The glossy business card from Mr. Finch felt like a piece of polished black ice in Thomas's rough hand, cold and alien the definitive proof that the world of selfless service he had idealized was fundamentally broken.
To Vought, strength was not measured by sacrifice, but by marketability and profit. If Vought sold Spectacle, Thomas realized, he could not afford to sell anonymity. He had to meet their corporate image with a symbol so overtly pious, so resolutely anti-corporate, that it would shame the gilded idols of steel. His father had trained him to be invisible, a hidden source of light; Vought demanded he become a weaponized billboard, a blinding flash.
He rejected the simple names that the locals had given him The Good Shepherd was too meek, implying subservience; Samson too vainglorious, tainted by the lure of the flesh and the judgment that followed.
His identity needed to be sharper, more aggressive, and entirely driven by the concept of purification and divine retribution. He settled on The Crusader. The name was a perfect fusion of militant history and divine zeal, implying not defense, but an active, aggressive campaign against the unholy.
It was a declaration of war against spiritual rot. It made his father wince when Thomas finally spoke it, an expression of profound spiritual fear that cut Thomas to the quick.
"Crusades are fought for earthly crowns, Thomas. They are tainted by avarice and pride, and they always end in blood," Silas whispered, recognizing the profound shift from a defensive posture of faith to a military one. "You are not commissioned to wage war on men, but on sin. This name smells of conquest."
"The sins of man and the sins of the Corporation have become one, Father," Thomas replied, his voice flat, his gaze fixed on a distant, inevitable horizon. The shame of his earlier silence and the trauma of the covered-up deaths had curdled into a righteous, unyielding anger. "The idols must be toppled. This is the new Holy Land, and it is polluted by corporate blasphemy. The sin of Vought is greater than the sin of any infidel; it is the sin of false idolatry, claiming the gifts of God for their own profit." This justification was his new, private theology, a terrifying fusion of faith and vengeance. He was no longer just seeking salvation; he was seeking to administer it, violently if necessary. The name Crusader was his flag of self-justification.
The uniform was designed in direct, harsh opposition to The Prairie Guardian's plastic shine and the coming sleekness of early Seven members. It was not a suit, but armor a physical penance for his compromise and a constant irritant.
He took an old, heavy leather shop apron, the material already scarred from years of farm work, and dyed it a dark, uncompromising crimson, the color of both sacrifice and war. He spent weeks hammering plates of salvaged, dull, non-Compound V metal taken from a discarded boiler and the heavy chassis of a broken-down truck onto the apron and thick leather gauntlets.
The joints were stiff, the metal dug into his collarbones, and the leather chafed his skin raw. He didn't smooth the edges; he wanted the outfit to feel primal and heavy, making it cumbersome, forcing him to rely on his innate strength rather than speed or Vought's implied technology.
The cumulative weight was tremendous nearly fifty pounds of crude steel and cured hide a constant, physical reminder that his path would be one of unending, difficult labor.
The rough, matte finish was intentional; it absorbed light rather than reflecting it, rejecting the spotlight he knew Vought craved. The ensemble was a deliberate visual rejection of Compound V chic, a suit that smelled of oil and sweat, not synthetics and focus groups, a physical vow of asceticism.
The most critical component was the shield, the physical manifestation of his conditional faith. It was not a high-tech ballistic piece, but a rough-hewn, kite-shaped sheet of steel salvaged from a scrap yard.
He spent days grinding the surface down with agonizing precision, leaving behind a scarred, industrial texture that looked ancient and battle-worn. He resisted the urge to polish it; the shield had to show the marks of the struggle.
At its center, he affixed a hand-forged, oversized cross, the edges deliberately left sharp, almost jagged. The cross was a weapon, not just a decoration. The shield was designed to be carried not just as defense, but as a visual declaration, an unmistakable piece of religious iconography that preceded him everywhere.
When he carried it, it felt like a holy weight, a physical embodiment of the burdens of his faith a permanent, forty-pound counter-weight to his own ambition and a constant trigger for the spiritual focus needed for invulnerability.
The shield was his pulpit, and its scarred surface was his testimony.
His public image began to coalesce around a new aesthetic: the uncompromising use of Bible quotations as slogans, delivered with the finality of a court judgment.
His media appearances were brief, efficient, and always ended with a chillingly delivered verse, often left etched into a damaged wall with the tip of his shield or whispered to the press before he vanished.
When he stopped a runaway fuel truck, he didn't give interviews or smile for the cameras; he simply stood over the immobilized vehicle, his figure framed by the early morning sun, and quoted: "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." (Hosea 8:7). This created a specific, unsettling brand: Crusader was not cheerful, reassuring, or friendly; he was an uncompromising prophet of judgment, a living, breathing editorial comment on the moral decay of the modern world.
He offered not hope, but inevitable consequence. The media tried to spin it as 'quirky Old Testament charm,' but the undercurrent of dread was unmistakable.
His increasing visibility attracted precisely the attention Vought needed for their demographic marketing. Vought was looking for cultural counterweights. With the rise of counter-culture and the increasing skepticism toward authority in the 1960s, Vought needed a hero who could tap into the conservative, deep-seated patriotic communities.
Thomas, the humble, muscle-bound knight quoting scripture, was perfect a clean, non-sexualized hero who spoke the language of the heartland. He was a demographic tool, marketed as the antithesis of the California hippies Vought was also cultivating. They explicitly needed a hero who could stand on stage with a politician and nod, projecting moral gravity. Crusader was their anchor to the vanishing American traditionalism.
The meeting took place not in a slick Manhattan tower, but in the back room of a regional Vought affiliate office in Ohio, a sterile, low-ceilinged room smelling faintly of stale coffee and Denton's overpowering cologne.
The representative, a low-level Vought Guy named Denton, was less polished than Finch, all cheap suit, nervous energy, and a palpable desperation to impress his superiors with a new 'flyover country' asset. Denton didn't care about Thomas's faith; he cared only about the market share and the political optics.
"Look, Crusader," Denton said, awkwardly using the chosen moniker, trying to sound authoritative while fidgeting with a plastic pen. "We got Captain Cold out in California, and he's talking about peace and love, doing meditation retreats. Total hippie. That sells in L.A. We need something… firmer for the Bible Belt. You're giving us 'firm.' You're giving us that holy knight stuff. The conservative markets eat that up. They see you, they don't see some lab experiment they see divine intervention. We can sell that contrast. We'll call it 'Grit and Grace,' or 'God's Own Enforcer.' Either way, it's money, and we can move a lot of action figures in the mid-size cities."
The offer was substantial: a contract for regional endorsement tours (mainly at church revivals, county fairs, and military base openings, strategically chosen to avoid the big coastal cities), a significant, tax-free stipend, and the critical hook high-end medical care for his aging parents, who were beginning to struggle with the physical toll of farm life and the stress of his secret.
Thomas felt the familiar revulsion rise again, a physical sickness in his stomach, but he held it down with the practiced discipline of his youth. His father's fear had been his own: that compromise meant idolatry. But Denton's proposal offered a means to an end, a weaponized piece of leverage.
It was the only way to get close enough to the Idols of Steel to study their weaknesses and prepare for the eventual cleansing, and the medical care provided the perfect, pure excuse a righteous debt.
"I will accept," Thomas stated, his voice ringing with forced conviction, pushing the shield across the desk. The sharp-edged cross scraped a deep, permanent score into the polished veneer a symbolic destruction of Vought property before he even began.
The gesture was both a signing and a warning. "But my message is non-negotiable. I do not endorse the Supers. I endorse the Word. If I am asked to compromise the scripture, the contract is void. And the medical care for my family must be permanent and unconditional, guaranteed in writing."
Denton, desperate to hit his quarterlies, merely nodded, barely listening, already sketching out taglines on a cocktail napkin. "Yeah, yeah, Bible stuff. Sure, pal. We'll call that 'Creative Control.' Just make sure the shield is visible for the cameras, and keep the fire and brimstone to a manageable three minutes. Think Ed Sullivan, not Revelations."
Thomas signed the contract, the pen feeling like a branding iron in his hand, rationalizing the betrayal instantly: he was not selling his soul; he was entering the lair of the beast to bring God's judgment from within, utilizing the enemy's resources against them. He had sacrificed his purity for leverage, turning himself into a Trojan Horse.
He immediately felt the profound, aching loss of his autonomy and the spiritual darkness of the deed. He could already taste the sulfur of the corporate compromise. The small, private flicker of pride he felt at his cunning, however, was quickly extinguished by a cold, unsettling premonition that was less a thought and more a spiritual dread.
He had just exchanged a holy commission for a Vought contract, and he knew, deep in his gut, that this compromise was the first fracture in the wall of his moral defense. The strength in prayer was about to be severely tested by a world that craved his invulnerability in rage and Vought now owned the lease on his rage. His true, private war had officially begun, and he had already taken his first casualty: himself.