"βios"
(Here comes the legendary sword-drawing song.)
(I did my best. I hope you enjoy the read a little more. If the writing's decent, please leave a short comment.)
"Vroom-"
As a compressed sonic boom bore straight in from the coastline, all that invisible pressure slammed into the mudflat.
In an instant, the seawater in the shallows was squeezed into white foam. Shell fragments and grit shook loose from the mud, then tumbled.
Homelander had arrived.
He hovered about ten meters above the ground, his chest heaving before his cape, red embers lingering around his eyes.
First, he saw Ryan.
Then, he saw that someone was holding Ryan in his arms.
That person raised his head, revealing a face identical to his own.
No, to be precise, it was his face when he was younger, at his absolute peak.
Blond hair, blue eyes, strikingly handsome.
And brimming with confidence.
Homelander frowned, staring at that face and examining it with X-Ray Vision for a full five seconds.
The bone structure was normal. There were no signs of shapeshifting or of muscles squirming beneath the skin.
Shapeshifter?
He tilted his head, his nostrils contracting slightly.
That feeble maggot Shapeshifter couldn't last even two minutes. Once the time limit for maintaining his altered facial muscles ran out, they would sag like an old granny's tits.
"Interesting. Some kind of contemptible imitator...?"
Homelander narrowed his eyes. He couldn't see through this person he had already classified as a "supe."
As far as he was concerned, he was currently the strongest fighter among all "supes."
He was invincible.
So he held everything beneath his notice and had never felt any apprehension. He merely considered John before him a "pathetic" imitation of himself.
That was his second reason for being angry.
The first was that the other man had laid those disgusting paws on his beloved son.
He had reason to believe that every part of this plan had been cooked up by the clown before him, who had no idea he was courting death.
"So, all this, including that diversion just now... I have to admit, your plan wasn't bad."
"But how the hell did you dare put my face on that ugly mug of yours...? And that is my son."
But John, standing some distance away, paid him no fucking attention.
He didn't even spare him a glance.
Instead, his complicated gaze now rested on Ryan.
This little brat excitedly clinging to him, his former "son," had hope shining in his eyes.
"Mister... you're here to save me, right? Right!"
A trace of struggle flashed through John's eyes. He suddenly thought about his experiences in his previous life.
The pain of pouring his feelings into someone only to be betrayed-he didn't want to experience it again, nor did he want anything to go wrong with his new life.
Love lay with Joe and Martha.
The things of the past were already dead.
At that thought, John merely said coldly to Ryan:
"Run south. Keep running until you reach the streetlights, then stop. Your dad's waiting there."
"Dad?"
"Yes, your Uncle Butcher."
"Okay..."
Ryan looked up at John, then back at Homelander hovering in midair.
Then he bit his lip, his short little legs stamping through the muddy shore as he turned and ran south. His silhouette soon disappeared into the shadows.
Up in the sky, Homelander's gaze followed that retreating figure, his lips twisting.
Just a fucking kid. How far could he run?
If he went looking, it wouldn't take long to catch him and bring him back, then win him over.
Sooner or later, Ryan would follow him with absolute devotion.
He was confident of that.
But...
The presence of certain scum was clearly an eyesore.
Right now, he was very unhappy.
Anyone who provoked him had to pay the price.
Then Homelander's eyes returned to John's face. He clasped his hands behind his back, narrowed his eyes slightly, and revealed his trademark fake smile.
"Just as well... Now I've got the time to deal with you, you knockoff."
From a distance, John looked at Homelander, at those blue eyes identical to his own.
There was suppressed anger, disdain, arrogance, and contempt for everything.
In truth, he knew that loneliness also lay in their deepest depths.
If possible, he didn't want to come into conflict with "himself."
That "self" would one day break through Vought's circle of capital, seize power firmly in his own hands, and then, step by step, become a new god standing above all living beings.
Well, one step short of a god.
But that was still him. He didn't want to shatter the "beautiful dream" of his former self.
Once upon a time, it had been his cherished wish too.
The ideal he had pursued and fought for all his life.
To deny his former ideal and shatter "his own" dream-he felt he couldn't do it, and found it difficult to bring himself to act.
But he couldn't have both the fish and the bear's paw.
What he needed to seize was all the weight of this world, and the weight of The Boys included "him."
Only then could he satisfy Lucifer's conditions.
Only then could he save those he truly loved.
His Joe and Martha.
Thus, mirror images, the same self with different lives, would ultimately end up on opposite sides.
But he could choose not to strike first.
"Heh. I'm in a great mood right now. I won't let you die so quickly."
Homelander moved.
The next second, his whole body became a red-and-blue afterimage. His right fist exploded from his waist, its leading edge carrying an initial velocity of Mach three, aimed straight at John's face.
But to a freak like John, who had enjoyed over a decade of sunbathing and whose internal compound had undergone who knew how many iterations...
Homelander was still far too slow.
He merely tilted his head slightly.
The fist brushed past his ear, its wake sending his blond hair flying.
But John's center of gravity remained steady. He simply turned sideways and lightly shifted a small step aside.
"Die!"
Seeing his first punch miss, Homelander grew somewhat angry from embarrassment, and immediately hurled a second punch.
A left hook swept toward the temple.
John leaned back another half inch, letting the fist slide past the tip of his nose. Then came a third punch, straight at his chest.
Are you done yet...?
By this point, John was already growing a little impatient.
Then he slapped downward with one hand, his palm striking Homelander's body with precision.
Immediately afterward, he reversed his hand and caught Homelander's fist.
John himself had never been a good person.
It was only because he had gained real parents after his rebirth that he had reined in his temperament considerably.
He admitted that he was holding back against "himself," and even felt reluctant to face him.
But that didn't mean he had no temper.
If he really had to choose, he would choose only himself.
He wasn't that noble.
Now that things had come to this, there was no need to drag it out.
At that thought, a beam of crimson-gold light suddenly burst from John's eyes, fine as silk, gilding the edges of his irises with a dazzling ring of fringe.
His five fingers abruptly tightened.
What followed was the lingering reverberation of a powerful collision and its tremoring impact.
Visible ripples spread across the mudflat. A black wave of sandy mud was instantly lifted along the shore, pushing outward ten meters with the two men at its center.
Shell fragments and grit flew outward in the shock wave, pattering into the distant shallows and throwing up countless white splashes.
An abandoned bicycle standing nearby was flipped straight over by the shock wave, spinning through the air several times.
"Th-this is impossible!"
The vicious fake smile on Homelander's face instantly froze. He had put seventy percent of his strength into that punch.
Forget some knockoff-even the five-meter-diameter concrete support pillar in Vought Tower's lobby would have been punched clean through.
Yet now, his previously unstoppable fist had been caught outright, clamped so tightly it couldn't move, as though trapped in iron pincers.
"You fucking-"
Homelander tried to break free, pushing forward with all his might and tensing his biceps to their limit.
Bulging veins spread and multiplied, and his bones began to crack under the immense pressure.
His face had flushed red from the strain, veins showing at his temples and a fine layer of sweat seeping across his forehead.
But that hand seemed glued in place. It still wouldn't fucking budge.
John rose into the air as well, one hand behind his back, ascending slowly and steadily until he hovered two meters above the ground.
Bright white moonlight shone from behind him, tracing his outline in silver.
Truly looking down from above.
At that moment, his right hand still held Homelander's fist. His arm was held low, his elbow slightly bent, his shoulder blade utterly motionless.
"Crack, crack-"
Just then, the sound of breaking bones suddenly rang out.
Homelander's expression changed abruptly, and he looked down at his hand.
The blood vessels beneath his skin had been flattened by the pressure, obstructing the return flow of blood. His fingertips had turned an unnatural bluish purple.
What followed was an agony that had very rarely visited his nerves.
"Hiss-"
He gritted his teeth and forced himself not to cry out, but beneath John's pressure, his knees had already begun to bend involuntarily.
Then his shoulders pitched forward, his spine bent, and one knee plunged from the air and sank into the mud.
"Who... are you, really...?"
Homelander squeezed the words through clenched teeth, but his left hand wasn't idle. It drove upward from below, heading straight for John's heart.
But this time, John deliberately chose not to block. Instead, he released his grip, perfectly shedding the force.
The restraint suddenly vanished, and Homelander's forward-pressing weight met nothing. His entire body toppled forward.
Without the slightest hesitation, John drove his right knee straight up the instant Homelander pitched forward.
"Thud!"
A muffled impact rang out.
The knee slammed into Homelander's abdomen. His abdominal muscles caved inward at the moment of impact, and the air in his lungs was forcibly driven out through his windpipe.
The impact passed through the nerve plexus in his abdomen. Excruciating pain instantly bowed Homelander's body, his eyes widening into circles.
The next second, Homelander spat a mouthful of blood.
But before he could finish doubling over, the point of John's elbow followed, slamming brutally into the back of his neck.
An extraordinarily intense dizziness engulfed Homelander's entire cerebral cortex. Then his vision and hearing became terribly blurred.
The impact traveled from his hip joints into his thighbones, and the sand beneath Homelander's feet collapsed with a rush into a shallow pit half a meter across.
"Smack!"
The slurry of sand and seawater exploded more than a meter into the air, sending shell fragments, scraps of seaweed, crushed crab shells, and tiny fish bones flying.
Gritting his teeth, Homelander forced himself to climb up, but the intense dizziness left his body limp, and he slumped on the ground like a lump of mashed potatoes.
John said nothing. He merely bent down, reached into the muddy pit, and gripped the back of his neck.
Only moments earlier, the back of Homelander's neck had taken John's heavy blow. Now the skin bore purplish-red swelling, severely congested with blood.
As John squeezed it, a piercing pain instantly shot through Homelander.
In an instant, his brain, dazed from the beating, jolted awake as though someone had stabbed it with a needle.
He lay among gravel and shallow water, face toward the sky, with a mouthful of unswallowed blood still in his mouth.
"Cough, cough..."
At that moment, an intense sense of humiliation began to surge upward from the bottom of his chest.
All his life, everything had gone smoothly for him. He had never experienced a moment as humiliating as this.
Now, although half his face was still buried in the sand, he had been utterly enraged, and his whole body began to burn.
"Aaargh-"
Homelander slammed both hands against the ground, his eyes skipping every stage of charging up.
Only one thought filled his mind.
How dare he?
Humiliation. Utter humiliation!
I'll smash him to pieces, smash that face, tear everything apart, make him pay for my pain in blood.
"!!"
An enraged growl rolled up from deep in his throat.
Then he began firing at the ground, at his surroundings, at everything he could see.
Wildly, madly, without holding anything back.
Two crimson beams erupted from his pupils, whipping through the air. The nearest patch of sand and mud instantly vaporized under the heat, blasting out a scorched trench three meters long and half a meter deep.
The damage from Heat Vision was no joke. Even John could only avoid its edge for the moment, turning sideways to dodge the first beam.
Just then, the second grazed his shoulder, burning a smoking scorch mark across his leather jacket's shoulder seam.
And the instant he leaned back, Homelander broke free. He immediately surged forward, a sonic boom erupting as he closed to within two meters of John.
This time, John failed to react. The punch landed squarely.
"Thud!"
The fist sank into his chest muscle. His sternum caved inward half an inch under the impact, and the shock wave traveled through it into his chest cavity.
The next second, John's body left the ground. He flew backward like a cannonball just above the tidal flats, his back smashing through a protruding reef rock and sending fragments flying.
"Cough, cough."
John lay faceup in the rubble, tasting blood in his mouth as well.
He blinked, catching a figure abruptly appearing overhead out of the corner of his eye.
A red-and-blue afterimage flew upward, flipped thirty meters in the air, hovered, and looked down. Heat Vision lit up in his eyes again.
Two red beams aimed straight at John on the ground. A moment later, without the slightest delay, they slammed straight down.
At that same instant, John's eyes lit up as well. Compared with Homelander's crimson, his beams carried a more oppressive golden-red hue.
Blood had ignited all of John's killing intent.
The next second, the four beams collided thunderously in midair, straining against each other before an eye-searing ring of light exploded outward.
Then John's Heat Vision pushed forward, the force instantly pulverizing the rubble beneath his feet.
He gradually rose from the rubble, the crimson-gold light in his eyes flaring once again as he drove his Heat Vision upward.
Then, step by step, as though treading on air, he began steadily ascending from a standing start, floating upward.
Just before he reached Homelander's height, John darted aside, cut off his Heat Vision, and kicked hard with both legs in midair.
"Vroom-"
A transparent membrane appeared around his body, blooming into a white lotus behind him as a sonic boom erupted.
A fraction of a second.
He caught up to Homelander, who was still flying upward, until they were face-to-face, closing in.
They could even see their own reflections in each other's pupils.
Homelander still had not recovered from the impact of the Heat Vision.
His arms remained crossed in a blocking stance, his eyes still firing.
Then John simply swung his arm and slapped him across the face.
His palm swept horizontally from right to left, slicing through the air with a piercing whistle.
"Smack!!"
The slap struck Homelander's left cheek, the collision of cheekbone and hand bones cracking through the air.
"..."
Homelander did not react at all. The Heat Vision he was still firing was slapped straight out of existence.
This was only the beginning.
Following the momentum of the palm, his head jerked hard to the right. Another tooth flew from his mouth, and his entire body spun nearly ninety degrees sideways in midair.
For that instant, he froze.
No one in his entire life had ever dared to hit him this way.
Nor had he ever fought such an evenly matched battle, one that put a minus sign on his career record.
But... why?
Taking advantage of his daze, John drew his right hand back, clamped all five fingers around his throat, and abruptly turned downward.
Both bodies flipped simultaneously hundreds of meters in the air, heads down and feet up.
John's hand remained clamped around Homelander's neck, his elbow locked, his fingers digging into his windpipe. Then he accelerated into a dive toward the sea below.
"Boom!"
A gigantic depression fifty meters across smashed into the sea. Surging layers of waves pushed outward in every direction, exposing the black basalt of the shallow seabed.
A ring of white water thirty meters high rose around the depression's edge. Its crest curled over, then collapsed inward, crashing together.
Huge waves swept across the sea.
Every fish within a fifty-meter radius was stunned by their shock wave, floating to the surface belly-up.
"Bubble, bubble-"
Underwater, John kept his grip around Homelander's neck and continued driving downward.
Ten meters, twenty meters, thirty meters!
They smashed through the reefs in the shallows, the force sending fragments shooting in every direction like shrapnel.
As they entered the middle depths, the blue-gray water around them churned into an enormous vortex.
Then John pinned him against a rock on the seabed. Homelander's back slammed into its surface, blasting out a spiderweb of cracks.
"Gurgle-"
Seawater flooded his windpipe. Bubbles spilled from his nostrils and gurgled upward as Homelander struggled, grabbing John's wrist with his right hand and desperately trying to pry it away.
John gave him no chance. He simply held his breath and straddled his chest.
His left fist followed, then his right!
Left fist, then back to the right!
The surrounding seawater vaporized the instant each fist arrived, creating a brief cavity that then collapsed, exploding into a mass of white bubbles.
Homelander's face jerked aside with every punch. His nose was already broken, and his mouth was full of blood mixed with seawater.
It still was not enough.
John stopped punching, and crimson-gold light began gathering in his eyes.
Amid the violent confusion, struggling, and suffocation, Homelander's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
Those two increasingly bright masses of crimson-gold light, at this distance, would very likely shoot straight through his head.
He was truly afraid.
This was probably the first time in his life he had ever truly felt fear.
If he did not leave now, he would definitely die here.
Acting purely on instinct, Homelander's eyes flew wide. His right hand released John's wrist, and he drove his knee upward into John's back.
They were not on land now, but underwater. Without a point of support, any movement could become an opportunity to break free.
Now!
John tumbled once in the water and steadied himself, but Homelander had already used that opening to kick hard against the seabed with both legs, hurtling diagonally upward like a stone launched from a slingshot.
He did not look back, swimming upward desperately instead, his arms cutting through the water as two dark-red trails stretched into straight lines behind him.
Before long, he passed the phosphorescence and charged into the warm currents of the shallows. The surface above his head grew brighter and closer.
"Splash!"
He broke through the surface and flew into the air, moonlight falling across his mangled face.
Seawater mixed with blood streamed down from his hair, his ears, and his uniform collar, but he no longer had time to tidy up his "image."
Any slower, and I might very well die here...
In a panic, he glanced down at the sea below.
Pitch-black. He could see nothing.
Without hesitation, he endured the excruciating pain all over his body and flew straight west, lurching through the air.
The bedraggled red-and-blue figure grew smaller beneath the moonlight, finally shrinking into a dim speck on the horizon before disappearing at the edge of the clouds.
The sea grew quiet again.
Distant swells gently pushed the broken shells on the tidal flats, making faint rustling sounds.
"Splash..."
A spray of water blossomed on the sea's surface.
John rose as though riding a transparent elevator, ascending into the air, expressionless.
[World Distortion Level: 60%]
He silently gazed at the last tiny speck on the horizon, hovering motionless in midair.
In the end, he had still been unable to bring himself to do it.
But now, his identity had truly stepped into the spotlight, laid before the eyes of every major power.
Risks and dangers would come swarming in.
"Looks like... I can't hide anymore."
"There isn't much time left."
(If this chapter wasn't well written, or if there were any problems with the fight scene, please tell me. I really value your opinions, brothers. Let's go!)
(Oh, right, I have a bold idea. Have you ever seen Homelander in a suit?)