"Everyone off the street — now! Lower floors, find cover — move!"
"Superman's gone insane — run!"
"Oh God, oh God — the building—"
The upper third of a skyscraper on the east side of the block had simply stopped existing. What replaced it was a cascading shower of concrete, steel rebar, and glass moving downward at the speed of gravity — a debris field wide enough to cover four lanes of traffic. The people on those four lanes were running, which helped some of them.
Drake and Camilla were not running. They'd found a corner of a partially-collapsed structure on the ground floor, solid on two sides, open enough that they could see the street, and were watching the red cape carve arcs through the smoke above Metropolis with the resigned attention of people who have already determined that they cannot outrun whatever is happening.
"I told you we needed a basement," Camilla said quietly.
"If the building collapses, the basement traps us." Drake kept his eyes on the sky. "A structure that's already taken damage has already done most of its collapsing. You want to be on the first floor, near an exterior wall, not underground." He paused. "I read that somewhere."
"Gotham."
"Gotham," he agreed.
They looked at each other. Around them, the sounds of Metropolis in crisis filled the air — screaming, the groan of stressed metal, the irregular percussion of falling things. The crowd outside was still moving, still shoving, still doing the thing that crowds do when they've never had to practice this before.
"Gotham people would have found cover by now," Camilla observed. "These people are running in circles. They don't know the drill."
"They've never needed the drill. That was supposed to be the point of having him." Drake watched the cape cut through a cloud of construction dust and emerge on the other side, laughing. "When we were still in Gotham and heard that Metropolis had a superhero — that crime incidents were down to once every few months — I thought that sounded like paradise."
"Nobody mentioned that when it went wrong, it went wrong at a scale that took out half a block at a time."
"Nobody mentioned that, no."
Below the chaos, a sound cut through the debris noise — not an explosion but a pressure wave, a boom that arrived before the source did. A figure dropped from the upper air in a blur of silver-white and black, mechanical components catching the light as it descended. Cyborg hit the street at speed, caught himself, and angled both arms upward.
The sonic cannon on his right arm discharged in a sustained burst directly into the descending cape, and the resulting detonation swallowed both figures in smoke and fire and shrapnel moving at several hundred metres per second.
"Superman! Wake up!"
The smoke cleared.
The man in the cape stood in the centre of the blast area and felt the last of the heat dissipate against his skin. The warmth was pleasant — like a bath that had cooled to room temperature. The shockwaves had been mildly stimulating, a sensation somewhere in the neighbourhood of a massage. The shrapnel had struck his suit, bounced, and fallen to the ground as scrap.
He turned his hand over in the cooling air and looked at it with something approaching wonder.
This was what it felt like, apparently. Omnipotence. Genuine, unqualified, undiluted omnipotence — no effort, no cost, just the complete absence of anything in the world that could threaten him. He'd known it intellectually. He hadn't known it like this.
He laughed. The sound of it came out wrong — too loud, too sharp, resonating off the buildings in ways normal laughter didn't — and he didn't care.
He crossed the distance to Cyborg in a single movement and hit him hard enough to produce a sonic boom before the man had finished raising his defences.
Cyborg's body left a channel through two buildings and embedded itself in the road at the end of it.
"Beg for mercy, Cyborg." The cape settled as he descended, unhurried, to where the half-broken figure lay. "Beg me for a quick death."
"He looks exactly like those supervillains in comics," Drake said, from across the street. His voice was very level. "The kind that announces they're going to destroy the world. I always assumed Superman was the opposite of that."
"I assumed a great many things about this city." Camilla closed her eyes briefly. "Six months without a single crime incident. I thought I'd found somewhere better."
"We'll find somewhere better."
"We'll find somewhere without superheroes."
A sound like thunder rolled across the city — the caped figure accelerating, plunging into a building, re-emerging with Cyborg's damaged body in one hand. Drake watched him gain altitude, watched Cyborg's mechanical arm twist in a way arms don't, and turned away.
"He ripped off an arm and a leg," he said. "That's — yeah. That's it for Cyborg. He can't win this."
"Hey!"
The shout came from street level. Both of them looked.
A teenager — green-skinned, which Drake noted and filed under things Metropolis has that Gotham doesn't — had appeared on the pavement below the aerial fight, fists clenched, expression somewhere between furious and terrified.
"What are you doing to Cyborg?! He's a Titan — he's one of the good guys!"
The caped figure turned in the air and looked down. His expression was the expression of someone who has stopped finding anything interesting except the next thing to break.
"Of course he's not a bad guy," he said pleasantly. "But I am."
He dropped Cyborg into the side of a building and turned to face the green kid.
"Another one. How many of you are there?" He spread his arms. "Come on. All at once."
The car hit him from behind.
Nobody had seen where it came from. It was a mid-size SUV, already wrecked along one side, and it arrived at speed and with a downward angle, driving the caped figure into the road surface with a sound like a building falling. A crater opened up in the asphalt. The car bounced sideways and came to rest on its roof twenty metres away.
Drake stared.
A girl in a red uniform — the W insignia at her waist — stood in the street with the particular focused stillness of someone who had just thrown a car and was already calculating what to do next. Drake had seen her face in news reports. She and the green kid were a team.
She moved to the crater's edge and looked in. The cape was visible below, face-down in the cracked asphalt, not visibly moving.
"Superman can't be disabled by kinetic force," she said, partly to herself. "His biofield absorbs impact independently of mass. He should have—"
"Really." The voice came from directly behind her left ear. "You know quite a lot about Superman."
The girl's pupils contracted.
The green-skinned boy, half a block away, was already shouting: "Wonder Girl — behind you!"
The man in the cape was above her, close enough that she could hear him breathing, holding a steel construction plate in both hands like a serving tray.
He was still smiling.
"Now," he said. "Let's have a real conversation."
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