Lois's expression froze for a moment.
Her fingers hovered over her voice recorder, uncontrollable shock roiling in her light brown eyes. For the first time, the ace reporter who had faced countless explosive stories without batting an eye looked visibly blank.
"What? You actually killed a god?"
Her voice rose a pitch, its final note ringing with naked disbelief.
Yongye casually tossed the orange peel toward the trash can, landing it squarely inside. Then he laced his hands behind his head and leaned back in his swivel chair, his smile as brilliant as the afternoon sunshine over Manhattan outside.
"Killing a mere chief god? No big deal."
"Doctor of the Unified System eats gods on a daily basis. Now that's badass!"
Lois's lips opened and closed, then closed and opened, until she finally squeezed a muffled gasp from her throat.
Behind the camera broadcasting live, the young male reporter carrying it was so horrified that he nearly dropped the equipment.
The Daily Planet's live feed lit up simultaneously on hundreds of millions of screens around the world.
The instant Yongye's words, "I took out Susanoo-no-Mikoto," landed, Twitter's servers entered their seventh countdown to a crash within ten seconds.
Lois asked a few more questions, covering everything from Susanoo-no-Mikoto's appearance to the course of the battle, from the Takamagahara Divine Kingdom's reaction to Doomsday's next move. Yongye answered them all, his wording casual and his tone languid, as though the god-slaying battle had been nothing more than an ordinary street brawl.
The interview ended forty minutes later. Lois put away her voice recorder and notebook, gave Yongye a slight nod, then headed for the door with the camera crew.
At the doorway, she paused and turned her head. The sunlight streaming through the windows outlined her profile in alternating light