That which does not destroy, strengthens.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Behind a camera there is a woman, she is using an old model and with her middle finger, which sports a golden ring, she is trying to take a picture, she has long brow hairs and a smile that wasn't going to fade anytime soon.
Even though the world mentioned an apocalypse from another world going on now.
Even though a humanoid alien has sent a message of destruction to the world.
Even though a real war of the worlds happened in the desert.
Even though she wouldn't believe the government when they said the invaders retreated.
She wasn't going to let it waste, to have a single day where every good she could do would get wasted by doing nothing. So, she was here, in Metropolis. Always said to be the city of the future, where everyone always looks forward.
And she had her future right in front of her, her son. Her only son.
"C'mon smile for the camera!" her kind and gentle voice said.
And there was the little boy, that tries too hard to not laugh, his face tries to stop from laughing but the impulse is so strong, and he makes a loudly rictus. His mother wants him to smile but not showing all his child teeth.
And then he stops laughing but is still content, and this is enough for the mother.
"Aw that's it!" she says with a little laugh in her mouth.
Not even wanting it the little laugh makes the child giggle a little, but it's a soft one and the boy is where her mom wants him to be.
"And here!" she said after a click.
The woman sees the photo she just made, but the kid isn't the first thing she notices.
There is a giant tripod is in the sky and a light ray coming out of it.
The camera is still showing this pic. A laughing lad, an alien spaceship in the sky, people walking by, a person with a dog on a leash, the dog looks uneasy, as if it feels in the air something wrong or something bad about to happen, a person about to turn around by the sound of something but that looks at the wrong direction, a man that remains immobile thinking he is dreaming what he is seeing.
It all happened in a second.
The camera is on the ground, surrounded by broken pieces of metal and rock. Near it there is the hand of a woman with a ring on her middle finger, darkened by the dust and reddened by blood.
Destruction had come.
First, they heard a sound that cut the air, nothing could prepare anyone for that, it appeared in the sky within seconds, only the air in the sky knew it.
And then the beam of devastation came.
For a super being, that could sense and avoid getting struck by a lightning from the sky, the beam was slowly coming but inevitable, like death that comes, unable to stop it, you can only watch as it devours life.
And that's how it felt for General Swanwick.
Surrounded by other men of war in an improvised cabinet he was distressed, the words of his peers were mute to him. He was just thinking at how trying to stop that without compromise his position.
He was sent here by the elders that called themselves guardians. As a supervisor. Someone who can see but cannot act until the situation is dire.
And here he was, general of the biggest army of the planet but without anything able to destroy the horrific machine.
No beings on earth based on his knowledge could stop that, not even trying to stop that and failing. There was only failure in the possible future as he saw it.
He knew the knight of the night was still alive, even his identity, but what could he do against an alien invasion?
He saw a scarlet speedster flying in the desert, but nothing came out of it, as the flying girl could be dead as he saw her fighting the invaders from the sky.
What can we possibly do.
And then a blonde man touched him.
"WHAT" the general screamed.
"Uh sorry general, eh I was trying to get your attention by a minute" the man said.
"Yeah, sorry I was distressed" he said with fake confidence and with a broken voice "What do you want to tell me?"
The man looked around like someone that couldn't find the right words neither after thinking them "we saw that the…the bat-jet and the flying girl from the battle in the desert seems to go straight to Metropolis and…we suppose they're trying to fend the invaders, what do we do?"
The general couldn't believe someone was that stupid or hopeful to try it.
"Let them, we need all the hopeless help we can get." He said with a coldness on pair with a commander that would recruit children and women in a war against tanks.
Maybe the flying girl could be of help? He was thinking.
Maybe she was an alien like them?
.
.
.
Yeah, she could as well be! Maybe she is the key.
But that squad can't know how to deal with these emissaries of death. They need my help as well.
And the general left the building, but for the people in the room he was still here doing calls, maybe if they paid attention to the little details, they could see he was repeating the same movements every 10 seconds and saying the same "yeah" to the phone every 60.
And the head of the scientists in the America base said.
"Oh God, it's a terraforming machine."
"Terraforming initiated." said Jax-Ur with the same stone hearted tone of a butcher that blunts the knives to kill a sheep.
"We're turning Terra into Krypton, blessed by the light of the dazzling yellow Rao, and when sore fear comes to the humans of this planet, they will realize their sacrifice was for the good of Krypton." Zod said with cold elegance.
All the kryptonians in the room cheered "For Krypton." And left the zone so the head scientist and the head general would be alone.
And then a silence came in the space with the two leaders, and one broke the silence.
"Why did you keep the refugee Zor-El alive?" Jax-Ur asked with stone cold curiosity.
Zod was almost offended by the question, but he knew he had to answer it at some point.
"You told me we didn't have to kill her to retrieve the codex, just extracting it." Zod said, in a tone that sounded like he hid more, and didn't want to tell more.
"You really think that I, the last living member of the Thinker Guild of Krypton, can just think you broadly interpreted my words?" the genetist spit venom as he said this. "You had no problem slaying the infant Kal-El, so I have to assume your newly discovered mercy happened because she was a female."
Zod starred at the scientist, who looked at him with a sense of pitifulness, as if he realized his adversary's deepest mind's secret. And the general stayed there, with a cold anger in his face, then he lowered his head with seething contempt.
"a natural born female specimen could be useful for us by being alive, don't you think?" the general replied with a secure tone.
"For God Telle's will it could really be," the scientist said with a spark of interest but it stayed with the same cold eyes "We could turn her into an organic womb and have another pawn in our quest for repopulation, since she is a natural born kryptonian she could be compatible with our genetic makeup and create not clones but mixed genes offsprings." While talking he put his hand under his chin.
Zod's face formed a little smile, slightly visible but could be taken for an evil signature look of victory.
And Jax-Hur conceded "as a scientist I will take what I can of this situation, but in case she tries anything me, or you, will have to contain and even kill her in necessity."
Zod nodded "be it".
But before he could leave, he had another question "before I forget, are you working or will you work on these suits that emits this sol system's sun radiations?"
And Jax-Hur answered "yes, after taking the liberty of proving the yellow sunlight on myself and our close allies I realized with pleasing surprise that if we may restart our intergalactical empire having we will need to have assurance we can neutralize any possible fiend of cosmic origin or of Oan affiliation." He said with a rigid and wise voice.
"Let this be the start of a new age" Zoid sternly exclaimed. "The age of Krypton's resurrection! And like how our guilds were engineered by birth we cannot afford wrong doings by failure." And he said with a whisper "Faora-Ul."
And then the kryptonian lady of iron appeared, she could hear the whispers and move at super speed with the newfound effect of the yellow Rao on the near presence.
"I'm here to serve" she said with elegant coldness.
"Go to terra, near the world engineer, and protect it. But don't go to close or you would lose your powers."
"Yes, sir" and she walked by, not even once looking back or losing her elegance.
"There will be no need, victory is at our reach, and the possibility of losing is just a glimpse of paranoia, here's Krypton's resurrection." Jax-Hur said with his trademark severe tone.
Zod replied with a questioning tone "And that's what scares me, enemies that know they will lose anyway are willing to die for their cause."
It was hard not seeing Metropolis, a giant city, symbol of the future, and with a giant mechanical abomination of its sky.
With a beam coming from it that was destroying everything by playing with the gravity with the same strength as a magnifying glass for an ant colony in the hand of a very sadistic kid.
Airplanes and jets were invading the skies, hoping they could do something, anything to stop the destruction after their eyes.
There was fear in every heart.
Even in the superheroes ones.
The black Batplane is skiing the sky.
Along a flying girl, going with the same speed if not faster if she wanted.
But all three of them have an uneasy feeling, they don't know how anything about stopping the spaceship or even fight the literal demons from another galaxy.
Inside the tension was so thick no one wanted to cut it.
The young boy of the super trio was shaking uncomfortably on the grip of things to come until he couldn't bear it anymore.
"What can we do?" Barry asked to no one in particular.
And then a broody and strong voice said.
"Yesterday like today we're still in this situation, on a jet, with a super girl near us, and with the wish to defeat the bad guys, we will reach them and then, unleash everything we have, we will not go down without a fight." Bruce Wayne was talking.
"So, like…we go in the ship and hope we can break everything and turn everything right so we can all go back to our lives?! Does it make sense?" the speedster asked frenetically.
"That's what heroes do, hope. But we know hope doesn't defeat evil, just give us a reason to keep fighting." you could tell by that voice that the dark knight was tired.
"And as we know, hope never makes sense." Bruce conceded.
Barry was concerned, and said "just yesterday it was all so easy and right, how did it go all wrong just like this?"
"Barry, if you live as long as I lived, you will realize it was never easy or right, maybe there were fewer super villains back when it was just Joker and his goons, but the same awful aspect of evil was always with us." A long pause came.
"For us seeing another world coming and invading us seems something that never was before, but when you think about it that's the conquest of America, stronger people subjugate the weaker people and take their land. There is always a bigger fish and a bigger pond, for the indios America was their pond and thought themselves as the biggest fishes, then the conquistadores came, and realized a there were bigger ponds and bigger fishes." He said with a scary sense of coldness.
Barry was speechless. He really didn't know what to say.
He was just standing here, sitting on his seat waiting to enter in the apocalyptic machine and hope for the best.
And then a flying figure in the sky appeared, different from the other ones, this one had a cape.
"What's that…" was all Bruce could say.
And then time appeared to be stopped.
"Heroes, heroes." the voice from nothing called.
"What's going on!?" Barry said, or at least he thought he said. Because his body was immobile and his mind spoke it.
"It appears we're trapped in a psionic attack, something that shouldn't be possible." Bruce said with creepy calm.
"Do you always have an answer for every paranormal problem?! Why are we like this?! Why is the world outside not moving nor the jet?!" the younger boy asked with a rush.
"I said it, perhaps the psionic power that trapped us is happening in between milliseconds in the real world." Bruce said with the same tone.
"I hear you humans, but I can't hear any other sound" a feminine voice called.
"Kara?" the young boy asked.
"Yes, I'm somehow stuck mid-air in an abnormal twist of fate, I'm here and I can her you two, and you can hear me."
"Is the doing of Kyptonians somehow?!" the kid was even more uneasy.
"Not that I recall unless their technology advanced to the point where they can mindcontrol." Kara's answer was cold but impulsive.
"Heroes, heroes." The strong and deep voice called again.
What? Whose talking? Are you the one that did this to us?" Barry asked quickly.
"Yes." The answer was cold, and a silent of reflection came into the two men. Bruce was enigmatically trying to understand the situation.
"Here we are." Kara broke the silence.
"Have no fear, for I don't want to hurt you, for I'm your ally" the voice said. "I'm an alien like the kryptonians, but unlike them I work for humanity, unlike them my presence here shouldn't change the course of the human race."
At this the two men in the airplane were afraid, as they saw the figure in the sky of before approaching and then they could picture his colors.
He was green in skin; his clothes were made of an impossible to define material of color blue that went from his chest to his shoulders with an X shaped pair of belts on his chest that connected to a red breechcloth under what appeared to be his naked stomach area, with blue pant like gear that went to his feet.
"My name is J'onn J'onzz, of the planet Mars, known as Calvin Swanwick on earth, known as the manhunter of planet Per'elandra in my language, known as a peacekeeper of planet 2814.36.C for the elders of Oa, I offer you my hand in friendship." he said.
