It didn't particularly matter if the Justice Lords had their powers or not, because they didn't need them to maintain their stranglehold over Earth. Armies of Superman Robots and a loyal police system kept them in charge of the world's population and, if push came to shove, they always had the Watchtower.
The Lords' space station was essentially a giant gun, outfitted with a wide array of weaponry designed to fire through the atmosphere onto the planet below. There wasn't a single villain, riot or uprising on Earth they couldn't defeat through a simple application of point and shoot.
But they didn't have anything to protect them from the inside out.
The air on the station was was filled with sulfurous fumes as consoles burned and shards of metal flew through the air. Troops of rebels marched through the corridors, destroying obstacles with a methodical precision. The Justice Lords were on the retreat.
Tears streamed from Clark's eyes as he jumped over heaps of broken robot. He could hear the screams as his teammates fell behind him. He didn't know who was alive, and who was just injured. He couldn't afford to check. He prayed that they'd make it.
He ran into the hanger, slamming his fingers into the control panel and locking it behind him. His only hope was to escape in the Javelin, and try to regroup with his comrades later. The boarding ramp lowered from the immense ship, and he was aboard in seconds.
The instant the door closed, however, he was pushed to his knees and forced into handcuffs. He was surrounded by rebel troops and the ship was filled with his curses.
Lois was at their head, a grim expression covering her perfect face like a Halloween mask. Dozens of questions cluttered his mind. How could you? Why would you? Where did you come from? Don't you love me? Instead he asked: "How did you teleport into the Watchtower? How did you connect to our systems?"
Lois shook her head, and one of her rebels stepped forward, a red haired kid with freckles on his cheeks—he reminded Clark of Jimmy Olsen. "How do you think?" The kid spoke as his form wavered, quickly replaced with the emerald skin of the Martian Manhunter "I let them in."
Superman growled, lunging forward. "J'onn, how could you?"
The martian smiled coldly, as the rebel soldiers brought their guns down on their former savior, and his words echoed in Clark's ears in his final moments on this Earth, as the universe faded to black around him. "I did it for your own good."
The Justice Lord once known as Clark Kent spent countless millenia floating in darkness. Fragments of his mind floated through the abyss, tiny particles spreading across eternity. He watched worlds come into being, and he watched them shatter apart, but he couldn't make any sense of any of it.
His particles had no coherence, they wanted to disperse—to disappear. That couldn't be accomplished if he stayed whole. Suddenly, or maybe slowly—he couldn't tell, his mind was filled with an immense golden light.
He was warm, and happy and his mind came together through the dark void.
He had a thought, his first thought since the dawn of creation, and filled his entire self with a sense of the ends justifying his means. He knew that he truly was a hero—because believed he was bound for heaven.
But Clark's heaven wasn't a dark cell in a moist dungeon. It wasn't chains around his wrists and a thick collar around his neck. His heaven wasn't crawling with rats, or filled with the stench of powerful magic. So why is it, that that's where he found himself when he woke up?