Inside a LexCorp laboratory every screen in the room was running simultaneously.
Satellite feeds. Traffic cameras. Military footage pulled from sources that LexCorp was not officially supposed to have access to. News broadcasts cut and isolated frame by frame.
The entire room buried under data and the people trying to make sense of it.
Lex stood in the middle of it with his hands clasped behind his back, looking at the main display where two figures had been isolated from the Metropolis footage.
The one in the cape catching a building facade with one hand.
The one in the trench coat standing in a ring of dust where a street used to be, chains pulling a warship out of the sky like it weighed nothing.
"Find everything," Lex said. "Every digital trace. Every camera frame. Every record connected to either of them going back as far as the records go."
His staff typed faster.
"Sir the one in the cape we have very little," one of them said. "He appeared during the invasion and we have no prior record of any individual with these capabilities anywhere on file."
"Then build the file," Lex said.
"The other one is different," a second analyst said carefully. "We found a photograph. World War One. Germany. 1918."
Lex turned.
The photograph came up on the main screen. Black and white. Worn edges. A face that matched the man in the trench coat exactly, not a single day different between then and now.
Lex looked at it for a long moment.
"He has been here for over a century," Lex said quietly.
"Yes sir."
"There is also witness testimony from 1918," the analyst continued, pulling up scanned documents on the secondary screen.
"Multiple high ranking German officials who attended a party that year. Several of them disappeared from public life shortly after. The ones who remained became erratic, unstable. Their written accounts all describe the same thing."
"Which was," Lex said.
"A god of death. At the party. Those are their exact words."
"Pull every mythological reference to a god of death," Lex said. "Every culture. Every text. All of it."
His staff moved immediately.
The results came up across the screens within minutes. Egyptian. Greek. Norse. Hindu. Dozens of mythologies, dozens of names, but the consistent elements were the same across all of them.
A scythe as a divine weapon capable of killing anything regardless of what it was. The ability to guide the dead into another realm. A death dimension with many names across cultures. Netherworld. Underworld. The realm beyond.
And immortality.
Then one of the analysts overlaid Daniel's photograph from Metropolis onto the compiled profile. Brown trench coat. Scythe visible on his shoulder. The chains. The darkness.
Every data point on the screen pointing in one direction.
The room stopped.
Nobody typed. Nobody spoke. They all just looked at the screen because aliens were one category of problem and this was an entirely different category that none of their training had covered.
Lex looked at the screen for a long moment, jaw tight, eyes moving across every piece of data.
Then slowly, almost despite himself, a smile formed.
"Wow," Lex said quietly.
Not fear. Not concern.
Excitement.
"Now," Lex said, turning back to the room. "Find me a way to kill one."
Every head in the room turned toward him simultaneously.
The silence that followed was the particular silence of people who had all just heard the same thing and were all hoping someone else had heard it differently.
"Sir," one analyst said carefully. "You want us to find a way to kill a god of death?"
"That's what I said," Lex replied, already moving toward the next screen.
"The same god of death who just dragged an alien warship into another dimension," another analyst said, with the tone of someone who felt this context was relevant.
"Yes," Lex Luthor said.
Nobody moved for a moment. Then they quickly got back to work. Lex was the one paying them, and none of them understood why he had suddenly become obsessed with the two people from the invasion.
"Sir," the lead researcher said, pulling up every reference they had compiled. "We have gone through every mythology, every text, every fragmentary account we could access."
"There is no conventional method," the researcher said.
"None. A being of this classification cannot be harmed by anything of human origin. The consistent finding across every culture that references a god of death is the same."
"They can only be challenged by other divine beings or weapons forged outside of natural reality."
The room looked at Lex.
Lex looked at the screen.
"So conventional weapons do nothing," Lex said.
"Nothing sir."
"Military hardware."
"Nothing."
"Nuclear."
The researcher hesitated. "We have no mythological precedent for nuclear specifically but based on what we witnessed in Metropolis where conventional Kryptonian weaponry failed to put him down we have no reason to believe nuclear would be different."
Another silence settled over the room, heavier this time.
"And sir," one of the analysts said carefully, "the public has already given the two individuals names. They're calling the alien 'Superman'… and the other one 'Reaper.' Both already have growing public support online."
Lex Luthor stared at the screen for a second before letting out a quiet laugh.
"Of course they do," Lex muttered. "The world sees beings that can level cities and immediately starts building fan clubs."
He turned sharply toward another section of the lab. "Mercy."
"Sir?"
"The Kryptonian data. Tell me you've made progress decoding it."
A pause.
"We've managed to partially translate fragments recovered from the scout ship," the technician answered. "Most of it is still encrypted, but we're getting structure patterns, energy systems… weapon classifications."
*****
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