"His heart rate's dropping below minimum threshold, Professor Carlton."
"Hit him with adrenaline. Now."
"It's not responding. Mentor… it's not doing anything."
There was a pause, followed by a tired sigh that carried more irritation than concern. "Then throw him back in containment, Legrand. Reduce the compound dosage by five percent for the next subject. We're not wasting any more resources."
The voices faded into static, like someone lowering the volume on his life.
When Ethan Pierce opened his eyes, he wasn't sure if he was alive or just waiting to be disposed of.
Pennsylvania wasn't supposed to feel like this. The state had forests, quiet suburbs, small-town diners, places where nothing worse than bad coffee happened. Instead, he found himself inside a concrete box masquerading as a psychiatric facility—officially registered under a global health nonprofit, unofficially owned and operated by one of the most powerful corporations on Earth.
Vought.
The room was barely wider than a prison cell. One narrow bed bolted to the floor. A stainless-steel toilet. A sink that looked like it had been installed purely out of legal obligation. No mirror. No sharp edges. No dignity. The fluorescent light above flickered with the kind of rhythm that could drive anyone insane.
Ethan sat on the edge of the bed, barefoot, dressed in a thin white long-sleeve shirt and hospital pants. His fingers trembled slightly as he flexed them, studying his hands like they belonged to someone else.
Because they did.
"This has to be a joke," he muttered under his breath, his voice hoarse and unfamiliar. "You don't just wake up in a new body. That's not how reality works."
Except it clearly did.
The memories in his head didn't belong to one person. They overlapped, tangled together like corrupted files forced into the same drive. There was his old life—mundane, ordinary, safe. And then there was this one. Medical evaluations. Restraints. Diagnoses stamped with the words "psychological instability." Transfer orders to something called the Sage's Forest Center.
Only it wasn't a hospital.
It was a farm.
And the patients weren't being treated.
They were being tested.
The moment the name Vought surfaced in his thoughts, a flood of fragmented memories followed. Clinical white laboratories hidden behind reinforced walls. Men and women in lab coats discussing dosage adjustments like they were tweaking a recipe. Security doors that sealed with hydraulic finality. And somewhere beyond those walls, a corporate empire that manufactured superheroes the way other companies manufactured smartphones.
In the world of The Boys, Vought wasn't just powerful. It was untouchable.
They had perfected Compound V in infants decades ago, creating icons like Homelander and the rest of the Seven. But adult trials were a different story. Unstable. Violent. Lethal. The survival rate hovered around ten percent, and even that number felt optimistic.
The other ninety percent didn't get capes. They got body bags.
Ethan swallowed hard as more images surfaced. Skin splitting under internal pressure. Bones warping into grotesque shapes. A man whose head had transformed into something that vibrated like a speaker, emitting a low mechanical hum until his skull collapsed inward. Another patient who had liquefied, leaving nothing but a dark stain that maintenance crews scrubbed away without comment.
Compound V wasn't a miracle serum.
It was a roulette wheel loaded with bullets.
And he was on the table.
"They're using the psych ward as a screening pool," Ethan murmured, connecting the pieces. "No families. No lawyers. No questions."
Orphans. Runaways. Patients declared unfit for society. Perfect test subjects. If they survived, Vought gained a new asset. If they died, paperwork disappeared into classified archives.
His predecessor—the man whose body he now inhabited—had already undergone initial injections. The reason he was still breathing was either luck or delayed side effects.
Neither option was comforting.
Escape crossed his mind, but the idea collapsed under its own weight almost immediately. The doors were reinforced steel. The cameras were hidden but constant. Armed security rotated in twelve-hour shifts. And if things spiraled out of control, there was a final measure.
Lamplighter.
Even in fragmented memory, the image was clear. A tall figure standing in a dim hallway, face illuminated by a small dancing flame hovering above his palm. Officially retired from the Seven. Unofficially employed as a cleanup specialist. If a subject went rogue, evidence burned.
Stormfront had visited too, once. Not for him specifically, but to inspect "progress." Her eyes had scanned the patients like defective merchandise. He remembered the way she had looked at him—like something she'd scraped off her boot.
The message had been clear. You are disposable.
Ethan leaned back against the cold wall and stared at the narrow window near the ceiling. It was too small to squeeze through, even if he could somehow reach it. Layers of fencing and forest waited beyond. This wasn't a hospital.
It was a cage buried inside another cage.
"So this is it," he whispered. "Second chance at life, and I get lab-ratted by a trillion-dollar psychopath factory."
A hysterical laugh threatened to bubble up, and for a brief second he wondered if the diagnosis stamped on his file had finally become accurate.
Then something flickered in the corner of his vision.
Ethan blinked.
The wall in front of him shimmered faintly, like heat rising off asphalt. A translucent square frame appeared, hovering in midair. It didn't cast a shadow. It didn't reflect the light. It just… existed.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
When he opened them, it was still there.
"Okay," he said slowly, breathing carefully. "Either I've snapped, or this is the part where the cheat code kicks in."
The frame pulsed softly, and faint text began to materialize across its surface. The letters were blurry at first, like a buffering screen struggling to load.
A soft chime echoed inside his head.
Ding.
[Extreme stress detected. System initialization in progress.]
Ethan froze.
The words weren't coming from the room. They weren't audible in the traditional sense. They were imprinted directly onto his awareness.
[Multiverse Role-Playing System loading…]
He stared, heart pounding so violently he could feel it in his throat.
"You've got to be kidding me," he whispered, but there was no real disbelief left in his voice now. Just cautious hope.
A progress bar appeared beneath the text.
Loading… 12% … 37% … 64% …
The fluorescent lights above him flickered violently. The air grew heavy, like the pressure before a thunderstorm. His vision tunneled, darkness creeping in from the edges.
Then the world disappeared.
There was no transition, no sensation of falling. One moment he was in the cell. The next, he was somewhere else entirely.
There was no floor beneath his feet. No ceiling above. No walls, no light source, no sound. Just endless blackness stretching in all directions, vast and suffocating.
It felt like floating in deep space without a suit.
Cold. Silent. Infinite.
Ethan tried to move, but his body felt distant, secondary to his awareness. He wasn't sure if he even had physical form in this place.
Then he saw it.
At first, it was just a shape—massive, unmoving, suspended in the void. As his perception adjusted, details sharpened.
The creature stood over three meters tall, its frame thick with muscle that looked forged rather than grown. Gray-white exoskeletal plating wrapped around its torso and limbs like natural armor. Jagged bone spurs protruded along its spine and shoulders, each one curved and vicious, designed not for aesthetics but for slaughter.
It wasn't merely large.
It was inevitable.
Every instinct in Ethan's mind screamed that this thing was not meant to exist. It radiated raw, primal destruction, the kind of presence that ended civilizations rather than threatened them.
"This can't be…" he breathed.
Understanding struck like lightning.
Doomsday.
The being that had killed Superman. The embodiment of adaptive evolution. A monster that resurrected stronger every time it died. Not a hero. Not a villain.
An extinction event with legs.
As if sensing his realization, the creature's eyes opened.
They were empty. Not mindless—worse. Detached. Absolute. They looked at him without emotion, without hostility, without mercy.
Ethan felt impossibly small under that gaze.
Then the System chimed again.
[Role template selected.]
[Transferring template: Doomsday.]
The darkness shattered.
He snapped back into his body, gasping as the cramped hospital room slammed back into focus. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead. The toilet dripped faintly. Somewhere down the hallway, a metal door clanged shut.
But something inside him had shifted.
The translucent panel hovered clearly before his eyes now.
[Doomsday Template Loaded Successfully.]
[Current Role: Doomsday]
[Template Unlock Progress: 0.0%]
Ethan stared at the final line.
Zero percent.
He should have felt disappointed.
Instead, a slow smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
Zero wasn't nothing. Zero was a starting point.
If even a fraction of that monster's power could be accessed—if he could unlock abilities piece by piece—then the balance of power inside this facility was about to tilt. Lamplighter's flames. Stormfront's lightning. Reinforced steel doors.
None of it would matter forever.
He leaned back against the wall, heart steadying as a new emotion replaced fear.
Anticipation.
"Alright," he murmured softly, eyes glinting as he focused on the panel. "Let's see how many role points it takes to turn this madhouse into rubble."