A middle-aged man living in Metropolis heard a rumbling sound in the distance.
He didn’t look around in a panic like the tourists on the street, nor did he take out his phone to take pictures.
He simply switched the shopping bags in his hands to the other side and continued walking toward his home.
More restless super-powered individuals causing trouble again.
This kind of thing isn’t news in Metropolis a few times every month, someone thinks they’re strong enough to challenge the ruler of this city.
And then they would learn that they weren’t strong enough, and Ultraman would handle it.
It had always been this way.
Many people feared Ultraman; behind his back, everyone described him as a dictator, a tyrant who ruled Metropolis through fear.
The middle-aged man had once thought so too or rather, he had once been taught to think so.
But that was a long time ago.
He stopped at a traffic light at an intersection, his gaze falling on the silhouette of that U-shaped building in the distance.
Memories welled up uncontrollably, dragging him back to that day years ago that changed everything.
…
That day, a massive spaceship descended upon the skies of Earth.
It didn’t appear slowly; it just suddenly manifested outside the atmosphere, obscuring half the sky.
Ominous dark red light flowed across the surface of the hull, like a giant open eye looking down at the ant-like humans on the ground.
Then it opened fire, without warning, without an ultimatum, and without any of the ultimatums aliens sent in the movies.
A beam of light shot from the bottom of the hull, striking a city on the East Coast.
That city vanished from the horizon, right there on everyone’s live television broadcast.
It wasn’t blown up, it wasn’t burned down; it vanished as if someone had used an eraser to wipe it off the map.
Human governments deployed all available military force: missiles, fighter jets, orbital weapon platforms, and in the end, they even launched nuclear bombs.
That warhead, carrying humanity’s ultimate fear and ultimate trump card, flew toward the alien spaceship trailing a white wake, exploding into a small Sun on its surface.
Then the fire dissipated, and the hull remained intact.
It didn’t even leave a scratch.
Everyone fell into despair; the host’s voice on television was trembling, the internet was filled with doomsday rhetoric, churches were packed with people praying, and even more people chose to rush home to spend their final moments with their families.
Then, that figure stood out.
A red cape, a blue bodysuit, and a sharp, angular U-shaped emblem on his chest.
That was the existence everyone usually feared, the target of the media’s scathing criticism, the name parents used to scare disobedient children Ultraman.
Ultraman flew toward that spaceship, all alone…
At the time, he was still a young man.
That day, he should have been hiding in a shelter with his family, but an inexplicable impulse made him break free from his father’s hand, running against the tide of people toward a highland with an open view.
He wanted to see with his own eyes what the battle of the strong looked like. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
And he saw it.
He saw Ultraman, known as the God of Mankind, hit head-on by a beam of light, falling like a meteorite from high in the sky and smashing into the distant mountain range; the entire mountain trembled.
Then Ultraman stood up, flew up again, was knocked down again, stood up once more, and flew up once more.
Each fall was heavier than the last, and each time he stood up, it was slower than the last.
But Ultraman’s back never changed direction.
The young man crouched on the ground, his fingernails digging into the dirt.
The concepts he had been instilled with in the past told him that the man was a bad guy, a dictator, the greatest threat to Earth.
But at that moment, watching that red and blue figure crawl out of the deep crater again, wobbling as he flew toward that sky-covering spaceship, his lips moved involuntarily.
“Come on, Ultraman.”
The voice was so small that even he couldn’t hear it clearly.
But he knew that in that moment, he had meant it from the bottom of his heart.
Later, the spaceship was repelled.
When Ultraman fell from the sky, he was covered in wounds, half of his cape was burned away, and the blood on his face almost completely obscured his face.
But Ultraman was standing.
From that day on, this man never cursed Ultraman in his heart again.
Because he knew that in this World where super-criminals were everywhere, it was precisely because of Ultraman that ordinary people like them had a chance to live normally.
…
The memory ended.
The green light turned on.
The middle-aged man carried his shopping bags and continued walking home.
A dull thud came from the distance, identical to the sound from years ago.
He did not look back.
What was that?
A bird?
A plane?
It’s Ultraman!
Ultraman tore through the air at extreme speed, his cape trailing behind him in a red straight line.
His target was the figure observing from the rooftop.
His fist crossed the distance of hundreds of meters in a fraction of a second, carrying enough kinetic energy to pierce a mountain, aiming directly for Lex Luthor’s face.
Lex Luthor didn’t dodge; the moment the fist was about to touch his nose bridge, his eyes lit up with blinding white light, and he raised a hand, steadily catching the punch.
The shockwave generated by the collision of fist and palm spread out from the rooftop, and the glass curtain walls of several surrounding buildings shattered simultaneously, pouring down like a rain of crystal. Get faster updates on novelping dot com.
Lex Luthor tightened his five fingers, gripping Ultraman’s fist, rotated his body, and threw him backhand.
Ultraman stopped in mid-air, his body instantaneously coming to a halt in defiance of the laws of inertia, and then he shot back in the opposite direction at the same speed.
A kick, landing squarely on Lex Luthor’s chest.
Lex Luthor was kicked away, crashing through the water tower behind him; rusty iron sheets and residual water exploded outward, and he flipped twice in mid-air before barely steadying himself.
“Lex Luthor, are you done playing your game of hide-and-seek?” Ultraman looked coldly at the red-haired man opposite him.
It was truly ironic in this World, Lex Luthor actually had a full head of thick hair, and paired with that robust physique, if he didn’t speak, he looked almost like an upright superhero from a distance.
But Ultraman knew better than anyone that he wasn’t.
This Lex Luthor was completely different from the Lex Luthor of the main Universe who possessed genius intellect and the belief in human supremacy; he was no idealist, nor was he a defender of humanity.
He was just a Raider who would stop at nothing to become stronger; his ability was called Shazam, and he could gain power by shouting a specific word to summon lightning.
But that wasn’t enough his true ability was to kill other super-powered individuals and absorb their power for his own use.
When Ultraman founded the Ultimate League back then, he had even thought about bringing him into the fold; after all, talent was hard to come by, and he believed people could change and could be guided.
So Ultraman found Lex Luthor and talked with him, talked about rules, about order, and about the possibility of a super-criminal also being able to live a decent life by behaving themselves.
Lex Luthor’s answer.
was to slaughter the other members of the Ultimate League, drain their powers, and then dump the bodies at the entrance of Ultraman Building.
Afterward, in order to lure out more targets, he created several more large-scale chaotic events, deliberately slaughtering ordinary people just to force the Ultimate League to send someone to stop him.
This person had no bottom line, no principles, and not even a decent ambition he just wanted to become stronger, not caring about the means or the cost.
“You should know that I have run out of patience with you.” Ultraman hung in mid-air, his voice like ice, “I don’t need the chaos you bring.”
“Hahaha, chaos.” Lex Luthor’s eyes beneath his red hair flashed with blue light; it wasn’t the Shazam light Ultraman was familiar with, but some deeper, more violent energy fluctuation.
“Ultraman, you really know how to joke; in human society, you are the greatest chaos. What? Are you still thinking about putting the entire World inside a bottle?”
Putting it into a bottle.
Hearing these four words, Ultraman’s expression didn’t change, but a corner of his heart stirred.
This sentence was too iconic.
In countless parallel Universes of DC, “Why don’t you put the entire World in a bottle?” had its most famous origin in the conversation Superman had when he landed in the Soviet Union, became a Red Son, and faced his Universe’s Lex Luthor.
But this sentence shouldn’t have come from Lex Luthor’s mouth.
This World’s Lex Luthor was simply not someone who would ponder existential propositions; he was more like a mindless Raider holding a Raider license.
Had something changed about Lex Luthor?
Ultraman suppressed these thoughts and refocused his gaze on the opponent in front of him.
“What, do you want to represent humanity to overthrow me?”
Ultraman’s tone was very flat, as if he were asking a question he already knew the answer to, but in reality, a flash of excitement crossed his heart.