Shin froze the moment he stepped into the laboratory.
He had entertained the thought of taking Superman's bloodline more than once, but ending the man's life had never crossed his mind. Even the Superman of the Flashpoint timeline, the one who had been imprisoned and tormented from childhood to adulthood, denied the sunlight and sky, treated only as an experimental subject, had still risen in the end to fight for the fate of the world. That Superman had been worthy of the name, even if the world had not been worthy of him.
Now, that same symbol of hope, the one who would one day become the planet's savior, lay scattered across the floor in lifeless, broken pieces.
For all Shin's morally flexible worldview, the sight lit a spark of rage deep in his chest.
"This world," he muttered, voice low and bitter, "is truly beyond salvation."
Without hesitation, his fist crashed into the laboratory's bulletproof glass. The reinforced pane, designed to withstand heavy artillery, exploded outward in a shower of fragments.
The chamber was still drenched in the oppressive glow of artificial red sunlight, designed to strip Kryptonians of their gifts. In the One Piece world, he had once trained using seastone cuffs and seawater to build endurance. This was no different. If one's foundation was strong enough, suppression techniques could be resisted. Even under the red sun's draining influence, Shin remained far from helpless. He was not, after all, a full-blooded Kryptonian... yet.
Even if that day came, his vast reserves of chakra would remain. The raw, almost limitless energy drawn from his inhuman physique could sustain his combat capabilities even if every Kryptonian advantage were stripped away.
He stepped into the crimson light. His right hand darkened, shrouded in a dark mist, and without ceremony, he absorbed what remained of Superman's limbs. A small black sphere materialized in his palm. Without pausing, Shin vanished in a flash of displacement, his Flying Thunder God Technique carrying him away from the scene.
A rumble spread through Metropolis, faint at first, then growing into a tremor felt across the city. Far beneath the streets, an enormous hollow cavity had formed, carved out of the bedrock itself. At its center rested a perfect stone sphere, its surface smooth from crushing compression.
No one in the base survived the collapse. All personnel, equipment, and structures were compacted inside that dense prison.
A hairline crack formed along the sphere's surface. Through it emerged a man with shock-white spiked hair, Lieutenant Sinclair.
He had been the very first subject of the Superman Project, dubbed as Subject Zero.
Sixty-seven years earlier, an unconscious Doomsday had fallen to Earth, buried deep until excavated by the US military. Sinclair was chosen, perhaps condemned, to be the initial test case. The experiment had been simple in concept, monstrous in practice: inject Doomsday's genetic material into his body, then subject him to constant trauma in an attempt to force evolutionary adaptation.
By sheer fortune, Sinclair had survived. He had neither perished from the strain nor devolved into a mindless killing machine like the creature whose DNA he carried. At first, he had even been loyal to his handlers.
But the US military was nothing if not consistent in its disregard for human dignity. To them, Sinclair had never been a soldier, only "Subject Zero". That cold indifference eroded what humanity remained in him. Eventually, his loyalty cracked.
On one mission, Sinclair massacred both his target and the allied forces meant to support him. He was imprisoned, his value deemed outweighed by his instability.
Over the years, other incidents followed. Once, Sinclair had manipulated Superman himself into freeing him, only to unleash a slaughter within the base. His rampage ended with him being locked away in a stasis dimension called the Phantom Zone.
Now, with Shin's destruction of the experimental facility, the Phantom Zone containment failed. Sinclair was free again.
"Mission… kill all parahumans," Sinclair whispered to himself, his voice a rasp of intent.
Shin did not yet know he had unleashed another dangerous experiment. Even if he had known, he doubted it would have mattered. His focus was elsewhere, on himself, and on the transformation that had just taken place.
He had fully integrated the Kryptonian cells into his body, replacing every one of his own. In the process, he had abandoned every other genetic inheritance, even the godlike bloodlines of the Ōtsutsuki clan and the dimension-warping Kamui.
He no longer relied on the overwhelming versatility of the combined Devil Fruits either. Instead, he carried only three Devil Fruits, two of which were the Dark-Dark Fruit and Munch-Munch Fruit.
His primary power was the Yamata-no-Orochi Fruit, though he could cycle between the others when necessary.
He was essentially a Kryptonian who possessed both a Chakra Fruit and a Devil Fruit.
His new physiology was staggering. Even stripped of Ōtsutsuki blood, his chakra reserves dwarfed anything that clan could muster. The Ōtsutsuki were famed for producing hundreds or thousands of times more chakra than a human with the same stamina and willpower. But Kryptonian genetics, particularly those of the comic book Superman, eclipsed that by magnitudes so absurd they defied easy comparison.
Even tens of millions of times greater was, in Shin's opinion, a conservative estimate.
He suspected that, if he chose to focus all his chakra into a single ninjutsu, he could deform the Earth's crust with one Earth Release Jutsu or hurl the oceans into the sky with a single Water Release Jutsu. It was no boast, it was simply the truth of what he had become.
The decision to replace his original cells with those of this world's Superman had been deliberate. If there was even the smallest chance that the comic iteration was stronger than the cinematic one, it was a gamble worth taking.
There had been a loss, however. The solar energy he had accumulated in his original Kryptonian cells had largely been absorbed and transformed before he could preserve it. Only a sliver remained, but even that sliver was enough to match decades of solar charging.
When the absorption finished, his body began to change. His formerly lean frame thickened with dense muscle until he resembled the archetype of an American comic book hero.
"…Something feels off," he muttered, flexing a newly massive arm. "Maybe I just can't get used to Western aesthetics."
Joking aside, the transformation had awakened more than physical strength. His senses sharpened beyond even his previous limits.
Superman's 'super hearing' was not mere auditory acuity, it was a form of perception unrestricted by medium. It did not require sound to travel through the air. Paired with his Observation Haki and an overclocked brain, Shin's awareness ballooned outward until the whispers of the entire world pressed in on him.
It took only moments for the flood of data to settle into coherence. The planet was in chaos.
Everywhere, heroes and villains clashed in battles far more numerous and violent than anything Shin had observed when seeing the world through the limited lens of the Flash. The conflicts were not isolated incidents but a constant, global storm of war between metahumans.
And now, with Superman gone and the balance further disrupted, the storm was only beginning to intensify.
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