A well-drilled, professional crew doesn't linger. Job done, they clear the scene—fast, clean, no wasted motion, every risk minimized on the way out the door. If something goes wrong, they move even faster. A pre-planned route, a getaway car already running, and inside two or three minutes they could be a couple of miles gone.
Even Homelander, tracing a search grid with his eyes, was still just one man—and his X-ray vision only punched through a wall or two before it gave up. Point him in the wrong direction and give a real professional outfit enough of a head start, and they'd vanish clean.
It wasn't hard to understand why. If his eyes could see straight through the basement of every building in the city, the CIA's safe houses—every one lined with zinc specifically to stop him—would be worthless. If a building or two on a block came back blank to his vision, that blankness was the tell. That was how you knew something was hiding there.
It was also, incidentally, why—the last time he and Maeve handled something like this—he'd needed the SWAT captain to actually tell him which floor the hostage-taker was on. If it were as simple as looking, Homelander would've announced the floor number himself, loudly, in front of every camera on scene. The man never once passed up a chance to remind people what he could do.
Which was why, once he'd finished quietly closing out the basement and taken back to the sky, the very last thing he expected to find was some guy already interrogating a Shining Light straggler right out in the open, on a public street.
Well. Wasn't expecting a bonus round.
Description: Was this one stupid, or just supremely overconfident? Hadn't it occurred to him that Vought had superheroes on payroll? Or did he just figure they weren't fast enough to matter? Either way, saves me the legwork.
He drifted down into the alley slow and unhurried. Even then, the man didn't look up—still bent over his work, still grinding away at the broken, jaw-shattered wreck of a Shining Light member sprawled in front of him, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was no longer alone.
Homelander took a few steps closer, letting his vision sweep the pair. The man on the ground had the same broken limbs as everyone left behind in the basement—couldn't speak, same tattoos under the same skin. All the marks of one of the ones who'd slipped out before the cleanup.
Which meant the man standing over him was the one who'd caused all of it.
So why only one? Homelander turned his attention to the figure doing the questioning—dressed in layers. Outermost was a plain black robe. Underneath that, when Homelander's eyes cut through it, was the same clothing the Shining Light rank-and-file wore, complete with matching tattoos on the skin beneath. Same organization. And over the face, sitting on top of all of it: a pale, expressionless mask.
Then he noticed it—bandaging at the man's right side and left leg, wrapped over what looked, unmistakably, like gunshot wounds.
That's it. That's why none of them fought back. All of them, brothers in the same cause, brainwashed into the same loyalty—of course nobody expected a traitor standing right next to them. It clicked into place clean and satisfying, the kind of answer that felt too good not to be true.
He studied the mask a moment longer—long, narrow, deliberately hideous, forgettable in the way anything that isn't a real face is forgettable—filing the shape of it away. Then his attention shifted back to the man being interrogated, the one who'd been reduced to a shattered, sobbing wreck.
Two beams of red-hot light found his skull and ended it. Whatever was left of his will to survive had, up to that point, still outweighed the part of him that wanted to die. Now it didn't matter either way.
Homelander hadn't done it out of mercy. He'd done it because the last thing he needed was this man surviving long enough to talk to a court-appointed lawyer. With Madelyn's military integration bill already making Vought plenty of enemies, this was exactly the kind of moment those enemies would love to exploit—and losing a bill was nothing next to what would happen if Compound V ever saw daylight.
The masked man finally turned his head.
"Funny," he said.
"You don't look all that scared." Homelander studied the blank, unreadable mask. "Why aren't you running? Given up already? Where's the rest of your crew?"
"What crew?" The mask tilted, almost amused. "You think I needed backup for this?"
That wasn't the answer Homelander had been expecting. "So what, then—Supes? Night vision? You glow in the dark or something?"
He waved the question away before it could even be answered.
"Doesn't matter. Whatever you can do, I don't care." He took a step closer. "I want to know why you turned on your own people. What location were you trying to pull out of him?"
"You want to know?"
"Take your time." A cold smile crossed Homelander's face, his eyes already warming to red. "I've got all night to play."
Three shots. Then three more.
The masked man's hands moved before Homelander's sentence finished—twin pistols out, six rounds fired in one unbroken breath, every single one landing in the exact same spot with a precision that had no business existing: dead center on Homelander's right eye.
Spent brass rang off the pavement. Homelander's hand shot up to clutch at the eye, which was twitching, mid-beam, laser already building and now interrupted before it could fire. There was no pain—there never was—but something had physically arrived in his eye at the exact wrong moment, and the sheer wrongness of that threw the whole process off.
Fury boiled up fast. He dropped his hand and glared across the alley at the man who'd just put six rounds in his face, expression gone flat and murderous.
And in that same instant, pieces started clicking together. Two nights back—a report he'd barely registered at the time—a shooter with accuracy that matched Gunpowder's, in a firefight where, notably, nobody had died. Just like tonight. The wounds on this man's side and leg lined up with that same incident. Add the tattoos, add the organization, and it all made sense: same crew, restrained because they were his own people—except tonight, wanting something enough to turn the guns on them instead.
The red faded out of Homelander's eyes.
Whoever this was clearly had answers he needed, and heat vision had a bad habit of ending conversations permanently before they'd properly started.
He came in fast, straight at the man, fists first.