The night air above the coast tasted clean and cold, the kind that cleared a man's head. Marcus hung a thousand feet up, weightless and effortless, letting the city roll beneath him in slow, glittering ribbons. His HUD painted the skyline with thin glyphs, altitude, wind shear, nearby comm towers, encrypted bands he'd already cracked and filed under "in case." He'd been running drills for months. Tonight he wanted noise. He wanted a headline. He would've settled for a car chase.
"Come on," he murmured to the quiet between stars. "Give me something messy."
A soft chime. The live news tile in his visor bloomed to life.
—METROPOLIS: SUPERMAN VS. METALLO—
The feed jittered to a stabilized zoom: steel-on-fist brawling through a construction plaza, cranes groaning as they took the hit. Metallo—John Corben once upon a time, looked like bad decisions wrapped in better engineering. Synthetic chassis, kryptonite core pulsing a sickly green behind the ribbed chest plate. Strong enough to rag-doll a freight car, tough enough to make a Kryptonian grunt, and mean enough to open that chest and flood a city block with radiation just to win a round.
Another tile pulsed.
—DOWNTOWN METROPOLIS: GIGANTA BANK ROBBERY—
Split screen. On the left, Superman caught a haymaker and crashed through rebar, shook it off, came back. On the right, a redheaded giantess, barefoot and laughing, tore the armored doors off a vault like wrapping paper. In seconds she ballooned from "tall" to "oh hell," her skin taut with size, each step a city ordinance violation. Bullets pelted her like rain. She grew again and the rain didn't matter.
Marcus let the feeds run while his systems scraped police radio. Dispatch chatter hit his ears in layered clips: officers diverting traffic; radiation warnings flagged around the Metallo fight; a panicked sergeant yelling for someone to stop Giganta from making a turn that would shear an overpass.
He ran the math fast. Metallo was a walking kryptonite lighthouse—Superman's problem and a hazard zone for anyone dumb enough to intrude. Giganta, though… she was turning patrol cars into paperweights and playing shot put with sedans. He didn't have to be faster than a bullet. He just had to be there first.
"Route me," he said. The HUD drew a clean vector.
He rolled onto his back, stared one heartbeat at the scatter of stars, then tipped forward and went.
The world blurred. Air stacked against his chest in rippling pressure waves, then snapped as he punched through. He throttled the boom, shaping it, angling high over glass towers to keep windows intact. The city smeared into highways of light. His helmet fed him traffic maps, alley wind lanes, live blockages. A second boom, smaller. Marcus leveled off, bleeding speed as Metropolis rose to meet him—blue-white and vertical, every surface reflecting the night like it had something to prove.
He skimmed a news chopper by inches. The cameraman swore into a dead mic.
"First impressions," Marcus said to himself, "let's not start with lawsuits."
He coasted lower, drifting over midtown. Sirens spread like a chorus. Two districts apart, two disasters, one green and lethal, one redheaded and enormous. He let Metallo go. Superman needed space more than help. Civilians near Giganta needed the opposite.
"Downtown," he told the suit. "Priority: barricades and crowd flow. Tag any thrown objects."
The visor painted the street grid in white wireframe. A red triangle flickered into life, then streaked toward a checkpoint like a comet.
—OBJECT: VEHICLE—
—INBOUND—
—IMPACT IN 1.7s—
From above, Giganta looked like a moving hill with hair, a grin too big for the street she was tearing through. She'd ripped a car from a parking lane and hurled it in a lazy arc at a police barricade half a block ahead. The world below braced, too slow to move. The car tumbled—roof, hood, glittering glass—right at the cluster of blue uniforms who'd already decided this was how the story ends.
Marcus cut down the last thirty feet like a blade.
He caught the car in one hand.
Momentum bucked. Metal screamed. His boots kissed asphalt and carved two clean black crescents across it before he stopped dead, the sedan hovering in his grip like a toy that had forgotten how to fall. The barricade officers flinched, then froze, eyes bulging, breath held in a single, collective prayer that they were still alive.
Marcus tilted his helmet just enough for the visor to meet theirs. "Yo," his voice came through the modulator warm, almost light, "you good there, officers?"
A beat passed. Two. Someone nodded. Someone else remembered to breathe. A rookie whispered, "Holy," and lost the rest.
He set the car down gently behind them, out of the line of fire, fingers leaving no dent at all.
Up the street, Giganta wheeled, interest snagging like a hook. She squinted down the avenue at the black-clad figure and the little golden emblem that caught every streetlight like fire. When she smiled again, it showed too many teeth.
From the east, the Metallo fight boomed, a distant, green-edged thunder. From the south, crowd screams surged and broke. From the west, more sirens.
Marcus rolled his shoulders once. The suit moved like it had always been part of him. His HUD queued threat metrics without being asked.
SUBJECT: GIGANTA
— Size alteration: rapid, to several hundred feet
— Strength: high, scales with mass
— Durability: superhuman at scale; bulletproof
— Secondary: sonic shout at giant size; structural damage risk
"Copy," he said, to no one, to himself, to the pulse in his throat that felt like it belonged to some larger animal finally waking up.
He rose off the pavement in a slow, deliberate meter, just enough to clear the cruisers and the wall of blue behind them.
"Alright," he said under his breath, a smile tugging behind the mask. "Let's dance."