“Everything’s fine, the hijackers have been dealt with and the turbulence is just some rough air.”
Homelander kept his smile wide and his voice loud for the passengers as he leaned toward Queen Maeve and dropped to a murmur.
“Let’s go.
Even if I knew how to fly the plane it wouldn’t matter, the cockpit is destroyed and there’s no saving this one.”
“No.
It shouldn’t end like this.”
Queen Maeve looked out at over a hundred pairs of hopeful eyes.
She looked at the little girl a few rows up, young and angelic, and what was left of her conscience refused to let go.
“Go outside and hold the plane up,” she said urgently.
“Just lift it.”
“Lift it?
And how exactly would I do that?”
Homelander gave her a flat look.
“At this speed I’d go straight through the fuselage, or the whole airframe rolls over.”
Queen Maeve’s nails bit into her palms.
She kept pushing.
“Then carry the passengers down one at a time.”
Homelander almost laughed.
“One at a time?
There are over a hundred people on this plane.
You want me to make a hundred trips?”
There was no way to save all of them.
And even saving some would mean his failure got out.
Better to save no one.
Better to leave and act like he’d never set foot on this plane at all.
His mind was made up.
He was about to drag Queen Maeve out with him when he noticed a young man pushing through the turbulence toward them, completely ignoring the shuddering of the aircraft.
The same Chinese-American kid who’d spoken up about the armed hijacker earlier.
Clean, sharp features.
Alert, bright eyes.
Short hair, neat and fresh.
Tall and lean in a budget hoodie and faded jeans.
What surprised Homelander was the kid’s heart rate.
It had steadied considerably since before.
Calm.
Controlled.
“Homelander.
Queen Maeve.”
Los came forward and got straight to it.
“My name is Los.
I just got my acceptance to Godolkin University.”
Queen Maeve was still frantically working through options and barely registered his approach.
The sound of his voice made her look up.
“Godolkin?”
She was genuinely surprised.
Godolkin University was a Vought-owned institution, purpose-built to identify and train superpowered young adults, a pipeline of pre-heroes to keep The Seven and Vought’s other programs stocked.
Several current members of The Seven had come up through Godolkin’s Lamplighter crime-fighting program.
“And?”
Homelander looked at Los without interest.
A student at one of Vought’s schools meant nothing to him.
He assumed the kid was about to beg for his life.
“My ability lets me reinforce non-living objects,” Los said plainly.
“Reinforce things?”
Queen Maeve’s expression flickered with disappointment.
Not teleportation, not flight, nothing that helped right now.
Los kept going.
“I’ve been thinking through the worst case: the plane is completely out of control and there’s no way to bring it down manually.”
“If that’s where we are, I think I can reinforce sections of the airframe to make them harder and more compression-resistant.
Then, once I’ve calculated the load-bearing points, Homelander could hold the aircraft steady for a short controlled descent.”
That was his plan.
He knew Homelander had no Bio-Force Field, no way to distribute force evenly across a structure.
But his own [Enhance] and [Bio-Force Field] together could cover exactly that gap.
Of course.
A minute ago, Los never would have imagined that his first act after transmigrating would be helping Homelander save a plane.
“That could actually work.”
Something lit up in Queen Maeve’s eyes the moment Los finished laying it out.
She turned to Homelander, her voice dropping into something close to pleading.
“John, let’s at least try.
Please.”
John was Homelander’s real name.
Homelander said nothing.
He was still weighing it internally.
The lives of a hundred passengers meant nothing to him.
All of this felt like effort he shouldn’t have to spend.
He’d rather be home taking a nap.
Los looked at the silent Homelander.
“I’ve actually been a fan of yours for a long time.
Applying to Godolkin was partly about following in your footsteps.”
He kept it brief, then closed his right fist and pumped it once, hard, barely containing his excitement.
“And when you save these hundred-plus passengers today, it’ll be the biggest story of the year.
Nothing else will even come close.”
“I’ve already got the headline: Patriotic Strength, On Par With God.”
“The lead image writes itself: you, single-handedly holding up a crippled aircraft full of passengers for a safe landing.
That image of a god walking among men will go absolutely everywhere, people will lose their minds over it.”
Homelander had been ready to physically drag Queen Maeve off this plane.
Then that hit him, and he jolted like someone had thrown a switch.
His heart was actually pounding.
Most of The Seven’s heroic moments were staged by Vought’s marketing department, scripted rescues choreographed for cameras.
Homelander had sat through enough of those productions to be completely numb to them.
But listening to Los paint this picture, the image of it, the scope of it, Homelander felt it straight through to his bones.
It was like fresh milk and the best rush of his life cresting at exactly the same moment.
He could already hear New York going wild with his name.
Patriotic Strength.
On Par With God.
A god walking among men.
This was marketing.
This was what it was supposed to sound like.
Every one of Vought’s so-called elite marketing people, every overpaid self-important hack collecting a paycheck, couldn’t hold a candle to this kid who’d barely turned legal age.
Los watched the broad, genuine grin return to Homelander’s face and knew the moment had turned.
Homelander could not care less about a planeload of passengers.
But his reputation as a superhero was something he cared about more than anything in the world.
Homelander let the smile drop.
For the first time, he looked at Los with real attention, both hands coming down onto the young man’s shoulders.
“Can your ability actually pull this off?
When the moment comes you hold on no matter what, and don’t you dare screw it up.”
If it could actually work, why not try?
Homelander was practically buzzing.
Los felt the weight of those hands pressing down.
He held Homelander’s gaze and nodded.
He knew this wasn’t just encouragement.
It was also a threat.
“Los.”
Queen Maeve was staring at the young man who had just changed Homelander’s mind with a handful of sentences, her head still catching up with what she’d witnessed.
She couldn’t help herself.
“Are you really a Godolkin student?
Because honestly you should be in journalism.”
What followed moved fast, according to Los’s calculations and planning.
Homelander went outside and carved away the rear cabin and cargo hold at altitude, shedding as much of the plane’s weight as possible and leaving only the essential nose section and main passenger cabin.
Queen Maeve went through the cabin making sure every passenger had their seatbelt fastened and their oxygen mask on.
The bodies of the flight crew were cleared from the aircraft to reduce the load.
Los ran [Enhance] continuously, pushing as much reinforcement as he could into the nose and the underside of the fuselage, the structural core, so the remaining wreck of an airframe wouldn’t come apart the moment Homelander applied force.
Everything was set.
As the crippled Boeing descended to roughly three thousand meters and appeared above the New York coastline, Homelander positioned himself beneath the nose, spread his arms wide, and pushed up.
A deep, teeth-grinding metallic groan rang out, steel bending and fracturing under sudden stress.
The top of the nose section buckled almost immediately but held together.
No blowout.
Homelander’s arms and half his body drove up into the nose of the aircraft, and he pushed with everything he had, holding the plane against its own momentum.
Los’s ability was doing its job.
As Homelander drove upward from outside, Los drove back from within.
[Enhance] feeding strength into the material around him, [Bio-Force Field] slowing the spread of fractures through the airframe.
Metal fragments tore free from the remaining structure in the wind.
The damaged aircraft bled altitude, bled speed, and came to rest, barely and impossibly, hovering low above the shoreline.
The cape billowed.
Homelander brought the shattered half-plane down at the edge of New York with nearly every passenger alive.
The crowd erupted.
By the time the fire trucks, ambulances, helicopters, police cruisers, and media vans had surrounded the landing site in an impenetrable ring, a young man had already slipped into the crowd and quietly disappeared.
He hadn’t taken a single moment of Homelander’s spotlight.
He had no interest in being on camera.
Running force mechanics, planning the landing sequence, pushing his abilities nonstop the entire way: it had cost him everything he had.
He was spent, close to collapse.
He just wanted this to be over.
He wanted Homelander to forget he existed.
He wanted to find somewhere quiet to lie low and build his strength.
That was probably going to be harder than it sounded.
In the flood of cameras and microphones and flashing lights, Homelander stood at the center of it all like a superstar on a red carpet, his signature smile locked in place.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he filed away a name.
Los.
The kid had delivered something real today.
That young man had genuine talent, and Homelander liked what he saw.
The marketing instinct, specifically.
Across the makeshift press area, Queen Maeve’s gaze drifted more than once to the back of the young man walking away.
“Los.
First-year at Godolkin.”
She filed the name away too.
If he hadn’t stepped in today, this would have ended somewhere very different.