The sick glow hit first.
Metallo's chest plate was already cracked open like a furnace door, the kryptonite core pulsing in jagged green breaths that painted the steelworks a nauseous hue. Every time Superman closed, Metallo mixed piston-strong hooks with a flare of radiation, stacking weakness on top of bruises. The Man of Steel staggered, caught himself, tried to bull through and got hammered back into a scaffolding that screamed and died in a shower of sparks.
Crowds pressed behind police tape a block away, faces upturned, bathed in that unearthly light. The news choppers circled like moths.
Vanguard dropped in at a shallow angle, a dark streak cutting across the glow, HUD already screaming about rads and structural load.
—RADIATION: ELEVATED—
—CIVILIAN INJURIES: MINOR (DEBRIS)—
—STRUCTURAL COMPROMISE: 3/10 BUILDINGS—
—PRIMARY THREAT: METALLO—
"On me," Marcus said to the suit. "Minimal collateral."
He hit the ground with zero bounce and moved before the dust knew it had been disturbed. One step became three. Three became a blur.
Metallo saw a shadow, pivoted to swat it the arm wasn't there anymore.
A clean twist at the shoulder coupler, a torque through the elbow spline. Bolts popped like knuckles. The limb hit the pavement fifteen feet away, end-over-end. Metallo swore, turned and his other arm left him with a noise like a pry bar finally winning against old metal.
"HEY!" the cyborg roared, core flaring. "Get your-"
His knees went next, not with cruelty but with the pitiless efficiency of a man removing batteries. Vanguard's hands blurred; knee actuators folded; gyros screamed. Metallo toppled with an earthshaking crash, torso twisting, legs no longer an argument.
Superman blinked at the sudden absence of fists, found his feet and wavered, a hand pressed to his chest as the kryptonite wind washed over him again.
"Core," Marcus told himself. There wasn't time for finesse.
He planted a boot on Metallo's sternum, reached into the cracked plate, and wrenched. The green heart came free with a wrenching squeal, cables snapping like tendons. Metallo's eyes flickered, the sound in his throat dropping two octaves to a glitched-out growl. The light bled from his vents. The air tasted instantly cleaner.
—RADIATION FALLING—
—PRIMARY THREAT: NEUTRALIZED—
For a breath the city held still. Then the crowd exhaled as one, a long tremor of relief that wove through sirens and the thup-thup-thup of helicopter rotors. Superman straightened, color already returning to his face as the sickly glow died.
Vanguard hovered, the stolen star burning in his palm. Green light crawled over his glove and across his visor. He turned the core once, weighing it, measuring output, projecting decay curves. The HUD ticked numbers he already felt in his bones.
"Containment," he said. He palmed open a pocket seam at his thigh an internal sheath he'd lined weeks ago with layered shielding for exactly this kind of souvenir and slid the core inside. The glow vanished. The warnings on his display dropped to baseline.
He scanned the block: shattered facades, torn asphalt, a leaning crane, a dozen cars that would never be cars again. Two injuries tagged yellow. No fatalities. That last line mattered most. It always would.
"Hey!" a voice cut through the chaos, sharp, confident, used to being heard. "You! Up there!"
Lois Lane broke from the tape with Jimmy Olsen in her wake, camera already live, mic wired, eyes bright. She spared Superman a quick, searching glance. Are you okay? got a small, stubborn nod, then locked back on the man in black and gold.
"Who are you?" she called up, chin high.
Vanguard angled toward her, hanging ten feet off the ground, a silhouette against pulverized concrete dust. The gold V on his chest caught a floodlight and threw it back like dawn.
"Vanguard," he said, voice modulated into that calm, even register he'd chosen for the mask.
Lois opened her mouth, twenty questions sat behind her teeth, ready to sprint, but he lifted a hand, not rude so much as busy. His visor was still crawling with data, and the facts were ugly.
He turned to Superman. "You've been at this too long to still be doing damage like this."
The street went quiet in a new way. Cameras searched for the angle that would make sense of that sentence.
"This wasn't an unknown," Vanguard continued, tone steady. "It's Metallo. You've faced him before. You know his tricks. And still....."
He let the sentence hang, let the visuals finish it for him: the crane, the smoking cratered bus stop, the street that would take a month to patch. Superman's jaw worked once as if to answer; he closed it instead. He'd taken uglier criticism from people who hadn't bled to save the same city.
"Perhaps I expected too much from a veteran," Vanguard said after a beat, almost to himself. "But I started tonight and....."
Lois cut in, fast as a blade. "Could you have done better?"
He faced her. He didn't say a word. He just extended one gloved hand toward what was left of Metallo limbs in a neat line, torso powered down, kryptonite heart gone and then he looked up at the shattered skyline…and the lanes he'd not broken getting there.
A muscle jumped in Lois's cheek. She wasn't the type to accept a half-answer, but the picture was a paragraph.
Superman stepped forward, breath steadier, voice threaded with gravel. "Wait..."
Vanguard was already climbing.
"Don't," he told the suit. No backwash. No collateral. The lift was smooth as a whisper. He banked once, then arrowed up and out, punching a sonic crack that ran harmlessly down the avenues without breaking a single pane.
"Vanguard!" Lois called, hand up, but the sky had eaten him. Jimmy kept shooting, tracking the last smear of movement until it was just another star.
Superman crouched like a runner about to launch, tried the air and stopped, a wince pulling at the corner of his eye as the kryptonite hangover knifed his lungs. He forced the urge down. Chasing a stranger on pride, with a city still shaking, wasn't the move.
He looked from the direction Vanguard had gone to the wrecked street at his feet. His gaze lingered on the neat geometry of dismantled Metallo, on the lack of collateral around that one surgical act, and a line set in his brow that wasn't there five minutes ago.
Behind the tape, the city started to hum again.
"Who was that?"
"Vanguard, he said."
"He just—took the core."
"Fast. Clean."
"Did he…call out Superman?"
"Maybe someone needed to."
Lois lowered her mic, expression thoughtful rather than angry. "Joey," she said to Jimmy, eyes still on the sky, "freeze the frame where he pockets the kryptonite. And the catch angle on the Metallo dismemberment. I want them side by side for the lead-in."
Jimmy nodded, still grinning from the adrenaline. "Got him. He moves like he's been at this for a while but he's new. I mean obvious I'm still on big blue's side but damn."
"Mm." She glanced at Superman, reading the set of his shoulders, the careful way he breathed. "And get me a still of Superman when the light drops. We'll need the contrast."
Across the block, MPD started the slow business of reclaiming a street. EMTs checked bruises, engineers talked about cranes, someone found Metallo's left hand halfway through a deli window and put it carefully on a tarp like it might bite.
Superman took one last look at the quieted core's absence, at the tidy ruin of a monster who'd given him bad nights for years, and then up, to where a nameless ally had cut the knot and left without a speech.
He frowned not in anger, but in the complicated shape of a man measuring himself against a new yardstick and rose carefully to help the city put itself back together.