The door clicked shut. The courtroom was dead silent. Rows of military brass, federal prosecutors, and armed bailiffs sat rigid.
Daniel walked down the center aisle, stepped into the wooden defendant's box, and leaned his elbows on the railing, making eye contact with the men in uniform.
"Well, here I am." He said. "What do you guys want?"
The federal judge stared at him, hand resting inches from his gavel, not touching it. He swallowed hard. "You are summoned under the Metahuman Registration Act."
The lead prosecutor, a four-star general, stood, keeping a careful distance behind his table.
"You are charged with unsanctioned vigilantism, operating as an unregistered weapon of mass destruction, and causing five hundred million dollars in infrastructure damage. Register your identity, submit to federal oversight, and pay restitution, or face immediate military detainment."
Daniel looked at him. He didn't laugh. He didn't get angry.
"Detainment," he repeated. He tapped a finger against the railing; the soft thud echoed through the room like a gunshot.
"I let you pass your laws. I let you print your money. I let you sit in this room and pretend you have authority. If I hadn't stopped the invasions, there wouldn't be a Washington D.C. left for you to govern. You're only breathing right now because I allow it."
He stood straight, cold grey eyes on the judge. "I'm not paying you. I'm not registering. And if you ever send another piece of paper to my house, I will rip the roof off the Pentagon and show you what a real threat to national security looks like. Now. Are we adjourned?"
The general didn't flinch. His posture stiffened with a misplaced surge of confidence.
"Since you refuse compliance, you are officially classified as a hostile enemy of the state. You are under arrest."
Throughout the gallery, a dozen men in identical black suits stood up in unison. They didn't draw firearms — they didn't need to. Their muscles strained against their suits, and their eyes began to glow with a burning red heat.
Daniel looked around at them. The tension broke as a low chuckle escaped him, building into full laughter.
"Hahahahahah..." He leaned back against the railing, shaking his head, then looked at the general. "Stupid, unstable clones of Superman. So this is what gave the government the balls to summon me."
The general's face lost its color — the government's most classified black-site project, identified in seconds.
"This farce has gone on long enough," Daniel said. His smile vanished, replaced by cold boredom.
He raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
The shadows beneath the twelve clones warped and exploded outward, black energy erupting from the floor into jagged jaws of darkness.
Before a single clone could fire heat vision, the shadow-beasts lunged, jaws clamping shut, swallowing them alive with a sickening chorus of crunching bone and tearing flesh, dragging the men down into the floor.
In seconds, the government's billion-dollar weapon was gone.
The shadow-beasts dissolved back into normal shade, leaving the gallery empty. No blood. No bodies. Just silence, and the remaining people in the room realizing they'd just tried to trap a monster in a wooden box.
***
Daniel stepped over the space where the clones had been and looked down at the general, hyperventilating, hand shaking over his holster. Daniel looked at him with the detached boredom of an exterminator evaluating a termite infestation.
"Since you officially declared me an enemy of the state," Daniel said, voice flat, "I suppose I'll act like one. Let me show you the cost of your arrogance."
He blinked. A silent pulse of grey energy sheared through the courthouse ceiling. Across all fifty states, the sun disappeared. The sky turned into a pitch-black void.
Then the darkness opened its eyes.
Massive shifting shapes — jagged limbs, gnashing teeth, dead staring eyes — peeled out of the black, eclipsing every major city from New York to Los Angeles. They didn't attack.
They just hung there in the sky, radiating pressure that brought the country to a paralyzed standstill.
Daniel's voice didn't come through radios. It appeared directly inside the minds of three hundred million people, cold and heavy.
"Citizens of America. Your government just decided to pick a fight with a god," Daniel said. "You elected them. You pay their salaries. You bear the burden of their stupidity."
In the courtroom, the general collapsed to the floor, weeping silently as the weight of Daniel's presence crushed the air from his lungs.
"You have exactly twenty-four hours," Daniel's voice echoed through a gridlocked continent. "If Washington does not issue a full, public apology and total capitulation by this time tomorrow, I will erase this nation. "
"Not just your leaders — every one of you. I'll scour this continent clean, state by state, the same way you took this land from the natives: by slaughtering everything that breathes until the map is wiped clean."
He looked down at the weeping general, but his voice kept broadcasting to the terrified masses.
"You gave these politicians their power, so you'll bleed for their mistakes. If you want your families to survive tomorrow, drag your leaders out of their offices and handle them yourselves. The clock is ticking."
Daniel turned his back on the general and walked out of the courtroom, pushing open the glass doors into the black afternoon.
The plaza was paralyzed. Reporters, cameramen, armed guards stood exactly where he'd left them, trapped under the blackened sky.
He walked halfway down the marble stairs and sat down, elbows on his knees.
Above him, the abyss shifted.
One by one, the shadow-beasts peeled off the sky and plummeted toward Washington with a roar, slamming into the streets and the courthouse plaza, shattering concrete, crushing abandoned news vans under their weight. They folded their limbs, lowered their heads, and knelt in a silent perimeter around Daniel.
He looked out at the crowd and the kneeling horrors. The boredom finally left his face, replaced by a wide, cold smile.
"Come on, people," he said. "The clock is ticking."
*****
A/N: If you'd like to read ahead of the Webnovel release schedule, you can join my Patreon!
The Patreon version is 30 chapters ahead.
👉 patreon.com/Universal_Peace