"Holy FUCK! Are you all this good at calling in the middle of the night?"
Li Jie was jolted awake by an insistent ringtone. He grabbed his phone and checked it. It was 3:17 a.m., but the caller was Nygma.
Fine.
He sighed and answered.
"Hello?"
"Jay, turn on the TV." Nygma sounded only slightly excited, but in all the time Li Jie had known him, even that much excitement was highly unusual.
"Now?"
"Now."
"All right, all right..." Li Jie muttered as he sat up in bed and felt around for the remote. "What happened? Did John Elway suddenly retire... HOLY SHIT!"
The moment the screen lit up, every trace of sleepiness vanished.
On-screen, a huge chunk of Metropolis's skyline was missing. The entire upper half of one skyscraper had disappeared, like a cookie with a bite taken out of it by a giant. A massive hole had been punched into the side of another building nearby, its edges still smoking. A third had simply collapsed halfway, its rubble piled in the street. The lights of fire engines and ambulances painted the whole street into a red-and-blue nightmare.
A ticker scrolled across the bottom: "Supergirl and Lex Luthor clash in fierce battle. Downtown Metropolis sustains severe damage. Casualty figures still being compiled."
"FUCK..."
The footage changed. Lex Luthor stood before a field of rubble, his bald head flashing under the cameras like some asshole's high beams. A giant robot stood beside him, and a crowd of reporters faced him, their microphones reaching toward him like a forest.
"...I must admit that my laboratory does bear some responsibility for tonight's events."
Lex Luthor's tone was sincere and steady. "We were conducting cutting-edge energy research in an effort to solve the energy crisis facing all humanity. Unfortunately, that research attracted some