[I wasn't satisfied with the ending of The Boys, so in a fit of rage, I instantly started this book to give Homelander a perfect ending.]
[Please look forward to what comes next.]
[John's reaction to coming across edits of himself.]
[520 netizens clear his name and pity his childhood.]
[The Boys' conceptual-god lineup.]
[Parking spot for guys more handsome than Foot-Shrinking Boy.]
[Parking spot for girls prettier than Maeve, Cate, Starlight, and Kimiko.]
Music recommendation for this chapter ↓
"Homelander in Hallway"
[Ready? Let's roll!]
Thud!
When John opened his eyes...
He found that he seemed to have been stuffed into some cheap children's spinning rocker.
"Fuck..."
Violent tremors drilled through his bones into his spinal cord, then rattled into his teeth like Parkinson's.
Not just that... there was also weightlessness that nearly shoved his lungs out, and a terrifying force pressing him back.
John could even clearly hear his bones creaking inside the tight restraints.
Outside?
The sounds were even more of a chaotic mess.
Was that wind?
He desperately hoped it was wind.
Because it sounded more like the atmosphere breaking the sound barrier beside his ears when he used to fly at high speed.
Thud, thud, thud!
A string of jolts left John's eardrums numb and his chest resonating. He couldn't tell which way was up.
"Fuck... is this goddamn hell or heaven?"
"Stop fucking with me, Jesus."
Before John could steady himself, another surprise struck.
Thud!
Outside the pod.
The ground rushed straight at him like a gigantic wall.
The entire pod bounced violently upward, slammed down, then bounced again, plowing a deep furrow through dirt and rubble.
Unexpectedly, however, the shock absorbers inside the pod kicked in.
Some kind of transparent force field built into the pod suddenly appeared, silently tightening at the moment of impact and enveloping him and the entire cockpit as one.
Humm-
The explosive kinetic energy outside was like a punch into cotton, its force dissipated layer by layer by the transparent field.
Only a final dull sensation filtered through, giving John a token shove against the restraints.
Before long, the residual shaking after the pod hit the ground stopped, and thick smoke from the wreckage began drifting through the cracks.
The acrid smell of scorched metal, along with an earthy odor from somewhere, stung John's eyes.
Then everything fell quiet.
All that remained was the faint hissing of the pod's components and the intermittent crackle of a shorted circuit somewhere.
John simply hung in the restraints with a look of utter despair, warning lights flashing wildly beside him and bathing the interior alternately in red and darkness.
John was out of ideas.
From death to waking up, then immediately going through this whole series of "aviation disasters."
He spent several full minutes in a daze.
"So I... didn't die?"
But I clearly died...
Then who is this "me"?
With that thought, John lowered his head to look at his hands.
One look immediately froze his expression.
Because...
They were tiny, pink, wrinkled hands, their five fingers curled up obediently.
As frail as those infant test subjects Vought raised, incapable of even taking a derivative.
The lingering smoke inside the pod passed between his fingers. John stared blankly at that little hand for a long time.
"Shit! So... I've fucking turned into a weak-ass baby?!"
John's brain crashed.
Because just seconds earlier, his memories had still been clearly frozen in that humiliating office in the White House-
"I am-Homelander!"
Shhk!
The dull sound of a lead crowbar smashing hard against his skull had been heavy and blunt.
And there had been fucking agony.
Like a boulder plunging into a deep pool, it sent one final ripple through John's hallucinatory, shattered consciousness.
Like dreams and bursting bubbles.
The elegance of dying in cinematic slow motion, or a superhero's tragic, heroic curtain call...
He had neither.
All that remained was the moment his cheek hit the cold floor, and Butcher's rough face pressing close, hideous as a vicious ghost.
His lips curled back, the whites of his eyes bloodshot.
Panting heavily, he looked down at John from above.
As though looking at a dead dog.
John seemed to already know how his story ended.
But he refused to accept it.
"No... this goddamn world can't do this to me!"
As he lay dying, John gazed unfocused toward the ceiling of the White House, his damaged brain tissue barely piecing together his broken memories.
He had lived for over forty years.
For forty years, he had been the world's most powerful protector, the captain of the Seven.
Hundreds of millions looked up to him, and countless politicians treated him as an honored guest.
In terms of abilities alone.
He could easily burn through steel plates with his naked eyes.
He could effortlessly smash an F-16 Fighting Falcon above the stratosphere, and could even fly around the Earth in nine minutes.
(I calculated it carefully, bro. After taking V1, he was somewhere around Mach 218-252.)
And yet this powerful "self"...
Had actually died so unceremoniously at the hands of a lousy crowbar.
"Heh..."
The life flashing before his eyes was cruel, offering him no opportunity for warmth.
There were no flowers, no applause.
Nor was there some woman he had deeply loved smiling at him in holy light.
Instead-
Cruel scenes, like files casually flipped open, were laid bare before his eyes.
A white laboratory, the pungent smell of disinfectant, cold needles piercing his young soul countless times.
He had been little then, without a mother or father.
So all he had known was pain, all he had known was crying.
All he had known was clutching a little gray blanket with some unknown serial number and wrapping himself in it, bolstering his cowardly courage.
Then John had gradually grown up.
The little gray blanket became a cape of stars and stripes.
He became Homelander.
Under Vought's public relations and the media's constant praise, he was all-powerful.
He was the captain of the Seven, with hundreds of millions of fans. Whatever he wanted to do, he fucking did.
Maeve, Madelyn... Clara... his father, Soldier Boy, and even Black Noir, who had once poured his heart out to him.
They were all people in whom he had once placed his "love."
Then there was Ryan.
His precious son, who had inherited his "divine" bloodline and had eyes the exact same color as his.
Yet at the final moment, he had laughably sided with Butcher, allowing that ragtag outfit to slay a god.
"Sure enough, in this world... no one will ever love me."
He was no longer angry.
There was only a calm born of a heart dead beyond grief, as though an answer he had long known had finally been confirmed.
Gradually, John's consciousness grew thinner and thinner in the darkness, like a wisp of smoke slowly scattered by the wind.
"What a fucked-up life..."
Darkness swallowed everything.
And now, as his thoughts gradually became active again, his reasoning finally returned to normal.
Looking at the surrounding wreckage, which was clearly the scene of an aircraft crash, John simply couldn't connect it to either hell or heaven.
If this really was either of those places, then Jehovah and Satan might be the greatest fucking con artists of the past twenty centuries.
Fuck!
He had been reborn or transmigrated.
He had become an unknown little baby lying inside an unknown cockpit.
And the spacecraft had clearly just completed some kind of utterly catastrophic crash landing.
"..."
Drawing on the psychological resilience of a ten-year-old man-baby honed over many years in his previous life, John gritted his teeth and accepted this fucked-up reality in approximately five seconds.
Besides that, he also discovered that he was in terrible shape.
No different from when his powers had been stripped away during the great battle.
Put plainly, he was now a human baby who would shatter at a touch, too weak to truss a chicken.
And it was a fucking hell-difficulty start, too.
At that thought, John's infant face began twitching unnaturally, his jaw clenched.
So the spaceship crashed... that means it'll explode, right?
I need to fucking fly out of...
Wait?
My superpowers seem to be gone...
Fuck, somebody fucking save me!
As though John's prayers had been answered, before long, someone suddenly opened the cockpit door from outside.
Clatter-
Golden sunset light poured in, making John instinctively narrow his eyes.
Before long, two figures gradually appeared against the light, their outlines especially soft in the warm halo.
They looked like a farming couple.
The man wore a plaid shirt washed almost white, with broad shoulders and rough hands.
The woman wore a floral apron, a few strands of her golden hair blown loose by the wind.
Her eyes were very clear.
There was none of the fear or greed John had known in his previous life.
Only surprise, and something completely unfamiliar to John.
He blinked several times, taking a little while before he could barely identify what it was.
It was tender affection.
Tender affection for a child she had never met, without any reason at all.
"Jonathan, look!"
The woman's voice was as gentle as a breeze brushing over ears of wheat.
"He's actually still alive!"
"My God! Martha."
The man came closer and bent over to look at the little baby in the cockpit, unmistakable disbelief in his voice.
"Am I dreaming... did this really fall out of the sky?"
Without hesitation, he bent down.
Then, with those large, rough hands, he carefully undid the catches on the outside of the protective cover and lifted John out of the cockpit.
"...Don't..."
John swore this was the first time in his life anyone had held him in such a humiliating way.
No, that went for his previous life, too.
This was... so fucking unfamiliar.
It was nothing like the cold experience of being strapped to a laboratory table as a child.
Nor was it like the rough dragging of that slutty lab technician in black stockings and gold-rimmed glasses on the training grounds.
The man's palm was broad and warm, supporting his back with a gentle touch, as though cradling something fragile.
Although he no longer had his superpowers, John could still hear the steady, powerful heartbeat in the man's chest.
He could even smell the mingled scents of earth, sweat, and the fresh fragrance of wheat on him.
Yet... it was unexpectedly intoxicating.
At that moment, John's nerves, which had remained taut all this time, finally relaxed.
Having lived so many years, he could at least read people.
He could tell that this couple weren't bad people.
Then the woman named Martha leaned closer and gently touched his cheek with her fingertips, her eyes reddening slightly.
"What a poor child."
She sniffled as she spoke softly.
What? Poor?
Wait... him? Pitiful?
To John, this was an exceedingly rare word.
No one had ever pitied him in his previous life. People had either feared him or used him.
Or they had cursed him to die behind his back.
The word "pity" had never had anything to do with him.
And just then, he suddenly felt a physiological response he had absolutely no control over.
A cruel little joke born of biological instinct.
His eyes began to sting of their own accord.
"No..."
John sternly warned himself inwardly.
Aside from when he was alone, it was only when he was with Soldier Boy that he could truly let himself go.
But in the eyes of these ordinary people...
This was shit.
This was so fucking humiliating!
I'm Homelander...
Not some sniveling, weak-ass baby!
But the baby's instincts forcibly seized control of John's limbs, then erupted in an overbearing fashion.
"Waaah-"
The baby's cries rang out across the entire wheat field, carrying an emotion even John himself hadn't recognized.
Over forty years of loneliness, coldness, and resentment at being treated as a Vought "product" burst through the floodgates at that moment in the most primitive way.
Damn it, this is so fucking humiliating...
John cried while furiously cursing himself inwardly.
But... this damned embrace really is so warm!
"Oh, sweet little baby, don't cry..."
Martha gently took him into her arms and held him against her chest, patting his back lightly with one hand.
She began humming a lullaby he had never heard before. Its melody was simple, yet it possessed a certain magic that put him at ease.
"Don't be afraid, child. Don't be afraid..."
Her voice brushed his ear, as soft as a murmur.
"From now on, this will be your home."
"Home?"
John comfortably closed his eyes and lay quietly in this unfamiliar woman's arms.
He listened to her steady heartbeat, smelling the fragrance of laundry detergent on her and the fresh breeze from the wheat field.
In his previous life, he had had a luxury apartment, his own exclusive ride, and every material provision Vought could offer him.
But he had never known what home felt like.
So this was what home was like.
So it was this fucking simple.
Jonathan stood beside them, watching the baby in her arms gradually stop crying, and something seemed to quietly settle in his eyes.
Then he reached out, gently brushed the baby's forehead with his rough knuckles, and spoke softly:
"Martha, this is a child Heaven has given us. How about we name him Cl... John?"
"John Kent."
"That's a lovely name."
Just as John was immersed in this long-absent "warmth," ready to drift into a deep sleep.
"Bzzzt-"
An abrupt electrical crackle suddenly came from the wreckage of the crashed spaceship.
Hearing it, Jonathan and Martha finally snapped out of their daze and looked at each other.
Something about this scene seemed wrong.
If they weren't mistaken, that was probably a spaceship, the kind that only appeared in science fiction movies...
Then they looked back at John in her arms.
"Looks like there's more to this child than meets the eye..."
John lay comfortably in her arms with his eyes half closed. He yawned, and a barely perceptible fleck of red flashed through his pupils.
But Jonathan keenly caught it.
"Martha... did you see this child's eyes just now?"
(Addressing objections to the name)
The root of Clark comes from the Latin clericus, whose core meaning relates to the clergy, fitting Superman's definition as a "god among men."
In this storyline, however, Homelander has taken the place of Henry Cavill's Superman, and Homelander's real name is John.
Moreover, Homelander's original path through life didn't suit this name either. He lacked Superman's nobility and moral bottom line.
The name John comes from the Hebrew Yehochanan, whose core meaning is "one who has received God's grace."
So, as the author, I consider this a rebirth bestowed upon Homelander by Heaven, and have therefore departed from the original work to name him John Kent.
(All language in this book is for visual effect. There is no inclination whatsoever to insult women; it merely recreates the worldview and the characters' trajectories.)
(In addition, this book respects women. Its female characters will all appear as flesh-and-blood individuals who love and hate clearly. There will be no throwing themselves at men, blind infatuation, or similar behavior.)
(Goddesses, please rest assured as you read.)
(And you handsome guys, I'll write what you love to read.)
Wishing all you handsome guys and girlies a happy read!