Metropolis's bustling concrete canyons starkly contrasted with the quiet Kent farm. For Clark, the city was a sensory overload: sirens wailing from three boroughs away, the hum of millions of phones and the rhythmic thumping of subway trains vibrating through his shoes.
Yet, he was adapting. He'd enrolled at Metropolis University, diving into economics and finance. Clark believed understanding the complex, invisible power structures governing the world was key to protecting it. He needed to grasp how money moved, how corporations operated and how society balanced precariously.
Despite the heavy course load, Lana's presence made the vast city feel like home.
it was a crisp Tuesday afternoon. Clark and Lana sat at a small wrought-iron table outside a café near the Centennial Park waterfront, taking a rare break from their studies. Lana was laughing, trying to steal a fry from Clark's plate, when his posture suddenly stiffened.
His super-hearing picked up a horrific sound a mile away: the agonising, high-pitched screech of shearing metal.
Clark turned his head towards the skyline. A few blocks over, a massive seventy-storey commercial high-rise was under construction. Perched at the very top was a multi-ton construction crane. One of its primary support cables had just snapped.
"Clark?" Lana asked, her smile fading as she saw his eyes widen. "What is it?"
Before her words could fully escape, a deafening CRACK echoed across the city block. The crane's boom arm, under the sheer weight, pulled the entire superstructure forward. Steel beams buckled and the crane tipped, tearing away from its moorings and plunging into a terrifying free-fall towards the crowded intersection of pedestrians and gridlocked traffic below.
Panic erupted in the streets as people screamed, looking up at the shadow of death plummeting towards them. There was no time to evacuate or for the authorities to arrive.
Clark didn't hesitate. He urgently looked at Lana and she simply nodded, telling him to go.
He slipped into an adjacent alleyway, his costume forgotten. He was just wearing a red t-shirt, an unbuttoned blue flannel and jeans. But he possessed speed. He tapped into the deep solar-charged reservoir of his Kryptonian cells, moving faster than the human eye could process.
To the terrified pedestrians staring up at the falling crane, there was only a sudden violent gust of wind.
A red and blue blur streaked through the intersection. A mother clutching her stroller suddenly stood safely on the steps of a bank fifty yards away. A taxi driver, frozen in shock behind the wheel, found his entire car lifted into the air and gently deposited three streets over in an instant.
However, the massive jagged boom arm of the crane continued its descent, aimed directly at the glass canopy of a crowded subway entrance.
Clark couldn't simply catch it; the sudden stop would shatter the crane into deadly shrapnel. Using hyper-time, he leapt into the air, intercepting the falling steel structure mid-descent. He grabbed the thickest support beam and strained, using his own body as a counterweight. He didn't stop the fall; he redirected it.
With a grunt of exertion, Clark wrestled the plunging crane away from the subway entrance, aiming it towards an empty cordoned-off construction pit nearby. The metal groaned and warped under his grip. He released the boom a fraction of a second before impact and blurred out of sight.
The crane smashed into the dirt pit with an earth-shattering BOOM, sending up a massive cloud of dust and debris.
Silence hung over the intersection for a moment before a collective gasp of breathless disbelief erupted from hundreds of survivors. They surveyed their surroundings, utterly bewildered. They were alive; cars had been moved and people relocated, but no one had seen who or what had caused it. Only a lingering gust of wind and the faint, after-image of red and blue remained.
Twenty minutes later, long before emergency services could fully secure the perimeter, a fleet of black SUVs bearing the "LexCorp" logo pushed through the police barricades. A young, sharply dressed man with piercing, calculating eyes stepped out into the settling dust. Lex Luthor didn't glance at the bewildered survivors; he walked straight past the police tape to the wreckage of his company's multi-million-dollar equipment.
He knelt in the dirt, ignoring the ruin of his custom Italian suit, and ran a gloved hand over the primary support beam of the boom arm. It wasn't just broken from the fall; it was warped, crushed inward on both sides by what looked exactly like the grip of two impossibly strong hands.
"No micro-burst of wind could do this," Lex murmured to himself, his brilliant mind already dismissing the weather reports frantically broadcast by the news stations. A cold, obsessive spark ignited in his eyes as he traced the deep indentations in the solid steel. Something was hiding in his city.
A mile away, Clark slipped back into the wrought-iron chair opposite Lana, the metallic scrape of the seat completely drowned out by the distant wailing sirens of emergency vehicles.
He was breathing heavily, a thin layer of concrete dust coating his flannel shirt. His hands, resting on the café table, trembled slightly. It wasn't from physical exertion—his Kryptonian muscles were fine—but from the sheer, overwhelming adrenaline of what had just happened.
Lana stared at him, her coffee forgotten. His dusty shirt caught her eye, then she looked toward the skyline where a massive plume of grey smoke billowed upwards.
"Did you…?" she whispered, leaning across the table.
"I managed to get everyone out of the way," Clark replied, his voice hushed. "I redirected the boom arm into an empty lot. If I'd stopped it, the sheer force would have snapped the metal into shrapnel over the crowd."
Lana reached across the table, taking his trembling hands in hers. "Clark, that was incredible. You saved hundreds of lives."
"But I left a trace," Clark said, looking down at his phone as alerts lit up the screen. The news was already calling him a 'miracle wind' or a 'red and blue blur'. "I moved quickly, Lana. Faster than ever. However, there are cameras everywhere in this city. If someone slowed down the footage…"
"We need to get off the street," Lana said, her tone shifting from awe to focused determination.
She packed up their bags and led Clark away from the café, navigating the panicked crowds until they reached an older mostly abandoned building on the edge of the Metropolis University campus.
Lana unlocked the door to an old radio broadcasting room she'd secured access to earlier in the semester.
She locked the door behind them and immediately dropped her backpack onto a dusty desk. She pulled out her laptop alongside two modified police scanners she'd bought from an electronics surplus store.
"They won't see your face on those cameras," Lana assured him, booting up her equipment. "But you're right. You can't be everywhere and you can't go in blind. If you're going to keep doing this, you need someone watching your back."
Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she tapped into the encrypted Metropolis emergency dispatch frequencies. "I'll monitor the grid. I'll filter out the noise, find the real threats and give you exactly where you need to be. We'll keep you a ghost."
Three hundred miles away, in the quiet den of the Kent farmhouse, the television tuned to a 24-hour news network.
"Breaking news from Metropolis," the news anchor's voice crackled through the room. "A catastrophic crane collapse near Centennial Park has miraculously resulted in zero casualties. Witnesses report a strange phenomenon: a sudden burst of wind, a blur of red and blue, moving people out of harm's way."
Martha pressed her hands over her mouth, tears welling in her eyes. Jonathan stood behind her, placing a heavy, grounding hand on her shoulder. They'd spent over a decade terrified of the day the world would discover their son's secret. They'd always feared the government, the military or the public panic. But now, watching the blurry footage of the disaster, their fear was overshadowed by a massive wave of pride.
"He did it, Martha," Jonathan whispered, his voice thick with emotion. "He saved them."
Sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of them, Brody had dropped his first-grade maths homework. The six-year-old scrambled closer to the television, his dark eyes fixed on the screen. They were showing amateur cell phone footage of the dust clearing. There was no clear shot of a person just a faint supersonic streak in the air.
But Brody knew. His little six-year-old heart pounded against his ribs.
He could feel a strange primal heat rising in his chest. It wasn't the crushing weight of the 10G gravity suit humming softly beneath his clothes. It was his ki flaring intensely in response to his brother's actions. Clark was out there saving people from monsters and disasters.
Brody looked down at his small hands. The ten times gravity suddenly didn't feel heavy enough. If he was going to stand by his big brother and become the legendary warrior his parents in the hologram had spoken of…
He needed to become much stronger.
The six-year-old bolted up from the rug, slamming the screen door shut behind him as he dashed into the yard.
Nick Fury stood on the porch, clutching his encrypted SHIELD tablet and staring in mild disbelief at the biometric readouts he'd been monitoring. Brody sprinted into the dirt driveway, clad in his dark blue gravity suit. Under ten times Earth's normal gravity, Brody shouldn't have been able to run so fast.
"Uncle Fury," Brody demanded, his chest heaving. "Turn it up."
Fury raised an eyebrow. "Ten Gs is the maximum your current curriculum allows, kid. We're not moving you to twelve for another three months. Rushing this could cause bone micro-fractures."
"I don't care," Brody said, his small fists clenching at his sides. He looked up at the legendary spymaster, and for the first time, Fury saw something truly terrifying in the six-year-old's dark eyes. It wasn't the playful chaos of a toddler anymore; it was the fierce, burning pride of a warrior race. "I saw the news. Clark is out there fighting and protecting people. But he's all alone. I need to be ready to help him. Make it twenty."
Fury stared at the boy. Doubling the gravity instantly was insane. It could crush a normal human's internal organs into paste. Yet as Fury looked at Brody, he recalled the holographic message from the pod—the one in a millennium—the Legendary Super Saiyan. "Alright, kid," Fury said, his voice dropping to a serious, calculating tone. "Brace yourself."
Fury tapped the screen, bypassing the safety protocols, and slid the dampener dial straight to 20G.
The air around Brody seemed to violently distort. He let out a sharp gasp, dropping to one knee as the invisible, crushing weight of twenty Earths slammed into his small frame. The porch stairs groaned, the wood splintering slightly under the localised density. Brody's arms shook violently, his teeth gritted in sheer agony.
For a agonising ten seconds, gravity had won. Brody was pinned.
Then, a faint, almost imperceptible green aura flickered around his boots.
With a guttural yell far too deep for a child, Brody pushed back. The dormant ki within him flared, flooding his muscles with raw, untamed power to combat the resistance. Slowly and painfully, he planted his second foot on the ground. The wood cracked further. His small muscles bulged against the metallic fabric of his suit.
He stood up.
Trembling, drenched in sweat and breathing like he'd just run a marathon, he stood perfectly straight under twenty times normal gravity.
Brody looked up at Fury, a triumphant wild grin on his face. "See? I'm getting stronger."
Fury slowly lowered the tablet, a cold shiver running down his spine. The boy wasn't just adapting; he was evolving on demand.
"Yeah, kid," Fury murmured. "You are."
As Brody ran off to the fields to test his new limits under the crushing weight, Fury stepped deeper into the barn's shadows and pulled out a highly encrypted satellite phone.
"Hill," Fury said, his voice dropping to a low authoritative whisper. "I need a digital cleanup crew working in Metropolis. Grab every piece of CCTV footage dashcam video and satellite imaging around Centennial Park for the last hour and scrub the red and blue anomaly. Replace it with corrupted files or visual artefacts."
"Director, LexCorp is already launching an independent investigation into the crane," Agent Hill's voice crackled through the receiver. "Luthor's people are on the ground."
"I know," Fury replied, his single eye narrowing as he looked out over the Kansas cornfields towards the horizon. "Luthor is smart but he's looking for a god. Let's make sure he only finds the wind. We protect our own."