Keller raised the practical question. "Do we have enhanced individuals we can actually package right now? We can't exactly go looking for them on short notice."
"We're not looking on short notice."
Ikorela raised her chin with certainty. "Our superiors laid the groundwork for this moment twenty years ago."
"Allow me to introduce the captain of The Seven."
She paused for effect, then delivered the name with full weight:
"Homelander."
The door opened.
A large, powerfully built man walked in.
Strong frame, presence that filled the room. Hair styled back in neat gold, not a strand out of place. A deep-blue close-fitted suit. On his shoulders, stylized gold eagle-wing pauldrons. Most visibly: a cape behind him that was the American flag.
Ikorela moved to stand beside him once he entered.
Homelander swept his gaze across the assembled faces and delivered a signature sunlit smile. "Good evening, everyone."
The Tri-Corporation moved fast.
With HYDRA's backing, they consolidated their combined resources in a short time and publicly announced the existence of their superhero program, alongside a formal company rename.
They took the Vought name, but not unchanged.
The Tri-Corporation was now officially Vought International.
The superhero announcement didn't generate an enormous response at first. The world already had superheroes. Iron Man. Daredevil. Spider-Man. Street-level heroes had been appearing for years; the market was not undersupplied.
But Vought's marketing operation was something else.
Within a short time, they had established Homelander as a figure who had been quietly protecting the world for years, operating entirely without recognition. A steady stream of footage: Homelander rescuing people in crisis, neutralizing threats, always present, always effective, with the grateful testimonials of those he'd helped running across every major platform.
Simultaneously, Homelander began making himself visible, appearing on major talk shows and in network interviews at a pace that bordered on relentless. The attention he generated in that period briefly exceeded even the news cycle Tony Stark had created when he announced he was Iron Man.
On the back of this operation, Vought's stock price and market valuation went into something approaching a vertical climb.
Moving while the moment was hot, after Homelander's debut, Vought released the rest of The Seven in sequence.
A-Train. Translucent. Queen Maeve. The Deep. Lamplighter. Black Noir.
Each successive reveal pushed the public reaction higher.
In a fully sealed underground testing facility, Matthew was running tests.
"Tests" was generous. What he was actually doing was using the Alien Queen from the recent Pass reward to generate large quantities of Alien eggs for parasitizing various biological subjects, with the goal of producing progressively more capable Alien variants.
During this period, using the Marauder strain developed at Umbrella headquarters, he had successfully bred a variant capable of optical camouflage: the Assassin Alien.
To push the overall capability ceiling further, he had used T-103 Tyrants as incubation hosts, producing a variant six meters in scale with enlarged tail spines and claws, roughly the mass of a small cargo vehicle: the Tyrant Alien.
He was currently experimenting with Extremis-injected clones as hosts, attempting to produce a variant with ranged attack capability.
It had worked.
He looked at the newest variant in front of him: the Artillery Alien.
Externally, it was largely indistinguishable from a standard Alien. The difference was a barrel growing from its back, roughly the diameter of a large bowl.
Live-fire testing confirmed: the Artillery Alien's barrel could project a plasma fireball at temperatures of approximately three thousand degrees Celsius, with an effective range of around five hundred meters.
Beyond that, it had fully inherited Extremis's regenerative capability. Standard severed-limb damage posed almost no meaningful threat to it. Only decapitation or bisection-level trauma could produce a definitive kill.
As of this moment, the Artillery Alien was Matthew's best work.
The one limitation: Alien reproduction required both the Alien Queen and a separate living host. The colony couldn't self-replicate freely the way a genuine Zerg swarm could.
Though if they ever did reach that kind of unrestricted expansion.
Matthew estimated it wouldn't be long before a certain bald individual arrived to investigate the smell.
He was about to move on to further parameter testing when his phone, which had been quiet for several days, interrupted him.
He pulled it out. Two messages from Ada.
[Ada: (video)]
[Ada: I know you're enjoying your little experiment, but I think you should watch this one.]
He sent a brief reply and opened the video.
It was a carefully edited compilation: the Tri-Corporation's recent restructuring, the launch of Homelander, and the full marketing rollout of The Seven, laid out in sequence.
Three minutes of footage. It felt considerably longer.
When it finished, he hadn't fully come back to himself yet.
He stared at Homelander's promotional poster on the video thumbnail, with the rest of The Seven arranged behind him, and felt a quantity of opinion building in his chest that demanded release.
Could someone explain to him where exactly this Homelander had come from?
And why had the Tri-Corporation renamed itself Vought?
***
lol, just like that? even the MC is surprised,