Plans have a way of falling apart on contact with reality.
Smuggling all three of them through as checked baggage wasn't the original idea. The actual plan had been to field-test his upgraded kite backpack.
He sketched the design out before he landed in this reality, near the tail end of his stretch in Barry's universe. Too many weeks spent around real working scientists like Cisco and Caitlin left him itching to build something of his own.
Once he landed in what he privately called the Black Robe Universe, he built a new version from local parts. This one was designed from the ground up to fold together with Satsuki, combining into a single unit.
Once assembled, the whole thing ran on steel plating, Energon cubes for fuel, and an actual Cybertronian engine. Long-haul flight stopped being a problem, and speed wasn't something he had to worry about managing. By Satsuki's math, the Philippines was ten hours out, no complications.
Unfortunately, none of that helped against Homelander.
After Jude caught a strange burst of encrypted traffic passing through Homelander's phone, he had Satsuki crack it open. Inside: a set of coordinates in the Philippines, and several more locations marked alongside it. Whatever Homelander was flying out there to do, taking the direct route themselves meant a real chance of running straight into him.
Rushed and sloppy, or did Vought really think this wasn't worth committing to paper? Jude couldn't say for sure.
He sat quietly in front of the laptop, watching the plane's camera feed. It was useful mostly for tracking the timeline, so he would know exactly when to move. He didn't risk sending the nanobots out for a look around outside. Not with Homelander potentially close enough to notice.
The instant he spotted Homelander's shape tearing across the sky outside the porthole, the tension in his shoulders broke.
Homelander was gone inside three seconds. The plane kept cutting smoothly through the clouds toward its destination.
Should've just had Clark do this leg, Jude thought. Faster than any of us. But Superman vanishing for half a day and turning up in the Philippines is the kind of thing people start asking questions about.
"So when are we actually leaving?" Frenchie said. "We can't sit in this safe house forever. Three days out, Vought's crew starts dosing those babies. We're burning daylight."
Kimiko turned and waited for Jude's answer.
"We already left." Jude didn't look up. "Thirteen hours in this safe house, and we're in the Philippines."
He pointed toward the kitchen area. "Seriously, trust me on this. Eat something, then get some sleep."
He got up and walked away, leaving Frenchie and Kimiko trading a baffled look behind his back.
Five hours later, deep in the early morning, Kimiko and Frenchie were both asleep. Jude, running on a two-hour power nap, sat wide awake. He watched the laptop screen, waiting to catch the sunrise over open water.
He frowned at the screen. "Homelander? Already wrapped it up?"
He exhaled slowly. Homelander finishing early wasn't necessarily bad news. If anything, it meant one less unpredictable variable to worry about running into during the actual op. Lower risk all around.
Eight hours after that, having used the nanobots to quietly shift the Wallpaper Room out of the airport and hustled the other two toward the coordinates Kimiko provided, Jude realized just how wrong that read had been.
"This is... the Shining Light camp?"
"Yes," Kimiko's phone answered. "At least, it used to be."
Frenchie stared at the smoldering compound. He didn't speak.
He wasn't a sheltered civilian. He had done his share of dirty work across Russia and New York, sat through gunfights, and had blood on his hands more than once. He figured this place would look like a bunch of armed fanatics, maybe a couple of unlucky guys who got robbed for their trouble, a pile of weapons, a handful of bodies. Extremist outfits basically all ran the same playbook. He braced for something he had seen before.
What actually greeted them was dead silence. There wasn't a single living person left to make a sound.
Smoke and fire hung over the wreckage. The two-headed snake flag burned along with everything else. The steel gates and outposts that ringed the camp, along with the barracks, were reduced to rubble and scrap. Blood soaked dark and deep into the ground.
They walked through charred bodies and limbs scattered without any pattern. The stench mixed blood, gunpowder, and charred meat. Jude did a careful count. At least a hundred Shining Light members dead, here alone.
It clicked into place for him.
"Setting aside the ones buried under the collapsed buildings. That sentry had his skull caved in. That one got thrown hard enough into the wall to shatter his spine, and that one fell from way too high up."
He crouched by a stretch of collapsed wall, running his fingers along the blackened masonry. "As for these..."
"Clean cut, but cauterized. Burned hard along the edge, high heat." Frenchie crouched beside him, tracing the same line. "And it's not localized. Whole row of guys here have the same wound pattern, lined up like it went straight through more than one of them at once."
Kimiko typed fast. Homelander did this?
"Has to be him. You can't fake heat vision." Frenchie's mouth twisted. "Not exactly Superman's style, is it? Mowing down a hundred guys."
"He was here. And he's already gone." Jude gave them the short version of what he saw. The brief relief on both their faces curdled fast.
"They came here specifically to silence them."
"And he wasn't here long, either."
"So the other camps on that map. Are they next?"
"Or already done. We need to move. Now."
Jude turned to her. "Kimiko. Is your brother here?"
Her head snapped side to side.
Of course he isn't. How could he be. This was hell dragged up to the surface. Bodies split open everywhere you looked. Insides spilled out where a person used to be whole. If he had been here, there wouldn't be enough of him left to recognize.
She moved fast through the wreckage, checking the face of every corpse she could reach. When she finally straightened up, she exhaled, her shoulders dropping.