Alex calmly knelt and quickly checked Jeremy’s cooling body.
No visible wounds.
No burns.
No suspicious marks of any kind.
The boy looked exactly like he had simply died of his severe injuries…
massive cardiac arrest directly following a catastrophic electrical overload.
A county medical examiner would eventually find deep kryptonite-irradiated cellular degradation and total organ failure.
Highly tragic, but medically explicable.
Alex carefully lifted Jeremy’s body…
noticeably lighter than expected, almost as if the brutal magical extraction had somehow taken physical mass along with the energy…
and carried him all the way to the far end of the dim utility corridor.
He gently placed him in an empty storage closet, deliberately positioned to look like the frightened boy had desperately crawled in there to hide and eventually collapsed.
Then, he firmly shut the door.
The morning janitor would finally find him tomorrow.
The local police would investigate.
The official cause of death would be quietly listed as fatal complications from long-term meteor exposure.
Another depressing entry on the Wall of Weird.
Another senseless tragedy in a farm town already entirely full of them.
No one would ever look for a killer, simply because there was absolutely nothing to suggest one actually existed.
Alex silently slipped back out through the service entrance.
The night air was wonderfully cool and clean.
Brilliant stars spread endlessly across the black Kansas sky in a dense, beautiful tapestry that you simply never saw in polluted cities.
The expansive parking lot was incredibly quiet…
most of the excited dance attendees were still happily inside, totally oblivious to what had just happened in the dark utility corridor.
Alex walked slowly home in the dark, his massive, doubled magical core humming quietly and steadily in his chest like a powerful second heartbeat.
When he finally reached the quiet group home, he went straight to his room, locked the thin door, sat cross-legged on his bed, and deeply meditated.
He purposefully cycled the new, raw energy through his expanding core for hours.
Aggressively testing its limits.
Carefully mapping its new contours.
Deeply learning its complex rhythms.
By the exact time he finished, somewhere near three in the morning, he had fully, perfectly integrated the harvested mana.
It was entirely his now.
Completely indistinguishable from his own native reserves.
He slowly opened his eyes and extended his right hand into the darkness.
“Lumos.”
Pure, clean light violently bloomed from his palm…
not the faint, pathetic, guttering spark that had been his absolute best effort just last week, but a steady, brilliantly warm glow that instantly filled the entire room.
Bright enough to easily read by.
Bright enough to make the dark shadows completely retreat into the far corners.
He held it effortlessly for thirty seconds.
His massive reserves barely even dipped.
Alex smoothly extinguished the light and lay back heavily on his creaky bed.
He stared quietly at the water-stained ceiling in the comforting darkness.
Back in the Marvel Universe, his long path to absolute power had been incredibly long and twisting…
many hard years of intense study, brutal training, and complex alliance-building before he ever reached the exalted level of Supreme Sorcerer.
He had ruthlessly clawed his way up through infinite patience, sharp intellect, and the occasional application of absolute, brutal force.
Here, the path was obviously simpler.
Much darker.
But incredibly faster.
Every few weeks, a brand new one inevitably appeared…
a new threat, a new crisis, a new unavoidable tragedy.
And every single one of them carried massive energy that Alex could easily harvest.
Clark would step up and save the innocent.
That was his essential role.
His pure calling.
His ultimate destiny.
Alex would handle the rest.
Sunday Morning
Alex was casually sitting on the cracked wooden steps of the group home, tightly lacing his running shoes for his grueling morning workout, when a sleek black Mercedes smoothly pulled up onto the gravel driveway.
The driver’s door opened and a massive man in a sharp dark suit quickly stepped out…
clearly a highly trained chauffeur or bodyguard.
He walked purposefully around the vehicle and opened the rear passenger door.
Lex Luthor climbed out.
He actually looked significantly better than the last time Alex had seen him…
which admittedly wasn’t a very high bar, since the last time he had been half-drowned and violently coughing up dirty river water.
Today, he wore a flawlessly tailored grey suit with no tie, paired perfectly with a dark purple shirt beneath it.
His scalp was perfectly smooth and clean.
His posture was totally impeccable, despite a very slight, guarded stiffness in his left shoulder…
heavily bruised ribs, probably, from the violent crash and the desperate CPR.
He looked exactly like what he truly was: the twenty-one-year-old billionaire heir to a massive, global empire, standing awkwardly in the dusty gravel parking lot of a depressing county group home on the absolute outskirts of nowhere, looking slightly out of place but entirely, confidently comfortable with it.
“Alex Carter,” Lex greeted smoothly.
“Lex Luthor.” Alex intentionally didn’t stand up.
“I would honestly say this is a surprise, but billionaires generally don’t visit rundown group homes without a very specific reason.”
Something sparked brightly across Lex’s face.
Genuine amusement.
The very faintest upward twitch of his lips.
“I wanted to thank you personally,” Lex said.
He walked closer and stopped right at the bottom of the wooden steps, looking up at Alex.
“You jumped headfirst into a freezing river and actively pulled a total stranger out of a sinking car. That definitely isn’t something most normal people would ever do.”
“Most normal people don’t crash their expensive Porsches into rivers.”
The faint twitch fully blossomed into an actual smile.
“Fair point.”
He paused for a beat.
“I also wanted to thank Clark Kent, but I naturally stopped by the Kent Farm first. He was… characteristically humble about the whole dramatic thing.”
“That sounds exactly like Clark.”
Lex studied him intently.
It was the exact same analytical, piercing gaze that Alex had noticed back at the muddy riverbank…
measuring, cataloguing, filing critical information away.
Lex Luthor clearly processed people the exact same way Chloe Sullivan processed news stories.
He just did it much more quietly.
“You live here,” Lex stated.
Not a question.
He glanced critically at the group home…
the badly peeling paint, the visibly sagging porch, the totally rusted rain gutters.
“I do.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Parents?”
“None.”
He didn’t offer any fake sympathy.
He didn’t look away awkwardly.
He simply acknowledged the cold fact and moved right on.
Alex actually appreciated that significantly more than he would have ever expected.
“I have a strict policy,” Lex said smoothly.
“When someone actually saves my life, I like to make absolutely sure they know the massive debt is acknowledged. I am definitely not in the habit of leaving accounts unsettled.”
He reached smoothly into his expensive jacket and produced a crisp business card…
heavy cream stock, elegant embossed lettering.
Lex Luthor.
LuthorCorp Fertilizer Plant No. 3.
Smallville, Kansas.
A direct phone number was printed neatly beneath it.
On the back, in handwritten blue ink, was a second, private number…
personal, Alex easily guessed.
“If you ever need anything,” Lex said, holding out the thick card, “call that number.”
Alex slowly took the card.
He looked at it.
Then, he looked right back at Lex.
In the old television show, Lex Luthor’s tragic fall was the deeply sad tragedy of a man who was genuinely born good and was systematically made evil…
by his cruel father, by his own dark obsession, and by Clark Kent’s relentless, paranoid refusal to ever trust him with the simple truth.
Every single time Lex bravely reached out, Clark instinctively pulled away.
Every time Lex asked a perfectly reasonable question, Clark shamelessly lied.
And eventually, the desperate questions turned into obsessive investigations, and the investigations turned into deep betrayal, and the betrayal finally turned into all-out war.
Alex had helplessly watched it happen on a glowing television screen in another life and felt the utterly pointless, tragic waste of it all.
He was absolutely not going to let it happen again.
“I appreciate it,” Alex said quietly.
He carefully pocketed the card.
“And just for the record… you honestly don’t owe me anything. I jumped because someone was actively drowning. That isn’t a debt. That’s just what you do.”
Lex looked at him in total silence for a very long moment.
Then, he nodded…
slowly, thoughtfully, almost like Alex had just said something truly worth remembering.
“You are an incredibly unusual fifteen-year-old, Alex Carter.”
“You have absolutely no idea,” Alex replied dryly.
Lex smiled again.
And this time, it actually reached his eyes.
He turned smoothly, walked back to his idling car, and got in.
The massive Mercedes smoothly pulled away, tires crunching loudly over the loose gravel, and quickly disappeared down Miller Road.
Alex watched it go until it was completely out of sight.
Then, he tightly laced his running shoes, stood up, and started running.
He had a very long way to go.
Miles to cover.
A magical core to heavily strengthen.
Spells to modify to this world.
And somewhere out in the vast, quiet fields of Smallville, buried deep in the dirt or sleeping in sterile hospital beds or walking blindly through crowded school hallways without knowing what was growing inside them, the next harvest was waiting.
Clark Kent would save the world.
Alex Carter would save Clark Kent.
And if the world got a little darker in the process…
well.
That was just the cost of doing business.