Chapter 188: Real Marvel Unlimited
Homelander's voice carried no emotion at all as it cut through the street.
The mother he'd singled out felt her legs go weak under her, almost buckling completely.
For her child's life, she forced her trembling body forward and walked to him anyway.
"Mom!"
The child's voice cracked through the crowd.
Homelander's face twisted at the sound. "Shut your mouth! Or I kill your mother first, then I kill you!"
"I'll do whatever you say, Mr. Homelander. Just please don't hurt my child," the woman whispered, pleading.
He looked down at her, this woman willing to throw herself between him and her child even at the absolute edge of terror, and felt something in him curdle into a discomfort he couldn't quite name.
He had never once, growing up, experienced anything resembling a mother's love. Some part of him envied this child for having exactly that, and that envy was the actual root of his anger.
He looked up at the figure closing in fast across the sky and shouted a warning. "Matthew Lawrence!"
"I know exactly how badly you want me dead. But I'm warning you — don't get any closer!"
"Or I kill them, one at a time, right in front of you!"
"That's a direct contradiction to your whole 'benefiting the people' routine. Think about that before you do anything stupid."
A satisfied smile crossed his face.
After the plane, he'd assumed he had Matthew completely figured out.
In his read of the man, Matthew wasn't willing to let civilians die.
Which meant these people made a perfectly good shield to buy his way out of this.
While he was busy congratulating himself on the plan, the figure in the sky didn't appear to have registered the warning at all. It hadn't slowed down. If anything, it had accelerated.
"Matthew Lawrence! Are you deaf?!"
"Slow down right now or I kill every single one of them!"
"Hey!!" Homelander shouted, panic and fury mixing.
"Fuck! You're actually fucking deaf!"
When the threat clearly had zero effect, he shoved the woman away from himself in fury and turned to run again.
But the few seconds he'd wasted on the warning had already cost him the window.
Matthew didn't slow down at all. He hit Homelander's face dead-on, like an artillery shell leaving the barrel.
The force matched, almost exactly, the hit that had launched him out of the Mirror Dimension earlier.
Homelander heard his own cheekbone shatter, his nose break, teeth scatter from the impact, all in real time.
The combined gravitational acceleration carried both of them clean through the street and two full blocks past it.
By the time Homelander dragged his ruined face out of the rubble, a hand had already closed around his disheveled hair, and Matthew was driving his knee into his skull, repeatedly, without comment.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Each impact of knee against cheekbone produced a dull, heavy sound louder than artillery fire.
A handful of knee strikes later, Homelander's face was unrecognizable, blood and fluid running freely.
Matthew looked at the wreck of a face, nose, eyes, mouth all leaking blood, with open distaste, dropped him to the ground, and put a boot on his chest.
Under Homelander's terrified gaze, the armor on Matthew's arm shifted again.
A black, red-veined axe materialized in his hand.
He raised it overhead, the blade angled directly at Homelander's throat.
Pinned under the boot, vision already going blurry, Homelander stared at the cold gleam of the blade and swallowed hard, shouting in a rush. "Wait!"
"Matthew Lawrence! I have something to say!"
"Say it." The voice came out flat and cold from inside the armor.
Given the actual opening, Homelander found he couldn't produce a single word.
After a long beat, he managed to force out something that resembled a smile more than a grimace. "So... Mr. Lawrence... can we shake on it? Truce?"
After a short silence, Matthew answered flatly. "Of course—"
"Not a chance."
The axe came down.
Homelander, watching the cold light close in, kept begging.
"Please... stop! I'll give you Vought! I'll give you all of it, I'll do anything—"
"I'll do anything you want! I'll give you anything!"
"No! No! You can't do this! You can't!"
"I am Homelander! I am—"
The blade cut him off mid-word.
A flash of steel, and the sentence stopped existing.
A head, intact and undamaged, rolled to the ground. Blood sprayed two meters out.
Looking down at the now-still body, Matthew didn't hesitate. He opened the Evolution Field at full strength and drained every trace of life essence from the corpse instantly.
The body, emptied of everything that made it a body, shriveled visibly within seconds, the way a centuries-old mummified corpse would, and crumbled into ash at the slightest touch.
With that handled, Matthew turned to face the crowd of onlookers still filming on their phones.
He snapped his fingers.
Every phone in every hand crushed itself into scrap metal in the same instant.
The crowd stared at the smoking pile of wreckage on the ground, half-formed words on their lips, until their eyes landed on Matthew's armor and the pile of ash at his feet, and every one of those words got swallowed back down.
A phone wasn't worth a life.
Not after watching someone get decapitated.
There's a reason they say the smart move is recognizing what the situation actually requires.
And right now, the smart move was clear to all of them.
With the scene handled, Matthew was about to leave when Doudou's voice came through his earpiece again.
"Boss, you've got a call from Mother Fucker."
"..."
"Connecting now, as fast and as no-frills as I can manage—"
A series of connection tones.
Nick Fury's voice came through, carrying real urgency.
"Matthew Lawrence. We've got a situation in Pennsylvania."
"There's a facility there called the Institute for the Study of the Abnormally Empowered, a Vought-run prison for enhanced individuals. It's been thrown open. I need you on this."
"This is a genuine crisis. The government's taking heavy losses against this group, so—"
"So." Matthew cut him off, getting straight to the point. "What's the rate this time?"
Two seconds of silence on the other end. Then a furious, low-volume curse. "...Goddammit, Lawrence, is money the only thing that's ever on your mind?"
Matthew laughed lightly. "What, you want to skip the money talk and have a heart-to-heart with you instead, you dark-skinned old jerky-strip?"
"Tell me what you've got."
"A hundred million. Pre-tax. That's my ceiling," Fury said, the number coming out through gritted teeth.
The frequency with which SHIELD had been hiring Matthew and Umbrella's special security division had already pushed their first-half spending thirty percent over last year's budget.
More spent meant less to skim.
Which was exactly why Fury was hurting over the number.
Given that this offer was actually reasonable, Matthew agreed without further negotiation.
Once he had the exact coordinates, he became a streak of motion and vanished from the street entirely.
Pennsylvania. The Institute for the Study of the Abnormally Empowered.
On paper, this was an ordinary psychiatric facility under Vought's umbrella. In reality, it was a black site.
Vought had been illegally detaining civilians and psychiatric patients here, subjecting them to inhumane experimentation with Compound V, all in pursuit of a stable formula for granting adults superpowers on demand.
The patients who'd developed powers as an unintended side effect of Compound V, along with the regular people whose bodies had been broken by the experiments, were never released even after acquiring abilities. They'd simply stayed locked up, indefinitely.
This meant the facility was full of people whose mental state had already been unstable to begin with, now further damaged by prolonged confinement and torture, in possession of dangerous, uncontrolled powers.
With containment now suddenly down, all of them had an unrestricted outlet for whatever violence had been building up inside them for years.
Outside the facility, a perimeter of police vehicles had surrounded the building, with visible military assets staged further out.
Inside, thick smoke poured from the research tower, and the open ground nearby was littered with the bodies of officers and staff who had stopped moving entirely.
On the roof of the research building, Cindy — designated the most dangerous inmate the Institute had ever held — stood at the edge, looking down at the dense ring of police vehicles below, a disturbing smile pulling at her mouth.
She wore a grey prison uniform. Despite being a woman, there wasn't a single hair on her head.
Behind her, a staff member was pinned to the ground by two of the powered inmates.
The staffer, looking at Cindy's back, couldn't stop shaking.
He understood exactly what was coming.
Cindy pulled her attention away from the perimeter below and turned to look at him.
She held the silence for a moment, then spoke with open mockery. "I remember you. You spit in my lunch once."
"Didn't you?"
"Honestly, I could let that go."
"—"
She didn't finish the sentence.
A wet pop.
The staffer's body burst apart from the inside, like something had crushed it from a distance with an invisible hand.
The mess was extreme.
The two inmates restraining him, seeing the body explode and finding their own arms still attached to what was left, gagged audibly in disgust.
Cindy's eyebrow rose at the sound.
With no warning at all, she raised her hand and made a crushing gesture toward both of them.
Two more wet pops.
The two people who'd been helping her a second ago were just as dead now.
This was part of why Cindy carried the "most dangerous inmate" designation.
She was, if anything, more volatile than Homelander.
Combined with telekinesis powerful and invisible enough to kill without warning, she was almost impossible to defend against.
While she was still admiring her work, a figure in a brown wool coat descended unhurriedly from the sky.
Matthew.
He took in the scene, the dead staff, the dead police, with a slight frown.
Cindy, watching him land, registered a flicker of caution, but didn't think about it for long. She raised her hand the same way she had a moment ago and reached out with telekinesis to crush him from a distance.
Matthew glanced down at his slightly deformed coat, then at Cindy on the roof's edge, then at the military forces closing in around the facility, and spoke flatly into his earpiece. "Nick Fury. Pull everyone back two kilometers."
"...Two kilometers? What are you doing?"
"Cleaning up your enhanced psychiatric population for you," Matthew said, and turned to Cindy.
A wet pop.
An invisible, overwhelming pressure slammed down on Cindy's head like a massive hammer.
A section of the entire building was sheared away in an instant by the force, ceiling, load-bearing walls and all, driven directly into the ground.
Fury, watching the live drone feed, rubbed his eyes at the sight of the building appearing to lose an entire corner.
He hadn't even blinked.
So why did the building look like something had taken a bite out of it?
"Slow the footage down."
"Yes, sir!"
On the slowed playback, Fury realized the building hadn't actually been bitten by anything invisible. The force that had hit it had simply moved too fast to register on camera at normal speed, which made the footage look edited.
Inside the facility.
The mass of unstable enhanced individuals scattered throughout the building reacted to the impact with even more agitation.
With Cindy handled, Matthew walked through the breach in the building's side.
A handful of enhanced patients came charging straight at him. His expression didn't change at all.
A casual sweep of his hand.
A wave of gravity rolled outward.
The patients' bodies were torn apart instantly, and the corridor walls themselves were left pitted and gouged, as though scraped by an invisible blade.
With that handled, Matthew's eyes drifted to the sealed walls of the patient rooms lining the corridor.
He raised one hand and crooked a single finger.
A blast.
The walls on both sides of the corridor blew outward like double doors forced open by a giant, carrying rebar and shattered brick with them.
An entire floor's worth of exterior wall was "pushed" off the building by an invisible force and slammed down onto the open ground outside, throwing up a cloud of dust.
With the walls gone, the patients who'd been hiding in their rooms, working up the nerve to attack, were suddenly fully exposed.
Nowhere to hide from Matthew's line of sight.
They stared at him with open malice, this uninvited presence who'd just torn through the wall to reach them.
Matthew's gaze moved across each of them in turn, cold, indifferent, the way someone assesses a pile of scrap waiting to be disposed of.
He raised one finger and tapped it upward, lightly.
A hum.
The floor beneath the patients erupted upward without warning, carrying an enormous weight, moving faster than their nervous systems could process, and slammed them into the ceiling.
Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap.
The dense, heavy impacts blurred together into a single sound, like a cruel child smashing a dozen flies against a tabletop in quick succession.
Blood and tissue sprayed from the gap between floor and ceiling, running down the walls in slow streaks, like a rag soaked in blood being wrung out.
Once it was done, Matthew didn't bother looking up at the "artwork" left pressed into the ceiling. His attention went straight down.
Without even glancing at the elevator down the hall, he tapped his toe lightly against the floor.
A deep crack.
The floor beneath him collapsed instantly, forming a precise circular hole. The rebar and concrete sheared as cleanly as tofu cut with a sharp blade, the edges smooth as glass.
Matthew dropped straight through into the floor below.
The dust hadn't even cleared before alarm sirens and chaotic screaming hit him.
This floor clearly held more patients. The corridor was packed with enhanced individuals of every description, tearing into each other or dragging unlucky researchers who'd gotten separated from the group.
The air reeked of blood and waste.
Matthew's sudden appearance froze the entire scene for a brief moment.
Every set of eyes locked onto the brown-coated man who'd just dropped from above.
A heartbeat later, the nearest enhanced individuals let out something closer to an animal scream and charged him, claws and teeth bared.
Matthew didn't bother looking at them either. He raised one hand and made a loose grip in the air.
A hum.
Everything inside a fan-shaped zone in front of him locked in place instantly, gripped by a sudden, overwhelming gravitational field.
The attackers who'd been mid-air a moment ago froze completely, suspended, their snarling expressions visible and unmoving, like someone had hit pause.
His open hand closed slowly into a fist.
Instantly.
A churning flood of gravity filled the entire floor, dragging the trapped patients together into a single crushing mass, compacting them down into something resembling a miniature collapsing star.
Matthew kept walking, floor after floor, unhurried, moving through the building as though it were entirely empty.
No flair. No wasted expression.
He was simply walking.
A hand raised. A hand lowered.
Wherever he looked, life ended.
The gravity field shifted shape continuously around him as he moved.
Within a matter of seconds, by the time he reached the next floor's corridor, there was no remaining activity above him at all.
Some of the patients had tried to fight back. Their abilities had been too weak to matter. None of them had managed to so much as touch him.
He reached the center of the floor and stopped, looking down at the floor again.
The same light tap of his toe.
A crack.
The floor gave way, and he dropped to the level below.
This time, what greeted him wasn't chaotic screaming. It was a thick, suppressed silence.
Dozens of enhanced individuals were crammed into the corners of this floor, their expressions no longer manic or violent, just deeply, visibly afraid.
The carnage from the floors above had clearly reached them somehow.
The moment Matthew landed, several of them stepped back on instinct.
One man, who appeared to have retained some clarity of mind, raised a trembling hand. "I—"
A blast.
Before he could get a second word out, he and several people near him were slammed into the ceiling by a wall that erupted from the floor without warning.
"I don't have time for whatever you were going to say."
Matthew's eyes narrowed slightly.
The X-ray vision he'd absorbed from Homelander swept across the entire floor and the one beneath it.
With every target locked, he didn't hesitate. He brought both palms together in one motion.
A crack.
The rebar near every locked target tore itself loose from the surrounding concrete instantly, courtesy of the gravity field, and drove straight through each of them with no resistance, pinning them to the walls and embedding them back into the structure of the building.
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