(THE “S” STANDS FOR HOPE) CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX: VICTOR

Victor had always found comfort in accumulation.

Skills layered atop skills, habits reinforced by discipline, and reflexes honed not merely through repetition but through proximity to competence itself, until they settled into him as naturally as breath. There was a particular satisfaction in knowing that if a situation demanded perfection, he could supply it, and if it demanded patience, he could simply wait and allow circumstances to shape themselves into something manageable. 

This was not arrogance, despite what lesser men sometimes muttered behind his back. It was certainty, earned through years of intentional exposure to excellence and the careful pruning of weakness wherever he found it.

That certainty was why Kaiser had chosen him.

Clark Kent, according to the file, was nobody. A dishwasher turned reporter, possessing an earnest demeanor and a posture that suggested chronic apologetic tendencies, with a life that appeared to have been assembled through equal parts luck and mild persistence rather than any guiding ambition. 

He had no powers, no known associations apart from the one, no suspicious financial backing, and no training worth mentioning beyond what could be picked up through observation, imitation, and enthusiasm. The man’s most notable trait appeared to be an uncanny tendency to be present when interesting things occurred without ever being central to them.

Victor had skimmed the report once, then again, irritation creeping in despite himself.

There were men with no history, and then there were men like this, whose histories were so aggressively sparse and unremarkable that they bordered on the suspicious by sheer absence alone. Still, nothing in the file suggested anything beyond minor competence elevated by circumstance, and certainly nothing that would justify excessive caution.

Kaiser wanted him dead because he was asking questions, not because he posed any meaningful threat, and that alone rendered the assignment beneath Victor’s usual standards. Nevertheless, a task was a task, and Victor had fully expected it to be completed within the span of a single week.

The first attempt was simple, bordering on mundane, which was to say it should have worked without complication. 

Kent lived in a cramped apartment above a closed-down bakery, the sort of place that spoke of a man who valued cheap rent over comfort or safety, and Victor encountered no difficulty bypassing the lock or navigating the interior in the dark. He tampered with the ancient gas line feeding the unit, opting for carbon monoxide poisoning as a method that rewarded patience rather than spectacle and took advantage of Kent’s own habits. The man cooked late, worked late, and displayed the sort of absent-minded tendencies that made domestic accidents not merely possible but likely. 

Victor ensured the conditions were ideal, satisfied himself that the variables were controlled, and left.

Two days later, Clark Kent independently published an article on PHO.

Victor read it in a diner, his fork paused halfway to his mouth as he felt a brief, unwelcome but genuine flicker of surprise. The piece was as unremarkable as the man himself in content, though energetic in tone, focusing on unsafe housing conditions in older Brockton Bay neighborhoods and citing Kent’s own building as a firsthand example. 

He described waking up dizzy, calling a firefighter on a whim, and being told he was lucky the leak had been discovered early. Despite the interviews and citations, the post ran without much fanfare, buried beneath advertisements, parahuman gossip, and crime blotters.

Victor stared at the accompanying photograph, which showed Kent smiling sheepishly between a repair worker and firefighter, hair slightly mussed and glasses sitting crooked on his nose.

Unfortunate, he decided, but hardly alarming.

The second attempt involved traffic.

Kent walked everywhere—a habit born of necessity rather than principle—which narrowed the field, but Victor had patience and an excellent understanding of urban timing. He chose a crosswalk near the docks, one with poor sightlines and perpetually impatient drivers, and arranged for a delivery truck to run the light, timing everything down to the second. It was not elegant, but it was effective, and Victor watched from across the street with professional detachment as events unfolded according to plan.

Clark Kent stepped into the crosswalk, paused, frowned at something in his notepad, and then took an awkward half step backward as a cyclist clipped his elbow. The stumble carried him just far enough out of the truck’s path that it passed in front of him rather than over him, its side mirror snapping off a street sign in a brief shower of sparks.

Kent landed on his back, winded but intact, and lay there blinking up at the sky while pedestrians shouted and drivers hastily slammed on their brakes. An ambulance arrived within minutes, though Victor noted with irritation that Kent waved the paramedics off after a cursory check, insisting he was fine while apologizing repeatedly for causing a scene.

Victor left before the traffic cleared, jaw tight, discovering that he did not enjoy the sensation of grinding his teeth nearly as much as he would have preferred.

The third attempt was more personal, involving a rifle and its crosshairs.

Victor had absorbed enough marksmanship to know exactly what he was doing, and the vantage point he selected was excellent. Kent was alone, walking through a park at dusk, idly whistling a tuneless melody as he went. Victor lined up the shot, controlled his breathing, adjusted for distance and wind, and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle jammed.

Victor cleared it with ease, irritation sharpening his focus, and reacquired the target just in time to see Kent stop abruptly and bend down. The bullet passed through the space where his head had been a second earlier and shattered a decorative rock behind him.

Kent straightened, holding a child’s lost shoe, and looked around in mild confusion before jogging toward a nearby playground. He returned the shoe to a tearful parent, accepted their thanks with visible embarrassment, and resumed his walk, entirely unaware that he had come within inches of death.

Victor packed up and left, very much annoyed.

There were other attempts after that, each one more creative than the last, and each failing in ways that defied sense. A collapsing fire escape that gave way only after Kent had already stepped clear. A murder arranged through intermediaries that ended with Kent tripping, falling into the assailant, and knocking them unconscious against a parked car. A poisoned cup of coffee that was knocked over by a passing waitress before Kent could take more than a sip, soaking his notes and prompting an apologetic laugh along with a self-deprecating remark about his own clumsiness.

Each failure reinforced the same conclusion.

Clark Kent was not a parahuman. There was no discernible pattern of intervention that could explain these outcomes, and no external manipulation that Victor could detect despite careful analysis. The man was simply lucky in the profoundly irritating way that some people just were, stumbling through danger with a baffling talent for being in the wrong place at exactly the right time.

Victor would have found it funny if it had been happening to anyone else. There was a distant, almost academic amusement in the way the universe seemed to bend just enough to preserve such an unremarkable man.

Instead, it was more than a little infuriating.

The accumulation of failure gnawed at him as repetition refused to lead to resolution, reducing meticulous preparation to something uncomfortably close to coincidences. Outcomes drifted further from expectation rather than correcting toward it, and probability, which should have imposed order through persistence alone, instead appeared defiant, challenging skills and assumptions that had never failed him before.

Eventually, Victor set the file aside and made a decision.

Subtlety had its place, and distance had its uses, but there was value in directness as well, particularly when dealing with men who seemed to survive every attempt on their lives through nothing more than accident. If the world insisted on interfering, then he would remove as many variables as possible and deal with the problem personally.

He would meet Clark Kent face-to-face.