CH 57: The Boys – Six Nobodies
Hela looked at the six people standing before her and felt a faint sense of confusion. They called themselves the Seven, yet there were only six of them standing there. Was this world so primitive that its people had somehow failed to learn basic counting, or was there another explanation for such an absurd name? She quickly dismissed the first possibility; the world did not appear primitive enough to justify it, which left only the second explanation, and judging by the people standing before her, stupidity seemed considerably more likely.
The six members of the Seven, meanwhile, were experiencing very different emotions. Vought's instructions had been clear: do not engage Hela in unnecessary conversation, because allowing her to simply ignore them would make the Seven look weak, but at the same time they had been told to project confidence and speak once they had defeated her. The problem was that several of them were beginning to suspect that the second part of the plan was rather optimistic. A-Train kept remembering the footage of Shockwave being caught and thrown aside as though he were nothing, and he had enough self-awareness to know that he wasn't so vastly faster than Shockwave that the same thing couldn't happen to him.
Their strategy had therefore been straightforward. Homelander, Queen Maeve, and Black Noir would engage Hela directly, while A-Train and Translucent would exploit their speed and invisibility respectively to attack from unexpected angles. The Deep, as usual, had been given little specific responsibility beyond doing whatever he could contribute. None of them were particularly confident about the plan, but Homelander's presence gave them enough reassurance to proceed, especially with cameras from Vought broadcasting the confrontation to an audience of millions. Whatever happened, Homelander would surely be enough to handle her. At least, that was what they wanted themselves to believe.
Hela remained seated upon her throne throughout their approach, apparently uninterested in the people who had come to challenge her. That indifference irritated Homelander more with every passing second, because there were few things he hated more than being treated as though he were irrelevant. The Vought technicians had barely finished positioning the high-definition cameras when Homelander finally lost his patience and rose into the air, his eyes glowing red as twin beams of heat vision tore toward the goddess sitting before him. Hela didn't even bother looking at him. The beams struck her body and simply washed over her without producing any visible effect, leaving her sitting exactly where she had been.
Seeing Homelander attack gave Maeve and Noir the opening they had been waiting for, and both moved in from opposite sides. Hela finally shifted her attention, though not because Homelander's attack had concerned her; it was the two approaching Supes that had finally become close enough to warrant removing. She rose from her throne with almost casual ease and turned toward Black Noir, catching him before he could complete his attack. One hand seized him with such effortless strength that he couldn't even struggle, while her other hand caught one of his legs, and with a simple pull she tore his body apart.
The reaction from the watching crowd was immediate. Screams erupted throughout the streets as people recoiled from the sudden brutality, while the delayed news feeds gave broadcasters just enough time to throw up mosaics or cut away entirely from the worst of the footage. Queen Maeve barely had time to process what had happened before Hela turned and drove a kick directly into her chest, launching her through the air and sending her crashing into the crowd far beyond the immediate confrontation. Maeve survived, though she was badly injured, but Hela didn't even bother watching where she landed; to the Goddess of Death, whether the woman lived or died was simply too insignificant to matter.
Translucent, meanwhile, had already decided that discretion was the better part of survival. He had approached while Hela's attention was occupied, relying on his invisibility to make himself impossible to detect, but from Hela's perspective the trick was barely worth acknowledging. She could perceive him perfectly, his invisibility doing nothing more than making him look like a particularly poor attempt at camouflage. The instant he turned to flee, a dark-green sword materialized behind him and pierced straight through his chest, killing him before he could take more than a few steps.
“How dare you?” Homelander roared.
He launched himself forward at full speed, anger overcoming whatever caution remained, and drove his fist toward Hela with enough force to make the air around him crack. Hela simply raised one hand and caught his fist. The sudden stop was so complete that Homelander's expression changed from fury to disbelief, and before he could even pull himself free, Hela's fingers tightened around his hand.
“I am the God! You dare call yourself a goddess?” he snarled, firing his heat vision directly into her face at point-blank range as though greater proximity would somehow make the attack more effective.
Hela merely stared through the red beams.
“Pathetic.”
For the first time since she had arrived in this world, Hela decided to experiment.
Homelander suddenly felt something being torn out of him.
His body remained standing, but an instant later Hela was holding something invisible in her hand, something that Homelander himself could somehow see despite no one else around him being able to. His own soul had been ripped free of his body, leaving him staring at Hela in absolute horror as she examined it with the detached curiosity of a goddess studying an unfamiliar specimen. Emerald-green chains materialized around the soul in her grasp, winding themselves around it and sinking into its very essence until Homelander could feel their presence despite no longer possessing a physical connection to his own body.
Hela studied the bound soul for several moments before finally deciding she had learned enough. With a simple movement of her hand, she forced it back into Homelander's body, the emerald chains following it and remaining wrapped around his soul even after it had returned. Nothing appeared to have changed from the outside, yet Homelander could feel the chains surrounding something far more fundamental than flesh, and the realization left him more frightened than any physical attack could have.
“Bring the blue one back,” Hela ordered.
Homelander's expression hardened despite the fear still visible in his eyes. He was accustomed to giving orders, not receiving them, and certainly not from some strange woman who had just torn his soul from his body. “And why would I—”
Hela tightened the chains.
Pain exploded through Homelander's very soul.
His body convulsed as an agonized scream tore from his throat, the sensation completely unlike anything he had experienced before. It wasn't an injury he could endure through toughness, nor something his body could resist healing; the pain existed somewhere deeper, somewhere his physical strength offered him absolutely no protection. Hela watched him for several seconds with detached curiosity, apparently interested in determining just how much punishment the soul of this world's greatest “god pretender” could endure before his mind gave out.
It didn't take long.
Homelander's eyes rolled back, his body went limp, and he collapsed unconscious onto the ground.
Hela looked toward the remaining members of the Seven. The Deep, still wearing his green suit, had already fainted from terror and was sprawled uselessly on the ground, while A-Train—the blue one—had taken advantage of the chaos to run as far from the square as his legs could carry him. Hela had no particular interest in pursuing him; whether he escaped or not was irrelevant, because her experiment had already yielded what she wanted.
She simply looked down at the unconscious Homelander, the faint emerald glow of the chains still visible within his soul.
For all their boasting, these people had been remarkably disappointing.
She had faced the heroes of Earth before, and although many of them had been arrogant, reckless, or absurdly overconfident, they had at least possessed enough strength to make their presence meaningful. Some had even earned a measure of her respect through their willingness to stand against beings vastly more powerful than themselves.
These people were different.
They called themselves heroes, yet most of them had barely been worth testing. One had tried to hide from the Goddess of Death with invisibility, another had attempted to outrun her after realizing he was outmatched, and the strongest among them had proclaimed himself a god before having his soul dragged from his body like a frightened child. Hela's disappointment was almost palpable as she looked toward the enormous screens still displaying the smiling faces of the Seven, their carefully crafted image of America's greatest heroes continuing to play above the ruined battlefield.
She had seen real heroes before.
Compared to them, this world's champions were pathetic. Even her wolf brother would have found them beneath the level of a proper meal.
The silence that followed was almost stranger than the screams that had filled Times Square moments earlier. Across the world, millions of people were still staring at their televisions, phones, and computer screens, many of them unable to comprehend what they had just witnessed. The broadcast had begun as another carefully manufactured Vought spectacle, complete with cameras positioned to capture the Seven's triumphant victory over the mysterious goddess who had dared to challenge America, yet somewhere between Homelander's first attack and the moment his soul had been torn from his body, it had transformed into something nobody at Vought had prepared for. There was no triumphant music anymore, no polished commentary, and certainly no advertisements capable of making what had happened look heroic; there was only the horrifying footage of America's greatest heroes lying defeated while Hela remained standing.
In homes across the country, people who had spent their entire lives believing the Seven were practically invincible were experiencing the same realization at roughly the same time. Some parents hurriedly pulled their children away from the television, while others simply sat frozen in their chairs, unable to look away despite themselves. Bars that had been filled with people watching the confrontation erupted into confused conversations, with some customers insisting that the footage had to be fake or edited, while others pointed out that dozens of independent cameras had captured the same thing from different angles. Social media exploded almost instantly, hashtags appearing faster than anyone could read them, with people arguing over whether Hela was actually a goddess, some previously unknown Supe, an alien, or something that humanity simply had no word for yet.
The reaction to Homelander was even more complicated. For years, Vought had carefully cultivated his image as the strongest, bravest, most dependable hero in America, the man who could supposedly handle anything thrown at him, and millions of people had believed it because they had never been given a reason not to. Now those same people had watched him attack Hela with everything he possessed, only to have his fist caught as casually as a child's, his heat vision ignored, and his soul dragged out of his body before he was reduced to a screaming wreck. The fact that he was still alive somehow made the footage even more disturbing, because nobody watching understood what Hela had done to him or whether the unconscious body lying at her feet was even still under his own control.
At Vought Tower, however, the atmosphere was considerably less philosophical. It was chaos.
Employees who had spent years coordinating publicity campaigns, crisis management, merchandising, sponsorships, and media appearances were suddenly dealing with a catastrophe for which none of their contingency plans had been written. The carefully prepared advertisements showing the Seven as America's greatest heroes were still running on some screens because nobody had thought to shut them down quickly enough, creating an almost surreal contrast between the smiling faces of Homelander and his teammates and the footage being broadcast only a few blocks away. Executives shouted into phones while assistants ran between offices carrying conflicting orders, and every attempt to control the narrative seemed to collapse faster than the last.
“Cut the feed,” one executive demanded.
“We can't,” another replied, barely managing to keep his voice steady. “Every major network has independent footage, and social media already has thousands of recordings.”
“Then bury it. Give them something else to talk about.”
“With what?”
That question left the room silent.
There was no scandal Vought could manufacture that would distract people from what had just happened in Times Square. They could spin a bad rescue, a failed mission, even the death of a hero, but they couldn't explain away Homelander being casually defeated by a woman who had publicly declared herself the Goddess of Death and then proceeded to dismantle the Seven as though they were an inconvenience. Worse still, Hela hadn't merely defeated them; she had done it without appearing remotely challenged, and that distinction was already spreading through the public consciousness.
Outside the cordoned-off area, the people who had gathered before the battle were slowly beginning to emerge from wherever they had taken shelter. Police officers remained tense behind their barricades, unsure whether they were protecting civilians from Hela or protecting Hela from civilians, while reporters spoke into cameras with expressions that had none of their usual professional confidence. Nobody wanted to be the person who stepped too close to the throne, and even the journalists who had spent years chasing dangerous stories seemed content to remain safely behind the perimeter.
Above them, the enormous screens continued to show Hela sitting upon her throne.
For years, those screens had belonged to the Seven.
Now they belonged to her.
There were, of course, some people who were actually thrilled by what they had witnessed, and among them, Billy Butcher stood the tallest. He had spent years building his life around one particular belief: that the Seven were not untouchable, that Homelander was not some invincible god, and that sooner or later someone would have to bring them down. Yet watching it happen so completely, so publicly, and with such humiliating ease was almost more than he had dared to hope for. Sitting before the television with a drink in hand, Butcher stared at the footage of Hela sitting upon her throne, a slow grin spreading across his face as the realization settled in that the world's most powerful Supe had just been made to look utterly helpless.
For once, he didn't care whether Hela was a goddess, an alien, another Supe, or some new nightmare nobody had a name for yet. She had done something Butcher had wanted to see for years, and she had done it without needing a team, a carefully prepared plan, or even the slightest hint of hesitation. Homelander had attacked her in front of the entire world and had been reduced to a screaming wreck, while the rest of the Seven had either been killed, incapacitated, or fled the moment they understood what they were facing. Butcher took another drink, watching the footage replay across the screen, and couldn't help thinking that perhaps Christmas had simply arrived a little early this year.
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