Reign's presence filled the S.T.A.R. Labs laboratory, overwhelming and malevolent. The air itself seemed to grow thin, charged with a threat from another world.
"How could I know so much about the Worldkillers?!" she roared, her voice a rumble of apocalypse. "Because I am one. Born to fight. Born to slaughter. Born to conquer. The desire burns in me like a million suns. But I do not know why."
Her eyes, glowing embers, locked onto Utopian. She pointed a finger at him, a gesture laden with absolute defiance.
"But I know it is you I must destroy."
Utopian did not flinch. He felt the raw power emanating from her, a force that rivaled his own, perhaps even surpassed it. But he had a reason to fight far greater than hers.
"I won't let you harm anyone," he declared, his voice calm but firm, a stark contrast to Reign's shrieks of rage.
The battle that followed was titanic.
Reign lunged at him with the speed of a meteor. Their fists collided in a blinding flash and a deafening BOOM that shook the entire S.T.A.R. Labs complex. The shockwaves shattered the lab's reinforced windows, sending shards of glass and metal flying like lethal confetti.
Utopian used all his strength to contain her, but Reign was unnaturally violent. She hurled him through several successive walls, catapulting him out of the building and into the air above Metropolis.
"YOU ARE NOTHING!" she screamed, pursuing him, her eyes firing beams of glowing red energy that scarred the sky.
Utopian righted himself in flight, his own eyes emitting a concentrated heat beam to counter hers. The two beams met in a crackle of pure energy, creating a magnetic storm that caused all electronics in the city below to sizzle and short-circuit.
They tore through the skies, their bodies becoming supersonic arrows carving trenches through the clouds. Every blow landed was like a clap of thunder, every impact against a building an explosion of concrete and steel.
Utopian quickly realized he could not win by brute force alone. Reign was too powerful, too unpredictable. He had to be strategic.
He drew her higher into the atmosphere, where the air was thin, hoping to weaken her. But Reign, being Kryptonian, seemed as comfortable in the near-vacuum of space as on Earth.
"YOUR TRICKS ARE PATHETIC!" she sneered, landing a punch that sent him careening toward the ionosphere.
It was then that Utopian remembered Reign's words. "The desire burns in me... But I do not know why." She was a weapon, but a confused one, driven by programming she didn't understand herself.
As she charged him again, he did not raise a fist to strike. Instead, he used his X-ray vision, scanning not her body, but the remnants of the Kryptonian technology sealing her armor. He searched for a flaw, a weakness.
He found it.
On her torso, where the emblem of the House of El should have been, was a central crystal, the source of her power and her original imprisonment.
Focusing all his energy, Utopian projected a thin, precise beam of heat, not at Reign herself, but at the crystal.
A cry, not of rage but of pain and surprise, escaped her. The crystal cracked, emitting a flickering light.
"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!" she shrieked, staggering.
"I've given you a choice," Utopian replied, slowly descending back to the ground, exhausted but determined. "You were born a weapon, but you don't have to be one."
Reign looked at the crack in her crystal, then at Utopian's face, no longer with hatred, but with profound confusion. The program controlling her was disrupted.
The fight was over, for now. But Utopian knew it was only a respite. Reign was still there, unpredictable and dangerous. And he may have awakened an even greater monster by offering her a semblance of free will.