Kansas — where everything began.
The sonic boom of breaking the sound barrier drew closer and closer. Ever since that night, this was the first time Joey had returned to this place.
The land was still scorched and parched, unchanged in the slightest. Soil burned by hellfire would likely remain barren for many years to come.
Joey didn't even know why he had come back. Was it the psychological pressure of killing someone for the first time?
He rejected that thought almost instantly. When he looked at Stormfront, what he felt was only relief. Someone like her should never have existed in this world to begin with.
So what, exactly, was he struggling over?
At this moment, Joey didn't want to think about it anymore. Maybe he really should listen to some of Raven's advice—like putting up a gravestone for his adoptive parents.
Under Joey's heat vision and hands, the soil skipped through geological changes that would normally take tens of thousands of years, reshaping itself into stone. He sliced the rock with heat vision, carving out a gravestone of modest size.
Here lie Jonathan Kent and Martha Kent.
At first, Joey intended to erect it on the ground, but after some thought, he rose into the air instead. Wrapping the gravestone in a bio-field, he broke free of the atmosphere and the planet's gravity, avoided relay satellite surveillance, and placed it beneath the slope of a crater on the dark side of the Moon.
After finishing all this, Joey returned home, hovering in midair and looking down at the scorched earth below. A trace of fear, inexplicable, rose in his heart.
Could he really stand against Trigon?
His brain almost immediately gave him a negative answer. This was a being that transcended dimensions. To defeat Him, Joey would need to be as strong as that "Clark Kent."
Clark Kent's power didn't come solely from being Kryptonian, but from the saintlike love and justice in his heart—qualities Joey didn't believe he could ever live up to.
Raven's failed escape not only left him with nothing in an instant, but also rang the doomsday bell for this universe.
The worries Joey had once buried deep down—about Kryptonians visiting Earth—had become completely irrelevant with Trigon. potentially turning his gaze toward this world at any moment.
This world had no Speed Force, no Batman, no Atlantis, no Themyscira, no Martian survivors. There was no Justice League. There were no superheroes.
There was only a group of flashy, hollow superpowered humans, most of whom made their living deceiving the public—and one "Superman" like himself.
Maybe Raven should be added to that list.
If Joey said he felt no resentment towards Raven at all, that would be a lie. But he also knew that pushing her too hard would bring no benefit whatsoever.
In his view, Raven could have simply left—jumped to another universe altogether.
Just like Raven's father, Trigon , had countless universes and planes to conquer, Raven herself had countless parallel universes she could hide in.
Once Trigon reclaimed Wrath, it wouldn't be easy for him to find Raven again. But she didn't flee. Instead, she chose to stay in this universe and face Trigon's arrival together with the people of this planet.
Almost everyone in the world has made mistakes, and when those mistakes hurt others, what they usually receive in the end is not sincere forgiveness.
It's just—
Forget it.
Living a second life, Joey found it hard not to stay rational. He still wanted his life to go on, to seek power for revenge, and to fulfill the wishes he had once abandoned—not to be crushed by Trigon, who could descend at any unknown moment, in a pointless struggle with Raven.
So forget it.
Raven could see into people's hearts. Maybe that was why she recognized this and reached a delicate balance with him on this planet.
"I heard the same sound as that night, so I came to take a look. Didn't expect it to really be you."
The sound of screeching brakes came from the distance. Arthur kicked open the slightly deformed car door and jumped down from his battered Jeep.
"Laurie kept insisting that the one she saw on TV that day was you. I thought you died that night too, but it looks like my daughter was right."
Arthur stopped some distance away, struck a match, and lit a cigarette. Through the swirling smoke, he looked up at the red-and-blue figure floating in the air.
"Where's Laurie?"
Joey slowly descended from the sky and moved closer to his neighbor, but the man instinctively took two steps back. Joey didn't need Raven's talent to feel the fear leaking from him.
Almost everyone assumed that Joey's parents had died because his powers went out of control. No matter how much Joey explained—even if he openly admitted that he was an alien visitor like Homelander—it made no difference.
As if awakening superpowers and killing one's parents were something utterly common place.
"Kid, your parents' deaths weren't entirely your fault. I told you that the night it happened."
Arthur took a deep drag, and the cigarette in his mouth shrank by nearly a third in an instant.
"If I told you that every single superhuman in this world—every child with powers—was born because their profit-hungry parents sold their children's future to the devil called Vought, including you and your parents... would that make you feel any better?"
"If you have something to say, keep it brief. And don't bring my parents into it again. I'm not like those people."
Joey gently blew on the cigarette, turning it into a frozen icicle.
"And one more thing, old man. Smoking is bad for your health."
Arthur sighed, turned around, and patted the car door, signaling for Joey to get in. What he had to say wasn't limited to just this.
Vought Corporation monopolized the entire North American superhero market. Each one of these so-called "superheroes" had been approached by Vought when they were infants—or even embryos.
Using money and promises of the future, Vought persuaded the parents to inject themselves or their children with Compound V.
The Arthurs, living in Iowa, had been among them. Arthur's wife had voluntarily injected the drug into the embryo during pregnancy, but for the first five or six years after Laurie was born, she showed no sign of developing any powers.
After regaining his clarity of mind, Arthur used his own channels to learn more and realized that the awakening of superpowers was far from a gentle process.
Arthur's wife— Laurie's mother—continued to dream of how glorious life would be with a superpowered daughter. Her attitude towards her powerless child grew increasingly harsh.
Arthur had no choice. To protect his ex-wife—and more importantly, to protect his daughter—he could only take Laurie and leave everything behind, coming to Kansas to live as a farmer.
"Have you told Laurie about this?"
After listening to Arthur's story, Joey immediately connected it with the compound he had previously seen in Vought's internal mail system. No wonder Vought could treat most superheroes with such absolute authority.
These superheroes weren't heroes at all. They could barely even be called human—nothing more than commodities objectified by a capitalist behemoth like Vought.
"Not yet." Arthur stepped on the brakes and, ignoring Joey's disapproving look, struck another match and lit a cigarette.
To avoid secondhand smoke, Joey decisively pushed open the door and got out. He then saw the Catahoula Leopard Dog that had slipped through the fence barking wildly at him.
Joey was used to it. This stupid dog acted like this almost every time. Usually, Laurie would come out and give it a couple of solid slaps, and it would calm down.
But Joey waited for a long time.
Laurie never came out.
Arthur walked over and patted Joey on the shoulder.
"And that's the second thing I wanted to tell you..."
---
Starlight used the strongest willpower she'd ever mustered in her life to finally crawl out of bed.
The investigation over the past few days had left her deeply unsettled. The child disappearance cases were far too clean—no clues at all—and that in itself was a clue.
Overall, it was a case of finding nothing and yet finding something.
After repeatedly hitting dead ends, she had finally begun to wonder why Stan Edgar would hand this case to a complete amateur like her.
But after thinking it through, she realized it wasn't something she could possibly figure out. And for the sake of her place in the Seven, she didn't have any better options anyway.
When she went to sleep the night before, she had planned to get up early and make a map, marking the disappearance sites to see if any patterns emerged.
Starlight staggered into the bathroom, bleary-eyed, groping around the vanity for her toothbrush. She was already planning to buy a map of the New York area and some pushpins once she was fully awake.
In her haze, Starlight noticed that the golden hair she had always taken pride in seemed to have turned white in the mirror. She lowered her head to spit out toothpaste, preparing to rub her eyes.
Even if she'd been overworking herself, she couldn't possibly have gone gray overnight… right?
Before she could act, the white figure in the mirror reached out with both hands and clamped down on Starlight's throat.
This time, Starlight was fully awake.