Friday evenings on the Kent farm were usually reserved for Martha's pot roast and quiet conversation around the kitchen table. But Friday, the air over the back forty acres crackled with a heavy, suffocating tension.
Clark had flown back from Metropolis just as the sun began dipping below the horizon, painting the Kansas sky in bruises of purple and orange. He hadn't even made it to the back porch before Nick Fury intercepted him.
"Drop the duffel bag, Kent," Fury said, tossing a specialized biometric scanner onto the hood of his SUV. "The kid has been training under twenty times Earth's gravity for a month. He's memorized the
heavy bag, and he's outgrown the obstacle courses. He needs a moving target."
Clark looked out toward the freshly harvested cornfield. Brody was standing fifty yards away, wearing his dark blue gravity suit, rolling his small shoulders. Even from this distance, Clark could feel the dense, vibrating heat of the six-year-old's ki.
"Mr. Fury, I don't know," Clark hesitated, adjusting his glasses. "He's six. If I misjudge my speed or my strength, I could seriously hurt him."
Fury let out a dry, humorless laugh. "Right now, he's carrying the localized weight of a commercial airliner, and he's not even breaking a sweat. If I were you, I'd be a lot more worried about your own jaw. Go."
Reluctantly, Clark took off his glasses, set them on the porch railing, and blurred into the field. He reappeared ten feet in front of Brody.
"Alright, buddy," Clark smiled, dropping into a loose, gentle stance. "Let's see what you've got. Come at me."
Brody didn't say a word. His dark eyes narrowed, flashing with a sudden, feral intensity. He bent his knees, his boots sinking into the packed dirt.
BOOM.
The sound barrier shattered. Brody didn't just run; he exploded forward, leaving a crater where he had just been standing. Clark's eyes widened in sheer shock. For
the first time in his life, Clark barely had time to raise his forearms to block.
Brody's tiny fist slammed into Clark's crossed arms. The kinetic shockwave leveled the dried cornstalks in a thirty-foot radius. Clark felt his boots skid backward, carving two deep trenches into the Kansas soil.
"Whoa!" Clark grunted, his Kryptonian muscles flaring to absorb the impact. *He's incredibly fast.*
Brody didn't pause. He launched into a relentless, dizzying barrage of strikes. It wasn't human martial arts; it was pure, unadulterated Saiyan instinct. He fought like a wildcat, spinning, kicking, and striking with a fluidity that was terrifying to watch. Clark found himself completely on
the defensive, relying purely on his superhuman reflexes to weave, duck, and parry the flurry of blows.
"You're not fighting back!" Brody yelled, deeply frustrated. He wanted his big brother to treat him like a warrior.
Brody backflipped away, creating a dozen yards of distance. He planted his boots, drew his hands back to his waist, and let out a guttural, furious shout. The ambient energy around the farm suddenly twisted. A blinding, localized flash of blue-white light erupted from Brody's small palms.
"Brody, wait—!" Clark shouted.
A raw, untamed blast of concentrated ki tore across the field, scorching the earth in its path. Clark blurred out of the way just in
time. The energy blast sailed past him, detonating against an old, abandoned grain silo at the edge of the property. The steel structure vaporized in a deafening explosion, sending molten shrapnel raining down over the empty fields.
Silence fell over the farm.
Brody stood in the dirt, panting heavily. The sheer force of the ki blast had completely shredded the denim jacket he wore over his gravity suit. And with the jacket destroyed, the furry brown tail that was normally wrapped securely around his waist snapped loose, swishing wildly behind him in the cool evening air.
"Brody... how did you do that?" Clark asked, genuinely stunned, stepping forward out of the settling dust.
Brody looked down at his own hands, equally surprised by the destructive power he had just unleashed. "I... I just felt it..."
"Okay, time out. Both of you," Fury called out over the radio, pacing near his SUV. "That's enough for one night. The sun's down."
Brody wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked up to find the sun. But the sky had fully transitioned into night. The heavy autumn clouds that had been blanketing the atmosphere suddenly parted, moved by the shockwave of Brody's blast.
Hanging low in the Kansas sky, perfectly framed between the clouds, was a massive, luminous full moon.
Brody's dark eyes locked onto the glowing celestial body. He froze.
Thump. Thump.
Clark stopped walking. His super-hearing picked up a sudden, horrific change in his little brother's physiology. Brody's heartbeat wasn't just accelerating; it was shifting, echoing with a deep, primal drumbeat that sounded like war drums.
"Brody?" Clark asked, a sudden chill running down his spine.
Brody didn't answer. He couldn't look away from the moon. His jaw slacked, and a low, guttural growl began to vibrate in his chest. His heart rate skyrocketed to over three hundred beats per minute.
"Kid, eyes on me," Fury yelled from the distance, recognizing the sudden spike on his biometric scanner. "Kent! Get him inside! Now!"
Clark lunged forward to grab his brother, but it was too late.
Brody let out a horrific, ear-piercing scream that ripped through the quiet farm. His small body began to spasm violently. His bones popped and cracked, elongating at an impossible rate. Dense, coarse brown fur erupted across his arms, his face, and his chest. His mouth stretched into a terrifying, fanged maw, and his dark eyes vanished entirely, replaced by glowing, blood-red orbs.
The dark blue gravity suit, designed to stretch, strained to its absolute limit as the boy grew. Five feet. Ten feet. Twenty feet.
Clark stumbled backward, staring up in absolute horror as the shadow of the beast eclipsed the moonlight. Standing in the middle of the Kent farm was a fifty-foot-tall, mountainous Great Ape. The Oozaru let out a deafening, earth-shaking roar that shattered every window in the farmhouse, turning its glowing red eyes down toward the tiny Kryptonian standing in the dirt below.
The Great Ape raised its massive, furry fists toward the heavens and drew in a breath that sounded like a vacuum, preparing to unleash another earth-shattering roar.
"Brody, stop!" Clark yelled, his voice echoing with Kryptonian volume.
The Oozaru froze.
Instead of swinging its massive fists down upon the farm, the giant beast blinked. The glowing, blood-red hue in its massive eyes flickered for a fraction of a second. The ape slowly lowered its arms, looking down at its giant, clawed hands in absolute bewilderment. It turned its massive head toward the ruined silo, then down toward Clark, letting out a low, bass-heavy whimper that shook the dust from the barn roof.
"Clark...?"
The voice didn't come from the ape's mouth. It was a telepathic projection of pure, panicked ki, echoing directly into Clark's mind.
"Brody! Is that you?" Clark asked, hovering slightly higher so he was at eye level with the giant beast's chest.
The Great Ape nodded its massive head, taking a clumsy, terrified step backward. The ground quaked. "I'm too big! Everything is so small. It hurts, Clark! There's too much power!"
On the porch, Fury was frantically tapping his smoking tablet. "Kent! The biometric dampener in his gravity suit is overloading! It wasn't designed to stretch over a mass this size! If he doesn't revert back, the suit is going to detonate!"
"I don't know how to go back!" Brody's panicked voice echoed in Clark's mind.
"Brody, listen to me," Clark said, projecting his voice with absolute, calm authority. "Remember your training. Remember the gravity. Don't let the power push outward. Pull it in. Compress it!"
The Great Ape gritted its massive fangs. Brody closed his giant eyes and clenched his fists. He stopped fighting the crushing, localized 20G gravity of the suit and instead used it, drawing the explosive, untamed energy of the Great Ape inward.
The air around the farm began to violently warp. A blinding, jade-green aura erupted around the fifty-foot beast, swirling like a localized hurricane. The ape let out a deafening, echoing roar of pure exertion as its massive physical form began to shrink, dissolving into pure, condensed ki.
The light was so intense that Clark had to shield his eyes, and Fury was forced to duck behind the hood of his SUV.
When the blinding green light finally shattered like glass, the fifty-foot monster was gone.
Standing in the center of the crater was Brody. But he wasn't the same six-year-old boy.
He had successfully compressed the Great Ape transformation into his humanoid body. His musculature had bulked up significantly, tearing the sleeves of his flannel shirt entirely. His wild black hair was spiked up even more ferociously, defying gravity with a primal, untamed edge. The intense, jade-green aura flared violently around him, crackling with static electricity.
But the most striking change was his eyes. The dark, playful pupils of the little boy were gone, replaced by piercing, luminescent golden irises that radiated pure, primal fury.
Brody was panting heavily, floating two inches off the ground entirely by the sheer pressure of his own energy. He looked at his hands, watching the green electricity arc between his fingers. He wasn't mindless, but he was drowning in adrenaline.
"Brody?" Clark asked, landing gently on the ground a few feet away.
Brody slowly looked up, his golden eyes locking onto Clark. The heavy, suffocating pressure radiating off the boy was astronomical. "I... I can feel it all," Brody growled, his voice deeper, layered with a faint, beastly echo. "The power didn't go away. I just pulled the monster inside."
Fury stepped out from behind the SUV, staring at the shattered screen of his biometric scanner. It was entirely black, having short-circuited trying to calculate the boy's power level.
"How much stronger is he?" Clark asked, never taking his eyes off his brother.
Brody clenched his fist, causing the air itself to ripple with a sonic boom. He looked at Clark, a wild, fierce grin breaking through the primal fury. "Twenty times. At least."
He had unlocked the Wrathful state. The power of the Oozaru, concentrated entirely within a human vessel. He had the strength of the Great Ape, but the speed, precision, and mind of Brody Kent.
The universe was vast, and Lex Luthor was building his corporate empire, but standing in a crater in the middle of a Kansas cornfield, the six-year-old boy with the golden eyes had just become the most powerful being on the planet.
And as the adrenaline finally peaked, the golden hue faded from Brody's eyes. His hair dropped, the green aura sputtered out, and the crushing weight of the 20G gravity suit finally caught up to his exhausted body. Brody collapsed forward, completely unconscious.
Clark blurred forward, catching his little brother before he hit the dirt. He cradled the exhausted, sleeping boy in his arms, looking up at the full moon.
"We're going to be okay," Clark whispered. "But we're going to need a bigger training field."