Hey guys, Novaflame6 here again. So... yeah this is another rewrite of one of my older stories. It had a good plot and everything, I just lost inspiration for it. But hopefully some new ideas I have story wise can help me stick with the story until completion. So here you go! This is the rewrite of Hero from the future of another universe; Goku Black's Reincarnation! I'll be changing a few things this time around to make the story flow better and hopefully be more interesting.
Chapter One — Visitor from the Future
The city never truly slept.
New York breathed in the amber glow of ten thousand streetlamps, its skyline a jagged crown against the bruised purple of early evening. Traffic hummed like a distant river below the rooftops, and the salt-tinged wind off the Hudson carried with it that peculiar cocktail of exhaust, hot asphalt, and possibility that was uniquely, unmistakably the city's own.
High above it all, a golden streak cut through the dying light.
She moved the way stars move — with a kind of effortless permanence, as though the sky had always belonged to her and the rest of the world had simply forgotten to notice. A blue-and-red cape snapped and billowed behind her like a battle standard, and her blonde hair, loose against the wind, caught the last amber rays of the setting sun and burned like spun copper.
Her name was Kara Zor-El.
The world knew her as Supergirl.
Cousin to the Man of Steel, junior member of a team of young heroes who called themselves Young Justice, and tonight — like most nights — she was making her rounds above the Manhattan skyline with the quiet diligence of someone who genuinely believed that being good was its own reward. She had just banked around the silver tower of the Chrysler Building, beginning a lazy southward arc, when something below pulled her gaze downward with the force of a physical blow.
She stopped mid-air.
That's... me.
The thought arrived before logic did. Standing on the broad span of the Manhattan Bridge, trading blows with a green-clad figure Kara recognized immediately, was a girl who wore her own face like a stolen coat. The same jawline. The same build. The same golden hair, though wilder now, whipping freely in the night air. Even the eyes — those piercing, storm-grey eyes — were hers, though where Kara's held warmth, this girl's held only a cold and purposeful fire.
The green-clad figure was Artemis, apprentice to the Green Arrow, and she was losing.
Kara didn't deliberate. She folded her cape behind her and dove.
The impact was everything a collision between two Kryptonian-level beings ought to be — a thunderclap without lightning, a shockwave that rattled windows three blocks in every direction. Kara hit her lookalike like a freight train and drove them both into the asphalt of the bridge's pedestrian walkway, tearing a ragged furrow through the concrete before skidding to a stop in a cloud of gray dust.
She twisted free, putting herself between the clone and Artemis in a single fluid motion.
"Run!" Kara ordered, not looking back. "Get out of here, Artemis — alert the others about this—"
The kick caught her squarely in the stomach.
It was like being hit by a wrecking ball swung by a god. The breath left her body all at once. The bridge railing crumpled around her as she passed through it, and then there was open air, and then there was an abandoned warehouse's exterior wall, and then there was darkness and the taste of copper and the slow, grinding complaint of every bone in her body all at once.
Get up, the voice in her chest said. You don't have the luxury of staying down.
She got up.
They met in the air above the river, and for a time the two girls were a single terrible storm. Fists and forearms. Chokeholds broken by elbow strikes. Speed against speed, strength against strength. To anyone watching from shore, they would have been impossible to follow — two blurs that occasionally materialized into a human shape before dissolving again into motion.
But Kara felt it almost immediately.
Something was wrong.
She was slowing. Her breath came harder than it should. The familiar, deep reserves of solar energy that normally felt as inexhaustible as sunlight itself were draining — steadily, quietly, like a battery with a hairline crack in its casing. She bared her teeth against a surge of frustration.
Why? I haven't been fighting long enough to be this tired. What is she doing to me?
The answer arrived in a flash of crimson light.
Kara's eyes widened a half-second before the heat vision connected.
The twin beams struck her like a pair of red-hot rails. She felt it even through her invulnerability — not pain, exactly, but pressure and heat and the overwhelming kinetic insistence of energy that had no intention of being politely deflected. She was driven backward through the side of a building, through two interior walls, through a support column, and finally into the far exterior wall where she struck with enough force to send cracks spider-webbing across the entire facing.
She crumpled to the floor of what had once been a loading dock.
Dust drifted around her like snow.
On the bridge, Artemis saw the clone begin its descent toward the wreckage, and she reached instinctively for her bow. She wasn't a fool — she knew the limits of a carbon-fiber arrow against a Kryptonian-level threat. But Kara was her friend, and that was simply that.
She never got the chance to loose.
The sky changed.
It was the only word for it. The evening light didn't fade so much as withdraw, as though something immense had stepped between the world and its source of illumination. A bruise-dark aperture opened in the air above the bridge — edges crackling with violet and deepest black, geometry that refused to stay still, edges that seemed to fold into themselves and then fold again. Yellow lightning arced outward from its rim in irregular, almost organic bursts.
From within the aperture came wind.
Not a breeze. Not a gust. Wind — the kind that carries the smell of a world you've never visited, that presses against you with the flat authority of something that exists entirely outside of ordinary physics. It spiraled downward in a tight column, and within it, visible only as two points of red light burning through the dark like distant stars, was a figure.
Then the column struck the bridge.
Shockwave. Light. The sharp crack of something enormous meeting something immovable.
When the wind died, a young man stood on the bridge railing with the casual ease of someone who had simply stepped off a bus.
He was dark-skinned, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, with black hair that defied gravity in a shape that might charitably be described as a palm tree — jutting upward and outward in dense, weightless spikes that no natural hairline could have produced. He wore a grey gi over a black turtleneck, the ensemble completed by red-sashed belt, white shoes, and a single gold-and-green earring that caught the lamplight like a coin at the bottom of a wishing well.
He was looking at the clone with a mild, appraising expression.
The clone was three meters away, suspended in the air by the fingers of one of his hands, which was wrapped around her forearm in a grip that she could not, judging by the color draining from her knuckles, break. He hadn't moved from the railing. He had simply caught her, mid-descent, the way someone might catch a glass sliding off a countertop.
He released her.
She flew backward through the wall of an abandoned building in a shower of brick and old mortar.
He hopped off the railing, brushed a nonexistent speck of dust from the shoulder of his gi, and watched the settling debris with a look of polite academic interest.
"Hm." He tilted his head slightly. "I'd expected more, given all that bravado."
The clone emerged from the rubble furious and shaking, splinters of wood still falling from her hair. She fixed him with eyes that had gone incandescent with heat, and her voice, when she finally found it, shook with the effort of containing something that wanted very badly to be a scream.
"You'll regret this."
The young man didn't answer immediately. Instead, he seemed to consider the statement with the same measured thoughtfulness one might apply to a moderately interesting philosophical proposition. Then, almost imperceptibly, the corners of his mouth curved.
He laughed.
It wasn't a cruel laugh. That, in some ways, was what made it unbearable.
"Making a fool out of you?" He shook his head, voice dropping to something quieter, more precise. "Don't misunderstand. I never considered you a fool. You're far too small for the word to do any work."
The clone snarled and closed the distance between them in a blink.
Her fist stopped in his open palm.
The impact produced a sound like a gunshot. The pavement beneath his feet cracked in a perfect radial pattern from where he stood, but he didn't move. He looked at her fist in his hand, then at her, with an expression of patient, almost gentle disappointment.
"You fight," he said, "like someone who has read about fighting but hasn't yet understood what they read."
Then he moved.
The knee into her midsection was the opening statement. The following sequence was the argument — rapid, precisely calibrated, relentless — each blow landing at exactly the angle and velocity required to double the effect of the one before it. He wasn't wild. He wasn't angry. He was methodical in the way that mathematics is methodical, and it was somehow more frightening than rage would have been.
He launched her skyward with a final rising kick and was already moving before she'd reached the apex of her arc.
He cupped his hands at his right side, fingers interlaced, elbows back.
And he began to chant.
"Kaaaa..."
On the ground, Kara had pulled herself free of the debris. She stood on unsteady feet, chest heaving, watching the young man hover thirty meters above the river with his hands drawn back and something building between them. She'd seen a lot of things in her time as a hero. She had fought beside her cousin against creatures that had leveled continents.
She had never seen anything quite like what was currently forming between a stranger's palms.
It began as a point of darkness — not the absence of light, but something that actively consumed it, pulling the surrounding air into itself with a low, resonant hum that she felt in her back teeth rather than her ears. Then it began to expand, the darkness blooming outward and brightening at its edges into deep violet and black in the way that a coal, when it burns hottest, seems almost purple rather than red.
"Meeee..."
The clone had halted her upward trajectory. She was staring at him, and for the first time since she had appeared, there was something in her eyes that wasn't contempt or rage.
It looked very much like fear.
"Haaaa..."
"Brace yourself, Kara." Artemis was at her side, one hand on her arm, her voice low and very level in the way it only got when she was genuinely frightened. "I don't know exactly what that is, but I don't think we want to be in the blast radius when he lets it go."
"Meeee..."
Kara braced herself.
He thrust his hands forward.
"HAAA!!!!!"
The beam was not blue. It was not red. It was not the clean, familiar energy she associated with Kryptonian physiology or with any of the lantern corps she'd encountered. It was black, shot through with veins of deep violet, and it moved with a sound like the world briefly forgetting the rules it normally lived by. It struck the clone and simply insisted — insisted she move, insisted she travel, insisted she accept the full argument that had been building since he first laid eyes on her.
She crossed the river in approximately one second.
The impact with the water produced a column of white spray that climbed three stories before the concussive burst turned it outward in a flat ring, and then the whole structure of displaced water came crashing back down in a chaos of foam and river-smell.
The young man drifted downward to bridge level.
He straightened his gi.
"A hundred years too early," he said quietly, to no one in particular, "for an imitation to defeat an original."
Artemis, standing beside Kara, exhaled a very long, very controlled breath.
"...Right," she said at last. "So that happened."
Up close, he was ordinary in the way that extraordinary things sometimes are — just a teenage boy standing on a bridge at dusk, hands in his pockets now, watching the river settle. He turned when he heard them approach, and his expression shifted into something open and unhurried.
"Are you both all right?" he asked. His eyes settled briefly on Kara's torn uniform and the fading bruises already knitting themselves back together beneath it. "I apologize for the delay. I have a tendency to... extend myself in a fight."
Kara felt warmth rise in her face before she could stop it. She told herself it was the adrenaline.
"We're — yes. We're fine. Thank you." She straightened. "I don't... know your name."
"Eleryc," he said simply.
"Eleryc." She let the word sit for a moment. "I'm Kara. Kara Zor-El. Though most people here call me Supergirl."
He smiled at that — a small, genuine thing. "It's a pleasure, Supergirl."
They shook hands. Behind them, Artemis studied the middle distance with the elaborate neutral expression of someone who was most definitely not smirking.
The walk back to Mount Justice was quiet, and the quiet was comfortable in a way that quiet between strangers rarely is. Eleryc followed without objection when Artemis suggested he join them, and something in the ease of his compliance — this person who could level city blocks if he chose to, simply falling into step beside them — struck Kara as worthy of attention.
He's choosing to be cooperative. The thought arrived with a clarity that surprised her. He doesn't have to be. He knows that. We know that. And yet here he is.
She filed the observation away beside all the other things she didn't yet understand about him.
There would be time.
Mount Justice received them in its usual fashion — the great reinforced doors, the cavernous entry corridor, the hum of systems that never fully slept. Kara gestured to the expanse of it with a quiet pride she tried and mostly failed to make look casual.
"Welcome to Mount Justice. Young Justice headquarters."
Eleryc surveyed it with unhurried attention. Then, so quietly she almost missed it beneath the ambient noise of the base, he said:
"It's even more impressive than I remembered."
Kara went still.
"Remembered," she repeated. The word landed like a dropped coin — small and precise and impossible to ignore. "You've seen this place before. When? Because I have an excellent memory, and I'm absolutely certain I've never seen you."
"Easy," Artemis said, appearing at Kara's elbow with the particular calm of someone who had learned that the best way to defuse Kara in a suspicious mood was to not match her energy. "New guest. Benefit of the doubt." She turned to Eleryc. "That said — what exactly did you mean by that?"
He was quiet for a moment. Not evasive — processing. As though deciding not what to say, but where to begin.
"I suppose," he said at last, "I should start at the beginning. Or rather — at the end, since that's where I came from."
"Twenty years from now," he said.
The three of them had found a corner of the entry chamber away from foot traffic — three people and a gravity that seemed to have settled over the conversation the moment those five words left his mouth. Artemis had gone very still. Kara stood with her arms crossed in the posture she adopted when she was listening more intently than she wanted anyone to know.
"Twenty years," Kara echoed. "You're telling me you came from twenty years in the future."
"Yes."
A beat.
"What's it like?" Artemis asked. Her voice was careful and quiet, the way it got when she was afraid of the answer.
Eleryc's jaw tightened. It was a small movement, but Kara had been watching his face, and she saw the way his hands — resting on his knees — curled briefly at the knuckles before releasing again. He had that particular stillness of someone managing something very large in a very small container.
"A nightmare," he said. "Literally and without exaggeration. The male heroes are dead — all of them. Every founding member of the Justice League. Even—" He paused. "Even those who were believed to be beyond any conventional threat. With them gone, there was no unified force left. The villains moved quickly. Governments fell. Cities burned." His voice didn't waver. It was worse, somehow, for not wavering — as though the grief had been carried so long it had gone smooth, like a river stone. "And the entities who orchestrated it all revealed their purpose once the damage was done. They hadn't come to elevate anyone. They'd come to conquer."
"The Amazons." Artemis said it like she'd already known — or feared — what was coming.
Eleryc looked at her. "They were deceived. I need you to understand that first, before anything else. Ancient deities with ancient grudges worked on them for years — whispering half-truths, amplifying old wounds, reshaping their perception of what was real and what was threat until they genuinely believed that what they were doing was necessary. That it was righteous."
"Diana would have stopped them." Artemis's voice had an edge that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite desperation, but lived somewhere between the two. "Wonder Woman would never have—"
"She tried." The words were quiet but absolute. "When she finally understood what had been done to her sisters, she tried everything she could. She rallied everyone she could reach. She fought." He paused. "She wasn't enough. None of them were, by then. Because by then, it was already too late."
Silence gathered between the three of them.
Then Kara said: "That's why you came back."
"Yes."
"To prevent it."
"Yes." He met her eyes. "And I didn't come alone. My sister, Cassa, and several others who survived the final days. We planned carefully — we identified a specific point in the timeline, the moment before the corruption began to take root, and we built a way back." His expression shifted — something fractured moving briefly behind his eyes before discipline closed over it again. "But there was interference when I came through. An energy signature I didn't recognize, and when I emerged, I was alone. They could be anywhere. Or anywhen."
"Which means finding them is your first priority," Artemis said.
"It has to be. Without them, I won't be able to identify exactly when and how the deities first make contact with the Amazons. This isn't something I can stop alone." He exhaled. "Though I'll confess — simply finding someone willing to listen already feels like more than I had an hour ago."
Artemis put a hand on his shoulder, briefly. "You're not alone anymore."
Kara uncrossed her arms. The motion was small, but it meant something, and she suspected he was perceptive enough to know what. "We need to tell the others. All of them — the full team. If what you're describing is even remotely possible, it concerns all of us."
"Agreed. But we proceed carefully." His voice dropped. "The deities in my timeline were subtle. They worked from shadow for years before they revealed themselves. If any of them are present in this era — if any of them know I'm here — they'll accelerate their plans. Or they'll move against the people closest to me before those people can become a threat."
"Then we move quietly and quickly." Kara's tone had settled into the register she used when she'd made up her mind completely and the universe had better take note. "Your sister — can you sense her? Track her somehow?"
"We share a unique energy signature — what my people call ki. If she's using her power anywhere on this planet, I should be able to feel it." His head tilted slightly, as though listening to something below the threshold of normal hearing. "When I first arrived, there were several signatures I didn't recognize. I couldn't determine which, if any, were her. But it's a starting point."
"Then we start there." Kara looked at Artemis, who gave a single brisk nod. "Tonight, we find the others. Tomorrow, we start looking for your people."
Something shifted in Eleryc's face — not dramatic, not performative. Just the quiet way a thing changes when it stops being carried alone. He inclined his head.
"In my time," he said, "they told stories about the determination of the Legendary Supergirl. It seems those stories were accurate."
Kara felt the warmth come back to her face and had the grace, this time, to turn away before he could see it clearly. "Come on," she said. "The others should be getting back soon."
She led the way deeper into Mount Justice, and Eleryc followed, and Artemis brought up the rear with the quiet and deeply satisfied expression of someone watching something interesting begin.
None of them noticed the small dark shape that separated itself from a shadow near the entrance, moving in absolute silence — low to the ground and purposeful, carrying the news of a visitor from a ruined future to masters who had not yet shown their faces.
The board was set.
The opening moves had already been played.
And in the corridors of the mountain, the first tentative shapes of an alliance that might save the world were just beginning to find their form.
To be continued in Chapter Two: Scattered Across Time & Space