Alex did not go inside the school.
He quietly circled the building and waited alone in the dark parking lot, leaning casually against the brick wall of the gymnasium near the rear service entrance.
The muffled, heavy thump of loud music leaked steadily through the thick walls…
something forgettable and generically upbeat.
Through the narrow high windows, he could clearly see bright colored lights flashing to the beat.
Inside, he knew with absolute certainty, Clark was confronting Jeremy.
The exact specifics didn’t really matter.
Clark would win.
Clark always won.
That was simply the fundamental nature of being Kryptonian…
you could electrocute him, burn him, freeze him, crush him under a massive building, and he would invariably get right back up.
Jeremy Creek’s electrical powers were undeniably impressive by mortal human standards, but against an alien who could literally shrug off a car hitting him at sixty miles an hour, they were barely a minor inconvenience.
Alex suddenly felt the wild energy spike…
a massive, tearing surge of electrical power that made every single hair on his body stand on end.
The tall parking lot lights violently flickered.
A nearby car alarm shrieked into the night.
Inside the gymnasium, the pulsing music completely cut out for a tense second before weakly sputtering back to life.
Then, absolute silence.
The fight was over.
Alex waited in the shadows.
Five minutes later, the heavy metal service door swung open and Clark Kent stumbled out, looking deeply exhausted but totally unharmed.
He paused, took a long, ragged breath of the cool night air, and headed slowly around the corner toward the main front entrance…
back to the crowded dance, back to his oblivious friends, back to the exhausting performance of absolute normalcy.
He didn’t see Alex standing quietly in the shadows.
Good.
Alex waited another ten full minutes.
The strange tugging sensation deep in his chest hadn’t faded at all.
If anything, it had grown much sharper…
far more insistent.
It was physically pulling him inside the building.
What do you want me to find?
he asked the feeling silently.
No answer. The source of this chapter is g.com.
There never was.
The mystical current never spoke in actual words.
It spoke entirely in gravity…
in the quiet, irresistible, planetary pull of something that simply needed to happen.
Alex silently slipped inside through the unlocked service entrance.
He found Jeremy Creek collapsed in the dim utility corridor right behind the main gymnasium.
Or rather…
his magic found Jeremy Creek.
The silent pull led him smoothly through a winding service hallway, past a cluttered janitor’s station, and around a sharp corner into a narrow, dark corridor completely lined with heavy electrical panels and thick water pipes.
The burning sensation in his chest flared brightly like a compass needle violently snapping north, and then went perfectly still.
Here.
The boy was lying broken on the cold ground, slumped heavily against a grey bank of electrical panels.
His ragged clothes were physically smoking.
His skin was deathly pale…
far too pale, the distinct pallor of someone whose body was rapidly shutting down.
The bright electrical energy that had actively crawled across his skin during their brief encounter in the cornfield was completely gone, replaced entirely by faint, sputtering sparks that flickered and died pathetically like a candle caught in the wind.
He was alive…Barely.
Clark had beaten him, but Clark simply didn’t kill.
He had probably cleverly used the water from the overhead sprinkler system or a nearby fire extinguisher…
something to rapidly short-circuit Jeremy’s electrical abilities without actually delivering a lethal, physical blow.
Then, he had simply walked away, trusting blindly that the local authorities would properly handle the rest.
Alex crouched silently beside Jeremy.
He honestly didn’t know why his magic had forcefully brought him here.
He hadn’t come to this dark hallway to kill this boy.
He hadn’t come with any concrete plan at all.
He had simply followed the powerful pull…
the exact same instinct that had flawlessly guided Dumbledore to hidden Horcruxes and the Ancient One to tearing dimensional rifts.
The deep instinct that clearly said: this matters.
Pay close attention.
The boy’s dark eyes were open.
Completely glazed.
His breathing was incredibly shallow and highly irregular.
Faint sparks danced weakly across his trembling fingertips…
Alex studied him.
Not with the cold, calculating assessment of a predator evaluating prey…
but with the careful, measured attention of a seasoned healer examining a critical patient.
Three full lifetimes of deep magical knowledge confidently told him exactly what he was looking at even before he physically confirmed it.
Jeremy Creek was dying.
Alex gently placed his bare hand directly on Jeremy’s chest.
It was pure instinct.
Not a killing instinct…
a diagnostic one.
The exact same reflex that had always made him press his hand to wounded Aurors on the bloody battlefield at Hogwarts.
The exact same impulse that had driven him to urgently scan Tony Stark’s glowing arc reactor whenever it dangerously malfunctioned.
He just wanted to understand exactly what was happening inside this boy’s failing body.
Nothing more.
He pressed his palm perfectly flat against the boy’s sternum and actively pushed his magical awareness deeply inward…
directly into the complex network of meteor-irradiated cells that pulsed faintly beneath Jeremy’s cooling skin.
What he found was absolute chaos.
Jeremy’s body was a literal war zone.
The intense kryptonite radiation had totally fused with his cellular structure at a fundamental, biological level, rewriting his basic biology into something that was neither fully human nor fully meteor.
His entire nervous system had been forcibly converted into a living, breathing electrical grid.
His blood now carried charged particles instead of normal hemoglobin.
His failing heart physically beat with the erratic rhythm of an alternating current.
And all of it was catastrophically failing.
Clark’s violent intervention had completely disrupted the fragile system.
The delicate electrical feedback loop that miraculously kept Jeremy alive was rapidly collapsing, violently shorting out, and tearing itself completely apart from the inside.
He was definitely dying anyway.
Slowly.
Excruciatingly painfully.
Over a period of hours or perhaps days, his own body would actively consume itself as the volatile meteor energy burned right through his remaining healthy cells.
Alex could just walk away right now.
Let the boy die slowly on his own terms.
Let the morning janitor find the burnt body in the daylight.
He started to slowly withdraw his hand.
And then something terrible happened, his magical core moved.