Dorian uses blood to empower followers and form a crew

Dorian’s blood-based project turns the powers of the gifted into the foundation of a personal army: Draco’s blood makes it possible for powers to persist in new hosts, while regular infusions of gifted blood help Dorian remain immortal. The project serves his revenge against Draco and his stated aim of freeing powered people from secrecy, but its methods also make blood the instrument through which Dorian sustains himself and equips a force he plans to unleash.

Discovery and Purpose

Dorian’s plan has three parts: to become immortal, prevent Draco from completing his mission, and let humanity fall into its own chaos. He regards the first objective as already achieved through the blood of the gifted; stopping Draco and carrying out the rest of the plan have remained obstacles. His resentment is rooted in Draco’s selection over the gods’ own children and grows into a desire to destroy him. Dorian also condemns the Hero Society for forgiving Draco after he killed gifted people he considered unfit.

The blood project is thus not simply an effort to collect useful abilities. Dorian sees powered people as entitled to use what they have been given, and he wants them to live without hiding or fear. At the same time, his plan explicitly includes revenge and the prospect of human society collapsing into chaos. The promise of liberation and the design for retaliation sit side by side: his army is meant to embody the former while serving the latter.

Blood as a Means of Transfer and Survival

The decisive discovery is that Draco’s blood can help powers take hold in other people. By mixing it with the blood of people whose DNA contains power genes, Dorian finds that the abilities remain in their new hosts. He treats Draco’s blood as the missing key that can make his force more than a collection of ordinary followers. The method lets him pursue powers associated with the Hero Society without making his recruits clones of its members.

A related but distinct blood procedure keeps Dorian himself immortal. He must infuse gifted people’s blood with his own, a process that takes several hours and leaves him bedridden until it is complete. During one such treatment, an infusion machine mixes his gold-tinged blood with blood donated by a god-powered man. The procedure makes his continued immortality dependent on a recurring supply rather than a single past transformation.

Dorian’s access to that supply changes over time. He once took donations from people he encountered on the streets, but the hospital later had so much donated blood that he no longer needed to obtain it himself. Donors, he notes, gave blood without thinking about their powers. The hospital’s supply therefore provides an ongoing resource for his work, while also revealing how a routine act of donation can be repurposed for a supernatural project the donors do not appear to understand.

Building and Training the Crew

Dorian organizes the empowered followers as his own version of the Hero Society. He expects them to be better equipped than the people they are meant to oppose and says he will soon unleash them. Their abilities include strength, empathy, and shapeshifting; the group also includes a computer specialist and a killer. Dorian identifies magic as the ability his force lacks, but considers it of little use beside the power of the gods.

Ajax provides a concrete demonstration of the project. A veteran who had lost everything after coming home, he volunteers to host unlimited strength. Dorian asks him to bend a piece of rebar. Ajax grips the metal, gradually bends it, and snaps it in two. Dorian takes the result as evidence of progress, then moves on to check how the others are developing their abilities. His instruction is that they keep practicing and gain control over their new powers: the recruits are not merely recipients of blood-based enhancement but trainees expected to use their abilities deliberately.

The crew’s composition reflects Dorian’s aim to reproduce a range of powers associated with the Hero Society rather than duplicate its people. He describes his followers as possessing the same powers as his opponents, not as copies of them. That distinction makes the army a rival institution assembled from new hosts, with its own membership and training, rather than a literal replication of the existing organization.

Powers, Futures, and Contradiction

Dorian connects his own abilities to the same divine source as Phillip’s: both possess power from Apollo, though Dorian also has other abilities. Phillip’s sight of the future is constant; Dorian describes his own as something he can switch on, consulting possible futures while following the path he wants. He contrasts Phillip’s anticipated future, in which powered people become accepted heroes who protect humans and live safely, with his own ambition to set the gifted free on different terms.

That contrast sharpens the tension in Dorian’s project. He presents secrecy and fear as wrongs to be ended, yet his intended release of the gifted is tied to a plan to let humanity descend into chaos. He also admits that years were wasted while the effort focused on the wrong problem: after concluding that only blood from Draco was needed, he sees the earlier delay as unnecessary. His crew’s emergence therefore marks both technical progress and a change in the perceived route to revenge.

Significance of the Blood-Based Army

Blood links Dorian’s personal survival to his political and military ambitions. Infusions keep his immortality going; Draco’s blood enables the transfer that allows others to host powers; donated blood supplies the process on a larger scale. Each function depends on bodies carrying powers, but the consequences differ: one sustains Dorian, another equips his followers, and the hospital’s donations make the operation easier to maintain.

The resulting army embodies Dorian’s rejection of the Hero Society’s limits on the gifted, but it is also an instrument for confronting Draco and pursuing Dorian’s own chosen future. His directions to Ajax and the other recruits show the project moving from a blood-based discovery into organized preparation: the followers practice, develop control, and become a force Dorian believes he can unleash. The blood that first appears as a means of extending one life becomes the basis for a collective power—and for a conflict that Dorian intends to impose on the world.