Clark fell quieter than before. Jude noticed, letting the silence hold.
The conversation had helped. Clark had said as much, and Jude had believed him. Yet Jude's casual admission—his lack of a definitive rule against killing, spoken without a trace of regret—lingered. It sat just beneath Clark's skin, stubbornly fixed in place.
I'm not afraid of him. Clark watched him. Jude was readable enough: kinder than he let on, carrying a quiet reliability that drew out secrets from people who hadn't intended to speak. Clark didn't trust anyone unconditionally, but Jude defied categorization.
Stronger than Bruce, but not by much. Senses sharper than average, but they don't stretch across a city block. Speed Force access, but finite. Borrowed. Drawing from storage. Slightly beyond human. Nowhere near a metahuman. By every conventional metric, he wasn't particularly dangerous.
And yet, when Jude had spoken of putting bullets into people, flatly and without posturing, a sudden coldness had settled in Clark's chest. It had nothing to do with power levels.
He means it. That was the source of the cold. He means it, he isn't bothered by it, and the only thing stopping him is his regard for Bruce and me.
Clark cataloged the thought and kept his eyes forward.
The space around them shifted. Lois stood across from Batman.
"You're doing this wrong, Lois." Batman's voice remained low, measured, wiped clean of whatever he might have been feeling. "Killing them doesn't fix anything. The environment that creates supervillains will just produce more."
"Then I'll kill those too."
Crimson light leaked from her irises. The crest on her chest glowed, no longer a beacon, just a brand burned into the black fabric. Whatever grief she once carried had burned out, leaving only a harsh, radiating heat.
"All these years," she said. "Your principles haven't made this world one degree better. Not once. You're a failure."
"And Clark?" Batman stood entirely still. "He had the same principles. Is he a failure too?"
The name landed. The red light flared, wild and uneven, and she moved.
Batman caught the blow in standard kevlar. He launched backward, clearing twelve meters before hitting the ground. He rolled, forcing his momentum through the shattered concrete, his hand already dipping toward his belt for the one contingency he had brought.
Green kryptonite. His fingers closed around the glow.
Lois hit him again.
"I'm from Earth," she said. "Your contingency only works on Kryptonians."
She stood over him. Her voice flattened out. "Stop. Surrender."
Batman cataloged his own ruin. Internal bleeding. A shattered sternum. The right hand fractured. The stone cast its green light across his left glove, entirely useless. The woman standing above him held his pulse in her hands.
If you don't compromise, you die.
He drew a ragged breath and pushed himself up.
"Batman never compromises."
Blood broke the words, but the cadence held firm.
The red light intensified in her eyes.
The scene ruptured in a flash of heat.
Silence stretched between Clark and Jude. They had already seen the end of this timeline. They had seen what Lois held when the dust settled. The gap between her glowing eyes and that final image required no explanation.
"Try to think of it this way," Jude said. "Even if she went wrong, the direction she took isn't necessarily where she was originally headed." He looked straight through the cascading walls of the Speed Force. "The Dark Multiverse carries a specific frequency. Certain energies corrode decision-making at pivotal moments. Choices that appear irrational from the outside are often the result of very deliberate influence, applied at exactly the right juncture."
"You mean the gaze."
"Almost certainly."
The timeline spooled backward.
The Joker. He stood in a derelict warehouse, the beginnings of some elaborate punchline scattered around his feet. He looked up at Lois, his grin freezing as he registered a variable he had not anticipated.
She didn't speak. She offered no setup. Her eyes ignited, and she melted him into the floorboards with slow, focused efficiency.
"Lois!"
Batman dropped through the skylight. The cape snapped taut, breaking his fall as he hit the concrete and rolled into a standing position. He looked at her over the smoking remains.
Lois looked back.
"When Clark died," she said. "Why didn't you get there as quickly as this?"
The vision tore away.
Clark watched the darkness bleed back into the Speed Force. The Joker's death was clean. No hesitation. A long-standing problem, simply erased. That part tangled his thoughts. But her immediate pivot toward Bruce, her face totally blank. No grief. No transition. Just assessing the next target.
The timeline pulled further back.
Lex Luthor stood at his penthouse window, looking down at the city. He held a glass of red wine, swirling it slowly. A private reserve from the Archbishop of Canterbury's supplier, he was saying, offering the vintage as if it were a legal defense. He watched Lois drift past the glass. His eyes tracked her, calculating.
"We are all saddened by the death of Superman," he said. The performance was seamless.
"I know you did it, Lex." Lois hovered beyond the glass. "The nuclear accident."
"Oh, look at you." Luthor turned, smiling. He had run this conversation in his head before. "You used to be a journalist looking for the truth. Now, apparently, you can simply see right through things."
He lowered himself into his leather chair.
"There was a nuclear accident. I was surprised, I'll admit, though I will also admit it was convenient. Arms are much easier to sell when people feel unsafe. This event came at a very useful time." He spread his hands on the desk. "But I didn't cause it. My legal team—quite a good one, I think you'd agree—can confirm that the existing evidence is insufficient to establish my involvement. Therefore, I am innocent."
"Does he think he's talking to Superman?" Jude said.
The reinforced glass shattered inward.
Lois took Luthor by the collar before the shards even hit the carpet. She hoisted him one-handed, cleared the shattered frame, and pulled him straight up.
"What are you doing—" His words dissolved into a raw, dragging sound.
She didn't answer. She accelerated.
The friction grabbed at them. The atmosphere sheared against her clothes, the temperature spiking as she broke the sound barrier and drove higher. Heat washed over her skin. The flames meant nothing. She had burned from the inside out for months; this was just a change in temperature.
Luthor was unprotected.
His mouth tore open. The wind pressure crushed the air back down his throat, choking off the scream. The heat swallowed him. The drag stripped away his suit, the blazing slipstream pulling the oxygen out of his lungs. He burned simultaneously from the friction without and the superheated air within.
Lex Luthor, one of the most intelligent minds on the planet, vanished into the stratosphere without a sound.
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