Clark, You Saved Lex Luthor?

Whoosh!

Time seemed to slow down.

For a moment, the rippling water inside the school bus, the hair of the unsteady girls flying about, the saliva sprayed from the boys' mouths as they screamed in terror, the cups floating and drifting on the water's surface—everything seemed to move a hundred times slower.

David assessed the situation and calmly smashed the window beside him.

With a sweep of his arms, he shot toward the front of the school bus like a torpedo fired from its tube.

The school bus's front end sat high above the water. Inside, everyone was panicking in terror, and no one noticed him.

Underwater, David did not hold his breath. His expression remained relaxed.

"The Thanos Eternal race physique doesn't need food, water, or even air. It can survive in the vacuum of space at over two hundred degrees below zero."

Not to mention a mere riverbed.

David pressed his well-defined palm against the front of the bus and pushed with one hand, as casually as if brushing aside someone standing in his way.

Amid the raging river, the school bus—more than ten tons and comparable to a mid-sized coach—shot backward like a shell launched by explosive force. It burst through the surface and flew toward the shore in a thunderous spray of water.

Bang!

The school bus traced an arc more than ten meters long over the river before crashing heavily onto the grassy bank. Its heavy rubber tires sent mud flying, and the rebound from the impact made the entire bus bounce.

The glass windows shattered from the shock, spraying fragments everywhere.

"Ah!"

Caught off guard, everyone inside the school bus fell forward and backward, fearfully covering their heads.

"What happened?"

After a while, once the glass fragments had finished falling, everyone stood up in a daze and looked outside in disbelief.

A moment ago, they had been at the bottom of a dark, raging river, their lives hanging by a thread. In the blink of an eye, they were on a sunny riverbank, with birds singing in the forest around them. Everything felt so vivid and wonderful.

"Are... are we dreaming?" They stared wide-eyed at one another.

"God!"

The faithful school bus driver snatched off his hat, his face full of shock as he stared into the river, as though trying to find the figures of angels.

"Are you okay, Chloe?"

Hearing a voice beside her, Chloe, who had narrowly escaped death, turned her pale face toward him.

Like her, David was soaked from head to toe, but his expression was calm. Not a trace of fear could be found on his deep-featured face.

Did everyone in the Kent family have such strong hearts?

"I'm... I'm okay."

Having brushed shoulders with death, Chloe still could not recover from what had seemed like a miracle. She answered blankly.

"I thought the next time I saw light or breathed air again would be when grieving people brought in a crane to pull the school bus, full of our corpses, up from the riverbed."

What exactly had happened?

This was the shared question in the minds of everyone on the school bus except David. Who had saved them? Had God heard their prayers?

"Let's quickly get off the bus and move away from here!" The school bus driver, having regained a little of his senses, shouted loudly.

The riverbank was slippery. If the school bus slid back into the river, that would be a deadly joke.

Splash, splash.

His wet clothes clung to his body as David wrung them out, calmly leaving the school bus that had nearly become their coffin together with the others, who were still shaken.

"It seemed like something rammed us out of the river?!"

Staring in shock at the dented front end, which looked as if an Asian elephant had headbutted it, the burly school bus driver opened his mouth and could not close it for a long time.

"Is there some kind of water monster in the river?"

Still terrified, the students began chattering in amazement.

"Our school bus landed on its head, and it flung us out?"

Looking again at the rushing river, they felt as though a huge beast lurked beneath its surface.

David glanced at the mark he had left, then casually looked away.

Thanos, a mutant of the Eternals, possessed unimaginable strength and endurance, along with recovery abilities and agility far beyond those of ordinary people. His skin was nearly indestructible, especially against cold, heat, electricity, radiation, poison, aging, and disease.

His body was even tougher than Vibranium, and his terrifying power was enough to slay gods.

"Though I've only fused with a little over eighty percent of the template so far."

Even he did not know where his upper limit of strength lay.

Pickup trucks, boulders... everything felt weightless when he lifted it.

By David's estimate, catching an airplane falling from the sky like an adult Superman, pulling a steel warship weighing thousands of tons, or lifting a residential building over ten stories high would all be effortless.

"It's just that without an all-purpose bioelectric aura, those things would probably shatter and fall apart."

The school bus driver's claim that something had rammed the school bus out of the river was simply ridiculous.

At the bottom of the river, David had not even dared to push too hard, afraid that he would spare these people the pain of drowning only to send them to meet God early.

Everyone moved away from the riverbank and sat nearby, waiting for rescuers and their parents to arrive.

The school bus had plunged into the river once and then been thrown onto the shore. The violent impact had injured quite a few people, leaving them with broken bones and bleeding heads...

A school bus falling into a river and then somehow being rammed ashore by an unknown creature was undoubtedly an absurdly bizarre incident, enough to make some biologists and scientists scratch their heads bloody without figuring it out.

"But in this town, it couldn't exactly be called unusual, nor was it enough to shatter anyone's worldview."

Ever since the meteor shower more than a decade ago, strange things had happened constantly in this town.

People in a vegetative state for years suddenly waking up and disappearing, enormous wolves bigger than tigers appearing in the dark woods at night, little girls carrying teddy bears in deserted cemeteries at midnight and vanishing the moment you looked away...

Monsters with strange speed and immense strength roaring as they carved through mountains in the middle of the night...

There were too many to count.

Hearing that their children had been in trouble and nearly buried at the bottom of the river, their worried parents soon hurried over one after another.

Seeing her mother Martha drive up and stop by the roadside, David walked over with some confusion.

"David, are you all right?" Martha rushed over anxiously, worry written all over her face as she repeatedly checked him over, trying to see whether he was hurt anywhere.

"Do your legs hurt? What about your chest? Did you choke on any water?"

"I'm fine, Mom."

Only after patiently showing her several times that he was unharmed did David barely calm his mother down. Taking her hand, which was colder than his own, he smiled. "Why did you come? Where's Dad?"

He had actually thought about showing his abilities to his parents long ago.

But unlike Clark, whenever he used his strength, his skin turned purple and stripes grew along his jaw. He looked like a genetic mutation, even more alien than a Kryptonian. He was afraid Jonathan and Martha would worry.

"The police just called. Your brother was in a car accident on another bridge and fell into the river. Your father went to check on him."

Martha's expression was both worried and strange.

It was odd. Both her sons had gotten into trouble at noon on the same day. One's school bus had skidded into the river, while the other had been knocked into the river by a car.

"A car accident? Did he wreck someone else's car?"

David was puzzled.

"Was the driver okay? We won't have to pay compensation, will we?"

The school bus falling into the river felt strangely familiar. How had Clark still ended up in the river after avoiding it? Was this the power of fate?

"David, Clark is your brother."

Hearing her younger son speak this way, Martha's worried expression turned somewhat helpless.

"I know.

But his body can't be damaged even by a truck, right?"

David spread his hands.

Even if he did get hurt, as long as he was not dead, all he needed was to lie under the sun for a while.

"See you this afternoon, Chloe."

After chatting with his mother for a moment, David said goodbye to Chloe. Mother and son turned toward the vehicle, climbed into the old pickup truck that had served the Kent family for more than a decade, and drove away.

After David left, Chloe, wrapped in a blanket by the rescue workers, was shivering from the cold.

Then she suddenly spotted a footprint not far away, with a patch of bright green water grass crushed beneath it.

"Hm?"

Confusion appeared in Chloe's eyes as she looked around.

Whose footprint was that? Nobody had gotten out by breaking the windows before the school bus reached the shore, so why was there water grass?

Aside from a few injured students and a handful who thought this was a perfect opportunity to pretend they had been hurt and take time off to play at home...

Classes continued as usual that afternoon and the next day. Nothing was delayed.

David could not help marveling at the town residents' thick nerves and adaptability.

"Being baptized by a meteor shower really is different."

The next day, at dusk.

David and Clark returned home from school.

At the entrance to the yard on the Farms, a brand-new red pickup truck stood quietly. Its gleaming paint reflected the fading sunlight, and a gift bow was wrapped around it as though it were a present.

"Whose car is that?"

Seeing their mother emerge after finishing work in the barn, Clark stepped forward and asked with a smile.

"Mom, are we finally replacing our car?"

"It's yours, Clark."

"Mine?"

"You saved Lex. He gave you the car."

Martha frowned as she took out a letter of thanks and handed it to Clark.

David had heard about it yesterday. Clark had been knocked off the bridge by an out-of-control silver sports car. Clark had been fine, but the car's owner had nearly died in the river.

Clark had pulled him from the river and saved his life. The man had been deeply astonished by his body.

"Dear Clark: Drive carefully, and don't be like me..."

Hearing that, Clark eagerly tore open the letter and read aloud with excitement. "I can't thank you enough for yesterday—Lex Luthor."

He had already imagined driving this beautiful pickup truck to school. It would definitely make Lana notice him more.

David, who had not cared much about this matter before, raised an eyebrow and looked strangely at the thank-you letter when he heard that name.

"Wait, Clark, you saved Lex Luthor?"

"Yeah, what's wrong?" The young Superman looked up, puzzled by the expression on his brother's face.