The sky over the city was a perfect, unbroken sheet of glass, but to Homelander, it felt like a cage.She hovered two thousand feet above the concrete grid, her heavy velvet cape snapping in the high-altitude wind. To the millions below, she was a living god. She was beautiful, untouchable, and lethal, wrapped in gold and midnight blue.
Her jawline was sharp enough to cut glass, her blue eyes bright enough to pierce through steel. She had spent a decade convincing the world—and herself—that she was the pinnacle of creation. Nothing moved without her seeing it. Nothing breathed without her permission.
Yet, for the past three days, she had been suffocated by a feeling she had never experienced in her entire life: the sensation of being watched. Homelander's eyes narrowed, the blue depths of her pupils shifting as her microscopic vision engaged.
She scanned the horizon. Her eyes peeled back the layers of the city below, cutting through brick, steel, and flesh. She saw a man cheating on his wife in a high-rise hotel. She saw a teenager stealing a candy bar. She saw the rhythmic, wet thumping of three million human hearts beating in their fragile chest cavities.None of them were looking at her.
None of them possessed a gaze heavy enough to press against the back of her neck like a hot iron."Where are you?" she whispered, her voice cutting through the wind.She turned on her heel in mid-air, her super-hearing straining. She filtered out the roar of jet engines miles away. She filtered out the chatter of the streets, the sirens, the hum of air conditioners. She listened for the unique, rhythmic thrum of a super-powered heart, or the click of a high-tech camera lens, or the hum of a cloaking device.
Nothing.
There was only the empty, whistling air.The paranoia tasted like ash in her mouth. Sovereign was not a being who felt fear; fear was a currency she dealt to others. But this invisible scrutiny was a violation. It felt as though someone was peeling back her skin, looking past the indestructible muscle and bone, straight into the hollow space where her soul was supposed to be.With a thunderous boom that shattered the windows of the skyscrapers below, she dropped straight down.She landed in the center of a deserted industrial park on the outskirts of the city.
The concrete fractured beneath her boots, spiderwebs of dust exploding upward. She stood perfectly still in the wreckage, her fists clenched, her chest heaving. Her laser vision ignited, twin beams of brilliant, blinding crimson warming the air around her face.
"Come out!"
She roared, her voice shaking the corrugated iron walls of the surrounding warehouses.
"Show yourself! I will tear you into pieces! I will burn your family to cinders! Show your face!"
She spun around, firing a wild, sweeping beam of heat. The crimson light sliced through three warehouses like a hot knife through butter, sending tons of structural steel and concrete crashing to the ground in a chorus of screeching metal.
Smoke and fire billowed into the evening sky.She waited, her breath coming in shallow, jagged gasps. Surely, if an enemy was hiding, the destruction would flush them out. Even a speedster or a teleporter would leave a displacement trail in the smoke.There was nothing but the crackle of burning debris. No one was there.
The gaze remained, heavier now, mocking her from the empty air.
Surrender.
Homelander gasped, her entire body jerking as if she had been struck by a high-voltage current. The voice did not travel through the air. Her super-auditory nerves, capable of hearing a teardrop hit a pillow from three miles away, had registered absolutely nothing.The word had bloomed directly inside her cerebral cortex.
It was a soft, calm, almost pitying voice. A man's voice, tired yet focused.
It is over, Jane. Your soul is compromised. Surrender quietly, and the transition will be painless. Please choose life.
.A cold sweat broke out across her forehead, dripping down her perfect, sculpted cheek.
"Get out of my head,"
she hissed, her teeth grinding together so hard they threatened to shatter.
"Get out of my head!"
You cannot fight what is already inside, the voice replied, echoing in the caverns of her skull. You are an apex predator in a world of glass, but your cage has a ceiling.
Open the door.
Arrogance, pure and volatile, surged through her veins like liquid fire. She was Homelander. She was the one who dictated terms. She was the Vought corporation's greatest miracle, a creature crafted from the DNA of humanity's best, one brilliant innovation after another.
No pathetic, sniveling psychic rat was going to crawl inside her brain and tell her to lay down her arms.
"I am the only one who decides when it's over!" she shrieked.
With a scream of unadulterated rage, she launched herself into the sky. The sonic boom she left behind leveled the remaining walls of the industrial park, kicking up a hurricane of dust and fire.
She flew straight up. If the enemy was using a satellite, or a ground-based broadcast array, she would outrun the signal. She would tear through the atmosphere until the frequency snapped.The air grew thin, then freezing, then non-existent.
The blue sky bled into the deep, terrifying black of the vacuum. Below her, the curve of the Earth glowed in a brilliant crescent of blue and white. She had never felt more powerful than she did out here, looking down at the world that belonged to her.
You cannot fly away from yourself, the voice whispered, completely unaffected by the vacuum, completely unaffected by the hundreds of miles she had traveled in seconds.
It sounded closer now, right behind her eyes.
You are exposed, vulnerable and away from innocent's. That god complex you've built has finally fallen apart"
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" Sovereign screamed into the void, no sound escaping her lips in the airless space.She began to strike her own temples with her fists.
Blows that could shake mountain tops rattled her own skull, sending blinding flashes of white light across her vision. She flew in erratic, violent loops, diving back down toward the atmosphere at Mach 50, heating the air around her into a blazing fireball of friction, hoping the sheer sensory overload would burn the intruder out.
She smashed through a mountain range, reducing a jagged peak to a valley of gravel. She tore through the ocean, parting the waves into a canyon of boiling water. She did everything she could to shock her nervous system, to drown out the parasite.
But the voice remained, undisturbed by the cataclysmic violence of her movements. It was a part of her now. Or worse—it had always been there.
Your anger is so loud, the voice said, sounding genuinely tired. But it is just a mask for the little girl shivering in the laboratory. You just want love ,it doesn't have to end this way.
Jane fell from the sky, crashing into a desolate desert basin. That feeling of death escalated until it drowned out everything but the voice.
She helplessly cried and whispered. Her sense's couldn't lie to her.
Her instincts bordered on precognition. If she refused it was death.
A faint token appeared before her.