Factories thundered day and night, their smokestacks belching smoke into skies already blackened by war. But it was not tanks or rifles that poured from the assembly lines anymore. It was serum. It was syringes. It was containment units. The Zar' Eth had changed everything.
Chris Reeves walked the length of the lab floor, his notes tucked beneath his arm, watching soldiers—barely boys—file in for injections. Compound V had been stabilized, yes, but stabilized did not mean uniform. Some emerged titans, their fists strong enough to crack Zar' Eth bone. Others flickered with sparks, or twisted into grotesque shapes, their gifts more curse than weapon.
For every one who walked out stronger, three were carried out on stretchers.
Vought didn't care. If anything, he welcomed the chaos. To him, every success was a new "hero" to parade before the cameras, every failure a secret to bury. With the Zar' Eth pushing humanity to the brink, Frederick Vought played his hand—he sold Compound V not as desperate science, but as salvation. He shook hands with generals, whispered promises to senators, and signed contracts with studios.
The United States manufactured soldiers. Vought manufactured superheroes. The empire he had always dreamed of had found its foundation.
Chris ignored the speeches, ignored the banners plastered with Soldier Boy's grin. He buried himself in research. Stability wasn't enough. The Zar' Eth were too strong, too relentless. They weren't being defeated—only delayed.
And then the Soviets delivered a prize.
In a crate hauled from the front, blackened and cracked but still alive with power, lay a captured Zar' Eth wormhole gate. Its obsidian ring pulsed with golden light, the air around it humming faintly as though alive. The generals wanted weapons. Vought wanted leverage. Chris wanted answers.
He spent days with it. Weeks. He siphoned fragments of its energy, spliced them with Compound V, sketched diagrams of impossible geometries. The glow of the gate haunted his dreams. If he could fuse the stability of his serum with this golden energy, he thought, they could create Supes powerful enough not just to match the Zar' Eth, but to surpass them. Supes who could win.
Cecil found him one night, staring into the light, the golden shimmer reflected in his glasses.
"You ever think some doors aren't meant to be opened?" Cecil asked.
Chris didn't look away. "Every law of science says this energy shouldn't exist. Which means it's the most important discovery of our time. If I can bind it to Compound V, we can end this war."
Cecil shook his head, lighting a cigarette. "Or start the next one."
The words didn't stop him. Nothing could.
The night it happened, the lab was empty but for him. Tanks of Compound V lined the walls, their blue glow beating like hearts. The gate pulsed brighter than ever, its light spilling across the floor in golden waves. Chris fed the energy into containment cells, merged it with samples of the serum, and finally, with shaking hands, initiated the final test.
For a moment, it worked. The energy stabilized. The readings soared. On his chalkboard, equations balanced that had no right to balance. For a heartbeat, Chris Reeves thought he had done it—perfected the formula.
Then the gate screamed.
The golden light erupted, bursting from its cracks. Compound V shattered its containers, flooding the lab. The two forces met, clashing, fusing, detonating in a blinding storm.
Cecil, racing down the hall at the first alarms, saw only the explosion. Saw Chris's body disintegrate into atoms, torn apart before his eyes. The blast shook the complex. When it cleared, there was nothing left.
The world believed Christopher Reeves died that night.
But his atoms did not drift apart. They fused. Compound V, golden dimensional energy, and human genius, bound together. Where Viltrumites were born of Smart Atoms, Chris Reeves was remade of G-Atoms—golden particles woven with intent, indestructible, eternal.
The boy genius was gone.
And in his place, the seed of Mr. Miracle was born.