*After Hours*
September in Kansas: the sky was so blue it looked as though someone had splashed it with paint, without a single cloud in sight.
Every year around this time, the town of Smallville held a small agricultural fair.
Farmers from the surrounding towns would bring their finest produce to set up stalls and make some money.
The Jonathan Kent family was no exception.
The pumpkins Jonathan grew this year were bigger than ever, and Martha insisted they had to enter them in the fair.
So Jonathan drove his sputtering old pickup truck, hauling the whole family down to the town market.
The town gas station was right on the way to the fairgrounds.
Jonathan pulled over to fill up, while Martha took John into the convenience store to buy some water.
John stood at the convenience store entrance, clutching a bottle of orange soda.
Condensation dripped down the glass bottle through his fingers, falling straight onto the toes of his shoes.
He didn’t drink it; he was watching Jonathan fill the tank.
In his past life, elevated to the highest heights, he had naturally never paid attention to such trivialities performed by “mortals.”
On the contrary, during these few years of enjoying an ordinary life, John had learned quite a lot from these mundane details.
Now, he found everything around him rather amusing.
Not far off, Jonathan held the gas nozzle with one hand and put his other hand on his hip, leaning sideways as he chatted with the station owner.
The owner was a greasy fat man with a missing button on his overalls, revealing a large stretch of his gray undershirt.
“Hey!
Jonathan, do you know how much gas is going up next month?
Fifteen cents!
Fifteen!
Damn oil companies.”
Jonathan smiled and shook his head in helpless resignation.
Right then, however, a pickup truck barged recklessly into the gas station.
John, who had been watching the area closely, naturally noticed something off and lowered his soda bottle.
*Screech—*
The pickup slammed its brakes right next to the pump, tires tearing into the concrete and leaving two black skid marks.
The sharp stench of burning rubber immediately drifted through the air.
Once the truck stopped, three men of varying builds scrambled out.
The leader was a bald man.
His shiny head gleamed in the sun, and an old scar ran across his scalp from his brow bone all the way to the top of his head.
It looked particularly repulsive.
He walked up to the station owner, stopped abruptly, leaned forward, and slammed his left palm hard onto the counter.
*Thwack!*
“Old Ford,” the bald man sneered, the corner of his mouth twitching to the right as he revealed yellowed, nicotine-stained teeth.
“Time to pay up today, ain’t it?”
The owner, Old Ford, turned pale instantly upon hearing this.
He stepped back, his back hitting the shelf behind him.
“Mike, I told you, I can’t lend you that money.
I’ll get audited.”
Before Old Ford could finish, the bald man reached across the counter and grabbed the owner by the collar.
He jammed his knuckles right beneath the man’s Adam’s apple and hoisted him upward with force.
The owner was pulled clear across the counter, his feet practically lifted off the ground.
One hand instinctively grabbed at the bald man’s fingers, while his other hand flailed wildly in the air, knocking over an opened bag of potato chips and scattering crumbs all over the floor.
“Hahaha—”
The two companions behind the bald man burst out laughing.
One had a full beard and narrow, close-set eyes.
He glanced around, reached out to snatch a bottle off a shelf, and weighed it in his hand.
*Tap, tap—*
The other, a tall, skinny guy leaning against a pump, had a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
He blew out a thick cloud of smoke, squinting at the owner.
Just then, Martha walked out of the convenience store holding two bottles of water.
Noticing the commotion over by the pumps, she paused, shoved the water bottles into John’s hands, and stepped forward.
“Jon!” she called out.
Jonathan had already hung up the gas nozzle.
His lazy stance leaning against the truck door shifted, his feet planted shoulder-width apart.
He first glanced at Martha, then at the bald man’s grip on Old Ford’s collar, before double-checking that the nozzle was securely back on the pump.
“Hey, pal…” Jonathan’s voice wasn’t loud, but it resonated with steady authority.
“Let him go.”
The bald man turned his head and looked Jonathan up and down.
A flannel shirt, worn jeans, grease-stained leather gloves.
He sneered.
“Redneck…
who the fuck are you?”
“Just a passerby.” Jonathan didn’t back down.
“No need to get rough.
Talk it out.”
The bald man released the owner and turned around.
He stood half a head taller than Jonathan.
Fueled by booze, he stepped forward aggressively until his chest was almost pressed against Jonathan’s.
The stench of liquor and sweat fermented under the midday sun into a sickening reek.
“Do you have any idea who I am?”
Jonathan didn’t answer.
“I asked if you know who I am!”
The shove came without warning.
The bald man slammed both hands into Jonathan’s chest.
Jonathan stumbled back two paces, his back hitting the metallic shell of the gas pump.
But the bald man didn’t stop there.
He let go of the owner’s collar and swung his arm out to the side.
His fingers clamped onto the rim of the iron trash can by the convenience store entrance, and he swung it up into the air.
The metal cut through the air with a dull howl, hurtling straight toward Jonathan.
Danger!
John’s pupils shrank violently in that fraction of a second.
In his field of vision, there was only the descending metal trash can and the side of Jonathan’s face, which hadn’t even fully turned around yet.
For three years, he had walked beneath the Kansas sun every day.
Aside from changes in his physical capabilities, he hadn’t experienced any other “mutations.”
That outer layer wrapped around his body was like a transparent cocoon, sealing away everything from his past life so he couldn’t draw upon it.
Yet at this very instant, a distinct surge of heat exploded right from the base of his spine.
It raced up his backbone and violently burst into his limbs.
John wasn’t even conscious of moving.
Not even the thought of *I need to get over there* had fully formed; it was a pure, instinctual desire—
*(I say, the person before me shall stand in my presence.)*
He simply wanted to shield Jonathan, and then the fucking air itself exploded.
*BOOM—*
It literally exploded.
The air surrounding his body compressed in a fraction of a second, then blasted outward.
A visible shockwave of white vapor radiated outward from him in all directions.
*Whoosh—*
By the time John flashed in front of Jonathan, the bald man’s foot hadn’t even lifted off the ground.
Height-wise, John’s face was right at chest level with the bald man.
He was four years old, barely reaching an adult’s waist.
Yet his face bore no expression a four-year-old child should ever have.
His lips peeled back—not in tears, nor in laughter, but in a terrifying curve somewhere in between, closer to a beast baring its teeth before a lethal bite.
His teeth clamped together tightly.
The jaw-clenching force was so severe his jaw trembled, and veins on his temples bulged like squirming earthworms, twitching and rolling.
His eyes flared wide with fury!
Followed by a burst of glowing red light, pouring outward from deep within his pupils like molten iron.
*CRACK!*
In the next instant, a brutal right fist whipped out from John’s waist, slamming dead-center into the bald man’s face.
The sound of fracturing bone was as crisp as stepping on a box of crackers.
A second later, the bald man went flying.
His body flipped twice in the air before smashing right through the pickup truck’s windshield.
The whole sequence took less than two seconds.
John stood where he was, his right fist still raised, a faint, lingering heat radiating from his palm.
*Fuck…
it seems my powers have recovered a bit…*
*But why now of all times?!*
*Fuck this body, fuck these powers, fuck that bald bastard and his two moronic lackeys, fuck how I always do this—act first and think about the consequences later, only to realize the fallout is staring right in Jonathan and Martha’s faces.*
I dropped my guard!
To avoid exposing how “special” he was, he had played the good little boy for three whole years.
Three years of pretending to build sandcastles, taking naps alongside diaper-wetting toddlers, smelling their snot and sour overnight milk.
Why put on the act?
Precisely because he was terrified that once his powers were revealed, Martha and Jonathan would view him as a mutated freak who killed without remorse.
He could not repeat the mistakes of his past life!
John had been with the Kent family for three whole years, and he hadn’t spent that time completely stagnant.
He had studied middle-school textbooks, received a basic education, and gained a general understanding of this world.
Superhumans?
Not a single damn one!
There were only politicians as disgusting as the Department of Defense, and a history nearly identical to his original world…
Like a fucking absurd duplicate.
Now look at this…
All that damn acting down the drain!
Still…
as long as Jonathan is okay.
He lowered his head with a touch of regret, staring intently at his right hand.
Blood dripped from his fist, and his cuff was torn open by the shockwave.
*Heh…
in his past life, he had crushed countless throats with this very hand.*
As for the consequences…
John slowly turned his head to look at Martha.
At that moment, Martha happened to be looking at him, too.
To John’s surprise, however, there was no fear in her eyes, no horrified shock of looking at a monster.
Just then, the station owner poked his head out from behind the counter, his face pale with horror.