The screen was a wall of numbers, a digital cascade of assets, liabilities, and liquid capital. I leaned back in the leather chair, the cool obsidian desk pressing against my forearms, and let the sheer magnitude of my new reality wash over me.
The bank account balance was a latitude.
$14,240,000,000.
That was just the personal liquid assets. It didn't account for the stock portfolio, the real estate holdings, the offshore accounts, or the valuation of Spencer Industries itself. The Spencer family's wealth was a global web, so deeply integrated into the world economy that it was practically untouchable. I was sitting on a pile of resources that could fund a small country's war for a decade.
"Money is a superpower," I murmured, the truth of it settling in my bones. Batman wasn't wrong.
[Holy… mother of… wow] the System stammered.
[Okay new plan. Forget Homelander. Forget Vought. We're buying an island. A big one. With a volcano lair and shark tanks. We'll build our own army and retire in luxury. Deal?]
A laugh bubbled up in my chest. It felt strange to smile in this situation.
"Tempting," I admitted. The smile remained on my face as I considered the absurdity of the suggestion. "But an island won't stop a flying psychopath with heat vision."
[Fine. Be practical. But I'm officially putting in a request for a shark tank.]
I shook my head. I closed the financial terminals one by one.
[So who's first on our non-existent hit list?]
The question hung in the air. My first kill had to be carefully chosen. I needed to test my new capabilities in a controlled environment. Vought protected their assets fiercely. I needed a target they wouldn't care much about, someone whose absence wouldn't set off alarms.
"Let's see what this Hacking Mastery can really do," I cracked my knuckles.
The Hacking Mastery was an instinct that guided my fingers. I looked at the keyboard, and the QWERTY layout looked like a control panel for the digital world.
I started small. I wanted to verify the news report, to see the raw data before Vought's spin doctors turned it into a heartwarming story of accidental tragedy.
My fingers flew across the mechanical keys, the clicking sound a rapid-fire staccato in the quiet office. I opened a dozen command prompts. My thoughts moved faster than the lines of code scrolling across the monitors.
I built a series of cascading proxies in seconds. I routed my digital signature through a labyrinth of servers in a dozen different countries, bouncing the signal from a server farm in Estonia to a satellite link in Brazil, then through a university in Singapore.
The security of the NYPD secure case file database was formidable, designed to keep out nosy journalists and amateur hacktivists. But to me it looked like a chain link fence made of wet paper. I found the tiny flaws in the legacy code, a buffer overflow vulnerability here, and a weak handshake protocol there. I crafted a data packet that mimicked a routine diagnostic request from a precinct in Queens.
I sent the packet. The system accepted it without a flutter.
Access Granted.
I was in.
I pulled up the dispatch logs for Midtown.
Incident #4492-B. 10:42 AM. Robin Ward. DOA. Cause of death: High velocity impact.
I scrolled through the officer's initial notes. They were written in the frantic shorthand of a cop who knew he was out of his depth. "Vic completely liquefied. Suspect identified as A-Train (The Seven). Vought liaison on scene immediately. NDAs issued to witnesses. Cleanup crew arrived at 10:48 AM."
Six minutes. It took Vought six minutes to scrub a murder from the pavement.
[Efficient scumbags, aren't they?] the System noted. [If they put half that effort into actually saving people, the world might not be a dumpster fire.]
"They're not in the saving business," I replied, my eyes scanning the redacted files. "They're in the image business."
I wrote another simple script to scrub the database for specific keywords. I typed: "Supe," "superhuman," "collateral," and "unexplained phenomena."
I cross-referenced those results with another filter. Cases marked "closed," "sealed," or "unresolved" within 48 hours of a Vought legal representative being contacted.
The data that flooded the monitor was sickening.
Hundreds of cases populated the list. Assaults that had been buried under NDA settlements. Robbery reports that went nowhere because the perpetrator wore a cape. Missing persons reports that ended abruptly with "insufficient evidence." And murders. So many accidental deaths.
Each crime was tied to a different Supe. All of them lay buried under a mountain of Vought legal paperwork and hush money. This was the real face of superheroes. A trail of bodies and broken lives, sanitized by a multi-billion dollar PR machine that bleached the blood out of the pavement.
I saved the data to an encrypted drive for insurance, leverage was always useful. Then, I scrubbed the logs and backed out, leaving no trace I had ever been there.
"Now for the dirty laundry," I muttered.
I navigated to the dark web. It was a place I had only read about in my previous life, a digital sewer where the light of the law didn't reach. But now, I knew exactly where the doors were. I found encrypted forums where the ultra-rich and the criminally connected conducted their business.
I scrolled through threads that would make a normal person vomit. They traded in secrets, in illegal weapons, in human trafficking, and sometimes, in Supes.
I found message boards where people hired low-level Supes for "off-book" work. Bodyguarding drug shipments, debt collection, and intimidation. These were powered individuals who weren't clean enough for Vought's pristine public image but were too dangerous to be unemployed.
I started cross-referencing again. I pulled names from the buried NYPD files and matched them against usernames and gossip on the underground forums. I was looking for the perfect overlap. A history of criminal behavior, a lack of corporate protection, and a low public profile.
I sat in the blue glow of the monitors for hours, the only sound the hum of the cooling fans and my own steady breathing. My eyes skimmed line after line while my mind slowly pieced the puzzle together.
A name surfaced in a complaint thread on a forum for underworld fixers. A client was ranting about a job that had gone bad, blaming a Supe for hire who'd gotten careless and high on the job. The post included a grainy security camera photo of a small man exiting a warehouse.
I ran the photo through facial recognition and cross referenced it with Vought's public registry of Supes.
A match appeared on the center screen. The file opened to a cheesy promotional image of a man in a cheap costume winking at the camera.
Name: Termite
Affiliation: Vought International (D-List Talent)
Public Profile: Star of the direct-to-streaming film series "Ant-Man," a low-budget Vought parody.
I focused on the image. The man looked small even in the photo. He looked eager to please, with a manic energy in his eyes that screamed instability.
The System's interface flickered to life in the corner of my vision, overlaying the monitor.
[TARGET SCANNED]
NAME: Termite
POWERS: Size Alteration (Shrinking)
TIER: 4
A Tier 4. He wasn't the absolute bottom of the barrel, but he was close enough to scrape the wood. He was worth 500 XP. It was a solid start.
I dug deeper. I hacked into Termite's personal finances, cracked his private social media accounts, and pulled his medical records from Vought's private clinics.
He was a mess. A walking disaster. Years of drug abuse, cocaine, meth, and whatever designer compounds Vought pumped into their stars. Overdoses and quiet rehab stints that the PR team had buried deep. He had a reputation for using his powers in ways that made even other Supes uncomfortable, invading privacy, and crawling inside things he shouldn't.
He was drowning in debt. He owed money to bookies, dealers, and loan sharks. To keep himself afloat, he'd been taking freelance jobs for local criminals, using his shrinking ability for high-end theft and espionage.
His disappearance wouldn't cause panic. If anything, Vought would probably be relieved to strike his liability of a name off the payroll. He was a loose end waiting to be snipped.
[So, this is our guy?] the System asked, sounding unimpressed. [A shrinking pervert. Seems like a fitting start. Small fry for a big guy.]
"He was less of a fry and more of a… demonstration model," I replied, a predatory amusement stirring within me. "And frankly, my application of his talents will be far more dignified than whatever he's doing now."
I checked his location data. He was currently holed up in a stash apartment in a rundown part of the Meatpacking District, likely hiding from his creditors.
The plan began to form in my mind, assembling itself like the components of a rifle. It was a logical sequence of events.
I stood up from the desk, pushing the leather chair back. I walked out of the office and headed toward the hidden wall of the armory.