As a rule, Jude didn't worry much about supes who wanted to get physical. Every supe walking around in this world was a Compound V product, one way or another, and outside of the ones whose whole gimmick was raw physical enhancement, most of them ran on the same basic template: stronger than a normal person, sure, but not so much stronger that it erased the gap in skill.
The stat difference alone wasn't the problem. It was everything sitting on top of it. Years of actual fighting experience versus none, because these people were superstars first and combatants a distant second. They spent infinitely more hours in front of cameras than they ever spent in a real fight.
Jude had already tested that theory twice. Once against Translucent, once against Kimiko. He came out on top both times without much trouble. By that math, he had a real edge over most of the roster in a straight close-quarters fight.
Homelander did not belong to most of the roster.
Even against Maeve, Jude figured his own mid-tier physical enhancement plus actual skill gave him a fighting chance on its own. Stacked with the right buffs, it was a near-guaranteed win. Homelander was a different conversation entirely. His numbers weren't just good, they were in their own bracket. Top 0.5 percent, easily. He would have been the undisputed top of the food chain, if Clark hadn't shown up and quietly bumped him down a rung.
And if it ever came down to fighting an actual Kryptonian, at least there was Kryptonite to go looking for. Homelander didn't have a weakness like that. Nobody had found one yet. He was just Superman with the volume turned down and none of the gaps. A fully rounded stat sheet without an obvious crack in it anywhere.
Completely sealed off. Unless I've already got something waiting.
As Homelander closed the last of the distance between them, Jude's hand drifted toward his pocket, the quiet, unremarkable prelude to whatever came next.
Then Homelander was simply there, closing the gap in the time it took to blink. Even with reflexes boosted well past human norms, Jude wasn't fast enough to get clear on reaction alone.
It didn't matter.
The hit never landed.
"Huh. I figured you were one of the few guys around here who actually knew how to fight." Jude laughed. "That was about as subtle as a marching band. Your whole body told me where you were going three steps before you got there. You want people to miss that punch next time, try wearing a robe."
Homelander sailed a good ten meters past him before he managed to plant his feet at the far end of the alley, and Jude's commentary hadn't done anything for his mood. The man didn't have A-Train's finesse. He just had raw speed, full stop, and raw speed came with a cost. Past a certain point, the brain simply couldn't keep up with the body anymore.
Which, generally, didn't matter, because nobody survived getting hit by him regardless of how sloppy the technique was.
His feet left the ground. Airborne, he could push two, sometimes three times the speed of sound. Flight beat running by a wide margin, always had.
"Your call," he said, his voice cold and flat. "I would've kept you in one piece. Now you'd better hope you get lucky."
"Homelander, no!"
Maeve's voice cut down the alley first, Clark's a half-second behind it. Maeve hauled him bodily through the air, since he hadn't been airborne yet when the shouting started. If Clark had simply taken off the instant he heard the alarm, on his own, he would have already been standing here before Homelander finished his first sentence. Outside of the Flash family, flight beat running in pretty much every metahuman matchup that mattered, a rule Clark occasionally forgot in the heat of the moment.
Homelander clocked their approach.
Too sharp, both of them. Caught up before I even finished. No time left for the interrogation now. Only one option remained.
Silence them.
Immediately.
His eyes lit red.
Hearing the two of them closing in, Jude pulled his hand back out of his pocket.
Plan's dead. Staying here doesn't get them killed, but it does get me swarmed and dragged off. And that's worse.
"Forget it," he muttered. "Fall back. We already got what we came for."
Decision made, his other hand went for a different pocket. That was the one Homelander's eyes locked onto, catching sight of four oddly-shaped little mushrooms tucked inside. One of them was already in the masked man's palm.
Homelander's heat vision was a half-breath from firing when a wave of cold tore out from the center of the alley, rolling out in both directions and swallowing everything in its path. The temperature dropped somewhere past reasonable, and in an instant, three people stood frozen solid where they had been standing. Homelander, Maeve, and Clark. All three turned to ice.
"What is this?!"
Homelander's panic was immediate and total. He had never encountered anything like it. The absolute loss of control over his own body hit him harder than the cold did, and something old and ugly surged up alongside the fear: the specific, familiar horror of being strapped down and unable to move. A feeling he had known intimately as a child, on tables he hadn't asked to be tied to, more times than he wanted to remember.
The Ice-shroom was rated for a clean four seconds of lockdown. Jude, immune to his own tricks thanks to a cold resistance stat he had specifically built up for exactly this reason, walked through the frost like it wasn't there. Homelander was a different story, and even so, sheer brute strength was already working the ice loose from the inside. One second in, the whole shell was ready to give.
I'm going to kill you. The thought tore through him white-hot.
The masked man didn't wait around to find out. He raised his other hand, and what Homelander's eyes landed on next was a small green sprig of clover.
It took effect almost instantly. Its little puffed-out cheeks let loose a gale-force gust that caught Homelander, still half-locked in ice, clean off balance, hauling him skyward with a force he had no leverage to fight.
The ice shattered at the same moment.
Free again, Homelander fought the wind the whole way up, and by the time he had clawed himself high enough to push back against it, he had already been carried a couple of thousand meters straight up. He had more or less shrugged off whatever these harmless-looking little plants could throw at him.
That was when he noticed three small black shapes rising through the wind toward him. As they closed the distance, he recognized them as the same mushrooms he had seen sitting in the masked man's pocket a moment ago. This one was black, with two red spots where eyes might go.
"What the hell is this now?"
The blast came first as sound, then as heat. A mushroom cloud bloomed slow and enormous against the sky, hitting with enough force to blow every thought clean out of Homelander's head.
As if worried the point hadn't quite landed, the other two mushrooms went off right behind it.
Three mushroom clouds merged into one over the city, the combined heat somewhere north of tens of millions of degrees. The shockwave rolled outward hard enough to knock pedestrians on the street below clean off their feet, people who would be picking themselves back up for a good while yet.
Out of the heart of the blast, a scorched, broken shape dropped straight down out of the sky.
That was what was left of the once-invincible Homelander.
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