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Zod smashed through the Fortress like a vengeful meteor, armor shredded, skin seamed with glowing veins. He struck the glacier with the force of an earthquake; the impact cracked the ice around the approach and sent a wave of blown snow and glassy fragments scattering into the sky.
Alarms flared inside the fortress even as Zod's silhouette tore through the outer atrium. An old defense orchestra awakened turrets folding, servo-guards reassembling, icicle-lattice shutters clamping into place. For a moment it was all system protocols and Kryptonian codes: identification, friend-or-foe, contain and neutralize.
Zod spat blood into the frozen air and snarled. Through lips white with cold and fevered heat he barked orders as if the fortress were a soldier who owed him obedience. The console displays flickered beneath the pressure of his will; his hands worked through the residual pain. He smashed security overlays, rerouted authority, rewrote clearance levels. The fortress' language was logic and code, Zod's was force and command and for a sliver of time his will steamrolled the old machine.
"Open," he rasped, voice raw. "Let me in. Let it serve me."
But the fortress was more than hardware. Its locks were woven with the ghost-memories of Jor-El. As Zod's hands tore at the fortress' control matrices, the place recoiled and shuddered, not in blind compliance but in judgment. It scanned, recognized, and the next pulse of its defense protocol decided.
Outside, Igris and Kamish bore down on the ruined approach, wings and swords and shadow-armor ripping through the snowfall. The fortress, having identified them as armed, unknown aggressors at the perimeter, opened firing lines crystalline drones lifting, automated glaives launching like bladed hail. For a tense second the air filled with the glitter of defensive ordnance.
Igris didn't care. The first volley splintered against his shadow plates as he carved through the sky, a figure of living shadow perfectly timed. Kamish's wingbeat was a gale; his roar split the light as he looped, talons slicing drones into falling shards. The automated defense had been built to preserve Kryptonian sanctity; it had not expected shadow marshals, and it did not last long against them. Igris and Kamish made brutal, elegant work of the robots, shields punched open, servos ripped free, crystal cores cored out with brutality. Metal and light fell in showers; the fortress recoiled and rebalanced, wounded but not dead.
Zod used their engagement as the opening he needed. He shoved through the main atrium he fed commands into the heart of the place overwrite, prioritize, dominate the place. Heat and cold warred across his skin, strengthening reactions, sharpening reflexes. At the same time the process ripped at him, tearing microtissue into furious regeneration and burning the edges of who he was. He felt both stronger; limbs like pistons, senses like drawn steel and weaker, because the price of power was a body unmade and remade in pain in such a short amount of time, unlike Kal and Kara who had plenty of time to adapt here on earth, he did not have that luxury.
Zod worked the codes, the very air in the command hall breathed, and a shape unstitched itself from the glimmering walls. It was not the crude, angry apparition of legend this was Jor-El, but not the man in the recordings; he came as the fortress remembered him measured, severe, the soft light of a thousand calculations in his eyes. The projection did not flicker; it filled the room with an actual presence.
"Zod," the voice said not a warning, it was calm and collected.
Zod's head jerked up at the sound. Blood crusted one lip; his posture sagged under the twin weights of fury and energy. "Jor-El," he returned, the answer a stone thrown into a still pool. It carried all the contempt he had ever stored for the Council and their laws.
Jor-El's ghost regarded him with an engineer's sorrow. "This place is not meant to be a crown for the violent," he said. "It is a sanctuary. You cannot bend it and claim to save what you destroy."
Zod laughed, he still bled, "Leave," he spat. "You are a memory. A ghost cannot stop me now. I am what Krypton should have been. I found your little project by the way." He waved a hand as if dismissing the man entirely then sneered with a fresh venom. "That clone you made. H'El. I will use him to rebuild what the Council failed to start, and then I will destroy him when he is no longer useful. You disgusted us with Kal...letting a natural birth through, bending tradition. And you still dared to make… this abomination."
Jor-El's face tightened. "H'El," he said quietly, as if the name deserved reverence and regret. "He was… an experiment in possibility. Not abomination. You frame what you cannot control as sin."
Zod's eyes flashed. "You always spoke of choice as if it were a virtue. You taught Kal choice, and look where it led: a man who chooses the weak and the comforting over the strength of a people. Kal's freedom is a contagion. I will not abide it."
Jor-El's projection moved closer, and the light around him seemed to cool the air. "You cannot rebuild a world on the bones of what you condemn," he said. "You are blinded by vengeance. H'El... if you let him be what I designed him to be, if he can be guided by someone like Kal, he might carry the best of us forward. A child who can choose justice rather than repeat the Council's crimes. And as for Kal himself.. he already made me proud."
Zod's laugh was a low slash. "You cannot understand. You preserved a philosophy of mercy and softness. I have learned what we must do. Feed the new Krypton with the sun. Purge weakness. The World Engine is a forge which I will use here on earth, I'll use the resources you have here to make more in case they manage to destroy the one we have. Now tell me, where is the Phantom zone projector?"
Jor-El's voice turned hard, and for the first time behind the soft scientist's façade there was steel. "Destroying worlds is not building a legacy, Dru-Zod. You call it purification; it is only slaughter. You will not make Krypton greater this way, as for that device it doesn't exist anymore."
Pain knifed across Zod's face. He staggered forward, swearing, one hand clenching the console. "You've never been a good liar, and you will not stop me," he said, gargled with fever. "No spirit, no machine, no god shall stop me from making what must be."
Jor-El's spectral eyes were sorrowful, unyielding. "Then you will be remembered as the man who burned a world trying to resurrect another." He stretched a hand, not in plea, but in the gentle finality of a teacher. "You could still turn back from this. Let the fortress stand as it was meant. Let H'El become what he was intended. Leave Earth to its inhabitants."
Zod's face twisted into something like pity for Jor-El's helplessness. "Your words are useless." He banged on the console with a fist that shook the frozen hall. "Do what you will...fight the tide of my will if you must. But I am not a man to be argued into inactivity."
Jor-El's image started to fade. He left Zod with words that were less prophecy than invitation "Power without restraint is ruin. You can still choose beyond vengeance, Dru-Zod."
Zod's hand closed into a fist so tight his knuckles popped. He stared at the place where the projection had stood; for the briefest beat, there was an echo of something like doubt, and then he slammed the fist into a wall.
And then a sound.
Soft at first. Almost insignificant. The crunch of heavy metal boots against frost.
Step. Step. Step.
Slow and unhurried.
Zod's head lifted sharply, his eyes narrowing toward the corridor beyond, the sound grew louder echoing against crystal walls.
And then he emerged.
A knight, wreathed in violet flame and shadow. His armor was a living darkness, its edges glowing faintly violet, as though reality itself recoiled from touching it. Frost hissed and retreated where he walked. In his hand, a great longsword crackled with arcs of blue lightning, its blade pulsing like a vein of fury drawn from the storm.
Igris.
The shadow marshal of the Monarch. One of the King's hands.
Zod's jaw clenched, and for a moment, the world stood still between them, two soldiers.
"This damn wraith…" Zod rasped, his voice half-growl, half-breath. His body shifted instinctively into stance, though his muscles twitched with exhaustion. "That human's lapdog."
Igris didn't stop walking. His helm tilted slightly as if regarding Zod with faint curiosity or pity. When he finally spoke, his voice came through the helmet like the toll of a bell: deep, metallic, and commanding.
"I am no dog," Igris said, each word deliberate, echoing through the crystal chamber. "I am the shadow of his will. And you…" his blade lifted, crackling, "…you are the stain that dares linger on his light."
Zod smirked weakly through blood. "You think you can kill me, creature? I'm a general I have fought against worse odds." His eyes burned.
Igris' steps halted, sword held loosely at his side. A current of violet wind whispered through the chamber.
"And yet," Igris said, voice steady as a blade unsheathing, "you crawl here broken. Hunted. Dying. A general without an army… a god reduced to a fugitive."
Zod's teeth bared. "Careful, wraith."
The knight tilted his head again, faint blue lightning arcing down his armor. "You misunderstand. I take no joy in killing you." His sword rose, one hand gripping the hilt with solemn strength. "But my King has decreed your end. And I have sworn my blade will deliver it."
Zod growled, stepping forward, his body trembling with fury and pain. "You'll find that Kryptonian blood doesn't spill easily."
"Good," Igris replied, lowering his stance, his voice calm almost reverent. "Then it will make your death worthy of the King I serve."
/-\
If you Like this story! Check out my other stories! Solo leveling in Westeros.
&
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my patreon at
"https://www.patreon.com/FrenzyAren"
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want