The first explosion rocked the archive, showering us with dust and chunks of concrete. The mountain itself was screaming in protest.
"Structural collapse imminent!" Wraith yelled, his telekinesis flaring to life, deflecting a falling beam.
"Homelander is triggering the facility's self-destruct!" I shouted. "Noir, is there another way out?"
Noir was already moving, a phantom in the crimson light. He didn't speak, simply gestured for us to follow and sprinted down a side corridor I hadn't noticed. It was a service tunnel, narrow and steep, leading deeper into the earth.
Deeper. Not out.
"Are you insane? We need to go up!" Wraith protested.
Another explosion, closer this time. The ceiling of the archive we'd just left buckled and caved in, sealing our only known exit. Noir had known. He knew the facility's death throes.
We ran. The tunnel sloped downward, the air growing colder and thicker. The red lights gave way to the eerie, silent glow of old emergency strips. The walls here were different—smoother, older. We were in a part of The Aerie that predated Vought's official records.
The tunnel opened into a vast, cavernous space. It wasn't a lab. It was a mausoleum.
Row upon row of cylindrical tubes, like giant test tubes, stretched into the darkness. And inside each one, suspended in amber fluid, was a body. Some were monstrous, twisted parodies of human form. Others were eerily perfect. All of them were dead.
The failures. The cost of creating "heroes." This was Vought's real hall of fame.
At the center of the chamber was a single, larger tube. It was empty, its glass shattered from the inside. A placard on the base was stamped with a familiar name: PROJECT: BLACK NOIR.
This was where he was born. Where the boy died and the weapon was forged.
Noir stopped before the shattered tube. He didn't look at it. His entire body was rigid, a statue of repressed memory. The psychic pain radiating from him was a physical force in the room, making the air hum. My own absorbed ghosts writhed in sympathy, a chorus of agony.
Another detonation shook the cavern. A crack splintered up the wall, and water began to spray from a ruptured pipe. The entire mountain was coming down on top of us.
"We're trapped!" Wraith panicked, his telekinetic shields flickering. "We're going to die down here!"
I looked at Noir, then at the solid-state drive in my hand. The truth. The original sin. It couldn't die here.
The ghosts in my head fell silent for a moment, their voices uniting in a single, clear thought, born of my own desperation and their collective will to survive: Graviton.
I could control gravity. Not just increase or decrease it, but manipulate its direction.
I looked up at the mountain of rock above us. I looked at my companions—a terrified kid and a broken weapon.
"Wraith!" I barked, my voice cutting through his panic. "I need everything you've got! A telekinetic bubble around us, as strong as you can make it!"
He nodded, gritting his teeth, and a shimmering sphere of energy encapsulated the three of us.
I closed my eyes. I reached out with my newest power, feeling the immense, crushing weight of the entire mountain above us. I felt the pull of the earth's core, the natural law that demanded we be crushed into paste.
And I rewrote it.
I whispered, "Mazahs."
Black lightning erupted from me, not destructive, but transformative. It wasn't a blast; it was a field. A localized reversal of the gravitational constant.
With a groan that seemed to tear reality itself, the thousands of tons of rock and metal above us ceased to be a ceiling. It became a floor.
I inverted gravity.
The cavern didn't collapse. It launched.
The three of us, inside Wraith's bubble, shot upward like a bullet fired from a gun. We tore through the collapsing levels of The Aerie, through rock and steel and concrete, a protected nucleus in a cataclysmic eruption.
We exploded out of the mountainside into the grey morning sky, surrounded by a geyser of pulverized rock and the dying screams of Vought's past.
I hovered, gasping, the effort of the inversion leaving me drained. Wraith was unconscious, his bubble gone, kept aloft by my secondary field. Noir stood on a chunk of floating debris, as steady as if he were on solid ground, his blank mask turned toward me.
Below us, the entire mountain slumped in on itself, settling into a new, permanent grave.
In the distance, I could see Homelander, his smile finally gone, replaced by a look of pure, unadulterated shock. He hadn't expected me to survive. He certainly hadn't expected me to bring the mountain with me.
Our eyes met across the valley. The message was clear.
The game was over. The war had begun.
And in my hand, I still held the drive containing the truth that could end it all.