Mark looked at The Deep on the ground, satisfied. He had to admit, without Sabretooth-level strength this wouldn’t have been possible—because even the most useless supes still had real, inhuman physical durability.
He glanced around at the public, his eyes glowing for a brief moment as they swept over them, and everyone who had been recording on their phones took an instinctive step back. They’d just watched him beat a superhero into the ground, and none of them knew if they were next.
But, contrary to their expectations, he just turned and walked away.
The crowd parted without a word.
Mark didn’t waste time. Deep was one thing—useless on the ground—but the next problem wasn’t.
Homelander.
He would have seen it already, or someone would have called it in, and the gap between that and his arrival wasn’t going to be long. That meant minutes at best, maybe less. He needed distance—streets between them—before that happened.
He turned the corner, eyes flicking once for cameras, then slipped into an alley.
The Sabretooth claws came out with a wet snap. He drove them into the wall and pulled himself up, body straining as he tried to climb—
His grip slipped.
He dropped halfway down, boots scraping against concrete.
"Guess it’s not easy climbing," he muttered.
He set his jaw, drove the claws in again, and this time forced his way up—slow, rough, but steady—until he hauled himself onto the roof.
Twenty seconds later, the air above the street cracked as Homelander dropped straight down and hit the road, the impact settling through the asphalt while his cape fell into place behind him.
He didn’t speak at first. His eyes moved over the scene in a slow sweep—the halted traffic, the fractured wall, the shallow craters punched into the road, and then finally The Deep, still on the ground, caught somewhere between getting up and deciding it wasn’t worth it.
Homelander’s gaze stayed on him a moment longer than necessary.
"Where is he?" he said.
The Deep raised a hand, pointing down the street Mark had taken, then hesitated mid-motion and lowered it carefully, like even that much movement felt like a mistake.
Homelander followed the direction, looking down the stretch of road. People had gathered, phones out, every angle covered, but there wasn’t a single trace.
The street had gone quiet around him, the only sound the low murmur of people and the faint clicks of recording.
"Is he going to say something?" someone muttered.
"Why isn’t he saying anything?"
The questions spread through the crowd, low but persistent, the kind that built when expectations weren’t being met.
Homelander didn’t react. His jaw stayed tight, eyes still on the empty road ahead, weighing something no one else could see.
A voice from the back pushed louder than the rest. "Is The Seven going to deal with this or not?"
No answer came.
After a few seconds that stretched longer than they should have, he lifted off without a word, rising cleanly into the air and disappearing out of sight.
The silence he left behind lingered.
Only then did movement return. The driver who had been hiding behind his door stepped out slowly and made his way over, stopping a short distance from The Deep, who had managed to sit up against the cracked wall, one hand pressed to his face, still trying to process what had just happened.
***
Mark pulled the hoodie and mask off the moment he was far enough away and exhaled hard, breath leaving him in a sharp rush.
The building jumps, the running—those little parkour tricks had actually worked. If he clipped that and threw it on YouTube, he’d probably pull a ridiculous number of subscribers. Maybe he should consider it.
The thought lasted half a second before it died, cut off by the obvious—his stupid luck had carried most of that, otherwise that dumb act wouldn’t have worked at all. Maybe it was Kazuma luck.
And that bullet—yeah, that still hurt like hell.
"Fuck..." he muttered under his breath. "How do those guys make regeneration look painless..."
Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they just got used to it.
He ran a hand through his hair, grounding himself as his breathing evened out. The target choice had worked; Deep was useful for one thing—visibility, the kind that spread fast and stuck.
Now the public had something to post all over social media, and his popularity would spike fast, which meant he could grow stronger just as quickly.
In Vought Tower, Madelyn Stillwell stood at the head of the table and looked at The Deep.
"How did you lose like that."
It wasn’t a question.
The Deep opened his mouth.
"Don’t," she said. "Don’t explain it. I watched the footage. Everyone watched the footage. Half the country watched the footage." She set both hands flat on the table.
"Do you understand what this does to the image? Anyone can walk up to one of The Seven on a public street and put them through a wall. That is what people are saying right now. That is the conversation happening everywhere."
The Deep said nothing.
"One of The Seven," she repeated. "On the ground. In broad daylight. Recorded from forty different angles."
Homelander walked in and looked at the footage still playing on the screen.
"He ran before I got there," he said. "Coward."
Madelyn looked at him.
"That doesn’t matter," she said. "The damage is already done."
She pulled up her tablet and slid it across the table.
The headlines were already moving fast.
Seven Slayer. Red Eye. Vought’s Nightmare.
"The public has already given him names," she said. "He has been trending for six hours straight. And The Seven is no longer untouchable—that is the narrative forming right now, and every hour we don’t respond to it, it gets worse."
*****
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