"Good fight!"
"Kill that son of a bitch!"
"Homelander's getting bodied out here!"
"Long live Superman!"
Maeve looked out over a cabin full of passengers working themselves into a frenzy. She did not know what to do with any of it. People loved a spectacle. She always knew that much. What she had not expected was for this particular crowd to flip a switch. The same faces that had been sobbing, praying, and dialing loved ones a minute ago were acting like they had ringside seats at a title fight, cheering for blood.
This group has some serious issues.
Then again, maybe that was the normal reaction. Coming out the other side of something like this with your head screwed on straight would be the stranger outcome. What looked like mania from the outside was just pressure finding somewhere to go.
Clark tuned all of it out. He focused only on the plane's center of gravity as it kept drifting left, forcing him to adjust his grip again and again. Behind him, the Homelander he had sent flying was already circling back for another round. Below him, a small, bare spit of an island finally came into view. It was barely enough real estate to hold most of the fuselage, but it was something.
The dead weight of the plane kept dropping. Gravity did what gravity does, indifferent to how many people were praying against it.
Maeve wrenched the cabin door open. "Superman! We're going into the water like this! It needs a runway, something smooth to slide out on!"
Clark looked down at the flat, glassy stretch of ocean beneath them. It was the only option he had time to consider. By the time Maeve finished shouting, he had already worked out what came next.
He fought to hold the glide angle steady and aimed the wreck at the water. He took a breath and let it out.
Cold poured from his mouth, a directional blizzard. Two hundred degrees below zero and dropping, freezing straight through the surface of the Pacific and down into the seabed a hundred meters below. In seconds an ice sheet the size of a parking lot spread beneath them. It grew so fast it looked less like ice forming and more like the ocean itself turning to stone.
The force of that breath kicked back against him hard enough to slow the plane's fall on its own. The fuselage skimmed down onto the ice and kept sliding.
By some miracle, the sheet held. It cracked under the weight and splintered at the edges, but it did not give way.
Clark sucked in another breath and blew a second time, bleeding off more speed while the plane carried on shuddering across the ice below him. The math worked out, barely. The nose finally caught rock and tree line, plowing a long, ugly furrow into the island before grinding to a stop.
He did not stay to watch the passengers weep with relief or thank whatever god they figured had pulled this off. A second later he was back in the air, putting his body between the island and Homelander's stare.
"Homelander. It's over."
"Like hell it is! Not until those F-16s get here!"
The crack of broken air split the sky as Homelander broke the sound barrier, closing the distance in a blink. Clark sighed.
"You brought this on yourself."
He was there and gone in an instant, driving a fist into Homelander's stomach. It was not full strength. Not even close. Some instinct in him pulled the punch even now. It did not matter. The air itself seemed to bend around the impact.
Homelander's ribs went first, then both forearms he had thrown up to block it. They snapped cleanly. His body rocketed backward past Mach 3 and slammed into the ice sheet floating offshore. A spray of shattered ice and fine white dust plumed into the air. The cracking sound kept spreading until the whole sheet split down the middle.
A moment later, Homelander surfaced. He dragged himself out of the water.
"Superman! I'm going to kill you!"
"I'm sorry, Homelander."
Clark was already in front of him again, his fist raised a second time.
"You're not killing me. You're not killing anybody today." He paused. "There's one more thing. It's not the classiest thing to admit, but I've wanted to do this for a long time."
"You've had this coming."
It took roughly two minutes. By the end of it, Homelander was face-down on the rocks, beaten past recognition, out cold.
"That actually saves me the trouble," Clark muttered to himself. "I was going to have to freeze him solid so he couldn't try anything once the recovery team showed up."
Right on cue, the jets he had been waiting on finally showed. Two dots resolved out of the haze over the water, engines screaming closer. Within ten seconds the pilots had the wreck in sight and the coordinates locked.
"Command, be advised, looks like we're a little late."
The report went out to headquarters immediately.
Clark collected Homelander and Maeve and headed straight back to Vought.
The recording cut out there. Frenchie and Kimiko sat on either side of Jude, staring blankly ahead.
"What's with the faces?" Jude asked.
"Superman just, he wrecked Homelander. Like it was nothing?"
Frenchie's expression sat somewhere between disbelief and dread. He had killed a supe himself once. That alone had taught him exactly how far out of a normal person's weight class these people operated. Homelander was supposed to be the ceiling. The strongest thing walking. Nobody was supposed to make him look like a warm-up round.
"Clark's always been stronger than Homelander. You didn't know that?" Jude said. "I'll put money on it. He's the strongest hero on the planet, full stop."
That lit Frenchie right up. "Then why are we still tiptoeing around this? Let's just take Vought down. Nobody's stopping Superman."
"That's the actual problem."
Jude scratched the back of his head. "Taking Homelander apart is easy. Taking Vought apart isn't much harder, honestly. The hard part is making sure we get all of it." He started counting it off on his fingers. "The kids at Sage Grove Center still haven't been pulled out. We've barely scratched the surface of how Compound V even moves through the supply chain. Lamplighter's still out there, completely unaccounted for. And on top of all that, I'm fairly sure I just found out Vought's founder was a Nazi scientist."
"Clark took Homelander apart in about two minutes flat, and every time we dig one layer deeper into this company, we find three more underneath it."
The three of them made it back to New York the next day. By then a headline had already caught fire across every screen in the city.
"The Eight Stop Hijacking Terrorists, 'Heroes in the Armed Forces Act' Headed for a Vote."
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