Clark's road-safety advice stood for three seconds before the armored truck proved it necessary.
He moved before the thought fully formed, stepping between the teenagers and the truck before either had time to react. He raised his hands to the front bumper. The metal groaned under his fingers. He arrested the vehicle's momentum by lifting its nose off the asphalt.
The front wheels left the pavement. The engine shrieked against the sudden loss of traction. The truck's massive inertia pressed forward, the chassis creaking and shuddering against his grip.
Clark made a small adjustment. He lifted his feet a fraction of an inch, trading road friction for flight, taking the force on his own frame rather than fighting the ground for leverage. The truck came to a full stop, suspended at an angle. The engine ticked in the sudden quiet.
He set it down carefully. The front end was dented. Everything else remained intact.
A sonic boom cracked over the street.
Two figures descended.
The first dropped from above at speed, his cape snapping behind him. Red and white stripes framed a star-spangled pattern. Two eagle-head shoulder pads bracketed his chest. The political symbolism lacked subtlety. In Clark's universe, heroes communicated their allegiances through actions. Here, they built them into the costume.
The second dropped from the edge of a building several stories up. A woman in dark armor with silver trim landed in a crouch, precise and practiced. It was a warrior's entrance, not a showman's. She reminded Clark of Wonder Woman—a painting that resembled its subject without ever being mistaken for the original.
They straightened. They looked toward the street.
Nobody looked back at them.
The crowd's attention remained fixed on the figure standing in the road. His red cape barely moved in the still air. The blue suit was long and well-fitted, cut to neither hide nor announce the physique beneath it. The result was that it announced itself anyway. The musculature was not performative; it was the consequence of physics applied to a body over a long time. The red S caught the morning light.
Jude stood six feet back on the pavement, his hands in his pockets. If someone tried to imagine what a deity looked like, and then that deity walked out of the imagination, stopped a truck with his bare hands, and stood there waiting—that is what this street is processing.
Clark did not understand the staring. He was accustomed to being well-liked in Metropolis, but this attention lacked gratitude, relief, or the warm recognition of a familiar face. The crowd maintained the heavy silence of a gallery where a piece of art turned out to be overwhelming. Clark looked around, his brow furrowing slightly at the response to a routine stop.
He doesn't know, Jude observed. He doesn't know how conspicuous the real thing is when everything around it is a performance.
"Gentlemen." Clark knocked lightly on the driver's side window. "Would you mind stepping out? I don't want to fight anyone. You can't escape at this point, and surrendering now will work in your favor at sentencing."
Inside the cab, two men gripped their weapons, their knuckles white. They had prepared to die fighting. Now, their eyes darted between Clark and the dashboard. They had expected a supe to smash through the windshield. They had expected threats, pain, and the brutal efficiency of a Vought hero making a public example. Instead, a man had knocked on their window and informed them of their legal options.
"Are you—are you going to kill us?" the driver asked.
Clark blinked. "No. Why would I kill you?"
"We're—we're criminals."
"Right. That's what judges are for."
The two men looked at each other. Then they looked out the window and saw the two figures standing behind Clark.
They placed their guns on the dashboard, opened the doors, and lay face-down on the pavement.
Clark walked around to the back of the truck and knocked twice. "Your colleagues have surrendered. There's no point continuing alone."
"I surrender! Don't—don't kill me, I surrender!"
A gun slid out of the rear compartment. The third man climbed out and joined his companions on the asphalt.
"Good man." Clark straightened.
"Are you Homelander?" The criminal ask
"Me?" Clark shook his head.
"No," said Homelander. "I am."
It should have been a clean morning.
The alert had come from Vought's operations desk: armored truck robbery in progress, two units of The Seven dispatched, high-visibility response. The formula was well-established. Homelander descends from the sky. Homelander subdues the criminals with whatever level of force makes for the best footage. Homelander stands with one boot on the stopped vehicle while the crowd erupts. Homelander poses for the cameras with Queen Maeve at his shoulder. Homelander ascends and is gone. The approval rating ticks up three to five points. Vought rewards the performance.
That was how it was supposed to go.
Instead, an unknown, unbranded, uncatalogued hero had lifted the armored truck off the ground and set it down without straining. He had convinced three armed robbers to surrender without raising his voice. He now stood in the middle of the street, the morning sun at his back, while the entire block stared in silence.
Including Queen Maeve.
Homelander had noticed.
She watched the man, her attention focused and unguarded. She made no effort to hide it. Her eyes tracked his face, his build, his easy competence, and the complete absence of performance. After years surrounded by approximations, she was staring at an original.
The vein at Homelander's temple pressed against his skin.
The man looked like him. He moved like him. He had the same basic loadout: strength, flight, vision. He shared the same silhouette from certain angles. He even wore a cape. Vought's positioning relied on the premise that Homelander was the pinnacle—the first, the finest, the standard everything else was measured against. The conditioning ran deep. Any version of him that existed was merely a version, and versions existed below him.
That was the framework.
The framework was encountering difficulty.
He crossed the street. A smile stretched across his face, arriving slightly ahead of schedule. It was a preemptive measure, calculated for the cameras recording the interaction.
"You" he said, his voice warm. "Nice work. Lucky you happened to be here." He scanned the blue suit, his eyes sharp, evaluating a threat while projecting admiration. "Judging by the uniform, fan of mine?"
Clark turned to him. His brow dipped slightly.
"I'm sorry," Clark said. "I don't follow the superhero scene very closely. Are you Homelander?"
The smile held. It required more muscle control than usual.
"That's right." Homelander pushed the warmth back into his voice. "And you must be new to this." His gaze flicked to the three men lying face-down on the pavement, then back to Clark. He lowered his pitch, adopting a collegial, avuncular cadence. "Word of advice. With criminals, soft-handed doesn't keep the public safe. You leave them room, and they take it. Better to be decisive. Make sure they can't cause problems later."
He reached down and picked all three men off the ground by the backs of their jackets.
He threw them into the air.
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