E8: Superman #2

[Spider-Man Beyond]

E8: Superman #2
Don't Ever Call Me Superman! Part 2 of 4

Written by Russell Burlingame (Borntorun)
Edited by Daniel Dyer (Spider-Man Beyond)

Coast City, California.

I can't feel my fingertips. There's a ton of rock and silt and mud and fish falling on top of me. Thousands of gallons of ocean water rushing by my head. I can't breathe, and I can't feel my fingertips. It's very likely that I'm going to die. Going to die and I don't actually have a name. The people around me have started telling me to call myself Conner Kent. It sounds like a cartoon name—too alliterative for me. But it's what I've got. Those same people—the ones who want me to call myself Conner—they want me to do something “special”. They want me to be Superman. The problem is, President Luthor already appointed a “Superman”. A few weeks ago, after an assassination attempt by a group of Qraci terrorists was thwarted at the White House by a cybernetic man in a red cape, the President declared for all to see that Superman was back. You probably saw it—front page of every paper in the English-speaking world.

My mouth is filling up with this disgusting muddy, salty water, but I can't control my fall, let alone fly out of the crushing tide. I have to try to focus. Fly. Maybe I can fly downward faster than the water is moving, and that will get me out of the rush of the tide.

I don't understand what's happening here, though—this UFO behind me, burrowing deeper and deeper into the surface of the planet, seems to be what caused the crater I'm falling into just off the shores of beautiful downtown Coast City. But it's Superman behind me, flying above the hole, who's really got me confounded. I almost had the damn UFO—almost had my hands right on it—before he started blasting me. Some kind of cannon? I thought Superman didn't use guns.

So what if this isn't Superman? I mean, I'm not. And people say I am all the time. What if this dude is no more Superman than I am? What does that leave me?

Dammit, focus. I'm going to die here if I can't stop dwelling on the past.

The tide slams me against the jagged rock wall of the deepening chasm I've fallen into—I must be a thousand yards down by now—and what would kill most people, allows me to gather my bearings again. I use my tactile telekinesis to throw a big chunk of the loose soil and rock from the wall, into the rush of water. It's a gamble, because it could just as easily end up on my head as over it, but it works. For a split instant, it forms an umbrella over me and that instant is all I need to catapult myself away from the waterfall and into the middle of the massive hole. Surrounded by roaring water on all sides and hovering a few hundred yards above a spacecraft that appears to be boring its way deep into the planet's crust, the silence and relative calm of where I am seems like the eye of a terrible storm. Somehow, it's not a surprise when Superman starts shooting.

“Who are you?” he demands. “Why have you done this?”

Why have I--? You've got to be kidding. I fly up to where he can see me, and hover about ten feet in front of him. “Who am I?” I offer back, as defiantly as I can muster. “I am Con--” No. Secret identity. Jonathan told me that if people know my name, I'll never be left alone to live my life.

“What?” Superman demands. It's hard to tell if he's getting impatient—the metal mouth always seems to be sneering, and the one human eye he has squints pretty much all of the time. Maybe it's tissue damage from the big fight?

“I am--” Think, Conner, think. I'm Superman? No, won't work. He's Superman. Who's Superman? Kal-El. Krypton. I'm Conner. Earth. Conner-El? No, stupid. “--Kon-El.”

“Kon-El? As in, the House of El? You're... Kryptonian?” Superman lowers the cannon he's made out of his arm, and looks at me. The squinty eye goes wide.

“I am—kind of—it's hard to explain. What the hell happened here? We need to stop that UFO--!”

Superman's eye narrows, and he raises the cannon again. “The people of Coast City have suffered enough, villain!” he shouts, and then fires. The cannon shoots some kind of white-hot energy blast that burns like crazy and I lose all my focus and start falling again. Staying in the air during a fight is tougher than I thought it would be!

Oh, man. A fight? I' m fighting Superman? This is not what I signed up for. “Wait!” I call back up at him, holding out my hands, but he dives into the breach with me, pummeling me with a series of quick, powerful punches that send me flying downward. I finally make contact with the UFO—but I'm backwards, upside-down and bouncing across its surface. I try to grab on, but the jagged part I had tried to get hold of to stop it are now firmly dug into the earth around the edges of the hole, protected by the giant waterfall. I can only grab futilely at the smooth, round exterior of the craft and there's no seam to pull it apart. I start to find my footing again, look up to see where Superman is, but he's already on the charge. He's carrying a huge rock with him, and by the time I can react, it's on top of me, knocking me off my feet. He blasts me with that cannon again, and then punches me—hard--and I go flying and slipping across the surface of the ship, through the water and deep into the rock and soil of the earth. Again, I can't feel my fingertips—now I can hardly...move...no air.

***

[Spider-Man Beyond]

GAH! There's an air pocket now, around my head. Must be the T.K. kicked in while I was sleeping as a defense mechanism. How long have I--? Can't think about it. Can't dwell, can't stop. Gotta stop Superman.

For now, I have a leg up: he obviously thinks I'm dead, or he'd have come to finish the job. I can use my body as a drill. Use my speed and my telekinesis to tunnel down and away from the shaft that UFO created, hollow out a chamber to think for a minute. I need to use this advantage, because I won't get it again.

Maybe I could just hang out here... wait for something to happen! It's not bad... it's cool, there's plenty of water...

Yeah. Kidding, of course. I've got that tug at the back of my brain again, something forcing me to go out and do the right thing. So. Superman. What stops him? Kryptonite and magic. What stops me? Kryptonite and magic. And apparently big Kryptonian dudes with crazy energy cannons. Those too. And I don't know where I can get any Kryptonite... Magic? I feel like I know some magic types. But maybe it's just my imagination. I sure can't remember any of them. Can't remember anything before the armored guy... armored guy? Maybe he can help? As good a guess as any!

I plow through the rock and silt and water and up into the air. I start heading East, back toward Metropolis, but a huge burst of heat and pain takes me out of the sky and drops me back down in the water.

On the western coast of Coast City, the crazy Superman-guy has built a giant energy cannon. Apparently motion-activated. I can see it from where I'm treading water, just before Superman himself shows up out of the giant hole in the ground.

“You're tougher than you let on, Kon-El,” he tells me, and points his cannon my way. It's at that moment when I decide that water, maybe, isn't such a bad place to be after all. I dive as fast and far as I can, and then make a beeline for the crater left by what I'm starting to assume is Superman's UFO... but it didn't look Kryptonian...

The hole goes miles and miles down—I can actually SEE where the Earth's crust gives way to molten rock. And I can see that the heat and pressure apparently hasn't done anything to slow down whatever it is the UFO was doing, because there's all kinds of wires and platforms and things down there. I stop on one of the platforms and look up to see Superman charging at me. Instinctively, I punch the wall beside me and it collapses. I jump into the air, grabbing a large rock as I do. The crater wall starts to fall into the lava-like substance; some of it seems to float there, while other parts melt and sink. But the rock I have, I heave as hard as I can at Superman. I know it won't stop him, but he reacts just as I'd have hoped: he keeps coming, never altering his course, while during the moments when he was looking at the rock instead of me, I've switched locations. Grabbing one of the cables his UFO has laid out, I pull it up with me and, operating from behind Superman now as he crashes into the spot on the wall where I used to be floating, I use the cable as a giant, metal lasso to corral Superman in from behind. Once he's tangled in it, I throw the whole mess as hard as I can into the molten rock, then I fly around the entire area, punching the surface of the wall every couple of feet as I go, sending a mountain of rock and dirt raining down on the cyborg's head. I fly as high and fast as I can, emerging from the hole with only tatters left of my clothes, but to the applause of a group of news helicopters who, presumably, have caught a lot of the mess on tape. Standing directly in front of one of them, a camera pointed at me, I shout, “THIS IS THE CYBORG SUPERMAN'S FAULT! I DON'T KNOW WHAT HE'S DOING, BUT HE'S NOT--” I stop abruptly when a giant piece of what used to be someone's car catapults through the air and shears the helicopter in two. I get under it and can use my powers to hold the chopper together just long enough to get it back to the tsunami-ravaged beaches of Coast City. Inside, two of the crew are dead and the rest of them aren't looking very good. On the beach, a yellow-skinned alien with a purple body suit is running at me. Fast. His name is... Mongul? How do I know that? Have I fought him before?

Mongul lets out a howl as he dives at me, but I jump backwards, landing on top of the chopper. It only takes me a second to realize that doing so will put the reporters in harm's way—but I use the location to my advantage, pulling the twisted and mangled propeller from the top of the downed aircraft and using it to bat Mongul back into the water.

So he doesn't fly. Good.

I carry the propeller with me, diving into the water after the alien and twisting it around him. Once I'm satisfied that he's immobilized, I pull him up out of the water with me, only to throw him, hard, into the destroyed city street. I watch as his helpless form crashes down through hundreds of feet of cement and pipes, and stops lodged deep under the buildings of Coast City.

That'll do for now. Superman won't keep for much longer.

I'm heading east—toward Metropolis, toward my man in the armor. He's the only one I know to ask for help. Moving way above the speed of sound, it only takes me a minute or two to get cross-country. Before I can reach Metropolis, though, a blue blur appears in the corner of my eye. I don't even have time to process the visual information before my head starts to swim, my body is in agony and I'm hurtling earthward. I can hear screams and destruction all around me as I smash into and then through an office building. The skyscraper starts to shake and lean with the force of my impact, but I manage to slow myself to a stop before it's unsalvageable.

A skinny, black woman is standing beside me when I start to get my bearings. I don't know where Superman is.

“Where am I?” I ask the black woman. Terrified, she can barely get the words out, but she tells me that I'm in Hampshire Plaza. “Where?” I repeat. “What city? What state?”

“Manchester,” she says, getting impatient. “New Hampshire. Hampshire Plaza.”

“Oh,” I say. “Is there a janitor's closet somewhere? I need a shirt.”

Before she can respond, the woman's chest explodes all over me. Through the smoking hole in the middle of her, I can see the cyborg.

“You're not Superman,” I tell him, and then he fires that damned cannon at me again.

Continued...