Chapter 186: Homelander: I Think This Is All a Misunderstanding, So Can We Not?
Outside Earth. Open space.
Dark was the only color out here.
Beneath his feet, a pure, almost impossibly saturated blue. Everywhere else: nothing.
Homelander, hauled into space through a sequence of long-range portals, was still partly disoriented when a crushing, full-body suffocation closed over him.
As Vought's strongest asset, Homelander could technically survive in vacuum for days. That capability did not mean he liked being there.
In fact, space was one of the environments he hated most.
Out here, he couldn't follow the natural rhythm of breathing the way his body expected to. Every inhale produced nothing but negative feedback, none of the satisfaction of actual oxygen hitting his lungs.
So the moment his body registered where it was, his first instinct was to break free of Matthew's grip and drop straight toward the blue planet below.
Matthew was never going to let that happen that easily.
The instant Homelander reoriented and dove like a missile toward Earth, Matthew raised one hand, and a portal opened silently, directly across his trajectory.
Homelander had already learned to be wary of that particular trick, but he reacted a beat too late and went straight through it.
When he tumbled back out the other side, he found himself not closer to Earth at all, but considerably further away.
Worse: the portal's exit point had a little personal touch from Matthew built in. He came out at full speed and slammed directly into a massive asteroid drifting in open space.
The asteroid stretched several thousand meters across. Its surface wasn't anything close to spherical.
It was irregular, almost lumpy, like something a kid had shaped out of clay and then abandoned.
Impact.
Homelander climbed out of the new crater, hair a mess.
He looked up just in time to see Matthew, in black bio-armor, stepping casually out of the same portal he'd just been thrown through.
"In such a hurry to get back, Mr. Homelander?"
"Not happy with the environment I picked for us?"
Matthew hadn't actually spoken out loud. The words arrived directly inside Homelander's head, via psychic transmission.
This particular ability was something Matthew had drawn out of Eveline through Consuming Evolution.
The reasoning at the time had been simple. His mental offense and defense had felt thin compared to everything else in his arsenal, so he'd taken Eveline's ability and folded it into his own.
As always, after absorbing Eveline's life force, he'd downloaded her consciousness into a fresh body.
The current version of Eveline retained her original psychic capability in full, in a body considerably more durable than the original.
On the other end of the link, the sound of Matthew's voice inside his own skull produced a wave of pure irritation in Homelander.
"Fuck!"
He swore it silently.
Red erupted from his eyes in the same instant.
The next second—
A whine of building pressure.
Heat vision, supercharged by Compound V, tore out of his eyes.
The corner of his mouth twisted into something ugly.
Matthew didn't move to dodge the incoming beam.
He raised his arm and took it head-on.
A sharp hiss of contact.
The beam hit his arm directly.
The expected result — the arm punching straight through, the body sliced apart — didn't happen.
Instead, where the heat vision connected, the bio-armor flushed red, the way it would under intense localized heating.
Then, after roughly ten seconds, the armor across that arm rippled and reorganized, the motion almost mechanical, like something self-repairing.
The ripple spread outward across his entire body.
Within seconds, the bio-armor covering Matthew had smoothed itself into something closer to a polished mirror finish.
Homelander, watching from a distance, didn't immediately register what had changed.
What he noticed next was the heat vision itself: hitting that new surface produced a visible deflection and split, the same way a laser scatters off a mirror.
In an instant, several thinner, scattered beams of red light bounced off at angles and went tearing into the surrounding terrain.
They raked across the surface of nearby asteroids, carving deep dark-red glowing trenches.
"Unfortunate timing, Mr. Homelander."
"Your signature move appears to have just stopped working on me."
Matthew lowered his arm slowly and let the heat vision keep hitting him, uselessly.
Homelander's eyes went wide, the beam still firing at full output.
No matter how much power he pushed into it, the result hitting Matthew never changed.
Deflected. Every time.
Watching his best weapon become irrelevant in real time, Homelander swore again and reoriented, looking for any window to get back toward Earth.
Before he could get any real momentum, Matthew's hands moved.
The space around Homelander began warping violently.
He felt, for a moment, like he'd fallen into the inside of a constantly spinning kaleidoscope.
Earth, distant and blue, and the cold pinpricks of starlight, fractured into hundreds of pieces by invisible mirrored planes, rotating and folding and flipping in a pattern his brain couldn't track.
The asteroid under his feet became a continuously rolling treadmill, dragging him deeper and deeper into open space without pause.
A Mirror Dimension.
Magic. The Mirror Dimension.
This particular spell had been a personal lesson from the Ancient One.
It was complicated, a domain-level spell rather than a single-target one, which made it significantly harder than the basics Matthew had started with. With his stacked psychic capability behind him, though, it had only taken two weeks for him to learn it.
His learning speed had genuinely impressed the Ancient One enough that she'd briefly entertained the idea of training him seriously, with an eye toward eventually competing with Strange for the title of Sorcerer Supreme.
That idea had evaporated almost immediately after Matthew asked about Dream Walking next.
Right. This one was too dangerous to consider seriously.
Asking about Dream Walking right after picking up the Mirror Dimension was not the resume of someone suited to be Sorcerer Supreme.
Inside the Mirror Dimension.
Warped light and shadow scattered the entire visible cosmos into countless overlapping fragments, the way a kaleidoscope shatters an image.
For a brief moment, Homelander caught his own reflection scattered across them.
He'd never encountered magic before. He hadn't had a category for it as a concept until right now, watching all of this unfold around him.
His chest heaved.
His pale blue eyes shook in their sockets.
He scanned the fractured light for anything he could use as a reference point.
There was nothing.
The asteroid beneath him kept rolling backward like a treadmill, dragging him deeper into the construct.
He launched upward, trying to physically break out of the distortion, only to find that no matter how hard he pushed, distance and direction and scale here refused to stay fixed. The whole space behaved like a living maze with no exit.
One second he was above. The next, below. The one after that, sliding sideways off to the left without explanation.
He was an insect trapped in a glass jar, beating its wings against a transparent ceiling that didn't budge no matter how hard it tried.
Recognizing this, Homelander went still.
His cape hung motionless in the vacuum.
His eyes narrowed slowly.
The panic behind them gave way to something colder.
He turned and faced Matthew's distant figure.
If flight alone couldn't get him out of this space, then killing the man generating it should do it.
He refused to believe this thing would keep running once its architect was dead.
His eyes locked onto the distant figure.
Matthew stood on a diamond-shaped fragment of asteroid that had been cut clean by the mirrored planes, walking toward him at an unhurried pace.
The bio-armor shifted with every step.
Heavier. Sharper. More overtly threatening with each movement.
A purely biomechanical construct.
The armor's surface held a black so deep it seemed to consume light entirely, smooth on the surface but unmistakably organic under closer inspection.
The seams between plates glowed a dim red, not bright, more like lava moving slowly under a cooling crust.
Each step caused the armor to flex slightly, opening and closing in a rhythm that synced with his stride, like the whole suit had its own independent heartbeat.
Homelander had genuinely expected this fight to be a one-sided beatdown in his favor.
After all, post-Compound-V, he was several times stronger across the board, including his heat vision.
But this wasn't going the way he'd expected.
He'd badly underestimated this man.
Matthew had taken his signature weapon offline without effort and sealed off every route back to Earth.
He hadn't even thrown a real attack yet, and Homelander had already been backed into a corner with no exit.
A cold bead of sweat ran down his temple.
He still had the conviction that Matthew needed to die. But for a man who had only ever fought one-sided fights, encountering someone genuinely matched to his own capability was producing a tension he couldn't quite name.
"Not ready yet, Homelander?"
"Or are you going to try the same move as last time — claim it's all a misunderstanding and we both quietly pretend nothing happened?"
Through the armor, Matthew watched the shifting expressions cross Homelander's face.
Homelander's fists tightened at that.
Then, almost as quickly, they loosened. He asked, almost tentatively, "...Could we?"
Internally, he thought: honestly, I do think this is all a misunderstanding. We could just shake on it and move on, couldn't we?
He'd apparently figured out exactly how to communicate with Matthew in this environment.
Brother, we are way past the point where shaking hands and calling it off is an option.
Faced with this sudden burst of practical thinking, Matthew went quiet for a moment, then shook his head slowly.
"As a SHIELD special advisor, I don't entertain peace offers from criminal organizations."
"After all, I represent justice."
"So." He let it land. "Get ready to die."
The armor on his arm shifted again.
What had been heavy plating reformed into the Blacklight Virus's blade configuration.
The blade form here was leaner and more refined than the version from the game it was modeled on, with more of the organic bio-armor aesthetic worked in.
Less brute force. More precision.
Homelander absorbed this and understood there was no way around the fight now.
His blond hair fell across his forehead, his expression shifting fully from hesitation to rage.
He'd just offered the man an out, practically groveling, and gotten nothing for it.
His jaw tightened. "If you want to die, I'll make it happen."
He came at Matthew like a missile.
His speed out here was far beyond anything he'd ever pushed on Earth.
On Earth, he usually held back, conscious that flying at full speed would blow out eardrums and shatter windows across the city.
Out here, in a vacuum with no air to disturb, none of that applied.
In a single instant, he covered several thousand meters and was on top of Matthew.
His fist, carrying the full weight of his Compound V-enhanced strength, tore through the vacuum directly at Matthew's face.
No air meant no sound to the impact, but anyone watching would have recognized the intent: that punch was meant to turn Matthew's skull to dust.
Matthew didn't panic.
He didn't even dodge.
His gravity field split into two.
One became an invisible buffer that bled off Homelander's incoming velocity. The other gathered into his other fist.
The invisible gravity field pulled every loose fragment of asteroid debris in the area toward that fist, the buildup alone visibly outscaling whatever Homelander's punch was bringing.
Once the gravity had fully concentrated, Matthew threw the punch without hesitation, straight into Homelander's incoming fist.
The two fists connected.
No sound at all.
Fun fact: vacuum doesn't carry sound.
That didn't mean the collision was quiet in every sense.
A visible shockwave rippled outward in a ring from the point of contact.
Everywhere it touched, the asteroid fragments scattered throughout the Mirror Dimension shattered to dust, as though crushed under an invisible hand.
Debris exploded outward into the zero-gravity field.
Before it could settle, two invisible gravity fields tore through the cloud like a pair of massive hands ripping fabric apart.
A figure in black armor, expression brutal, shot out through the gap.
His hand closed around Homelander's ankle like a vice.
Matthew hauled him along, silent as a freight train, straight toward a several-thousand-meter asteroid deep inside the Mirror Dimension.
Homelander fought the whole way, kicking with his free leg, firing heat vision directly into the hand gripping him.
The beam he was so proud of remained completely useless. He might as well have been pointing a laser pointer at Matthew's eye for all the good it did.
Matthew glanced at the still-struggling Homelander, then at the field of asteroids drifting around them.
He picked an angle.
A twist of the hips, a turn of the body, all in one motion.
Homelander went flying like a discus, hurled directly at the distant asteroid.
The gravity field converted instantly into a series of invisible acceleration zones at the moment of release, adding even more velocity to the throw.
Homelander moved so fast this time he didn't even leave a visible trail. The asteroid, several building-heights across, simply exploded in the distance.
A figure in blue, slightly worse for wear, staggered out of the resulting debris cloud, swayed for a moment, and found his footing again.
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