Lena Luthor

With so many labs recklessly destroyed, there's a chance this new "Super" is an unauthorized clone. But we have no way to confirm whether she originated from any of LexCorp's former facilities.

We will therefore be keeping an eye on the police's investigations and discoveries in regards to the destruction of LexCorps laboratories, then.

Lex and I were close as children. He made me proud of the family I was adopted into. He was my older brother, and that's how I choose to remember him.

But as we grew older, we grew apart. I hadn't spoken to him in years, not since he founded LexCorp.

@dr-ms-babysitter

Doctor. I assumed you'd be coming eventually. I'm sorry your vacation time had to be interrupted by.. Well all of this.

Oh, yes, of course..

Did my brother not let you sit while you talked?

*She offers awkwardly, tucking some of her hair back before clearing her throat.*

@dr-ms-babysitter

Doctor. I assumed you'd be coming eventually. I'm sorry your vacation time had to be interrupted by.. Well all of this.

Oh, yes, of course..

Did my brother not let you sit while you talked?

*She offers awkwardly, tucking some of her hair back before clearing her throat.*

@dr-ms-babysitter

Doctor. I assumed you'd be coming eventually. I'm sorry your vacation time had to be interrupted by.. Well all of this.

Oh, yes, of course..

Did my brother not let you sit while you talked?

*She offers awkwardly, tucking some of her hair back before clearing her throat.*

@dr-ms-babysitter

Doctor. I assumed you'd be coming eventually. I'm sorry your vacation time had to be interrupted by.. Well all of this.

Oh, yes, of course..

Did my brother not let you sit while you talked?

An incident like this shouldn't be something that's swept under the rug.

@l--corp

You’ve been the same boy for over a decade. I’m fully aware Lex never intended to let you go. That’s exactly why I won’t let you shoulder the blame for this.

An incident like this shouldn't be something that's swept under the rug.

@l--corp

You’ve been the same boy for over a decade. I’m fully aware Lex never intended to let you go. That’s exactly why I won’t let you shoulder the blame for this.

Okay.

Okay.

Today.

Today's the day.

Today's the day.

Kon’s hands were shaking as he peeled himself out of bed, out of their bed, way, way too early. Way earlier tha he wanted but he was already feeling like his bones were trying to escape his skin.

Today's the day.

He pressed a kiss to Tim's forehead, and Tim groaned, barely stirring, and Kon smoked warmly at the sleeping man, trying to memorize his face, because what if that's the last sound he ever hears from him? Kon knew Tim would understand his choice.

Today's the day.

His fingers trembled as they brushed through Tim's hair gentle, so gentle, as he thought of their child and Tim and his much he was really hoping he would make it back home. He tucked the blanket tighter around him, like that could protect him from what Kon was about to do. Today's the day.

Today's the day.

Today's the day.

He yanked on his hero suit. Jacket. Plain. No patches. No pins. No symbols. No hopes of anyone but himself. Because this wasn't for them. This wasn't for the community. This was his fight. His choice. His stupid, reckless, possibly fatal choice. His hands were clammy. His pulse was a war drum in his throat.

You can do this. You HAVE to do this. You're not their puppet. Not anymore. Never again.

He forced himself to breathe. In. Out. Shaky.

This is it.

This is freedom.

Or this is the end.

He stared at his own reflection, pale, jaw tight—and whispered ]

You're Kon-El. You're a hero. You're a soon to be father. You're more of a man than they'll ever be. You've survived worse. You'll survive this.

[ Kon walked into Cadmus. He stormed through those sterile, soulless halls like a god of vengeance descending on the unworthy, his boots cracking against the floor with every step. He didn't care about trying not to break the damn tile anymore. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, flickering like they knew what was coming, like even the building itself was afraid. Lab rats scurried past him, technicians, geneticists, security guards with their empty eyes and emptier souls, oblivious, their beady little gazes glued to their data pads or some other bullshit. Too zoned in on the work that was going to kill them. They never looked up when he came back broken, did they? Never flinched when he was dragged in bleeding, half-conscious, pieces of him missing, limbs hanging at wrong angles, chest caved in, skin peeled back and blistering from kryptonite. They stepped over him like he was furniture. Like he was trash. They didn't give a damn then and they wouldn't give a damn now, not that it mattered.

Their time was up.

Every single one of them had an expiration date stamped on their foreheads, and that date was today.

The red ring seared in his palm, pulsing with a hatred so raw it felt alive, a molten core of pure, undiluted wrath that fed on every memory that clawed its way to the surface like maggots burrowing through rotten flesh. The needles. The scalpels. The electric jolts that made his muscles seize and his teeth crack from clenching. The cold steel tables that bit into his back like frozen graves. The way they carved him open while he was conscious, deliberately conscious, because they wanted to study his pain responses, wanted to hear him scream, wanted to catalog every whimper and sob like data points in their sick little experiments. They stitched him back together with synthetic thread and callous indifference, never once asking if he hurt, never once offering so much as a kind word. He was nothing but meat to them. Nothing but a thing to be broken and repaired and broken and repaired and broken and repaired again, an endless cycle of agony that stretched into eternity.

The ring slid onto his finger like it belonged there. It recognized him. The transformation was quiet. He was quie5. His suit bled from blue to absolute black, swallowing the light, devouring everything except the crimson explosion of the lantern crest that branded his chest and back like a wound that would never heal. His jacket became a bright warning light red. The S was gone. Erased. Obliterated. Replaced by something that didn't stand for hope, or for truth, but was still justice. It stood for blood. It stood for revenge. It stood for every scream he'd ever swallowed, the tears he'd ever choked back, every moment of helplessness that had curdled into this beautiful, terrible rage.

And then the switch flipped.

Years of suppressed fury, of choked-down terror, of agony he'd swallowed until his gut was a bottomless pit of acid and bile, all of it erupted from his throat in a scream that shattered glass for miles, that sent lesser men to their knees with bleeding ears, that cracked the very foundations of the building like an earthquake made manifest. The sound was primal, inhuman, the death rattle of a universe that had pushed him too far. He didn't think. He couldn't. He didn't hesitate or plan. He just moved, a blur of black and red, a hurricane of pure, undiluted vengeance. He was the animalistic beast they feared he would be.

Kon killed first. Not with cruelty.

That was beneath him.

Cruelty was for them, for the monsters in lab coats who had made his existence a living hell. No, he gave them the mercy they never once offered him: quick, clean, over in a blink. A snapped neck here, the vertebrae crunching like dry twigs under his grip. A crushed skull there, the bone giving way like eggshells beneath his palm. A fist through a chest before they even had time to register the black-and-red nightmare descending on them, their hearts still beating against his knuckles for one brief, confused moment before they stopped forever. He painted the walls with their indifference, their cowardice, their guilt. He painted the floors with their viscera, their blood pooling in crimson lakes that reflected his new, terrible face back at him. He didn't savor it, there was no pleasure in this, only a grim, necessary purpose. He was cleaning house. He was burning the infection out at the root.

Then he turned on their precious machines. Their gleaming toys, their billion-dollar monuments to human arrogance, and he shattered them. Computers exploded into sparks and shrapnel, their screens going dark one by one like dying stars. Vats of cloning fluid and half-baked flesh burst, flooding the floor with viscous, reeking slime that mixed with the blood pooling around his feet, creating a sickening soup of carnage and corruption. Microscopes, centrifuges, genetic sequencers, all of it reduced to twisted metal and shattered glass. He tore through the storage units, the cryo-chambers, the rows upon rows of embryonic pods that held what could have been his brothers, his sisters, his countless failed iterations, all of them trapped in endless sleep, never given the chance to live, never given the chance to suffer as he had. He didn't free them. He didn't have the time to make space for them. To ensure they'd have good lives. So he just destroyed, his fists flying, his ring blazing, his rage a bottomless well that showed no signs of running dry.

He didn't stop when the ceiling caved in, massive slabs of concrete crashing down around him like the fists of an angry god. He didn't stop when he heard bones crunch under collapsing steel, when the wailing if sirens mixed with the groaning of a building being torn apart from the inside out. He didn't stop when his feet started to stick to the gore-slicked ground, each step a wet, sickening schlick that echoed in the ruins, the sound of a predator wading through the aftermath of its own making. He didn't stop when the sprinklers came on, when the emergency lights flickered and died, plunging everything into a hellish twilight of smoke and fire and shadow.

He stopped when nothing was left but a crater. A gaping, smoldering wound in the earth where Cadmus used to be, a scar on the landscape that would take decades to heal if it ever did after everything he had just spilled into the ground. The rubble smoldered, wisps of smoke curling up toward a sky that had gone gray with ash. The stench of ozone, blood, and burned plastic hung thick in the air, a perfume of absolute destruction. Kon hovered above it for a long moment, his chest heaving, his hands trembling with the aftershock of everything he'd just done. He looked down at the ruin he had made, at the graves of hundreds of people who would never hurt anyone again, and he felt... nothing. No guilt. No remorse. No satisfaction. Just a cold, empty quiet where the rage used to be.

Then he flew.

Lab after lab after lab. Each one a new tomb, each one a fresh symphony of screams and shattering glass. He tore through Cadmus and LexCorp facilities across the country, across the globe, leaving a trail of devastation that would make the apocalypse look like a minor inconvenience. He killed. He destroyed. He killed. He destroyed. Over and over and over until the rhythm became a heartbeat, a pulse of pure, unadulterated fury that drove him forward like a bloodhound on the scent of its prey.

When the so-called heroes showed up, those self-righteous bastards with their pleas and their damnation, their sanctimonious lectures about justice and mercy and the sanctity of life, Kon didn't even slow down. He used them. Grabbed them by their capes and hurled them into the walls like living missiles, their bodies carving fresh trenches through the crumbling architecture. Their attacks only fed the chaos, turning steel to dust, concrete to powder, glass to glittering rain. He didn't care if they lived or died, they were just tools now, just like he'd always been, just like he'd always be in their eyes. They'd never seen him as a person. They'd seen him as a weapon, a liability, a problem to be managed. So let them be weapons now. Let them be problems. Let them taste the destruction they'd helped create.

On and on and on until only one name remained. One final, gleaming monument to the man who had started it all. One last fortress of lies and cruelty that needed to be razed to the ground.

LexCorp.

He hit the servers first, ripped them apart with his bare hands, tore through the data banks like they were made of tissue paper, his fingers sparking and sizzling as he overloaded the circuits with raw, untamed power. The building went dark, the emergency generators kicking in with a pathetic hum that lasted all of three seconds before he blew those too. Alarms screamed in the darkness, a deafening cacophony that only fueled his rage further. He heard the panicked shouts of security personnel, the frantic footsteps of scientists trying to flee, and he laughed, a hollow, broken sound that echoed through the corridors like the howl of a dying animal.

Then he descended into the lab. The real lab. The heart of the beast. The place where they'd made him, unmade him, remade him, over and over and over like he was their eternal plaything, their favorite toy, their infinite source of data and pain. The walls were lined with monitors showing his own face, his own body, his own agony captured in high definition and stored for future reference. He saw himself on those screens—younger, smaller, more frightened—and he wanted to scream. He wanted to burn it all down. So he did.

The screams were deafening now, scientists scattering like roaches, guards firing useless beams that bounced off his skin like rain, their weapons melting in their hands as his ring pulsed with barely contained fury. He answered every single one with a fist, a foot, a blast of red light that left nothing but ash and silence. He tore through them like a scythe through wheat, like a wildfire through dry grass, like the end of everything they had so arrogantly thought they could control. He crushed them. He burned them. He unmade them, just as they had unmade him so many times before.

Through it all, he never spoke. Not one word. Not a single syllable. What was the point? They wouldn't understand. They never could understand. To them, he was a broken toy, a glitch in their system, a thing to be dismantled and reassembled ad infinitum. They didn't see the boy. They didn't see the rage. They saw specimen. Asset. Failure. They saw a problem that needed to be solved, not a person who needed to be saved.

So let them die in confusion.

Let them die in fear.

Let them die knowing that their creation had finally turned on them, had finally become something they could never hope to control.

When the last wall crumbled and the last body dropped, Kon stood in the ruins, chest heaving, blood dripping from his hands in lazy rivulets that pooled at his feet like offerings to a god he no longer believed in. The building groaned around him, a dying beast taking its final breaths, and he finally let himself feel the silence. The stillness. The absence of all the noise, all the pain, all the endless, grinding torture that had defined his existence for as long as he could remember.

He looked down at his hands, red, shaking, caked with the remains of everyone who had ever hurt him. He looked at the ring, still pulsing, still hungry, still wanting. He looked at the ruins of LexCorp, the final monument to his suffering, and he felt something stir in the depths of his chest.

It's not over.

He turned. And he went to find Lex.

Not to kill him.

No, that would be too easy. Too merciful.

Lex deserved to watch.

He deserved to see everything he'd built turn to ash.

He deserved to know, in his final moments, that his greatest creation, his son, was the one who had brought it all crashing down.

He deserved to feel the same helplessness, the same terror, the same agony that Kon had felt every single day of his miserable, manufactured existence.

Every single one of them. He should have killed this one off sooner before it got too head strong.

The aliens, the hybrids, the so-called "heroes", they were all ticking time bombs, and Lex had been a fool to think his creation would be any different.

But this? This was beyond his darkest predictions. The kill switch was dead.

Kryptonite radiation had zero effect.

It wasn't even registering as Kryptonian anymore, it wasn't using its powers. The ones he had scaled for, this was pure pulsing rage that tore through steel and concrete like paper. Some sort of red monster. What the hell had he unleashed? What had gone so catastrophically wrong in the genetic cocktail that birthed this nightmare?

Lex ran. He grabbed two nurses by their arms and dragged them through the winding corridors of the subterranean facility, his polished shoes slapping against the cold tile as alarms blared red around them. He didn't stop to watch the monitors, but he could feel it, each lab going dark, each safeguard crumbling, each scream cut short.

He knew that thing was hunting.

Not destroying randomly.

Hunting.

Picking off every piece of LexCorp infrastructure like it was savoring the destruction. Lex's stomach churned with revulsion. He had held that creature as an infant. He had watched it take its first steps, taught it how to speak and act. And now it was a rabid animal, a stain on his legacy, a grotesque mockery of everything he'd tried to build because of that awful alien DNA. The disgust coiled in his throat like bile. He should have terminated it the moment it first showed aggression. He should have listened to his instincts instead of his ego.

But he couldn't think about that now. Not when the eighth lab was his only refuge. The one place he had never allowed Superboy to set foot. The one place that mattered more than all his research, all his weaponry, all his wealth combined. Lex slammed his palm against the biometric scanner, his breath ragged, and the reinforced doors slid open just wide enough for him and the nurses to slip through before sealing shut with a deafening clang. The lab was smaller than the others, more intimate, lined with soft lighting and climate-controlled air. No cold metal tables. No sterile specimen jars. Just warmth. Just safety.

Just her.

Deep in the heart of this sanctum was the nursery. Lex had designed it himself, every inch, every single stitch of fabric. The walls were painted a rich, deep green, the color of old fairytale forests where monsters couldn't find you. Hand-painted trees stretched toward a ceiling dotted with tiny glow-in-the-dark stars, their branches intertwined to form a canopy of leaves. A large plastic treehouse dominated the center of the room, its hollow trunk wide enough for a child to crawl inside, its upper platform currently crowded with plush animals, elephants, bears, horses, dragons with velvet wings, a fat little lion that Lena loved to gum. Bookshelves lined the inner walls of the treehouse, filled with fairy tales and picture books and all the joys of childhood he was denied.

The floor was a masterpiece of comfort, a thick, fawna-style carpet that mimicked branching forest paths and clusters of wildflowers, each patch a different texture to stimulate Lena's tiny fingers as she explored. No hard corners. No sharp edges. Everything rounded, padded, kissed with softness. Fairy lights were strung from the artificial branches like captured fireflies, casting a warm, golden glow. Against the far wall stood her crib, not a cold metal or plain wood cage but a massive, hollowed-out plastic tree stump, big enough for her to grow into over the years. Its edges were lined with quilted bumpers embroidered with little foxes and owls. A mobile of felted woodland creatures spun lazily above it, catching the light.

Lex had spared no expense. No, that was an understatement. He had poured his soul into this room. Because his parents had given him nothing but cold hallways and colder silences, a childhood of expectations and punishments, of being seen as an asset rather than a son. He would never, never, let Lena know that emptiness. His sweet little Lena. His only blood. His only heart. She would grow up surrounded by love, by wonder, by the absolute certainty that her father would tear the universe apart before he let a single shadow fall across her.

And right now, that shadow was clawing at the doors of his facility.

Lex held her close, his arms cradling her tiny body against his chest. She was so small, so impossibly fragile, her wispy light hair curling against her temples, her little fists tucked under her chin. She stirred slightly at the muffled boom from somewhere far above, her brow furrowing in that sleepy, irritated way she had when disturbed from a nap. Lex began to hum. His voice was rough, but steady. Safe. You're safe. Daddy has you.

The nurses huddled in the corner, wide-eyed and trembling, but Lex paid them no mind. His entire world was in his arms. His precious girl. His reason for existing.

Outside, that abomination was tearing through his life's work, but in here, Lena was cocooned in green and gold and softness. In here, she was untouchable. He pressed a kiss to her forehead.

That thing outside was a mistake. A monster wearing the face of his ambition. Lex felt his jaw tighten, his teeth grinding as another distant crash echoed through the walls.

He hated it.

He hated it with a purity that surprised him, a revulsion so complete it burned in his chest like acid. He had poured resources into that creature, given it power, given it purpose, and it had repaid him by becoming exactly what he'd always feared. Mindless, destructive, alien to its core. It wasn't Kryptonian. It wasn't human. It was nothing. A failed experiment. A stain he would scrub from existence the moment he had the chance.

But not now. Now, he held his daughter. Now, he rocked her gently, his thumb stroking her cheek as she settled back into sleep, her tiny lips parting in a soft sigh. The fairy lights flickered overhead, casting dancing shadows across the painted trees. The carpet muffled every sound from the world above. The treehouse stood sentinel, full of stories and stuffed friends and a future Lex would fight tooth and nail to protect. ]

Daddy will make sure you're safe.

[ he cooed voice a silent vow in the dark. ]

Daddy will burn that monster to ash. But first, first, you sleep, my love.

Then he found it. Tucked away on the back edge of the Luthor mansion property, buried beneath layers of false walls and reinforced steel and every paranoid security measure money could buy, a hidden entrance, so well-concealed that he almost missed it. Almost. But the universe, for once, decided to cut him a break.

He crashed through the doors. Shredded them like tissue paper, the shrapnel embedding itself in the walls like confetti made of steel. Subtlety was dead. It had died the moment that ring slid onto his finger. It had died every building he'd leveled, every drop of blood he'd spilled. He was beyond subtlety now. He was beyond mercy. He was beyond everything except the singular, burning need to find the man who had made him and end him.

The lab was a ghost town. Most of the staff had fled, smart of them, really, but it didn't save the ones who had stayed. Their bodies littered the corridors, their blood painting the pristine white walls in abstract art that would have made a lesser man vomit. Kon didn't flinch. He didn't blink. He just walked, his boots leaving crimson footprints on the tile, his ring pulsing with a hunger that matched his own. He wrecked everything in his path, overturned furniture, equipment, priceless artifacts, tore down portraits of Lex's smug, self-satisfied face and ground them into dust beneath his heel.

He almost missed it. Almost. The passageway was so well-hidden, so perfectly integrated into the architecture, that he might have walked right past it if the ceiling hadn't collapsed under the force of his destruction. The trap door buckled, the hinges screaming as they gave way, and there it was. Abdark, narrow corridor stretching into the bowels of the earth, lit by flickering emergency lights that cast long, dancing shadows on the walls.

Kon didn't hesitate. He ripped the door open with a screech of tortured metal and stalked down the hallway, his footsteps echoing in the silence, each one a promise of the violence to come. The corridor was long, winding, lined with pipes and cables and the hum of machinery that vibrated through the floor. He could feel the presence ahead of him, a heartbeat, multiple heartbeats, fast and panicked, barely contained by the walls that separated them.

Lex was close.

Lex was terrified.

And Kon loved it. ]

Y'know, it's funny, Mr. Luthor..

[ Kon called out, his voice echoing through the corridor, dripping with venom and dark amusement. ]

The only time I've ever wanted to find you, the only time in my entire miserable existence, you seem desperate to get away from me. There a reason for that?

[ Silence.

Just the hum of machinery and the distant drip of water somewhere in the darkness. But Kon could feel him. Could hear the faint, ragged breathing, the muffled curse, the frantic shuffling of someone trying to escape or maybe prepare himself. ]

Come on, Lex,

[ Kon continued, his voice dropping to a dangerous purr. ]

Don't tell me you're scared. You? The great Lex Luthor? The man who played god with Kryptonian DNA? The man who had me cut open and stitched back together more times than I can count? You're hiding in a hole like a scared little rat?

[ He rounded a corner and saw it. A blast door, reinforced with enough steel to stop a tank. But Kon wasn't a tank. He was so much worse. He raised his hand, the red ring blazing, and he pulled. The door groaned, buckled, and then tore free from its moorings, flying down the corridor to slam into the far wall with a deafening crash.

And there, in the flickering light, stood Lex Luthor.

He looked wrecked. His suit was disheveled, his hair a mess, his face pale and glistening with sweat. His hands were shaking, Kon could see it from across the room, and his eyes, those cold, calculating eyes that had always looked at him like he was nothing more than a lab specimen, were wide with something that looked almost like fear.

Kon smiled.

It was not a kind smile. ]

He couldn't. He couldn't let anything happen to her. Not his Lena. Not his only light.

With trembling hands, Lex reached into the emergency kit he kept hidden beneath the changing table—a small vial of pediatric sedative, carefully measured, prepared for exactly this nightmare scenario. He had prayed he'd never need it. He had told himself it was just a precaution, just his paranoid mind running wild. But now, as the door buckled and howled, he was grateful for his own darkness. Grateful he had prepared for the worst. ]

Shh, shh, my sweet girl

[ he whispered, his voice cracking as he drew the tiny dose into a syringe. ]

Daddy needs you to sleep. Just for a little while. Just until the bad thing goes away.

[ Lena stirred, her big eyes fluttering open for just a moment, confused, sleepy, a little annoyed at the pin prick, but she didn't cry. She never cried when he held her. She just looked at him with that pure, unblemished faith that shattered his heart into a million pieces. Lex pressed a kiss to her forehead as he administered the sedative, his thumb stroking her cheek as her eyes grew heavy again, her breathing evening out into deep, dreamless rest. ]

Good. Good girl. Be a good girl for daddy.

[ He turned to the head nurse, Margaret, a silver-haired woman who had been with him for over a decade, who had held Lena during her first bath, who had sung lullabies when Lex was too exhausted to speak. Her face was pale, her hands shaking, but she nodded with grim determination when Lex thrust the baby into her arms. ]

Seal them in

[ he ordered, his voice steel despite the tremor in his hands. He gestured to the hollow tree stump—the one he'd designed with a hidden panic compartment, a secondary shell of titanium-reinforced polymer disguised as whimsical wood. Margaret climbed inside without hesitation, cradling Lena against her chest, and Lex pressed the concealed latch. The inner panel slid shut with a soft hiss, sealing them in darkness and silence. They would have air for hours. They would be warm. They would be safe.

Lex pressed his palm flat against the stump's exterior, his forehead bowing to touch the cool surface. ]

I'll take care of the monster

[ he murmured, more to himself than to them. ]

There's no need to worry, my love. Daddy will fix this. Daddy always fixes everything.

[ He stepped back, his hand lingering for just a moment longer before he forced himself to turn away. His fingers curled around the gun he kept in a biometric lockbox beside the crib—an experimental weapon loaded with kryptonite-tipped rounds that might be useless against this thing now, but it was all he had. All he'd ever needed. Until now.

The door screamed.

Lex spun toward the entrance, raising the gun with both hands, his stance wide and steady. His jaw was set. His eyes were cold. He would kill this monster. He would put a bullet through its black heart and watch it crumble to ash. He would—

The door exploded inward. Metal shrieked and twisted, torn apart like wet paper, and then it was there, a blur of red and black and raw, seething fury. Not the boy he had raised. Just the creature he had built. Its eyes burned like coals, it's frame seemed to pulse with barely contained violence. It wasn't Superboy anymore. It wasn't even Kryptonian. It was a nightmare given flesh.

Lex never got the chance to fire.

One second he was aiming, finger on the trigger, every muscle coiled for the shot. The next, a hand had him by the throat, slamming him against the nearest wall with enough force to crack the reinforced concrete behind him. The gun clattered to the floor. His vision swam red and black. He clawed at the arm holding him, his nails scraping uselessly against skin that felt like stone. ]

You...

[ Lex choked out, his voice a ragged whisper as he stared into those burning, hateful eyes. ]

You're the worst of us.

[ The monster tilted its head, almost curious. Almost mocking.

Two beams of searing, blinding heat lanced from its gaze, drilling through Lex's skull with surgical precision. Two holes. Clean. Instant. His body went limp, the last expression on his face a twisted mask of disgust and defiance.

Okay.

Okay.

Today.

Today's the day.

Today's the day.

Kon’s hands were shaking as he peeled himself out of bed, out of their bed, way, way too early. Way earlier tha he wanted but he was already feeling like his bones were trying to escape his skin.

Today's the day.

He pressed a kiss to Tim's forehead, and Tim groaned, barely stirring, and Kon smoked warmly at the sleeping man, trying to memorize his face, because what if that's the last sound he ever hears from him? Kon knew Tim would understand his choice.

Today's the day.

His fingers trembled as they brushed through Tim's hair gentle, so gentle, as he thought of their child and Tim and his much he was really hoping he would make it back home. He tucked the blanket tighter around him, like that could protect him from what Kon was about to do. Today's the day.

Today's the day.

Today's the day.

He yanked on his hero suit. Jacket. Plain. No patches. No pins. No symbols. No hopes of anyone but himself. Because this wasn't for them. This wasn't for the community. This was his fight. His choice. His stupid, reckless, possibly fatal choice. His hands were clammy. His pulse was a war drum in his throat.

You can do this. You HAVE to do this. You're not their puppet. Not anymore. Never again.

He forced himself to breathe. In. Out. Shaky.

This is it.

This is freedom.

Or this is the end.

He stared at his own reflection, pale, jaw tight—and whispered ]

You're Kon-El. You're a hero. You're a soon to be father. You're more of a man than they'll ever be. You've survived worse. You'll survive this.

[ Kon walked into Cadmus. He stormed through those sterile, soulless halls like a god of vengeance descending on the unworthy, his boots cracking against the floor with every step. He didn't care about trying not to break the damn tile anymore. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, flickering like they knew what was coming, like even the building itself was afraid. Lab rats scurried past him, technicians, geneticists, security guards with their empty eyes and emptier souls, oblivious, their beady little gazes glued to their data pads or some other bullshit. Too zoned in on the work that was going to kill them. They never looked up when he came back broken, did they? Never flinched when he was dragged in bleeding, half-conscious, pieces of him missing, limbs hanging at wrong angles, chest caved in, skin peeled back and blistering from kryptonite. They stepped over him like he was furniture. Like he was trash. They didn't give a damn then and they wouldn't give a damn now, not that it mattered.

Their time was up.

Every single one of them had an expiration date stamped on their foreheads, and that date was today.

The red ring seared in his palm, pulsing with a hatred so raw it felt alive, a molten core of pure, undiluted wrath that fed on every memory that clawed its way to the surface like maggots burrowing through rotten flesh. The needles. The scalpels. The electric jolts that made his muscles seize and his teeth crack from clenching. The cold steel tables that bit into his back like frozen graves. The way they carved him open while he was conscious, deliberately conscious, because they wanted to study his pain responses, wanted to hear him scream, wanted to catalog every whimper and sob like data points in their sick little experiments. They stitched him back together with synthetic thread and callous indifference, never once asking if he hurt, never once offering so much as a kind word. He was nothing but meat to them. Nothing but a thing to be broken and repaired and broken and repaired and broken and repaired again, an endless cycle of agony that stretched into eternity.

The ring slid onto his finger like it belonged there. It recognized him. The transformation was quiet. He was quie5. His suit bled from blue to absolute black, swallowing the light, devouring everything except the crimson explosion of the lantern crest that branded his chest and back like a wound that would never heal. His jacket became a bright warning light red. The S was gone. Erased. Obliterated. Replaced by something that didn't stand for hope, or for truth, but was still justice. It stood for blood. It stood for revenge. It stood for every scream he'd ever swallowed, the tears he'd ever choked back, every moment of helplessness that had curdled into this beautiful, terrible rage.

And then the switch flipped.

Years of suppressed fury, of choked-down terror, of agony he'd swallowed until his gut was a bottomless pit of acid and bile, all of it erupted from his throat in a scream that shattered glass for miles, that sent lesser men to their knees with bleeding ears, that cracked the very foundations of the building like an earthquake made manifest. The sound was primal, inhuman, the death rattle of a universe that had pushed him too far. He didn't think. He couldn't. He didn't hesitate or plan. He just moved, a blur of black and red, a hurricane of pure, undiluted vengeance. He was the animalistic beast they feared he would be.

Kon killed first. Not with cruelty.

That was beneath him.

Cruelty was for them, for the monsters in lab coats who had made his existence a living hell. No, he gave them the mercy they never once offered him: quick, clean, over in a blink. A snapped neck here, the vertebrae crunching like dry twigs under his grip. A crushed skull there, the bone giving way like eggshells beneath his palm. A fist through a chest before they even had time to register the black-and-red nightmare descending on them, their hearts still beating against his knuckles for one brief, confused moment before they stopped forever. He painted the walls with their indifference, their cowardice, their guilt. He painted the floors with their viscera, their blood pooling in crimson lakes that reflected his new, terrible face back at him. He didn't savor it, there was no pleasure in this, only a grim, necessary purpose. He was cleaning house. He was burning the infection out at the root.

Then he turned on their precious machines. Their gleaming toys, their billion-dollar monuments to human arrogance, and he shattered them. Computers exploded into sparks and shrapnel, their screens going dark one by one like dying stars. Vats of cloning fluid and half-baked flesh burst, flooding the floor with viscous, reeking slime that mixed with the blood pooling around his feet, creating a sickening soup of carnage and corruption. Microscopes, centrifuges, genetic sequencers, all of it reduced to twisted metal and shattered glass. He tore through the storage units, the cryo-chambers, the rows upon rows of embryonic pods that held what could have been his brothers, his sisters, his countless failed iterations, all of them trapped in endless sleep, never given the chance to live, never given the chance to suffer as he had. He didn't free them. He didn't have the time to make space for them. To ensure they'd have good lives. So he just destroyed, his fists flying, his ring blazing, his rage a bottomless well that showed no signs of running dry.

He didn't stop when the ceiling caved in, massive slabs of concrete crashing down around him like the fists of an angry god. He didn't stop when he heard bones crunch under collapsing steel, when the wailing if sirens mixed with the groaning of a building being torn apart from the inside out. He didn't stop when his feet started to stick to the gore-slicked ground, each step a wet, sickening schlick that echoed in the ruins, the sound of a predator wading through the aftermath of its own making. He didn't stop when the sprinklers came on, when the emergency lights flickered and died, plunging everything into a hellish twilight of smoke and fire and shadow.

He stopped when nothing was left but a crater. A gaping, smoldering wound in the earth where Cadmus used to be, a scar on the landscape that would take decades to heal if it ever did after everything he had just spilled into the ground. The rubble smoldered, wisps of smoke curling up toward a sky that had gone gray with ash. The stench of ozone, blood, and burned plastic hung thick in the air, a perfume of absolute destruction. Kon hovered above it for a long moment, his chest heaving, his hands trembling with the aftershock of everything he'd just done. He looked down at the ruin he had made, at the graves of hundreds of people who would never hurt anyone again, and he felt... nothing. No guilt. No remorse. No satisfaction. Just a cold, empty quiet where the rage used to be.

Then he flew.

Lab after lab after lab. Each one a new tomb, each one a fresh symphony of screams and shattering glass. He tore through Cadmus and LexCorp facilities across the country, across the globe, leaving a trail of devastation that would make the apocalypse look like a minor inconvenience. He killed. He destroyed. He killed. He destroyed. Over and over and over until the rhythm became a heartbeat, a pulse of pure, unadulterated fury that drove him forward like a bloodhound on the scent of its prey.

When the so-called heroes showed up, those self-righteous bastards with their pleas and their damnation, their sanctimonious lectures about justice and mercy and the sanctity of life, Kon didn't even slow down. He used them. Grabbed them by their capes and hurled them into the walls like living missiles, their bodies carving fresh trenches through the crumbling architecture. Their attacks only fed the chaos, turning steel to dust, concrete to powder, glass to glittering rain. He didn't care if they lived or died, they were just tools now, just like he'd always been, just like he'd always be in their eyes. They'd never seen him as a person. They'd seen him as a weapon, a liability, a problem to be managed. So let them be weapons now. Let them be problems. Let them taste the destruction they'd helped create.

On and on and on until only one name remained. One final, gleaming monument to the man who had started it all. One last fortress of lies and cruelty that needed to be razed to the ground.

LexCorp.

He hit the servers first, ripped them apart with his bare hands, tore through the data banks like they were made of tissue paper, his fingers sparking and sizzling as he overloaded the circuits with raw, untamed power. The building went dark, the emergency generators kicking in with a pathetic hum that lasted all of three seconds before he blew those too. Alarms screamed in the darkness, a deafening cacophony that only fueled his rage further. He heard the panicked shouts of security personnel, the frantic footsteps of scientists trying to flee, and he laughed, a hollow, broken sound that echoed through the corridors like the howl of a dying animal.

Then he descended into the lab. The real lab. The heart of the beast. The place where they'd made him, unmade him, remade him, over and over and over like he was their eternal plaything, their favorite toy, their infinite source of data and pain. The walls were lined with monitors showing his own face, his own body, his own agony captured in high definition and stored for future reference. He saw himself on those screens—younger, smaller, more frightened—and he wanted to scream. He wanted to burn it all down. So he did.

The screams were deafening now, scientists scattering like roaches, guards firing useless beams that bounced off his skin like rain, their weapons melting in their hands as his ring pulsed with barely contained fury. He answered every single one with a fist, a foot, a blast of red light that left nothing but ash and silence. He tore through them like a scythe through wheat, like a wildfire through dry grass, like the end of everything they had so arrogantly thought they could control. He crushed them. He burned them. He unmade them, just as they had unmade him so many times before.

Through it all, he never spoke. Not one word. Not a single syllable. What was the point? They wouldn't understand. They never could understand. To them, he was a broken toy, a glitch in their system, a thing to be dismantled and reassembled ad infinitum. They didn't see the boy. They didn't see the rage. They saw specimen. Asset. Failure. They saw a problem that needed to be solved, not a person who needed to be saved.

So let them die in confusion.

Let them die in fear.

Let them die knowing that their creation had finally turned on them, had finally become something they could never hope to control.

When the last wall crumbled and the last body dropped, Kon stood in the ruins, chest heaving, blood dripping from his hands in lazy rivulets that pooled at his feet like offerings to a god he no longer believed in. The building groaned around him, a dying beast taking its final breaths, and he finally let himself feel the silence. The stillness. The absence of all the noise, all the pain, all the endless, grinding torture that had defined his existence for as long as he could remember.

He looked down at his hands, red, shaking, caked with the remains of everyone who had ever hurt him. He looked at the ring, still pulsing, still hungry, still wanting. He looked at the ruins of LexCorp, the final monument to his suffering, and he felt something stir in the depths of his chest.

It's not over.

He turned. And he went to find Lex.

Not to kill him.

No, that would be too easy. Too merciful.

Lex deserved to watch.

He deserved to see everything he'd built turn to ash.

He deserved to know, in his final moments, that his greatest creation, his son, was the one who had brought it all crashing down.

He deserved to feel the same helplessness, the same terror, the same agony that Kon had felt every single day of his miserable, manufactured existence.

Every single one of them. He should have killed this one off sooner before it got too head strong.

The aliens, the hybrids, the so-called "heroes", they were all ticking time bombs, and Lex had been a fool to think his creation would be any different.

But this? This was beyond his darkest predictions. The kill switch was dead.

Kryptonite radiation had zero effect.

It wasn't even registering as Kryptonian anymore, it wasn't using its powers. The ones he had scaled for, this was pure pulsing rage that tore through steel and concrete like paper. Some sort of red monster. What the hell had he unleashed? What had gone so catastrophically wrong in the genetic cocktail that birthed this nightmare?

Lex ran. He grabbed two nurses by their arms and dragged them through the winding corridors of the subterranean facility, his polished shoes slapping against the cold tile as alarms blared red around them. He didn't stop to watch the monitors, but he could feel it, each lab going dark, each safeguard crumbling, each scream cut short.

He knew that thing was hunting.

Not destroying randomly.

Hunting.

Picking off every piece of LexCorp infrastructure like it was savoring the destruction. Lex's stomach churned with revulsion. He had held that creature as an infant. He had watched it take its first steps, taught it how to speak and act. And now it was a rabid animal, a stain on his legacy, a grotesque mockery of everything he'd tried to build because of that awful alien DNA. The disgust coiled in his throat like bile. He should have terminated it the moment it first showed aggression. He should have listened to his instincts instead of his ego.

But he couldn't think about that now. Not when the eighth lab was his only refuge. The one place he had never allowed Superboy to set foot. The one place that mattered more than all his research, all his weaponry, all his wealth combined. Lex slammed his palm against the biometric scanner, his breath ragged, and the reinforced doors slid open just wide enough for him and the nurses to slip through before sealing shut with a deafening clang. The lab was smaller than the others, more intimate, lined with soft lighting and climate-controlled air. No cold metal tables. No sterile specimen jars. Just warmth. Just safety.

Just her.

Deep in the heart of this sanctum was the nursery. Lex had designed it himself, every inch, every single stitch of fabric. The walls were painted a rich, deep green, the color of old fairytale forests where monsters couldn't find you. Hand-painted trees stretched toward a ceiling dotted with tiny glow-in-the-dark stars, their branches intertwined to form a canopy of leaves. A large plastic treehouse dominated the center of the room, its hollow trunk wide enough for a child to crawl inside, its upper platform currently crowded with plush animals, elephants, bears, horses, dragons with velvet wings, a fat little lion that Lena loved to gum. Bookshelves lined the inner walls of the treehouse, filled with fairy tales and picture books and all the joys of childhood he was denied.

The floor was a masterpiece of comfort, a thick, fawna-style carpet that mimicked branching forest paths and clusters of wildflowers, each patch a different texture to stimulate Lena's tiny fingers as she explored. No hard corners. No sharp edges. Everything rounded, padded, kissed with softness. Fairy lights were strung from the artificial branches like captured fireflies, casting a warm, golden glow. Against the far wall stood her crib, not a cold metal or plain wood cage but a massive, hollowed-out plastic tree stump, big enough for her to grow into over the years. Its edges were lined with quilted bumpers embroidered with little foxes and owls. A mobile of felted woodland creatures spun lazily above it, catching the light.

Lex had spared no expense. No, that was an understatement. He had poured his soul into this room. Because his parents had given him nothing but cold hallways and colder silences, a childhood of expectations and punishments, of being seen as an asset rather than a son. He would never, never, let Lena know that emptiness. His sweet little Lena. His only blood. His only heart. She would grow up surrounded by love, by wonder, by the absolute certainty that her father would tear the universe apart before he let a single shadow fall across her.

And right now, that shadow was clawing at the doors of his facility.

Lex held her close, his arms cradling her tiny body against his chest. She was so small, so impossibly fragile, her wispy light hair curling against her temples, her little fists tucked under her chin. She stirred slightly at the muffled boom from somewhere far above, her brow furrowing in that sleepy, irritated way she had when disturbed from a nap. Lex began to hum. His voice was rough, but steady. Safe. You're safe. Daddy has you.

The nurses huddled in the corner, wide-eyed and trembling, but Lex paid them no mind. His entire world was in his arms. His precious girl. His reason for existing.

Outside, that abomination was tearing through his life's work, but in here, Lena was cocooned in green and gold and softness. In here, she was untouchable. He pressed a kiss to her forehead.

That thing outside was a mistake. A monster wearing the face of his ambition. Lex felt his jaw tighten, his teeth grinding as another distant crash echoed through the walls.

He hated it.

He hated it with a purity that surprised him, a revulsion so complete it burned in his chest like acid. He had poured resources into that creature, given it power, given it purpose, and it had repaid him by becoming exactly what he'd always feared. Mindless, destructive, alien to its core. It wasn't Kryptonian. It wasn't human. It was nothing. A failed experiment. A stain he would scrub from existence the moment he had the chance.

But not now. Now, he held his daughter. Now, he rocked her gently, his thumb stroking her cheek as she settled back into sleep, her tiny lips parting in a soft sigh. The fairy lights flickered overhead, casting dancing shadows across the painted trees. The carpet muffled every sound from the world above. The treehouse stood sentinel, full of stories and stuffed friends and a future Lex would fight tooth and nail to protect. ]

Daddy will make sure you're safe.

[ he cooed voice a silent vow in the dark. ]

Daddy will burn that monster to ash. But first, first, you sleep, my love.

Shiloh coughs— a familiar dry rasp that never quite goes away. Then they check their watch. Two till the check in. They scoop the papers up, grabbing their oxygen. While they’re heading out the door, they neatly put a paper clip on the corner of the stack and then slide it into a folder. They nuzzle the bundle into the crook of their arm, along with Lex’s mail, and stop just outside his office door.

[ A quiet, tentative knock, slightly echoes through Mr. Luthor’s office. It’s a tad bit louder than last time. ]

@shi-and-loh

[ Luckily for Shiloh, Lex was in a good mood. A great mood even as he kept checking the monitors watching Ultraman pummel that false god into the ground. The interruption soured his mood a little bit another still of Superman crushed into the pavement made it all the better. ]

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

His lips curled into something cruel and hungry. He tilted his head, watching a fresh spray of red arc across shattered the concrete.

Where are your friends, Superman?

A sickening crack echoed through the lab speakers. Lex's smile widened.

Who comes to save a pariah, Superman?

Slowly, Lex turned back toward Shiloh, who was still standing stiff and silent in his office like a little ghost. Lex mused at him, voice dripping with theatrical sweetness. ]

Assistant,

[ he purred, rolling the word like candy on his tongue. ]

What do you think of Superman?