The aftermath of Butcher's assault was a controlled frenzy. I was "secured" in a high-level detention cell within the tower—a step up from my apartment, with thicker walls and more obvious cameras. Mallory's debrief was a masterpiece of cold fury.
"Butcher," she stated, her voice like chipped ice. "Inside my tower. How?"
"He's resourceful," I replied, sitting perfectly still on the bare metal cot. The data capsule was a hidden weight in my palm, concealed by a minor telekinetic sleight-of-hand that took all my focus to execute without triggering the collar. "You knew he was a threat. You underestimated him."
"We underestimated you," she shot back. "The correlation between your little performance in the training room, Homelander's subsequent... excursion, and this attack is not a coincidence. You're playing a game, Alex, and you're using Butcher as a pawn. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?"
"He's not a pawn," I said, meeting her gaze. "He's a force of nature. You can't control him. You can only aim him. Right now, he's aimed at the same target we are."
She studied me for a long, silent minute. The unspoken truth hung between us: I had orchestrated this. I had brought the war to Vought's doorstep to get a message.
"Homelander is returning," she said finally. "He's... displeased. The Swiss incident has drawn unwelcome international attention. He'll want a scapegoat. You've made yourself the perfect candidate."
"Let him come," I said, and for the first time, I meant it. The fear was still there, a cold stone in my gut, but it was being overwritten by a grim, determined resolve. Butcher's audacity had been a spark. The data in my hand was the fuel.
Once alone, I waited for the cover of the simulated night cycle in the cell. With my body blocking the primary camera's view, I used my thumbnail—its hardness subtly enhanced by a micro-thin layer of gravitonically compressed air, a new, delicate application of my dampened power—to slice open the capsule.
Inside wasn't a data chip, but a sheet of rice paper, covered in a dense, microscopic script. Butcher's analog solution to digital surveillance. I focused my enhanced vision, the collar allowing just enough passive ability to read it.
It was Vogelbaum's last testament. A confession, written in a shaky hand, smuggled out before Homelander's arrival.
...the subject, John, was not a blank slate. We attempted to engineer empathy, but the core programming was stability through dominance. A failsafe. He was designed to perceive any challenge not as a debate, but as a threat to be eliminated. It is not a flaw; it is the cornerstone of his psyche...
...the conditioning was anchored by a series of subliminal auditory triggers, keyed to a specific frequency—a resonant harmonic of his own cellular structure. We called it the 'Sibyl Code.' A word, a sequence of tones, could theoretically induce a temporary state of docility, a forced reset to a baseline command-protocol. But the trigger phrase was lost. Purged from all records after the project achieved autonomy...
...there is only one existing copy. A backup, etched not on a drive, but on a medium we believed incorruptible. The original master recording, on analog vinyl, stored in Frederick Vought's private collection. He was a sentimental man. He kept the artifacts of his 'greatest achievement.' It is locked away in the one place John would never think to look, the place he believes is his throne...
My heart hammered against my ribs. The Sibyl Code. A kill switch for a god. And it was here. In Vought Tower. In Homelander's own penthouse.
The absurdity of it was sublime. The key to controlling the most powerful being on the planet was a dusty old record in his own living room.
But accessing it was impossible. The penthouse was Homelander's sanctum, guarded by biometrics, motion sensors, and his own paranoid scrutiny. With the collar on, I stood no chance.
The words of the report burned in my mind: ...a resonant harmonic of his own cellular structure.
A new idea began to form, dangerous and brilliant. I didn't need to retrieve the record. I just needed to hear it. Once. If I could get close enough, my enhanced senses, even dampened, could capture that unique frequency. I could absorb the Sibyl Code, not as data, but as a new kind of power—a sonic key.
But to do that, I needed the collar off. Even dampened, the penthouse's security would detect a power surge the moment I tried to use my senses at that level. I needed a distraction so massive, so all-consuming, that it would draw Homelander's entire attention away from his lair and give Maeve and I the window we needed.
I needed to give Homelander exactly what he wanted: a public, undeniable reason to destroy me.
Chapter 62: The Unshackling
The opportunity came two days later, delivered by Homelander himself. My "reintegration assessment" was to be a live, televised event: a joint "security demonstration" with A-Train in a packed football stadium. The subtext was clear. He would put me in a situation where I would either break under pressure, revealing my instability, or be humiliated by his loyalist, proving my weakness.
It was the perfect stage.
The stadium was a roaring ocean of sound and light. Seventy thousand faces looked on as Homelander addressed the crowd, his voice a weapon of mass adoration. I stood beside him, a dark, silent counterpoint in my Mazahs form, the collar a stark black band against the crackling energy of my costume.
"The world needs to see that we are strong," Homelander boomed, his arm around my shoulders in a grip that could pulverize diamond. "That we are united! That even those who have lost their way can be guided back into the light!"
The crowd screamed its approval. I could feel A-Train's smug gaze from across the field. The demonstration was a farce: a simulated hostage rescue where A-Train would play the flashy hero and I the slow, brute-force backup.
But I had rewritten the script.
As the simulation began, with "terrorists" (stuntmen in costumes) taking "hostages" (cheerleaders) in the center of the field, I didn't follow A-Train. I stood my ground.
"Mazahs! Move to flanking position!" Homelander's voice crackled in my earpiece, a warning in its false cheerfulness.
I ignored him. I focused inward, on the storm behind the glass, on the 0.0003-second fracture. This wasn't about threading a needle of thought. This was about driving a spear through it.
I reached for the power I had absorbed from Mindstorm, the telepath. Not to read minds, but to do something far more ambitious and reckless: a wide-band psychic broadcast. I would use the stadium's own PA system, the millions of watts of power surging through it, as an amplifier.
I poured every ounce of my will into that microscopic gap in the dampening field. The collar screeched in protest, its internal systems overloading as it tried to contain a tsunami forced through a pinhole. Alarms blared in my internal comms. I felt a searing pain in my neck as the polymer grew hot.
And then, I spoke. Not with my voice, but with my mind, my words echoing through the consciousness of every single person in the stadium, and bleeding out through the television broadcast to the world.
"You are not seeing a demonstration. You are seeing a lie. Homelander is not a hero. He is a product. A faulty one. He was created in a lab, conditioned to dominate, and he will destroy anyone who challenges him. He tried to bury me in a mountain. He will do the same to this city, to this country, if he is not stopped."
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.
The stadium fell into a stunned, eerie silence, seventy thousand people frozen mid-cheer. On the world's screens, Homelander's smile didn't just vanish; it was wiped from his face by a wave of pure, undiluted fury. The cameras caught the moment his eyes began to glow, a hellish red that promised annihilation.
The psychic broadcast had taken everything. The collar, pushed beyond its limits, short-circuited with a loud CRACK, smoking and sparking. The muffling field died.
And the storm was unleashed.
Power, raw and untamed, flooded back into every cell of my body. The twelve echoes roared back to life, not as a council, but as a unified, furious choir. My black lightning, now unchained, erupted around me in a torrent, scorching the grass in a twenty-foot radius. The stadium lights flickered and died, plunging the arena into twilight, illuminated only by my crackling energy and the twin red suns of Homelander's eyes.
The fragile facade was gone. The leash was broken.
Homelander rose into the air, his face a mask of apocalyptic rage. "YOU!" he screamed, the word tearing through the air like a physical force, shattering the remaining glass in the press boxes.
The world watched, live, as the god and the usurper faced each other over a field of terrified civilians. There was no PR spin now. No narrative. Just power and hatred, naked under the lights.
I had my distraction.
As Homelander gathered the energy to vaporize me where I stood, I met his gaze, my own eyes blazing with black energy. I didn't transmit the thought, I simply formed it, knowing he would see it in my face.
You wanted a show, John. Let's give them a spectacle they'll never forget.
The first blast of his heat vision lanced toward me, a spear of incandescent death. I didn't dodge. I met it with a concentrated vortex of black lightning and gravitonically-warped space, the two energies colliding in a shattering explosion that tore the roof off the stadium.
The war was no longer cold. It was here. And the entire world was watching it live.