The Antarctic wind, laden with ice crystals, scraped a shrill rasp across the base's alloy outer wall.
This silver-gray fortress buried beneath the ice cap was bathed in the pallid light of polar day.
Automatic turrets on the perimeter rotated slowly, scanning lasers sketching web-like red lines over the snow. At one entrance, five soldiers in heavy power armor lounged against a blast wall, stealing a break.
Frost caked their armor seams; their breathing condensed into white plumes in the minus-40 air.
"Dammit, this hellhole." The squad sergeant flipped up his visor and fished out a crumpled pack of smokes. "Three more days on shift and I'm up for rotation."
His second, a burly man with a scar on his chin, leaned in for a light. The windproof lighter's blue flame lit his purplish face. "You hear? Something big in the capital."
"What big thing?" the third soldier puffed smoke rings. "Those old boys brawling in parliament again?"
Scarface lowered his voice. "My cousin's with the capital defense forces. Says yesterday some 'superhero' like out of an anime—or a comic—raised hell at HQ, tossed two battleships around like toys."
He gestured extravagantly. "Shoots lasers from his eyes, can fly, and is goddamn bulletproof."
"For real?"
"Buddy, your cousin didn't just get drunk and yank your chain?!"
"Hahahaha!!"
They all burst out laughing, the sound extra harsh over the empty ice plain.
"Total bullshit!" The youngest kicked at a drift. "If that happened, the whole net would've blown up already. You think the Public Opinion Control Bureau eats for free?"
The sergeant suddenly squinted. "Wait… what's that?"
The laughter cut off at once.
A shadow was creeping over the snow at their feet. It wasn't a cloud—Antarctica's sky was crystal clear.
All five heads tilted up in unison.
Homelander hung thirty meters up, red cape utterly still in the polar gale.
Ice-blue eyes looked down on the gaping soldiers, a chillingly "blank" expression on his face. Sunlight passed through his near-perfect physique to cast a shadow with a faint golden halo across the snow.
"Good morning, gentlemen."
After multiple upgrades, Homelander could already operate with a measure of autonomous thought like the new-generation clones, but his voice was still glacial. "Could you tell me the way to the virus vault?"
Waaah— wooo————!!
The sirens screamed across the base the instant he spoke.
"Enemy attack!!"
Bang—bang—!
The sergeant's roar and the turrets' thunder came as one.
Twelve 20mm rotary cannons spat flame, their fire weaving a death web in the air.
Homelander didn't even dodge. 20mm HE shells blossomed right before him, but the fragments twisted and fell, pitting the snow with a spray of sizzling pinholes.
At the same time, he locked on to the turrets. His eyes flared a dazzling red and, a heartbeat later—
Ri\~— whoosh——————!!
Boom— rrrrumble——!!
Every turret in sight detonated in succession, flaming debris scattering like fireworks.
The shockwave flipped the five soldiers. On the rookie's helmet display, a red \[Threat Level: ∞] warning flashed madly.
Deep in the base, in the comms room, the duty officer's coffee cup slipped from his hand.
"Initiate emergency protocols!!" he bellowed, slamming the red button. "Repeat, this is not a drill! All units imme—"
He never finished. The ceiling abruptly caved.
Homelander dropped in like a dancer; the instant his boots touched down, "it" opened its mouth and released a kind of shockwave that instantly blew out every electronic device within a hundred meters.
"Sorry to interrupt."
Expressionless, Homelander swept the room. "Which floor is Dr. Lyons' lab on?"
The officer's trembling finger slid toward the hidden alarm under the desk—
Schlit—!!
—and in the next second he realized his arm was gone.
The severed surface was mirror-smooth; it hadn't even had time to bleed.
"Wrong answer." Blood dripped from Homelander's fingertips. "Next?"
Meanwhile, three kilometers away in a crevasse, a stream of data flashed across Leon's helmet HUD.
After exfiltrating the UED capital via individual assault craft, Leon, Mike, Chris and the others had spent hours under cover of a stealth ship to reach the UED Antarctic base.
"Homelander's pulled enough fire."
Leon turned to the fully geared squad. "Dr. Lyons, lead the way."
"Hoo—"
Lyons drew a deep breath, the ice crystals on her cold-weather mask rustling loose.
She looked at the steel fortress where she'd once worked—
Now coughing fire and smoke—and a long-dormant heat welled up in her chest, like a frozen seed finally breaking through the soil.
"Follow me." She stepped into the snow. "I know a maintenance shaft straight to the core sector."
Mike whistled, his nanosuit rippling into snow camo. "Looks like our lady scientist is about to pop off."
Chris checked the energy slot on his pulse rifle. "Stay sharp. UED's elite are stationed here too, and they may already—"
Chris's warning was cut short by a sudden tremor.
In the distance, a battleship hovering in the clouds tilted, the blue glow of its charging main guns bathing the ice plain in ghost-light.
Leon's brows knotted. "Damn it! They're going to bomb the base outright!"
Lyons whipped around, eyes wide behind her visor. "Impossible! There are over three thousand researchers in there!"
"To UED high command," Leon grabbed her and ran, "that's just three thousand potential leaks."
Over the ice, Homelander pulled out of the base and lifted his gaze skyward.
The whites of "his" eyes slowly bled red.
Ri\~— whoosh——————!!
Scarlet beams ripped the sky.
The lasers from his eyes, like a god's spears of judgment, punched clean through the battleship's main power core.
Kra-khoom—!!
The kilometer-long steel behemoth shuddered violently at ten thousand meters. Armor plates twisted and peeled like brittle foil.
Overload glow bled from the fractures, staining a whole cloud deck in eerie neon. The ship snapped in two, burning wreckage corkscrewing down in the polar gale to blast two "craters" over five hundred meters wide into the ice.
A shock front flung up hundred-meter snow-waves, racing out like a tsunami.
But the crisis was far from over.
On Leon's team's helmet displays, over two hundred red blips converged on Antarctica from across the globe. The UED rapid-reaction fleet was on the move.
The nearest five destroyers had opened missile bays in low orbit. Hundreds of tactical missiles tore into atmosphere trailing orange-red plumes, pouring down like a doomsday meteor shower.
"They're insane…" Lyons' voice shook over comms. "Those missiles carry fusion warheads!"
Mike's nanosuit flipped into anti-radiation mode. He deliberately needled her: "Good news is we won't get captured. Bad news is we might get turned into molecules."
Leon ignored his friend's joke and pinged the stealth ship to have Homelander deal with the threat.
Moments later, Homelander snapped his head up, ice-blue irises swallowed completely by crimson.
His speed climbed and climbed. His red cape snapped in the shock cones. In seconds, he was past thirty times the speed of sound.
Boom— BOOM————!
Successive sonic booms vaporized the snow within a kilometer.
A streak of crimson lightning, Homelander wove through the missile rain. Each sweep of his hand carved a vicious "air blade" that sliced guidance systems; wherever his gaze fell, multiple warheads cooked off in midair.
UED fleet commanders in low orbit witnessed something they would never forget.
That red-caped figure traced complex topological curves through the swarm, the chain of fireballs in his wake blooming into a three-dimensional geometry of death.
All five destroyers' main screens overloaded at once. The last frame they caught was Homelander suddenly motionless in the stratosphere, twin superheated beams from his eyes melting straight through the fleet's energy shields—
The first destroyer's bridge was sliced laterally, the cut metal glowing molten orange-red.
The second's missile bay cooked off; the chain reactions turned it into a steel flower blossoming in space.
The third tried an emergency warp, but at the instant of spatial distortion a laser speared its engine; the twisted wreckage remained forever in the rift.
The blasts over Antarctica lit the entire continent.
Even hundreds of kilometers away, observers at research stations could see white-hot flares blinking across the sky—a final "wail" of UED's cutting-edge weapons before absolute power.
In the afterglow, Leon's team reached the side maintenance passage. Lyons pressed her palm to the biometric, frost-dulled metal washing green at once.
"Authorization confirmed, Dr. Lyons," a feminine synth-voice intoned. "Welcome back."
As the airlock slid open, a knifing chill rushed out.
Emergency lights in the passage strobed, throwing mottled bloodstains into relief. Homelander's visit, clearly, had not been gentle.
Chris crouched, ran a fingertip over a still-smoking bullet hole. "Firefight here three minutes ago. Gauss rifles."
"Standard security issue." Lyons' voice was tight. "They'll all have fallen back to the core sector."
Mike lifted a fist. Everyone froze.
From around the corner came broken snippets of comms: ".all units be advised… prioritize destruction of Omega samples… repeat, at all costs…"
Leon drew a finger across his throat.
Mike slid from the shadows like a ghost; two EM darts whispered into the talkers' necks.
Two UED soldiers dropped like cut strings. Behind them loomed a heavy blast door pulsing red, stenciled in yellow: \[Omega Sector · Top Secret].
"This is it." Lyons stepped up and aligned her eye to the iris scanner. "But it needs dual auth—we'll need an—"
She stopped dead. Behind the door's viewport, a black muzzle pointed right at her brow.
"Knew it was you, traitor."
The blast door eased open, revealing the fully armed director of the UED Antarctic base and a dozen security troopers with Gauss rifles behind him.
The director's aug-eye flickered red; his gun never wavered. "Tell us everything you know, and I'll let you die quickly."
In the blind spot, Leon had him in his sights.
Right then, the whole base convulsed. Ice crystals cascaded from the ceiling like a rain of diamonds.
Homelander had just downed the seventh battleship—and the wreck happened to fall on the base.
The director and the guards were distracted—just enough.
Before the man could finish, Leon's muzzle spat a ghost-blue pulse.
Crack—!
A perfect headshot. The aug-eye popped, metal shards and gore splashing the blast door.
At the same instant, Chris and Mike flashed in from both sides, pulse rifles shrieking in the narrow corridor.
Tat—tat—!
Gauss rounds howled past, sparking off alloy bulkheads, but the spec-ops duo were faster. Mike's nanosuit hardened in an instant, soaking two AP hits, while Chris pulled a tactical roll and snapped two controlled pairs; two guards exploded into blood-mist from the chest and dropped.
Lyons locked up where she stood. A bullet sheared past her hair; the scorched slipstream stink reached her nose.
She had never seen killing this close. The agents moved too fast for humans—more like precisely programmed machines of death.
"Don't move." Leon's voice sounded at her ear, low and cool.
His arm barred across her, his other hand rock-steady as he tapped three shots; the last three guards' skulls burst under the pulse slugs.
The gunfire cut off. Only the thudding of bodies and Lyons' ragged breathing remained in the corridor.
"You… you…" Her voice shook.
"Relax." Leon lowered his weapon, tone as flat as if he'd squashed a few ants. "When we act, we don't let our own take a hit."
Mike whistled, kicked a Gauss rifle aside, his nanosuit flowing soft again. "UED security never changes—don't even find a bit of cover. Shooting gallery."
Chris said nothing. He worked quickly over the bodies, confirmed no survivors, and gave Leon a nod.
Lyons drew a deep breath and forced herself steady.
She looked into the lab beyond the blast door—
Where the quantum virus core samples were stored—the "masterpiece" she had helped create.
"Time's short." She set her jaw and strode to the bio-terminal. "I need to extract the samples and overwrite the keys."
Her fingers flew over the interface. A holoprojection unfolded, showing a lattice of complex quantum-encryption protocols.
Leon stood guard behind her while Chris and Mike held the corridor, watching for reinforcements.
"Copying data…" the mechanical female voice announced, icy and precise.
The base shook again. Ice dust sifted from the ceiling.
Homelander was still outside, carving up the UED fleet, but the concussions were getting closer. Enemy fire was pushing limits.
"Stealth ship just warned us," Chris said, eyes on the data streaming across his tactical optics. "Ten minutes and we're out, or the orbital cannon will lock us."
Lyons' fingers faltered, then kept going.
She pulled up the base's emergency broadcast channel and keyed in her clearance.
"All researchers, this is Dr. Lyons," her voice rolled through the base on the PA. "The base is about to be destroyed. Evacuate immediately to Emergency Passage B7. Repeat, evacuate immediately!"
Static and clamor flooded the broadcast—panicked questions, angry shouts—but Lyons ignored it…
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