"My God!"
In the command center, the general's lips trembled. "This isn't a conventional weapon, this is—"
His words were cut off by a sudden silence.
All instruments failed at once. In the instant the lights went out, people saw the figure in the red cape already floating outside the command center's window.
Under his gaze, the bulletproof glass actually began to crack, and the dragon-crest insignia gleamed with a blood-tinged sheen in the sunlight.
The cracks in the bulletproof glass spread like a spiderweb, emitting a tooth-aching crack-crack. Officers in the command center instinctively backed away; someone bumped into the console, and the blue tactical map twisted and dissipated in midair.
"Open fire! Open fire!"
Crash—!
The general's roar had barely fallen when the entire floor-to-ceiling window exploded with a thunderous blast.
Tens of thousands of glass shards hung suspended in the air, as if time had stopped—
Until that red-caped figure stepped in. The soles of Homelander's boots crunched on the broken glass with crisp grinding, each step making the floor tremble ever so slightly.
The first to react were the security robots.
Six combat units dropped from the ceiling, their multi-barrel rotary cannons spewing a torrential stream of incandescent metal.
Bullets sparked in a dense shower against Homelander's chest, yet couldn't even scuff the outer coating of that tight combat suit.
Homelander cocked his head, the ice-blue pupils kindling red—
Ri\~— whoosh —!
Two crimson beams scythed across.
The robots' titanium-alloy skeletons parted like hot knives through butter. Plasma jetted from the cut edges, splashing eerie blue luminescence across the walls.
The upper half of a bisected robot still twitched, mechanical fingers still squeezing the trigger, firing the last rounds into the ceiling.
"Heavy squad in position!"
Dozens of soldiers in bulky power armor blasted through the wall. Their shoulder cannons charged in unison, ghostly blue plasma coalescing at the muzzles.
Homelander remained expressionless, then suddenly clapped his hands hard.
Boom—!
That single clap ionized the air into plasma; the fireball's blast wave inside the sealed space flipped a multitude of control consoles outright.
Through the superheated gas, the soldiers' screens tracked the figure striding forward. His red cape didn't stir in the heat, and a nanoscale energy shield flowed over the surface of his combat suit.
"Switch to AP rounds!"
The squad leader screamed as he toggled weapon modes.
Too late.
Homelander burst forward, becoming a blood-red blur.
The first soldier's helmet, along with his skull, was punched straight into his chest cavity; the scene of vertebrae bursting through the backplate of the power armor looked like a pomegranate exploding.
The second tried to block; his entire cybernetic arm was ripped clean off. What sprayed from the sundered hydraulic lines wasn't lubricant, but viscera extruded under high pressure.
A mist of blood spread through the command center.
A tech cowering in the corner witnessed the worst—Homelander seized the last soldier by the throat with one hand and hoisted a one-ton suit of power armor into the air.
The soldier's frantically kicking legs suddenly went rigid—
Because two laser beams erupted from Homelander's eyes and vaporized the head inside the helmet.
When the headless corpse was flung aside, the dull thud against the wall made the tech piss his pants.
Bzzz\~! Bzzz\~!
The alarm suddenly went shrill.
Homelander turned his gaze skyward. Through the shattered ceiling, two battleships over a kilometer long could be seen descending.
These steel behemoths unfurled all their gun ports, the main batteries' charging glow staining the clouds purple.
Having completed his mission of wrecking the command center, Homelander rose through the shattered ceiling and out into the open—"standing" in midair.
Farther off, three mecha squadrons were massing on the city's outskirts, their composite armor glinting coldly in the first light.
Chaos was beginning to spread through the UED capital.
Three kilometers from the command center, in the business district, pedestrians on their lunch break stopped in their tracks.
Someone pointed at the sky and cried out; more people pulled out their mobile terminals to film. That red-caped figure hovering in the battleships' shadow looked, in the morning light, like an avenging angel out of myth.
"Mom, did a superhero just come out of a cartoon? Didn't you say cartoons are all lies?"
a child asked innocently.
Ri\~ whoooosh ————!!
Before his mother could answer, two crimson beams slashed across the sky.
The glare was so blinding that every phone filming overexposed to a blank white.
When vision returned, the first thing people saw was—
Homelander's eyes lighting up with destructive red again.
Whoooosh ————!!
Two crimson beams, like swords of judgment, punched through the battleship's energy shield with ease.
The high-energy laser melted a three-meter-wide molten tunnel through the hull, through the armor decks, the living quarters, the power bay, and finally struck the engine core.
"Warning! Core overload! All hands aban—"
The captain's last order was drowned in a searing white flash.
Boom— Rumble————!!
A runaway power cascade tore a vast gash in the battleship's midsection, the shockwave flinging hundreds of tons of metal structures in all directions.
Burning debris fell like a meteor shower, setting off over a dozen secondary explosions near the urban area.
"The battleship is going down! Predicted impact: Central Business District!"
Waaah— wooo————!!
The ground-based air-defense system's sirens howled to the heavens.
On the holo-display, the 1.2-kilometer steel giant trailed a plume of rolling black smoke, diving toward the ground at a steep angle.
Its fall trajectory covered three commercial complexes, two maglev lines, and at least twenty residential towers.
"Evacuate immediately!"
The municipal AI's synthetic voice echoed from street speakers, but was drowned out by the crowd's screams.
Office workers ditched their briefcases, mothers scooped up their children, the elderly were shoved and fell—
Everyone surged madly toward whatever they imagined was safety.
A woman in high heels fell on the sidewalk. When she looked up, the battleship's shadow already covered half the block.
"Oh God—"
she murmured, watching that steel cliff that blotted out the sky bear down closer and closer.
The UED military ignored the imminent catastrophe.
The remaining battleship slewed all its main batteries to bear. A mass of plasma macrocannons charged together, dyeing the night sky an uncanny purple.
The ground mecha units' railguns began to roar, tens of thousands of depleted-uranium penetrators weaving a web of death in the air.
Yet Homelander treated these attacks as if they weren't there.
Boom—!
He suddenly accelerated, his red cape stretching into a bloody afterimage behind him. The shockwave from breaking the sound barrier shattered windows in the buildings along his path.
A mecha pilot stared wide-eyed at the tactical display, at the figure arrowing toward the plummeting battleship at Mach 7.
"Is he insane? That's forty million tons of—"
When the battleship was just 200 meters above the ground, Homelander finally reached the bow.
Time seemed to freeze for a heartbeat.
"he" thrust both arms forward, palms braced against the alloy ram, his cape snapping in the gale.
Thoom!!
The impact's shockwave billowed out in a sphere; every window within three kilometers shattered at once.
"Impossible—"
On the street, a bespectacled young man was the first to open his tightly shut eyes.
Reflected in his lenses was an unreal tableau—
Homelander's arms bulged with corded muscle. Beneath his feet, asphalt had been crushed into a concave by the counterforce.
The battleship that should have obliterated half the city now looked as if someone had hit pause, held in check midair by Homelander alone.
The groan of tortured metal echoed through the streets and alleys.
The ship's keel was crying under the strain, but the descent had, in fact, stopped.
Homelander's feet slowly sank into the ground; each step left half-meter-deep footprints in the concrete, yet he somehow kept the ship perfectly balanced.
"Look! He's changing the angle of descent!"
Disbelieving cries erupted from the crowd.
They watched Homelander's arms swell, pushing the battleship, inch by inch, to turn.
The steel behemoth of tens of millions of tons, like a toy in his hands, was being shoved toward the artificial lake at the city's edge.
The ship's tail scraped a skyscraper; its glass curtain wall fell like a waterfall, but under Homelander's precise control the main structure remained intact.
The UED military's guns suddenly fell silent.
Every soldier stared, dumbstruck. A young private even unconsciously lowered his weapon.
Only static hissed on the command channel, until a general's hysterical bellow shattered the silence:
"Open fire! Fire now!"
Yet at this moment, no one seemed willing to obey that order.
With a final deafening roar, the battleship was pushed entirely clear of the residential zone and slammed into the artificial lake.
The lake erupted into waves tens of meters high, which Homelander vaporized before they could crash ashore with his laser eyes.
White steam blanketed half the city, refracting rainbow halos in the morning sun.
When the mist cleared, people saw Homelander hovering above the lake.
"his" red cape remained spotless. His ice-blue eyes swept the stupefied populace, then fixed on the UED fleet in the distance as it began recharging.
No one knew who knelt first, then a second, then a third—
Soon, the entire street was full of kneeling civilians.
They gazed up at the figure in the sky like a god. Some cried, some prayed, more simply gaped, speechless.
In the temporary command center, a general stared at the monitors and suddenly grasped the true terror of the Human Empire—
This wasn't a war.
It was a dimensionality-reduction performance.
Ri\~ boom—boom—!
At that moment, the last battleship's main batteries erupted in blinding light—twelve plasma macrocannons firing in unison.
Scalding blue-white beams tore the air and struck Homelander in an instant as he hovered.
The blast's shockwave shattered every pane of glass within five hundred meters. The people on the ground were flung by the pressure wave.
"Direct hit! Repeat, direct hit!"
The spotter's voice rang across the command net.
But when the energy turbulence dissipated, every officer's face went ashen—
Homelander still hovered exactly where he'd been, his cape not so much as nicked.
"he" slowly raised his right hand, watching the lingering plasma glow curl around his fingertips, as if appreciating a shabby fireworks show.
Meanwhile, three hovercraft carrying Leon, Mike, Chris, a dozen-plus special ops operators, and the captives, had slipped free of UED pursuit during the window created by Homelander's massive ruckus.
At this stage, the UED had no mind to bother with a dozen spies from the Human Empire. Homelander alone had cost the UED all its "face."
"Bio-field strength holding at 87.8%," Mike said inside the hovercraft, eyes on the numbers. "Looks like the UED's main guns don't even count as a tickle."
Leon peered out the rear window at the godlike figure in the distant sky. "How much black tech did the Bio Division bolt onto him? I remember the Homelander from decades ago couldn't stand up to a battleship's railguns at all—let alone single-handedly brace a one-kilometer ship."
Chris flicked through the holoprojection rapidly. "Seventh-gen bio-field generator, antimatter-tolerant coating, and a phase shifter reverse-engineered from Precursor ruins."
He paused, then added:
"Of course, the key is those Xel'Naga gene fragments. After the Bio Division got the latest data and samples from Universe 18, they iterated upgrades on Homelander."
By contrast, panic was spreading inside the UED's supreme command.
"All conventional weapons ineffective!" the tech officer's voice cracked. "Nuclear is the last resort, but the required yield would—"
"Shut up!"
A general with a nameplate that read "Cohen" smashed his fist into the panel beneath the holo-display. "There are two hundred million civilians in the capital!"
His aide suddenly lowered his voice. "General, the research station just reported they detected Homelander's biosignal rapidly closing in. He seems to be searching for our position, intending to wipe out all senior leadership in one fell swoop."
Cohen's pupils contracted sharply.
He was also weighing whether to let the UED capital's two hundred million civilians be buried alongside the Homelander who threatened their lives.
Over the capital, Homelander abruptly ceased his attack.
"he" turned his head south, a flicker of machine-like precision calculation in his ice-blue eyes. A second later, his red cape billowed; the shockwave of a fresh sonic boom tore three intercepting fighters apart midair.
"Target leaving the battlespace! Speed exceeding Mach 20!"
Despair filled the radar operator's voice.
On the holo-map, the red dot representing death streaked away from the capital at an impossible speed.
And Cohen, slumping into his chair, suddenly understood the true purpose of this performance—
Homelander had never intended to destroy the capital.
He was a living decoy.
At that moment, on the outskirts of the Seventh Industrial District, three hovercars punched quietly through the final cordon.
Leon glanced back at the city mired in chaos and shook his head slightly. "Mission's preliminarily complete. Let the UED take its time to recover. With the stir we kicked up, we might even bring unification forward."
As for Homelander, he was already on the ice fields of Antarctica, in standby.
Even so, the UED didn't dare make a reckless move, because from their vantage point, the "Doomsday of Dominion" embodied by Homelander had only just begun.
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