The walk back to Vought Tower was the longest of my life. Every shadow felt like an ambush, every distant siren a prelude to Homelander's unleashed fury. The calm I had projected on the street was a lie, a fragile dam holding back a torrent of psychic and physical terror. Now, alone, the dam cracked.
The echoes in my head were in an uproar, not of fear, but of vicious approval.
You showed him! Ember crowed, her psychic voice a crackling inferno. You stood before the false god and you did not bend! Now we burn his throne!
Tactically sound, Graviton intoned, his logic a cold stream in the fire. You demonstrated control and exposed his emotional volatility. Public perception is a vector. You have gained significant ground. The next move must be preemptive.
He will not forget the insult, the Hypnotist whispered, a serpent coiling around my thoughts. The humiliation is a poison in his veins. He will seek to repay it a hundredfold. We must find his pressure points, his hidden shames. A mind, even his, can be unraveled.
I stumbled into a narrow alley, bracing myself against a grimy brick wall as a wave of dizziness washed over me. Using my power on such a wide, subtle scale had been a massive drain, but it was the internal struggle that truly exhausted me. Being the "chairman" was like trying to conduct an orchestra where every musician was a homicidal virtuoso insisting on playing their own symphony.
I replayed the confrontation in my mind. The child's voice. The sheer, unadulterated hatred in Homelander's eyes when I turned his drama into a farce. I hadn't just challenged his power; I had mocked his narrative. For a being who lived and died by his public image, that was a wound deeper than any I could inflict with my fists.
My burner phone vibrated. A single message from an unknown number.
Saw the show. You're playing with fire, mate. The kind that can burn down the whole world. -B
Butcher. Of course he had people watching. The message was typical Butcher—a backhanded compliment wrapped in a warning. He saw the move for what it was: a declaration of war that escalated things beyond anything his bombs and bullets ever could.
A second message followed, this one from Mallory.
My office. Now. Use the back channels.
The tone was urgent. The brief sense of victory evaporated, replaced by a cold dread. What had I triggered?
I made my way back through the city's underbelly, using my invisibility to slip past the now-inevitable media scrum forming around Vought Tower. The "street confrontation" was already the top trend on every social media platform. The clips were edited, of course. Some made me look like a stoic hero facing down a bully. Others, undoubtedly fed by Vought, focused on Homelander's "concerned" expression and my "defiant" posture, framing me as the unstable element.
Public perception was indeed a vector, and it was already splitting into factions.
Mallory's office was shrouded in gloom, the blinds drawn. She stood facing her bank of monitors, her arms crossed. On the screens were frozen images from the confrontation, along with live feeds of the talking heads already dissecting it.
"You lit the fuse," she said without turning around. Her voice was flat, drained of even its usual cynical energy.
"He gave me no choice," I replied, my own voice rough. "He was going to force a reaction. I gave him a non-reaction. It was the only move I had."
"It was a brilliant move," she corrected, finally turning to face me. Her eyes were shadowed. "And it might have just killed us all."
She gestured to a secondary monitor, showing a live feed from a satellite. It was trained on a remote, snow-capped mountain range. "The moment you turned your back on him, he left the city. He broke the sound barrier heading north. We lost him for seventeen minutes over the Yukon. When he reappeared, he was… calmer."
The screen switched to a thermal image. A vast, glowing patch of molten rock stained the white landscape, like a bleeding wound on the planet. A crater a half-mile wide, still glowing with intense, residual heat.
"He vaporized a mountain," Mallory said, her voice a whisper. "Not inverted it. Not buried it. He turned it into glass and steam. That was his therapy session. That was him getting 'calmer.'"
I stared at the image, a cold knot tightening in my stomach. The sheer, wanton scale of the destruction was a message meant for me, and me alone. This is the power you mock. This is what I can do when I'm merely frustrated. Imagine what I will do to you.
"The official story is a meteorite impact," Mallory continued. "But we know. He knows we know. This wasn't just a tantrum, Alex. This was a calibration. He's measuring his own rage, and the results are apocalyptic."
She sat down heavily behind her desk. "Edgar is furious. Not at you, not at him. At the situation. The balance of terror he's maintained for years is shattered. Homelander is no longer a contained asset. You've poked the bear, and the bear has just demonstrated it can crack the planet in half."
"So what's the play?" I asked, the echoes in my head momentarily silenced by the sheer magnitude of the threat. Ember's fire seemed paltry in the face of that crater.
"The play?" Mallory let out a hollow laugh. "The play is damage control. Edgar is recalling all Seven members from active duty. He's declaring a 'internal security review.' He's effectively grounding Homelander, or trying to. He's putting the entire organization on lockdown to keep him from going after you directly and tearing the city apart in the process."
It was a cage within a cage. Edgar was trying to contain the explosion by shrinking the arena.
"But he will go after me," I stated. It wasn't a question.
"Of course he will," she said. "But not with heat vision in Times Square. It will be cleaner. Quieter. An 'accident' during training. A sudden, catastrophic power failure during a mission. Or…" she met my gaze, "…he'll find a way to make you do it yourself. He'll push until that control you're so proud of shatters, and you become the monster he can then justifiably put down."
She slid a file across the desk. "Your new assignment. Effective immediately."
I opened it. It wasn't a mission brief. It was a psychological profile. My own. And attached to it was a requisition form for a specialized piece of tech.
"The Vought Experimental Neuro-Inhibitor," Mallory explained. "A collar. It's designed to suppress psychic and power emissions. Edgar's idea. You wear it, you prove you're 'managing your condition.' You refuse…" She didn't need to finish.
It was a leash. A visible, humiliating symbol of control. To Homelander, it would be a sign of my submission. To the public, it would be confirmation of my instability.
The echoes in my head erupted in unified, furious rejection. NEVER! they screamed. It is a trap! A cage for our strength!
But beneath their rage, a colder, more calculating part of me—the part that was still Alex—saw the grim logic. It was a test from Edgar. A way to see if I was truly controllable. Wearing it might be the only way to survive the next few days.
I looked from the file to the satellite image of the smoldering crater. I was caught between a god who wanted me dead and a king who wanted me muzzled.
I had wanted to be a symbol. Now, I had to decide what kind of symbol I would be: a defiant martyr, or a patient weapon.
Picking up the requisition form, I made my choice.
"It'll need to be adjusted," I said, my voice devoid of emotion. "The one you have is designed for Class 5 telepaths. My output is… significantly higher."
Mallory nodded slowly, a flicker of respect in her eyes. I wasn't refusing. I was negotiating the terms of my imprisonment.
The battle on the street was over. The war for my own soul had just entered a new, more desperate phase.