The Torch Office…
Monday Morning
The strange email had seemingly come from absolutely nowhere.
Chloe Sullivan had been sitting at her desk staring intensely at the routing data for three straight days.
Not entirely obsessively…
she absolutely had a high school paper to run, a full issue of the Torch to edit, and two critical deadline articles to chase down from Pete, who had solemnly promised to write something detailed about the homecoming game and had instead lazily submitted a single, poorly punctuated sentence describing the final score.
But closely squeezed between all of that, in the quiet, lonely spaces of early morning before school started and the long, silent evenings after it ended, she kept aggressively returning to the email.
Anonymous tip: unusual sounds and lights at the Simmons Foundry, south side of town.
Worth investigating.
That was absolutely all it said.
No sender name.
No identifying information whatsoever.
The return email address…
a long, messy string of completely random alphanumeric characters hosted at a cheap throwaway domain…
had already been permanently deactivated right before she had even tried to reply.
On the surface, it perfectly looked like a standard anonymous tip.
Smallville obviously had plenty of paranoid people who regularly noticed strange things but deeply preferred to strictly keep their names out of the local newspaper.
The entire Wall of Weird was fundamentally built on exactly this kind of quiet, plausibly-deniable, whispered information.
But the routing data was completely wrong.
Not wrong in an obvious, clumsy way…
wrong in the highly specific way that took someone who deeply understood complex network architecture to actually recognize.
The short email had been aggressively routed through seventeen different secure servers across nine completely different countries right before arriving safely in her inbox.
The digital path was so deliberately, painstakingly convoluted that it was practically invisible…
the exact kind of hardcore anonymization that would easily fool a highly trained law enforcement digital forensics unit, let alone a teenage high school journalist working late on a dusty library computer.
Alex had been incredibly thorough…
so dangerously thorough in his digital handling that it actually instead actively aroused her suspicion much more.
Truly, being overly cautious sometimes was exactly as much of a glaring red flag as being completely careless.
Chloe had already stubbornly tried three different, highly illegal IP tracing tools.
She had frantically pulled every single technical resource she actually had.
And every single twisted path firmly led to a solid dead end…
a ghost server that no longer existed, a rusted router that had quietly been decommissioned years ago, a shady ISP located deep in a country that conveniently did not have any extradition treaties with the United States.
Whoever had actually sent her this brief email absolutely knew exactly what they were doing.
The exact kind of terrifying digital ghost story that she had breathlessly read about in dark web hacking forums…
where certain covert government agencies or highly paid private intelligence firms could smoothly move directly through the internet without ever leaving so much as a single, digital footprint.
This was a highly encrypted email tip strictly about strange flashing lights at an abandoned metal foundry in Smallville, Kansas.
And it had clearly been sent by someone operating with the massive digital security sophistication of a heavily funded three-letter agency.
Chloe sat back heavily in her worn editor’s chair and tapped her pen rhythmically against her bottom lip.
Clark had actually gone straight to the foundry solely based on that tip and ultimately found Greg Arkin.
Greg Arkin was now…
officially…
lying silently in a deep coma at the Smallville Medical Center, his failing body actively suffering from what the terrified emergency physicians were nervously calling “severe kryptonite-related organ failure.”
Which was basically panicked doctor-speak for: we have absolutely no idea what just happened to this kid, but it clearly involves the glowing green rocks, and we are absolutely not going to officially put that in the permanent medical report.
The tip had been entirely real. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
The dangerous information had been perfectly accurate.
Someone had absolutely known that Greg Arkin was hiding at that foundry.
And that mysterious someone had explicitly chosen to safely deliver that critical information directly to the Torch…
to Chloe…
rather than simply calling the local police.
They clearly wanted them deeply involved.
Or, at the very least, they specifically wanted someone at the Torch actively involved.
Chloe grabbed a thumbtack and firmly pinned a new, blank index card to the absolute center of her Wall of Weird.
On it, she wrote in bold black marker: Anonymous Benefactor…
technical sophistication completely off the charts.
Has direct access to highly dangerous information about Freak incidents BEFORE they fully escalate.
Why the Torch?
She stared quietly at the card.
Then, she slowly wrote one more word.
Small.
Right in the bottom corner.
Who?
The Locker Room…
Three Days Earlier (Friday)
The heavy sauna smelled richly of hot cedar and thick steam and something else…
something dark and metallic underneath the wet wood and heat that had absolutely no name Walt Arnold could easily put to it.
He had been heavily using it for six long years.
Six years of aggressively taking the sharp edge off heavily aching muscles and the much deeper, creeping ache of simply getting older, of feeling his quick reflexes slowly dull and his tight joints heavily stiffen, all while the young boys under his direct watch aggressively got younger every single year.
He had genuinely been a very good coach once.
He had been the proud coach who boldly turned a totally mediocre football program into a celebrated state champion.
Who had cleverly recruited the hungry walk-ons that the big, arrogant schools always casually passed over and proudly turned them into real, dangerous players.
Who had carefully installed a true culture…
a real, living culture, not just a bunch of empty slogans painted on a cheap banner, but the actual, grueling daily discipline of lost boys finally becoming strong men.
And then, the losing had finally started.
It absolutely was not his fault.
He deeply knew that.
The local demographics slowly shifted, the raw talent noticeably thinned out, the big star players started selfishly going to the rich Metropolis schools with much better facilities and significantly bigger, richer boosters.
Walt had bravely adapted.
He had constantly adjusted.
He had stubbornly done exactly what any good, desperate coach did…
he had ruthlessly found completely new ways to aggressively compete with exactly what he actually had.
Some of those ways were clearly written in the official rulebook.
Some of them absolutely were not.
He hadn’t ever formally decided to actually cheat.
It hadn’t been a conscious decision at all.
It had just been a very slow, highly gradual accommodation to the brutal reality that the rough game was already being played incredibly dirty by absolutely every single school with a serious football program, and stubbornly refusing to play along wasn’t actually highly principled…
it was just willingly losing.
Walt lowered himself heavily onto the hot wooden bench and leaned back heavily against the sweating cedar wall. Get faster updates on g.com.
Thick steam rose rapidly from the scorching rocks.
The blistering heat was absolutely enormous…
the intense kind that went completely past physical discomfort and directly into the strange territory of something almost religious and transcendent, where your tired mind completely detached from your heavy body and floated somewhere completely clean and quiet.
He honestly didn’t notice it at first.
The eerie glow was highly subtle.
A faint, sickening green pulse coming directly from deeply beneath the scorching rocks…
barely visibly cutting through the thick, hissing steam.
He had casually seen it before and easily dismissed it.
Weird mineral deposits, he had logically assumed.
Something buried deep in the rock itself simply catching the massive heat.
Nothing actually worth investigating.
But tonight, the green glow was significantly brighter.
And tonight, when the blistering heat forcefully entered his tired body, it definitely didn’t just quickly warm his aching muscles.
It crawled.
It moved violently through him exactly like a second, parasitic circulatory system…
absolutely not blood, absolutely not heat, something entirely else.
Something highly unnatural that had no name in any of the languages Walt Arnold had ever studied.
It moved fluidly from the scorching sauna rocks straight through his sweating skin, racing brightly along his panicked nerves, aggressively gathering completely in his large hands.
His thick palms suddenly felt incredibly strange.
Massively heavy.
Dangerously dense.
Walt slowly held his trembling hands up and stared blankly at them in the steam.
The deep lines of his calloused palms glowed a faint, terrifying orange.
Absolutely not a trick reflection from the rocks.
Definitely not a weird trick of the thick steam.
It was actively coming from deep inside his own skin.
Walt violently pressed his glowing hands flat against the wooden bench.
The thick cedar instantly scorched completely black directly beneath his hot palms in a single instant…
a perfect, smoking handprint instantly charred deeply into the wet wood right before he violently jerked back with a terrifying sound that was half a loud shout and half something else entirely.
He sat totally frozen in the thick steam and looked with wide eyes at his hands.
The bright orange glowing slowly faded.
His thick palms looked completely normal again.
The wooden bench beside him had two perfect, smoking black handprints burned completely into it.
Walt Arnold sat silently in the hot sauna for a very long time.
Then…
slowly, incredibly carefully, exactly like a terrified man cautiously performing a dark magic trick he absolutely did not understand…
he slowly extended one thick finger directly toward the wet cedar wall and thought purely about heat.
A thin, crackling tongue of bright orange flame instantly appeared right at his very fingertip.
Walt stared blankly at it.
The Crows were absolutely going to play their absolute best season in an entire decade.
He was personally going to make absolutely sure of it.