Power Trip - Chapter 42

Chapter 42: While You Were Gone…

Rex never cared for telemarketers.

He hated everything about them. The spam calls, the overly-friendly tone, the dead to the world tone. You name it. Turns out, that hate even extended to the architecture. Because even though MetaWorks replaced and refurbished the place, Rex still despised it. 

Although, maybe that wasn’t for the same reasons.

The panicked environment wasn’t helping.

Right in the middle of the chaos, standing on King’s actual, primary diagnostic console in boots that definitely still had mud on the heels, was Red X. The kid was twelve, maybe thirteen if you counted the sheer, unadulterated spite he brought to the table, and he was currently wearing his costume like a kid who had stolen his older brother’s leather jacket to go look tough at a bus stop. 

He was violently stabbing his fingers at the holographic interface, trying to override a secondary tracking sub-routine that had clearly been written by someone smarter than him. Cue the nerd fight.

“Move your tiny, thieving fingers, you absolute gremlin!” Gizmo shrieked, his mechanical spider-legs clicking furiously against the brushed steel floor as he lunged toward the console. “You’re throwing the telemetry off by twelve gigahertz! That’s King’s personal array, you miniature felon! Touch that node again and I will hardwire your suit to deliver a direct neural shock to your pituitary gland!”

“I’m stabilizing the perimeter scan, you oversized garden ornament!” Jason snapped back, his voice cracking just enough on the high notes to completely ruin the dark, brooding vigilante aesthetic he’d clearly been practicing in the mirror. “King left me in charge of the tactical override! If his tracker isn’t pinging, it means the hardware is suppressed, which means we need a wider frequency sweep, not your stupid little math problems!”

“Your brain is a math problem!” Gizmo roared, his goggles flaring bright blue as three separate welding arms deployed from his harness, all of them sparking aggressively within an inch of Jason’s mask. “Get off the glass!”

Rex watched them from the edge of the central platform, leaning heavily against a pillar and wishing, with every fiber of his being, that he had stopped for a breakfast burrito on the three-mile walk over here. 

The walk had been miserable, by the way.

For reasons Rex really didn't want to get into right now—mostly involving a minor misunderstanding with an exploding pool ball and a GDA-sanctioned transport vehicle—he was currently banned from using Cecil’s teleporter network. So, now when he wants to go to someplace within a hundred miles, he has to find his own transportation.

Like a peasant.

To add a massive, industrial-sized shovel of salt into the wound, Cecil had explicitly told him the emergency briefing was at six in the morning. Rex, knowing his own personal relationship with alarm clocks, had arrived at eight, fully expecting to be the guy everyone yelled at for being late. Except the meeting wasn't actually scheduled until nine. 

Cecil had deliberately lied to him by three full hours because the old man possessed absolutely zero faith in Rex’s ability to exist as a punctual human being. Which meant Rex had been sitting in this vibrating tech-nightmare for a full sixty minutes, entirely alone with his own thoughts, before anyone else even showed up.

It was a special kind of torture. Especially now that the rest of the room was filling up with smoke.

“You’re both being bloody idiots, you know that?” John Constantine muttered from the corner of the room. Rex loved the guy’s accent. Hated the attitude, though.

He was slumped so low into King’s custom leather lounge chair that his trench coat looked like a discarded tarp, his legs draped over the armrest as he flicked a long cylinder of grey cigarette ash directly onto the pristine, silk-weave carpet. 

“The trackers aren't suppressed, mate.” Constantine said the obligatory British word. “They’re gone. Trust me, I could summon them if they were in this plane. So, obviously, they aren’t. I’m not even getting overtime for this, you know. Hell, if he’s actually dead, why are we even here? Let’s just call it a half-day, yeah?”

“Shut up, John!” Jinx yelled, her pink hair whipping behind her as she paced a frantic, erratic circle around the central holotank. Her hands were twitching, small sparks of purple probability energy snapping off her knuckles like firecrackers. “He’s not dead.”

“Love, I can respect the loyalty, but—“

“If King were dead, the automated payroll system would have locked us out of the cafeteria accounts by now.” Jinx interrupted with a roll of her eyes. “He’s too cynical to die without a contingency plan. And Supergirl’s tracker went offline at the exact same millisecond. You really think there’s something strong enough to take them both out at once?”

“Maybe they just went to get gelato again,” Red X offered, his voice dripping with dry sarcasm. “You know how they get. A little financial stress, a little alien drama, and suddenly they’re flying to Florence because the local dairy options on the East Coast don't meet their elite warrior standards.”

Nobody laughed. In fact, the entire room seemed to drop three degrees in temperature as a loud, wet crack echoed from the primary arrival pad.

The air didn't just ripple; it tore open with a sharp smell of ozone and stale spearmint. 

Cecil Stedman stepped out of the white flash, his black suit looking wrinkled, the lines around his eyes cut so deep they looked like scars… they might’ve been his actual scars. Guy was too ugly to tell. He didn't even look at Rex. He didn't look at the kid on the console. He just adjusted his earpiece with one hand and pointed a single, stiff finger at the monitor.

“Turn off the alarms, Gizmo,” Cecil ordered, his voice carrying that flat, administrative weight that always made Rex want to check his pockets for contraband. “They aren't in the state line. They aren't on the continent. As of twenty-four hours ago, Luke Grayson and Kara Zor-El have been completely removed from our local space-time continuum.”

The doors to the elevator bank hissed open before Cecil could even finish his breath. Superman stepped out first, his red cape billowing slightly from the sheer speed of his transition, his jaw set into a hard, white-knuckled line that looked entirely wrong on a guy who usually looked like an oversized boy scout. 

Right behind him were the Graysons. Mark looked like he hadn't slept in a week, his Invincible costume slightly rumpled at the collar, while Debbie held his arm with a grip that looked tight enough to bruise. You know. If Mark was human.

And then there was Nolan. Omni-Man didn't walk into the room; he drifted three inches off the floor, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes fixed on Cecil with the kind of heavy, unblinking intensity that usually preceded a small country being deleted from a map.

“Where are they, Cecil?” Mark demanded, his voice cracking as he stepped past his mother toward the holotank. “You said you had a lead on the warehouse. You said it was just a caution check.”

“I know what I said. It was.” Cecil said, his tone entirely devoid of remorse as he met the kid’s eyes. “I asked your father three days ago to check the energy signatures coming out of that sector. He said no, so I asked you. And you said no. Something about girl stuff or something? I can never remember with you teenagers.”

“Burn!” Rex raised his hand for a high-five. No one high-fived him.

“Rex, you are a teen.” Kate rolled her eyes. 

“Yeah, nineteen.” He defended himself… and high-fived himself. No one leaves Rex Splode hanging.

“And I believe Nolan said he was busy with therapy shit’ which I believe is his current euphemism for sitting on a mountain in Colorado and pouting.” Cecil continued, staring at the much larger, stronger, and more dangerous guy ever, directly in the eye.

Nolan’s boots hit the floor with a sound like a small mortar shell going off. In a movement so fast Rex didn't even see the transition, the Viltrumite’s hand closed around Cecil’s black silk tie, bunching the fabric into his fist and lifting the old man six inches off the ground until Cecil’s polished shoes were dangling uselessly over the console.

“Choose your next words with extreme care, Stedman,” Nolan hissed, his voice a low, vibrating rumble that made the glass panels in the walls ring. “My son is missing. If your petty little intelligence network used him as bait for whatever primitive experiments were running in that ditch, the Global Defense Agency will not survive the afternoon.”

“Put him down, Nolan,” Debbie said. Her voice wasn't loud, and she didn't have super-strength, but she didn't look at her husband with an ounce of fear. She just crossed her arms. “Put him down right now. Ripping his head off isn't going to tell us where Luke is.”

Nolan stared at her for two long, agonizing seconds before his fingers uncurled. Cecil dropped back onto his heels, completely unphased, using his thumb to smooth out the wrinkles in his tie as if he hadn't just been suspended by his throat by a planetary conqueror.

“Thank you, Debbie,” Cecil muttered, clearing his throat once. “Look, we’ve combed over the site. It was the Maulers. They were building a high-capacity memory transfer array. We found the schematics in the rubble. We’re not sure why, and even less sure what happened. There’s no blood at the scene. No biological residue. If they were dead, my cleanup crews would be pulling platinum plating out of the masonry. They were moved.”

“Moved how?” Superman asked, his blue eyes narrowing as he stepped between Nolan and the console, his hand resting on the edge of the screen. “If it’s a portal, the Fortress sensors should have picked up the displacement. I checked the upper frequencies before I flew here. The atmosphere is quiet.”

“That you know of, mate,” Constantine said, blowing a massive ring of grey smoke toward the ceiling. “There are plenty of people with the know-how to pull a stunt like this. Morgan le Fay’s been itching for a rematch since Luke took her shiny little stick. Lex builds teleporters like kids build Lego sets. Hell, if we’re just making a list of people who hate King’s guts, and could zap around, we could add Jason to the suspect pool.”

“Hey! Back off, Red Coat!” Jason yelled, his hand dropping toward his utility belt where three separate explosive discs were already humming. “I was working. Maybe you should give it a try.”

“Pass.”

“He didn't do it,” a small, quiet voice said from the shadows near the elevator.

Ace stepped into the light. The girl was wearing an oversized MetaWorks hoodie that came down to her knees, her pale face half-hidden by her dark hair, her eyes wide and entirely unblinking as she looked at Nolan.

“I’m always in his head,” Ace whispered, her voice carrying that creepy, absolute certainty that always made Rex want to step five feet away from her. “He was thinking about a specific brand of pizza for three hours while he was waiting for the train. He doesn't have the codes for the warehouse. He’s just angry because he thinks King forgot his birthday.”

“I didn't think about the pizza for three hours!” Jason barked, his face turning bright red beneath the mask. “It was forty minutes! And that defense is incredibly unhelpful, Ace! Stop telling people what’s in my head!”

“A reluctant point to the trench-coat brigade,” Jinx sighed, rubbing her temples. “Look, the kid’s clean. But that doesn't get us closer to finding them. If we don't find King soon, the clients are going to notice. The subscription model only works if the subscribers believe the guy in the platinum suit is actually available to save them from their own stupidity.”

“We’ll handle the search,” Superman said, looking back at Mark and Nolan. “We’ll split the grid. Nolan, check the upper atmosphere for residual tachyon trails. Mark, stay with your mother until we get a solid coordinate. We aren't leaving them out there.”

“And what about the business?” Gizmo demanded, waving a small, grease-stained wrench at the room. “We have fourteen high-tier subscribers currently holding on the customer service line because a rogue elemental is currently freezing the water mains in downtown Chicago! Mammoth is strong, but if he tries to hit a water main, he’s just going to flood four blocks of commercial real estate!”

Rex looked at the Guardians of the Globe remnants standing behind him—Robot was still recalibrating his drone’s optical sensors, and Dupli-Kate was casually braiding her own hair, looking entirely bored by the cosmic drama. Rex let out a long, heavy sigh, the kind that came from a man who knew he was about to make a massive mistake but lacked the structural integrity to stop himself.

“Look,” Rex said, stepping forward into the center of the platform. “We’ll take the queue. The Guardians are technically a public utility now, right? Consider it a peace offering. MetaWorks can deploy the Doom Patrol and the heavy hitters to go look for your boss, and we can handle the local subscription garbage so the civilian population doesn't start burning down the supermarkets because their premium protection package is lagging.”

Cecil looked at Rex, his single eye narrowing with a cold, calculating interest that made Rex instantly regret every word that had just come out of his mouth.

“That is surprisingly cooperative of you, Sloan,” Cecil noted. “Very well. Gizmo, route the secondary priority calls to the GDA local dispatch. Let’s see how the new Guardians handle a little customer service.”

…

The intersection of 5th and Main smelled like burning asphalt and expensive perfume, a combination that Rex was currently ranking as the third worst thing he’d experienced all week.

“Sir! Sir, you need to understand the structural physics of high-yield kinetic detonations!” Rex screamed, his voice already hoarse as he hurled a small, glowing green marble directly beneath the front axle of a matte-black Mercedes G-Wagon.

The marble didn't explode with a lethal shockwave; it released a highly controlled, burst of compressed air that lifted the three-ton luxury vehicle exactly four feet into the air, allowing it to slide sideways onto the municipal sidewalk with a loud, metallic screech.

The man sitting in the driver’s seat—a guy wearing a pristine linen suit and a wireless earpiece that looked like it cost more than Rex’s entire gear budget—didn't even look out the window. He just rolled down the dark-tinted glass by two inches, his face twisted into an expression of intense, bureaucratic fury.

“I have a brunch appointment at the harbor club in eleven minutes!” the subscriber shouted, his voice carrying that shrill, entitled whine that Luke’s business model had apparently spent three years cultivating. “My MetaWorks premium tier explicitly guarantees a clear transit corridor in the event of local meta-human activity! There is a giant, purple mutant currently digesting a city bus three blocks away, and I am stuck behind a Honda Civic! Do you have any idea how much I pay for this subscription?!”

“I don't care if you pay in solid gold bricks, pal!” Rex yelled back, his hands already glowing bright green as he reached into his pouch for another charge. “The road is blocked because the asphalt is currently liquefied! If I don't lift your car manually, your expensive tires are going to melt into the drainage system! Sit in your air conditioning and shut the door before I accidentally drop a kinetic charge into your sunroof!”

Across the street, the situation was somehow even more humiliating.

The local organic grocery store had been completely surrounded by a perimeter of orange GDA cones, mostly because four separate versions of Dupli-Kate were currently forming a physical human wall around a woman in an immaculate tennis skirt who was brandishing a high-end stainless steel water bottle like a club.

“This is an absolute violation of my consumer rights!” the woman shrieked, her face turning a vibrant shade of magenta as she pointed at the empty shelves through the store window. “The King promised that MetaWorks clients would have priority supply chain access during a Level Three municipal disruption! My specific brand of unsweetened almond milk is entirely out of stock, and your... your little clones are refusing to let me check the back storage room!”

“Ma'am, for the love of God, please look behind you,” the primary Dupli-Kate said, her arms tightly crossed over her chest as she gestured toward the horizon.

About half a mile down the avenue, a sixty-foot-tall crustacean-humanoid mutant was actively ripping the power lines out of the street, sending massive showers of blue sparks into the sky while two GDA response vans tried to blind it with floodlights.

“The back storage room doesn't exist anymore!” a second Dupli-Kate shouted from the curb, her hand resting on the handle of her sidearm. “A piece of the mutant’s shell fell through the roof ten minutes ago! The entire dairy section is currently buried under four tons of reinforced concrete and organic kale! There is no milk!”

“I don't care about the mutant!” the woman screamed, her voice reaching a frequency that Rex was pretty sure was triggering the local car alarms. “I am a Diamond-Tier subscriber! I want to speak to the regional manager! Where is the man in the platinum armor?! He would never allow his staff to treat a premium member with this much disrespect!”

Rex watched a third version of Dupli-Kate slowly lower her head into her hands, her shoulders shaking with a mixture of physical exhaustion and raw, murderous intent. Rex couldn't even blame her. He stood there in the middle of the rain-slicked, chaotic intersection, his boots covered in road grime, his gloves smelling like sulfur, and let out a short, bitter laugh that tasted like carbon monoxide.

This was King’s grand vision. This was the glorious, world-saving empire that the big brother of the universe had built with his god-tier strength and his clever little legal permits. When the literal gods of space and time weren't around to throw monsters through buildings, the heroes weren't warriors; they were just highly glorified, underpaid concierges for people who had too much money and zero survival instincts.

“If King doesn't come back in three hours,” Rex muttered to himself, his fingers curling around a fresh explosive marble as he eyed a particularly stubborn city bus. “I am personally going to find whatever dimension he’s hiding in and blow up his favorite coffee machine.”

…

The grass beneath Mark’s sneakers felt entirely too solid, entirely too normal, and it was making him want to throw up.

He was standing in the center of their small, rectangular backyard, staring blindly at the white paint peeling off the garden shed while Eve’s hand rested on his forearm. Her touch was warm, a steady, grounding weight that usually had a way of pulling him back down to earth whenever his brain started to redline, but today it just felt like a physical reminder of everything he’d failed to do.

“Mark, you’re spinning,” Eve said, her voice tight with that quiet, fierce concern she only used when she thought he was about to do something incredibly stupid. “You can’t carry the weight of the entire world on your shoulders. You didn't know.”

“I should have gone,” Mark muttered, his teeth clicking together so hard his jaw ached. He didn't look at her. If he looked at her, he’d have to acknowledge the absolute, terrifying truth of what had happened. “Cecil asked me three days ago. He explicitly asked me to check the energy signatures at that warehouse because they were spiking, and I told him no. I told him I was busy. I was literally sitting on the couch watching a re-run of some stupid movie while Luke was walking into a trap.”

The guilt wasn't just a heavy feeling in his chest; it was a physical, choking sickness. Luke was his older brother. The guy who had practically raised him while their dad was off saving the world or writing books or whatever the hell Nolan had actually been doing for the last twenty years. 

Luke was the smart one, the one who won an Oscar, the one who built a literal superhero franchise out of thin air just because. He was the guy who always had a dry, sarcastic answer for everything, the guy who would literally drag Mark to Italy for ice cream just to cheer him up after a bad training session.

And now he was just... gone. Cleanly deleted from the grid along with Kara, leaving behind nothing but a pile of smoking masonry and a bunch of high-tier subscribers screaming about their transit guarantees.

“We don't even know where they went,” Mark whispered, his fingers curling into tight, white-knuckle fists at his sides. “What if they’re trapped in the Phantom Zone? What if those blue-skinned freaks did something to his head? I could have stopped it, Eve. If I had just been there—“

“You wouldn't have changed a damn thing, Mark.”

The voice didn't come from the house. It dropped straight out of the sky, a flat, heavy rumble that instantly killed the ambient sound of the neighborhood crickets.

Nolan Grayson landed without a sound, his white-and-red boots pressing exactly two inches into the manicured sod before he straightened his spine. He looked completely different from the man who had been pouting on a mountain in Colorado for the last week. 

The uncertainty, the strange, fragile humanity he’d been trying on since the whole truth about his empire had leaked out—it was all gone, scrubbed away by the cold, military precision of a soldier who had suddenly found himself in a combat zone. He didn't look at Eve. He didn't offer a single word of comfort to his remaining son. 

He just adjusted the heavy white fabric of his cape and fixed Mark with a stare that felt like a physical pressure against his sternum.

“Get your suit on,” Nolan ordered, his voice entirely devoid of cadence. “We’re leaving.”

Mark blinked, his brain lagging behind the sudden shift in momentum. “Leaving? Dad, Cecil said the GDA is still processing the tachyon data from the warehouse. We don't even have a heading yet—“

“Cecil Stedman is a bureaucrat who views the galaxy through a keyhole,” Nolan interrupted, his arms crossing over his chest with a sharp, leather-on-leather snap. “He is waiting for machines to calculate what I can see with my own eyes if the trail is fresh enough. The Mauler Twins are primitives, but the energy displacement required to move a Viltrumite and a Kryptonian simultaneously doesn't just vanish. It leaves a tear. A microscopic thinning of the space-time fabric. If we linger here while your brother’s employees argue over resource allocation, the trail will cold-snap.”

Eve stepped forward, her hand dropping from Mark’s arm as a faint, pink aura of energy began to crackle around her knuckles. “Nolan, he’s exhausted. He hasn't slept since the call came in from MetaWorks. You can’t just drag him into a tracking mission without a plan.”

“This isn't a discussion, Eve,” Nolan said, using her name with that terrible, dismissive distance that always reminded Mark that his father had lived for two thousand years before Earth even existed. “The Kryptonian girl’s people—Zod’s remnants—are already scouring the lower quadrants. If they find the displacement vector before we do, they will launch an uncoordinated orbital strike on whatever coordinate they pull from the ether. Mark is coming with me because he needs to learn how to track a target outside of an atmosphere. Move.”

Mark didn't look back at Eve. He couldn't. The sheer, unadulterated terror of losing his brother was currently functioning as a highly volatile fuel, burning through the static of his fatigue until his ears were ringing with it. He crossed the yard in two strides, grabbed his rumpled yellow-and-blue suit from the porch railing where it had been drying, and pulled the mask over his head in one continuous, desperate motion.

He didn't even say goodbye. He just launched.

The transition from the ground to the upper sky didn't happen in stages; it was a violent, skull-rattling acceleration that tore the breath right out of his lungs. One second he was looking at the yellow light leaking from his mother’s kitchen window, and the next, the entire suburban grid of their neighborhood was turning into a grey, cross-hatched smudge beneath his boots. 

Nolan was ahead of him, a white streak cutting through the low-hanging cloud cover with so much force that the moisture didn't just part—it exploded into a circular wake of vapor that trailed behind them like a scar.

Jesus, he’s moving fast, Mark thought, his teeth vibrating against his fillings as he pushed his own flight center to its absolute limit. Usually, when they flew together, Nolan maintained a respectable, civilian-friendly pace, something that didn't shatter every window within a three-mile radius. Not today. Today, his father was flying with the casual, terrifying indifference of a missile that had already been cleared for launch.

The blue of the sky didn't fade; it died.

It was a strange, unsettling thing to watch the atmosphere thin out. The vibrant, familiar azure of the daytime sky began to curdle at the edges, deepening into a bruised, violent purple before turning into a flat, velvet black that looked entirely too heavy to be real. 

Mark’s ears popped with a wet, agonizing click as the pressure dropped to absolute zero. The air in his lungs—the last real breath he’d taken over Ohio—felt like a block of ice expanding against his ribs, forcing him to lock his throat shut to keep his thoracic cavity from collapsing under the external vacuum.

He’d been to the moon before. He’d sat on that grey, dusty rock with Luke and eaten a terrible sandwich while looking at the blue marble of Earth, and he’d thought, in that stupid, naive way he always did, that he understood what space was. He’d thought he had a handle on the scale of it.

He was completely, hilariously wrong.

Nolan didn't stop at the lunar orbit. He didn't even look at the moon as they blasted past it, the grey sphere appearing as a brief, cratered blur on their left before vanishing into the distance. They were pushing directly into the deep dark, navigating by the cold, unblinking glare of stars that didn't twinkle anymore. 

Without the atmosphere to soften them, the stars looked like tiny, white-hot needles driven directly into the black canopy of the universe, so bright they made Mark’s eyes water beneath his lenses.

Where are we going? Mark wanted to scream, but the word just thudded uselessly inside his own skull, a mute vibration that had no air to carry it. Dad, stop. We’re too far out. We’re entirely too far out.

Nolan wasn't listening, anyways.

The older Viltrumite’s head was tilted slightly to the left, his eyes narrowed as his gaze swept across the empty void between Mars and the asteroid belt. He was hunting. Mark could see the micro-adjustments in his father’s shoulders, the way Nolan’s body would twitch three inches to the north to catch a faint, invisible current that Mark couldn't even perceive. 

To Mark, the universe was just an infinite, terrifying room full of absolutely nothing; to Nolan, it was a map written in thermal signatures, gravitational depressions, and the faint, copper-tasting residue of ancient Kryptonian drive-trails.

The physical toll hit Mark all at once, a massive, leaden weight that dropped onto his nervous system like a falling building. 

His muscles were screaming. Flying at this velocity wasn't like running; it was a sustained, full-body act of violent will, a constant battle to keep his own internal gravity from being ripped apart by the sheer kinetic momentum of their transit. His vision was beginning to narrow at the margins, the blackness of space bleeding into a dark, swimming grey as his blood pressure struggled to compensate for the lack of a planetary core beneath him.

He looked down, trying to find Earth, trying to find anything that looked like home, and his stomach did a slow, sickening flip.

The planet was small. It wasn't the massive, infinite world he’d spent his whole life defending; it was just a blue-and-white marble, small enough that he could have covered it with his thumb if he held his hand out. The sheer, industrial-sized insignificance of it hit him like a physical blow. 

Every single person he knew—his mom, Eve, the guys at MetaWorks, the annoying Diamond-Tier lady with her unsweetened almond milk—they were all stuck on that tiny, fragile speck, completely unaware of how easy it would be for the universe to just blink and wipe them out.

And Luke was out here somewhere. Or worse, he wasn't.

Nolan suddenly slowed down, the deceleration so abrupt that Mark nearly overshot him, his boots swinging forward as he fought to kill his own forward momentum before he crashed directly into his father’s back. 

They were drifting now, floating in the absolute, freezing silence near the inner edge of the asteroid belt. A massive, jagged chunk of iron-rich rock—probably three miles across—was rotating slowly a few hundred yards away, its shadow swallowing them in a cold, featureless dark that felt like a grave.

Nolan reached out, his thick, scarred fingers closing around the collar of Mark’s suit. He didn't do it to hurt him; he did it to anchor him, pulling him close until their foreheads were almost touching, allowing the mechanical vibrations of his vocal cords to pass directly through the bone of their skulls.

“Look at the stars, Mark,” Nolan’s voice buzzed inside Mark’s ears, sounding metallic and distant, like an old radio transmission. “Tell me what you see.”

Mark swallowed hard, his throat dry as sand. I see nothing, he wanted to say. I see stars. I see a bunch of rocks that want to crack my skull open.

“I don't... I don't know,” Mark managed to project through his jaw, the vibration weak. “It’s just empty, Dad. There’s nothing here.”

“There is never nothing,” Nolan snapped back, his grip on Mark’s collar tightening just enough to bruise. “The Kryptonians built their empire on light; they leave a signature that stays in the cosmic dust for decades. If Luke were dead, his cells would have ruptured, and the solar radiation would have scattered his Viltrumite sequencing across this entire quadrant like a flare. I don't see a flare. I see a displacement wave that moves toward the outer rim, near Jupiter’s gravitational well.”

Mark looked toward the horizon, where the massive, pale orange disc of Jupiter was visible as a distant, terrifying jewel against the black. It looked beautiful. It looked like an absolute nightmare. The distance between where they were standing and that giant gas ball was more space than Mark had ever traversed in his entire life, a gap so wide his human brain literally couldn't process the math of it.

“He’s alive, Mark,” Nolan said, his tone dropping back into that flat, unyielding certainty that was the closest the man would ever get to an apology. “He is alive because he is too much like his mother to leave without saying goodbye, and he is too much like me to be broken by whatever petty magic those sorcerers threw at him. But he is far away. And if you’re going to help me bring him back, you need to stop looking at the ground.”

Nolan let go of his collar. The sudden lack of contact left Mark drifting alone in the vacuum, his limbs twitching slightly as he fought to maintain his orientation against the glare of the sun. He looked back at the tiny blue marble of Earth, then turned his head toward the orange eye of Jupiter.

The survival guilt was still there, a cold, sharp needle in his heart, but the static was gone. He wasn't a kid in a backyard anymore. He was a Viltrumite. And his brother was missing.

Mark leaned into the black, his hands curling into fists as he prepared for the next launch. 

“Lead the way.”

…

The grey dust of the Aitken basin didn't shift unless Nolan made it shift.

There was no wind on the dark side of the moon. There was only the heavy, freezing weight of absolute vacuum and the sharp, jagged shadows cast by the lip of the crater. Nolan stood perfectly still, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes fixed on the blue-and-white curve of Earth hanging over the horizon. 

He had just left Mark snoring on his bed, completely spent, his body shivering off the deep-space chill under three layers of blankets. The boy was soft. He had the strength, the baseline genetic markers were all there, but he lacked the internal iron required to look at the void and not look back for home.

Luke wouldn't have broken. Luke would have spent the entire flight complaining about the lack of cabin pressure and the quality of the stars, but his heart rate wouldn't have spiked once. A good father shouldn’t have favorites.

Yet another sign that he wasn’t a good father. At least not by human standards.

Nolan reached into the small, reinforced recess beneath a jagged outcropping of black basalt, his fingers brushing past the jagged silicate until they clicked against a smooth, cold square of obsidian-like alloy. The imperial long-range transmitter was a primitive piece of vanguard tech by modern Viltrumite standards, but its quantum encryption was completely invisible to Cecil’s satellites. He pressed his thumb against the center of the square, letting the needle-prick read his DNA.

The device didn't hum. It simply bled heat into the freezing vacuum, a faint crimson line pulsing across the face of the stone before the audio-induction node vibrated against the bone of Nolan’s jaw.

“Report, Vanguard Nolan,” General Kregg’s voice delivered a dull, metallic thud directly to his inner ear. The connection was flawless, routed through three separate relay drones drifting in the Oort cloud. “Your scheduled transmission is seventy-two hours overdue. The central archives have already flagged your quadrant for structural regression. Explain the delay.”

“The local data required additional validation,” Nolan lied, his voice flat, his face a smooth mask of military indifference. He kept his eyes on the tiny blue speck of North America. “The planet’s planetary defense network is more fractured than initially evaluated. The presence of the rogue Kryptonians has complicated the timeline. I am stabilizing the parameters before initiating the primary purge.”

“The High Command is entirely indifferent to local complications, Nolan,” Kregg snapped back, the syllables cut with that cold, bureaucratic cruelty that Nolan had spent two centuries trying to forget. “Our long-range telemetry shows a severe spike in atmospheric degradation and meta-human instability within the Sol system. The native population is weaponizing exotic energies. They are approaching the tipping point. The planet requires a guiding hand immediately, or it will be reduced to slag before the harvest fleets can even deploy.”

Nolan’s fingers tightened against the basalt rock, the solid stone turning into a fine, grey powder between his knuckles. “The native population is manageable. The infrastructure is intact. I will have the integration plan finalized within the month.”

“Your timeline is no longer satisfactory,” Kregg said, his tone shifting into something heavier, something that made Nolan’s spine stiffen against the lunar rock. “The archival branch has processed your biological updates. The presence of your offspring has been noted. Specifically, the eldest.”

The ice in Nolan’s chest didn't come from the vacuum.

“They are developing on schedule,” Nolan said, keeping his voice carefully level, filtering out the sudden, violent surge of adrenaline that was making his knuckles twitch. “Mark is cooperative. He has begun high-altitude training. He will be ready to enforce compliance when the fleet arrives.”

“They are not soldiers, Nolan. They are assets,” Kregg corrected him coldly. “The High Command does not care about their training schedule. The Viltrumite bloodline is thin. The genetic purity of our race is on the precipice of total stagnation. The biological data from your eldest son suggests that the human genome possesses an unprecedented stability when spliced with our DNA. They are no longer viewed as vanguard support. They are properties of the Empire’s repopulation initiative.”

Nolan didn't breathe. He couldn't. The thought of Luke—the sarcastic, stubborn boy who spent his weekends playing dress-up in platinum armor and arguing about customer service tiers—being treated as a livestock sample in a Viltrumite breeding facility made his jaw lock with enough force to crack a tooth. They didn't see a family. They didn't even see the boy who had won an award for writing a story about a man in a metal suit. They saw a solution to an extinction crisis.

“I have the situation under control,” Nolan repeated, the words tasting like copper in his mouth. “There is no need for external intervention.”

“The High Command disagrees,” Kregg said, and Nolan could hear the faint, scratching sound of an administrative log being finalized on the other end of the galaxy. “Your updates are deemed insufficient given the value of the biological assets in your custody. Anissa has already been dispatched. Her scout vessel cleared the Vega system six hours ago. She is entering your sector to personally inspect the Sol system, verify the functional strength of your sons, and enforce immediate compliance with the integration decree.”

The induction node cut out with a short, dead click.

The silence returned to the crater, heavier and colder than before. Nolan slowly pulled his hand away from the transmitter, staring at the grey dust on his fingers. Anissa. The Empire’s premier tactical auditor. A woman who had liquidated three separate planetary civilizations before her first millennium because their production quotas had dipped by four percent. 

She didn't negotiate, she didn't pout on mountains, and she certainly wouldn't care about Debbie’s feelings or Mark’s fatigue.

If she came down to that house, if she looked at his children and saw anything less than perfect, mindless soldiers ready to be shipped back to the home world for genetic harvesting, she would burn the entire continent to the bedrock just to clear the field.

Nolan looked back at Earth. The blue marble looked so incredibly small from here. So fragile. He turned away from the light, his cape snapping behind him as he launched himself back into the dark sky, his chest tight with a pressure that had absolutely nothing to do with the vacuum of space.

…

The world was entirely too loud, and none of it was what Clark needed to hear.

He hovered three thousand feet above the bustling streets of Metropolis, his cape rippling in the high-altitude updraft while his senses expanded outward, peeling back the layers of the planet's ambient noise. 

He bypassed the millions of conversations, the thrumming engines of the city buses, the rhythmic clicking of the GDA tracking satellites, and the distant, rolling thunderheads over the Midwest. He was looking for two very specific signatures. He needed the steady, heavy, slightly metallic thud of Luke’s heartbeat, or the sharp, high-frequency bio-electric hum that Kara’s cells naturally emitted whenever she was agitated.

There was nothing. Just an empty, mocking silence where his family should have been.

The weight of it was suffocating. Their reunion had been a fragile, messy thing, a collision of ancient ghosts and modern complications that had left Kara looking so small, so emotionally drained beneath that fierce warrior exterior she’d inherited from Brainiac’s conditioning. 

She was his cousin. His blood. He had stood with her in the crystalline light of the Fortress of Solitude, showing her the holographic legacy of Jor-El and the delicate, shimmering fragments of the Growth Codex, hoping to prove that Krypton could be something more than a weapon to be pointed at the stars. Then Faora had broken the peace, forcing them into a brutal, claustrophobic brawl that had ended with the general locked behind the crimson hum of a red-sun cell. 

He had thought they had time to breathe. He had thought he could protect her. He was wrong. And he would never forgive himself for that.

The air pressure dropped so violently that Clark’s jaw clicked.

The blue sky above the North Atlantic didn't just darken; it turned the color of an old, deep bruise, the clouds curdling into thick, unnatural ridges as a massive shadow rolled over the ocean. The GDA early warning grids didn't even beep. 

The intruder simply displaced the atmosphere, a three-mile-long, obsidian-class Kryptonian military dreadnought dropping out of hyperspace with a heavy, concussive boom that shattered the glass in every lighthouse from Maine to Nova Scotia. The hull was a jagged, predatory line of black alloy, its belly pulsing with the dull, crimson glow of active military shielding.

The New Kryptonian Empire had found them. And they weren't here to negotiate.

“League, on me!” Clark bellowed into his comm-link, his voice catching the thermal layer as he tilted his body forward, breaking the sound barrier before the echo of his own voice could clear his ears.

They didn't hesitate. They never did. To his left, a streak of brilliant emerald light cut through the darkening fog as Hal Jordan materialized, his ring already flaring into a massive, multi-layered defensive grid. 

Below them, a jagged line of yellow lightning fractured the surface of the sea as Barry Allen pushed his kinetic friction fields to their absolute limit, running across the whitecaps at a velocity that left a trail of boiling steam in his wake. And rising straight out of the cloud bank, her golden lasso trailing behind her like a line of liquid fire, was Diana.

The response from the dreadnought was instantaneous, cold, and executed with an absolute lack of theatrical display.

A wave of high-intensity radiation erupted from the ship’s lower battery, turning the sea beneath them a sickly, irradiated scarlet. It wasn't an explosive blast; it was a tactical dampening field. Hal’s emerald shield didn't just shatter—it dissolved into green smoke, the ring on his finger letting out a sharp, high-pitched squeal as the red-sun frequency scrambled the construct’s internal logic. 

Hal plummeted toward the ocean, his arms flailing as the sudden loss of flight equilibrium dropped him like a stone. A millisecond later, the ambient friction field around Barry gave out entirely, the red-sun dampener bleeding the kinetic buildup right out of his muscles. The Flash tripped over a cresting wave, his body skipping across the water like a flat stone before vanishing beneath the foaming white foam.

Then the bay doors hissed open, and Faora-Ul dropped into the sky.

She didn't use the clumsy, flying brawling style of a newly empowered metahuman. She descended with the terrifying, practiced grace of an elite martial artist who had mastered the gravity of a hundred different worlds. Diana met her in the air, her Amazonian sword swinging in a flawless, silver arc meant to take the general's head at the collarbone. 

Faora didn't even draw a weapon. She sidestepped the blade by a fraction of an inch, her movements so precise they looked mechanical, and caught Diana’s wrist with a grip that sounded like a hammer hitting an anvil.

“A primitive specimen,” Faora murmured, her eyes completely dead behind her dark visor as she used Diana’s own forward momentum to pivot, her elbow driving upward into the demigod's jaw with a sickening crack. “Your strength is an accident of birth, Amazon. You lack discipline.”

Diana fired a burst of divine lightning from her bracelets, but Faora didn't even flinch. She simply absorbed the impact with her chest plate, twisted Diana’s arm until the shoulder joint popped out of its socket, and hurled her downward through the hull of a drifting cargo ship three miles away.

“Zod! Stop this!” Clark screamed, his own heat vision flaring red-hot as he cut through the secondary defensive drones that were swarming out of the ship’s hangar. He managed to pull up right in front of the primary command bridge, his hands held out, his chest heaving as he stared through the reinforced viewscreen at the tall, bearded figure standing at the helm. “We have the Codex! We have the means to rebuild our people without blood! We can build a new world together, peacefully! Think about Kara—she’s safe, she’s found a life here!”

General Zod didn't step back. He didn't even look angry. He just stared through the glass at the last son of House El with a heavy, aristocratic contempt that felt more dangerous than any kryptonite spear.

“You speak of culture like a child who has only read about it in storybooks, Kal-El,” Zod’s voice cut through the reinforced glass, projected by the ship’s external comm-array with a flat, military finality. “Krypton was not a collection of philosophical debates. It was an empire. This planet is an undisciplined colony, a chaotic nest of genetic anomalies and corporate play-actors. You have grown soft under this yellow sun, playing the role of a guardian for cattle.”

“They are my people, Zod!” Clark shouted, his fists bunching as the dreadnought’s primary batteries began to glow a deep, lethal violet, targeting the coastlines below.

“They are an obstacle,” Zod said, his hand dropping onto the main tactical console with a slow, deliberate pressure. “Faora has been recovered. The Sol system will be integrated into the infrastructure of the New Empire. If you choose to stand with the dirt, Kal-El, you will be buried in it.”

The primary battery fired.

The world went white. The concussive force of the beam didn't just knock Clark backward; it stripped the air from the region, sending him spinning through the cloud layers as his vision blurred, the distant, fractured screams of his friends echoing through his ears before the rising smoke from the burning sea swallowed them all.