Leon could see every movement in the camp clearly enough to time his responses before the triggers were actually pulled.
He waited anyway.
The first wave came in from multiple angles simultaneously — grenades arcing through the air, shoulder-launched rockets, the blunt indiscriminate firepower of people who were angry and frightened and had a lot of ammunition.
Leon stood in the center of the camp and swept his heat vision once, left to right, a single controlled arc.
The incoming ordinance met it partway and detonated in sequence, the chain of explosions moving across the attack vectors like a closing zipper.
When the vehicle-mounted missile systems began cycling to launch, Leon left the ground.
“JARVIS.”
“Master Leon.”
“Satellites.
Right now, over Afghanistan.”
“There is a US military intelligence satellite in current operational orbit.
At this scale of engagement, it will have already flagged the location.” A brief pause.
“Additionally, there is a reporter approximately 700 meters to your northeast, on the hillside.
Local press.
Recording.”
“A reporter.” Leon adjusted his position in the air slightly, chin up, and let the emblem on his chest catch what light there was.
He’d made this uniform to be seen.
“How can Superman’s first significant engagement go unrecorded?”
He scanned toward the hillside.
The man was in the brush on the slope above the base — wrapped tightly against the cold, local dress over local coloring, a half-and-half beard that spoke to middle age and decades in this specific region.
The kind of beard a man grows when he’s spent enough time in the field that regular maintenance stops being the priority.
His equipment looked worn, carefully maintained the way things get when they’re essential and irreplaceable.
He’s been doing this for a long time, Leon thought.
The kind of correspondent who stays when the others rotate out.
Who has seen this country before the current state of it, and during, and now.
The reporter was staring at Leon through his lens with the expression and had just seen something they weren’t prepared to classify.
“Is that—” The middle-aged man lowered his camera marginally and blinked, then raised it again.
“Is that Superman?”
The figure in the air had a red cape moving in the wind despite the altitude.
It had a build and bearing that matched every depiction the reporter had ever seen.
It had a face — and this was the strange part — a face that was entirely clear through the lens, exactly the right kind of handsome, but that somehow refused to stay in memory.
Every time he tried to fix the specific features, they blurred at the edges of recollection, like a word you know perfectly well until you try to spell it.
But the shape of it.
The cape.
The S on the chest.
If Superman can save this country, the reporter thought, in the specific register of a man who has run out of more rational options, I will spend the rest of whatever money I have supporting every company that had anything to do with creating him.
In the camp below, fire appeared on one of the vehicle platforms.
Then another.
Then four more.
Six truck-mounted missiles — two or three meters each, military weight — lifted on their launch rails and ignited.
“That’s a—” The reporter leaned forward, blood draining from his face.
“Those are missiles.
Missiles.
Get out of the way, Superman, move—”
Leon moved toward them.
The other hand was a fist in front of him, pointed at the first missile in the cluster like a drill bit, and he accelerated directly into the impact zone.
The first missile met his fist.
The detonation that followed brought the other five with it in rapid succession — five explosions compounding into one, the blast wave expanding outward across the base and rolling up the hillside, bending the trees on both slopes simultaneously.
The reporter’s headscarf was ripped away by the pressure wave.
He grabbed his camera.
He couldn’t stop staring.
The mushroom cloud was forming above the explosion site.
Under direct hits from six missiles, the reporter thought, very carefully, no one survives.
Not even a complete body.
That’s what explosive at that scale does.
That’s what I’ve seen it do.
Then a strong wind moved through the cloud.
Not the dissipation of a normal blast — something directed, something coming from inside the smoke.
The mushroom column broke apart and scattered in every direction, the dust dispersing in seconds rather than minutes.
Leon was there.
Exactly where he’d been.
Red cape still moving.
Uniform exactly as it was before the missiles hit — not a mark on it, not a trace of powder or smoke or blackening of any kind.
The reporter stood up.
He stood up fully, breaking cover entirely, and it didn’t occur to him to care about that until much later.
He made a fist and hit the air with it, his face hot, something building in his chest that he couldn’t name because he hadn’t felt it in long enough that he’d stopped cataloguing it.
“My god!” he shouted, to nobody, to the night, to the hills.
“I knew it!
I knew he could!”
He’d spent nights — too many nights to count — waiting for international organizations to act.
Resolutions, statements, condemnations.
He’d watched them accomplish nothing for years.
And then a man in a cape had shown up, taken six missiles in the face, and was still standing in the air above the source of them.
I see you, the reporter thought, in the direction of that distant figure.
I see you and I have my camera and I will not stop until the whole world sees you too.
In the camp, the reaction was different.
The remaining personnel who hadn’t fled or been shot for trying to were making noise, but not the noise of people celebrating.
The word that was moving through the camp — passed between the tents and the remaining weapon positions in urgent, frightened voices — was monster.
Gunshots punctuated the chaos: Ten Rings policy on desertion, applied in real time.
Leon waited above the camp, watching this, and found himself genuinely curious about what they were going to do next.
He didn’t have to wait long.
The decision, apparently, was to use the Jericho missile.
“Oh,” Leon said, to himself, and looked at the eastern tent where the launch preparation was underway.
“There it is.”
The Jericho carried a wide-area incendiary payload — every point within two kilometers of the detonation would receive coverage.
The people in the camp who had decided to do this had apparently made a calculation: if the monster inside the perimeter couldn’t be killed by direct impact, then maybe they could create a perimeter large enough that no one could survive being inside it, monster included.
It was, Leon reflected, a genuinely committed approach to the problem.
“JARVIS,” he said, “keep recording.
Tony made this.
When you send him everything, include the message: how do you sleep?”
“Recording continuously, Master Leon.”
The launch took a few minutes — the Jericho wasn’t designed for rapid field deployment, and the personnel operating it were working from documentation they probably hadn’t studied until this moment. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
But eventually the first missile cleared the launch rail, and then the second, and then the third.
Three in total.
All stock, all at once.
Leon watched them climb.
The Jericho’s design began its characteristic second phase at mid-trajectory — the main body disintegrating as designed, releasing the dispersal payload into dozens of independent sub-munitions that spread across every approach vector.
Tony had built it to eliminate any possibility of evasion at the target point.
There was no gap in the coverage.
No angle that wasn’t addressed.
“It really is excellent work,” Leon said.
He glanced toward the hillside.
The reporter.
Ah.
“I have to step away for a moment,” he said, and was gone.
The experience, from the reporter’s perspective, was this: a flash in the air where Superman had been, then something that was not quite a shape but was moving faster than he could track arrived beside him, and then he was somewhere else.
He was on a different hillside, further from the base, and he was being set down carefully on ground that didn’t have an incoming three-Jericho strike zone directly below it.
He had time to notice that he was 3 kilometers from where he’d been.
He didn’t have time to react to any of the rest of it, because the figure was gone again before he could look up.
Don’t worry, shouldn’t be too late, Leon thought, returning to his position at approximately the speed that thought travels, and looking at the incoming cloud of sub-munitions covering the sky in every direction.
He didn’t want his uniform blackened.
He threw punches.
The motion was beyond what any human visual system could track as a sequence of events — what it would have looked like from outside was a figure at the center of an expanding ring of simultaneous detonations, as if every point of the incoming swarm had arrived at the same moment at the same target and been met at the same moment by the same impact.
The physics underneath it: fists moving faster than the sub-munitions, intercepting each one before it could complete its detonation cycle in the direction that mattered.
The explosion was enormous.
It was larger than the six-missile detonation.
Larger by a meaningful margin.
The sound arrived at the reporter’s new position as a physical force — a wall of pressure that came through the trees and folded him sideways into the ground, his camera protecting his face as he rolled.
He lay there for a moment, breathing, and watched the column of fire and smoke build into the sky.
Even at three kilometers, the heat was real.
Even at three kilometers, the shockwave had knocked him down.
He pushed himself upright against the nearest tree.
“What kind of missile does that?” he said, to no one.
He said it several times.
“What kind of missile—”
He thought about the sub-munitions he’d seen dispersing from the main body.
Dozens of independent warheads, all coordinated, no gaps.
If a force he’d encountered had deployed those against a conventional position—
He didn’t finish the thought.
He’d seen enough of war to know what the end of that sentence was.
“Superman.” He looked at the smoke column.
“Where is—he saved me.
He knew I was there.
He saved me.” A pause.
“And then he went back into that?”
The column of smoke was enormous.
And then a wind moved through it — the same directed dispersal he’d seen before, the same signature — and the smoke broke apart and scattered and there was the figure again, in the same position, the same cape, the same composure.