Ada closed her eyes.
She had not spent much time in the months since her memory started returning on making peace with the concept of her own death — the gaps were too large, the recovered fragments too disordered, the sense of what she had been and what she had lost too incomplete to produce the kind of settled reckoning that might have made this moment easier. What she had instead was confusion, and a diffuse sadness that she couldn't assign to its proper sources, and the tail of the Ant King pointed at her throat.
Meruem had changed his assessment. He had intended to eliminate her. His senses, which operated at a resolution that made human perception seem like a rough sketch, had registered the situation inside her body before the killing decision was fully formed. Whatever she was on the surface, she was not only that. Beneath the skin — ally along the spine, anchored to the vertebral column — there was a second presence. An insect of a kind he had not encountered. A mother organism, distinct from the host body, coexisting with it rather than competing.
His instinct translated this finding into appetite rather than disgust. For Chimera Ants, eating prey was not simple consumption — it was acquisition. The bloodline factors, the biological capabilities of what was absorbed, remained available to the eater. A Chimera Ant who ate another apex predator did not merely eat. They grew.
Whatever lived in Ada's spine, it was something he wanted.
He recalculated his action.
Before the recalculation produced a new outcome, the floor above them stopped existing.
It was not debris that fell. It was a person, arriving through five floors of reinforced concrete by the most direct route available, which was straight down. The impact landed and the dust went outward in a sphere, and for a moment the figure at the centre of it was only a shape in the cloud — tall, built with the proportions of something that had been designed rather than born, a cape moving in the displaced air.
The dust settled.
The suit was blue with red edges. The cape behind him carried the World Government's flag. The hair was blond. His expression, as he looked around the ruins at the three people on the floor and the two individuals responsible for putting them there, contained the quality of someone whose anger has not yet resolved into a direction.
Caesar Clown, Vegapunk, and Ada registered his arrival simultaneously and with approximately the same reaction — a collective release of held breath, the relief of people who have been managing a catastrophic situation without adequate tools and have just been handed something adequate.
"Our reinforcement," Vegapunk said, and it came out slightly more emotional than he intended.
Homelander's eyes moved to Ada first. She was upright, functional, the tail near her no longer moving. He noted this, filed it, and shifted his attention to the floor. Stussy was there — the woman who had been the first person constructed in the architecture that had eventually produced him, lying face-down in the debris with the stillness of something that had been put there rather than fallen there.
The anger found its direction.
"You have no right to be called human beings," he said. His voice was very controlled. The control was the problem. The kind of control that exists because the alternative is something considerably larger than a voice. He did not want explanations. He did not want context. He wanted the people who had done this to understand, at a physical level, what the consequence of having done it was.
Meruem had his first serious miscalculation of the day.
He felt the life energy coming off the blond man the way a person feels heat before they're close enough to see the fire. The sensation was qualitatively different from anything he had registered in this room or in most rooms — not stronger in the sense of scale, but different in kind, the way a sun is different from a flame rather than just a larger version of the same thing. Endless. Radiating without apparent expenditure. No ceiling visible from where Meruem was standing.
A handful of cold sweat — an experience he had almost no frame of reference for — moved down his forehead.
If I could absorb that, he thought, I might reach the same altitude as Captain Kaido.
The thought was still forming when Homelander was in front of him.
The distance had been significant. The interval between Homelander's last position and his current one contained no visible transit — not speed that the eye couldn't track, but the elimination of the tracking problem entirely by completing the movement before the tracking began. The punch that followed was not a technique. It was a statement of physics.
Meruem's body discovered what a wall felt like from the perspective of a projectile.
The sound of the Ant King's impact — mass travelling at significant velocity into a reinforced surface — was followed by the sound of the surface declining to hold. Meruem was embedded in the wall at a depth that suggested his body had not entirely agreed with the wall's assessment of where the boundary was. He groaned, which was noteworthy — the Ant King of the Chimera Ants, one of the Beasts Pirates' most significant combat assets, producing the sound of pain in response to a single punch from someone who had covered the room's length between one breath and the next.
He tried to push himself out of the wall. The structural damage to his body was real and significant. The punch had nearly taken everything.
Homelander had already turned.
Tien Shinhan was not a man who required a situation to present itself formally before he assessed it. He had registered Homelander from the moment of arrival, categorised him, and arrived at a conclusion that his instincts found uncomfortable: the level in front of him was not one he could match with what he currently had available.
He tested the conclusion anyway, because a martial artist who accepts assessment without verification is not a martial artist.
He displaced — the near-instant positional shift that his body had spent decades developing past the threshold of what conventional tracking could follow — and arrived behind Homelander with his fists already in motion. He hit the man's back with everything the Flowing Water Rock-Crushing Fist could concentrate into a targeting sequence.
The result told him what he needed to know. Homelander did not move. The strikes landed and the feedback through Tien Shinhan's hands communicated nothing of the impact being received — no give, no acknowledgement, no micro-adjustment of weight. It was the sensation of having struck something that did not register the experience as relevant.
Tien Shinhan stepped back and revised his estimate of the gap.
Homelander turned his neck, very slowly, and looked at the three-eyed man with the expression of someone dealing with a secondary matter they haven't fully allocated attention to.
He waved one arm backwards.
The force in the gesture was the loose, casual force of someone who doesn't need to aim. It connected with Tien Shinhan the way a wave connects with something standing in shallow water — not targeted, not technical, simply overwhelming in the way that sufficiently large forces are. He received the same architectural treatment as Meruem. The wall outside the science base, beyond the wall inside the science base, and then the black fog of the base's external environment, all in sequence.
Tien Shinhan pulled himself out of the external wall and came back.
This was the correct response for someone with his training. He came back through the gap he had made and launched the Flowing Water Rock-Crushing Fist in a sustained combination — not hoping to damage, but hoping to find an angle, because every defence has an angle if the attack geometry is varied enough. Homelander stepped around each strike with the unhurried precision of something that could see every intention before it became movement.
"Your technique is excellent," Homelander said. It was not condescension. It was a factual assessment delivered by someone who could afford to be accurate. "You're not there yet."
The straight punch that followed sent Tien Shinhan through the wall entirely and into the fog outside. He was not coming back immediately.
Garou had watched both exchanges.
Monster Garou's combat instinct was not sophisticated, but it was very accurate about one question: what can hurt me, and what can't. The answer the last ninety seconds had produced was unambiguous. Direct engagement with Homelander at close range was a decision that had already been made by two other people and had reached the same outcome twice.
He made a different decision.
He pulled the available energy from the symbiote and from his own body simultaneously, the Venom-amplified output adding to his biological maximum in a way that the skin of his hands couldn't fully contain — they reddened, the capillaries under the surface responding to the heat of what was concentrating in his palms. He took the breath he needed. Every muscle that could be tensed was tensed.
He pushed both palms forward.
What came out of them was not a technique with a name. It was everything he had available, shaped into a forward direction, released at once. The shock wave hit the floor, the walls, the air, and the section of building above it with equal indifference. The pressure carved a path. Concrete and steel opened. The building's complaints became structural notices.
The dust cleared on a hole where a section of the science base had previously been.
Homelander was standing at the edge of the hole, looking through the aftermath with the expression of someone who has been surprised and is still processing whether to classify the experience as significant.
There was dust on his suit. Minor. The suit itself was undamaged.
He turned, found Garou's face with the full focus of his attention, and punched him.
The face — ally the face, ally the part of it most centrally and visibly located — received this at the velocity Homelander had decided was appropriate. Garou's trajectory matched those of his predecessors. The wall did the work that walls do in these circumstances, and then the floor above received the secondary impact, and then the building's opinion of its own structural coherence became academic.
The Garou did not immediately get up.