Marcus leaped into the sky, and the world exploded around him.
This wasn't just flying. It was total liberation, a sensory symphony. The wind whipped his face with a force that should have flayed his skin, but he felt only a vigorous caress. The city's roar decomposed into a myriad of distinct sounds: car horns, conversations, the beat of a pigeon's wings, the hum of circuits within buildings. The smells—pollution, street food, ozone, the distant ocean—mingled into a complex, living perfume. And his sight... His sight pierced the clouds, distinguished pedestrians kilometers away, saw the world tinted with minute variations of heat.
Is this how he feels everything? he thought, a pure, childlike euphoria washing over him. Whoa!! This is... incredible!
For a long moment, he just carved circles in the sky, climbing, diving, punching through a cloud that dispersed into vapor on impact. The power was both terrifying and intoxicating. He understood Homelander's arrogance a little better; possessing such power could easily make you believe you were a god.
Alright, recess is over, he reasoned, clenching his fists. I need to find the nice guy in blue.
He focused, filtering out the ambient noise, straining his hearing beyond the city, searching for a unique, signature sound: the supersonic whistle of a hero on a mission, or the groan of a metal structure under superhuman force.
Then he heard it. Thousands of kilometers away, over the Pacific Ocean. A muffled but clear sound: the shriek of an oil tanker's hull tearing, the stifled cries of the crew, and a steady, powerful exhale, like a giant bellows stoking a fire.
Without a second's hesitation, Marcus pointed his body west and shot forward.
He cut through the air like a fighter jet, the sky becoming nothing but a blurry tunnel around him. The sonic boom that ripped through the atmosphere in his wake was deafening, a roll of thunder crashing over the ocean. In mere seconds, the scene unfolded below. A giant oil tanker, with a gaping tear in its hull, was listing dangerously. A slick of black, iridescent oil was beginning to spread like a wound on the water.
And there, at the heart of the disaster, was the Man of Steel.
Superman was suspended in the air, his back to Marcus, concentrating. From his eyes emanated two thin beams of glowing red heat, welding the tear in the steel with surgical precision, sealing the ship's wound drop by drop of molten metal. His scarlet cape snapped in the salty wind. He was both serene and immensely powerful, a bulwark against catastrophe.
Marcus slowed, hovering a few hundred meters away, his heart pounding not with fear, but with solemn anticipation. This was the moment.
He nervously adjusted his hood, taking a deep breath he didn't really need.
Then, he dropped from the sky, landing with a calculated heaviness on the aft deck of the tanker, which shuddered under the impact. The metal buckled under his boots.
The sound of welding stopped.
Superman turned around, slowly. His eyes, a blue as intense as the sky he had just left, settled on Marcus. There was no surprise or fear in his gaze, only an intense vigilance, an immediate and silent assessment. He floated a few centimeters above the deck, his silhouette outlined against the oil slick, a sentinel facing the unknown.
First contact had been made.