Clark almost laughed out loud at Homelander's request.
A group of attackers. Night vision gear. Can't have gotten far, easy to track. On paper, it was a fine theory. It just happened to be wrong on every count, because Clark knew exactly what Jude was capable of—the stealth, the combat instincts sharpened past anything human, the kind of perception and raw physicality that made a room full of armed men into an afternoon's work for one guy, alone, in the dark. Homelander had no idea he was chasing a ghost that had already left the building an hour ago.
Guess I've still got to put on a show.
"Sure," he said. "If I spot anyone suspicious, I'll bring them in."
He was gone before the sentence finished landing, and the moment he cleared the basement, Homelander and A-Train both let out a breath they'd clearly been holding.
Superman made everyone around him tense—that alone was exhausting to work around—and worse, the guy had an actual no-kill policy. Cleaning house with him standing there wasn't an option.
"A-Train. Bring in the rest from outside."
The two of them didn't so much communicate as confirm what they'd both already decided. It went fast. It went smooth. It went a little too smooth for Maeve's taste—she stood back, watching, and something about how efficient and businesslike they both suddenly were struck her as wrong. Neither of them had ever handled a scene like this with this kind of focus before. Normally, the only thing either of them cared about at an incident like this was how it'd play on camera.
Something's off. Something's very off.
She was still turning that thought over when A-Train finished hauling the last of the men in from outside—seven or eight of them, all in the same condition as the rest: jaws dislocated, arms and legs shattered.
"Everybody accounted for?" Homelander asked, doing a quick count.
Then his eyes lit up red.
"Wait—what are you doing!"
Maeve barely got two steps forward before his heat vision beat her there. It swept the room in under a second, and the basement came apart with it—blood across the walls, bone and tissue everywhere, organs spilling out where bodies used to be whole. What had been a room full of broken, groaning men became something closer to an abattoir. Homelander's heat vision had cut clean through the entire group. Nobody was left breathing.
"Why would you do that!"
"Because they're terrorists." Homelander said it flat, no more emotion than reading off a grocery list. "When we got here, they didn't surrender. They tried to fight their way out. I didn't have a choice."
As soon as the words left his mouth, A-Train blurred into motion.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Gunfire chattered through the ruined basement like popcorn going off, rounds pinging harmlessly off Homelander and clattering to the floor. In seconds, A-Train had every pistol in the room pulled, fired, and pressed back into the dead men's hands—a full staged firefight, cased and dressed, in under ten seconds.
A slow smile spread across Homelander's face. A-Train's read on the moment had been dead-on—first real op like this together, first time seeing how the guy actually operated under pressure, and his instincts were sharp. Good enough, at least, to prove he was worth keeping around.
Maeve stood frozen, staring at the wreckage, her face drained of color. She'd been part of scenes like this before. She'd never had to watch one happen right in front of her like this—not since Clark.
"You and I both know that's not what happened," she said.
"Does it matter what happened?" Homelander looked at her, almost bored. "We've done this exact thing plenty of times before, and you never had a problem lending a hand. Why the sudden change of heart?"
"And don't forget what these people actually are." He kept going before she could answer. "Real terrorists. Real killers. Every one of them's got more than one body behind him—whole villages, overseas, wiped off the map. They earned this."
"Superman's turned you soft, hasn't he? All this second-guessing."
The words died in Maeve's throat. She had helped him do exactly this, more than once, before Clark ever showed up—and it was only after meeting Clark that she'd found the nerve to tell Homelander no. She didn't say any of that out loud.
"What's wrong with respecting a life, even one that's earned its ending?" Clark's voice came from the doorway. He'd let himself back in quietly, and his face went hard the moment he took in the room.
"These men deserved to answer for what they did—I won't argue that," he said. "But they'd already lost the ability to fight back. What we should've done was hand them over for trial. Not execute them ourselves. Justice that doesn't follow its own rules isn't justice. It's just more harm."
"And that's not even why you did it, is it?"
Homelander scoffed and didn't bother arguing the point—mostly because Clark was right, and mostly because the actual reason had nothing to do with good or evil and everything to do with keeping mouths shut.
"Guess that means you didn't find your suspicious man out there," he said instead, already lifting off the ground. "Must've gotten clean away by now. Shame."
He shot straight up out of the basement without waiting for a response. A-Train glanced once between Maeve and Clark, said nothing, and peeled off after him.
"I didn't expect him to kill every last one of them," Clark said quietly, once they'd gone. "Last time, he actually listened to you and let that man live. I thought that meant something was starting to change in him."
"Something's not right. Something's very wrong here." Maeve shook her head, grim. "His approval numbers went up two points the last time he showed restraint. So why go back to this, now, of all times? None of it adds up."
Clark looked over the ruined basement one more time and had to agree. They headed back up to the street together, already talking about reaching out to Jude directly—he'd want to know exactly what had gone down here tonight.
That's when Maeve noticed Homelander hadn't flown back toward Vought Tower at all. He was descending, slow and deliberate, onto a street two blocks over.
She grabbed Clark's arm, and they went after him.
Two blocks from the basement massacre, in an alley nobody was using for anything legal, an interrogation was already underway.
"Tell me where he is."
The man on the ground was rigid with fear, straining against a body that no longer answered to him—no working hands, no working legs, jaw hanging useless. Two curled snake tails peeked out from under his sleeve. Gloves still on his hands.
He was the last one. The sole survivor of the stronghold.
"Tough guy."
Homelander laid two fingers against the man's arm, tracing the line of bone and tendon beneath the skin, then twisted.
The pain of already-shattered joints grinding back against themselves should have torn a scream out of him. His eyes rolled white, his whole body convulsed—but with his jaw hanging slack and disconnected, all that came out was a wet, wordless shriek, swallowed by the alley walls before it could go anywhere.
"I'll ask one more time. Are you going to tell me, or not?"
The man was still shaking through it when a shape dropped out of the sky at the far end of the alley.
Clark had followed the same anomaly his own eyes had caught. He'd found him.
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