Marvel: Raising — Chapter 170 - The Homie VS The Homelander
"Ashley, that... is that him?"
The company.
The moment the sky went dark, the sun extinguished, the Homie standing upon the planet, A-Train panicked.
He rushed to the CEO's office, eyes locked on the satellite photos, his face gone ashen.
"Stay calm." Ashley wiped cold sweat from her brow, lips trembling. "We still have Mr. Guan."
The unspoken implication hung in the air.
Because when that Homie in the star-spangled battle suit appeared, the two of them had actually lost faith in The Homie.
Utterly inconceivable.
But there was no helping it. First, the Homie's long-accumulated terror hit different for Ashley and A-Train. They'd come from The Boys universe. It was PTSD, plain and simple.
Second, the original Homie never had the ability to extinguish the sun.
And as everyone knew, The Homie's energy source was the sun.
The implications were immediate.
This was too terrifying. Scared them half to death.
That the two of them could barely hold it together and hadn't already bolted out the back door counted as bravery.
As for everyone else?
Even those who knew nothing of the history between The Homie and the Homie still had their own intelligence channels.
"J.A.R.V.I.S., what's the situation?"
Tony Stark asked.
The next moment, a stuttering electronic voice came back, lagging hard: "V-Very bad."
"For reasons unknown."
"Another Azu has appeared."
"He froze the sun with his gaze. A light that had burned for 4.6 billion years in this star system has been snuffed out. The entire blue planet is now shrouded in darkness, a night without light. A force field saturated with annihilative, destructive energy has scrambled the cosmic magnetic field. The Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn are falling. The blue planet's continental plates have shifted. Hurricanes and earthquakes everywhere."
Tony Stark: "!"
What the actual hell. That bad?
He looked up, his expression caught somewhere between inquiry and disbelief.
Who exactly was that?
Just the aura of his arrival could trigger catastrophe on this scale?
If that was the case, all he had to do was stand still and every living thing, every civilization on this planet would march toward annihilation.
What was this, Doomsday?
And you know what — Tony guessed right.
DC's Doomsday was, in itself, the most terrifying monster in existence, the ultimate biological weapon. It had brutalized Superman. It had adapted to Darkseid's Omega Beams.
Infinite evolution. Impossible to kill.
And now? The Homie was Doomsday plus Bizarro plus Speed Force plus Black Adam, and had soaked in the core of a sun on top of it all.
Buffs stacked to the absolute max.
When the sun went out and the star system froze, a piercing cold spread alongside a viscous, clinging darkness. Out across the glaciers spanning the cosmic void, a figure emerged from the ice.
The Homelander stood in the dark. His face was laced with cracks like shattered porcelain.
The look he fixed on The Homie, ascending into the sky, was saturated with envy and hatred, with jealousy so raw it had curdled into something sick. A sickly distortion. A madness barely held in check.
"I knew you'd come on your own," the Homelander said. "You'd never pass up a chance to perform for Dad, John."
"Don't say it like that." Azu, that is, The Homie, grinned. "Because if you found out Dad was actually the one who sent me this time, and that he gave me something good on top of it —"
"You'd cry yourself sick, John."
!
The Homie erupted. Eyes going red: "What did Dad give you?"
"Guess."
Azu's smile was pure malice. "I can already hear the sob in your voice. You're not seriously going to crawl home and cry into your little blankie, are you? No way, right? No way?"
Before the last word left his mouth, the air around them dropped several degrees sharper.
"Kill you, and I can become The Homie too! I can be Dad's good son too!"
The Homie's expression twisted, face going full feral. He stabbed a finger at Azu. "You will become a part of me!"
He was already there before the words finished.
Right in front of Azu. Eyes pitch-black, gaze cold and flat.
Not teleportation. Not magic.
Just running.
The Speed Force.
He'd also been injected with Ultimate Velocity 9, but compared to Scarlet Witch or Black Strange, the Homie was clearly faster, stronger, and more stable. His speed defied description. "I'll punch through time and space just to reach you" wasn't a metaphor — it was a literal statement.
By the time Azu registered that he'd moved, Azu had already taken the hit.
BOOM!
One punch. Like a billion-ton meteorite impact. The glacier that had frozen a swath of open space shattered, debris swirling and scattering into sky-filling hail, a torrential rain of ice.
But the falling trajectories of that hail, that rain, twisted like magnetic field lines.
Because the punch force was still radiating outward.
That staggering force looked like it wanted to punch straight through the entire blue planet. Rotation and revolution stuttered to a halt. Hail and rain hammered down. Mountains crumbled, the earth split. The punch force drove down into the planet's core like a seismic wave, then detonated outward in every direction, 360 degrees.
And then an astonishing sight appeared.
On one end of the blue planet, Azu was knocked flying by a single punch. During his descent, on the exact opposite side of the world, cities, cars, and people suddenly lost all gravity and floated into the air.
Both sides suspended. The momentum and trajectory perfectly mirrored each other.
The equivalent of a shockwave blasting clean through to the opposite end of the planet. The equivalent of lifting the entire world upside down and holding it there.
Powerful. Inconceivable.
WHOOSH!
The Homie's form tore through curtains of hail and rain and slammed down into a city.
This place had once suffered a nuclear accident. The people here had already perished, courtesy of America's archaeological-style disaster relief.
An empty cityscape, deserted buildings. Perfect for a fight.
"YOU! ARE! STILL! SPACING! OUT!"
Then Azu heard it: a shrieking, piercing wail rising up behind him, right at his ear. The sound of a woman scorned dialed up to supernatural frequencies, so aggrieved it was like a ghostly wind cutting through the ruins.
The Homie had caught up. Swinging with absolute zero technique, haymakers and front kicks and double hammer strikes to the temples, a chaotic storm of blows.
Azu stepped back, pivoted, and kicked.
BANG!
Fist met foot. The heavens roared. A mushroom cloud punched into the sky. With nothing but raw physical force, the two of them pulverized molecules and atoms alike, a detonation indistinguishable from a nuclear blast.
In the churning smoke, Azu tried to retreat and create distance.
The Homie was faster.
He chased, he pummeled, he roared with exhilaration. ORA ORA ORA. "I'm stronger! I'm superior! I'm better! I do whatever I want! You cannot beat me!"
Azu: "Yeah, yeah, sure, totally."
BOOM!
Mid-sentence, Azu's eyes blazed gold. Heat vision burst outward.
"Come on then!"
The Homie didn't flinch. He glared straight back. Freeze vision crackled out, white frost shimmering like a cold rainbow.
Two world-ending beams collided.
Extreme cold and extreme heat hammering into each other, over and over.
The sky flashed brilliant one second, radiant as full sunlight, then plunged into a dark downpour the next. The earth below turned to magma, then hardened into frozen permafrost, then back again. Mountain ranges ten thousand meters away collapsed like sandcastles.
The buildings of the uninhabited city didn't stand a chance. They shattered, groaned, and tumbled into the fissures splitting the earth open, swallowed whole.
"Tony..."
J.A.R.V.I.S., who had been monitoring the battle via satellite, registered something that sounded almost like human shock: "The climate, gravity, even the fundamental physical properties of matter on this planet have been altered."
"The aftershocks of their battle are reshaping the planet."
Tony Stark: "..."
Speechless. Helpless.
The current situation was beyond Iron Man. Beyond any superhero.
Because this was, in the truest sense, gods fighting. Compared to The Homie and The Homie 2.0, superheroes didn't seem all that super anymore.
No costumed figures strutting a New York runway. No unhinged "I have an announcement." No cheap sucker-punch knockouts, no coin-flip matchups.
Against The Boys aesthetic, where sudden death and overwhelming raw power crushed everything in front of it, even Iron Man could only watch from a distance and hope that his side's god was the one still standing at the end.
➤ Next: Win! — Clash