The world fred white and electric blue, and for a single, stretched heartbeat—or perhaps something far longer—I was unmade, unmoored. Unsure if I even existed. Everything about me felt scattered, like dust in a powerful gust.

  “Recognized Match B 0 6,” came a cool, mechanical announcement, yanking me back to myself.

  The brightness dimmed, leaving me standing in a space far rger than I’d expected.

  It was quiet and I gnced around, noting the towering ceiling and sturdy metal beams that rose into shadow. Artificial lights highlighted rows of massive machinery set against smooth rock walls.

  A low hum filled the pce—probably the power systems—but no signs of anything living.

  Until my ears picked up the approaching hiss of hydraulics. I looked up to see a figure descending from a side panel near the ceiling. Which in itself was quite an unconventional position to pce an entrance. Gliding down effortlessly on a red column of air.

  Red Tornado nded quietly in front of me, his blue cape draping around him.

  “Greetings Match. Welcome to Mount Justice,” he greeted, his voice unerringly synthetic. “You are much earlier than we anticipated.”

  Not exactly the welcoming I was expecting.

  I shrugged, stepping past him to enter properly into the cave.

  “Wanted to see my new home before things got busy.”

  My footsteps rang out against the polished floor, which only underscored how empty the pce felt. “Bigger than I thought,” I muttered, voice carrying in the silence.

  “It was designed that way,” Red Tornado inclined his head slightly in thought, “to accommodate the rapidly expanding Justice League at the time. I believe its intention of its size was to meet each member’s unique requirements and it served well to. Until its location was compromised.”

  I raised an eyebrow, observing how neatly the facility was carved into the mountainside. “And now it’s the junior team’s hideout. Doesn’t seem….smart.”

  “The term,” Tornado replied without missing a beat, “I believe is called ‘hiding in pin sight.’”

  I snorted. Sure. Personally, I saw it as handing an obvious target to lunatics who didn’t know the meaning of restraint.

  This would be no permanent residence of mine.

  “You are welcome to familiarize yourself with the facility.” Red Tornado offered. “I am avaible to assist in anyway I can.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” I replied, my voice sharp. “As fascinating as this Mausoleum is, it is not why I’m here early.” I replied.

  I turned to face him, my cape swishing behind me.

  “Where is everybody?”

  ______________________________

  Happy Harbor was a wastend. The sky was a choked tapestry of swirling cinders and dust, wind howling its death anthem across shattered streets in midday sun with its glow smothered by bruised clouds and swirling debris.

  Everywhere, structures that once stood proud were now bowing, bending, uprooted like weeds in a hurricane’s path. Boats that belonged on water found themselves perched on rooftops, while cars y belly-up in the road, their metal frames groaning as if in mourning.

  The waterfront had become a graveyard of splintered piers and broken foundations, each battered by unrelenting cyclones. The air shrieked with civic arms that struggled to make themselves heard over the greater roar.

  And at the center of it all, floating above the chaos, was the android.

  He looked like Red Tornado, but twisted, wrong. His crimson armor gleamed in the dim light, his eyes glowing with a ruthless, mechanical intent. A scarf covered his face, and bck lines striped his limbs instead of yellow. He was a dark mirror, a reflection of something familiar turned monstrous.

  His arms were raised, and wherever he pointed, tornadoes erupted, tearing through the harbor with a fury that left no room for mercy. People ran, screaming, clutching children, dragging the injured. But the winds were relentless, and the casualties mounted.

  Robin and Kid Fsh huddled behind a crumbling wall, their breaths ragged from repeated attempts to guide panicked civilians to safety. Each time they thought they’d secured an area, another gale ripped through and the harbor sang with fresh screams.

  Aquad clutched at a jagged sb of concrete for bance, summoning water from ruptured pipes beneath the cracked asphalt. His liquid shield shimmered bright as twisted debris flung itself against it—a broken door here, a shredded mast there—sending vibrations that numbed him to his bones.

  Nearby, Superboy huddled behind the overturned shell of a pickup truck. “I can’t get close!” He yelled.

  Robin pressed a hand to his ear, trying to call out orders over the wind. “We need you in range SB!“

  Each attempt he made to charge the android was met with a cruel flick of the wrist, a lesser cyclone that snatched him and pitched him through a wall or into a heap of rusted wreckage. He would rise coughing, covered in grit, and try again—only to be struck down by another savage gust.

  Nothing worked. Leaping to the android would see him tossed aside. Not even anchoring his hands and feet to the street worked. Not when the tornadoes unched at him was grinding through yers of tar, cement and stone.

  Overhead, the android hung in the air, looming like a vengeful spirit. He gestured, conjuring twin funnels on either side of him, each one chewing and grinding through what remained of the dork yards.

  Wood and metal splinters shot out like flecks of shrapnel, cutting through the storm-torn air. Miss Martian, hovering lower to the ground, did what she could to protect those pinned beneath colpsed beams. She coaxed survivors through the swirling mess with her telekinesis, using gentle nudges to push aside fallen rubble before it became their tomb.

  Until the android’s head snapped in her direction. Its red eyes intensified, and lightning started crackling around its metallic fingers like writhing serpents. A cold, steady tone slid from its mechanical throat: “Enough.”

  Both arms thrust forward. A single, monstrous tornado erupted, devouring everything in its path, swallowing entire blocks in its terrible dance.

  Houses groaned before crumbling with pitiful snaps of wood. Debris battered the streets in a thousand directions, leaves of metal whirling across shattered windows and battered cars. Another flick of his outstretched arm, and the sky broke open with electric fury. Lightning forked and split, hammering the asphalt until it glowed with heat and shattered on impact. The storm’s roar drowned out the screams of anyone not fast enough to get clear.

  Man, woman or child.

  Kid Fsh quickly grabbed Robin, and sped off, running as the android’s second attack took form: jagged forks of lightning, snaking through the bckened air.

  Chasing after them.

  He kept running as bolts smmed down, bsting the asphalt into scorched fragments. One stray strike smashed a mppost, sending it toppling with a tortured squeal of metal.

  Aquad narrowly dodged a sizzling nce of electricity, the air around him charged with static that raised the fine hairs on his neck.

  Superboy tried again—fury and desperation fueling him—to close the gap. But all it took was a single gesture for the android to hurl him skyward like an old toy, sending him careening into a cargo container so hard that the steel screamed. Chunks of debris rained on his head, and he just looked up, teeth gritted in anger just in time to catch a bolt of lightning to the noggin.

  And then the android turned its wrath fully on Miss Martian.

  But Miss Martian was still tending to two dazed civilians who couldn’t walk on their own. She’d barely gotten them behind a battered bus when a crackling chain of lightning carved a blistering path straight at her. Eyes wide, she looked positively panicked.

  A lot of decisions but there was nowhere to run—her shield was down, protecting the civilians. And even if it wasn’t, the scale of the attack wasn’t something she could take on.

  “M’gann!” Robin, Aquad, Kid Fsh, and Superboy all shouted, their voices rough with dust and terror.

  A brilliant fsh seared the air. The bolt hit, raising an explosion of sound , dust, a brief searing fsh of heat and then broken pavement. For a few breathless seconds, it felt like time had slowed, caught in a single heartbeat. Nobody could see through the swirling haze. The shockwave left the team’s ears ringing, their chests tight with dread.

  Slowly, the dust began to clear and they strained their eyes into the murk. With ragged gasps, their senses strained for any evidence of their teammates survival.

  First, the sound of a fabric rustling in the breeze was heard.

  Then the gloom thinned out enough that they saw what it was.

  A cape.

  A big rustling white cape.

  With a symbol, the symbol of the house of El.

  ____________________________

  Green.

  She was green.

  The color stood out in the apocalyptic ndscape Happy Harbor seemed to have become. Against the ashy dusty air, the half sunken harbor, the colpsed buildings and the occasional dead body of an unfortunate soul who got caught in the wind.

  The color stood out. Alive, like fresh shoots breaking through charred earth after a fire.

  There was a life to it, supple.

  It reminded me of a flower.

  A beautiful green flower.

  I knew this wasn’t what she really looked like but the fact that this was who M’gann M’ozz saw herself as, was something I considered…beautiful.

  Her hair was crimson, flowing and delicate like petals, framing a freckled cheek. Her rge amber eyes blinked open impossibly wide, her expression shifting quickly from confusion to wide-eyed relief. She had realized, with no small amount of wonder, that she was still alive and unhurt.

  Then she realized the reason for that

  Me.

  She immediately drew back, flying back into the air to put some distance between us. I let her.

  “Wh-Superman-sir?!”

  Suppressing the sudden, votile anger at being addressed in that way once again, I moved. One step was all it took, and I stood before the android, who tilted its head with an approximation of amusement.

  “Finally, a worthy adversary,” the machine decred, its voice carrying a metallic echo. It raised one arm, the servos whining as if eager to unch what I suspected would be a concentrated cyclone. “Superman!”

  But before the word had fully left its synthetic voice box, I moved. My hand became a bde of motion, slicing through the air and through its raised arm with an unyielding force. The severed limb cttered downward, and I caught it in mid-fall, its weight nothing in my grip.

  I didn’t hesitate. In the same motion, I thrust the arm back at its owner, the jagged edge smming into its chassis. The force carried it backward, crashing through a nearby building with a deafening crunch of metal and concrete.

  Brickwork crumbled into a cloud of fine dust as I followed the impact, my momentum driving the machine into the wall of the next building—a sprawling warehouse filled with boats.

  To its credit, the android had already begun recalibrating, its reaction immediate and unimpeded by anything as human as pain.

  I closed the distance. My focus locked onto its other arm, intending to neutralize it before it could unch more tonardoes.

  But before I could connect, the machine moved.

  It raised its intact arm, deflecting my strike with a head on wind bst. Drastically reducing the momentum of my charge.

  Still, even without the driving force of momentum, my fist retained its deadly potential. The proof came the moment it grazed the reinforced pting of the android’s shoulder. The metal groaned under the sheer pressure, a spiderweb of cracks rippling outward from the point of impact. Sparks leapt from the fracture like fireflies scattering into the air.

  I pressed the advantage, twisting my body to deliver a follow-up strike. The air crackled with energy as I drove my elbow into its torso, aiming to crush its internal mechanisms before it could retaliate. But even as I was striking, the android adapted, its remaining systems recalibrating at an inhuman speed.

  Its servos whined, and it shifted its weight with fluid precision, redirecting the force of my blow just enough to avoid catastrophic damage. A counterstrike followed—a piston-like kick aimed squarely at my ribs.

  I caught the kick with one hand, my grip denting the metal pting, but even then, it adjusted, twisting its body and using the momentum to try and unbance me.

  It wasn’t just reacting; it was thinking ahead, running advanced combat protocols or predictive algorithms that allowed it to meet my Kryptonian strength and speed head-on.

  A ughable attempt.

  I anchored my heel into the ground, the force of my stance creating a crater beneath me. In that instant, the android’s predictive algorithms must have alerted it to imminent danger; it promptly directed its sole remaining hand toward me, unleashing a nascent tornado.

  Without hesitation, I brought my hands together in a resounding cp, generating a shockwave that obliterated the forming cyclone.

  The shockwave rippled through the air, its force staggering the android as its footing faltered. For a brief moment, it reeled, servos whining as it struggled to stabilize on unsteady legs. When it finally managed to right itself, its head tilted up—just in time to meet the blinding fury of a heat bst.

  The beam struck with a searing intensity, the alloy pting of its face glowing molten red, warping and cracking under the relentless assault. The impact should have hurled it backward, but I didn’t give it the chance. My hand shot out, cmping around its single remaining arm with unrelenting force.

  Metal groaned and shrieked in protest as I tore the limb free, sparks cascading like a violent rainfall. Wires snapped, hydraulic fluid sprayed, and I cast the mangled appendage aside like a broken toy, leaving the android standing there—completely armless.

  It faltered for a moment, head twitching as if attempting to comprehend its rapidly deteriorating state. I didn’t hesitate. My fist plowed forward, driving straight through the warped, half-melted remains of its head.

  There was no resistance—just a sickening crunch as my blow obliterated the core of its processing unit, decapitating it in a single decisive strike. The body seized, then slumped, lifeless, to the ground, the fight well and truly over.

  Bending low, I gripped its mangled torso, lifting it effortlessly. The twisted remains dangled from my grasp as I took to the air, the ruined ndscape spreading out beneath me like the aftermath of a forgotten war.

  Ash and smoke blurred the horizon. Fires flickered amidst the rubble, stubborn embers of destruction that refused to die. My ears, sharper than any human’s, caught the faint screams beneath the chaos—the desperate cries of those buried alive, muffled but persistent. My focus shifted, honing in on the diminishing heartbeats of those still trapped below. Their struggles were faint, but they were there, and they wouldn’t remain unnoticed. Not by me.

  A sigh escaped my lips as I soared onward, the weight of the android insignificant compared to the gravity of the task ahead. This wasn’t over. Not for me.

  When I reached the team, I nded softly, the ground beneath my boots barely registering the impact. The android’s shattered frame hit the ground with an unceremonious thud, pieces cttering at the feet of the gathered team.

  For a moment, silence reigned.

  They looked at me, I looked at them. And in the stillness, I could feel the weight of it all—what they’d seen, what they’d endured, and what they now faced. Their gazes were unreadable, heavy with tension and exhaustion.

  Then, in the quiet, Superboy stepped forward. His fists clenched, his eyes dark with something I couldn’t quite pce. He stopped just a few feet away, close enough that I could feel the air of his breath.

  “Hello, Brother,” I said, breaking the silence.

  Superboy’s response was a punch.

  ———————————————

  Ho Ho Ho! Everyone

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