On Apokolips, the one-sided battle continued.
But Homelander remained as steady as a rock; he even let out a lazy yawn, his head tilting slightly with Kalibak's heavy blow before turning back with utter boredom.
Then his gaze moved past the frenzied Kalibak, landing on Super Ego, who was suspended in mid-air several hundred meters away.
The two locked eyes.
Homelander raised his right hand, pressing his index and middle fingers together in a small downward motion.
A simple instruction.
Super Ego, carrying the consciousness of Ego the Living Planet, understood instantly.
The tall figure blurred for an instant in mid-air.
The next second, Super Ego charged directly into the dense army of Parademons.
There was no battle cry, nor any unnecessary tactical evasions. Super Ego displayed the posture of an absolutely efficient killing machine.
A red and blue afterimage sliced into the most concentrated center of the Parademon formation.
His eyes lit up with a red light of death, and two scorching high-energy rays cut back and forth through the army of Apokolips.
Every second, hundreds or thousands of Parademons were sliced into several pieces, their mangled bodies with charred edges falling like rain.
"Enemy attack! Counterattack! Fire!" Commander Virman Vundabar, who was coordinating from the rear, shouted hoarsely with eyes nearly bursting from their sockets.
However, Super Ego suddenly turned in the air, his chest swelling high.
"Whoosh—!"
A blast of extreme freezing air erupted from his mouth, and a frost storm swept outward in a fan shape.
In an instant, Vundabar and the troops around him were all frozen into ice sculptures.
The slaughter continued, and its speed grew faster and faster. Super Ego traversed through the enemy ranks; every pause was accompanied by the crisp sound of shattering bones and the noise of bodies being torn apart. Blood pooled on the ground, flowing along the cracks in the rocks.
And Kalibak was completely unaware of everything happening behind him.
He had completely fallen into a frenzied obsession, with only one thought in his head: to smash the head of the blonde man in front of him.
"Die! Die! Die! Die! Die!"
Ten minutes, twenty minutes, forty minutes...
After an hour of continuous high-intensity output, the speed at which Kalibak swung his club finally slowed down.
"Huff... huff..."
He stopped, leaning on his beta club with both hands, panting heavily.
Murky sweat soaked the hair all over his head, falling to the ground in large droplets.
It wasn't that he didn't want to continue the attack.
Rather, extreme fatigue, combined with the fear gradually spreading from deep within his heart, forcibly cut off the frantic attack commands in his brain.
The wind dispersed the pervasive dust.
Homelander was still standing there. He hadn't even changed his posture, with his hands casually behind his back.
He silently glanced at the system panel.
[Desperate Watch Energy Accumulation Progress: 7.3%]
Homelander's brow furrowed into a deep frown, a clear look of impatience flashing in his eyes.
He raised his hand and touched his right arm.
He saw a tear about two centimeters long there, revealing a small patch of clean skin.
This "Unyielding Elegy" skin had finally produced a slight visual effect.
"Is that it?"
Homelander looked disdainfully at the panting Kalibak, his tone filled with disappointment.
"I stood here and let you hammer away like a blacksmithing idiot for an hour."
Homelander pointed to the insignificant tear on his uniform.
"And you only managed to fray a thread for me?"
Kalibak's hands began to tremble uncontrollably.
What was he seeing?
His own unreserved, continuous bombardment—which could destroy continental plates on other Planets—had lasted for a full hour!
And it actually only caused a small tear in this man's clothes?!
Kalibak's confidence was shattered at this moment; the strength he had always been proud of was nothing but a joke in front of this man.
This sense of despair was something he had only felt when facing his father, Darkseid.
"No... it's impossible..." Kalibak retreated several steps, stumbling and nearly falling.
Such a monster was definitely not someone he could handle!
He must notify his father!
Reason finally returned to the Beast's head.
"Virman!!"
Kalibak roared with a hoarse voice: "Go and notify the Dark Fortress! Have them connect to Father's signal! Hurry—!"
His roar echoed across the open plains.
There was no response.
Nor was there any sound.
The World was terrifyingly quiet.
Kalibak was stunned; he looked around.
But as far as his eyes could see, there were only corpses.
Incomplete, mountain-like piles of corpses covered the entire black plain.
Broken warships, charred metal wreckage, and the frozen, shattered bodies of Parademons extended all the way to the horizon.
Dark green blood gathered into small lakes, emitting a sickening stench.
The smell made even a monster like Kalibak, who was constantly immersed in slaughter, feel a surge of nausea.
This hellish Planet, feared by the entire Universe, finally revealed what hell was truly supposed to look like.
"This... how is this possible..."
Kalibak stood blankly amidst the mountain of corpses and sea of blood, his mind a complete blank.
"Looking for your subordinates?"
A flat voice suddenly rang in his ear.
The hair all over Kalibak's body stood on end instantly.
He whipped his head around.
Homelander was already standing beside him at some unknown point, less than a meter away.
His face was expressionless, his eyes coldly watching him as if looking at a corpse.
"Ah—!!"
Kalibak let out a terrified scream; the sound completely lacked the majesty of a Commander of Apokolips, sounding like a stray dog that had its tail stepped on.
He dropped the beta club in his hand and scrambled away in the opposite direction on all fours.
He just wanted to get away from this devil! The further, the better!
"Bang!"
After running just a few steps, he crashed headlong into a hard "wall of flesh."
The massive reactionary force sent him falling backward, landing his backside in the blood-stained mud.
He looked up to see Super Ego's equally expressionless face.
Homelander in front, the son of krypton behind.
The two of them, one in front and one behind, sandwiched Kalibak in the middle.
Kalibak completely broke down.
He trembled violently like a sieve, desperately trying to move his body backward.
"Don't come over... don't come any closer!!"
Just as Homelander was preparing to toy with him some more,
Suddenly, the ground beneath their feet began to undergo a violent change.
Huge cracks spread rapidly across the scorched earth of Apokolips, and Kalibak looked at those opening fissures in terror.
He discovered that what was gushing out from the depths of the cracks was no longer the familiar dark red magma, but a heart-palpitating, ghostly blue light.
Kalibak looked up in terror.
He found that not only the ground, but the sky had changed too.
The atmosphere of Apokolips, which usually roiled with dark red toxic clouds all year round, was currently being rapidly covered by a thin layer of a faint blue membrane.
This blue film was like a giant glass dome, completely enveloping the entire Planet and isolating it from everything outside.
"This... what is this?"
"You... what on earth have you done?!" he roared desperately at Homelander and Super Ego.
Neither Homelander nor Super Ego spoke; they simply curled the corners of their mouths upward at the same time, forming two identical, eerie smiles.