Clark Kent, Superman, landed with the weight of a falling star, his boots shattering the asphalt into a spiderweb of cracks that radiated outward for fifty yards. He stood amidst the settling dust, his cape fluttering like a tattered shroud in the stale, recycled wind of the dying city. His eyes, which once were the bright, shimmering symbol of hope for a billion souls, now burned red with the cold, predatory hunger of a scavenger, narrowed as he surveyed the carnage left in the strangers' wake.
Hawkgirl's body was a ruin. Her Thanagarian wings were bent at impossible, jagged angles, and her head had been reduced to a grisly, unrecognizable paste against the concrete, her form already turning to dust. Nearby, the massive, fur-covered frame of Gorilla Grodd lay slumped like a discarded mountain of grey meat, he, too, was dead and turning to ash.
Wonder Girl was absent from the immediate area, but Clark's super-hearing picked up the rhythmic, breath, hiss, and growl, a faint, frantic pulse coming from the wreckage of a collapsed office building half a mile away. She was alive, her Amazonian constitution had been the only thing that allowed her to survive against the girl she had fought.
He scanned the area for the girl and the small boy he had seen, but they were not there, they had just vanished.
He bared his fangs, a low, guttural growl vibrating in his chest that sounded more like a shifting tectonic plate than a human voice.
'The King will not be happy about this,' he thought, his mind flickering momentarily to the dark, blood-slicked throne in Blüdhaven where Nightwing sat in judgement.
His head snapped toward the horizon, tracking the trajectory of the man he had just struck. With a roar that rattled the remaining glass in every skyscraper for ten blocks, Clark launched himself into the sky. He broke the sound barrier instantly, the resultant boom flattening the nearby charred vehicles. He reached the estimated landing zone in seconds, his super-vision scanning for a broken body, a massive crater, or the distinctive scent of foreign blood.
There was nothing. The street was empty. No heat signature, no heartbeat, no scent of the man he'd punched. The prey had vanished into thin air, and that pissed him off.
He let out a scream of pure, frustrated rage that echoed for miles before he forced himself to descend. He hovered in the ash-choked sky, still scanning the area just in case, before he decided to leave when he couldn't find anything.
Growling, he turned back toward Gotham, the sonic boom of his departure punctuating his failure.
Meanwhile, under some broken buildings, the group was quiet as they watched the man of steel rage before flying off in rage.
Kenji Takahashi leaned his back against a cold concrete wall and slid down until he hit the floor, his legs finally giving out. He was panting, his lungs burning, his body aching in pain, and his arms trembling from the shock wave blocking the hit of Superman. Even when he used both mana shield and gravity shield, the man's punch had smashed through and gotten him.
If people were expecting him to just go out there and face the freaking Man of Steel without prep, then they were mad. Powerful as he was, he was not stupid. This was the most bullshit person in this entire multiverse, the entire thing was practically built and written around his very existence, so no, he was not going to fight him....at least for now.
Vandalieu stood beside him, his expression as unreadable and cold as always, but you could see the boy focused on what he was doing. The boy's hands were raised, and a massive, shimmering dome of Death-Attribute mana expanded from his fingertips, saturating the tunnel. It was a "Silence" and "Scent-Eater" spell of terrifying proportions, designed to not only kill sound but to mask their very self from the senses of the very world by killing their presence. Even a Kryptonian's hearing would find nothing but a void where they stood.
Erza sat cross-legged nearby, her Heaven's Wheel armor gleaming faintly in the darkness. Her blade rested across her lap, her eyes sharp and wary. Unlike Sora, whom Kenji had snatched and stored in his System inventory the moment the boy went unconscious from the initial gravity shockwave, Erza and Van had been on guard and had stay conscious enough so he couldnt put them into inventory so he wrapped them in a gravity bubble as he was launched through the air and pulled them to him before the man of steel could notice while he was focused on kenji.
"You could have warned us this multiverse had that kind of monster," Erza muttered. There was no anger in her voice, only a deep, vibrating awe. She had barely seen the "Man of Steel" move when he came and when, and for the first time in her life, she felt the terrifying gap between her and someone. She didn't think she had ever met anyone who seemed to shine with power like the man she just seen.
Kenji let out a weak, dry chuckle that turned into a cough. "And ruin the surprise?" He sighed, his chest heaving as his regeneration finished knitting his forearms back together. "That was Superman. In most stories, he's the ceiling of what's possible. He's practically a god who can bench-press the planet for exercise. Fighting him here, with Sora to protect, would have been suicide."
Vandalieu observed flatly, his pale eyes tracking the mana flow in Kenji's body. "Are you okay?" he asked Kenji.
"Yes," Kenji answered, pushing himself to his feet with a grunt of pain. "I'll be fine, just a few broken bones, but they're healing already, right now we need to leave and find a place to settle down and think of how we're going to find that shard. Fighting Superman when we don't even need to would be unnecessary and stupid," 'very stupid' he thought.
"We have to know our limits in times like these. I know mine, and my limit is not getting turned into red mist by a vampiric boy scout."
He pulled up his System, he had managed to use observation on Clark when the man had come to check, and the stats were something alright.
Name: Clark Kent
Status: Name: Clark Kent/KAl EL
- Race: Kryptonian-Vampire Hybrid(infected)
- Tier: 9/???
- Title: Man of Steel
- Strength: 13/???
- Speed: 20/???
- Endurance: 17/???
- Intelligence: 18/???
- Wisdom: 12/???
- Charisma: 40/???
The stats were weird and he didnt understand at first but then it click, clark in a sense had two side of his stats, at base he was a tier 9, that was without the sun and everything, as a kyptonian clark was physically stronger than humans at base but thanks to the sun his stats varied, it shifted depending on how much solar radiation he had. It was good to know, but it also made it hard to know if he was stronger or weaker than the man at this time.
He felt the pain in his arms as he moved a bit and winced, definitely stronger than him at the moment. Well, thanks to all the vampires and everything, he now knew just what exact world they were in and its fate.
"We're in the DC vs. Vampires timeline," Kenji said, wiping soot from his face. "Which means this world is effectively a graveyard. We find the shard, we complete the mission, and we leave. There's no 'saving' this place. The rot goes too deep."
And he was not joking, Kenji didn't see how this place could ever go back to normal again. Truthfully, he didn't think he could ever remember a zombie or vampire apocalypse, that everything ended with humanity, alright at the end, and the few he was sure that were there ended with humanity less than a fraction of what it was, basically a reset for the species, and here this was even worse seeing that most heroes and villains were vamps.
This world will, to its end, not ever belong to humans without some serious god level power to fix it.
They decided to use the underground tunnels travel, moving through the labyrinthine dark for another hour, navigating a network of tunnels, hoping to find a place to laylow.
Suddenly, a loud commotion echoed from around a bend. A section of the tunnel wall exploded outward in a shower of brick and dust. A figure in a dark green cloak and a golden cowl was sent skidding across the floor toward them, leaving a trail of black blood.
'Dr. Mid-Nite', Kenji recognized instantly. The man was not well known to people, but Kenji recognized the outfit. The hero turned vampire scrambled to his feet when he saw them, his eyes glowing a sickly red as he hissed at the newcomers, his fangs elongating in a hunger-driven reflex. He lunged, his movements a blur of superhuman speed.
Sadly, for him, out of all the heroes and villains out there, he was not among the ones Kenji had to be wary of.
Kenji didn't hesitate.
He didn't have the patience for a long, drawn-out duel in a confined space. With a sharp flick of his wrist, he summoned his contract spirits. Four elemental fairies, Ignis, Undine, Sylph, and Gnome. Fire, Water, Air, and Earth faires materialized in a swirl of brilliant, contrasting light.
"Burn him to ash," Kenji ordered.
The mid-level spirits unleashed a coordinated torrent of elemental fury. A pillar of white-hot flame, pressurized by Sylph's winds, as the other two fairies shielded them from the flames as it engulfed the vampire. Dr. Mid-Nite didn't even have time to scream before his armor bubbled, his cloak turned to carbon, and his physical form collapsed into a pile of drifting cinders.
The group in the room beyond the broken wall froze. Kenji stepped through the gap, his golden eyes scanning the survivors. Harley Quinn stood there, held up against the wall by a person who looked to be Mr. Terrific, her oversized mallet still held tight in her right hand, looking at them with a mix of manic suspicion and was that a sliver of hope in her eyes.
Behind them was a hulking, grey-skinned Solomon Grundy, a shifting mass of Clayface, and a very tired, very human Commissioner Gordon holding a service revolver with a trembling hand.
"Who the hell are you?" Mr. Terrific asked, dropping Harley as his eyes darted between Kenji and the glowing, humming fairies on his shoulders.
Before anyone could speak, it seemed vampire reinforcements arrived from the far end of the hall. A vampiric Atom-Smasher, now a tower of undead muscle, charged through the opposite door.
The vampire, who seemed not even give a chance to speak, came rushing at him.
Kenji summoned the Yamato in an instant. As Atom-Smasher lunged with a fist, trying to kill him, and then Kenji moved, the Yamato flashed twice, and the giant's arms hit the floor with two heavy thuds before his brain even processed the loss.
Terrific seemed to have already started moving as he had thrown his T-spheres at Kenji.
Kenji then reversed the gravity on Mr. Terrific's orbiting T-Spheres, seizing them mid-air and firing them back into the vampire's chest with the speed of railgun slugs.
In a blur of motion, Kenji leaped, slicing the armless Atom-Smasher cleanly in two from crown to crotch. He landed and clamped a hand toward Mr. Terrific, catching the vampire in a gravity well that intensified by ten thousand percent in a second. It compressed the hero-turned-monster into a dense, marble-sized sphere of bone and blood, which Kenji promptly shoved into his inventory for later study.
Kenji stood amidst the sudden, ringing silence, the elemental fairies fluttering back to his shoulders like loyal pets. He turned to the remaining humans, a cheerful, overly polite smile spreading across his face.
"Hello there," Kenji said, his voice echoing in the underground tunnels. "We're a bit lost, and if it's not too much trouble, do you think you could help us out?"
Harley Quinn blinked, looking at the spot where a vampire Terrific, had just been turned into a mash of flesh and then to the ashes of Atom Smasher. "Help you? Honey, I think we're the ones who need the help."
———————————————————
If you want to read ahead and access 40 advanced chapters, check the patreon. $4 Dollars
Link:patreon/Phantomking785