Questions, comments and concerns? Reach out to me on discord on this link; dis cord .g g/KZ 26 95 W7 (just remove the spaces since ff doesn't play too nicely with links)

A/N; I am entirely reader-supported. Here are my special thanks to those of you who enjoy my writing enough to support me with your hard earned money on my pa-atreon page. Not just them though, special thanks to everyone who even just reads this story, reviews it, favourites or follows it. You're the reason I keep going. Thank you. Welcome to this new story, feel free to check out my other work if this is your first.

I searched the skies of New York with my eyes as I watched the movements by the various actors in what was to come in a short while. Loki flew with the aid of his spectre as he travelled to the top of Stark Tower. The Ancient one and a few of her disciples floated above their sanctum as they cast spells over the place in preparation for the inevitable invasion. It honestly shocked me how they still needed additional protection. Was the sanctum not supposed to be one of the most well protected places in the world?

I guess most of that protection had been metaphysical in nature, and the Chituari were everything but. Why was I just allowing Loki set off his plans? Because I could see the forest for the trees. The avengers were necessary. They would never form if this invasion never took place. The planet would never get ready for the various extraterrestrial threats that were sure to be on their way. No, the Chituari would invade and they'd do what damage they needed to to the city before the avengers would arrive and begin their plan. When I felt it was time, I would step in and crush the invasion in its tracks.

When I clenched my fists, I looked down at the nanotech weave that formed the suit I'd be using for the invasion. The large S of the House of El stood boldly on my chest, and my face was uncovered.

It was something I'd debated with myself and Kelex over on a continuous basis. What would happen when I outed myself as an alien? Would my companies suffer for it? Maybe. Very likely. Humans could be surprisingly racist creatures when given the right motivation. It wouldn't surprise me if my investor capital dried up at the same time my customers all fled. On the other hand, something about hiding beneath a mask did not sit well with me. Secret identities were strange things, and what I knew about the Marvel Universe was that they never lasted. I'd get found out sooner or later, and it would hurt more then because I'd made the attempt to hide myself in the first place.

It had been Kelex who pointed out that I was creating a false dichotomy for myself. I didn't have just two options. It wasn't either (a) out myself as an extraterrestrial, or (b) wear a mask. I could choose the silent and invisible option 3. Wear no max. Be open about my identity, and let people come to their own assumptions about where my powers came from. Mutants didn't exist in this universe, yes, but that didn't mean that people would automatically sus out where my powers came from, in the end. People like the Hulk and Spiderman seemed to get away scot free without answering many questions from the public about their powers and abilities. Simply leaving it up to ambiguity was counter to my nature, but it was still the option I chose in the end. It was the wisest one after all.

The skies were torn asunder as a blue wave shot straight out from Stark tower and pooled into a portal right above central manhattan. Of course, the New Yorkers took out their phones to begin recording to share on social media instead of running away at the first chance they got. I waited until the first Chituari spacecraft had come out of the portal and fired on a building before I sent a simultaneous notification to everyone's phone, asking them to evacuate the New York area, and the surrounding cities to be safe. Sure, I knew the invasion would be stopped here, but there was no justification for that beyond metaknowledge. As much as I could, I did my best to make sure that all my actions would be purely reasonable and justifiable from the perspective of a person who was as surprised about everything as the rest of the general public.

Once the first shots were fired and the notification and warning was sent, drones were sent flying across the city a few minutes later from the tower I'd chosen for my company. There weren't a lot of them. A few hundred at the most. The highest number Kelex said I could justify. They weren't armed, of course. They guided people to safety with flashes and asked people farther away to evacuate the city and they performed the secondary function of recording the emergency and livestreaming it on instaTV. My market share in the video space wasn't as large as I'd expected it to be by this point, but Kelex projected that livestreaming an alien invasion was sure to get me anything from a billion to three billion downloads as people from all across the world tuned in to get the live footage directly from the source in this time of fear and anxiety.

Was I milking it to make money? Yes. But who cared? No one. As the invasion ramped up in intensity, I saw the Quinjet begin to land with Iron man and Thor serving as the advanced party of the Avengers. I listened in as Steve gave out his orders and right before he said the famous phrase, I flew into their midst.

"Ohhh. Any orders for me?" They all looked shocked to see me in my red and blue suit floating off the ground.

"What's the name, kid?" Steve asked, not missing a beat

"Superman" "Clark Kent" Both Tony and I said at the same time.

"Superman" I said immediately after with emphasis in my voice.

"And what can you do?" Steve asked, giving Tony a look.

"Everything" I answered vaguely, a smug smile on my face.

When two Chituari on a speeder raced right at us, I just stared at them really intently, and bisected them with a blast of heat vision.

"Ok, join Thor on air control"

"Avengers Assemble!" so cool.

The thing about the Chitauri is that they were barely stronger than humans when it came to pure physical might. The only thing that had made them a threat was the technology that allowed them to glide through the air so seamlessly and the guns powerful enough to tear apart the cement and concrete walls our buildings sported.

Alien tech was good, and if it didn't risk showing my hand, I'd have had drones scooping up everything that remained behind. But no, I'd let it get into the wrong hands, government hands, criminal hands, and even Stark's hands. That was what the canon required, so that is what I would deliver. Sometimes, doing my best to make sure canon was followed till the point I was ready to toss it to the side made me feel a bit like a slave to the powers that be. Like even if I was here, in this world, nothing would still be different for a while.

I still consoled myself with the knowledge that unlike virtually every other slave to have ever existed in the history of mankind, I was doing this of my own free will and I stood to gain quite a bit from it. At some point, there would be four infinity stones ready for collection on this planet. That would be the point I would strike. Four infinity stones in one fell swoop and basically telling the mad titan to bring his best and come kiss my pale arse. That would be fun, and oh so worth it. If there was any goal worth fighting for, that would be it.

I flew through the air, teasing at the speed of sound as I flew through Chitauri speeders and obliterated the ones not in my flight path with quick bursts of heat vision. To be completely honest, I only still referred to that ability as such because of decades of reading comics in a past life. Right now, it let me fire blasts that pretty much reduced everything I aimed at to dust. I mean sure, I could narrow my vision to create a cutting effect, or to focus on the kinetic energy to knock things back from a distance instead of destroying them wholesale, but still the facts were the same. Heat vision had far outstripped its title. Something like power vision would probably be more fitting, but that was for later. Thoughts like that were for when I wasn't actively fighting an alien invasion.

Since I was streaming the entire thing across the world, I'd made sure to get caught in quite a few frames saving people and fighting the aliens. The cameras didn't focus on me anymore than any of the other avengers, but that was by design. I needed to cement it in the public sphere that I was one of them. That's why coverage of the impromptu planning session hadn't begun until I was floating among them. Let the world think of me as foundational a member as any other. That way, I'd get protected under the same aegis that allowed Natasha essentially get away with leaking terabytes worth of state secrets.

Sure, that meant I'd catch mud along with the rest of the team when things went wrong, but that was a problem for future Clark to resolve. Present Clark had bigger worries.

Bigger Worries was the name I'd given to the Leviathan that was rearing up to me with its mouth open as if to swallow me whole. Now, what was the most efficient way to get rid of this while doing the most possible damage to the surroundings. New York would need to be rebuilt after this, and considering I wanted to take the opportunity to own as much land in the city as possible, I had to take some of the devaluing into my own hands while not being completely obvious about it.

I willingly floated still and allowed the Leviathan to swallow me before I flew through its inside, turning my power vision everywhere I went, destroying what internal organs and systems the giant creature had. The thing had to be at most a thousand metres long so flying through it happened in a matter of seconds before I flew straight through the other end after crossing my hands in front of my head. When I appeared on the other end, the creature seemed to finally notice the loss and began to fall to the ground. Good. Some good ol property damage. I felt a bit guilty about those losing their homes, but I'd build them even better and cheaper ones. And I wasn't ignorant of the kinds of people who made their homes here. At prices about 100% higher than the National average, these people weren't hurting for living at all.

The next Chitauri speeder that came for me was destroyed with a narrowing of my eyes as I flew away in the search of another Leviathan to slay. This time, I'd try to find out if I could replicate that hulk trick of just punching it to death. That would be fun.

XXXX

Unconcerned as I was with the end of the fight, I paid almost zero attention to the situation with Loki, Natasha, and Tony. What I did know was that it took them close to two hours from the minute the invasion began for Natasha to breach Loki's shield. And when she did, I kept a careful eye out for Tony and the Nuke. Now that I could see it with my own eyes, I could see how stupid an idea this was. Tony was embarking on what was a suicide mission simple and short. How he'd survived in canon was pure luck in that the explosion pushed him in just the right direction and just the right speed to return back home before the portal closed.

Could I let it come down to that in this world? Hard as I'd tried to not change the canon, I knew that I'd done a lot more flapping than a butterfly in this fight. What if my changes led to Tony's death like this. Somehow. The irresponsible Billionaire had grown on me over years of collaborating on projects and just hanging out when our schedules would allow. Apart from Kelex, Tony was actually the closest thing I had to a friend in this world. It was sad considering I didn't even like the man most of the time.

Seeing it all, and thinking it through in slow motion, my body moved on his own. Izuku Midoriya, anime protagonist that he is, had described it as feeling the intense need to save someone and your body just moving off its own volition to save that person. I stood in front of Tony before I'd even noticed my body move. When I pushed him away and took over guiding the nuke, I ignored the shouts from his suits speakers. He couldn't catch up to me. He guided the nuke, while I basically dragged it with me.

Unknowing to me, Tony was too busy calling after me to tell Natasha not to close the portal. Unknowing to me, Fury in Natasha's earpiece had an eye on everything and instructed her to close it the moment I passed. When I passed through the portal and found myself in the cold vacuum of space, I pulled on my immense strength to haul the life ending weapon straight at the Chitauri mothership.

It was when I turned around to fly home that I saw the portal finishing its close. Try as I might, with all the speed I could come up with, the portal closed itself before I could reach it. I'd missed it just by seconds and found myself stuck in the void of space. To add salt to the wound, the only viable source of spacecraft in the area exploded in seconds as the Nuke finally reached it. Fuck. My. Life.

A/N; I decided a time skip was appropriate. And I also decided to chuck all my original plans to the wayside and see if I'd have more fun writing the tales of Superman in Space instead. Needless to say, this is going to be fun (I hope).. We've got the next three chapters of this story, along with the next five chapters of another fic that I uploaded at the exact same time as this one (an OCSI into a firebender during the 100 year war in the ATLA universe) all available on pa-atreon, and you can read all of that right now just by heading to the link on my profile or searching for my username up there. Feel free to have a look.