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Clark crawled up from the mud.
He clutched his aching chest, his eyes filled with total confusion.
For the first time in his eight years of life, he experienced what it felt like to be knocked completely off balance.
But his confusion didn’t last long before he saw the blonde girl in the distance choking his brother’s neck.
“Ariel—!”
The ground exploded, leaving a crater in the mud.
With a thunderous leap, the eight-year-old boy slammed violently into the girl.
BANG—!
The two small bodies collided.
The dull, heavy crash shook the leaves right off the trees, and the brute force of the impact forced the girl to release her grip.
Clark landed right in front of Ariel.
He panted heavily, turning around to show off his reliability as a big brother.
“Ariel, are you alr—”
“GET OFF ME!”
A low snarl rang out.
The golden storm returned in a flash.
The girl slammed into Clark again, head-first.
BOOM!
Clark didn’t even get to finish his sentence before the girl tackled him straight into the depths of the cornfield, rolling across the dirt.
Ariel touched his reddened neck and coughed hard a couple of times.
In the distance, whole swathes of cornstalks flattened like waves in an ocean.
Miniature tornadoes shifted back and forth across the farmland.
Was this the first clash between Superman and Home…
er…
Homelander Girl?
In any case, if a photographer were here right now, this scene would definitely be enshrined in the 31st Century Superhero Museum.
But unfortunately, all Ariel could see right now were two unruly kids in mud pits, pulling each other’s hair, tearing each other’s clothes, and swinging wild, uncoordinated punches.
After pondering for a moment, the Golden Lion of Smallville decided not to get involved in this Ragnarok-level brawl that looked like two elementary schoolers fighting over a snack.
Standing in the shade of the tree, he evaluated the guy who was supposedly his uncle.
“Wake up!”
Ariel squatted down.
Slap!
Slap!
Windup arms, two solid, heavy slaps right across the man’s face.
“Wake up!
Uncle!”
Slap!
Slap!
Another back-and-forth pair of slaps, but the man’s eyelids didn’t even quiver.
Instead, Ariel shook his stinging hand and sucked in a cold breath.
Why the hell was this guy’s face so thick?
Chug-chug-chug-chug!
Spewing black smoke, the tractor driven by the old farmer rushed to the scene.
His eyes widened as they landed on the chaotic storm tearing through the cornfield.
“Ariel!
What happened?!”
“Didn’t we pay our taxes this year?
Why did the IRS send an armored vehicle?!” Jonathan yelled in anger.
“See for yourself,” Ariel sighed.
Jonathan narrowed his eyes to look.
Slowly, an expression of…
old-fatherly relief emerged on his honest, simple face.
“Good Lord,” Jonathan marvelled.
“There’s actually a child who can play together with Clark?
It’s a miracle!”
Ariel’s eye twitched wildly.
“No!
Dad, look closely!” he said crossly, pointing at the cornfield.
“Where on earth does that look like playing?!
Your eldest son is about to be eaten alive!”
Jonathan froze for a moment, only then realizing something was wrong.
“Anyway, take a look at this guy first,” Ariel said, giving Jonathan no chance to break up the fight, pointing toward the shade behind them.
CLANG!
A wrench dropped onto the ground.
“Is he back?!”
“Could it be…?” Ariel played along, putting on a shocked expression.
“I told you guys last night at dinner, I have a younger brother,” Jonathan sighed.
“That is to say, your uncle.”
“But why is he unconscious?” The old farmer was somewhat bewildered.
“Long story…” Ariel patted Jonathan’s rear like a little adult.
“We need to wake him up fast now, or else our bumper crop this year will only net us stripped cornstalks.”
Hearing this, Jonathan turned his head in even greater shock.
He looked at the storm in the distance, then looked at his younger brother on the ground.
The old farmer’s brain was clearly overloading.
How come the kids of the two Kent brothers…
Both looked so much like bulldozers?
No, now was not the time to think about such things.
Jonathan shook his head, throwing the absurd thought out of his mind.
He lunged to Benjamin’s side and shook his shoulders violently.
“Ben!
Wake up!
Ben!”
So it really is Uncle Ben?
Ariel sighed.
Did I get the Little Spidey script this time around?
“Benjamin Kent!
Open your eyes!
It’s Jonathan!”
No response.
And in the distant cornfield, the sounds of fighting continued relentlessly.
Jonathan grew anxious.
Looking at this face that was just as indifferent as in his memories, a surge of anger that had built up for over a decade suddenly rushed to his head.
He raised his palm.
Slap!
Slap!
Of course, it was useless—it only hurt Jonathan’s own hand.
“Get up!
You bastard!” Jonathan’s voice cracked, blue veins bulging on his forehead.
“Benjamin!
It’s been thirty years!
When faced with trouble, are you still only going to lie on the ground and play dead like a spineless coward?!
You coward!”
“I’M NOT A FUCKING COWARD!”
With a low roar, the playing-dead Benjamin suddenly shivered, his eyes snapping wide open.
An angry, aging face hovered directly above him.
“Dad?!” he shouted in a sudden panic.
“…It’s me.” Jonathan slapped his forehead.
What a dramatic family reunion drama this was.
Ariel clicked his tongue.
People always thought it was hard to wake someone who was pretending to be asleep or going crazy…
In truth, it wasn’t hard at all.
You just had to strike the exact word that touched his deepest insecurity, and he would jump up like a stray cat that just got its butt scalded…
Although Jonathan didn’t understand psychology, he clearly knew how to hit a Kent where it hurt.
“Jo…
Jonathan?”
Benjamin frowned, instinctively reaching for his rear, feeling the lingering waves of numbness throughout his body…
The PTSD from his days in boot camp surged up instantly.
His pupils dilated wildly.
He covered his rear with both hands, scrambling backward in the mud.
“FUCK!!” The man let out an earth-shattering roar.
“Jonathan?!
Aren’t you the biggest redneck in this damn town?!
Are you so old now that you have to rely on this to get it up?!”
Standing under the tree, Ariel silently covered his face with his hand.
Whose Uncle Ben is this unhinged?!
If Spider-Man saw this, he’d turn into a giant spider monster on the spot!
In the distant cornfield.
Hearing the voices of their respective fathers, the kids stopped tumbling.
Jonathan stood frozen in place.
“You bastard…” Trembling, he pointed at Benjamin, unable to speak for a long moment.
The caring lines he had rehearsed night after night over the oil lamp were completely stuck in his throat, and he didn’t want to say a single word of them to this guy anymore.
Two men in their late forties stared at each other like that.
“Um…”
Not until Ariel pointed toward the cornfield.
“Uncle Ben, no matter how tenderly you stare into my dad’s eyes, my dad isn’t going to give you his ass.”
Uncle Ben glared furiously.
“Brat!
What the fuck did you just say?!”
Ariel nodded obediently.
“Alright, Uncle Ass.”
“Hey, you—”
“Enough!”
“Whatever it is, we’ll talk inside later.
It’s bad if the neighbors hear the noise,” Jonathan said, glancing at the cornfield.
In Smallville, sounds traveled far.
“So what if they hear?
It’s not like that old bastard next door is still alive, is he?”
“Wait, he’s actually not dead?”
Seeing Jonathan stay silent, Benjamin chuckled to himself.
Old Thaddeus really was just like the salted fish hanging in his yard—he lived long and stank just as bad.
“Just as well.
I’ll head over right now and scare him to death, saving him the trouble of using binoculars from his second-floor barn every day to spy on Martha.”
“Enough!
I told you thirty years ago there was nothing like that!”
“God’s toilet seat!
Then I’ll speak plainly.
Where the hell would a robin come from in Smallville?
Why don’t you say the old salted fish was actually looking at your little bird?”
“Ben!
You…”
“Jonathan, don’t put on that old-man posture with me—”
“Uncle!
Old Thaddeus’s binoculars have always only been pointed at the cornfield.”
Interrupted mid-sentence by Ariel raising his hand, Uncle Ben froze.
But as a Soldier Boy type, he still had to mumble a slurred curse: “F***k, then he definitely had his eyes on you, blonde pretty boy.
Tsk…
like a girl.
You look like the kind of cub scout a priest would target.”
Question marks popped up all over Ariel’s head.
“Alright, stop arguing, both of you.”
Having no heart to deal with his foolish younger brother, Jonathan looked at the storm still raging in the cornfield, tightened his grip on the wrench in his hand, and strode forward, about to charge into the mud.
“I’ll do it.”
A heavy hand clamped onto his shoulder.
Benjamin spat on the ground.
“You’ve got old bones.
Don’t go joining in the damn commotion.”
“If you break apart, I don’t have the money to pay your medical bills.”
“But you—”
“Enough!”
“I say, with great power comes great responsibility,” Uncle Ben interrupted him, revealing a resolute look in his eyes.
“Jonathan, are you deaf?”
Looking up and down at this younger brother he hadn’t seen in years, various memories of the past flooded back into Jonathan’s mind.
Jonathan’s eyes turned red.
Alright, he took back what he just thought about this guy.
Although he didn’t know why Benjamin’s mouth had become so foul, that cowardly trash from back then was truly much, much beefier than in his memory.
His muscles bulged so hard they almost burst through the ragged plaid shirt he wore.
The old farmer didn’t know what this guy had experienced out there over the years, but one thing was crystal clear: the bastard who used to shrink his head and run away whenever trouble hit now possessed power.
He had the strength to shield others behind him, and most importantly, he had a daughter.
He even said “with great power comes great responsibility.”
He really had grown up.
“I’ll leave it to you, Ben,” the old farmer said, rubbing his big son’s hair next to him, feeling deeply relieved.
“Now don’t go embarrassing yourself in front of your nephew.”
“…Huh?”
Benjamin, who had been savoring Jonathan’s subtle facial expressions—feeling ten times higher than smoking weed—froze mid-stride the moment he heard the word nephew.
“Nephew?”
“Two of them,” Jonathan added proudly.
Uncle Ben felt a sudden itching in his brain.
Only then did he abruptly realize something…
He looked at the blonde brat grinning under the tree’s shade, then turned his head to look at the terrifying human cub in the cornfield who had headbutted him—a top-tier metahuman who hadn’t slept in half a year—into a faint.
A sense of absurdity rose spontaneously, giving Benjamin goosebumps.
Could it be that Compound V, which Vought and the military had spent decades and countless resources on, killing innumerable test subjects to create, was a complete joke?
It wasn’t a biological miracle at all?!
It was just blood?
This girl and he were this strong simply because Kent blood ran through their veins?!
After all, that old square Jonathan just married Martha, and the kid they produced could smash a tree in half with a headbutt!
Damn it!
Why on earth did he give up on Martha back then to join the army?!
What a dog-shit world!
Questioning his entire existence, Benjamin gritted his teeth and charged toward the wreckage.
BANG!
His military boots stomped into the muddy water, splashing mud everywhere.
He ran hard, his back giving off the unyielding, battle-hardened aura of a veteran.
It was dragged out long, like a slow-motion shot in a movie.
Watching him, Jonathan felt even prouder.
Except the problem was that the cornfield was roughly five hundred meters away from the shade of the tree.
Yet for such a short distance, Benjamin ran for a whole minute, leaving father and son standing awkwardly under the shade for a full minute.
This made Jonathan, who was used to Superman’s speed, frown uncontrollably.
“Your Uncle Ben…
why is he running so slow?”
“This is normal human speed, Dad,” Ariel suppressed a laugh.
“Maybe my uncle is…
warming up?”
BANG—!
Two short exclamations of surprise came from deep within the cornfield.
The raging storm finally ceased.
Only after a long while were the cornstalks ahead roughly pushed aside.
Benjamin walked out, a mud-covered brat tucked under each arm.
Clark was on the left, helplessly kicking his short legs in the air.
He seemed unable to comprehend how someone could suppress him with a single hand.
The blonde girl was on the right.
She had initially been hissing frantically like a wild cat, but the moment she smelled the tobacco scent on Benjamin, all her aggression vanished instantly.
She clutched Benjamin’s plaid shirt tightly, staying completely still like a hedgehog burying its head in the sand.
Walking up to the two of them, Benjamin loosened his grip.
Splat.
The two little ones were carelessly dropped onto the muddy ground.
“Look, the lambs tear at each other in the mire, while the old dog wearing a wolf’s skin finally returns to the fold.
Amen.”
He uttered a casual prayer.
And then…
“As a priest, I’ve now counseled you.
Neither of you fucking fight anymore, got it?!” Uncle Ben glared fiercely at the two brats.
Clark rubbed his bottom aggrievedly, then climbed up like nothing had happened.
He casually slapped the muddy handprints off his chest, shuffled over to Ariel’s side, and started whispering.
The girl, meanwhile, silently shrank behind Benjamin’s leg.
“Let go!
Don’t hold on so damn tight!
My pants are coming down—do you want all of Kansas to see your dad’s underwear?!” Benjamin shook his leg in annoyance.
However, the girl didn’t care.
Her small hands remained clamped onto Benjamin’s pant leg as she stared guardedly at Clark and Ariel on the opposite side, her eyes still fierce.
Staring back at the Homelander cub while listening to the Kryptonian cub whispering in his ear, Ariel couldn’t help but sigh in his heart, thinking that his future was looking utterly bleak.
As for Jonathan, his eyebrows knit slightly.
Why was Benjamin talking like this now?
He had to temporarily revoke his positive evaluation of this guy.
He knew that back in the day, even though this guy lived a decadent life of drinking and partying, he hadn’t been the type to spew curses with every single sentence.
Ignoring the loser whom he had once again stamped as irredeemable, Jonathan spoke gently to the girl.
“Are you hungry, child?”