Chapter 205: Matthew's Custom Dark Edition: Homelander
Inside the testing facility.
With the results of the third test phase announced, Matthew allowed a small degree of satisfaction to show on his face.
"Since phase three is clear, it's time for the final test."
The final test phase.
Live combat.
As for the opponent...
Matthew clapped twice. The metal wall in the distance split open and retracted to both sides, revealing a passage behind it.
The corridor beyond was completely dark. No light at all.
The Prototype Nemesis standing near the wall entrance heard the movement behind it and turned its head. Its gaze followed the turn toward the darkness at the passage's far end.
Before it had fully looked:
A sound like a supersonic missile tearing through low altitude detonated without warning.
The next instant, the Prototype Nemesis simply came apart.
Blood and flesh scattered across nearly twenty meters.
Blood rained down from the air in drops. The powerful frame that had shrugged off multiple RPG hits had been ground apart in a single moment.
When the red rain finally stopped falling, a silhouette materialized in the air above, hovering, both hands clasped behind its back.
Immaculate blond hair. Eyes carrying a deep crimson light.
All-black combat suit. Dark red cape behind.
A cold, remote presence radiated from it, as though whatever stood there was less a person than a thing designed for killing.
Homelander.
Or more precisely — the custom version.
The original Homelander had come with too many personality defects. Matthew had used the System to customize him directly, producing something loyal and functional: a killing machine that answered to one person.
Every personality flaw, every quirk, every unstable tendency had been stripped out completely.
What remained was a fully dark version. Even the combat suit was symbiote-constructed. His body had gone through multiple rounds of update and enhancement. He was not the same thing he had been.
Under the cold lights, Homelander floated with hands behind his back, face blank and still.
Those crimson eyes moved slightly. Something burned deep behind them, slow and hot, churning beneath the surface.
A thought was all it would take. The heat vision that could melt through steel would pour out without limit.
The symbiote suit seemed to sense its host's intent to kill.
Black cords like thick veins surged beneath the surface of the suit, spreading across his chest and up his neck — as though countless living things were threading through the fibers, hungry for the bloodshed and violence that was coming.
Meanwhile the Blacklight Prototype had already finished recalibrating.
Having absorbed the railgun's energy through the prior phase, every joule had been fully converted into enhancement fuel and distributed through his body. His frame had expanded another full degree — height now pushing two meters ninety, standing there like a giant poured from black iron.
The Blacklight Prototype looked up at the hovering figure, and something surfaced in his eyes that hadn't been there before. Caution.
The next instant —
The body modified by Las Plagas began rapidly restructuring.
The flesh of the right arm churned and reshaped like boiling wax.
Bone cracked and shifted rapidly beneath the skin. Within moments, a heavy bone shield had formed.
Half a person's height. An irregular fan shape. Surface layered in grey-white bone plate.
Across the surface, dense spiral grooves were etched into the material, and along the edge a row of irregular reverse barbs extended outward, each one catching the cold light with a hard gleam.
The left arm changed in a way that was more unsettling.
From the elbow joint downward, flesh and bone extended and solidified outward into a massive cleaving blade over a meter and a half long.
Dark red. As though tempered directly from muscle fiber: rough surface, unusual sharpness.
The blade's tip curved upward slightly, forming a reverse hook.
A cut from this wouldn't just open the target. Pulling it back out would drag organs and tissue with it.
The Blacklight Prototype lowered his center of gravity. Shield across his chest. Blade angled down toward the floor. A textbook combat stance.
Homelander looked down at all of this from above.
His face remained completely expressionless, as though the fully armed creature below was nothing more than an insect making a show of its claws.
His eyes moved slightly, gaze sliding past the Blacklight Prototype to find Matthew in the distance.
Homelander didn't speak.
But what those crimson eyes communicated was entirely clear: are we starting or not?
Matthew read it without difficulty.
Seeing the Blacklight Prototype ready, he raised his right hand. Several spell arrays materialized along his arm.
Then his fingers formed a seal.
In the same instant —
The entire testing facility space shuddered like water struck by a stone.
The air resonated. Light bent and folded. A translucent barrier expanded outward from Matthew as its center, spreading rapidly until it enclosed the entire floor.
Mirror Dimension: deployed.
Both the Blacklight Prototype and Homelander were enclosed within it simultaneously. The surrounding environment looked unchanged. But the battlefield was now completely sealed from the outside world.
The insurance measure — making sure the testing facility itself survived what was about to happen.
With that done, Matthew pushed his sunglasses up. "You can begin."
The moment the words landed —
Homelander moved.
No windup. No telegraphed intent.
He went from absolute stillness to over ten times the speed of sound in an instant, the sonic boom not yet reaching the air before he had already crossed more than a hundred meters of distance.
The air behind him tore apart, producing visible white shockwave rings expanding outward in his wake.
The dark red cape on the symbiote suit was pulled straight into a thin bleeding line by the velocity. The speed was enough that even the Blacklight Prototype's dynamic visual tracking could only catch a blurred afterimage.
One moment.
Homelander's knee was already in the Blacklight Prototype's face.
Against a knee strike coming in at over ten times the speed of sound, the Blacklight Prototype chose not to absorb it.
The massive energy the railgun had poured into him had been sitting there like a dormant volcano that had finally found its outlet.
The bone shield on his right arm dropped. The cleaving blade on his left arm rose instead.
One cut, downward.
The energy converted by the Void Shield released in that moment, flooding out of his body in a torrent, channeling along the blade's edge as a visible dark red streak that roared outward along the cut path.
The shriek of the blade opening the air hadn't even reached them before that compressed flood of energy slammed into Homelander's knee.
The collision of two destructive forces in midair.
The moment they met, the entire Mirror Dimension seemed to be paused — the surrounding air seized, every particle of drifting dust, every fragment of debris, even the light itself, froze mid-motion.
Then:
A shockwave erupted outward from the collision point in every direction.
The air compressed into a white wall and struck every surface simultaneously like a hammer swung from all directions at once.
Everything inside the Mirror Dimension shook violently. The folded barrier surface erupted with dense ripples as if the force were about to tear through it in the next second.
Before the smoke and fire had cleared, two points of crimson light blazed to life in the air above.
The heat vision in Homelander's eyes spiked.
He looked down at the figure below and something cold moved through his gaze.
Didn't go down in one hit.
Then another.
He didn't wait for the smoke to settle. The heat vision fired.
Two searing red beams lanced out from the center of the smoke cloud, splitting the dense haze cleanly in two and carving a straight vacuum channel through it.
The air along the beams' path hissed and burned.
The sweep was wide. It hit the Blacklight Prototype without missing.
The Void Shield activated immediately, the pale blue luminescence flickering rapidly as it consumed the thermal energy flood and converted it to power.
But this enhancement had a ceiling. The body's structural limit was the cap.
If absorbed energy exceeded the cap by too much, the result was catastrophic structural failure from within.
So the Blacklight Prototype would stop absorbing before reaching that limit and vent the stored energy before it could destroy him.
The heat vision was also different from the railgun in one key respect.
The railgun had lasted ten seconds and stopped. Homelander's heat vision showed no sign of depleting — it poured out in a continuous, seemingly inexhaustible stream.
The Void Shield went from pale blue to deep blue, then from deep blue to a blinding red.
Energy was accumulating internally faster than it could be vented.
The Blacklight Prototype's body was like a reservoir being pumped past capacity. The dam walls could be strong — they still had an absolute limit.
The deep red lava-crack lines beneath his skin began spreading rapidly. The light from them intensified, as though magma were about to break through the surface.
Muscle fiber strained under the energy load, producing a stressed whine. Bone made faint creaking sounds from inside.
At the limit.
Seeing it, the Blacklight Prototype's eyes locked hard. The Void Shield cut off instantly.
In the same motion, he raised the bone shield on his left arm and brought it up in front of him.
The heat vision hit the shield. A sharp hissing contact sound.
The grey-white bone plate began melting at a visible rate, black smoke rising from the surface.
But the spiral grooves across the shield's interior came into use now, spreading and redirecting the heat vision's energy outward along the channels rather than allowing it to concentrate on one point.
While the shield held, the Blacklight Prototype pulled his right foot back half a step —
Then drove it into the floor.
The energy stored in his legs released on impact.
A violent force surged outward along the floor surface in every direction like a ground eruption, the concrete tearing from within, the floor surface buckling into a straight ridge that shot toward Homelander's position, hurling debris and dust high into the air.
When that force reached Homelander's feet:
The floor exploded.
Chunks of concrete mixed with rebar launched in every direction like fragmentation grenades. Each piece carried the energy the Blacklight Prototype had released, moving fast enough to produce a sharp whine from air friction, a comprehensive barrage directed at the airborne Homelander.
Against fragments that would have turned an ordinary person into a colander, Homelander didn't move.
Instead, the symbiote suit on his body responded.
The suit's surface swelled with dozens of fist-sized protrusions, as though countless living things were moving rapidly through the fibers beneath.
Then hundreds of pitch-black tendrils burst out of the suit simultaneously.
Each one moved with something like independent purpose, precisely striking the incoming stone fragments.
Every piece hit disintegrated into powder and rained down from the air.
More tendrils spread across the space between, weaving into a dense net that intercepted every remaining fragment mid-flight. Not one piece came within three meters of Homelander.
The smoke cleared. The debris settled.
Homelander was still hovering in the same position, hands behind his back, the tattered dark red cape rippling in the energy residue.
Those crimson eyes looked down through the settling haze at the Blacklight Prototype below.
Deep in them, the red glow rose again.
Facing the returning heat in those eyes, the Blacklight Prototype understood that passive defense was no longer sustainable.
His feet blew the floor apart beneath him. His entire body launched like a round accelerated to its limit on an electromagnetic rail, slamming directly upward toward Homelander.
No technique in this hit.
Every last reserve of energy poured into his legs. Fast enough to drag a conical white trail in the air behind him.
Shield forward. Blade trailing behind.
He used his own body as the weapon and drove at Homelander in the most basic, most direct way possible.
Homelander's eyes narrowed.
Heat vision swept out again.
But this time, the Blacklight Prototype didn't activate the Void Shield.
He let both red beams graze across his flank.
Flesh vaporized instantly, leaving two deep channels burned to the bone.
He didn't even flinch.
One moment later he was at Homelander's level.
He launched upward.
Then:
The cleaving blade came down.
Every unit of energy still unspent in the Blacklight Prototype's body was in that strike.
The dark red blade groaned under the force as it descended, fracture lines of light spreading across the bone edge as though it were about to shatter.
It didn't.
The blade connected squarely with Homelander's left shoulder.
A detonation like thunder at close range.
The visible shockwave from the point of contact spread outward in every direction.
Homelander's body was driven from the air straight down by the impact.
He hit the floor like a meteorite, concrete and rebar thrown high, the floor gouged into a trench dozens of meters long, his body finally slamming into the Mirror Dimension's barrier at the far edge.
Dust and smoke erupted skyward.
The Blacklight Prototype landed.
His left arm's cleaving blade had shattered completely on that strike — only a jagged stump of broken bone remained at the elbow joint.
His regeneration was already at work. Within moments, a new blade was reforming.
But that wasn't the point right now.
His eyes were fixed on the cloud of smoke that hadn't yet settled.
Through it, a silhouette slowly rose. It stepped forward and walked out of the smoke.
Homelander's dark red cape had been mostly sheared away by the blade. The remains hung ragged behind him.
The symbiote suit at his left shoulder had been opened by a deep, ugly gash. The black fibers were convulsing as they repaired themselves.
Through the still-moving tear, raw flesh and exposed bone were visible beneath.
He was injured.
Insignificant to him. One breath and it would be gone.
Homelander looked down at his left shoulder.
Nothing on his face.
The next instant —
He was gone.
The Blacklight Prototype felt danger and his pupils contracted hard.
He didn't even have time to turn.
A hand covered in symbiote fibers appeared in front of him.
A punch landed.
The Void Shield responded instantly.
The shield began flickering.
The force behind this single punch exceeded the Void Shield's absorption rate.
Seeing the situation deteriorate, the Blacklight Prototype moved to raise the bone shield.
Too late.
Crack.
The bone shield shattered under the fist.
Grey-white fragments mixed with flesh and blood scattered in every direction. The Blacklight Prototype's right arm deformed completely under the impact, bone fracturing under the skin with a sound that reached the teeth.
Having destroyed the shield, Homelander didn't throw another punch.
He reached out and gripped the Blacklight Prototype by both shoulders.
Then both hands pulled simultaneously.
Outward.
"Shk."
The sound of flesh tearing — dense and sharp.
The Blacklight Prototype's left arm was ripped from his torso in one motion. Blood and shattered bone poured from the tear and soaked across a wide section of floor, red spreading across the concrete.
Not finished.
Before the blood had finished spraying, Homelander's heat vision activated.
At point-blank range.
Two red beams erupted from his eyes and drove directly into the Blacklight Prototype's right side.
The beams entered at the right shoulder at an angle, burned downward through the chest cavity, and exited at the waist.
Where they passed: skin carbonized instantly. Muscle contracted and curled under the heat. Internal organs vaporized. Bone melted to a red liquid that dripped from the edges of the cut.
The air filled with the smell of burning flesh.
The Blacklight Prototype's body was cut diagonally in half.
The cut surface was uniformly black.
The heat had sealed the vessels. Not a drop of blood came from the cut.
Homelander looked at what remained of the Blacklight Prototype, now completely unable to fight. He said nothing. He simply dropped what he was holding and turned, flying back into the passage he had come from without a word.
Behind him.
With a heavy impact, the half-body of the Blacklight Prototype hit the floor, raising a ring of dust.
He still tried to push himself up.
His body told him the reality of the situation before his mind fully accepted it.
The fight was decided.
The mass-production version had not been able to overcome the custom unit.
But in context — not bad at all.
If the Blacklight Prototype had been wearing its powered armor, this fight would not have ended so cleanly.
At minimum... the Blacklight Prototype could have lasted a few more rounds.