"You could have done it easily. Capturing him alive and locking him up would have been better than killing him outright. We can't keep solving problems this way."
Yongye turned to look at Superman. The easy smile on his lips slowly faded, replaced by a colder, sharper expression.
"Open your damn eyes and look!"
As Yongye snapped at him, he raised a hand and slowly swept it around them.
A collapsed storefront jutted into the middle of the road, twisted rebar reaching toward the sky like struggling arms. A bus lay on its side, its middle section severed in two. Half its body rested on a row of dead electric scooters, their bells still jingling in the wind.
Farther away, a ruptured fire hydrant sent water shooting skyward before it crashed back down. Muddy water streamed into a roadside drain, carrying half a child's shoe and a broken plastic whistle.
And nearest to them, a boy of five or six sat on the ground beside a woman's corpse.
The woman's back was bent at a grotesque angle. Her head hung limply against the shattered asphalt, most of her loose black hair stained red with blood and soaked in a slowly spreading dark-red pool.
The boy's mouth gaped wide. A raw, piercing wail tore from his throat, snot and tears smeared across his face. His little hands tugged uselessly at his mother's stiff clothes. The fabric did not move.
Superman's gaze followed Yongye's gesture all the way around, then settled on the overturned school bus and the little boy. His Adam's apple bobbed involuntarily.
His clenched jaw loosened slightly. A complicated anguish surfaced in his blue eyes, then swiftly gave way to something else: silence and restraint, like a door slowly closing.
"We could have done better."
His voice was lower