Transmigrated into The Boys, Starting as Soldier Boy

Chapter 32: Chapter 32: Vought’s Counterattack

The beach interview video blew up that very night.

Homelander stood in front of the microphones and said, "The hijackers destroyed the plane’s control panel." The reporter pressed him, asking, "Was this an elaborately staged publicity stunt?"

Then came Soldier Boy’s line: "Say one more fucking word, and I’ll twist your heads off and throw them into the sea."

The clip was cut into countless versions and spread like wildfire across Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.

Six of the top ten trending topics were related to the incident.

Public opinion was currently split into two camps.

One side believed this was not a stunt at all.

Soldier Boy was right. Homelander could have simply abandoned those hundred-plus people, but he saved them, every last one, and the rescue had been handled properly.

Vought would even compensate the passengers. Everything had turned out fine.

Soldier Boy’s rant at the reporters was crude, volatile, and violated every PR guideline imaginable. freewebnøvel.coɱ

But that rough honesty was exactly what made countless fans feel vindicated.

However, the other side was louder.

They believed all the suspicious details pointed to one fact: Soldier Boy had deployed The Deep in advance, which meant they had known the plane would get into trouble ahead of time.

If it was not a stunt, there was no way they could have known something would go wrong in advance.

One hundred and twenty-three people had taken a walk past death’s door, only to be expected afterward to worship their rescuers with gratitude. That, in itself, was manipulated fear.

This side kept attacking Homelander and Maeve on social media.

Homelander and Maeve’s approval ratings began to fall.

Even The Deep was baffled. He was supposed to be making his return to The Seven, yet his already mediocre approval rating had dropped again?

Benjamin’s approval rating barely moved. His outburst at the reporters made some people think he was real, while others thought he was rude. The two sides were about equal and canceled each other out.

But there was one thing everyone agreed on: with Soldier Boy, there was nothing you could do.

He did not play the PR game. He did not cooperate with public opinion manipulation. He did not care what anyone said about him.

He had no weakness to attack, because he had never cared what people thought of him.

At two in the morning, the bad news came.

Two rescued passengers, an elderly couple in their seventies, had been sent to the hospital for examinations that evening. At different times later that night, both suffered sudden cardiac arrest and died after resuscitation efforts failed.

The doctors’ preliminary diagnosis was that the extreme fear they experienced during the high-altitude fall had placed too much strain on their hearts. freewebnøvel.com

The news hit the already churning sea of public opinion like a depth charge.

Every media outlet that had still been watching from the sidelines erupted at once.

The CNN night news anchor read the opening line that would later be quoted again and again in a heavy voice:

"One hundred and twenty-three people rescued, two dead. Is this the price of heroism, or the sacrifice of a publicity stunt?"

On social media, accusations drowned out every attempt at defense.

Someone dug up a photo of Mia, the little girl who had clung to Homelander’s neck on the plane. Someone edited her face into black and white and added the caption, "What if she had been the one who died because of this stunt?"

By three in the morning, the post had been shared twenty thousand times, and the comment section was full of people crying.

The deaths of the two elderly passengers turned the earlier doubts about a stunt from "conspiracy theory" into "solid evidence."

If the mission was not a stunt, why had rescue forces been deployed in advance?

If it was not a stunt, why did people still die even after the rescue forces were in place?

Homelander’s approval rating updated at 3:17 a.m.

Down six percentage points...

The PR department intern on night shift thought the system had glitched when he saw the number. He refreshed it three times, and the result was the same every time.

Homelander sat on the floor of his apartment, his back against the base of the sofa, his phone clenched in his hand.

On the screen was the graph of his approval rating.

The red line plunged straight down like a cliff, like a wound burned open by laser eyes...

He had been staring at that line for a full twenty minutes.

To save those people, Homelander had flown more than sixty trips back and forth between the sky and the sea.

He had held Mia in his arms. He had placed her mother on a dolphin’s back... and then two elderly people died.

It was not his fault...

The doctors said it was cardiac overload.

But everyone was saying... if Homelander had not staged a stunt, if he had not made the whole thing so big, if he had warned the passengers in advance, those two elderly people would not have spent those long two hours in terror, would not have gone into cardiac arrest, and would not have died.

Homelander parted his lips and murmured, "I did everything I could."

He said it to the empty air...

Then Homelander buried his face in his knees. His back pressed against the base of the sofa, his cape crumpled beneath him. The phone screen went dark, and so did the falling red line...

Along with all those accusing words...

Homelander began to feel like he could not breathe.

He even found himself wondering whether it would have been better if he had abandoned all those people back then.

...

Benjamin had not slept, because the direction public opinion was taking was clearly wrong.

The sudden deaths of the elderly couple were tragic, but public opinion had placed both lives entirely on the "stunt" account and aimed all its fire at Homelander.

The narrative around the incident was too neat.

Too neat to be natural. Someone was pushing it from behind the scenes.

Vought clearly needed to get Supes into the military. It clearly needed the public to maintain a positive impression of superheroes. Yet at a time like this, it was allowing, even fueling, a public opinion lynching against Homelander...

They would rather damage the company’s short-term interests than take a shot at Homelander and him.

No, their main target was still him. They were trying to drive a wedge between him and Homelander by making Homelander suffer, because if it were not for him, Homelander’s approval rating would not have dropped by that much.

Interesting. They were willing to wound themselves?

Why?

"Is it because I’m too much of a threat?"

Benjamin snorted.

Outside the window, New York’s night sky was stained a murky orange-red by countless lights, and the W logo atop Vought Tower still glowed tirelessly.

Soon, he called Homelander.