It absolutely wasn’t a conscious decision.
Alex did not actively choose to pull.
His core…
the tiny, starving flame that he had been so carefully nursing for weeks…
reached desperately toward the dying meteor energy the exact way a drowning man reaches for air.
The way a deeply parched root reaches blindly for water.
Automatically.
Desperately.
Without any permission.
Before Alex could even begin to react, the powerful connection snapped into place.
The sudden sensation was totally unlike anything he had ever experienced in any of his three long lives.
It definitely wasn’t like naturally absorbing mana from the environment…
the slow, patient, measured process of drawing in ambient magical energy and carefully filtering it through his core.
It wasn’t like channeling the infinite power of an Infinity Stone or tapping deeply into the cosmic wellspring of the Magic Dimension.
It was exactly like drinking pure lightning.
Jeremy’s remaining electrical energy…
every single last spark of meteor-irradiated power left in his rapidly failing body…
violently tore free of its dying host and surged powerfully right into Alex’s palm.
It raced rapidly up his arm like liquid fire, scorching painfully through his delicate meridians, violently crashing into his magical core with the overwhelming force of a heavy battering ram.
Alex’s jaw firmly clenched.
His vision went totally white.
Every single muscle in his body instantly locked rigid as the foreign energy slammed into his tiny core and essentially detonated.
For one terrible, agonizing second, he thought it would simply kill him.
The meteor energy was wild, completely alien, and fundamentally incompatible with the deeply structured magic of his three-lifetime training.
It thrashed violently inside his core like a caged, rabid animal, tearing viciously at the walls, burning straight through the carefully cultivated pathways he had spent weeks painstakingly rebuilding.
Then, his core did something entirely unexpected.
It adapted.
The unique fusion of three distinct souls…
the wizard, the sorcerer, the cosmic entity…
had ultimately created a magical foundation that was uniquely, impossibly resilient.
Flexible.
Hungry.
His core actively seized the raging meteor energy, broke it cleanly down, and totally reconstructed it…
not as the chaotic, electrical force it had been in Jeremy’s body, but as pure, deeply refined mana.
Raw, limitless power, completely stripped of its toxic alien origin, instantly converted into something Alex’s advanced magical system could safely process and easily store.
The blinding pain slowly faded.
And when Alex finally opened his eyes and looked deeply inward, he saw that his magical reserves had literally doubled.
Not a modest, incremental increase.
Not a marginal, expected improvement.
Completely doubled.
From the pathetic equivalent of a first-year Hogwarts student to something confidently approaching a second-year…
and a very strong second-year at that.
His core was noticeably larger, much denser, and vastly more stable.
The internal pathways that actively channeled his magic felt significantly wider, noticeably smoother, and incredibly more efficient.
His hands were visibly shaking.
Alex slowly looked down at Jeremy Creek.
The boy was dead.
His dark eyes were wide open and completely empty.
His skin had gone a strange grey…
not the typical pallor of death, but the flat, minerite grey of a physical body that had been completely and utterly drained of all meteor radiation.
He looked exactly like a stone statue.
A hollow husk.
A dry shell from which absolutely everything vital had been cleanly extracted.
Alex slowly stood.
His legs were a bit unsteady, but his mind was crystal clear.
Jeremy Creek was dead.
Alex stared blankly at the boy’s body for a very long time.
He truly hadn’t planned this.
He definitely hadn’t come to this school to kill.
His magic had guided him…
the current, the instinct, whatever name it currently carried…
and when he had touched the dying boy, his starving core had simply acted on its own, reaching desperately for the energy with a primal hunger that Alex honestly hadn’t known it possessed.
But the final result was exactly the same.
A teenage boy was dead, and Alex’s hands had directly done it.
He waited quietly for the guilt to arrive.
Back in the Harry Potter world, he had agonizingly obsessed over his very first kill…
a cruel Death Eater named Rowle who had been just about to murder a helpless group of Muggle children.
In the Marvel Universe, the guilt had slowly faded over time, firmly replaced by a cold, necessary pragmatism that Sebastian Shaw had eventually learned to live with.
Here, in his third life, the guilt finally arrived…
genuine, cold, and incredibly heavy.
Even a life that was technically already ending.
He stood and sat with it.
He didn’t try to push it away.
He didn’t attempt to rationalize it.
He simply let it settle deeply into his bones the exact way cold water settles into dry earth.
Jeremy Creek had undeniably been dying.
Clark’s violent intervention had basically ensured that his mutated body would completely fail within mere hours.
The volatile meteor energy was already rapidly consuming him from the inside out.
Alex’s core had simply taken what was actively being destroyed anyway…
pulled it cleanly free of a collapsing system right before it uselessly dissipated into nothing.
That was the absolute truth.
Whether it was a genuine comfort or just a convenient excuse, Alex honestly wasn’t sure.
Perhaps it was a bit of both.
But underneath the heavy guilt, another, darker feeling was slowly forming.
Not eagerness.
Definitely not bloodlust.
Something much quieter and far more dangerous.
Understanding.
This was exactly why his magic had brought him here.
Not just to kill…
but to learn.
To actively discover a profound truth about this new universe that he simply couldn’t have found any other way.
The volatile meteor freaks of Smallville carried dense, raw energy that his magical core could directly absorb, convert, and fully integrate.
Energy that would otherwise be totally wasted…
burned away uselessly in sterile hospital beds or simply dissipated harmlessly into the atmosphere when their failing bodies finally gave out.
Massive energy that could rapidly rebuild absolutely everything he had lost.
Alex definitely wasn’t a monster.
He would absolutely not hunt completely innocent people just for power.
He definitely wasn’t Voldemort.
He wasn’t Thanos.
But the vast universe had just shown him a very clear path.
And if that specific path absolutely required him to be the one who willingly walked into the dark places right after Clark walked out…
to quietly finish what the naive Boy Scout always left undone, to take directly from the dying what they obviously no longer needed…
then he would walk it.
Not because he specifically wanted to.
Because his magic clearly said he had to.
And in three long, brutal lifetimes, that quiet instinct had never, ever been wrong.