CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT — SUPERMAN

The Simurgh was breaking.

Superman had fought gods, monsters, and beings of impossible power. He had battled cosmic horrors, extraterrestrial tyrants, and held dying stars in his hands. But nothing—no war, no villain—had ever felt quite like this. 

Pieces of her existed in his rogues’ gallery: the cold intellect of Brainiac, the inevitability of Darkseid, and the future manipulation of Time Trapper. Yet none combined it all. None blurred the line between machine and omen, between intelligence and instinct, between destruction and something far worse.

She did not speak. She did not bleed. She did not even truly fight. She simply was—a presence that defied reason, a force that did not need to win to unravel everything.

She did not speak. She did not bleed. She did not even truly fight. She simply was, and her existence alone threatened to unravel everything.

But she was losing.

His fists slammed into her delicate frame, each blow delivered with calculated force—just enough to break her defences, to shatter the technological constructs she formed in response. Every strike sent shockwaves rippling through the void, distorting space itself.

She was fast—too fast. Not in movement, but in thought. He could feel it, the way she read him, the way she anticipated every attack before he threw it. A thousand futures unfolded in her mind, a million paths traced and outcomes discarded in the space of a heartbeat.

But Superman was faster.

Faster than thought. 

She lashed out, fingers like surgical blades, and he twisted past them, driving the heel of his palm into her chest. The impact sent her spinning. Before she could recover, his eyes burned with heat vision, twin beams carving through the impossible matter of her wings. He wasn’t sure if they were physical, metaphysical, or something beyond either—her body was an amalgamation of organic, inorganic, and extradimensional elements, a structure that defied conventional understanding.

It didn’t matter. They burned. They tore free.

She could not feel pain.

But for the first time, she understood it.

And yet.

Somewhere below, something shifted.

Superman heard—felt—a distant, thunderous impact sending tremors rolling through Earth’s crust, each one heavier, angrier than the last.

His senses stretched outward, past the silence of space, past the pulsing energy of the battle, past the fear and awe radiating from Brockton Bay’s survivors—

—And into India.

The realization hit like a hammer. The temperature spike. The radiation bloom. Seismic instability spreading like a wound torn open in the planet’s surface.

Behemoth had awoken.

Not just emerged. Not just surfaced. He was already rampaging. Delhi was burning. The death toll was already climbing into the thousands, and the radiation alone would ensure thousands more if he wasn’t stopped.

Too soon. The Endbringers never attacked this close together. But he should have known better.

The Simurgh had planned this.

His jaw clenched, fingers curling into a fist. Damn it. He should have seen it coming. Of course she had an escape plan. Of course she had a contingency plan. He had been so focused on ending the cycle of destruction, so determined to finally stop her, that he had ignored the simple truth.

She didn’t need to win.

She just needed to make him choose.

Superman looked at her, his vision cutting through the dim light of high orbit. She was still damaged, still reeling. If he struck now—really struck—he could end it. End her. He could destroy her core before she recovered, before she wove another web of precognitive inevitability into being. Leviathan had fallen by his hands. Maybe, just maybe—

The calculations ran through his mind, faster than any human computer. The time it would take to finish her. The lives that would be lost while he did.

Millions.

And that was it.

That was the choice.

She had given him a scenario where he could never win.

Superman exhaled slowly, the weight of it settling into his chest.

Then, he turned away.

Behind him, the Simurgh drifted, damaged, but cognizant. Watching. Calculating.

And as Superman tore toward Earth in a flash of red and blue, she did something no one had ever seen before.

She smiled.