Marvel: Raising — Chapter 144 - Homelander Slaughters the Boys' World

"......"

Watching these familiar scenes unfold.

John actually felt like laughing.

DC had New Vought now. Marvel had its own company. But when it came to raw fandom purity, fan loyalty, the kind that got cultured over decades, neither could touch the original Vought.

"Look, it's Homelander!"

"So handsome, so handsome!"

"Idol!"

Spotting John, passersby erupted in cheers, waving their Homelander merch in the air.

"Hahahaha."

John instinctively flashed his bright, open smile. But under the sunlight, his face was deathly pale and cracked, like a walking corpse.

Genuinely terrifying.

"Oh my god, could it be true what Vought said, Homelander went on a secret mission and got hurt?"

"He really did, I'm crying!"

"AAAAAAH, Zubaby has it so rough! Mommy's here!"

John hadn't even thought of an excuse. The fans filled it in themselves.

John: "......"

6.

Speechless. Again.

Then John, star-spangled suit and all, WHOOSHED back to Vought International.

Cheeks pale and cracked.

His eyes held a bone-deep, glacial light, still as a frozen throne, yet his every breath billowed with flame.

The Anti-Life Equation matrices and sequences were visible to the naked eye, orbiting him in slow, churning loops, making the already brutal, ferocious John look even more savage.

"Oh. Homelander."

Seeing John return, Edgar, who had seized control of Vought International again during the gap, stepped out. "You're back just in time."

"A-Train, Starlight, Ashley — they've all been branded wanted fugitives."

"Now the company needs you..."

Edgar directed with his usual air of authority.

But.

John didn't listen to a word of it. Didn't get angry. Didn't get annoyed.

"Someone get me everything the company has produced, all the Compound V, the temporary Compound V, and the corresponding data."

"And my good son, Ryan."

John's voice was flat. "Hand them over."

"?"

The scene was so far outside the expected script that Edgar went completely still.

How was this possible?

In his mind, John was a product. No different from an app or an AI. You issued a command, and under normal circumstances, the product responded accordingly.

But John had just ignored him.

"What exactly have you been through out there? Homelander."

Edgar's frown deepened. His tone shifted into something harder, an interrogation.

In the past, whenever Edgar adopted that stern posture, whenever he spoke in that measured, paternal tone, John would fold immediately.

But now, John just looked at him. Calm. Unhurried. The look a man gives an ant.

Edgar felt his scalp crawl. "You're... no longer starved for love? That defect of yours, it's just gone?"

"That's right."

John let out a short laugh. "The product you spent decades building — all those experiments, all that conditioning, all that careful engineering — it only takes a single moment to make it feel something like a person."

"All it took was seeing my official dad."

His laughter climbed as he spoke, wider and wilder, until it cracked open into a full, unhinged cackle, teeth and all.

"Thank you, Edgar. Thank you for the recognition."

He laughed like it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. "So in your eyes, I'm already about the same as Azu? Hahahahaha!"

The brightness of it unsettled Edgar more than anger would have. He steadied himself with a deep breath. "Who is this official dad?"

The laughter cut off.

Dead silence.

A cold, murderous light filled John's eyes, the kind that felt like it was about to stop being metaphorical and turn into something that could drill through steel.

"You don't get to say his name."

John's personality had always been twisted, fractured at the core. But now he looked less like a man and more like a live wire.

When it came to his official dad, the contradiction was total. John talked about him constantly, obsessively, desperately, the word "dad" practically lived on his tongue. But the moment anyone else so much as mentioned that man, something in John switched. His eyes lit up with a particular brightness, and then the rage came in right behind it.

He would lose it completely. Roaring. Howling. Kicking like a toddler mid-tantrum, ready to throw a freeze vision blast at anyone who dared try to "steal" his official dad, planets, star systems, everything in the vicinity, flash-frozen and shattered.

In his heart, there was only one rule that mattered: his official dad could only ever have one good son, and that son was him.

"Edgar, I used to want your approval."

"Like a son wanting his father to be proud of him."

"But that was then."

"Looking at you now, you're just an ordinary man. Nothing more."

John smiled again, wide, radiant, the kind of smile that should mean happiness. It didn't reach anything below the surface. The eyes were wrong. The whole shape of his face was wrong. "You're not a god. You're not a father. You're just a fool who never learned his place."

One punch. Edgar's insides decorated the wall.

John walked through Vought International like he owned every hallway of it, which he supposed he always had. Freeze vision fired on zero frames' notice. Flames spat from his lips when the mood struck him.

He even stopped in front of a Vought International live-stream camera, threw up a peace sign, and made the streamer paint the floor with their brain matter and offer up their heart.

This place where he grew up.

These familiar faces. These familiar rules.

Watching it all break apart.

The screaming, the despair, the hatred, it lit him up. It made him feel good.

"This is proof I've grown!"

John looked utterly blissful, his whole body shaking with it.

Yes. This.

This was the feeling. He wasn't the weak, useless creature he used to be. He'd finally shed that overgrown-infant skin. He'd risen into something new, something that looked a lot like eight-year-old Azu.

This was what he'd been chasing. What he'd been working toward the whole time.

......

"Achoo."

Marvel world. New York. The farm.

Azu sneezed.

"Knock it off."

He scratched his head and told Godzilla to quit stomping through the dandelions, the pollen tickled. Then he yanked a stalk of sugarcane free with a clean pop, bit down on it, and stretched out flat on the earthen ridge between the fields.

Chewing sugarcane. Completely at peace.

Over at Stark Tower, Mr. Tony was throwing a hundred-day celebration for his daughter right about now.

But Dad was still off messing around in the ninja world.

Dad wasn't going.

Azu didn't have much interest in the crowd either.

He had asked Dad why he wasn't going. Dad's answer: "Party that lively? Something's definitely going to get broken."

So Azu had been watching through the Time Stone.

He saw Mr. Tony stroll out of his Iron Man armor with the energy of a man who had been waiting all week to do exactly this, smug, shining, soaking up the cheers.

"Top donor 666!" Deadpool was pole-dancing.

"Hulk, smash that like button!"

Banner, maybe out of shyness, switched to the Hulk to make his appearance.

"Need a recharge?"

Thor was generating electricity.

A-Train had shown up too, and his appetite was in fine form.

On the mutant side, the X-Men had sent a delegation: Blink, Polaris, Magik.

The whole crowd was going, eating, drinking, celebrating in full force.

And then.

A ragged man in a black leather jacket slipped through the edge of the party and started helping himself to the food.

Under normal circumstances, with Tony's money, feeding one extra guest was nothing.

The problem was that Stark Industries had a well-established reputation for producing supervillains.

The staff clocked him immediately. The guy ate like he'd been dead for a week, piling his plate, going back for more. It was embarrassing just to watch.

Get out.

A few words turned into shoving. The shoving turned into someone pulling a gun.

And that was the moment Johnny Blaze, who had just been through a string of disasters, was still being hunted by devils, and whose mental state was charitable to describe as fragile, revealed his flaming skull.

After that, there was no putting it back in the bottle.

Ghost Rider moved through the party on pure mission. The iron chain came out. He lashed people with it, burned them with his hollow, blazing eye sockets, and when that wasn't enough, he whistled, and a motorcycle answered, the kind that could fly above the clouds and tear through the earth beneath them.

He rampaged up through the building in style, leaving chaos in his wake, completely unstoppable.

Azu: "Lol."

Dad was right again. He was still laughing.

➤ Next: The Angel of Marvel