Chapter 41: Royal Homecoming
The hum of the heavy-duty plasma torch down the hall was the only thing competing with the steady, digital pulse of my armor’s diagnostic screen. It had been four days since we broke the back of the High Councilor’s administration, and Metropolis was currently experiencing the kind of logistical hangover that only occurs when a god-king is suddenly evicted from his palace.
The streets outside were a labyrinth of stalled tanks, abandoned checkpoints, and thousands of ordinary citizens who were still looking up at the sky as if they expected a red cape to drop down and incinerate them for standing in groups of more than three.
I was sitting on an overturned packing crate in one of Lex Luthor’s secondary sub-basement laboratories, using a small polymer spatula to scrape a stubborn wedge of dried strawberry milkshake out of the delicate seam where my neck guard met the collarbone plate. Gizmo was going to murder me when I got back.
Not because the armor was structurally compromised—Viltrumite density took care of the heavy lifting there—but because the custom circuitry for the internal cooling vents was packed with marble dust… and also cookie crumbs.
“You are skipping the secondary ventilation ports,” Kara noted, her voice dropping down from the vaulted ceiling with that characteristic, completely unphased bluntness I’ve come to expect from her.
She was floating upside down, her boots lightly tapped against a massive overhead structural beam, her red cape hanging straight down like a curtain. She had a half-eaten sleeve of human graham crackers balanced on her stomach, her blue eyes tracking the precise movement of my spatula with intense, earnest curiosity.
She’d spent the last forty-eight hours discovering the broader spectrum of mid-tier processed sugar available in this universe, and the results were currently keeping her remarkably cheerful despite the fact that we were technically stranded in a ruined reality.
“I’m not skipping them,” I muttered, not looking up as I flicked a grey crumb of concrete off the platinum finish. “I’m ignoring them. There’s a psychological difference. If I acknowledge that the vents are clogged, I have to accept that I smell like a stale bakery inside this thing, which lowers my overall operational efficiency by at least six percent.”
You know. Probably.
“Your internal temperature is rising by two degrees every forty minutes because of the blockage,” she countered, shifting her weight slightly so that she rotated in place, her posture perfectly horizontal against the gravity of the room. “That is inefficient. Back at the New Kryptonian Empire, if a warrior allowed their combat rig to accumulate organic debris, Brainiac would have reassigned them to the filtration waste blocks on the lower rings. For three solar cycles.”
“Well, it’s a good thing Brainiac isn't here,” I said, finally setting the spatula down with a dull click against the metal crate. “Mainly because he’d probably try to index my milkshake collection, but also because his corporate management style sounds incredibly tedious.”
Never say I don’t have my priorities in order.
“Besides, we have bigger problems than my vents.” I reminded her. “Bruce is still upstairs pretending that he understands Lex’s multiversal routing algorithms, which I only give fifty-fifty odds.”
“Which results in Bruce understanding them?” Kara tilted her head, confused. As she lazily drifted towards me, without even offering a cracker. Rude. And also a little dumb.
“I… it’s fifty-fifty.” I blinked. “Either of them?”
“I see.”
Does she?
“You’re missing the point.” I waved my hand. “Look, assuming everything goes well, we can be back home in three hours. Who knows how everyone’s reacted to us going missing? We can be walking into a big mess, right after cleaning up this one.”
A sharp, metallic chime echoed from the primary terminal across the room.
The screen flickered, replacing a scrolling directory of localized atmospheric densities with a high-definition tactical map of the North American continent. A flashing crimson triangle was blinking directly over the coordinates for Gotham City—specifically, the high-security perimeter surrounding the remains of Blackgate Penitentiary.
“Spoke too soon,” I sighed, reaching down to scoop up my helmet from the floor. “We missed a spot.”
The reflective visor was still a complete mess of spiderweb cracks from my little disagreement with Clark, but the internal HUD was still tracking basic telemetry. Small blessings. I slid it over my head, the seals locking around my neck with a pressurized, heavy hiss that smelled distinctly of artificial strawberry and industrial grease.
… okay, fine. I really needed to get this cleaned.
“Looks like the local garrison in Gotham didn't get the memo about the High Councilor’s new luxury accommodations in the red-sun box.” I announced, cracking my neck, my knuckles, and my back. Am I getting old?!
One crisis at a time.
Kara dropped from the ceiling, her boots hitting the concrete floor with absolutely zero impact sound—a textbook demonstration of flight-assisted deceleration that she’d probably had beaten into her since she was in a stasis pod. She dusted a stray graham cracker crumb off her sigil, her face instantly shifting from that slightly awkward, ice-cream-loving teenager into the focused, unyielding elite warrior who had put Wonder Woman through a wall.
“The current scoreboard is twelve to nine,” she stated, her jaw setting into a hard, competitive line that I found completely terrifying and incredibly endearing at the same time. “I am leading by three units. The automated defense artillery in New Themyscira counted as two because the firing mechanisms were linked to a singular biometric grid.”
“That is blatantly cheating,” I protested, checking the power levels on my thrusters as the HUD booted up. “You flew into a automated turret array, ripped the primary targeting battery out with your teeth, and claimed it was two separate targets. I spent forty minutes manually detaining a platoon of heavily armed Peacekeepers in Chicago without breaking a single bone because Bruce asked nicely. That’s quality workmanship. It should be weighted accordingly.”
“The metrics were agreed upon before we departed the diner,” Kara said, her tone flat and entirely devoid of remorse. “Units captured or neutralized. The method of execution is irrelevant to the mathematical total. If you wish to close the deficit, I suggest you accelerate your deployment parameters.”
Before I could even formulate a suitably cynical comeback, she was gone. Jerk.
The vacuum of her departure didn't just rattle the papers on Lex’s desk; it sucked half the loose blueprints right off the walls, leaving them spinning in a violent vortex as the low, rolling rumble of a sonic boom echoed up through the ventilation shafts. She didn't even use the elevator doors; she just chose a vertical ventilation shaft that led straight to the surface and widened it by six inches with her shoulders.
“Brilliant,” I muttered, watching my HUD try to recalculate her trajectory as she crossed the state line in under four seconds. “She’s running hot. Gizmo is definitely charging me double for the structural repairs to the sub-level.”
I leaned back, let my own density shift until the floor beneath my boots began to crack, and pushed off. I didn't make as much noise as she did—mostly because I didn't want Bruce coming down here to give me another lecture about the structural integrity of his borrowed real estate—but the speed was the same.
The world outside the Hall of Justice blurred into a streak of grey concrete and smoky purple sky as I broke the sound barrier over the harbor, my silver cape snapping behind me like an iron sheet in the gale.
By the time I crossed the dreary, rain-slicked perimeter of Gotham, the tactical situation at Blackgate was already a total disaster. A faction of high-ranking Regime loyalists, led by none other than Cyborg and a desperate remnant of the Yellow Lantern corps, had locked down the island.
They’d turned the prison’s automated defense grid inside out, using the heavy anti-meta cannons to keep Batman’s local Insurgency cells pinned down across the narrows. Kind of genius, actually. It wouldn’t stop me, but still.
Game recognizes game.
As I dropped through the low, oily clouds over the bay, I could hear Victor Stone’s synthesized voice booming over the facility's localized security frequency. He was frantic, his digital cadence spiking into high-frequency registers that signaled a guy who knew his entire reality was collapsing around his ears but couldn't accept the conclusion.
“—the High Councilor is still operational!” Stone was shouting, his white eye-optic flaring against the rainy dark as he stood on the roof of the primary cell block, his arm transformed into a massive sonic cannon that was currently keeping a trio of Insurgency armored cars trapped behind the outer gates. “The data feed from Metropolis was an internal leak! A coordinated cyber-attack by Luthor! Hold the line! If we lose the island, we lose the sector!”
“You know, Victor,” I said, landing directly on the barrel of his sonic cannon with a weight that drove the massive cybernetic assembly three feet down into the roof’s reinforced concrete structure. “I’ve seen a lot of corporate damage control in my time, but trying to convince people that a live four-K feed of your boss getting stuffed into a thermos is a ‘cyber-attack’ is a really tough sell.”
Cyborg’s optical sensor whirled, his gears screeching in protest as he tried to lift the cannon against the sheer, unyielding mass of my Viltrumite stance. “King! You... you’re the anomaly from the other sector. The one who broke the gate.”
“The very same,” I said, reaching down with one hand and casually crimping the tip of his sonic barrel like an empty soda can. “Look, I’m incredibly tired. I’ve been living on stale diner food and multiversal stress for a week, and my couch back home is currently calling my name. Just lie down. Let the regular human authorities handle the paperwork, and we can all pretend this evening didn't happen.”
He didn't take the option. Instead, his entire chassis hummed as a localized white-noise blast erupted from his secondary shoulder ports, the kinetic energy slamming against my chest plate with a sound like a heavy hammer hitting an anvil. It didn't move me—not even an inch—but it did leave a fresh scuff mark on the platinum finish right over my MetaWorks logo.
“Alright,” I sighed, my voice dropping back into that deadpan, older-brother cadence as I reached through the flash of energy and grabbed him by the central power matrix on his chest. “We’re doing this the hard way. That’s fine. But I’m counting this as three separate units because of the cybernetic enhancements.”
The struggle lasted exactly eleven seconds. He tried to route the island's entire backup generator through his left arm to shock my central nervous system, but Viltrumite biology doesn't really care about three thousand volts of domestic electricity.
I just waited for the current to ground out through the roof, then gave him a precise, low-velocity tap to the primary control junction behind his neck. His optics flickered, sighed with a high-pitched digital whine, and went dark as his chassis settled into a heavy, silent heap against the concrete.
I stepped back, looking down at the unconscious cybernetic enforcer, and checked my HUD. “That’s one.”
Before I could even look for the remaining Yellow Lanterns who were currently circling the upper guard towers like giant, glowing hornets, a sudden, massive shadow fell over the eastern courtyard. It wasn't a cloud. It was a fully armored, sixty-ton Regime main battle tank, complete with the golden insignia of the High Councilor painted across the side skirts.
The vehicle didn't roll into the courtyard. It dropped from a height of roughly three hundred feet, hitting the mud with an earth-shattering crunch that completely flattened the remaining barbed-wire fences and two unoccupied security vehicles.
Kara descended slowly right behind it, her blue boots hovering an inch above the tank's crushed turret. She had her arms tightly crossed over her chest, her expression entirely serene as she looked up at the roof where I was standing.
“Thirteen,” she said, her voice carrying perfectly over the sound of the pouring rain and the distant sirens. “The tank contained a high-ranking tactical commander and two security operatives with specialized energy sidearms. They refused to dismount when I requested their surrender from the sky, so I adjusted their position manually. That is three additional points for my tally.”
I looked at the tank, which was currently leaking hydraulic fluid into the Gotham mud like a stabbed whale, then looked down at Cyborg, who was snoring softly at my feet.
“This is getting ridiculous,” I muttered, my voice echoing hollowly inside my cracked visor as I began the long, tedious process of dragging Victor toward the transport vans. “You can’t just use the local armor divisions as a personal scoring system, Kara. It’s completely skewing the data.”
“The data is accurate,” she replied, her tone earnest and utterly unbothered by my frustration. “Perhaps if you spent less time engaging in rhetorical debates with the enemy, your numbers would be more competitive. We should return to the laboratory. The Bruce person said the portal is approaching a state of optimal alignment, and I do not wish to remain in this universe when the ice cream supplies are so poorly distributed.”
I didn't argue. Mostly because she was right about the city, but also because I could already feel the heavy, familiar ache of a multiversal headache starting to form behind my eyes. The victory lap was over, the dictator was in his box, and it was finally time to go home.
…
The blue-and-white light of the multiversal gateway didn't look like Angstrom Levy’s messy, reality-shredding tears. There were no jagged green sparks, no terrifying visual glimpses of three different versions of the same room overlapping until your brain started to leak out of your ears. This was Lex Luthor’s engineering—clean, calculated, and terrifyingly precise.
The portal sat in the center of the reinforced tech lab like a massive, spinning coin of pure kinetic energy, its outer ring humming with a stable, high-frequency vibration that made the dust on the floor dance in perfect, concentric circles.
I stood at the edge of the platform, my cracked helmet tucked firmly under my left arm, letting the cool, artificial draft from the generator hit my face. The smell of the room was finally changing, the heavy stench of Metropolis soot being slowly replaced by the sharp, familiar scent of ionized copper and clean air conditioning filtering through from the other side.
“The telemetry is locked onto your specific sector coordinates,” Lex said, not looking up from his primary diagnostic terminal. His fingers were still moving across the glass interface with that same frantic, machine-like speed, but the lines of tension around his jaw had softened slightly since we brought Cyborg in. “The anchor point should manifest directly within your company’s primary structural radius. Assuming your internal defensive grid doesn't mistake the displacement wave for an incoming orbital strike.”
“Don't worry about the grid,” I said, stretching my neck until the joints clicked with a sound like a pistol shot. “Gizmo designed the security protocols, which means if the portal doesn't look like a tax collector or a copyright notice, the automated turrets will probably just ignore it. He’s very consistent like that.”
Lex paused, his hand hovering over the final activation key as he finally turned his head to look at me. The pale light of the gateway reflected off his bald head, making him look remarkably like the man who had tried to murder my entire family back in our universe, but the expression in his eyes was entirely different.
There was no megalomania there. Just the profound, hollow exhaustion of a man who had spent five years living a lie so he could save a species that didn't even know he was trying.
“You’re an interesting variable, Luke,” Lex noted, his voice dropping into a quiet, professional register that felt more like a research summary than a personal statement. “In my calculations, a localized entity with your specific biological density should have either attempted to claim the vacant throne or immediately retreated to their own sector to avoid the political fallout. You did neither. You stayed long enough to fix the plumbing and then asked for a beverage.”
“Well, the plumbing was leaking all over the multiverse, Lex,” I said, adjusting the straps on my gauntlets. “And as for the throne... do you have any idea how much paperwork goes into running a global dictatorship? The logistics alone would kill me. I can barely get my team to fill out their weekly expense reports without someone trying to audit our pizza budget. You can keep the office. Bruce looks like he’s already picked out the curtains anyway.”
As if on cue, the shadows near the secondary exit shifted, and Batman stepped into the light of the console. He looked exactly the same as he had in the crater—covered in grey dust, his eyes completely bloodshot behind the cowl, his posture unyielding.
He didn't look like a guy who was about to celebrate the liberation of his planet. He looked like a man who had just realized that now that the monster was gone, he was the one who had to figure out how to feed eight billion people without an army of automated drones to enforce the peace.
He didn't offer a hand, and he didn't launch into a grand speech about the enduring nature of the human spirit. He just stopped five feet away, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, his cape dragging through the copper shavings on the floor.
“The remaining loyalist cells in the European sector are standing down,” Bruce said, his voice flat, dry, and entirely devoid of emotion. “The broadcast worked. Without the High Councilor’s biometric signature to authorize the automated enforcement protocols, the regular military divisions are processing the transition commands.”
“Good,” I said, nodding toward the portal. “Then you don't need us to play garbage collector anymore. That’s a relief, because Kara was currently winning our little sweepstakes by four points, and my fragile ego couldn't take another tank delivery.”
Kara stepped up beside me, her boots clicking softly against the metal grid of the platform. She had her classic red-and-blue uniform completely smoothed out, her hair tucked neatly behind her ears, her expression returning to that solemn, literal intensity that she used whenever she was trying to look like an official representative of an empire. She looked at Lex, then looked at Bruce, her head tilting slightly as she analyzed their vital signs one last time.
“You are a very unusual human, Lex Luthor,” Kara stated, her voice carrying that perfect, unhurried cadence. “In my sector, the man who carries your name is a thief who lacks honor and smells faintly of sulfur. You do not smell of sulfur. You smell of burnt coffee and administrative anxiety. I find this acceptable. I will allow you to keep your dog privileges, should you choose to acquire one.”
Lex blinked, his mouth opening slightly as he tried to find a logical, scientific response to a multiversal character reference based entirely on olfactory feedback. “I... thank you. I will take that under advisement.”
Kara turned her attention to Batman, her blue eyes softening just a fraction into that awkward, guarded curiosity that she always showed whenever she encountered a human who was clearly suffering from a lack of proper connection. She stepped forward, her movement so fast that Bruce’s shoulders tensed instinctively, his hand dropping toward his utility belt before he caught himself and froze.
She didn't attack. She just reached out and tapped the center of his chest plate with one finger—hard enough to make the reinforced carbon fiber click, but light enough that it didn't crack his ribs.
“You should consume a significant quantity of lipids and enter a stasis cycle,” she told him, her tone deadpan but remarkably earnest. “Your myocardial rhythm is erratic due to sleep deprivation, and your skin possesses the coloration of a subterranean fungus. The High Councilor is in the box, Bruce. The world will not dissolve if you close your optical sensors for six hours.”
Batman stared at her through the white slits of his cowl. For a second, just a tiny fraction of a second, I thought the guy was actually going to smile. Or sigh. Or maybe just fall over from sheer exhaustion.
But he didn't. He just slowly lifted his head, looked past her at the swirling blue energy of the gateway, and gave her that single, silent nod—the absolute maximum amount of emotional currency the dark knight was capable of spending in a single day.
“Go home,” Bruce said softly.
“That’s the plan,” I said, sliding my arm around Kara’s waist and pulling her slightly closer as the displacement field began to pull at the edges of my silver cape. I looked back at Lex, who had his hand resting on the primary toggle. “Thanks for the lift, Lex. If you ever find yourself in a flavor of reality where you aren't fighting a god-king for survival, look us up. MetaWorks offers a twenty percent discount for non-evil tech moguls.”
Lex gave a dry, single-syllable laugh and threw the switch.
The hum of the generator spiked into a high, vibrating roar that completely swallowed the sound of the room. The blue-and-white light surged outward, wrapping around my boots, climbing up the platinum plates of my armor until the grey walls of the Insurgency lab began to stretch and blur like wet paint.
I locked my fingers through Kara’s, her density settling against mine as the absolute vacuum of the multiversal transit took hold, pulling us out of the ruins of the Regime and throwing us back into the dark.
…
The first thing that hit me wasn't the sound of the portal closing. It wasn't the familiar, comforting hum of the MetaWorks secondary elevator, or the smell of Jinx’s terrible lavender incense that she kept burning in the lobby to hide the scent of Mammoth’s leftover take-out.
It was the smell of burning copper.
And not just copper—the thick, greasy, unmistakable stench of military-grade structural insulation being turned into slag by a localized plasma discharge. My internal HUD didn't even have time to display the standard “Welcome Home” greeting before it violently flared into a chaotic grid of amber and crimson warning alerts, the temperature sensors registering an external atmospheric heat of three hundred degrees Fahrenheit within the room.
I didn't step onto the carpet. My boots hit a jagged, uneven sheet of melted structural steel that groaned under my weight, the metal sizzling as it came into contact with the cool platinum of my greaves.
The blue light of Lex’s gateway snapped shut behind us with a sharp, concussive pop that sucked the remaining air out of the space, leaving us standing in a thick, choking cloud of grey concrete dust and pulverized drywall. I didn't need the HUD to tell me where we were, but my brain was actively refusing to process the visual data.
The MetaWorks building—the custom-built, sixteen-story reinforced skyscraper that I had spent three years funding through subscription models and legal meta-human contracting—was completely sheared in half.
The entire western wing of the lobby had been obliterated, the solid titanium support pillars twisted like wet licorice and thrown into the street below. The ceiling was entirely gone; where the upper executive suites and Gizmo’s laboratory should have been, there was only a massive, jagged crater that opened straight up into a bruised, ash-choked sky. The defensive grid that I had trusted to keep the city safe hadn't just been bypassed; the automated turrets had been torn out of their housings by their roots, their heavy barrels melted into useless lumps of slag that were currently dripping down the ruined walls like wax.
“Luke,” Kara said, her voice dropping all its playful, ice-cream-loving cadence in a microsecond.
She didn't float. She stood perfectly still beside me, her head tilting slightly as her ears tracked the baseline frequency of the chaos outside. Her classic red-and-blue uniform was already covered in a thin layer of our home reality’s soot, her fingers curling into tight, white-knuckled fists as her jaw set into that rigid, terrifying expression she used when her protective instincts completely overrode her personality.
“I hear the baseline frequency of a Kryptonian combustion unit,” she whispered, her blue eyes narrowing as she looked through the smoke toward the shattered courtyard outside. “And... and my cousin’s signal. But the rhythm is wrong. It is too rapid. He is experiencing extreme physical stress.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not the only one,” I muttered, my deadpan sarcasm tasting like ash in my mouth as I reached down and slammed my cracked helmet back over my face. The HUD flickered twice, the primary diagnostic systems struggling to link with the building’s pulverized mainframe before giving up entirely and switching to local sensors. “The GDA local frequencies are completely jammed. Whatever just hit this block didn't come through a dimensional tear. It walked right through the front door.”
I stepped through the shattered remains of the lobby entrance, my silver cape dragging through a puddle of burning hydraulic fluid that had leaked from one of our security drones. The courtyard outside looked like a textbook orbital bombardment zone. The manicured lawns were entirely gone, replaced by a series of deep, smoking trenches that looked like they had been carved by a giant plow.
In the center of the largest crater, fifty yards away, Nolan Grayson was on his knees.
My father—the man who had conquered worlds in the name of the Viltrumite Empire, the man who had looked down at the entire planet as a collection of insects before he finally decided to stop pouting and work with the GDA—was actively bleeding.
His signature white-and-red costume was torn open across the shoulder, exposing the raw, dense muscle beneath, and a thick stream of dark Viltrumite blood was leaking from his nose, dripping onto the shattered concrete beneath his fingers. His chest was heaving in short, ragged gasps that signaled a level of physical exhaustion I had never seen from him in my entire life.
He wasn't fighting a drone or a monster. He was locked in a brutal, muscle-straining deadlock with a man wearing a suit of dark, ancient Kryptonian military armor—a suit that carried the cold, sharp lines of a specialized commander.
General Zod didn't look like the broken, desperate survivors we’d just left behind in the Injustice universe. He looked like an empire that had finally found its target. His fingers were clamped around Nolan’s wrists, his teeth bared in a silent, calculating snarl as he used the full, yellow-sun-charged density of his alien biology to force my father’s shoulders down into the dirt.
The air around them was vibrating, a continuous, low-frequency hum of pure kinetic force that was turning the surrounding gravel into dust just from the proximity of their strength.
“You fight with the desperation of a traitor, Viltrumite,” Zod’s voice carried over the courtyard with a cold, clear resonance that sounded like a military execution order. “You have spent lifetimes preparing this world for your collective, yet you allow it to languish in the mud for the sake of these... these primitives. Your empire has failed you. Or perhaps you have simply grown soft under the glare of this star.”
Nolan didn't answer. He couldn't. Every single scrap of his biological energy was currently being routed into keeping his wrists from being snapped like dry twigs, his eyes wide with a mixture of raw fury and something that looked dangerously close to panic.
I took a single step forward, my boots cracking the pavement as my own Viltrumite density settled into my spine, but before I could even clear the distance, a massive sonic boom rattled the remaining glass in the MetaWorks structure.
The shockwave didn't just rattle the buildings; it blew the smoke out of the courtyard in a perfect, expanding ring of vacuum. A streak of yellow and blue shot across the lawn, moving at a speed that would have registered as a ballistic missile on any standard GDA radar array.
It was Mark.
My younger brother hit the brick wall of the secondary garage with an impact that completely pulverized the structure, the reinforced concrete collapsing over his legs in a heavy mountain of debris. His suit was torn to ribbons, the front panel completely stained with his own blood, his fingers twitching weakly against the rubble as he tried to find the leverage to pull himself out.
Hovering directly over the ruins of the garage, her silver cape snapping in the hot backdraft of the fires, was Faora-Ul.
She looked exactly as she had when we locked her in the red-sun box at the Fortress of Solitude—unyielding, cold, and entirely devoid of human empathy—except she wasn't trapped anymore. Someone had opened the thermos. Her dark eyes were fixed on Mark with an aristocratic contempt that made her look like a judge passing a routine sentence on an unruly animal. She didn't even have her hands out; she was just floating there with her arms neatly tucked behind her back, her posture perfectly vertical against the gravity of our world.
“The boy lacks the structural discipline of a true warrior,” Faora noted, her voice carrying that same flat, military cadence that Kara had used back in the lab, but stripped of any potential warmth. “He relies on the density of his bloodline rather than the mechanics of combat. He is an insult to the species that conquered the sector.”
The pieces of the puzzle clicked together in my head with a sudden, cynical weight. Brainiac didn't just lose Kara’s coordinates; his empire had tracked her distress signal right back to the Sol system. Or worse, Lex Luthor’s little stunt with Faora back home had provided the New Kryptonian Empire with the exact spatial coordinates of our Earth. They hadn't just come to rescue their soldier; they’d brought the entire frontline vanguard of the Phantom Zone survivors to reclaim the territory.
But as my eyes traveled higher up into the smoky sky, past the smoke of my burning company and the spectacle of my family getting their teeth kicked in, my Viltrumite blood went completely cold.
Hovering a hundred feet above the entire battlefield, completely detached from the physical struggle below, was a lone woman.
She wasn't wearing Kryptonian armor. She was clad in the immaculate, white uniform of the Viltrumite Empire, her long hair tied back in a severe, military braid that hung over her shoulder. Her arms were crossed over her chest, her dark eyes looking down at Nolan’s struggle with a cold, administrative disdain that made General Zod look positively emotional by comparison.
Anissa.
She wasn't here to join the fight. She looked like an auditor who had just arrived at a poorly managed warehouse to find the local manager sleeping on the job. She didn't look at Mark, and she didn't look at the Kryptonian invaders with any sense of military alarm; she just looked at Nolan with the quiet, dangerous curiosity of a species that considers the slaughter of entire planets to be a routine clerical duty.
“You have made a remarkable mess of this assignment, Nolan,” Anissa said, her voice dropping down through the smoke with a soft, clear resonance that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “The Empire expected a fully compliant population ready for integration. Instead, we find… this. It is deeply disappointing.”
Her eyes shifted slightly, tracking the sudden movement as Kara and I stepped fully out into the open courtyard. She looked at my platinum suit, then looked at Kara’s classic red-and-blue uniform, her eyebrow raising with a cold, analytical interest that signaled she was currently rewriting her entire tactical report in real time.
Kara didn't wait for an introduction. Her blue eyes flared with that sudden, blinding crimson light, the air around her head shimmering with a localized heat that made the gravel near her boots turn to liquid glass. Her protective instincts had locked directly onto the woman hovering over my family, her stance turning so dense that the ground beneath her boots sank three inches into the concrete.
“They are threatening your bloodline, Luke,” Kara said, her voice dropping into that steel-hard register that she used whenever the warrior completely took over. “Give the command, and I will remove their capability to breathe our atmosphere.”
I looked at the General forcing my father into the dirt. I looked at Faora hovering over my bleeding little brother. I looked at the Viltrumite empire’s chief auditor looking down at me like I was a spreadsheet error that needed to be manually deleted. Then I looked back at the ruined, smoking half of the MetaWorks building where my couch used to be.
I reached up, unlatched the seals on my cracked helmet, and pulled it off, letting the hot, ash-filled air of my home reality hit my face. I gave a slow, deep sigh, my deadpan sarcasm returning with the heavy, exhausted weight of an older brother who had just realized that his vacation was officially over before it even started.
I looked at the multi-faction apocalypse currently taking up residence on my front lawn, then looked sideways at Kara’s glowing red eyes.
“You know what? Okay, fine,” I muttered, adjusting the dented collar of my suit with a dull click. “I’m officially calling in sick for the rest of the year.”