The Landing and the Cage
Thomas did not die when he hit the pavement of the Manhattan street below. He had known he wouldn't. His invulnerability, once a gift, was now the ultimate curse a guarantee that his sacrifice would not be a clean, immediate death, but a long, agonizing imprisonment designed to showcase the state's power.
He impacted the asphalt of Park Avenue with a sound like a small, controlled demolition. The shockwave radiated outward, shattering windows in a three-block radius and buckling the street under the force. The residual heat from his rapid descent combined with the friction of the impact left a deep, star-shaped crater in the middle of the expensive avenue. Thomas himself was unmarked, the force absorbed by his dense, Compound V-enhanced body. He lay in the crater he created, stunned but conscious, the heavy, scarred shield having landed nearby, its cross facing the shattered spire of Vought Tower a final, silent testament to his defiance.
The military response was instantaneous, precise, and brutally efficient, far exceeding Vought's decentralized capacity. The Army, already mobilized in preparation for the chaos unleashed by Gideon's Trumpet, descended in a wave of black armor. Searchlights blinded him, cutting through the dawn haze. Hundreds of specialized operatives, wearing exoskeletons and armed with experimental magnetic and sonic dampeners, swarmed the crater. There were no negotiations, no attempts at traditional arrest, and no request for surrender. They were there for absolute, immediate containment.
They didn't try to use brute force, recognizing it would be useless. They deployed the A-9 Protocol, a measure developed in secret for dealing with rogue, high-level Supes whose powers were primarily kinetic or thermal. First, massive, high-powered magnetic clamps slammed onto his limbs, pinning him to the asphalt, exerting hundreds of tons of force. This was immediately followed by the activation of specialized sonic emitters tuned to a very low-frequency hum that, while harmless to his organs, caused a dizzying, immobilizing neurological overload. The effect was similar to intense vertigo and nausea combined, a systematic assault on his nervous system that paralyzed his will to fight. Thomas was rendered instantly helpless, his great physical power useless against the military's cold, calculated technology that exploited the weakness of the mind.
He was extracted from the crater by heavy-duty retrieval units and placed in a heavily armored, lead-lined transport truck. The entire process, from landing to containment, took less than three minutes. As the truck rumbled away from the scene which was immediately sealed off as a "hazardous materials zone" the last thing Thomas saw was the face of one of the soldiers who supervised the loading. It was not a face of hatred or fear, but one of grim, weary certainty. In that moment, Thomas knew his true victory was realized: The age of trust was over. The military no longer relied on Vought's heroes; they now saw them as liabilities to be neutralized, confirming the deepest, darkest implication of the exposed Compound V Ledger.
The War of the Narrative
While Thomas was being transported to an unlisted underground facility, the real battle was fought in the media, a desperate war for public perception.
Vought, led by a surprisingly composed Ingrid, launched a desperate, two-pronged counter-narrative, exploiting the few hours of confusion before the tidal wave of evidence became irrefutable.
The Official Line: Thomas, the Crusader, was branded an internal terrorist, a fanatic whose years of religious extremism had culminated in violence. Vought claimed he had been corrupted by a shadowy foreign agent (a convenient, anonymous, and untraceable entity) and had spent years maliciously twisting internal documents to launch a political attack on the free world's greatest protectors. His jump from the tower was framed as a final, dramatic act of self-condemnation and suicide stemming from untreated mental illness. The public was shown controlled footage of the damage to the Vought Tower observation deck the carnage left by Countess and Bastion which Vought claimed was Thomas's unprovoked rampage against his former allies. Ingrid even appeared on a national news broadcast, shedding a single, perfect tear while decrying Thomas's "fall from grace" and using his actions to justify tighter government control over all Supe activity.
The Martyr's Whisper: But the truth, thanks to the exhaustive detail of Gideon's Trumpet, was already out and rapidly propagating across every open channel. The documents spoke for themselves, exposing the lies faster than Vought could generate new ones. As the initial shock subsided, a massive, spontaneous counter-myth began to form. To the global public, Thomas was no terrorist; he was The Whistleblower-Martyr, the solitary hero who sacrificed his gilded life to expose the rot that had consumed the nation's leadership. He became a potent symbol for every citizen betrayed by the powerful a figure of profound, righteous defiance. His heavy, scarred shield, recovered by police from the edge of the crater, became an instant, unofficial monument near the site of his landing, soon covered in flowers, candles, and protest signs demanding justice and accountability. He was instantly canonized by the masses as The Zealot Who Spoke, his final actions viewed not as an act of violence, but as a necessary Purification by Fire. This narrative The Gospel of Thomas fueled a generation of anti-Vought and anti-government sentiment.
The Fate of the Zealot
Thomas's destination was not a standard prison, but a subterranean military complex designed to hold beings that defied conventional containment. They called it The Vault, a depth-charged facility buried beneath an inert mountain range in the Western states.
His cell was not a barred room, but a small, white hemisphere, entirely padded with thick, non-Newtonian dampening material designed to absorb unlimited kinetic energy. The air was controlled, pumped in through shielded vents, and the floor constantly emitted the same low-frequency sonic hum that had immobilized him during capture. He was stripped of all clothing and accessories, including his tattered cowl. He was Thomas again, naked, cold, and utterly alone, trapped by his own physical perfection. The room was not built to punish the body, but to dissolve the soul.
The worst element of his captivity was the constant, pervasive silence. They removed all ambient noise, all natural light, and the sonic field prevented him from even hearing his own breathing clearly, creating a profound, sensory deprivation chamber. His years of Discipline of the Stillness had prepared him for isolation, but this was different it was sensory annihilation, designed to erode his mind, not just his body. The military understood that Thomas's only weakness was his profound, religious need for purpose and meaning. By denying him all sensory input and all action, they hoped to turn the vessel of "Consequence" into a drooling, compliant vegetable, a Supe whose body remained intact but whose spirit was utterly broken.
His only contact was a military psychologist who visited daily, not to interview him about Vought, but to assess the speed of his cognitive decay. The questions were simple, repetitive, and meaningless: "What is your favorite color, Thomas?" "How does the sound feel?" "Do you remember the sermon you gave in Atlanta?" They were not trying to break him for information; they were trying to unmake him for safety, to erase the very zeal that had motivated Gideon's Trumpet. Thomas survived by turning his internal world into a final fortress, constantly reciting his father's old scriptures in his mind, the memory of the Harmony Creek altar his last line of defense against the absolute silence.
The Shattered Citadel
Up above, Vought Tower was sealed off, its gleaming structure marred by the massive, shattered observation window and the crater in the street. Ingrid, surprisingly, was not arrested. In the ultimate act of corporate survival and cynical efficiency, she immediately transitioned Vought into a fully nationalized asset, signing over all patents, real estate, and remaining contracts to the US government in exchange for full personal immunity and a lucrative consultancy role. She saved herself by selling the entire company a poisoned legacy to the very forces Thomas had hoped to empower with the truth. Vought, the corporate entity, died, but the system that created it simply changed management, trading corporate greed for bureaucratic control.
The Soldier Boy Generation remnants fared worse. Crimson Countess was quietly shipped to a different, less-luxurious facility for study and potential future use. Bastion, still neurologically damaged from Thomas's sonic attack, was quietly euthanized two days later under the new "Asset Streamlining" directive. The government, now the sole proprietor of Compound V technology, was streamlining the assets. The new era wouldn't feature flamboyant heroes with loose morals and civilian contracts; it would feature controlled, disciplined super-soldiers, managed directly by the state and bound by military law. The freedom Thomas fought for was replaced by a more insidious, pervasive form of control.
Thomas, locked in his white, humming tomb in The Vault, achieved his purpose but paid the ultimate price. He had smashed the idols of steel, but the resulting fire had consumed him entirely. He was a martyr without a flock, a prophet in a padded cell, destined to live indefinitely in silent defiance, the physical proof that sometimes, the only way to win the holy war is to ensure your own damnation. His legacy, however, lived in the streets, a quiet promise of a future reckoning.