A single gunshot split the void.
It cracked through the mangled ruins of the Watchtower like a thunderclap from hell, sharp and merciless. Time itself seemed to freeze. Superman and Kai halted mid-motion, eyes wide, lungs held hostage by dread.
Then the smell hit burned ozone, coppery blood.
Superman looked down.
His chest pulsed with a sickly green glow.
Kryptonite.
The bullet had embedded just above his heart, melting through flesh and sinew like acid. His knees buckled immediately. A groan, raw and wounded, ripped from his throat as pain unlike any he had felt in decades wracked his nerves. His body, so long impervious, shuddered with each tremble of death radiating outward from the wound.
He didn't understand.
He hadn't seen it coming.
Hadn't heard it.
That should have been impossible.
He collapsed onto one knee, the reinforced alloy beneath him fracturing with a deafening crunch.
Kai's voice barely escaped his lips. "No…"
From the darkness, they emerged.
Vandal Savage walked in as if he owned the moment. Calm, deliberate, his boots never missing a step amid the scorched debris. His tailored coat, somehow immaculate, whispered around him with the grace of silk and the menace of steel.
Behind him, Ultra-Humanite loomed. A creature of brutal intelligence, his pale fur clotted with gore, eyes flicking across the ruined chamber with slight amusement as he regarded everything like it was meaningless.
Neither spared Superman a second glance.
The Man of Steel now lay prone, his lips stained red, his fingers trembling as they reached feebly for his ruined chest. Beside him, Hawkgirl was a broken wreck. One wing ripped out entirely, the other bent grotesquely. Her leg was a shattered thing, twisted backward. Her mace lay in pieces beneath her blood-slicked hand.
And Kai?
Frozen.
Staring at the monsters before him.
Terrified.
Vandal stood before the boy, eyes gleaming with something ancient—curiosity sharpened by cruelty. He tilted his head like a collector inspecting a rare specimen.
"Now," he said quietly. "Let's see it."
That was all it took.
Something fractured deep within Kai, a final crack in a soul already splintered by death, loss, and the unbearable pressure that had suddenly befallen him. The guilt. The helplessness. The rage.
It all detonated.
His breath hitched. Then stopped. His muscles seized. A sound part gasp, part sob, part scream clawed its way from his chest.
His white hair lifted as if in zero gravity.
His eyes rolled back—white, pupil-less, void.
His spine contorted violently. Bones cracked, skin tore. Veins bubbled to the surface, blackened and glowing. Steam hissed from every joint as cursed energy flooded his body like boiling oil.
Inside the mindscape, Mahoraga stirred.
Still bound in golden chains, coiling viciously around the monster.
But the wheel behind its monstrous head began to spin.
Once.
Twice.
Then faster.
The chains groaned, shuddered, snapped.
Kai screamed.
But the sound was no longer just his. It was an inhuman chorus, a symphony of anguish and divine wrath, echoing across dimensions.
The transformation began.
Flesh twisted. Bones exploded outward. His limbs grew, tore, and reformed. Claws erupted from fingertips. His face disappeared, replaced by twitching wings of skin and sinew. His chest split and regrew. Blood streamed down his face in rivers, evaporating into cursed steam. The wheel above spun like a turbine, trailing sparks of violet fire.
Mahoraga had arrived.
Not in spirit.
In flesh.
It towered over the ruin and carnage. Its arms were twitching. Its wheel is spinning hungrily. Its body, a monument of unnatural evolution, bent for violence.
Vandal smiled.
He removed his coat and folded it neatly on a nearby destroyed console. His bare torso, scarred and impossibly lean, bore the wounds of countless centuries. And at its center, embedded into his chest, pulsed a red orb, and as it pulsed, a sick laugh of a young boy echoed in the background.
He cracked his neck. Blood vessels bulged at his temples. His smile widened.
Ultra-Humanite, ever the pragmatist, took a cautious step back. "Shall I initiate extraction, Savage?"
Vandal never looked away from the beast. "Activate the teleport failsafe. Get the others out. Now."
A flick of a wrist, a press of a device throughout the Watchtower, villains bathed in green light vanished one by one, teleported back to Earth.
Only four remained:
Mahoraga.
Vandal.
A dying Superman.
And Kai—buried somewhere inside the monster.
Then the beast roared.
Glass shattered. Space warped. The scream cracked the station's plating.
And it lunged.
It's fist reeled back for a strike that could cleave mountains.
Vandal met it without hesitation.
Their fists collided.
The world blinked.
The explosion of force ruptured the floor. Walls bent outward like tinfoil. Lights exploded. The Watchtower shook, groaning like a dying beast.
Mahoraga slashed each swipe a blur of positive energy, but Vandal moved like a man possessed, ducking, weaving, countering with fists that struck like warhammers.
A rib cracked.
The wheel spun.
Adaptation.
The wound healed instantly, better and denser. Mahoraga's form changed on the fly, muscle twitching and thickening. One of its wings screeched a psychic howl. Vandal's nose bled instantly, yet he grinned.
Another punch. This time, the monster's jaw cracked sideways.
Mahoraga screeched, retaliating with a flurry of swipes. Blood sprayed. The Watchtower listed, its orbit beginning to decay.
Bones erupted from Mahoraga's back ten, then twenty, impaling Vandal like a crucifixion. The immortal growled, tore himself free with a roar, a surge of red charging his body with power that made the beast sick, and headbutted the creature so hard its skull caved inward.
More adaptation.
Mahoraga's body mutated in real time growing a new jaw, thicker armor over its head, and retractable tendrils from its spine.
They didn't fight.
They butchered each other.
Blood coated the floor.
Kai, deep inside the storm, screamed.
No one heard.
He was drowning in Mahoraga's mind, in instinct and chaos, in a whirlwind of battle lust and divine wrath.
Vandal? He welcomed it.
"This is glory!" he bellowed. "You're the future!"
Mahoraga roared back, and this time, it wasn't just pain. It was agony.
The wheel spun faster.
Too fast.
Something cracked.
The creature staggered. Its limbs twitched erratically. The adaptation was failing too much, too fast. Sparks of cursed energy exploded from its joints.
Inside, Kai pushed.
Just a little.
Just enough.
Mahoraga paused. Screamed. Convulsed.
Vandal, bleeding from over a dozen wounds, watched with wild eyes.
A frown on his face as he watched the once menacing beast stagger and collapse like a newborn baby learning to walk.
"You're not ready," he muttered.
Mahoraga collapsed to one knee.
Trembling.
Confused.
The wheel spun faster. Violent. Erratic.
Kai's voice, distant but rising, echoed from the beast's throat.
"Help me…"
And Amanda Waller, watching from her reactivated monitors far below on Earth, whispered into her comms—voice low, trembling:
"…God help us all."