The universe has rules. Physical laws written into the fabric of reality with the same inevitability as gravity or entropy. When two immovable objects meet, something has to give.
Our fists connected, and the planet screamed.
The shockwave wasn't a circle—it was a sphere of pure, catastrophic force that expanded in all directions. The ground beneath us didn't crack; it unraveled, stone turning to dust, dust turning to plasma. The crater we'd already made doubled in size instantly, then doubled again. A mountain range three hundred miles away shuddered and collapsed as the seismic wave hit it. The atmosphere itself was punched away, creating a temporary vacuum that howled as air rushed back in to fill the void.
I felt it. I felt it.
The impact traveled up my arm like a song, a vibration so perfect it resonated in my bones. My knuckles registered the density of his flesh, the unearthly hardness of Grayven's god-blood, the sheer weight of his existence. He was strong. Not as strong as me—I'd held back more than I realized—but strong enough that I didn't have to worry about breaking the universe with a sneeze.
For the first time since I'd punched that meteorite into three pieces, I felt something besides omnipotence.
I felt excitement.
"Finally," I whispered, my voice lost in the thunder of our collision. "Someone who can keep up."
Grayven's face was a mask of concentration, those crimson eyes blazing with fury and something else—disbelief. He'd thrown that punch expecting to pulp me. Expecting to prove that Apokoliptian blood was supreme. Instead, he was meeting resistance that didn't just match him but welcomed the challenge.
We hung there, suspended in the air above the devastation, our fists locked in a contest of pure will. Then I pushed.
Just a little. A few percentage points of my strength, a tiny fraction of the solar energy I'd absorbed. Grayven's arm bent backward, his footing in the air slipping as he was driven down. He snarled, a sound like grinding tectonic plates, and poured on more power. I could feel the Father Box in his other hand feeding him energy, augmenting his natural might with the twisted science of Apokolips.
Good. I thought. Let it feed him. Let him think he has a chance.
I twisted my wrist, breaking the lock, and threw a straight punch that moved so fast it caught the air on fire. Not metaphorically—actual flames, brief and blue, from the friction of my knuckles against molecules. Grayven brought his forearm up in a block, the impact sounding like a planet being born. The force still drove him back a dozen feet, his boots carving trenches in the sky itself, reality warping to accommodate his stopping power.
He didn't pause. He couldn't pause—Apokoliptian warriors don't get the luxury of breathers. He shot forward, a blur of gray flesh and spiked armor, and his fist connected with my jaw.
My head snapped to the side. Pain flared, bright and sharp. Not agony, not even real damage, but the sensation of being hit. My skin registered the impact, the micro-fractures that healed before they could even spread. I tasted blood—just a hint, coppery and warm on my tongue. My own blood, for once.
Okay, I thought, shaking my head, feeling the vertebrae in my neck realign with tiny pops. So he can hurt me. A little.
I looked up at him and grinned.
"You've got a decent right hook," I said. "For a guy with daddy issues."
Grayven roared and came at me again. This time, I met him with a flurry of punches that I didn't bother to count. My fists became a blur, each one moving at speeds that turned them into white streaks in the air. Grayven blocked, parried, took some on his armor. The impacts rang out like a thousand bells being rung at once. Boomboomboomboom—a continuous roll of thunder that shattered the windows of his fortress on the far side of the planet.
He was good. Trained by Granny Goodness, probably, or one of the other sadistic tutors of Apokolips. His technique was brutal, efficient, designed to maim and kill with the least amount of effort. Every block was a counter waiting to happen. Every dodge was a setup for a killing blow.
But I wasn't fighting with technique. I was fighting with physics. Every punch I threw had mass and velocity that shouldn't coexist. I hit him from angles that required me to bend space around my elbows. When he tried to grab my wrist, I let him, then pulled him off-balance by accelerating my own arm's rotation until it generated its own micro-gravity well.
He shot his fist toward my face again. This time, I caught it. My hand wrapped around his knuckles, and I squeezed. Just a little. His bones groaned.
Then I spun, using his momentum against him, and threw him into the ground.
The planet had just started to recover from our first meeting. Now it suffered again. Grayven hit the surface like a cannonball dropped from orbit, creating a new crater that overlapped the old one. The shockwave was smaller but more focused, a directed blast that carved a canyon into the planet's crust, revealing layers of ancient sediment and the dull glow of the mantle below.
Dust rose in a curtain. I hovered above it, watching, waiting.
Grayven erupted from the ground like a missile. He was bleeding from a cut above his eye, thick, dark blood that glowed with inner fire. His armor was cracked in three places. His pride was shattered into more pieces.
"Who are you?!" he bellowed, his voice raw.
I didn't answer. I just beckoned with one finger.
He came, and this time he was desperate. His punches were wilder, trading precision for power. I let one hit my chest, absorbing the kinetic energy, feeling it like a deep-tissue massage. Then I returned it, adding my own force to the rebound. The blow caught him under the chin. His head snapped back. I followed with a hook that would have turned a battleship into confetti.
He didn't fall. He flew backward, skidding across the sky, but his hand came up, fingers splayed.
"Enough!" he screamed.
The Father Box flared. I felt the energy building in his eyes, the same crimson fire as his father's but younger, less certain. Still deadly enough to unmake stars.
"Omega Beam!" Grayven roared, and twin lances of red death shot from his pupils.
Time seemed to slow. I watched the beams come, and something inside me—the Void, that dark, hungry part of my power that I'd sealed away after saving Clark—stirred. It didn't recoil. It didn't warn me of danger.
It thrummed with excitement.
The Omega Beams weren't just energy. They were concepts given form. The concept of ending, of finality, of the absolute last word. They could follow a target through time, through dimensions, through the walls between realities. They existed to kill, and they did it perfectly.
I could have dodged. My speed was sufficient to move before the beams could adjust. I could have tanked them, trusting my molecular structure to hold against even this. But the Void's excitement made me curious. What would happen if I caught them?
Better yet—what would happen if I kept them?
Reality warped around my outstretched hand. Not a simple portal—that would just redirect them. No, I needed something more sophisticated. I reached into the fabric of space-time and pulled, creating a dimensional pocket, a fold in reality that existed outside the normal flow of causality. It was a place where time didn't pass, where energy could be stored indefinitely. I'd created something similar for my dimensional storage back on the farm, but this was smaller, mobile, designed for a single purpose.
The Omega Beams hit the portal and... kept going. They shot into that pocket dimension, their tracking algorithms confused, their energy contained. I felt the Void part of me reach out, tasting the power, analyzing its structure. It was Apokoliptian science mixed with divine will, a cocktail of destruction that made my Void-self almost purr with anticipation.
Later, I promised that part of me. We'll experiment with this later. See what makes it tick. Maybe even reverse-engineer it.
The portal snapped shut, and the beams were gone. Stored. Saved for a rainy day.
Grayven stared, his mouth actually hanging open. "That's... that's impossible. The Omega Beams cannot be—"
"Stopped?" I interrupted. "Redirected? Ignored? Trust me, pal, I'm just getting started."
I moved. Not at light speed—that would have been overkill. Just... fast. Fast enough that I was in front of him before his brain registered I'd left my previous position. My fist was already drawn back, and this time I didn't hold back. I poured solar energy into it, coating my knuckles in white plasma that burned with the fury of a star.
"Let's see how you like being on the receiving end."
Our fists met again, but this time I wasn't playing. The impact was a detonation that carved a trench across the planet's surface, a hundred miles long and ten miles deep. The atmosphere caught fire, a brief aurora of superheated gas that painted the sky in colors no living eye had ever seen.
I felt Grayven's bones break. Felt them shatter like glass under a hammer. His forearm, the one he'd used to block, simply... gave. The armor plating exploded into shrapnel. The flesh beneath ruptured. Bone, white and ghastly, erupted through the skin, blood spraying in a fountain that froze in the thinning atmosphere.
He screamed. It was a sound of pure agony, but also pure wrongness. Gods weren't supposed to feel pain like this. They weren't supposed to be broken.
I landed lightly on a piece of floating debris, watching him clutch his ruined arm. The Father Box was already working, sending healing energies, knitting bone, sealing flesh. Apokoliptian technology was miraculous, but even it couldn't erase the memory of that pain.
"Grayven," I said, my voice soft. Conversational. "You have so much potential."
He looked up at me, and I saw it in his eyes. Not just fear. Not just pain. I saw recognition. He saw me, truly saw me, and he understood that I wasn't just stronger. I was better. And I was toying with him.
The smile that spread across my face was the one Lana had once told me made her nervous. "Tell me," I said, stepping closer, my boots touching down on the broken planet. "How long have you wanted to shove that Father Box down your old man's throat?" (those who have thinking when mc give this smile like to lana this when they are in date because of u reader request l cut many scene)
Grayven's eyes widened. "You... you know nothing of my father."
"I know he doesn't acknowledge you. I know you're out here conquering a backwater galaxy hoping he'll finally look your way." I gestured at the devastation around us. "I know this is all just a tantrum writ large."
The Father Box pulsed warningly in his hand. I could feel its sensors on me, its desperate attempt to analyze what I was. It was smart enough to be terrified. Smart enough to know that if it called out to Darkseid, it would be exposing its master to something that might actually threaten him.
So I didn't destroy it. That would be crude. That would be noticed.
Instead, I let it watch.
"Grayven," I said, my voice dropping to something almost gentle. Almost sympathetic. "You're fighting for the wrong team."
He tried to stand, his healing arm still trembling. "I am a New God. I am the blood of Darkseid. I do not have 'teams.' I am the team."
"Right. And how's that working out for you? Your father lets you run around in the minor leagues, conquering galaxies he doesn't want, while he's off trying to find the Anti-Life Equation." I took another step closer. "You're not his heir. You're his errand boy."
The words hit harder than my punch. I saw them land, saw the way his jaw tightened, the way his eyes burned hotter. Pain and rage and something else. Something that looked a lot like hope.
"Who are you?" he asked again, but this time it wasn't a demand. It was a plea.
I could have told him. Could have said I was Robert Kent, adopted son of Jonathan and Martha, brother of Clark, child of Death. Could have said I was the thing that cosmic beings feared when they turned off the lights.
Instead, I gave him the truth that would hurt the most.
"I'm someone who sees you," I said. "And sees what you could be... if you stopped trying to impress a father who will never love you."
The Father Box pulsed again, and I felt its communication spell activating. It was trying to send a distress call. To Apokolips. To Darkseid himself.
I let it.
Let the old tyrant wonder. Let him send his probes, his parademons, his own Omega Beams. Let him come looking for the thing that could make his son question his loyalty.
Grayven stood there, broken and bleeding and listening. The air between us was thick with potential. I could see the calculations in his eyes, the desperate weighing of loyalty against pride, of fear against ambition.
"Think about it," I said, stepping back. "You've got my attention now. That's worth more than any conquest."
I turned away, giving him my back. It was a calculated insult, a show of contempt that would either break him completely or spark something dangerous in his soul.
As I began to rise, lifting off the ruined surface of his planet, I heard him speak one last word. Not a curse. Not a threat.
Just: "Wait."
I paused, hovering, not looking back.
"What do you want?" Grayven's voice was ragged, torn between rage and something that might have been hope. "If you're not here to kill me, if you're not here to take this galaxy for yourself... what do you want?"
I smiled, and let the white fire in my eyes speak for me.
"I want to see what happens," I said, "when a son stops asking for his father's permission."
Then I shot upward, breaking atmosphere in a heartbeat, leaving Grayven standing in the ruins of his conquest with a Father Box that was screaming warnings he no longer wanted to hear.
The cosmos stretched out before me, infinite and waiting. Behind me, a godling questioned his purpose. Ahead of me, the universe trembled.
Things were about to get very, very interesting But i suddenly stop into space.
[give me stone so that i can take his ranking 😭]