A/N: This story is rated M for mature content not suitable for children.
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Chapter 3: The False Vanguard
The supersonic barrier didn't just shatter over the Arctic Circle, it disintegrated.
Clark Kent tore through the upper atmosphere at Mach 15, a screaming wake of pressurized air trailing behind his red cape like the tail of a falling comet. Down below, the pristine white monotony of the ice sheets gave way to a horrific, unnatural scar. From fifty miles out, his telescopic vision locked onto the target area. It looked like an inkblot on a wedding gown: a massive, perfectly circular basin of dark, gleaming volcanic glass, surrounded by a jagged rim of steam that hissed violently into the sub-zero air.
But it was what sat in the center of that black glass that made his heart stutter against his ribs.
Two figures.
They weren't cowering. They weren't hiding from the satellite eyes of the world. They were tangled together in a display of absolute, unvarnished intimacy that felt entirely wrong for the barren, frozen wasteland. The male was massive, his broad back etched with glowing crimson lines that looked like fractures in a forge. The female was golden, her hair a brilliant banner against the dark stone, her body pressed so tightly to his that they looked less like two separate people and more like a singular, multi-tiered weapon.
Clark adjusted his descent, banking sharply. He didn't want to attack; his entire upbringing in Smallville had been an exercise in the preservation of peace. Jonathan Kent had taught him to extend a hand before he ever balled a fist. But the images Waller had sent him, the vaporization of an entire automated division in the blink of an eye, lingered in his mind like a poison.
He broke the cloud layer, his boots extending as he slowed his velocity, dropping toward the edge of the black glass sheets with a low, heavy thud that cracked the perimeter frost.
The steam parted.
Clark stood tall, the iconic 'S' on his chest catching the pale, weak northern sun. He kept his hands open, slightly away from his hips. "That's far enough!" his voice boomed, carrying the trained resonance of an authority meant to calm, not threaten. "My name is Superman. I was sent here by the authorities to ascertain your intent. You've destroyed sovereign military property, and you are creating a global security crisis."
Silence greeted him.
The two figures didn't jump apart in panic. In fact, the male didn't even turn his head immediately. He kept his thick arm wrapped securely around the blonde woman’s bare waist, his fingers digging into the flesh of her hip with a slow, grinding possessiveness that made Clark’s jaw tighten behind his media-trained mask.
When the male finally turned his head, Clark felt an instinctive, primal jolt of alarm go off in his hindbrain.
The boy's eyes weren't human. They weren't even the clear, crystalline blue of an alien survivor. They were a deep, burning, volatile crimson around the irises, a pair of miniature bloody suns that looked at the hero of Metropolis as if he were nothing more than a stray dog that had wandered into a king's banquet.
"Superman," Naruto repeated the word, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that carried no respect, only a deep, mocking amusement. He ran a hand down the curve of Kara's back, his palm hot enough to leave faint, shimmering vapor trails against the freezing air. "They gave you a title, mortal. They gave you a cape. And they sent you here to die for them."
Clark took a step forward, his eyes tracking the blonde woman. Her physical beauty was undeniable, but beneath her skin, his X-ray vision encountered something completely unprecedented. He could see through the human structure easily enough, but her cells... they weren't just absorbing solar radiation. They were saturated with a heavy, unstable, bloody-red energy that seemed to be actively rewriting her DNA, hardening her bone structure until her density surpassed anything he had ever seen in his own mirror.
And the boy beside her was worse. Clark’s vision couldn't pierce him at all. Naruto’s New God physiology was a wall of absolute, solid density, an existential black hole that simply rejected the Kryptonian’s sight.
"I didn't come here to fight," Clark said, his voice dropping an octave, his blue eyes locking onto Kara. "You're like me. I can feel the solar radiation coming off you. You're from the stars. But this planet... these people... they're fragile. The things you did to those drones, the energy you're releasing out here, it's destabilizing the region. If you don't come with me peacefully to talk to the authorities, they will treat you as an enemy combatant."
Kara let out a laugh. It was a rich, beautiful sound, but it carried a terrifying edge of pure, aristocratic disdain. She shifted in Naruto's embrace, her long, bare legs straddling his thigh as she looked over her shoulder at Clark.
"Authorities?" Kara scoffed, her fingers trailing up Naruto's bare, muscled chest, tracing the glowing crimson paths of the Astro Force. "You speak for the insects, little man. You've spent your life hiding among them, wearing their clothes, begging for their permission to exist. I can smell the fear on you, the way you hold your breath so you don't blow their houses down. You're a god playing at being a servant."
"They're not insects," Clark countered, his temper flaring for a brief fraction of a second, his fists clenching at his sides. "They're our neighbors. They're the people who gave us a home when our worlds were gone. We have a responsibility to protect them, not stomp on them because we're stronger."
"They didn't give me a home," Naruto said.
He slowly stood up, lifting Kara with him as if she weighed nothing at all. He didn't put her down; she simply floated beside him, her small hand locking into his, their fingers intertwining. Naruto stepped forward, the black glass cracking beneath his bare feet. The Astro Force within his veins began to hum, a visible, bloody-red aura rising from his shoulders like heat waves off asphalt.
"We took this land," Naruto continued, his red-hued eyes fixing Clark in a vice grip. "We bought it with the remnants of our past, and we stayed away from your cities. We didn't seek your humans out. But they dared to draw a circle around us. They dared to send machines to command us. On New Genesis, little Kryptonian, we had a word for those who presumed to command gods."
"What word?" Clark asked, his muscles tensing, his weight shifting into a combat stance.
"Collateral," Naruto snarled.
The movement didn't happen in frames; it happened between them.
Clark didn't see Naruto launch. One microsecond the golden-haired New God was thirty feet away; the next, Naruto’s massive, calloused hand was wrapped entirely around Clark’s throat.
The speed was absolute, Mach 30 baseline, achieved without any atmospheric buildup, leaving a vacuum pocket that imploded with a deafening crack that shattered the remaining ice walls for three miles around.
Clark’s eyes widened behind his glasses as his body was propelled backward at a horrific velocity. He slammed through the jagged rim of the crater, his cape tearing into shreds as he was driven five hundred yards through the solid, frozen permafrost.
He tried to bring his arms up to break the hold, but Naruto’s grip was like an anchor forged from the core of a collapsed galaxy. The New God’s fingers dug into Clark’s windpipe, the sheer density of his flesh refusing to yield even an inch to Clark's frantic, super-strength leverage.
"You think you're fast because you can fly through their skies?" Naruto roared over the screaming wind, his face inches from Clark’s as they tore a deep, mile-long trench through the Arctic landscape. "You're slow, boy! You've spent your entire life practicing how not to hurt things! Your muscles are lazy! Your instincts are rotten!"
Clark snarled, the Kansas farm boy disappearing as his survival instincts took over. His eyes flared into a brilliant, blinding solar crimson. Two beams of concentrated heat vision, burning at the temperature of the sun's core, blasted out of his pupils, striking Naruto squarely in the chest.
The solar fire hit Naruto's bare skin, and for a second, the blizzard around them turned into a white wall of vaporized moisture.
But Naruto didn't release his grip.
The Astro Force erupted from his chest in a violent, jagged starburst of deep red energy. The crimson cosmic force didn't just absorb the heat vision; it fed on it. Clark watched in pure horror as his solar fire was actively warped around Naruto’s body, converted into raw kinetic pressure that backfired directly into Clark’s face.
The explosion blew them apart.
Clark tumbled through the snow, bouncing three times before catching himself, his boots digging deep into the frozen earth as he slid to a halt. His flannel shirt was completely gone, his chest covered in soot, his breathing heavy for the first time since he had arrived in Metropolis.
Before he could even look up, the sky above him turned dark.
Kara dropped from the clouds like a falling moon.
She didn't use a fist; she delivered a two-handed downward strike that caught Clark completely off guard. Her knuckles, hardened to an absolute, unyielding density by fifteen years of Naruto’s cosmic conditioning, slammed directly into Clark’s collarbone.
The impact was catastrophic. A localized earthquake rippled through the northern shelf, the sound of the blow echoing like a naval cannon.
Clark was driven straight down into the bedrock, his body burying itself thirty feet deep into the dark stone. He gasped, a sharp, white-hot line of agony shooting through his shoulder. His collarbone wasn't broken, his Kryptonian physiology was too resilient for that, but it was bruised. He had been hurt. Truly hurt, by a woman who looked exactly like the people he spent his days protecting.
"Get out of our sky," Kara hissed, hovering right above the hole she had carved, her blue eyes flashing with that terrifying Crimson Flare. The jagged red sparks of the Astro Force crackled across her fingers, a visual warning that she was operating on a level that bypassed the standard limitations of her race.
Inside the deep, dark trench, Clark Kent lay on his back, staring up at the circle of gray sky.
His mind was reeling. Who were these two? The woman had the same solar signature as him, she was clearly a survivor of his own lost world, but she didn't look at him with the relief of a sister. She looked at him with the cold, murderous intent of a predator defending her mate. And the boy... that energy wasn't from Krypton. It wasn't from Earth. It was something primal, something that made his own solar reserves feel light, weak, and clean by comparison.
“They’re stronger than you, Clark.”
His father’s old voice echoed in his mind, from the days when they used to lift tractors in the barn. “Not because they have more muscle, but because they don't have to worry about what happens when they miss.”
Clark closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. He thought of Lois. He thought of his mother back in Smallville. He thought of the millions of fragile, soft human lives that depended on him keeping his word, the word that he would never be the monster the world feared he was.
"I can't lock them up," Clark muttered to himself, his jaw setting as he stood up within the stone tomb. "But I can't let them leave this waste either."
He floated up out of the trench, his body vibrating with a low, intense hum. The pale yellow sun above seemed to respond to his focus, the solar radiation pouring into his pores at an accelerated rate as he dropped his planetary restraints. He didn't want to kill them, but he was going to have to use every single ounce of his strength to break them.
He emerged into the arctic air, his face completely devoid of the gentle reporter mask. He looked like the god he was born to be.
"I tried to talk," Clark said, his voice echoing across the wasteland like thunder. "I tried to give you a choice. But you're dangerous. Both of you. If I have to drag you down into the bedrock to keep the world safe from you... I will."
Naruto stood five hundred yards away, his arm once again sliding around Kara’s waist as she floated down to his side. He looked at Clark’s newly awakened aura, the bright, golden solar glare that was beginning to distort the air around the hero, and his grin only grew wider, more savage.
"That's it," Naruto whispered, his hand sliding lower, his fingers gripping the meat of Kara’s thigh, lifting her leg slightly against his hip in a display of dominant, raw possessiveness that was meant entirely to demean Clark's moral stance. "Show me what you can do, Kryptonian. Stop pretending you're a man."
The second round didn't involve words.
Clark shot forward, a blue blur that broke the sound barrier five times over within the space of a single breath. He reached for Naruto, his hands extended to grab the New God and throw him into orbit.
But Kara moved first.
She intercepted him mid-air, her body colliding with his with the force of two speeding trains. They locked hands, their fingers crushing against each other as they battled for physical leverage above the black glass valley. Clark pushed with everything he had, his solar-powered muscles burning, but Kara didn't give an inch. Her astro-conditioned cells held their ground, her blue eyes staring into his from three inches away, the crimson sparks in her irises blindingly bright.
"He's mine," Kara hissed, her teeth bared in a feral snarl. "Every piece of him. Every drop of his fire. You don't get to touch him."
"He's using you!" Clark roared back, his hands trembling as he tried to break her grip. "Look at your cells! That red energy, it's changing you! It's burning you from the inside out!"
"It's completing me!" she screamed.
With a sudden, massive surge of strength, Kara brought her knee up, striking Clark squarely in the stomach. The blow sent him flying upward into the gray clouds, his breath escaping him in a sharp gasp.
Before he could stabilize his trajectory in the upper atmosphere, Naruto was already there.
The New God didn't fly; he had used the Astro Force to propel his high-density body upward like a rocket, breaching the cloud layer a fraction of a second after Clark. He appeared above the hero, his face a mask of absolute, divine execution.
Naruto brought both hands together, his fingers interlacing into a massive hammer. The Astro Force wrapped around his fists like a solid, glowing red anvil.
"Down," Naruto ordered.
He brought the hammer down directly onto Clark’s back.
The release of cosmic energy was so immense that it completely cleared the cloud layer over the entire territory, blowing the gray mists away to reveal the cold, blue sky above. The kinetic force drove Clark down at terminal velocity. He hit the black glass basin in the center of the crater like a falling asteroid.
The glass sheet shattered into millions of razor-sharp fragments. The earth beneath folded, a massive crater within a crater opening up as Clark’s body was driven fifty feet into the solid bedrock of the world.
The sound of the impact was followed by a terrifying, heavy silence.
Naruto floated down, his bare feet landing softly on the edge of the newly formed ruin. His chest was heaving slightly, the crimson lines on his skin pulsing with a rapid, erratic frequency. The Astro Force was running hot, demanding more expression, more destruction. His hands were shaking from the sheer volume of cosmic energy trapped beneath his flesh.
Kara landed right beside him. She didn't look at the smoking crater where Clark lay. She looked at Naruto. She saw the volatile, dangerous red light bleeding from his eyes, the way his body was trembling from the pressure of the Source radiation.
She didn't hesitate. She surged forward, her bare body pressing against his side, her arms wrapping around his neck as she pulled his mouth down to hers.
The kiss was a physical necessity.
The moment their lips met, the chaotic, destructive hum of the Astro Force found its grounding wire. The volatile crimson energy that had been threatening to tear the valley apart flowed out of Naruto’s skin and into Kara’s cells, a visible, crackling current of bloody-red fire that wrapped around their tangled bodies like a protective shroud.
Kara gasped into his mouth, her back arching as her astro-conditioned physiology absorbed the higher-dimensional radiation. Her skin turned a deep, heated bronze, her veins glowing with a mixture of golden solar light and crimson cosmic force. It didn't hurt her; it was an absolute, intoxicating rush of pure power, the only sensation on this planet that could actually satisfy her genetic density.
"More," she breathed against his lips, her hands tearing at his hair, her thighs locking around his waist as she pulled him down onto the shattered stone. "Give me... all of it, Naruto. Burn it out."
Naruto growled, his hands gripping her bare cheeks, pinning her down onto the smooth, hot bedrock that had been warmed by the energy of their battle. He didn't look at the sky. He didn't care if the hero in the hole was dead or alive. In that moment, the only thing that existed was the woman beneath him, the only being in the infinite universe who could take the full, devastating force of his true nature without breaking into dust.
He claimed her again, his body driving into hers with a raw, primal passion that was delivered with the full, unchecked density of a New God. Every touch was an earthquake; every gasp was a sonic ripple that cleared the falling frost from the air. They broke the stone beneath them, they melted the surrounding ice into a boiling mist, and they bled their energies together in a wild, fierce union that was entirely separate from the laws of the mortal world.
Down in the deeper trench, thirty yards away, Clark Kent slowly dragged himself out of the debris.
His suit was torn to rags, his body covered in deep, purple bruises that were only now beginning to heal under the distant yellow sun. He wiped a trace of heavy, red blood from his nose, his hand trembling slightly as he leaned against the shattered rock.
He listened.
His super-hearing picked up the sounds of their intimacy, the deep, guttural growls of the New God, the desperate, powerful gasps of the Kryptonian woman, and the terrifying, constant crackle of the Astro Force being vented into the bedrock.
Clark didn't fly back out of the hole. He stayed where he was, his head lowering, his heart heavy with a profound, terrifying realization.
These two weren't criminals he could lock up in Stryker's Island. They weren't rogues he could reason with using the words of Jonathan Kent. They were an absolute, independent ecosystem of cosmic might, a pair of wild, untamed bastions who would gladly turn the entire planet into a graveyard if anyone ever tried to separate them.
He reached into his pocket, pulling out the shattered remains of the secure Cadmus communicator. He didn't try to fix it. He simply dropped it into the dirt, crushing it beneath his boot.
"Waller," Clark whispered into the empty trench, his voice filled with a cold, absolute certainty. "You have no idea what you've started."
Three thousand miles away, the screen in the Virginia bunker remained dark, but the telemetry readouts had slowly begun to return as the spatial distortion over the Arctic stabilized.
Amanda Waller stood at the main terminal, her arms crossed over her chest, her face an unreadable mask of cold stone. Behind her, the entire command room was silent. The technicians were staring at their screens with wide, hollow eyes, tracking the final data streams that had been captured before the satellite arrays had been forced to reboot.
Lex Luthor stood at the side of the catwalk, his digital tablet dark. He wasn't looking at the numbers anymore. He was staring at the wall, his brilliant mind working through a series of calculations that were entirely separate from the military's protocols.
"He didn't bring them in," Waller stated. It wasn't a question.
"No," Luthor replied, his voice soft, almost melodic. "He didn't. In fact, if the seismic monitors are correct, our savior in Metropolis just spent the last forty minutes being treated as an intermediate obstacle. He survived, Amanda. But he didn't win."
Waller turned around, her dark eyes locking onto Luthor. "We need a contingency. If the Kryptonian asset can be neutralized by these... these New Gods, then our entire security baseline is compromised. We need something that doesn't rely on solar radiation or human physics."
Luthor slowly looked up, a small, dark smile breaking across his hairless face.
"I already have the foundations, Amanda," Luthor whispered, his eyes gleaming with that manic, scientific obsession. "The boy's energy. I managed to isolate three seconds of its frequency before the carrier wave was destroyed. It’s an extraction code. A signature from a higher plane. If we can replicate that frequency in a controlled environment... we won't just build a weapon to kill them."
"What will we do, Lex?" Waller asked, her jaw tightening.
Luthor stepped off the catwalk, his voice echoing in the metallic silence of the bunker. "We'll build a god of our own."
Chapter End
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A/N: Tensions are escalating as Clark realizes he isn't the most powerful being on the planet, and those lurking in the shadows are plotting against the cosmic duo. What will unfold next? Discover it in the upcoming chapter.