Felix Faust gives Earth 7 an opening taste of the more open horrors that Earth 1 will be bringing. As Stormfront and Homelander mock him, he uses some simple magic beams to knock the two over with little effort, terrifying the populace that there's actually something out there that could hurt their heroes.
While waiting for Jonathan Kent Jr. to bring more help, Ryan is attacked by The Shark (an old Green Lantern villain). Ryan is so scared and startled, his laser vision kicks in hard, killing it and mincing it at the same time.
The Joker, for all his clownish tendencies, is still a very deadly opponent. He takes advantage of Homelander's ego issues to manipulate him into unleashing a cloud of Joker gas that kills dozens of people.
A later plot has The Joker poisoning one of Vought's products, a bottle of painkillers. We see the victim, a housewife, take one and laugh herself to death. We even see the process written of what laughing yourself to death would be like.
Later on, when questioning Elena, Joker draws a knife under her eye in an attempt to find information regarding Flight 37. When Elena resists, Joker draws out his gun and tells her he threatens to kill her for being Maeve's ex-girlfriend. He even brings up killing Elena and pretending that she's still alive in order to get Maeve to do what he wants.
Realizing that Circe might be nearing her own endgame and could come after him, Joker decides to place a call to Homelander to ENCOURAGE him to be destructive. He even gives him advice on how part of the joke of life is to relish in the fear others feel for you.
The slow descent of Homelander is unnerving. His jealousy of how Superman got all the best parts of his fake life for real, and insecurity about how even in the greater multiverse he's a small fish in a big pond makes him even more unhinged.
After finding out Maeve is missing and that Black Noir abandoned him, Homelander just begins laughing and crying in a horrifying tone. Unnerving everyone in the building.
The following chapter has Homelander have a mirror talk. This time his mirror self (called Homelander) actually tries to convince his more innocent self (called John) to kill as many people as possible just to spite the Justice League. He's broken out of his "conversation" when he gets a call from Soldier Boy. Like in the show, Soldier Boy expresses his disappointment with Homelander. During this, Homelander realizes Ryan is gone, likely due to the League taking him to Becca. Upon realizing this, he is written as "Homelander" and not "John". Homelander straight-up implies to Soldier Boy he is going to massacre people once the video is out.
He no longer cared. Nothing could hurt him anymore.
When A-Train and The Deep meet with Homelander after this call they instantly take note of the oddity in Homelander's behavior. For starters, Homelander is emotionally numb at the prospect of having his reputation and image shattered. To the point he and those in the room are going to start a massacre. Next, when he reveals his parentage to those assembled in the room, Homelander states he wants to kill Black Noir for keeping it a secret. Finally, Homelander casually reveals that A-Train killed Popclaw on his orders when it looks A-Train has cold feet and states that the massacre will be in Trenton: where the family of A-Train's brother, Nathan, lives. The scene ends with some Godolkin University Students pinning A-Train to the ground, breaking his cast so they can inject Compound V in him to heal it. Homelander even ignores A-Trains' pleas considering that A-Train nearly died from a heart attack the last time he used Compound V.
The worst part is that Homelander knows he doesn't stand a chance against the Justice League. He will kill as many people as possible just to spite them.
The Scarecrow nightmares given to the Boys are no joke.
MM's nightmare is Homelander and Soldier Boy mocking him about the fruitlessness of his journey, and how no matter how hard he tries to fight against the injustice "heroes" put him through, nothing he does will change the past, present or future.
Starlight's nightmare is being accepted back as one of the Seven, being called no different from them and saying that she'll never be free of that guilt through her impulsiveness and carelessness.
Hughie finds himself in a graveyard where he sees Starlight's ghost angrily accuse him of cowardice. He is then grabbed by the corpses of the others, who proceed to drag him down into the ground. In the distance, Hughie sees his mother who abandoned him. He pleads for her to save him, but to no avail.
The fight between The Seven and the Legion of Doom is terrifying to read about:
Bizarro succeeds in resisting Homelander's punches and breaking his arms.
Giganta stomps Stormfront hard enough to break her limbs.
Cheetah viciously mauls Maeve.
Black Noir gets sucked inside of Clayface.
The Deep, realizing he can't win, tries to flee only for Manta to sever one of his arms and stab him in the kidney.
A-Train also tries to run, only for Doctor Polaris to smash his legs into the ground so hard his shin bones snap out of his legs.
The scariest part is the villains are holding back: fighting the Seven and breaking their bodies is nothing but a game to them. A-Train is only saved from being eaten by Grodd by Batman's intervention.
After taking V-24, Butcher seems Not Himself at several moments, and after being exposed, reveals that in fact it's Lex Luthor, whose contributions to the compound include mind control nanites in the formula. It stabilized the process, but also meant he could Mind Control them for those 24 hours as he chooses. As some reviewers commented, it's almost like a Demonic Possession seeing one of the big bads of DC control Butcher so callously.
When he decides to get personally involved, Lex orders Butcher to kill his friends. Butcher mindlessly obeys Lex, even calling him sir. Nothing the Boys do can shake him out of it. Not even Hughie mentioning Becca gets him to stop.
The next chapter shows how disturbing it is from Butcher's POV. The moment he's out of power, Butcher doesn't remember anything from being under Luthor's control. So in his mind he went from searching inside Mallory’s house to being in the middle of the woods under Soldier Boy’s boot.
It gets worse; Luthor and Professor Zoom manage to capture the Boys (sans Hughie) and it's made clear that Lex intends to use them.
Speaking of which, Professor Zoom appears to be in fit form. The Brain says that he makes The Joker appear to be a decent human being.
His capture of the Boys is like something out of a horror movie. First, when he grabs Frenchie it's almost as though the Frenchman blinked out of sight. Then he grabs Kimiko when she and MM are back to back. A second later, MM is brought to them by Thawne. Thawne prepares to torture them to find Hughie until he's told by Lex the League has just Zeta Beamed in. This doesn't stop Thawne from phasing his arm through Frenchiebefore running after Hughie anyway, though.
He does the same thing to Butcher before Lex stops him.
Thawne gets worse when he goes on a rampage and murders a bar full of Vought's employees, including the speedster Velocity. From the perspective of the survivor, all she sees is people just disappearing and reappearing with slit throats, shattered bones, and various other wounds, with no sign of the assailant. When Zoom reveals himself to her after everyone else is dead, he makes it clear that the only reason he didn't do the same to her was so she could pass on a message to A-Train and Flash, all while explaining that he read her driver's license at superspeed, and will find and kill her if she doesn't do what he asks.
Special mention should go to what he did to Velocity. The fact that his flesh was stripped near to the bone and he left a massive trail of blood makes it clear that Zoom dragged him against the ground at super-speed. And he was briefly still alive and conscious after the fact.
In Chapter 31, A-Train ends up in a confrontation with Zoom, and Reverse-Flash makes it clear very quickly how outclassed he is. The story has repeatedly demonstrated that A-Train's speed cannot remotely come close to Flash's, so when A-Train tries to fight someone who is just as fast and without any of the moral compunctions the Flash has, the end result is a massacre. On top of that, Eobard reveals that he found Reggie's family beforehand and revealed all of A-Train's crimes to them, completely destroying any positive view they had of him.
Finally, there's A-Train's death. Thawne runs A-Train around the world at the same impossible speeds he and Flash normally use, only without giving A-Train the protection of the Speed Force that keeps the laws of physics from tearing them apart. The end result is that all that remains of A-Train is his burnt goggles.
Just to rub salt in the wound, Thawne also made sure that Reggie's death happened in front of his entire family. Even Hughie (who hears about this from Annie), who has every reason to hate A-Train, was completely and utterly horrified by what Zoom did to him.
All characters who see the video of Homelander's massacre of Flight 37 are disturbed (with the obvious exception of the Joker); when Commissioner Gordon sees it for the first time, he admits that he briefly saw Superman in Homelander's place, and he and Batman agree that they're lucky their hero is as pure as the Man of Steel.
By the end of Chapter 30, Stromfront has gotten her hands on the powers of Shazam.
Homelander finally snaps during a press conference when he learns that not only has Stormfront's Nazi past been leaked to the media, but people are now calling him a Nazi due to his defending her and being so close to her. He ends up killing the entire crowd with his laser vision.
Chapter 32 ends with Homelander having acquired a Sinestro Corps power ring, preparing to face the Justice League alongside Stormfront.
The Deep, lacking Aquaman's Super-Toughness is boiled alive by Stormfront's magic lightning, reducing him to bones.
We find out why Sinestro wasn't present during Secret Society meetings: he was secretly creating a new planetary HQ to expand the Sinestro Corps. And with the majority of Yellow Lanterns now moved there, he's ready to unleash a new Sinestro Corp war upon Earth Seven as part of a master stroke against the Justice League.
Black Adam, after losing Stormfront at the Rock of Eternity goes straight for attempting to snap her neck to make sure she doesn't get away again. And worse, as Stormfront realizes he's not a League member, she knows that he's not bluffing.
Stormfront ends up with a... special kind of fate. While not forced to face the fact that she's a known Nazi in her world, The Wizard ends up giving her something more gruesome for trying to steal the powers of Shazam.
Butcher ends up putting all his latent rage into finally killing a powerless Homelander, pounding and slicing him over and over with his crowbar even after he loses consciousness, even squishing his brain to finish his aggression off.
