Vicious

Victor Vale and Eli Ever were the two most gifted students at Lockland University, brilliant, competitive, and obsessed with the same senior thesis question: could a person engineer their own superhuman abilities? Their research into EOs — ExtraOrdinary people created by near-death experiences — pushed them to test the theory on themselves, and it worked, at a cost that ended their friendship in blood and betrayal.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison with one goal: revenge on Eli, who has spent the intervening decade methodically hunting down and killing EOs across the country, convinced he is cleansing the world of what he considers monsters — a mission that conveniently keeps him from reckoning with what he became. As Victor assembles his own small, damaged crew and closes in, the lines between hero and villain, victim and monster, blur until neither man, nor the reader, can say with confidence which one is which.

V.E. Schwab's Vicious is a sharp, morally ambiguous superhero story that skips the capes for something colder and more human: two brilliant men, a decade-old grudge, and the terrifying ease with which ambition curdles into vengeance. It launches the Villains series.