Chapter 17: Capes for Christ

After nearly an hour of running, Mike managed to catch up with The Boys van and all 4 of them drove off to the chosen location of the Capes For Christ event. Mike just sat down and had Hughie meditate along with him and guided him on how to use the death knight techniques. *My psi focus has gotten exceptionally low from the constant usage, I need some time to restore my mind and let my neural heat dissipate.*

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Time passed by fast as the rays of sunlight shined in through the car windows and landed on Mike's face. Butcher and Mother's Milk had pitched a small tent outside the Van, while Hughie meditated through the whole night and so did Mike. The only difference was, Mike was mentally tired. He had to enter into his mind and restore his psychic focus. His psychic capabilities are much more limited than most others, so usually his wife helps him in regards to that, but now he had to spend multiple days to recover from all the neural heat he had accumulated from the constant talking and casting.

Luckily, he had quite a bit of time during their trip. The boys had arrived at the location slightly ahead of schedule, at 5am on June 6th, so they had time to rest and let the stress flow away.

Mike stretched his arms a bit and woke Hughie up. "Get up, Hughie. The sun has come up and we have a mission to do!"

Hughie was startled into consciousness. He was learning how to connect to his spirit and manipulate it for the last few days. When he opened his eyes, he looked at Mike with widened eyes and a small hint of fear. "Jesus Christ! How much spirit DO you have?!"

Mike smiled, as he realized Hughie had comprehended spirit sense. Even talented men have difficulty comprehending it in a week and Hughie managing to learn it in 2 days was quite impressive. *Most definitely 100 minimum.* "I would say, quite a lot. You might not be able to put this into perspective, but my spirit amount is about a 150 wayfarer." Hughie nodded his head and said "You are right, I have no idea how much that is. And aren't you that blade dancer? Why compare yourself to a wayfarer?"

Mike shrugged "Wayfarers are a standard for a reason. Wayfaring is reliable, straight forward and easy to learn. You'll be able to reach about 2/3rds of my spirit amount before you hit a bottleneck, so you don't have to worry about that. If you want a number crutch, then my effective spirit is about 3 times what you see now. You're effective spirit amount is around half of what you feel. You'll understand what I mean when you study everything more deeply., as you can't exactly quantify spirit. There is no hardest single digit 1 you can compare to. The best we have are wayfarers."

Hughie understood some of that, as Mike's explanation reminded him of multiple videogames he has played, but his knowledge about martial arts didn't change much.

Mike had Hughie do some exercises and stretches for a while, before the mission began.

A few hours passed, the boys woke up, they had a small meal of canned beans and parked their car at a good spot before their mission began.

As soon as they were done parking, Hughie looked at Butcher and asked "What's the plan?" Butcher's sunglasses lowered a bit and surprise was evident on his face.

He nodded and took out his phone "Ezekiel is the leader of this Christian rally, and this is for you too, alien, he has a very aggressive stance about being anything but heterosexual. The bible says something about god making women for men, so men can only love women and he is hammering that bollocks to all these religious twats and they keep gobbling it up like sheep. But we have this here!"

Butcher's screen showed a picture of Ezekiel with two boys, sharing a three way kiss with eachother. And Hughie quickly tried to cover it with his body. "Don't pull that out here! What if someone sees it and we get into trouble!"

Butcher scoffed "Relax! I have a special screen protector, that muffles the screen for anyone far away. At worst, they'll think we are wanking off to some gay porn, not sharing porn of their figurative messiah."

Mike nodded his head and urged Butcher to continue "Mike, your job is to get Hughie in. The supes here are allowed a plus on to the Ezekiel only special after-party instead of the 20k diamond pass thing. Ask your girlfriend to hook Hughie up and he threatens the guy with the picture here."

"What?" "What?" "What?"

The three boys stared at Butcher in surprise and he waved his hands "Calm down. Hughie can do it, cantcha, lad?"

Hughie was dumbfounded, so Mother's Milk had to say it for him "Butcher, the kid's barely holding up. He might have gotten some super powers, but he is just the normal Hughie we know. He isn't good enough to pull this off!"

Hughie nodded his head "Ya, what he said!"

Butcher nodded his head and said "Alright. I'll give you the details, Mike can't do it. MM, you can't do it and I sure as hell ain't getting baptized by Sargent homelander, so Hughie is the only one up for the job!"

Mike nodded his head "Hughie, you're up for the job!" He looked at Mike with pleading eyes and said "Oh C'mon, not you too!" Mike sighed "Look, Hughie, I can explain you and me being friends and you wanting to meet homelander in there, but Mother's Milk is a problem. From what I've learned about Japanese, they don't like blacks much. Vice versa for american blacks. Me being friends with a guy like Mother's Milk will be suspicious. Ezekiel also can't see me threaten him, or my chances of infiltrating Vought will crash like Bitcoin! I need to be clean of this whole thing, so you need to do this. Can I rely on you to do this, Hughie Campbell?" Mike's eye slightly twitched, but it was subtle enough, that the boys didn't notice.

Without much hesitation, Hughie nodded his head "I've got this!" and took the phone from butcher.

The two of them split off from the group and went to meet up with starlight, while Butcher and Mother's Milk just strolled around and talked about god with holy people.

Mike quickly ran a round and found the location of starlight and returned to Hughie. It took them all of 2 minutes to arrive near her.

"Remember, Hughie, You're the jackass, that was screaming into my phone at Billy's place!"

Hughie nodded with a serious face "Right! I'm the ja- Wait what?!"

"Mike!" Mike went in for a hug, which Annie reciprocated. They separated in a minute and Mike said "I was coming here and on my way I actually found one of my friends. Starlight, meet Hughie. Hughie, this is Starlight, the hero I told you about."

Starlight looked over at Hughie with a smiling face and was very surprised "Hughie? Hughie, Is that you?" The man in question looked dumbfounded and said "You're starlight?! So the job you were talking about was the seven!"

Annie cringed at the memory of their first meeting at the park bench. Mike looked confused and said "You two know eachother?" and looked towards Hughie, with agitation written all over his face. The agitation was quickly gotten rid of, when Annie noticed it for half a second.

Annie panicked slightly and said "No, no. Well we "know eachother", but we only met once and ranted to eachother a bit in a park, you know, just like 2 strangers who will never meet again talking a lot. Anyway, it's nice to see you here. How've you been?"

Hughie shook his head and got rid of the dumb expression on his face "Ya, pretty small world. I've been good, thanks for asking. How's the whole 'not liking your job' thing going? Still can't believe you're Starlight BTW. Hell, I'm amazed my friend is famous now, much less, that I met someone from the seven at a park bench!"

Annie's face suddenly lit up and she changed the subject in a hurry "Oh yeah! I watched the news yesterday. I was blown away. How did you manage to rescue so many people in such little time? A-train can barely run at his top speed for a single minute and you actually spent 10 minutes saving people. Vought's HQ blew up trying to find you the last couple of days! Even homelander wanted to personally invite you, but had to do a press conference, a speech and other stuff, so he couldn't!"

Mike rubbed the back of his head and looked a bit sad "Yeah. Still, wish I could have done more. I had no idea about the plane crash, not like I could have done anything about it. I also checked on the people I took to the hospital and one of them didn't make it. The others are recovering. It's... horrible to think how a group of people were capable of causing so much destruction in a single day."

Hughie bumped Mike's shoulder and said "None of that depressing shit. We get it, you want to be a superhero, but you are here with friends, so relax. You can't live your life moping over what you couldn't help."

Annie nodded along with Hughie's encouragement "He is right, you know. You did the best you could, no need to mope about it."

Mike just sighed *That was sloppy planning on my part. Can't believe I actually allowed 3 people to die. That was just... Subpar.*

The three of them went off to explore the place. The whole time Annie seemed to be looking for someone, but she soon forgot about who this person was and enjoyed hanging with Mike and Hughie, before her talk with the teens time came and she had to go.

A.N

This chapter has a lot of... Stuff. Hope you enjoyed, Starlight's mum ain't coming to anywhere, so let's see where that goes.

C'mon. Give me more stones. Also reviews and stuff, still waiting for that sweetass rating! I want to be The Boys: Domination.