In the end, Homelander still deigned to go out on patrol himself, making a wide circuit in an attempt to follow the faint traces he had previously detected and locate Translucent , who had been missing for far too long.
Whether alcohol or hard drugs, these things had extremely limited effects on a superhuman body. Translucent's unexplained disappearance made Homelander sense that something was off.
But after a round of patrols and questioning a few suspicious individuals, he still found nothing. Returning with a belly full of frustration, he could only seek a bit of comfort from Madelyn.
Homelander's attachment to Madelyn was almost a textbook example straight out of Freud—a giant infant lacking any sense of security, instinctively treating Madelyn as a mother figure.
And Madelyn, holding Homelander in her arms, was weighed down by her own worries.
First, she had to constantly think about how to get Vought onto the Pentagon's list of military procurement suppliers.
Second—and more importantly—Homelander had been a little too active lately.
Vought's superheroes were, in essence, performers rather than heroes. Their only real job was to play the roles the company had designed for them in front of the public.
But Homelander had clearly gotten too immersed in the act. Lately, he had been making decisions on his own and doing things far beyond the scope of his authority.
He had even bypassed Madelyn entirely and issued commands directly to every department, effectively treating himself as the true head of Vought's executive branch.
It was normal for a supe like Homelander to enjoy special privileges, but the kind of privilege he was exercising now posed a direct threat to both Madelyn and the company's operations.
There was an unspoken understanding between supes and Vought: once they took off their masks, they each had lives of their own. In front of the cameras, they saved the world; off camera, the world was something else entirely.
For example, Translucent liked to spy on people in private spaces; A-Train doted on his mistress; Queen Maeve was a raging alcoholic who slept with both men and women; The Deep liked to talk to fish...
Homelander alone was the exception.
He was a test-tube baby raised in a cold laboratory. Every relationship he had, from childhood all the way to his debut, had been fabricated piece by piece by Vought.
At first, Vought had even given him an origin story as an alien visitor just to save trouble. Only after Homelander's own insistence was it changed to that of a native-born American from a middle-class family.
Madelyn had read nearly every experimental log from Homelander's childhood in the lab, and every single entry sent chills down her spine.
From a very young age, Vought had implanted fear and insecurity deep into Homelander's heart, much like the way circus trainers tame baby elephants.
A baby elephant is tied with a rope from childhood. After trying for a day, a week, a month, even a year, it eventually learns that no matter what it does, it cannot break free from the rope. Naturally, it gives up.
And even after the baby elephant grows into a full-grown elephant, it will never again try to snap the rope that has long since become trivial to its strength.
But the current situation was that this elephant had started to test the rope.
The elephant that Vought had spent tens of billions in research funding to create was still under control—for now—but Madelyn was no longer sure how long that control would last.
Especially now, when the company itself was far from stable internally.
---
After sending Joey away with sweet words, Stormfront tidied herself up briefly, then leapt out of the suite's window and flew toward her usual workplace.
Unlike Joey, whose job was to play a superhero and act out childish fantasies every day, the work Stormfront handled was the true foundation of Vought's enduring power.
Stormfront landed at a heavily fortified mental institution, built like a fortress. The entire structure was poured from reinforced concrete thickened throughout, ensuring that no patient could escape easily.
After landing, she headed straight to the central monitoring room of the building and found the "attending physician" in charge.
"How's the progress?"
"In which area? DNA or the compound?"
Vought's superheroes were, at their core, humans with Compound V flowing through their bodies. There was no such thing as divine blessing—this was an open secret among Vought's upper management.
Vought was fundamentally a biochemical pharmaceutical company, not an entertainment agency. Superheroes were merely derivative products along the Compound V industrial chain.
And when researching something like Compound V, one would inevitably run into certain obstacles—problems that could not be overcome due to legal, moral, or ethical constraints.
That was precisely the purpose of Stormfront and the "mental institutions" she operated. In her institutions, there was no such thing as morality or ethics—only useless constraints.
"DNA. Didn't you tell me there was a major discovery?"
Stormfront was not particularly enthusiastic about DNA research. Human DNA mixed with Compound V exhibited countless bizarre variations, with no discernible pattern.
It could even be said that every individual injected with Compound V was practically a distinct species. There was reproductive isolation both between superhumans themselves and between superhumans and ordinary humans.
Under such circumstances, studying the effects of Compound V at the DNA level was an enormous undertaking far beyond what her resources could support.
Summarizing surface traits directly through various live experiments was far more cost-effective.
The "attending physician" adjusted his glasses and handed the experimental summary to Stormfront.
"The hair samples you brought in, along with the other samples, are very strange. If I had to describe it, their structure is more like that of humans who have not been affected by Compound V, rather than superhumans."
"Say that again?"
It was a very short sentence, yet Stormfront found herself unable to process it immediately.
"What I mean is, from a DNA-structure standpoint, it is obviously far closer to normal humans than to superhumans—whose DNA has been riddled with damage by Compound V…"
The physician belatedly glanced at Stormfront, a bead of cold sweat instantly forming on his forehead. "No offense intended, ma'am!"
Stormfront no longer had the attention to spare for his unintentional insult. She had just realized something critically important.
In her eyes, Joey was merely a kid who had just lost his parents—a broken-hearted child who could easily be swayed by even the slightest external comfort.
She could take advantage of this opportunity to cultivate dependence, slowly shape him over time—just like Madelyn had done with Homelander—spending years educating him and gradually molding him into whatever she wanted.
But if Joey's DNA was truly that close to ordinary human DNA, wouldn't that mean she had the chance to recreate another Joey through a normal human womb, just like how Vought had originally created Homelander?
A brand-new Joey, a blank slate.
She could raise him like a mother, shape him from scratch, and he would obey her absolutely.
Wasn't that far more cost-effective than spending years trying to educate a rebellious sixteen-year-old in the middle of puberty?
As for the extra dozen or so years it would take—Stormfront, a superhuman who had met Hitler face to face and remained eternally young and immortal, was the one thing she had in abundance: time.