"Life's A Struggle"
"Ugh-"
Jonathan's pupils abruptly contracted, and his mouth flew open.
He seemed about to say something, but before his vocal cords could vibrate, his chest began convulsing violently.
Then his back arched sharply as though he had been electrocuted, and the back of his head struck the concrete with a dull thud.
Then came a second blow, a third, a fourth...
Continuous, violent, full-body convulsions.
His limbs hammered uncontrollably against the concrete, his fingers curling into claws and digging straight into his palms.
"Joe!"
Martha lunged forward, trying to pin Jonathan's shoulders down, but his involuntarily flailing arm nearly caught her in the face.
In the end, only John pressing Jonathan down hard with his arms managed to barely still his body.
Those brown, gentle eyes of Jonathan's.
Those eyes that always held a trace of a smile in the dim light had now rolled back to their whites.
His pupils disappeared beneath his upper lids, leaving only two slits of bloodshot white.
"John, hurry, see what's wrong with Joe..."
John pulled the sobbing Martha behind him, placing his body between her and Jonathan, and then his pupils rapidly contracted...
Fuck... what the fuck was going on?
He had X-ray vision and could assess someone's physical condition by observing their organs in motion.
He had examined A-Train's swollen heart, which was on the verge of buckling under its burden, and knew that son of a bitch Butcher had a brain tumor.
But now, he had to diagnose Jonathan as quickly as possible.
Damn it... there couldn't be any mistakes!
Soon, he shrank his pupils from their normal diameter to pinpoints, then split, reassembled, and refocused them.
His X-ray vision forcefully pierced skin, fat, intercostal muscles, and ribs, penetrating all the way through.
From the texture of the trabecular bone to the translucent film of the pericardium, it finally stopped on the heart that was still beating faintly.
Then John saw an extraordinarily bizarre sight-
It was clearly a mass of black mist composed of some unknown substance, coiling around Jonathan's heart and gnawing at it like a viper.
...What the fuck was this thing?
When had it appeared?
Over the past dozen-plus years, John had used his X-ray vision to check Jonathan's and Martha's physical condition more than once.
After all these years, he could even draw the angles of Jonathan's coronary artery branches with his eyes closed.
He knew the location of the myocardial bridge better than the fucking latch on his own barn door.
Of course, his routine examinations weren't for peace of mind.
They were about binding them to him, about making sure these two hadn't developed any physical problems while he was away.
To John, that was absolutely unacceptable.
He wanted absolute possession of this "love," to hold it clenched tightly in his palm and let nothing threaten it.
But that mass of black mist didn't resemble a clot or calcification. It looked nothing like any pathological image he had ever seen in Vought's medical database.
It was writhing, in a purely physical sense.
It was even moving in some slower fashion, like a mass of old grime peeling off the inside of a chimney.
What?
This damn thing was actually alive!
Just as John reached that conclusion in shock, the black mist consciously began gathering together.
First it gathered above the heart, twisting tight, squeezing two arcs out of the chaos, stretching and bending them.
Finally, it settled into the shape of human eyes.
As though sensing John's gaze, those eyes bizarrely condensed into a single eye that slowly opened.
Its pupil was a vertical slit, black as an abyss, staring straight at John.
"Ah..."
With a sigh that seemed to come from ancient times, everything around John suddenly froze within the limits of his perception.
Yes, froze.
The raindrops outside the window simply hung in the air. The wheat along the field ridges remained bent over, no longer swaying.
A corn leaf torn loose by the wind froze in midair.
The droplets on its tip stopped at the very instant they fell, reflecting light like beads of liquid amber.
The entire world seemed to have been paused. Only John could move.
Who was it!
John's first reaction was anger.
Not fear.
Fucking hell, this shitty world-
This shitty world where he'd convinced himself to accept that "there wasn't a single goddamn superhuman" actually harbored a superhuman who could stop time?
Then what exactly had he been guarding against all these years, keeping his promise to Jonathan, pretending to be ordinary, putting up with it for eighteen years?
The air? The corn?
The little town of Smallville, whose sheriff was so fat he could barely hold a pistol steady?
What fucking bullshit...
His anger suddenly cooled.
He had lived two lives. In his previous life, he had been Homelander, the strongest being in the world.
He had fought Queen Maeve above New York Harbor and matched strength with his biological father, Soldier Boy, the strongest of the first generation.
But there had never been an outlier this far beyond the limits.
Not even in the files Vought had amassed over all those years.
This was fucking far beyond anything a superhuman could do.
Even at top speed, A-Train, who had betrayed him, could only enter a near-motionless "pseudo-state."
When A-Train rescued The Boys from the concentration camp, John had actually been able to sense it.
"Well, well... quite the remarkable counterpart~"
The voice came from behind him without warning, and John spun around.
At some point, a man in a white suit had taken a seat beside the kitchen table.
John was certain he hadn't walked in.
It was more as though he had been there ever since time stopped, only he hadn't let anyone see him before.
His skin was paler than a corpse's, his features seeming to have been carved with a knife by some excessively demanding creator.
A little more handsome than John.
He wore a deep-red velvet jacket with black trousers.
The top three buttons were undone, revealing an inverted pentagram tattoo over his collarbone.
A stemmed glass rested between his slender fingers as he leaned back in the battered wooden chair in John's home.
His posture was languid, one leg crossed over the other, his shoes polished to a brilliant shine.
His entire aesthetic was utterly out of place in this kitchen filled with the smells of animal feed and motor oil.
"Who the fuck are you... a local superhuman?"
"Why are you hurting Jonathan?"
John narrowed his eyes and gritted his teeth, every muscle tensing as a chill climbed his spine.
He instinctively recognized this feeling: just before his death in his previous life, the chest blast had stripped away his powers, leaving him like a mortal too weak to truss a chicken.
An intricate combination of intimidation, irresistible force, despair, and unwillingness...
But this was by no means a question of irresistible force.
Since the other man had appeared here.
And had even dragged Jonathan into danger, he had already touched John's reverse scale.
A dragon had a reverse scale; whoever touched it had to die.
He didn't move, but heat was already building deep in his eye sockets.
An extremely faint dark-red halo appeared around the edges of his irises, his Heat Vision on the verge of partial activation.
He stared at the man's temple, calculating rapidly in his head.
Heat Vision needed only three-tenths of a second to go from charging to full power.
The man was sitting in a chair, his posture loose, his weight leaning back, with no defensive stance.
If John struck now, the first blast of Heat Vision would target the space between his brows, the second would cut off his escape to the left, and the third-
"Hahaha, I know you're plotting how to kill me, but don't rush.
In fact... I mean no harm."
"Allow me to introduce myself. Lucifer Morningstar."
The man sensed John's overwhelmingly intense killing intent, but paid it no mind. Instead, he casually swirled the glass in his hand.
"Former proprietor of Hell, currently retired, with a part-time job handling a few... interdimensional problems."
He set his glass on the table and stood.
The moment he rose, John noticed that Lucifer's feet weren't quite touching the floor.
An extremely thin, dark-gray halo lay between his soles and the floorboards.
He was hovering, as though something were holding him up, on a principle entirely different from John's flight.
Lucifer...
Could this fucker be that Satan from some damned ancient Roman mythology?
"I can sense you're thinking some impolite things...
Where you came from... I know. What you are, I can more or less guess, too.
The will of this universe told me that a thief who shouldn't exist had fallen into its territory.
A cuckoo occupying a magpie's nest, taking a place that should have belonged to someone else.
But when you arrived, you actually tore up his script and took his seat yourself... you've got some guts."
As Lucifer spoke, the corners of his mouth lifted slightly.
"But before I finish, there's something more pressing you've overlooked...
Your adoptive father, Jonathan Kent, correct?"
John stiffened, then asked through gritted teeth:
"So what does this have to do with him! He's just a mortal. According to you, I'm the one who's supposed to be called to account, right?"
"Hold on, hold on..."
"Do you know about the Jonathan Kent of this timeline?"
Lucifer slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and walked to the window, his back to John, looking at the corn leaf frozen outside.
"He was supposed to die at five thirty this afternoon.
A tornado broke out, and while trying to save a sheepdog trapped in a car, he was swept away. A very respectable death.
The newspaper in the Kansas town even wrote him an obituary, headlined 'Local farmer sacrifices himself to save dog.' Martha Kent moved to Metropolis three years later."
With that, Lucifer turned and looked John in the eyes.
"So you changed his death."
"Yes, you did what any son would do, but the timeline is an exceedingly rigid judge. It doesn't like being altered.
It pushes back.
No matter what, Jonathan Kent will die in an accident-
Perhaps a car crash, or perhaps, as now, a sudden heart attack.
You can't stop it, because it isn't an accident. It's a corrective force, the rules of this universe wrenching a deviating track back into place."
Lucifer took a step forward, and the temperature in John's eye sockets spiked again.
But he chose to suppress it, narrowing his eyes at Lucifer.
Because he was utterly lost now. He wanted to understand what the fuck was going on.
"You didn't do it... what the fuck are you trying to say?"
"Remember how I just said you took a place that should have belonged to someone else?"
Lucifer said.
"That was a fellow named Clark."
John's brows knitted into a classic expression of bewilderment.
"What Clark? What idiot came up with a name that lame?"
"To be precise, Clark Kent."
"Who?"
The corner of Lucifer's mouth lifted.
But it wasn't a smile. It was a mocking expression, like a shark catching the scent of blood.
"Oh, interesting... you actually don't know him?"
"Why the fuck should I?"
John's voice was full of impatience.
"Who's Clark? What backwater did that idiot crawl out of... all I want to know right now is how to save my Jonathan."
"Oh, he's anything but irrelevant."
Lucifer set his wineglass on the table, interlaced his fingers, and leaned forward slightly.
"His is the name this universe wrote on the first page of its script.
"A baby from Krypton fell into a cornfield, was picked up by the Kents, and basked in the sun for over twenty years.
In the end, all that sunshine turned him into the most fucking perfect hero on this planet.
Blue suit, red cape, faster than you in flight, able to punch through a mountain range.
Later, humanity gave him a name... Superman."
He paused, watched John's expression, then nodded in satisfaction.
"And you, my dear counterpart, fell into the same cornfield, were picked up by the same couple, and grew up under the same sun.
But you aren't him. You squeezed him out of existence.
The screenwriter called the timeline had Clark Kent's script all written. The leading man never showed up, and you came instead.
A variant who slipped in through a rift from some unknown dimension.
The world consciousness sneezed, lost its protagonist, and stuffed in a stand-in without even noticing.
Until today... until you saved that old man who was supposed to breathe his last today."
At that, John fell silent for a few seconds.
"So what does that make this... the world writing his script with its own hands?
Is he its goddamn bastard son?"
"I came here, and the eighteen years I've lived through were real. Jonathan, Martha, they're real. It's all fucking real!"
"If you want to represent this goddamn will of your world, then let me tell you... fucking bring it on. I'll see this through to the end."
He looked back on the meticulous care the Kents had given him over those eighteen years, even shaping his outlook on life, values, and the world.
Even though he wasn't their biological son, John regarded them as his sole forbidden preserve.
He didn't even realize that those words were the most defiant he had ever spoken across his two lives.
"No, I have nothing to talk about with that old thing."
Lucifer leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and tapped his knee lightly twice.
"Want to hear something even more disgusting?"
He said.
"Clark Kent, Superman. I've seen his script. Do you know what he is? He's this universe's definition of 'good.'
On the scale of the entire universe.
He'll do the right thing at the right time, sacrifice himself for the right people, and shed the right tears before the right gravestone.
As perfect as a saint.
His very existence is a straight line from point A to point B, without a single deviation along the way. Boring beyond belief.
I've spent countless hundreds of millions of years in Hell and seen every form of torment and depravity... but none of them makes me sleepier than a perfect hero."
He stood and walked toward John, his feet landing on the floor, with no halo supporting his soles this time.
He had deliberately lowered himself.
He stopped before John, half a head taller, and looked down at him.
Those nebula eyes turned slowly, the scattered light in their depths no longer dark red, but some colder color.
"So you ask me who Clark Kent is?
He's a man already written. What are you? You're a fucking bug, an error... an accident on a cosmic scale.
But do you know what the funniest fucking part of all this is?"
He bent down, his lips almost touching John's ear, his voice lowered until only the two of them could hear.
"Errors can be corrected. Accidents can grow. The fake-
Can keep the real thing locked out of the script forever.
You aren't Clark Kent?
You should get on your knees and thank whichever god you believe in.
Because Clark Kent is a fucking slave. His goodness is a chain, and his justice is a cage.
Once absolute order collapses, it turns into an even more extreme annihilation."
At that thought, a glimpse suddenly flashed through Lucifer's mind: a figure hovering in midair, eyes glowing red, holding a bat's severed head in his left hand.
"But you-
You're nothing, nothing at all, and you can be anything."
He straightened, patted John's shoulder with his left hand, and reached straight into the void with his right. A parchment scroll appeared in his hand.
"Then~ let's make a deal."