"Open the hatch. We bring them back."
The order carried no strain, no anger—just certainty.
For a heartbeat, the bridge crew didn't move. Their eyes flicked between the fallen body of Captain Edward and Rhael Zane standing over him.
A Kryptonian captain—dead at the hands of a subordinate.
Under the old order, that was unthinkable.
Krypton's society had been genetically stratified. Roles assigned before birth. Command was engineered, not earned. A soldier did not rise beyond his designation. A scientist did not defy a general.
But Krypton no longer existed.
Predestination had died in stellar fire.
Medic Lucini was the first to act. She triggered the external bay release.
The hatch irised open.
Rhael moved.
He didn't sprint so much as vanish forward—air displaced in a concussive ripple as he crossed the landing platform in an instant.
Outside, Kree insurgents pressed their advantage.
They were disciplined—armor sealed, rifles calibrated for anti-armor penetration. Though branded "rebels," their formation and weapon signatures were unmistakably military. The Kree Empire had a long history of conducting unofficial operations through deniable assets.
One of the Kree soldiers sneered at the exhausted Kryptonian defenders.
"Krypton's been dust for years," he said. "Didn't think I'd still find stragglers worth selling."
He never finished the thought.
Rhael struck like an artillery shell.
He drove through the nearest insurgent at full acceleration. The impact detonated across the docking field—armor folding inward, body launched backward in a violent arc before crumpling lifeless against ferrocrete plating.
Silence fractured into chaos.
Todd, one of the trapped Kryptonian soldiers, stared. "Zane—?"
Rhael gave him a single nod.
"Fall back to the ship."
More Kree advanced, rifles raised.
The engineer who had warned against landing here hissed under his breath. "They're not common raiders. Those signatures match frontline Kree weapons."
Plasma bolts screamed across the open ground.
Rhael did not evade.
The beams struck him squarely in the chest.
An eruption of smoke and light swallowed his silhouette.
Lucini's breath caught.
When the haze cleared, Rhael stood exactly where he had been.
Unmarked.
He tilted his head slightly, studying the faint warmth fading from his skin.
"Is that your full output?" he asked calmly.
Internally, the response was immediate.
System NoticeKinetic Damage Mitigated — 48%External Energy Assimilated
His dermal layers had absorbed nearly half the force outright. The rest converted—plasma energy siphoned into cellular matrices, redistributed as fuel. The adaptive protocol mirrored known energy-absorption phenomena observed in certain metahumans, but here it was a direct extension of Kryptonian bio-architecture under stress.
The Kree hesitated.
One of them whispered, "Impossible."
Rhael flexed his fingers.
Energy moved through him like compressed lightning, coiling in muscle and bone.
"Continue," he said. "You're accelerating my recovery."
They fired again—desperation replacing discipline.
Bolts converged.
He absorbed them without recoil.
The heat fed him.
Under a red sun, a Kryptonian's power was restrained. But absorption protocols were independent of stellar spectrum. If energy was delivered directly, his body would use it.
Rhael stepped forward.
A rifle discharged point-blank into his face.
He didn't blink.
He closed the distance and drove his fist forward—not into flesh, but into open air.
The shockwave detonated outward.
Energy Threshold Reached
The stored plasma vented through kinetic projection. The air itself fractured under the release. A visible compression wave tore across the field, slamming into the insurgents like a moving wall.
Armor buckled.
Bodies lifted and hurled backward in synchronized collapse.
Concrete cracked in radial lines from the pressure impact.
When the dust settled, none of the Kree remained standing.
Rhael lowered his hand.
No pursuit. No excess violence.
He turned to the Kryptonian survivors.
"Return to the ship. We depart immediately."
Todd approached cautiously, eyes fixed on him. "What… happened to you?"
"Adaptation," Rhael replied.
Nothing more.
Behind him, Darkhaven's skyline flickered with distant lights—criminal syndicates and covert operatives already recalculating the cost of engaging this vessel again.
Rhael paused at the threshold of the hatch.
He felt it now—the ceiling approaching.
Under red-spectrum radiation, further growth would plateau. True expansion required yellow-sun exposure. Earth's star would provide it. Other systems might as well.
The universe was filled with empires—Kree, Xandarian coalitions, remnants of Kryptonian extremists, entities older than planetary formation.
To survive among them, brute strength was insufficient.
He would need authority.
Structure.
Control.
The hatch sealed behind him.
"Plot a course away from contested Kree territory," he ordered the bridge crew. "Then we evaluate long-term trajectory."
No one challenged him.
Not anymore.