"Ring-ring, ring-ring."
The alarm clock by the bed began to ring. Clark sat up, yawned, tossed the blanket aside, and reached over to turn it off.
He instinctively reached for his phone, but the moment he lit up the screen, it was filled with email and message notifications. Clark slapped his forehead. "I'm screwed!"
He unlocked his phone and opened the news app first. Sure enough, the top headline read: "Earth's Hero Superman Is Actually Not From Earth?!"
Clark's breath caught sharply, and his chest began to ache. He had expected this, but when it was truly made public, he still could not help feeling disheartened and dejected.
Why? Why had he grown up on Earth, received an Earth education, and never even been to another planet, yet still could not be considered an Earthling?
Why was it that, despite fighting bravely and saving so many people, all anyone cared about was which planet he had been born on?
Clark scrolled down the article. He did not even dare read the contents and went straight to the comments section. There were probably more than seven hundred comments. He only glanced through them briefly before seeing plenty of hostile words.
And, entirely unsurprisingly, many people attributed the battle between the monster and Superman to an alien civil war. They believed humanity and the military had been nothing but victims, cursing and complaining endlessly in the comments.
Some even hated Superman more than the monster, because they felt Superman had deceived them. He was obviously an alien monster, yet he had packaged himself as a hero—a Joker desperate for attention.
Many people might find such remarks unbelievable. After all, Superman had saved so many lives. But in the United States' particular climate of public opinion, the barriers between people were thick. Amid