A pair of heat rays punched through Daniel's chest from below.
Daniel looked down at the hole. Then at Zod floating beneath him, eyes still burning red, yellow sun already rewriting everything about him.
Who the hell let this man bathe in yellow sun?
The hole closed.
Zod came up like a missile and the impact hit like a BOOM.
Both of them driving through the building top to bottom, floor after floor exploding outward until they hit the street and the shockwave flipped three cars simultaneously.
Zod grabbed Daniel and drove him sideways through a parking structure, support pillars snapping one after another like CRACK, the upper level groaning and dropping as the columns gave out.
Daniel caught one on the way through, swung himself around and hit Zod across the jaw hard enough that the sound carried two blocks.
Zod grabbed him by the throat and threw him straight up through four ceilings before he cleared the building into open sky.
Daniel stopped himself, death energy wrapping down both legs and hardening into scythe blades.
Zod rose out of the smoke.
Daniel dove.
They met mid air and the shockwave rolled across twelve city blocks. Every remaining window in the surrounding buildings came down in one curtain of glass.
Daniel's feet hit the ground.
The death energy detonated outward in a perfect ring and everything inside it turned to dust.
Silence.
Daniel looked at Zod across the empty ring of dust.
One eye turned gold, filled with the turning faces of clocks, time itself visible behind the iris. The other went black, deep and absolute, the void of open space looking out through it, stars moving slowly in the dark.
"General Zod," Daniel said. "Let's fight."
Zod came in hard with a right hand that would have leveled a building.
Daniel stepped sideways and time around Zod's arm slowed, the punch moving through air that had become thick as concrete, and Daniel walked around it and hit him twice across the ribs before time snapped back to normal.
Zod staggered, confused, the punch having landed before he felt the wind-up complete.
He came again, heat vision firing.
Daniel folded space in front of him, the beams bending around a crease in reality and redirecting past his shoulder, scorching the street fifty meters behind him.
Zod adjusted and fired again.
Daniel folded it again, this time redirecting both beams back at Zod's feet, the explosion launching him upward.
Daniel was already above him.
He brought both hands down across Zod's back and the impact drove him back into the street. The crater doubled in size.
Zod pushed himself up, breathing hard now, eyes scanning, trying to predict movement that didn't follow normal rules.
"You're fighting time and space," Daniel said from three different positions simultaneously. "Pick one."
Zod picked the middle one and charged.
Wrong choice.
Two punches landed on both sides of Zod's face simultaneously.
His head snapped left and right at the same time, the impacts coming from angles that shouldn't have been possible, Daniel in two places at once, both hits landing within a fraction of a second of each other.
Then the chains came.
Black and gold, death energy and frozen time woven together, erupting from the ground around Zod and wrapping around his arms, his legs, his chest, each chain pulling tight and slamming him into the street as they continued to bind, the impact rattling the remaining structures on the block.
BOOM.
Zod strained against them, the Kryptonian strength under yellow sun considerable, the chains groaning under it, and for a moment it looked like they might give.
He tore one arm free.
Then appeared in the air above the street, the chains having lost their anchor point, and flew hard trying to break the rest of them through sheer momentum.
Daniel appeared in front of him.
"No," Daniel said.
The chains snapped back, pulling Zod out of the air and slamming him into the ground again. Then again. Then a third time, the street completely gone now, just a deep crater where Metropolis pavement used to be.
The chains pulled tight and held.
Zod hung suspended inside them, every limb bound, the gold and black energy burning where the chains touched the suit.
"Time is my domain," Daniel said, looking down at him. "There is no running from it."
The Scythe appeared in Daniel's hand.
He moved like a shadow, there and gone, passing straight through Zod in a single motion too fast to track, and appeared behind him, Scythe at his side, blood on the blade.
Silence for one second.
Zod's head hit the ground.
His body followed.
Daniel looked at the Scythe and the blood on it and swept it once before it disappeared back into nothing. He turned and looked at the ship still listing above Metropolis, the chain blasts having done their work on the hull, the whole structure coming apart slowly above the city.
Behind him the chains dissolved.
*****
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