The Arctic sun hung low and merciless, a white coin hammered against a steel sky. Clark floated twenty feet above the ice, arms spread, black suit shredded to ribbons. Yellow light poured into him like molten gold, burning away the green poison thread by thread. Every second was agony and salvation at once. His veins still glowed beneath the skin, but the glow was dimming, retreating, losing the war.
Below, Lois stood wrapped in a thermal parka, breath fogging the air. Hal hovered nearby, ring projecting a soft green dome to keep the wind off her. Jimmy sat on a supply crate, Sarah unconscious in his lap, an IV of lead-lined saline dripping into her arm—the only thing keeping the Nexus programming from rebooting.
Minutes bled into an hour. Clark's eyes snapped open—blue again, not the sickly emerald they'd been. He descended slowly, boots crunching on frost.
"How long was I out?" he asked, voice rough.
"Four hours," Lois said. "You stopped breathing twice. Hal restarted your heart with a construct defibrillator. Don't ever do that again."
Clark managed half a smile. "No promises."
Sarah stirred, moaning. Jimmy brushed hair from her face. "She's fighting it. Whatever Jimmy did with that shard scrambled the Nexus code, but it's still in her cells."
Hal's ring pinged. "Incoming transmission. Encrypted Justice League channel. It's Bruce."
Clark tapped his earpiece. Batman's voice was cold iron.
"Thorne's talking. He claims Nexus isn't one subject. It's a network. Every shard of Kryptonite on Earth has been seeded with a dormant fragment of the Nexus protocol. When enough mass is gathered, it self-assembles into a living weapon. A new you, Clark. But obedient."
Lois's eyes widened. "That's why they've been mining so aggressively. They're collecting pieces of a god."
Bruce continued. "There's a vault beneath the glacier. Thorne calls it the Crucible. That's where the final assembly happens. He activated the beacon before we took him. Forty-eight hours until critical mass."
Clark's fists clenched. The yellow sun had bought him time, not victory.
"Location?"
"Same glacier. Deeper. Sub-level 23. Reinforced with a Kryptonite/lead alloy my satellites can't penetrate. You'll be blind going in."
Clark looked at Sarah, then at Lois. "Then we don't go in blind. We go in angry."
Lois pulled a hardened tablet from her bag. "Before the Fortress shields went up, I mirrored the entire Verdant network. I've got partial schematics. Enough to know there are three convergence nodes. Destroy all three before they link, and the Nexus can't finish gestalt."
Jimmy raised a hand. "I can guide you. I spent three months inside that base. I know the patrol rotations, the blind spots, the guards who take bribes."
Sarah's eyes fluttered open—human brown, not emerald. "I… remember corridors. Cold ones. I can help too."
Clark crouched beside her. "You don't have to."
"I want to finish what they started," she whispered. "On my terms."
Hal cracked his knuckles. "Looks like we've got a team."
Lois checked her watch. "Forty-seven hours, thirty-one minutes. We hit the ice at dusk. The aurora will mask our approach."
Clark looked north, where the horizon bled green even under the sun.
"They wanted an empire of Kryptonite," he said. "They're about to learn what happens when you cage a god and then open the door."
He rose into the air, cape reforming from the last scraps of his suit, the S-shield catching the sunlight like a promise and a threat.
"Gear up," he said. "We're going to war."
Forty-six hours later.
The glacier loomed, a mountain of ice hiding a fortress of steel and poison. Five figures dropped from a cloaked Batwing: Superman in matte black, Green Lantern ring glowing low, Lois Lane in cold-weather combat armor, Jimmy Olsen carrying a backpack full of EMP grenades, and Sarah Olsen—eyes clear, fists clenched, a thin green vein still pulsing at her temple like a heartbeat she couldn't silence.
They breached at midnight.
Alarms never sounded. Jimmy knew the codes. Sarah knew the paths. Hal's ring silenced cameras. Lois planted charges on the first convergence node—a towering cylinder of refined Kryptonite the size of a skyscraper. Clark stood guard, feeling the radiation claw at him again, weaker now, but still hungry.
Node One detonated in silence—vacuum charges collapsing it into green dust.
Node Two was deeper, guarded by Nexus prototypes: failed subjects, half-human, half-something else. They moved like broken marionettes, eyes glowing, whispering in Kryptonian. Clark fought them with tears in his eyes. Every punch was mercy.
Node Two fell.
Node Three—the Crucible.
They stepped into a cathedral of ice and emerald light. At its center floated a sphere: living Kryptonite, breathing, growing, forming muscle and bone and cape. A new Superman, almost complete. Its eyes opened—pure green, no mercy, no soul.
It spoke with Clark's voice, but colder.
"Kal-El. You are obsolete."
Clark stepped forward, yellow sun still burning in his blood.
"Then come prove it."
The Crucible ignited. Green lightning arced. The final battle for Nexus began.
And somewhere in the dark, Elias Thorne smiled from his cell, watching on a hacked monitor, whispering to himself:
"Let them fight. The empire was never about winning.
It was about making sure no one else could."