Wednesday…
The Arkin House
Alex didn’t go to the abandoned foundry.
He went directly to Greg Arkin’s house.
The Arkin property was a deeply run-down, sad ranch house located squarely on a dead-end dirt road south of town.
The front yard was wildly overgrown with dying weeds.
The cheap white paint was aggressively peeling.
A rusted-out, ancient pickup truck sat heavily on cracked cinder blocks right in the middle of the cracked driveway.
All the windows were completely dark…
Greg’s terrified mother had been abruptly hospitalized just two days ago after a brutal “accident” that the Smallville PD was currently actively investigating as a violent domestic assault.
Alex stood quietly on the dark road and slowly extended his heightened magical senses.
The entire house violently pulsed with raw meteor energy.
Not the sharp, highly focused magical signature of a single infected individual, but a massive, diffuse, buzzing cloud…
thousands upon thousands of tiny sources completely overlapping, creating a dense wall of ambient radiation that physically made the small kryptonite fragment hidden safely in Alex’s backpack vibrate sympathetically against his spine.
Bugs.
Literal millions of them.
Deeply infesting the hollow walls, the rotting floors, the ruined furniture.
A massive, terrifying colony of heavily meteor-irradiated insects that Greg Arkin had been obsessively cultivating in secret for years…
and that were now, fully in the violent wake of his dark metamorphosis, just beginning to rapidly spread outward into the surrounding environment.
Alex absolutely did not go inside.
He really didn’t need to.
He had easily felt exactly what he needed to feel…
the absolute confirmation that the insects actively carried the exact same type of volatile meteor radiation that his hungry magical core could safely process.
The crazy experiment was completely viable.
Now, he just desperately needed living specimens.
Thursday…
The Foundry
It finally happened on a quiet Thursday evening.
Alex physically felt the massive energy spike from over two full miles away…
a massive, tearing flare of raw meteor radiation that instantly lit up his magical senses exactly like a roaring bonfire in a pitch-dark field.
It came directly from the far south side of town.
From the abandoned foundry.
Greg Arkin had finally made his move.
Alex was already rapidly moving.
He had carefully spent the entire previous evening meticulously preparing…
quietly buying a full set of large, thick glass mason jars from the local general store, carefully drilling small air holes into the metal lids, and heavily lining the interiors with thin strips of actual lead sheeting he had cleverly salvaged from a nearby construction dumpster.
Lead completely blocked kryptonite radiation.
The modified jars would successfully serve as perfect containment vessels…
keeping the valuable bugs alive while totally preventing their highly unique energy signature from dangerously leaking out into the environment. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
He had also casually purchased a thick pair of heavy leather work gloves, a long set of metal barbecue tongs, and a cheap, battery-powered camping lantern.
The entire total cost was exactly fourteen dollars and thirty-seven cents.
Massive infrastructure didn’t absolutely always require a fifty-thousand-dollar check.
Sometimes it just required a quick, smart trip to the local hardware store.
Alex quickly jogged all the way to the rusting foundry with his heavy backpack full of clinking jars.
He safely arrived exactly twenty minutes directly after the initial energy spike and carefully positioned himself deep in the dark tree line, roughly fifty yards directly from the building’s yawning main entrance.
He waited patiently in the shadows.
He physically felt Clark’s dramatic arrival.
The cold ground trembled very slightly.
A massive, sudden gust of violently displaced air rapidly stirred the heavy branches directly above him.
Clark Kent had frantically arrived at sheer superspeed, which clearly meant the situation was incredibly serious.
Inside the dark foundry, the brutal sounds of heavy combat began.
Rusted metal loudly crashing.
Heavy concrete violently breaking.
The terrifying, high-pitched, collective buzz of thousands of highly agitated insects.
And deep underneath it all, the low, guttural, clicking sounds of something that was simply no longer entirely human.
Alex calmly closed his eyes and tracked the violent fight entirely through his magical senses.
Greg’s chaotic meteor signature was completely wild…
violently surging and rapidly flickering exactly like a badly damaged electrical circuit.
Clark’s massive presence, however, was a total blank spot in the ambient energy field…
Kryptonian alien biology simply didn’t register on Alex’s traditional magical radar, which was simultaneously highly frustrating and deeply fascinating.
The brutal fight lasted for less than five total minutes.
There was a massive, echoing crash…
the terrifying sound of very heavy industrial machinery totally collapsing…
followed instantly by a sudden, massive explosion of Greg’s chaotic meteor signature.
Instead of a single, highly concentrated point, it rapidly fragmented into literally thousands of tiny, scattering sources, each one slightly dimmer than the last.
The swarm.
Greg had been completely crushed and had violently dispersed back into his component insects.
His human body was totally gone, completely scattered across the oily foundry floor as a crawling carpet of meteor-irradiated bugs.
Alex clearly heard Clark’s heavy footsteps…
normal speed now, slowly walking…
heading directly toward the foundry’s main entrance.
Then, a long pause.
Then Clark’s deep, gentle voice, quietly talking to someone.
Lana.
He was carefully checking on Lana.
Alex waited silently.
Ten long minutes later, Clark finally emerged from the dark foundry closely with Lana Lang.
She was visibly shaken but miraculously unharmed…
walking entirely under her own power, leaning very slightly against Clark’s strong arm.
Clark gently guided her to the dirt road and they walked slowly toward town, Clark’s calm voice remaining incredibly low and highly reassuring.
Alex waited another full five minutes.
Then, he moved fast.
The entire massive foundry floor was literally carpeted with crawling insects.
Thousands of them.
Tens of thousands.
They completely covered every single surface…
the rotting walls, the oily floor, the heavily rusted machinery, the totally collapsed metal catwalk where Greg had just been violently crushed.
They moved in sickening waves, blindly flowing over one another with the totally mindless urgency of creatures whose central colony mind had just been completely shattered.
Each individual bug glowed faintly, sickly green.
The pale light was barely visible…
a dim, creepy phosphorescence that was incredibly easy to completely miss if you weren’t actively looking for it.
But to Alex’s highly tuned magical senses, each tiny bug was a bright, glowing ember of pure meteor energy, burning hot with the exact same toxic radiation that had powerfully fueled Greg Arkin’s dark transformation.
Individually, they were completely insignificant.
A single bug obviously carried significantly less meteor energy than a single grain of sand carried physical weight.
But there were literally thousands of them.
Alex quickly pulled on the thick leather work gloves, swung his heavy backpack around, opened it, and got straight to work.
The rapid capture was highly methodical.
He carefully used the metal tongs to quickly scoop up large, writhing clusters of bugs…
they were highly sluggish, deeply disoriented, their entire colony structure brutally disrupted by Greg’s sudden death…
and rapidly deposited them directly into the waiting mason jars.
Each heavy jar held approximately two hundred writhing insects.
He successfully filled six entire jars in exactly twenty minutes, tightly sealing each one with a heavy, lead-lined lid.
The captured bugs buzzed very weakly against the thick glass.
Their pale green glow pulsed softly in the absolute darkness…
a faint, rhythmic, eerie light that vividly reminded Alex of a dying heartbeat.
He carefully held one of the heavy jars right up to his face and closely studied the bizarre creatures trapped inside.
Ordinary bugs.
Simple house beetles, largely by the look of them…
the exact same species Greg had been innocently collecting long before the toxic meteor infection completely transformed him.
But each tiny one now actively carried a pure fragment of raw meteor radiation deeply embedded in its altered cellular structure.
A tiny, glowing sliver of the exact same power that Alex’s hungry core had violently absorbed from Jeremy Creek.
A living, perfectly renewable, non-human source of raw meteor energy.
Alex honestly didn’t know if it would actually work.
He absolutely didn’t know if his magical core could safely absorb raw energy directly from tiny insects the exact same way it had rapidly absorbed massive energy from Jeremy.
The brutal process with Jeremy had been completely involuntary.
These bugs were incredibly tiny.
Their individual energy output was highly negligible.
The actual mechanics might be completely, fundamentally different.
But that was exactly why it was called an experiment.
Alex carefully sealed his heavy backpack, stepped out of the silent foundry, and completely disappeared into the Kansas night.