Clark flew up hard, high enough that the city shrank beneath him, then came back down with everything behind it.
He hit Zod like a missile.
The impact drove them both through the street and into the foundation beneath it, concrete and steel collapsing around them, and when the dust cleared Clark had Zod pinned against what remained of a support column.
He grabbed the helmet and pulled.
The seal broke and the helmet cracked apart and the Metropolis air hit Zod's face directly, yellow sunlight finding him for the first time without the suit filtering it.
Clark stepped back.
Zod straightened up, jaw tight, ready to continue.
Then stopped.
His eyes moved without his permission, cutting straight through the concrete wall beside him, through the building behind it, through three more blocks of city without stopping.
His hearing spiked without warning, every sound in Metropolis hitting him simultaneously, ten thousand conversations and sirens and collapsing structures and crying children all at once at full volume.
It was all coming at the same time with nothing to filter any of it.
Zod's hands went to his head.
"Ahhh," he said, the word tearing out of him, not a battle cry, just pain. "What is happening?"
He dropped to one knee, the most disciplined soldier Krypton ever produced brought down not by a punch but by a yellow sun doing to his cells in seconds what had taken Clark a lifetime of gradual exposure.
His body didn't know what to do with any of it.
"What did you do to me?" Zod roared, still on one knee, hands pressed against his head.
Clark looked at him and understood exactly what was happening. He had lived through it himself, slowly, over years, the Earth rewriting his cells one sunrise at a time.
"It's the change this planet brings," Clark said. "It takes time to adjust."
He paused.
"And it will be painful."
Then he drove his fist into Zod's jaw and sent him through the building behind him.
Clark straightened up and looked at the ship hanging above Metropolis.
He had seen enough.
His people had chosen this. Had looked at a living world full of people and chosen to erase it. There was no conversation left to have, no version of this that ended with both sides walking away.
He had chosen the human side.
He flew toward the ship.
Faora came out of nowhere and hit him mid flight, the impact sending them both sideways across the skyline.
Then the second one appeared, eight feet of engineered Kryptonian built like a wall, and before Clark could recover the big one grabbed him and threw him straight down toward the city with everything he had.
Faora came in first, fast and precise, hitting Clark across the jaw before he could set his footing, the impact sending him into a building face first.
She was already on him before he pulled himself out of the wall, a knee to the ribs, an elbow across the back of his neck driving him down.
Clark got up.
The eight foot one grabbed him by the throat with both hands and swung him into the street hard enough to crater the asphalt, then lifted him again before the dust settled and threw him through two buildings in a straight line.
Clark hit the third building and stopped himself, hands gripping the steel frame.
Faora was already there.
She hit him again, driving him back through the hole he had just made, and the big one caught him on the other side and slammed him into the ground again, methodical, two of them working together the way soldiers work, no wasted motion, no emotion, just removal of an obstacle.
Clark took another hit across the face that snapped his head sideways.
Then another.
He hit the ground and stayed there for a second, the street cracked around him, both of them standing over him.
He looked up at the eight foot one.
His eyes burned red.
The heat vision hit the big Kryptonian square in the chest and drove him backward across three blocks, crashing through everything in his path before he hit a building and stayed there.
Clark got up.
Then the black meteorites came down from the sky.
One after another, screaming through the atmosphere straight at the ship, each one hitting the hull and detonating on impact, the blasts chaining through the structure, each explosion feeding the next, the ship shuddering above Metropolis like something being taken apart bolt by bolt.
Faora looked up.
She jumped for it immediately.
Clark was in front of her before she cleared ten feet.
She hit him instead of the sky and they collided mid air, trading hits above the street, Faora trying to push through, Clark holding the line, neither of them giving ground, the shockwaves from each exchange raining debris down on the streets below.
Above them the chain blasts kept hitting the ship.
Daniel floated in the sky above Metropolis, hands loose at his sides, watching the black meteorites he had sent down continue their work on the hull, each detonation feeding the next, the chain reaction spreading through the ship's core systems now.
Below him Diana moved through the streets pulling survivors out of collapsed structures, her shield clearing debris, the lasso pulling people from gaps too small to reach any other way.
Further down Clark and Faora were still going, two Kryptonians hitting each other hard enough to shake the buildings around them.
Daniel looked at all of it and then looked back at the ship.
"Yeah," he said. "It's time you guys left Earth."
He raised his hand and sent another black meteorite into the hull.
The chain blast that followed split the lower section clean from the upper and the ship began to list sideways above the city, no longer holding position, gravity starting to make decisions for it.
*****
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