Chapter 189: Zod's Lie
General Zod sat in the spaceship, his eyes wide. He repeatedly toggled his Super Vision, scanning the vicinity with nearly every frequency.
By now, their spaceship had already returned to the expanse of space outside the atmosphere, to the very spot where his mothership should have been parked.
But he found nothing.
Zod stared, his mind filled with question marks.
Where's my home?
No, seriously, he was just messing around on the surface for an hour or two, and when he came back, his home was gone?
"Where is the mothership?" Zod, utterly furious, turned to the few subordinates remaining on the spaceship.
The entire mothership had vanished into thin air, and in an instant, General Zod's Kryptonian Army had been reduced to just a handful of individuals, just like Non's group.
Now, besides his most trusted adjutant, the Kryptonian woman Faora, and another burly Kryptonian who stood over two meters tall, there was only Non and three to five other Kryptonian soldiers left by his side.
The combined forces of Zod and Fort Rozz had been almost completely annihilated, and they hadn't even seen who their opponent was.
"We've detected an energy reaction from a Phantom Drive going berserk..." a subordinate reported, sweating. "We speculate that a counteracting Phantom Drive created a singularity, and the mothership was sucked into the Phantom Zone."
"Kal-El..."
Zod roared in fury, "Aaaargh!" He smashed a nearby control console into scrap metal with a single punch.
The remaining few fell silent, knowing that all was lost. The mothership was gone, the Planet Modification Engine was gone, and the Great Purge System was gone.
They all had a vague feeling that an invisible hand was behind the scenes on Earth, playing them like puppets the entire time. Now, even their home base had been stolen, yet they still knew nothing about their enemy.
"No, it's not over," Zod snarled through gritted teeth. "There's still Kal-El. I will kill him and take the Codex! His corpse will become the foundation stone of New Krypton, and we can still..."
Boom!
Before he could finish, the ship's outer hull was blasted through. A red-and-blue afterimage smashed through the shell and flew inside, landing in the center of the control room with a sliding tackle.
Speak of the devil, Superman had appeared.
"You!" Zod's eyes looked as if they were about to split. "You destroyed Krypton's hope! Traitor!"
"Krypton was destroyed long ago," Superman said. "Even if it were to be rebuilt, it would not be on the corpses of seven billion people."
"Shut up!"
Enraged, Zod flew forward. Superman countered with a punch. The two fought, their battle tearing through the spaceship and spilling out into space.
There was no longer a need for words. Even his mind went blank. Zod himself didn't clearly remember what happened next. He only felt his blood boil as rage, mixed with seemingly endless energy, surged from within his body, channeling into his fists as he threw punch after punch.
Zod had long since absorbed solar energy and gained superpowers. This Kryptonian exoskeleton battlesuit further enhanced him beyond his superpowers, making him stronger than Kal-El.
No, even before this, he was a natural warrior. His genetic conditioning meant he was born with far greater strength than Kal-El. This made him invincible and left this Kryptonian bumpkin, raised on a farm, with absolutely no chance to resist.
When he came to his senses, it was already over.
His hands were covered in blood, and their battle had punched through the Moon. And the traitor he despised, Kal-El, was a bloody, unrecognizable mess, no longer breathing.
"You shouldn't have opposed me. What a pity. We could have built a new Krypton together." Zod stood up, looking at the gradually cooling corpse. "Perhaps you should have died with your father."
And this was the clarion call for his counterattack.
Kal-El's resistance had caused him considerable trouble, but it wasn't enough to make him give up. He killed Kal-El and seized the Codex. Without the Planet Modification Engine, they scoured the Earth using more primitive means. It took more time and more battles, but they eventually succeeded in taking the planet.
New Krypton was established, and they became the creators of a new era. Twenty years later, New Krypton was thriving. The civilization forged by its people basking under a yellow sun was even more glorious than Krypton's peak.
Even when Krypton's greatest enemy, Brainiac, coveted New Krypton again, he suffered a crushing defeat. That detestable artificial intelligence was reduced to ashes before Zod's Invincible Armada.
And Brainiac's true form, battered and broken after being beaten and blown up, dragged itself across the ground trailing wires and sparks, and said in a stuttering electronic voice: "No... impossible... Emperor Zod is too powerful..."
And Zod, clad in gaudy gold and wearing an emperor's cape, planted a foot on its mechanical head and laughed heartily at the prosperous world he had created...
"..."
"Say, is it normal for him to be giggling so foolishly?"
Inside Zod's spaceship, Kara watched Zod—his body bound by magic and his hands tied behind his back with the Lasso of Lies—giggling foolishly in his sleep, and couldn't help but feel puzzled.
She looked at Raven, who was casting a spell beside her.
"Did your magic turn him into an idiot?"
"Don't look at me, I don't know either." The raven-haired girl shook her head. "The illusions are generated spontaneously based on their own inner thoughts. I have no idea what each of them is seeing..."
As she spoke, General Zod, still tied up on the ground, grinned again and let out a string of silly laughs, "Ehehehe," his body trembling with each giggle...
"Wow." Kara covered her mouth. "That looks pretty eerie."
This was the primary plan Orin Vale decided on after careful thought. In the movie, General Zod and his subordinates appeared fully armed in exoskeleton armor, which could block any radiation. This meant that neither Kryptonite nor a Red Sun would have much effect until their armor was damaged.
However, in the movie, even the yellow sun's radiation was initially blocked, so those Kryptonians were likely fighting Superman on relatively even terms at first, relying on their own physical prowess and the power of their black-tech exoskeletons.
But now, General Zod had been preparing for so long and had even merged with the forces from Fort Rozz. Orin Vale felt it was reasonable to believe that they had already soaked up enough sun to gain superpowers, and still had armor to block radiation.
This way, the first two of the three famous Kryptonian weaknesses were nullified—although Orin Vale felt he was perfectly capable of destroying their armor through brute force, he figured he could, but there was no need.
So, he designed this trap based on their only remaining major weakness: magic.
And when it came to magic, there were few in the world more capable than the daughter of Trigon. He first had Raven set up a barrier here beforehand, laying in wait for them to charge right into it. They were completely unaware, but the moment they charged in, they all fell into an illusion.
Then, Orin Vale hacked the spaceship's defense system, infiltrated it by phasing through the walls at supersonic speed, and used the Lasso of Lies to tie them all up tightly for good measure.
The quality of Raven's magic goes without saying, and the Lasso of Lies, even in the original work, is a divine artifact that not even the magic-wielding Wonder Woman can escape. A bunch of Kryptonians with negative magic resistance naturally stood no chance.
"I don't even know how to thank you," Superman said, looking at Orin Vale sincerely. "Things could have been so much worse. I mean, can you imagine if I'd had to fight them on the ground?"
"Thousands of people could have died! I can barely stand to imagine it."
"And there would've been hundreds of millions in property damage. Lots and lots of buildings might have collapsed," Kara chimed in.
"Yeah, and I can't afford to pay for that much damage. You know, with my meager salary from the Daily Planet..."
"Maybe the owner of one of those buildings would come after you to settle the score," Kara said with a laugh. "Maybe he's super-rich and would get a bunch of Kryptonite and an awesome suit of armor."
Superman thought for a moment. "I don't know, that sounds like something Lex Luthor would do. There couldn't be anyone else that petty, right?"
After a moment of silence, his tone suddenly became uncertain.
"R... right?"
(end of chapter)