The Scapegoat's Troubles

Metropolis, the Daily Planet newsroom.

Morning sunlight streamed through the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows and spilled across the cream-colored carpet.

The scent of coffee beans mingled with the smell of ink in the air.

Keyboards clattered across dozens of workstations.

Clark Kent sat at his desk and pushed the black-framed glasses slipping down his nose back into place.

On his screen was a dry article about an agricultural fair in Kansas.

Editor-in-chief Perry White pushed open the glass door, waving a stack of papers, his voice booming.

"Front page! I want a front page worth reading! Metropolis didn't even have a robbery last night. Do you expect me to print blank sheets and sell those?"

Lois Lane walked past with a mug, her heels clicking against the floor.

She went straight up to Perry.

"Boss, you need to see what's happening in Gotham."

Lois slapped her tablet onto an empty desk nearby and tapped open an encrypted tip.

Clark looked over the partition, his gaze landing squarely on the screen.

A bold red headline filled the black screen: "Arkham Slaughterhouse: Red-Eyed Demon Descends."

Two photos from the scene appeared below it.

The first showed Arkham's second basement level. Molten iron and charred remains covered the floor, while severed limbs and mangled bodies lay piled in a corner of the corridor.

The second was blurrier. Outside the Iceberg Lounge at night, hundreds of riot police aimed their guns into the air.

A bare-chested man hovered above them, blinding red light pouring from his eyes. Below him, the roof of a police car had been crushed flat by immense pressure.

Clark's fingers stopped typing. For two seconds, he forgot to breathe.

"The video leaked from the Gotham Police Department's internal network. It's already going for a fortune on the black market." Lois took a sip of coffee. "No one survived Arkham. Joker's head was crushed outright, and Penguin surrendered control of the entire East End."

Several reporters who covered breaking news immediately crowded around.

"He can fly? Shoot high-heat beams from his eyes? Bullets can't hurt him?" Jimmy, the sports columnist, swallowed and glanced toward the Metropolis sky beyond the window. "Sounds like an old acquaintance of ours."

"Superman doesn't kill." Lois rapped her knuckles on the desk, cutting off Jimmy's speculation.

"He'd rescue a stray dog stuck in the mud. This kind of brutal killing is either a deliberate imitation or a particularly vicious frame-up."

Clark said nothing.

He rose, walked over to the desk, and picked up the tablet.

He focused, his X-ray vision piercing the blur of pixels to reconstruct the energy pattern behind the red light.

The way the air warped, the residual heat radiating from the beam's edges—this was no laser weapon made by human technology.

It was pure biological energy spilling out under overload.

He knew that kind of destructive power, those violent ripples in the force field, all too well.

There had been no restraint. Whoever it was had let loose without holding anything back.

Someone was using power from the same source as his to do the exact opposite of what he did.

Clark clenched his jaw. His fingers tightened around the tablet's edge without his noticing.

Crack.

The protective case split with a sharp snap.

"Clark, my equipment isn't cheap." Lois pulled the tablet away and gave him a suspicious look. "You look awful. Eat something bad?"

"Stomach bug." Clark let go and tugged at his loose suit jacket. "I'm going to the restroom."

He turned toward the end of the hallway, quickening his pace.

As he put distance between himself and the newsroom, he shut out the noise of the Metropolis office building.

His hearing stretched outward across more than two hundred kilometers, locking onto Gotham.

The sound of its endless rain flooded his ears.

Through the wind and rain came the stifled, desperate breathing of gang members in Gotham's East End, the chattering teeth of guards still trembling outside Arkham, and the dull thuds of Penguin frantically knocking his head against the floor inside the Iceberg Lounge.

"Heat Vision... He tore the blast doors into strips of metal..."

One man had slaughtered his way through Gotham's underworld until everyone in it was terrified.

Clark pushed open the rooftop's metal door.

A cold wind struck him head-on, tousling his gelled curls.

He took off the black-framed glasses he wore as a disguise and slipped them into his breast pocket.

His slightly hunched back straightened. The meek, timid facade vanished.

Gotham was Bruce Wayne's territory.

Clark thought of his old acquaintance, who always wore a black bat suit and liked to judge everything from the shadows.

They had once had a deeply unpleasant encounter. In the end, they had agreed on one rule: neither would set foot in the other's territory.

Bruce's hoarse, cold warning still rang in his ears: "Look after your sunny city. Don't bring your alien disasters into my swamp."

Clark lowered his eyes.

He had always kept his word.

Even when he heard robberies and murders in Gotham every day, he had forced himself not to cross the line.

Human society needed humans to establish its order, and he respected Bruce's way of protecting his city.

But now an outside force had brutally crushed that order.

A butcher with power far beyond ordinary humans and no limits was running rampant through the city.

He had slaughtered patients at Arkham, subjugated crime bosses, and even openly challenged the police.

Those two glaring red beams were dragging the symbol on Clark's chest through the mud.

He would not take the blame for this.