One scene after another.
After Batman, after the Joker, after Luthor, the list continued. Lois possessed Kryptonian power without Kryptonian weaknesses. Unlike Clark, she had no interest in mercy. The names from the system's initial briefing scrolled past: Ares, Black Adam, Deathstroke, the Parasite, the League of Assassins, the Rogues. The red light would spark in her eyes, and then there would be nothing left of them. Supervillains who had survived encounters with Superman for years vanished in seconds.
She moved on to ordinary criminals. The numbers began to change.
Jude swallowed.
"I thought the hundreds of thousands of deaths—I assumed that was Doomsday," he said. "The battle, Superman dying, the collateral damage. I thought everyone else died trying to help in the fight." He stared at the timeline. "She killed all of them herself?"
The timeline answered, pulling backward.
The Fortress of Solitude.
The gates burst outward with a sound that lacked any human equivalent. Not an explosion. A release. Something vast and ancient giving way all at once. A figure emerged. Humanoid, but featureless, the way machines are featureless when no one thinks to give them a face. It radiated energy like a furnace and moved with the heavy urgency of a thing whose instructions had just reactivated after a very long silence.
Its emotions, however, were legible. Even without eyes or expression, Jude felt them. Grief, and beneath that, something older and more fundamental. Despair.
"Too late," it said. Its voice was simultaneously flat and resonant. "I placed Kal-El in the Life Matrix in time. But there are no vital signs. I can detect no signs of resurrection. He is gone."
Lois stood at the entrance of the Fortress. She looked at the figure Clark had never mentioned. Her face was the face of someone who had cried until there were no tears left to shed.
"Who are you?"
"I am the Eradicator." The construct's answer held neither pride nor modesty. Just a statement of fact. "A Kryptonian intelligence. A weapons and defense system, built into this Fortress by Krypton's ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago. I once proposed to Kal-El that I initiate the restoration program—rebuild Kryptonian civilization on Earth, make this world a second Krypton. He refused. I entered dormancy."
It paused.
"My core directive requires me to preserve the last Kryptonian bloodline. When Kal-El died, the program restarted automatically. I recovered his body and placed it in the Life Matrix." The energy surrounding the construct flickered. "It should have worked. It has always worked. But he is completely dead, and I—"
The Eradicator made a sound it was not designed to make.
"My containment is failing. The Life Matrix's energy output was calibrated for Kryptonian physiology. It is too much for this body. I am going to come apart."
Lois looked at the tattered cape in her hands. She had held it since they brought his body back from the plaza. She had not put it down.
"You," she said softly.
"Human physiology cannot—"
"This is not your battle."
"Lois—"
"I love Clark. His fight has always been my fight." She looked up at the Eradicator. "Now I want to end it."
The Eradicator extended its hand.
The energy hit her like a physical blow and kept coming.
Jude and Clark watched.
The energy was visible. Red at the edges, it coursed through her skin in jagged arcs. Every cell ignited as Kryptonian power tried to anchor itself in human biology, failing to reconcile the two. She was going to come apart. The process was violent and irreversible.
Then, something else moved.
It was almost nothing. A shadow tracing the edge of the energy, barely there, slipping into the gaps of the Life Matrix's work. Jude felt it rather than saw it. A cold, patient presence pressing into the convergence. Not interfering, exactly. Adjusting.
Clark frowned. He could sense the Kryptonian energy. The other presence was harder to grasp—a wrongness at the edge of his perception, a shape that did not belong.
"Something is wrong," Clark said.
"I know."
Jude watched Lois stop shaking. He watched the energy, which had been fighting her biology at every turn, simply accept her. Smooth, complete, the fusion finished in seconds. Clean. It was the wrong word for it.
She rose into the air.
The Eradicator collapsed behind her, silent.
Jude exhaled slowly.
"That was Barbatos," he said. "It has to be. The fusion shouldn't have completed on its own. The energy and the body are incompatible. Something reached in at exactly the right moment and made it work." He looked at Clark. "It made her into what we needed her to be. Kryptonian power, human grief, and Barbatos's corruption as the adhesive holding it together."
He turned.
"This is the pivot point. This is where we intervene. We could do it now."
Clark did not speak.
Then, slowly: "I want to see how I die first."
Jude opened his mouth, closed it, and thought.
His Clark has never died. The realization settled. He's never seen this. He's heard about it—the stories, the abstract possibility—but he's never sat inside the Speed Force and watched his own body fail to rise from the grave.
"Alright," Jude said. "You should see it. It's happened in enough versions of this universe that you'd be wise to have it in your head. If you've seen it once, it's harder to be surprised by."
Clark nodded.
Time pulled further back.
The Daily Planet. Daytime.
Lois sat at her desk, fingers resting on the keyboard, a draft open on her screen.
Today marks one month since Superman's death—
Her face was gray. Not tearful, not actively grieving. Just drained, like a place where a fire had burned out long ago. She typed, words appearing on the screen, her expression entirely still.
A month ago, vendors had sold Superman merchandise in Metropolis Plaza within hours of his death. Lex Luthor had set up the Tomorrow Fund within days, installing a golden statue in the plaza. She had found the speed of it obscene. She had found the statue obscene. She had written an article saying as much, filed it, gone home, and sat in the dark for hours.
Now, she didn't know what she felt.
She pulled up the news feeds.
Refugees detained at the border. Kahndaq in another nuclear dispute. The LexCorp oil field explosion ruled an accident. Gun licensing legislation passed in committee.
It had been a month since the man of tomorrow died. The world was still doing exactly what it had always done. Corrupt, violent, indifferent, carrying on as if his absence was the normal state of the universe.
The people of Metropolis seemed to have stopped talking about him.
Lois's screen glowed. She typed, and the story waited for its end.