Chapter 187: He Runs. He Chases. There Is Nowhere Left to Fly.
Homelander tumbled out of the dense debris cloud, off-balance, until his body slammed into another asteroid and finally came to a stop.
A sharp pain at his forehead made him reach up on instinct.
When his fingers came back into view, they were bright red.
His pupils contracted.
He was... bleeding?
While he was still staring at the blood, the mocking voice rose again inside his skull.
"Oi. Homelander."
"You call yourself a god. So tell me: does a god that bleeds still qualify?"
Before the thought finished landing, a sharp red glow tore through the debris cloud behind him.
A heat-beam, brighter and tighter than his own, swept through from the other side of the dust, splitting it cleanly in two and leaving a brutal burn across his body in the process.
His specialized combat suit was sliced clean open at the waist; blood welled out of the wound, then immediately froze into hovering droplets in the vacuum.
Looking up at the approaching figure cutting through the smoke, Homelander swallowed hard.
He'd been engineered as a superhuman from infancy at Vought, raised with strength that put him beyond ordinary humans from the start, which meant he'd never once needed any actual combat training.
In his understanding of the world: as long as you were fast enough, strong enough, and your heat vision hit hard enough, nothing could stand in front of you. Hand-to-hand technique had simply never been relevant.
This situation didn't fit that model at all.
His only ranged option had just been rendered completely irrelevant. The man in front of him matched him in both strength and speed, possibly exceeded him in both.
And he had actual combat technique that Homelander simply didn't have.
The Blacklight blade came down a beat later and took both his arms off cleanly.
Fear and raw physical agony together crushed whatever last shred of confidence he'd been holding onto.
Every year carefully managed by Vought's labs. Every moment chased by media spotlights. The entire manufactured myth built around the word "strongest."
All of it shredded, right here, by a brutally efficient, spinning blade of living flesh.
He pulled back on instinct, speed exploding again, his whole body rocketing backward.
Fear had taken over completely. There was exactly one thought left in his head: survive.
Faster. Faster. Faster again, in escalating bursts.
The sudden retreat caused Matthew's follow-up strike to miss entirely.
Watching Homelander cross ten thousand meters in an instant, Matthew shifted his gravity field into the crudest possible propulsion system and launched himself bodily after him.
The armor across his surface folded together into a smooth, streamlined teardrop shape.
This exact dynamic — chase and flee — was the thing Matthew found most tiresome about a fight. And Homelander, having finally registered that his life was actually on the line, had hit a panic-fueled speed that was genuinely difficult to close on quickly.
Several ring-shaped magical sigils generated themselves out of nothing around Matthew's forearm.
He rotated his wrist as though turning some kind of dial at a distance.
The Mirror Dimension around them began compressing violently inward.
Up ahead, Homelander, bloodshot eyes and sweat running cold down his forehead, glanced back at the space collapsing in on him and ground his teeth.
"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"
"How does this guy have this many tricks?!"
"What the hell even is this thing that keeps spinning? Magic?!"
"This world isn't supposed to have magic! I'm not living in some fairy tale!"
He kept cursing internally, as though the cursing itself could take some of the edge off the fear.
Still flying, he glanced back.
His eyesight let him pick Matthew out clearly even thousands of meters away in this environment.
Matthew's eyes had gone red. He was clearly about to fire heat vision.
Homelander cursed again.
He genuinely couldn't understand it. How much had SHIELD paid this man to make killing him a personal priority?
"Matthew Lawrence! I know you can hear me!"
"Can we not just shake on it?"
"If it's money, I'll give you money. I can hand you all of Vought, completely."
"If it's power you want, the two of us working together could have the whole world under our control inside a week!"
"Why does it have to be this — chasing me down to kill me?!" he shouted internally.
About two seconds later, a beam of heat vision sliced past his side, close enough to startle him badly.
Then Matthew's voice surfaced again in his head.
"Mr. Homelander. I genuinely feel sorry for you."
"Setting aside that shaking hands requires hands, you still haven't worked out why I'm doing this."
"I know exactly why—"
"No. You don't."
"From the start, the two of us have been on opposite sides."
Homelander finally couldn't hold it back. "Why?!"
Matthew kept up the pursuit, answering at an unhurried pace. "What I need is a society that functions, where people get to live their lives in peace. In simpler terms: benefiting the people."
"You, with your collection of misconduct and antisocial behavior, happen to fall directly under that umbrella."
"Benefiting... the people?"
Homelander repeated the phrase, his rage tipping over into something closer to mania.
"Benefiting the people?! Fuck benefiting the people!"
"Matthew Lawrence, you're insane. Completely, thoroughly insane!"
"I came up with every reason I could think of for why you'd want me dead, and somehow the actual reason is 'benefiting the people'?!"
"Does this 'benefiting the people' thing even pay you anything?!"
He kept screaming it internally.
What answered him was a sudden, heavy impact from behind.
Or, more accurately, a hammer blow.
A direct hit.
Inside the cramped Mirror Dimension, Matthew's fist landed squarely on Homelander's back.
The force knocked him completely off his trajectory, sending him crashing into one of the warping, mirrored asteroid fragments nearby.
The impact threw him an enormous distance and hurt enough that his face contorted.
But almost immediately, he realized something strange had happened — something that had actually worked in his favor.
Maybe it was his skull's particular resilience, or maybe Matthew had simply hit him with more force than the construct could absorb, but he'd punched straight through the Mirror Dimension and landed back in regular open space.
He didn't have time to assess what state his spine was in. He was already accelerating toward Earth.
It was like that last hit had never even happened.
Back inside the Mirror Dimension, Matthew looked at the hole punched clean through it, mildly surprised.
The Ancient One had never mentioned that a physical hit could break a spell like this.
"...I should probably go back and visit the bald lady once this fight's over."
"Knowing how to use magic without knowing how to break it isn't a complete skill set."
With that thought settled, he collapsed the Mirror Dimension and shot off after Homelander as a streak of motion.
In the distance, Homelander, now back into the atmosphere and watching the ground rush closer below, felt a surge of relief he couldn't fully suppress.
Once he made it back to Earth, he'd have options.
He pushed harder, dropping toward the ground like a falling bomb.
That was the moment the voice returned in his head: "Hey, Homelander. I accept the truce."
"Why don't you stop, and we talk this through properly?"
Fuck off!
"...!"
"Fuck talking it through! Fuck the truce!"
"You actually think I'm three years old? You think I'd fall for that?"
He shouted the response at Matthew's voice in his skull.
To buy himself room from Matthew closing the gap, Homelander glanced over at a passenger jet flying nearby, his eyes flooding red, a cruel smile spreading across his face.
"Hey... Matthew Lawrence!"
"You like benefiting the people so much? Here's your chance!"
"Let's see which one actually matters more to you: benefiting the people, or killing me!"
The heat vision fired.
One light pass, and the plane was sheared cleanly in half.
Screaming. Shouting. It tore through the sky.
Behind him, Matthew clicked his tongue at the sight.
He'd specifically picked space as the battlefield because he'd anticipated exactly this kind of cornered-animal move from Homelander.
He hadn't expected it to happen anyway.
He looked at the scattered passengers falling like torn paper, then at Homelander tearing toward the ground, and made the decision almost instantly.
"Doudou. Find the nearest Goblin Glider production facility." He said it directly into his earpiece.
"Searching..."
"Search complete. Here is the most direct, no-frills—"
"Just tell me!"
"Yes, sir! The nearest Goblin Glider production facility is 35 kilometers from your current position. Would you like me to deploy units?"
"Deploy. One hundred and twenty total. Use your judgment on the rescue specifics."
Matthew glanced at the people still falling rapidly toward the ground and, to buy them time until the Gliders arrived, inverted the local gravity field enough to slow their descent without making it obvious what he'd done.
Once that was handled, he resumed pursuit of Homelander, already well ahead of him.
Elsewhere—
Impact.
Homelander hit the ground at full speed, straight into the middle of a densely populated city.
No cushioning at all this time.
The impact alone, at the moment of landing, turned several uninvolved bystanders nearby into a fine red mist.
Onlookers froze for a moment before the screaming and chaos swept the street like a plague.
Listening to the overlapping screams around him, Homelander's expression curdled into open disgust.
He moved, planting himself directly in front of the fleeing crowd, eyes igniting red.
"Back up."
His voice carried a brutality that allowed for no argument.
The people at the front froze the moment they saw his eyes flare red. The people behind them, unable to see or hear clearly, kept pushing forward, and within seconds the crowd had collapsed into a stampede.
Watching the people behind apparently not register his order at all, Homelander decided to make it unmistakable.
The heat vision tore loose.
A crimson beam swept the street like a plow from one end to the other, leaving carnage in its wake, blood spraying without restraint.
Once he'd finished, he turned back to the crowd and shouted, "I told you to back up. Did none of you garbage hear me?!"
"Run again, scream again, and I'll burn every single one of you down one at a time!"
This time, everyone obeyed instantly. Some dropped to the ground on instinct, hands over their heads.
Satisfied that the method had worked, Homelander let out a cold huff, something close to pleasure flickering behind his eyes.
Of course.
The flowers, the applause, the cameras. All fake.
The only thing that had ever been real was fear.
These people had never actually wanted a hero. What they wanted was a ruler they could be genuinely, viscerally afraid of.
With that thought settled, he glanced up at the approaching figure in the sky, growing closer, and quickly raised his half-regenerated arm, pointing it at a woman in the crowd holding a child's hand.
"You. Come here."
"Don't make me ask twice. Or I kill the kid."
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