Chapter 4360: Justice League: Assembly (15)

Victor sat on the sofa, fiddling with his mother's phone in his hands. After a long while, he leaned his head against the sofa, then looked up at the ceiling, recalling the scene on the day of the car accident.

"I'm really very sorry, Vic. Your dad can't come to watch your game. He really has something very important..."

"This is the first championship of my life." The black youth sitting in the passenger seat didn't appreciate it at all. He said, "He hasn't been home for half a year. He doesn't care about you, nor does he care about my feelings. He's not a good father, nor is he a good husband..."

"He has his difficulties." The black woman sitting in the driver's seat sighed and said, "It's his hard work that has given us the affluent life we have today. You should also know that sports are very expensive. We live in a good neighborhood, thousands of dollars disappear like water every month, and I can even have savings. This is all because your dad works hard."

"Works hard, researching alien freaks? Come on, do you take me for a three-year-old? There's no such thing as aliens!" The youth shook his head and turned his head away, not looking at his mother.

His mother was also somewhat helpless, turned to look at him, and wanted to say something more. But the next second, a truck crashed into them from the side. Victor didn't remember the things that followed very clearly either.

When he woke up again, he wasn't lying in a hospital, nor was he lying at home, but in a laboratory. He saw his father whom he hadn't seen for a long time, and he also saw himself turned into a monster.

He couldn't play ball anymore, and it was impossible for him to go to school again. His life was completely over. At least before discovering his superpowers, that was what he thought.

However, the powerful strength brought by his mechanical body soon allowed him to find himself again. After the accident, the first time he gathered the courage to go out, he saw a mother and son wandering in front of an ATM on a snowy night, unable to even withdraw 11 dollars.

He gave them some money, of course not his own, but by using hacking technology to make the ATM spit it out. The look of worship in their eyes made Victor feel like he had come back to life. Later, he sought out his old classmate Derry. He originally wanted to fund a few orphanages, but Derry said it would be better to fund the down-and-out black community, so that if they ran into any trouble in the future, the other party could pull him up.

Victor just enjoyed the worship of others and soon agreed. He would regularly get some money, hand it to Derry, let him send it to the community, and he had also met the local gang boss a few times.

This was the only work Victor had been engaged in since the accident: using his hacking technology to get money and send it to the poor. He had been busy with this matter, which allowed him to forget the tragic accident.

Over time, he helped almost all the communities around. Every community knew there was a freak wearing a steel mask who would give them some money when they needed it most. Victor also enjoyed their respect and felt that life could just go on like this.

But now, seeing his mother's belongings again, Victor was filled with mixed feelings. He had to recall the tragic accident that caused him to lose his mother, which happened because he and she were arguing. Victor was full of guilt, almost unable to breathe.

Ever since he was a child, his father's work had always been very busy, and he had no time to accompany him at all. If it weren't for the fact that he would always send money over and occasionally return home a few times, he would have thought he didn't have a father.

And his mother had always been very good to him, caring about everything for him. She had even personally gone to school to apologize and help him solve a mess of trouble when he was acting foolish and used hacking technology to change his exam grades. And now, there was nothing left.

Thinking of this, Victor was overcome with sorrow and squeezed the phone tightly. His mother's face in his memory was clear enough, but he still wanted to see her, still wanted to wait for her to push open the door when she came home from grocery shopping and ask her if she was hungry.

Tears flowed down, Victor wiped his face and reopened the phone. He remembered his mother liked to use this phone to take pictures, and he wanted to see those photos, he wanted to see his mother's face again.

Reopening the phone to search, Victor found that his mother had recorded almost all the details of life. Most of them were about him, and a small part were some landscapes. Victor pressed the buttons to flip through for a long time, but didn't find a single selfie of his mother.

He had no choice but to use his hacking technology to start searching for images directly. But as he flipped through, he froze.

He held the phone in his hand, first flipped to the side, then flipped to the back, and immediately held it up, as if he had discovered something incredible. He stood up from the sofa with a *ceng* sound.

This phone was continuously emitting a strange signal.

Ever since he became a mechanical cyborg, he could perfectly read all the electrical signals in the surrounding environment, and could even manifest certain electrical signals, looking as if he were creating things out of thin air.

The signal emitted by the phone was very weak and mixed with other home appliances, so he didn't discover it at first. But once he delved into the phone system, he discovered something wrong.

This phone was not connected to the internet, so it couldn't be an internet signal. He wasn't making calls either. This kind of signal wasn't the electromagnetic radiation generated by the phone itself, but a radio wave being sent outward.

Victor hurriedly gripped the phone and began to use his talent to check all the systems of the phone. Finally, he found an abnormal program.

This was a completely hidden program that couldn't be seen at all from the phone's system, meaning ordinary people couldn't discover it. But even for a top-tier hacker with superpowers like Victor, finding this program took some effort. This proved that the person who wrote this program had a very high level, completely reaching the level of a top-tier hacker, and was definitely not something an amateur enthusiast could do.

Victor began to decipher what signal it was sending. And soon he discovered it was a location signal transmitter; this phone was continuously sending location information to a certain place.

Victor froze in place; he couldn't understand for a moment how this could be. How could his mother's phone have such a high-tech backdoor program, and why would it need to broadcast location information?

Suddenly, Victor seemed to have thought of something. He first tucked the phone into his pocket, then rummaged through the drawer nearby and brought a gun with him. This wasn't for self-defense, but for fear that someone would search his house and find weapons to convict him. Immediately after, he took all his identification documents and flew into the night sky from the balcony.

He tracked the signal, flew all the way south, and finally stopped in a desolate wilderness. He searched here for a long time and finally found a semi-underground air-raid shelter door. But after going in, he found that the place had long been abandoned.

The other party was clearly professional and left no traces behind. Not to mention data files, there wasn't even half a footprint or fingerprint. But this only made Victor more certain of the guess in his heart.

He took a deep breath, turned, and flew in another direction, arriving at the laboratory where his father worked. There was no one here either; the originally large high-tech base was covered in dust.

Victor was almost going crazy. He stood at the entrance of the experimental base, roaring madly. After circling a few times, he took out his own phone and called his father.

"Where are you?!"

"What's wrong? Victor? I..."

"WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU!!!!"

"Sorry, I can't tell you." The voice on the other end of the phone had some panting; he said, "I can't expose my own location. Otherwise..."

"You've already been exposed. South of Ventura, Los Angeles, right? I'm coming to find you right now."

"Don't..."

Hanging up the phone, Victor soared into the air and flew toward Los Angeles. He had reached his maximum speed, and the city lights and the texture of the earth's veins were blurred in his field of vision. He heard his phone ring, but he didn't care at all.

That man would only ever say "no": not coming home, not coming to watch his game, not going to the cemetery on his mother's death anniversary. He wouldn't tell them anything, but the greatest disaster his mother and son encountered was brought by him. He would definitely make him pay the price.

Flying all the way to Ventura, Los Angeles, countless signals turned into substance before his eyes. At that moment, his entire world turned into an ocean composed of 0s and 1s, and he accurately locked onto some unusual data and looked back at a certain place.

He flew toward that side again. When he stopped at the entrance of the laboratory, he knew he had found the right place. Victor walked in, but he didn't see his father; he only saw heavily armed agents.

"Victor Stone, right?" A heavily armed agent walked up to him, handed him a file, and said, "Look at this, find all the data inside the computer held by the person in this video. Otherwise, your father won't be coming back."

Victor opened his eyes wide in shock.

The agent walked back and said: "We know you're a genius hacker; you could hack into the school administration system to change grades while you were in school. Now use this ability to do something more meaningful. The future of the United States is waiting for you to decide."

"What the hell are you doing! Where did you take my father?!!!" Victor roared.

"And thank you for giving us the address. He didn't agree to cooperate with us before, and the military helped him cover up the address, wanting to hold him for a huge ransom, waiting for us to be forced into a corner before asking for a high price. Fortunately, we monitored the call between you two; otherwise, we might not have been able to find him so quickly."

Victor reacted immediately. His father had indeed hidden, but he hid because someone was targeting him. If he didn't hide, he would become a hostage. As a result, when he came to find him, he exposed the address. He eventually became a hostage.

"Tell me where he is," Victor said. "If I can't confirm he's safe, I won't help you with anything."

The agent seemed to have anticipated his reaction and directly opened the electronic screen nearby. His father still looked somewhat tired, and armed personnel were clearly standing behind him.

This video wasn't a video call, but had been recorded and stored long ago, so there was no signal to track. The other party was clearly guarding against him. Victor frowned as he watched the video.

While watching the video, he had already recorded the video through the camera. And now the video was continuously playing in a loop in his brain at a very high speed, and he was extracting usable information from it.

Suddenly, a place caught his attention. His father had a pen tucked into his shirt pocket. He wasn't sure if his father had such a habit, but the style of the pen was somewhat peculiar.

From this angle, one could see a circular emblem pattern on the very top of the pen cap. After conducting a wide-area search, Victor discovered that this was an extremely expensive pen, so expensive that it was not something people of their class could afford. And this pen wasn't a mass-produced model, but a handmade limited edition, and the arrangement of the gems on the pen clip of each pen was different, meaning each one was a unique item.

Conducting a search again for the arrangement of the gems, Victor discovered that the last time this pen appeared was at a press conference of Alexander Luthor, the owner of the Luthor Group.

Immediately following that, he searched for the news of Luthor's arrest, then the news of him holding Superman hostage in prison, and finally the name and information of the prison where Luthor would be held after the court found him guilty.

Belle Reve Penitentiary—a prison specially set up for holding super-powered individuals.

It must be here, Victor thought. It was precisely to guard against him that they would send the hostage to a prison specially designed for super-powered individuals; there must be something in that place that could resist superpowers—someone used this pen to give him a hint. ===== CHAPTER 4361 =====