The Smallville Junkyard was a graveyard of dreams and Detroit steel. Towering piles of crushed sedans, rusted tractors, and discarded appliances created a labyrinth of jagged iron that stretched for acres. Under the pale moon, it looked like a landscape from another planet.
Jeremy climbed to the summit of a mound of scrap metal, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He felt raw. The "Static" wasn't just a hum anymore; it was a physical ache, a restless, jagged heat that made his skin feel two sizes too small.
"Okay," he whispered, staring at his trembling hands. "What am I?"
He focused on a rusted 1970s refrigerator sitting ten feet below him. He closed his eyes, trying to find the "valve" in his mind. He didn't just want to throw a spark; he wanted to control it. He visualized the energy in his marrow flowing down his arm, narrowing into a needle-thin point at his index finger.
CRACK.
A bolt of blinding blue-white lightning arced from his hand. It hit the fridge with the force of a sledgehammer, punching a jagged, molten hole through the heavy steel door. The smell of ionized air and scorched paint filled the night.
Jeremy gasped, his knees buckling. His arm went completely numb, vibrating with a phantom "after-hum" that made his teeth ache. But he wasn't finished. The curiosity was a fever now.
He climbed down and approached a pile of discarded electronics—old tube TVs, VCRs, and car radios that had been rotting in the rain for years. He placed his hands over the pile, hovering just inches above the plastic casings. This time, instead of pushing, he tried to pull.
The result was terrifying.
The residual charge in the old capacitors—tiny bits of energy stored for a decade—didn't just flow into him; it was vacuumed. The blue tracer lines beneath his skin flared bright enough to show the silhouette of his veins through his sleeves. For a split second, Jeremy felt... more. His vision sharpened until he could see the individual grains of rust on a nearby fender. His hearing expanded until the wind through the corn sounded like a roaring ocean.
Then, the ceiling fell in as he felt a backlash.
A sharp, stabbing pain ignited in his chest, radiating outward to his fingertips. Jeremy collapsed into the dirt, coughing violently as his skin felt like it was being pricked by a thousand red-hot needles. He looked at his palms; they were flushed deep red, the skin beginning to blister.
"Too much," he wheezed, clutching his chest. "The body... it's just a wire. It can't hold it."
He realized then that he was a conduit, not a container. He could move massive amounts of energy, but his human cells were the weak point in the circuit. He was a high-voltage line trying to run through a household fuse.
As he sat there in the shadows of the scrap heaps, trying to steady his breathing, he saw something glinting in the dirt near his boot. It was a small, jagged fragment of green rock—a piece of the '89 meteor shower that the crushers had missed.
Jeremy reached out and snatched the small, jagged fragment of green rock from the dirt. He expected it to burn, or perhaps to shock him, but instead, the sensation was almost medicinal. The moment his skin made contact with the mineral, the jagged, stinging "Static" in his nerves smoothed out into a low, thrumming hum. It felt like a fever breaking.
It wasn't the painful scream of an overload. It was a harmonic resonance—a frequency that made the jagged heat in his chest suddenly feel... smooth. For the first time since waking up, the chaotic energy under his skin felt like it had found a center.
He shoved the rock deep into his pocket, his fingers curling around its sharp edges. He didn't understand the science behind it. He just knew that the rock changed the way his power felt.
He wasn't a boy anymore. He wasn't even the Jeremy Creek from 1989. He was something new, something that the Luthors wanted to own and the Kents would eventually fear.