Chapter 40: Fall from Grace
The High Councilor’s fingers dug into the platinum alloy covering my windpipe with the steady, hydraulic pressure of an industrial trash compactor. Then his eyes went completely red. Not the dull, warning flicker of a guy heating up a cup of coffee, but a blinding, localized solar flare that slammed directly into my neck guard.
The heat was instantaneous, an invisible hammer of radiation that smelled immediately like scorched metal and melting polymer. My internal HUD flared a chaotic cocktail of flashing amber warnings, the temperature sensors screaming that the integrity of the collar was dropping by ten percent every two seconds. I didn’t panic.
Honestly, I was mostly just annoyed. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get custom-molded platinum plating buffed out? MetaWorks has a budget, sure, but I’m the one who has to fill out the inventory requests when Gizmo gets lazy. This suit was a masterpiece before Clark decided to use it as a welding torch.
A very expensive, poorly designed masterpiece.
“You are a cancer on the world I built,” Clark snarled, his voice a distorted rumble behind the roar of his heat vision. “A distraction. I will burn you out of existence, and then I will fix whatever broken reality spat you out.”
“You know, Clark,” I wheezed, the external speakers cracking a bit under the sheer energy of his blast, “I… can’t actually think of something witty to retort with. Probably because you’re choking me. You mind?”
I brought my hands up, planting my palms firmly against his chest, digging my thumbs into the gold trim of his house crest. I braced my feet against the cracked marble floor, letting my Viltrumite density settle.
He wanted to push; I could push back. It was a stupid, muscle-bound stalemate that was probably destroying the structural integrity of the entire western wing of the building, but it did give my brain a second to catch up.
… nope, I’m still blanking on a good witty one-liner. It’ll come to me.
The air pressure shifted again, but this time it wasn’t a sonic boom. It was the low, rhythmic hum of the building’s main PA system waking up. The automated security sirens cut out entirely, replaced by a soft, digital chirp that signaled a complete administrative override from the upper levels.
“Attention, citizens of Earth,” a voice echoed through the high-ceilinged atrium. It was smooth, entirely devoid of panic, and possessed the kind of crisp, billionaire articulation that usually sells high-end smartphones or private security drones. “This is Lex Luthor.”
Huh. I completely forgot.
In this flavor of the multiverse, Lex wasn’t the guy trying to turn Superman into a coat rack. Well, okay, he was, but in this case, it was probably for the best. You know, because of the whole evil dictator thing.
I guess funding the underground rebellion while pretending to be said dictator’s best friend earned him a few brownie points. Seriously though, credit where due, there were long cons, and there were long cons. The guy was playing chess while everyone else was playing checkers with their fists.
Every single monitor in the Hall of Justice—and, judging by the faint, synchronized echo traveling through the broken windows from the streets outside, every billboard in Metropolis—flickered from the Regime’s golden emblem to a split-screen broadcast. On the left was a scrolling directory of data.
The hidden labor camps in the trenches of the ocean, the automated execution orders signed in digital ink, the casualty lists from cities that had simply ceased to exist because they didn’t clap hard enough during the High Councilor’s parades. Kara had clearly found the main server room, and she wasn’t exactly practicing data privacy.
But it was the right side of the screen that made Clark’s heat vision completely sputter out.
It was a live, high-definition feed of the hallway I’d just left. Right there, in crisp four-K resolution, was Billy Batson. He was sitting on the floor, his scrawny middle-schooler legs twitching under a massive layer of silver duct tape, with a chunk of his own cape shoved into his mouth like a gag. The text scrolling beneath the feed was simple: The Regime’s ’God of Thunder’ is a thirteen-year-old child. This is what protects you.
Clark dropped his hand from my throat, his head snapping toward the nearest wall monitor.
The absolute stillness of his posture changed, transitioning from the posture of an angry deity to a man who had just watched his house keys slide down a storm drain. He’d spent five years building a myth—an unyielding, flawless monument of absolute safety and divine right. And in the span of thirty seconds, a tech mogul and a teenage girl from another dimension had turned it into a grotesque Saturday morning cartoon.
I looked at the screen, then looked back at Clark, the realization hitting me with a sudden, cynical weight. He’d been using a literal child as a frontline enforcer. He’d taken a boy with a magic word and turned him into a weapon to police brutality on a global scale. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
This would be like evil Batman making his Robins enforce a martial-law curfew... oh, wait. I think he already does that? I guess the only real difference between a hero and a villain in this place is who has the better public relations team.
“They... they will not understand,” Clark whispered, his eyes wide as he watched the data stream continue to pour out into the world. The red glow in his retinas was gone, replaced by a cold, hollow panic. “The order... the peace... it requires a foundation. They cannot see this.”
“The illusion is over, Clark,” I said, stepping out of the small crater our weight had carved into the floor. “You didn’t build a foundation. You just built a giant mirror that only showed the parts of yourself you liked. And someone just threw a rock through it. Me. I’m the someone. If that wasn’t obvious.”
Yeah, that witty one-liner isn’t coming to me.
He turned back to me, his face twisting into something ugly, a desperate animal realization that he was losing his audience. He opened his mouth to speak—probably to launch into another sermon about the necessity of his throne—but I didn’t give him the stage. The monologue portion of the evening was officially canceled.
I leaned back, drawing my right fist across my chest in a textbook Viltrumite cross.
Which is to say, I hit him. Really, really hard.
My fist caught him square on the jaw with a sound like a lightning strike hitting a mountain. The shockwave didn’t just rattle the room; it blew the dust off the ceiling in a perfect, expanding ring. Clark didn’t fly back—not immediately. His body stayed horizontal for a microsecond, his face absorbing the full, kinetic weight of a species that conquers planets for a living, before he shot backward like a stone skipped across a frozen lake.
He tore through the secondary blast doors, shattered the reinforced structural pillars of the entryway, and skipped three times across the grand marble plaza outside, leaving a groove in the concrete that looked like a dry riverbed.
I walked out through the newly widened exit, the silver cape snapping behind me in the sudden gust of wind. I stopped at the edge of the shattered stairs, looking down at the High Councilor as he tried to find his feet in the dust.
“Alright,” I muttered, adjusting the dented collar of my armor with a dull click. “Let’s go finish this conversation outside. This place is a mess, anyways.”
Which I will not be apologizing for.
…
The structural groan of the upper holding blocks was a sound Kara knew intimately. It was the sound of a conquering force losing its grip, the physical architecture of a prison failing under the weight of an unyielding assault. Behind her, a ragged column of freed political prisoners moved with hesitant, trembling steps.
They were politicians, journalists, and former heroes whose spirits had been systematically ground down by the High Councilor’s regime, but Kara did not have time to soothe their frail human psyches. She needed them functional, and she needed them moving toward the lower levels where Luke was currently serving as a shield against the rest of the building’s garrison.
She floated an inch above the floor, her eyes sweeping the dim corridor as she guided the group toward the secondary security vault. When the heavy blast doors hissed open, she didn’t find a squad of Peacekeepers waiting to execute the captives.
Instead, she found a lone man standing before a massive array of terminal screens, his fingers flying across the glowing interfaces with an efficiency that reminded her entirely too much of Brainiac’s cold data-harvesting.
Lex Luthor turned around, exhaling a long, ragged breath that made his tailored shoulders sag with immense relief. “Thank God. The broadcast is holding, but the internal security grid is trying to re-route. You’re... you’re the Kryptonian. The one from the other side.”
Kara dropped her boots to the solid floor, her arms remaining tightly crossed over her red-and-blue uniform. She didn’t smile, and she didn’t offer a heroic greeting. Her chest felt hot, a lingering, volatile knot of tension tightening in her throat as she stared at the bald man’s face.
He looked different from the Lex Luthor she knew—the one who had stolen her family’s dog, launched a targeted military strike against her home, and actively unleashed Faora-Ul from the Fortress of Solitude just to watch the world burn.
This version lacked the absolute, sneering malice of her universe’s billionaire, but the facial structure was identical. The name was identical. And the rage vibrating under her skin didn’t care about the nuances of multiversal theory.
“You are Lex Luthor,” Kara said, her voice flat, literal, and entirely devoid of warmth. “In my universe, you are a parasite. You took my dog, you attacked my home, and you freed a mass murderer. Are you entirely certain you are not evil here? Just a very small, hidden percentage?”
Lex blinked, completely thrown off by the blunt, bizarre nature of the accusation.
He held up his hands defensively, his eyes wide as he glanced at the terrified prisoners behind her. “I... I have spent five years pretending to be Clark’s closest advisor while funneling every scrap of Regime intelligence to Batman’s insurgency. I just leaked their black-site coordinates to the entire planet. So, no. I am fairly certain I am on the side of the people who don’t murder children or enslave continents. I don’t even own a dog.”
Kara tilted her head, her jaw tightening as she analyzed his heart rate and the subtle micro-expressions of his facial muscles. He wasn’t lying. His pulse was rapid, but it was the frantic rhythm of a man who had been living on a knife’s edge for half a decade, not the calculated cadence of a deceiver.
It was deeply frustrating.
She had a massive amount of pent-up anger left over from her duel with Wonder Woman, and she had genuinely hoped this man would give her a legitimate reason to throw him through a reinforced bulkhead. Instead, he was just a very tired, very stressed human who had handled the logistics of a global rebellion.
“Very well,” Kara muttered, her tone clipped and guarded. “I will accept your explanation for now. But if you attempt to steal a canine or build a weapon that mimics a red sun, I will revisit this conversation with my fists.”
Lex opened his mouth to reply, likely to ask why on earth he would want to steal a dog, but the conversation was violently severed by the screech of metal down the hallway.
The heavy security doors at the far end of the corridor buckled inward, a localized thermal charge blowing the locking mechanisms to pieces. A desperate contingency force of Regime loyalists—at least a dozen heavy enforcers clad in advanced armor—surged into the vault line, their energy rifles immediately locking onto Lex and the freed captives.
They didn’t look like men who were willing to listen to a lecture about democracy. They looked like cornered animals who knew their empire was collapsing and wanted to take as many bodies with them as possible.
Before Lex could even reach for a sidearm or dive behind the central console, Kara was there.
She didn’t blur; she simply occupied the space between the soldiers and the civilians, her white cape snapping like a whip in the sudden vacuum of her movement. She didn’t offer a grand, heroic speech about freedom or justice. She didn’t invoke her cousin’s name, and she didn’t try to appeal to their sense of humanity.
She was a weapon raised in the cold vacuum of space, and she understood the absolute authority of superior force better than anyone in the room.
Her eyes flared with a sudden, blinding crimson light, the ambient air around her head shimmering with a terrifying, localized heat that made the soldiers’ advanced HUDs error out instantly.
“If you pull those triggers, you will die,” Kara said, her voice dropping into a register that was completely devoid of emotion, hard and unyielding as structural steel. “I will not just disable your weapons. If you fire a single shot, I will use my bare hands to strip the armor directly from your bones while you are still breathing inside it. Drop them.”
The lead enforcer froze. He looked at the glowing red spheres of her eyes, looked at the raw, effortless density of her posture, and then looked past her to the monitors showing their High Councilor being treated like a piece of laundry by a man in platinum armor outside. The illusion of their absolute authority hadn’t just cracked; it had vanished entirely.
The enforcer’s rifle hit the marble floor with a heavy, metallic clatter. Within three seconds, the remaining eleven weapons followed, the soldiers raising their hands in a silent, trembling surrender.
Kara’s eyes faded back to their natural blue, the heat dissipating from the air as she turned her back on them without another word. She looked at Lex, whose face had gone a completely different shade of pale.
“The path to the lower level is clear,” Kara noted, her voice returning to its earnest, slightly awkward cadence. “We should move quickly. My Luke is outside, and he is very efficient, but I do not wish him to finish the battle before I have a chance to assist.”
She did, after all, still have a lot of aggression to get off her chest.
…
The dust on the grand plaza was settling, but the air still felt thin, stripped of its weight by the vacuum of our physical movement. I stood at the top of the shattered marble stairs, watching the crater forty yards away. Clark was dragging himself up out of the concrete riverbed he’d carved with his back.
His red cape was shredded, hanging off one shoulder like a torn rag, and the golden House of El crest on his chest was split right down the center. All that divine dignity, all that unyielding posture he’d spent half a decade cultivating on global television, was just completely gone. He looked less like a god and more like a guy who had picked a fight with a freight train and lost.
But he wasn’t done. That was the problem with people who had an ideological obsession—they didn’t know when the show was over.
The air around his boots began to ripple as he pushed off the ground, a desperate, sonic shockwave cracking the pavement as he tried to shoot straight up into the sky. He wanted to get into orbit. He wanted to get under the direct glare of the sun where he could recharge, or maybe he just wanted enough room to drop a kinetic strike on the building from the edge of the atmosphere.
I didn’t plan on letting him try it.
I blurred. To the cameras still broadcasting Lex’s global feed, I probably just vanished from the stairs. To me, Clark was moving in slow motion, his torn cape flapping like a broken wing as he reached fifty feet above the plaza.
I caught him by the ankle.
My fingers clamped around his boot with the unyielding, hydraulic grip of a Viltrumite who had spent his entire life suppressing his density just so he wouldn’t accidentally put his hand through a wall. I didn’t pivot, and I didn’t launch into a theatrical spin. I just yanked him downward, utilizing his own upward momentum against him, and drove him back into the earth.
The sound of his impact was a dull, heavy thud that vibrated right through the soles of my boots as I landed beside him. The concrete plaza fractured in a perfect, spiderweb circle fifty yards wide, the structural supports beneath the plaza groaning as they absorbed the kinetic weight. I didn’t give him room to bounce. I dropped my knee directly onto his sternum, pinning his shoulders into the rubble with enough absolute force to keep a small moon from moving.
Clark thrashed beneath me, his fingers clawing at the platinum plates of my gauntlets, his teeth bared in a desperate, animalistic snarl. The red glow was trying to return to his eyes, but it was sputtering, flickering like a dying lightbulb under the crushing weight of my stance.
“This... this is chaos!” he screamed, his voice cracking, entirely stripped of that smooth, authoritative reverb he used during his global addresses. “You are undoing everything! The world... it needs the order! They will destroy themselves without me! I saved them!”
I looked down at him through the spiderweb fracture in my reflective visor.
Up close, without the global television filters and the palace guard standing between him and reality, he just looked incredibly small. And incredibly tired. The cynicism that usually kept my brain running in circles faded out, replaced by that quiet, heavy weight that comes from seeing a guy completely lose his mind to his own grief.
“I know you’re hurting, Clark,” I said, utterly and surprisingly sincere as I looked at the broken man beneath me. “I’m sorry for your loss. Really, I am. No one deserves what you’ve been through, least of all you. But you had it right the first time you put on that cape... there are some lines we don’t cross.”
He stopped thrashing for a fraction of a second, his eyes widening slightly as the words hit him. Whether it was the reminder of who he used to be or just the raw realization that the argument was officially over, his hands dropped from my wrists, falling limp against the shattered concrete. I can’t say it was very satisfying.
The heavy, armored rumble of a specialized transport engine broke the silence of the plaza.
Three modified Insurgency tanks rolled through the ruined security gates, their matte-black plating covered in soot and dents from the street fighting downtown. The lead vehicle came to a halt twenty yards away, its hydraulic ramp lowering with a heavy, mechanical hiss.
Batman stepped out of the shadows of the interior, his cowl covered in a thin layer of grey dust, his posture looking like he hadn’t slept a single hour since the day the world fell apart. Behind him, Lex Luthor stepped into the pale Metropolis sunlight, flanked by Kara, whose classic red-and-blue uniform was immaculate despite the absolute demolition derby she’d just put Wonder Woman through upstairs.
Lex was dragging a heavy, metallic cylinder that hummed with a low, rhythmic crimson light—a localized red-sun containment unit that looked like it had been built using every spare piece of tech the underground could steal.
Clark turned his head in the dirt, his eyes locking onto Bruce.
There was a desperate, lingering spark in his expression, an expectation of the usual ideological debate, the same argument they’d been having across a global chessboard for five long years. He wanted Bruce to tell him he was wrong. He wanted the grand speech about justice and the human spirit so he could tell himself he was still the protagonist of this tragedy.
Bruce didn’t even look him in the eyes. He didn’t stop to deliver a monologue, and he didn’t offer a dramatic sigh of victory. He just walked past the crater, his cape dragging through the concrete dust, and stopped next to Lex.
“Secure him,” Bruce said, his voice flat, exhausted, and entirely devoid of theatricality.
Lex nodded, his fingers tapping a sequence into the cylinder’s interface. The crimson light flared, washing over the plaza in a soft, low-frequency hum that made the remaining solar energy in Clark’s cells completely dissolve. The Regime didn’t end with a cosmic explosion or a grand declaration of freedom over the airwaves.
It ended with the quiet, solid click of a specialized cell door locking into place, sealing the High Councilor inside a box that didn’t care about his throne.
I stood up, adjusting the scuffed, heat-warped collar of my platinum suit with a dull click, and looked over at Kara, who was watching the containment unit roll back into the transport with a quiet, earnest focus.
“Well,” I muttered, wiping a layer of marble dust off my chest plate. “That’s that. Anyone else completely sick of this city, or is it just me?”
…
The bell above the diner door jingled with a pathetic, tinny chime that felt entirely disconnected from the reality of the street three blocks away. Outside, the sky over Metropolis was still a bruised, smoky purple, filled with the distant rumble of construction cranes and Insurgency transports trying to piece a broken city back together. Inside, it smelled like grease, old vinyl, and cheap coffee.
The neon sign over the counter was flickering in a rhythmic, buzzing pattern that gave the formica tabletop a sickly pink hue. We had officially claimed the corner booth, mostly because the local authorities were too occupied with the collapse of a global dictatorship to tell a guy in scuffed platinum armor that he couldn’t bring his own interdimensional entourage inside.
My helmet was finally sitting on the bench next to me, its reflective visor spiderwebbed with cracks that distorting the reflection of the ceiling fan. I wrapped my hand around a massive strawberry milkshake, the condensation cooling down the dull, throbbing heat in my palms where Clark’s heat vision had melted the alloy.
Which was also melting my ice cream…
Next to me, Kara was leaning over her own glass, her chin practically touching the rim as she intensely and earnestly analyzed the chemical structural perfection of the chocolate syrup clinging to the glass. She was tracking the slow, viscous slide of the dark liquid with the kind of laser-focused intensity she usually reserved for tracking high-velocity targets in the upper atmosphere.
Across from us, Lex Luthor was aggressively tapping away at a sleek, military-grade tablet with one hand while nursing a mug of black coffee with the other. His tailored suit was covered in a fine layer of concrete dust, but his fingers didn’t skip a beat as he actively tried to balance the volatile remnants of the global economy before the banks opened on Monday.
He looked like he had aged five years in the last five minutes, but the absolute lack of an evil scheme in his posture made the sight almost respectable.
The vinyl of the booth squeaked as Batman slid into the far corner next to Lex.
He didn’t order anything, nor did he remove a single piece of his Kevlar gear. He just sat there in full tactical uniform, looking like a massive, brooding gargoyle that had accidentally been misplaced in a family establishment. Harley Quinn was hovering directly over the back of my seat, her pigtails swaying as she made a clumsy, tactical dive to steal the cherry right off the top of my whipped cream.
“Ugh, I’m just saying, it’s a total missed opportunity!” Harley loudly complained, her fork missing my cherry by a fraction of an inch as I casually nudged my glass out of range. “The whole ’Pop-Star Rebellion’ angle was right there! We could’ve had glitter-bombs! T-shirts! Instead, we get text files and silver duct tape. Tunnels are so two-thousand-and-twelve, Kingy. We didn’t even get any merch deals out of the kid!”
“You mean Billy Batson, the thirteen-year old child I beat up?” I cocked a brow, holding the shake safely out of her radius.
“Duh!” She blew a raspberry right against the back of my shoulder plate. “Were there any other child soldiers you pummeled?"
“I mean… not recently.”
I looked around the table, taking in the absolute absurdity of the assembly—the broken billionaire, the brooding vigilante, the reformed clown, and the alien warrior who could probably throw the entire diner into the sun if the syrup didn’t taste right. I took a long, slow sip through my straw, letting the artificial strawberry flavor numb the roof of my mouth, and looked sideways at Kara.
“You know, despite everything... I can honestly say I’ve been on worse dates.” I said, leaning my shoulder back against the cracked vinyl.
Kara didn’t look up from her glass immediately, her finger tracing a perfectly straight line through the condensation. “Really?”
“No. This was easily the worst,” I replied, shifting my weight as a sharp piece of my damaged shoulder plate poked into my collarbone. “But uh... the company more than makes up for it. And... well, all things considered, I’ve been reminded that we never really have the opportunity to say the things we want to, when we want to... which is to say... I’m rambling right now, aren’t I?”
“Little bit,” Harley chimed in, her chin resting flat on top of my shoulder plate as she tried to eye the cherry from a different angle.
“Silence, Jester!” Kara’s head snapped up, her blue eyes narrowing with that intense, absolute authority that I just found crazy endearing. “My Luke wants to say something... you do, right? I’m still practicing Earth customs.”
The abruptness of it made Lex pause his frantic typing for a split second, his eyes darting up from the tablet with a look of profound bewilderment before he decided it wasn’t his business and went back to the global market projections. Bruce didn’t even move his neck, remaining perfectly static in the corner like a piece of functional furniture.
I cleared my throat, the dry filter of my helmet’s voice gone, leaving me feeling remarkably exposed without the visor between my face and the world. “Yes, I do. And well... I guess I’ll just say it. I love you, Kara.”
Kara stayed perfectly still for a long, agonizing beat. She looked down at her spoon, then dipped it into the chocolate ice cream with a deliberate, calculated motion. “Hmmm.”
The silence stretched across the table. Even Harley stopped reaching for the fruit, her eyes darting between the two of us with a rare, suffocating quiet.
“...” I waited, the silence stretching long enough that I was starting to wonder if the multiversal radiation had finally broken her auditory receptors.
“This is a delicious ice cream,” Kara said, completely avoidant, even avoiding eye contact, as she took a slow bite from the spoon.
I stared at her, the absolute lack of her reaction hitting me right in the ribcage. “Yep... you’re really not going to say it back?”
Kara paused, her expression shifting into that slightly awkward, guarded softness that always came over her whenever the pressure of being a living weapon finally dropped away. “Earth customs say that I need to play hard to get... Luke?”
“Yeah, Kara?” I asked, a faint smile finally breaking through the exhaustion on my face.
“I hate Earth customs,” she said, her voice dropping into that blunt, earnest tone that made the entire multiversal war feel like a hiccup at best. “And I love you, too. Also, I wish to never go bowling again. We should watch more cat recordings on the glowing rectangles instead.”
I let out a soft laugh, the remaining tension in my shoulders completely dissolving as I reached over and pushed the cherry toward her side of the table. “You are the perfect woman.”