Free Web NovelChapter 7: Chapter 7: Pounding Homelander
Chapter 7: Pounding Homelander
Homelander didn’t even let him finish. His eyes flared red, and his Heat Vision blew the clerk’s head clean off.
The head popped instantly like a watermelon.
Only after blowing the young man’s head off did Homelander realize what he had just done. Suppressing the urge to slaughter everyone in sight, he took a deep breath, his eyes still glowing red, and turned around impatiently to walk out of the Records Center.
He didn’t understand.
A superhero—clearly America’s hero, clearly his own idol—yet they wouldn’t even give him the chance to look into his files.
The security guards lining both sides of the corridor took a collective step back, their eyes filled with terror. Not a single one of them dared to stand directly in his way. Nobody wanted to get killed. For a few grand a month, who the hell was going to risk their life?
The moment the elevator doors slid shut, Homelander caught his reflection in the mirror-like finish of the metal doors, seeing his own face still splattered with the young man’s blood.
His expression was hideous.
It wasn’t anger. What was currently coiled heavily in his chest was something far more suffocating than anger.
It was pure, suffocating frustration.
That was a sensation that used to be completely foreign to him. From the day he first opened his eyes in the lab’s incubation tank, that kind of frustration didn’t exist in his vocabulary.
He was Homelander. He was the most powerful being on the face of this planet. He got whatever he wanted, and no one could stop him from doing whatever he pleased.
But today... he had been blocked a full four times.
And the thing stopping him wasn’t some superior Supe. It was a wall built out of rules and regulations, non-disclosure agreements, and practiced, corporate smiles. It was invisible and intangible; throwing a punch at it didn’t even make a sound.
The file does not exist.
Classified.
Requires joint authorization.
These corporate phrases were like pebbles, striking with precision at the softest, most vulnerable spot in his heart.
Soldier Boy—the man suspected to be his father. The veteran he had watched on a loop in old archival footage countless times as a child, the man carrying a shield and storming the beaches of Normandy in black-and-white film. The only existence he could ever call his own kind in terms of bloodline and raw power... The only one who shared his level of power.
He had thought the man was dead. Everyone told him he was dead. Dead in some top-secret mission, his body unrecoverable, leaving nothing but an old military uniform buried beneath a headstone. Homelander had even visited that cemetery himself, standing there for a long time, unable to fully articulate the emotion coiling inside him—just a profound sense of melancholy.
And now, this man was back alive. Showing up alive and kicking in Brooklyn, carrying a bucket of industrial lubricant and slamming A-Train straight onto the medical floor, smiling exactly like he did in those vintage photographs. He had even told him that he was his biological son, even if it wasn’t in the traditional sense.
Yet here he was, not even permitted to cast a single glance at Soldier Boy’s file. Worse, he was being ordered by Madelyn to slaughter the man who was highly likely his own father.
Homelander clenched his fists, fury and suffocating humiliation twisting together relentlessly inside his chest.
The elevator continued its ascent, the floor numbers ticking up one by one. He closed his eyes, forcing the tidal wave of emotion that was threatening to rip through his chest right back down into the dark.
He was going to look Benjamin in the eye.
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1:00 PM, the rooftop of an old apartment building in Brooklyn.
Benjamin sat on a battered old folding chair he’d salvaged from downstairs, clutching a can of ice-cold beer, a convenience store sandwich resting by his feet. He was waiting for someone. If everything went according to plan, that person would come looking for him.
Granted, there was also a chance a whole mob would show up to cause him trouble instead.
He took a bite of his sandwich, chewed twice, and was just reaching for a second can of beer when he felt a sudden stir of wind behind his back.
Benjamin didn’t turn around. Swallowing the food in his mouth, he took a leisurely sip of beer and set the can down by his feet.
"I was wondering how many times you were going to circle my building before finally coming up," his voice was as casual as a neighbor making small talk about the weather. "Three laps, Homelander."
The silhouette behind him didn’t budge.
Then, a voice spoke up from behind.
"They say you’re Soldier Boy."
Only then did Benjamin slowly turn around.
Sunlight hit his face, and it hit Homelander’s face. The two men stared at each other across the expanse of the rooftop—one sitting on a broken chair, the other hovering in midair—with what felt like an entire era separating them.
Benjamin stood up, crushing the beer can slightly in his grip as his eyes settled on Homelander’s young, unblemished face. High brow ridges, a perfectly straight nose, and a sharp, slightly upturned jawline. It was a face plastered on posters across America, printed onto t-shirts, and projected across the massive screens of Times Square.
Benjamin’s gaze flickered slightly. He could see the trace of hesitation and underlying unease in Homelander’s expression. The most powerful Supe on earth stood before him, looking like a high school kid who didn’t know where to put his hands.
Benjamin stepped forward slowly. He set the beer can on the floor and cracked the knuckles of his right hand. Then he reared back his fist and, putting his entire weight into it, smashed it squarely across Homelander’s multi-million-dollar face.
The force behind the impact was staggering. A heavy crack echoed across the rooftop.
Homelander’s body reeled backward, his feet tearing off the ground as he flew into the concrete guardrail on the opposite edge of the roof. The balustrade shattered completely, sending Homelander plummeting off the edge of the building.
Benjamin tracked him, leaping straight down after him.
Sprawled in a heap of shattered concrete on the ground below, Homelander clutched his left cheek, entirely stupefied. Because a sensation he had almost completely forgotten was radiating from his left cheek—pain.
Raw, genuine pain.
It instantly triggered memories of his childhood. Of those handlers in sterile lab coats using every imaginable method to break him. Of the incinerator hot enough to vaporize his very tears...
Pulling his hand away from his face, he looked down at his palm. A streak of blood was slowly smearing across the creases of his hand.
He was bleeding.
Homelander stared at the blood on his skin, his pupils instantly blowing wide. When was the last time he had bled? He couldn’t even remember anymore. Maybe a decade ago, or maybe back in the lab. His skin was supposed to be completely indestructible. His body was supposed to be entirely invulnerable—lasers, missiles, even falling meteors had never managed to leave a single mark on him.
He snapped his head up, glaring dead at Benjamin as the older man landed in front of him.
"What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!"
Benjamin stood his ground, casually shaking out his right hand. The blow had been incredibly heavy—even his own knuckles felt slightly numb—but his face remained entirely unbothered.
Truth be told, Homelander’s overall raw strength at this point in time still outmatched his own. But relying on his devastating chest blast and his intimate knowledge of Homelander’s psychological weak spots, Benjamin hadn’t hesitated to strike.
Looking down from above at Homelander sprawled in the dirt, his gaze was bone-chilling.
"I’m teaching my pathetic goddamn son a lesson."
Homelander’s expression instantly froze. His rising fury ground to a halt, replaced by a look of near-total bewilderment. He had never been disciplined by a father before.
Benjamin didn’t give him a second to process, pressing onward: "Stan Edgar and my old team packaged me up and sold me to the fucking Russians. They tortured me for forty years."
"They used me to test the absolute limits of Compound V tolerance. They shocked me with electricity, burned me with open flames, and used cryogenic gas to freeze my internal organs just to watch them regenerate cell by cell. They fired AK-47s straight down my throat, not to mention those goddamn radiation experiments. I went through forty fucking years of that. You grew up in a lab—you, of all people, should know exactly what that feels like. Forty whole years."
"And then I finally crawled out of that goddamn hole," he continued, his voice dropping to a harsh chill. "I traveled halfway across the planet back to America, turned on the television, and guess what the fuck I saw?"
He thrust a finger directly at the bright red star-spangled emblem on Homelander’s chest.
"I saw my son wearing a Vought uniform, flashing a perfect corporate smile for the cameras, acting as a glorified lapdog for Stan Edgar—the very bastard who sold his father out. I saw you running around with Black Noir, working missions shoulder-to-shoulder, patting him on the back at press conferences and calling him your ’great partner.’ Noir. The literal son of a bitch who personally led the rest of Payback to drug me into a coma. You tell me—do you deserve a fucking beating or not? You disappointing piece of shit."
Homelander clutched his face, parting his lips to speak, but the words caught hard in his throat. He wanted to fire back, but the split skin on his face was still throbbing. More than that, he couldn’t find a single counterargument. Not a single word. frёeωebɳovel.com
When Homelander finally spoke, his voice carried a faint, pathetic trace of a victimized child.
"I couldn’t get into the files," he whimpered. "I went down to Vought Records. I went to the archives, I went to the Board Secretariat. They told me your file didn’t exist. They practically told me to fuck off. They blocked me a full four times." fгeewebnovёl.com
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A/n: If you want to read ahead and find out what happens next right away, you can read up to 20 Chapters ahead on my p@tr~on: [email protected]/ForgottenDaoist (@ = a, link is in my profile).
