After a long and bitter argument that left the air in the rooftop laboratory crackling with tension, the lead researcher, a Vought loyalist named Dr. Evans, finally slammed his palm on the central console.
"Enough! We will proceed on two fronts," he declared, his voice cutting through the dissent. "Project Chimera will focus on a stable serum to enhance the abilities of our existing assets. Project Nomad will continue the development of a temporary Compound V for strategic deployment. The board wants results, not academic debates. This is the directive."
His authority was absolute. The other experts, some of the world's most brilliant minds, fell into grudging silence. They had been summoned not to collaborate, but to obey. They had their orders.
Observing from the silent, colorless realm of the Void, Marcus felt a flicker of amusement. He watched as the teams broke off, pulling up schematics and data streams on holographic displays. Now, with their minds focused and their tasks assigned, they were ripe for the harvest.
He extended a tendril of pure shadow, an intangible extension of his will that phased through the lab's reinforced glass. He let it drift toward a junior researcher, a young man hunched over a complex molecular model for Project Nomad. The tendril gently brushed against the man's temple.
Instantly, a torrent of information flooded Marcus's consciousness. It wasn't just data; it was memory, experience. He saw years of failed simulations, the frustration of formulas that destabilized, the eureka moment of a minor breakthrough, the chemical bonds, the protein sequences, the precise isotopic decay rates of the temporary compound.
"Impressive," Marcus mused, absorbing the knowledge in a fraction of a second. "Even a pawn in this game holds a vital piece of the puzzle."
He withdrew the tendril and turned his attention to another target: the stern-faced woman who had argued for enhancing existing supes, the head of Project Chimera. He repeated the process, siphoning her team's research into the delicate art of amplifying Vought's living weapons.
One by one, he targeted the key minds in the room, his Void-tendrils dancing invisibly between them. He was a ghost in the machine, a silent thief of intellect. In his mind, the stolen fragments of research began to shimmer and connect. He saw them not as disparate projects, but as incomplete pieces of a single, magnificent equation. The instability of the temporary formula, the amplifier from the enhancement serum, the foundational elements of the original Compound V—they were all variables in a grander design.
He wove them together, his consciousness a crucible of unimaginable complexity. The gaps in the original formula were filled by the data from Project Chimera. The weaknesses were patched with solutions discovered during the work on Project Nomad. And through it all, he infused his own dark knowledge of the Void.
And then, it was done. A perfect, elegant, terrifyingly potent formula glowed in the architecture of his mind. The perfected Compound V. The Void Equation.
With the ultimate prize now his, the rest was merely entertainment. A field test.
He turned his gaze from the oblivious scientists, looking through the laboratory's armored window toward the sprawling, wounded city below. Far in the distance, a battle was raging.
"The overture is over," Marcus whispered, a cold smile touching his lips. "Time for the crescendo."
He focused his will, and across the city, hell broke loose.
The battle was a whirlwind of chaos. The new Seven, led by the charismatic and ruthless Stormfront, were locked in a desperate struggle against a well-organized cell of superhuman terrorists. For every enemy they took down, two more seemed to emerge from the rubble, their powers varied and their tactics surprisingly effective.
Homelander was a golden blur of fury, his heat vision scything through enemy ranks. Queen Maeve was a bulwark of strength, her fists sending shockwaves through the street. A-Train was a streak of blue and white, evacuating civilians and running interference.
And then, in the space of a single heartbeat, they all stopped.
Homelander's heat vision cut out mid-blast. A-Train froze mid-stride, one foot hovering over the asphalt. Queen Maeve's punch halted a mere inch from a terrorist's jaw. They stood like statues, their eyes vacant and glassy.
For a split second, there was only confusion. Then their opponents reacted. A hulking brute slammed his stone fists into Homelander's chest, sending him flying backward into the side of a bus. A pyrokinetic unleashed a torrent of fire that engulfed Stormfront. A-Train, completely defenseless, was tackled to the ground.
"What… what was that?" Starlight gasped, her hands glowing with preparatory light. She watched in horror as her teammates were thrown around like dolls. It was happening again. That same unnatural stillness, the same chilling emptiness in their eyes that she'd seen right before they had turned on Vought itself and torn their own headquarters to shreds. This was his doing. The man in the shadows.
Her survival instincts screamed. As Homelander slowly, unnaturally, pushed himself up from the crumpled metal of the bus, she knew she had to go.
He rose to his full height, but something was terrifyingly wrong. A faint, violet energy flickered at the edges of his crimson irises. He wasn't angry. He wasn't even smug. He was utterly empty, and a slow, terrible smile spread across his face.
"Run!" Starlight yelled to no one in particular, turning and sprinting away from the battlefield, ignoring the enemy combatants as a far greater threat loomed behind her.
WHOOSH!
Two beams of concentrated heat, thicker and more incandescent than any she had ever seen from him, erupted from Homelander's eyes. They didn't just burn; they vaporized. Two of the lead terrorists, who had been coordinating the attack, simply ceased to exist, their screams silenced before they could even begin.
"Nowhere to run!" a voice hissed.
Two other terrorists who were scrambling to escape the laser's path were suddenly jerked to a halt. A-Train was there, a blur of motion leaving blue lightning in his wake. His eyes, like Homelander's, were glowing with a malevolent violet light. He was faster than ever, impossibly fast. He grabbed the two supes by their collars and, with a flick of his wrists, hurled them screaming into the air—directly into the path of Homelander's sweeping death rays.
"We need support! We need everyone!" one of the remaining terrorists screamed into his comms. "They've gone berserk!"
From a hidden bunker nearby, a dozen more superhumans poured out, their faces grim. They saw the carnage, the raw power radiating from The Seven. The tide had turned in the most horrifying way imaginable.
Back in his perch, Marcus watched with clinical detachment. The Void energy he had seeded within them was now fully activated. But it was a process. Their power wouldn't just spike; it would grow, exponentially, with every passing second. These terrorists were already dead. They just didn't know it yet.
"And now, the final transformation," Marcus decreed, clenching his fist.
On the battlefield, the change was immediate and grotesque. The Seven screamed, but it was not a scream of pain. It was a roar of agonizing ecstasy. Their iconic costumes began to ripple and distort, the fabric liquefying and turning into a living, biomechanical substance that writhed and fused with their flesh.
The star-spangled banner on Homelander's suit became a hardened, organic carapace, etched with pulsating lines of dark energy. Queen Maeve's tiara and bracers melted down her arms and face, reshaping into sharpened, bone-like extensions of her own body. A-Train's sleek uniform twisted into a jagged, insectoid armor, slick and black with pulsing violet veins. They were no longer humans in costumes. They were Warframes. They were monsters.
"KILL! YOU! ALL!" the seven voices roared in a dissonant, inhuman chorus.
The remaining terrorists stared in abject horror. They had been fighting superheroes. Now they were facing abominations.
"FIGHT! FIGHT WITH EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT!" their commander yelled, his voice cracking with terror.
A desperate, final volley of attacks flew toward the transformed Seven. Energy blasts, psychic assaults, and a hail of conventional munitions filled the air. A rocket-propelled grenade struck Homelander's new chest plate and detonated in a harmless flash of fire. A stream of high-caliber bullets flattened like soft clay against A-Train's new armor.
The slaughter had begun.