thefictionvixens Page 1409
Page 1409
When it comes to "anti-Superman," you can't help but be curious about the richest bald man in Metropolis.
“No.” Lex Luthor denied it outright, without a second’s hesitation as Superman flew into the window of the Lexus building to begin interrogation. “I have absolutely nothing to do with this preparation.”
“I have my doubts,” Superman grinned. “From the moment I’ve known you until now, you’ve never stopped developing weapons to kill me. Now that the government is getting involved, you’re telling me this has nothing to do with you?”
“It’s true,” Luther said. “To be more precise, I was working on a weapon that could kill you long before you even knew me. But believe it or not, I’m no longer involved in that field. People change, Superman, everyone looks forward. I’ve been in your shadow for too long, and now I’ve decided to stop racking my brains over it.”
Superman frowned. This was only the second time he had heard such a thing recently; the first time was when Lana said it.
"People do change, but some people's nature is unchangeable."
Luther raised an eyebrow: "Not long ago, I helped you deal with this thing called the Center, remember?"
“You helped us save the Earth, and it’s your planet too,” Superman insisted. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
"You just don't believe me, do you?"
Superman snorted: "After everything that's happened between us, do you really expect me to believe you?"
Luther sighed helplessly. "Alright, I don't blame you. If I were you, Superman, I'd find it hard to trust myself either. So, let's put the trust issue aside for now and listen carefully with your super hearing..." He paused, then said seriously, "The government's actions have nothing to do with me. Listen to my heartbeat, Superman, have I lied?"
Superman frowned. He turned to the open window, half-jokingly and half-seriously.
"You'd better not let me find out what tricks you're up to," Luther grinned. "Otherwise..."
“It won’t work, Superman, not this time,” Luther interrupted him confidently.
Superman gave him one last look, then glanced intentionally or unintentionally at the office door, before flying out the window.
Luther's fiancée, Lana Lan, stood outside the office door, listening to the entire conversation. Lex didn't notice, but Clark did.
That afternoon, Lana approached Clark. She offered to monitor Lex or help him hack into Lexcorp's mainframes to see if there was any record of cooperation with the government. Of course, Clark immediately rejected the offer.
“No,” he shook his head without hesitation, “It’s too dangerous.”
“I’m Lex’s fiancée,” Lana insisted. “He wouldn’t do anything to me.”
“Lex Luthor was involved in this case, and his abilities will surprise you.” Clark insisted in return, “I don’t want to… and I won’t involve you in my problems again, Lana.”
“But you know you can’t stop me,” Lana replied. “Whether you agree or not, I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”
Clark was getting annoyed. He knew Lana was serious; he knew her too well. They had known each other since childhood, and despite Lana's delicate appearance, he remembered her as incredibly stubborn—once she made up her mind to do something, she wouldn't be swayed.
But this was one of the qualities that attracted him to Lana from the very beginning, and perhaps that's why they were able to be together.
"Besides, I've already done a lot of dangerous things for you," Lana smiled slyly. "I won't bother with anything else."
“Alright,” Clark knew he couldn’t argue with her, so he agreed, “but you have to promise to be careful. If anything goes wrong…”
"I'll contact you right away, I know, just like before, right?"
As she spoke, an indescribable sadness and melancholy flashed involuntarily in her eyes, a sadness and melancholy so fleeting that it seemed like an illusion.
Chapter 1776 Lana
Lex Luthor swore to Superman that he had nothing to do with it, but he could not have imagined that just one day later, new evidence would point to him.
The new information came from what Helena had stolen from Waller. As the encrypted data decrypted, the name LexCorp began appearing repeatedly in Superman's training files, clearly contradicting Rudd's assurances to Superman the previous day. Less than twenty-four hours later, Superman reappeared in Rudd's office, this time with Xu Fu.
"I said I had nothing to do with this." Facing two Kryptonians who could topple the building with their bare hands, Luther showed no fear, only a hint of impatience: "I told you that yesterday, and I won't change my mind today. I said if you don't believe me, you can use your super senses to do a lie detector test."
“You’re always up to something, Luther. No wonder you managed to fool me,” Clark replied coldly. “We have enough evidence to prove that Lexcorp is connected to this government project, and there’s no point in pretending anymore. Right now, as we’re talking, Huntress has infiltrated Lexcorp’s central computer in the dungeon, and in a minute, she will connect to your servers and destroy all the weapons design data you’ve sold to the government.”
"What are you talking about? I'm not selling anything at all..." Luther paused suddenly, as if he had just realized something.
"No, this can't be... It doesn't make sense." He frowned.
“What is impossible, Luther?” Superman asked.
Luther didn't answer, continuing to frown and think: "But there's no other explanation... It can only be this way, it must be this way."
"What are you thinking, Luther?"
Luther looked up and back at them.
“You may be right, Lexcorp should be held responsible. But this is not my responsibility.”
Almost as soon as he finished speaking, Helena's voice came through the headset: "I hacked into LexCorp's central computer, but it seems Luther wasn't lying. I found all of LexCorp's contracts with the government, and all the orders... but Lex-Luther's name wasn't on any of them."
"Who is it?" Clark hesitated for a moment.
"it's me"
With a series of clicks from the electronic lock, the office's ornate wooden door slowly opened. Lana Lan appeared in the doorway, dressed in a handcrafted silk black jumpsuit and high heels. Her expression was stern, her gaze sharp as knives, like a queen commanding a vast army—a far cry from her appearance yesterday.
Clark was startled; he barely recognized the familiar face as his childhood friend. "Lana? What did you just say?"
“I said it was me.” Lana’s tone was calm, as if everything was normal and required no explanation: “Lex asked me to take over the company while he was busy with other things. I signed a contract with the government on his behalf to sell them anti-Superman weapon technology... which has been used against you.”
Clark's expression was as if he had swallowed kryptonite.
If this was a contract between the government and Lex Luthor to eliminate him, he might be furious, but not at all surprised, because it would make perfect sense. But what about Lana? The lovely small-town girl he grew up with?
If this is true, the damage to him will far exceed that of kryptonite or the Red Sun.
"Why did Waller blackmail you, or is Luther using you...?"
“No, I did it voluntarily.” Lana picked up the tablet and turned the screen toward the people in the room: it had a sophisticated interface with a touch button prominently displayed.
"Stay where you are and don't try to get any closer." Lana sternly stopped Clark from approaching. "This button is the detonator for a billion tons of kryptonite, thanks to Lex's years of hard work collecting it. I've compressed a billion tons of kryptonite into gaseous molecules and distributed them in a thousand warehouses. Once I press this switch, they will all explode, and all the kryptonite particles will escape into the atmosphere. It's completely harmless to humans, but for the next thousand years, you will be unable to set foot on this planet."
Clark stared at her for a long time, as if using his superhuman vision to examine her soul, checking from the inside out whether she was truly Lana Lan.
From the moment Lana appeared, Luther deliberately stepped back, remaining silent and acting as a front-row spectator, neither helping nor hindering her. Xu Fu kept his eyes fixed on Lana's fingers hovering over the power button. He was confident he could snatch the tablet before her nerves directed her fingers to touch it, or more simply, burn out the device's circuitry with his heat vision.
But Clark raised a hand in front of him, stopping him from doing so.
Because if Xu Fu did that, he would never know whether Lana had actually pressed the button, which was more important to him.
"Do you want to know why?" Lana scoffed self-deprecatingly. "Then I'll tell you why. You know I lost my parents very early... But do you know how I lost them?"
Clark shook his head: "I don't know, you never told me."
“I bet you won’t,” she looked directly into Clark’s blue eyes, something she had done thousands of times before, but never with the same meaning as today. She said, “The day you came to Earth… brought with you a meteor shower. Countless burning fragments rained down on the cities; many died, many lost something important. And me… I lost my parents.”
Clark remained silent for a long time. "I...I'm sorry, I never knew..."
“Of course you don’t know. Nobody told you, not even me. I told myself it wasn’t your fault. I thought I had stopped blaming you a long time ago. I did shed tears for you when you died six years ago.” She paused, then changed the subject: “Do you remember Stephen Hattie?”
“Remember, your best friend from elementary school,” Clark said softly, “she made fun of me for being a nerd, and you two had a huge fight about it.”
“Once.” Then she turned her gaze to Xu Fu: “…until that child got into a fight with an alien tyrant in New York and fell through the crack in the ground.”
Xu Fu frowned, about to say something, when Lana spoke first: "If you say this isn't your fault, I can understand. You may have done your best at the time, and I know you can't guarantee everyone's safety. But undeniably, your existence led to the disaster and destruction."
She turned to Clark: “It’s been like this for years. Ever since Superman came along, supervillains have been popping up everywhere. Before that, we didn’t even know aliens existed, but with you, alien invasions have become commonplace.”
Then she turned to Xu Fu: "You too. Superheroes disappeared for six years, a full six years, and we didn't have to worry about an office building suddenly falling on our heads. Look at the months since you appeared: New York, Gotham, Metropolis... how many more people will die because of this?"
“You know it’s not like that,” Xu Fu shook his head. “You just need an excuse to cover up your unreasonable anger.”
"Say what you will, I'm just preventing more tragedies from happening, like my parents, like Steven's parents. Now tell your companions in the central computer room not to touch anything, leave, go home, and pretend none of this happened. That way I won't press that button (for the money), and you'll have a home to go back to before the government decides to activate the last card."
Xu Fu stepped forward, his eyes flashing with red flames: "I can stop her."
Clark persisted, reaching out to stop him, stubbornly saying, "No, she won't refuse. I know her. She may be temporarily blinded by grief and anger, but deep down she's still that kind girl. As long as the data is destroyed and the mainframe is blown up, Huntress will be fine."
He spoke with such certainty and conviction that Xu Fu hesitated for a moment, but unfortunately, Lana did not hesitate. She stared at Clark almost without blinking and pressed her index finger without thinking.
Almost simultaneously, Xu Fu activated her thermal vision, burning the tablet computer. The device flew from her hand, fell to the ground, and black smoke billowed from the cracked screen.
But it was too late. The order had been given and airdropped into more than a thousand hidden factories. Thousands of kryptonite dust canisters were detonated simultaneously, sending up a powerful green smoke cloud that instantly covered the entire country's atmosphere and spread globally at an alarming rate.
The whole world has closed its doors to Kryptonians.
Chapter 1777 Green Krypton
At the time of the incident, Kara Zoel, as Supergirl, was battling a supervillain named Silver Banshee in the city. Silver Banshee had a black and white body, long silver hair that reached her thighs, and a pale, withered face, as if she had just crawled out of a grave. Her primary weapon was screams, which could emit sound waves far beyond human endurance, enough to kill someone instantly.
Her shrill, high-pitched voice caused Kara, who happened to have super hearing, immense pain, but Kara endured it for a while, at least until she was sent back to prison, or rather, she should have been sent back to prison. Under normal circumstances, the Silver Banshee should have been a second-rate character, perhaps categorized as a "superwoman on her way to work." Under normal circumstances, the Silver Banshee was at best a second-rate character, perhaps categorized as a "superwoman on her way to work," at most causing Kara morning tinnitus.
But today is different.
Kara put the banshee down and was about to take her to the police station when suddenly green dust billowed up. She realized it too late; kryptonite powder and the resulting radiation instantly filled the entire city of Nasino, penetrating her mouth, nose, and every pore of her body.
Kara's pupils contracted, and she staggered. She stood there half-crouched, as if panting. An immeasurable amount of kryptonite powder spread through her respiratory tract in an instant, mixed into her blood vessels, and burned her as if thousands of needles were piercing her. Her blood seemed to be boiling, and the kryptonite radiation in the atmosphere 080 seemed to be taking away the strength from her bones and body.
The silver banshee, who had been inwardly cursing herself, was now active again. She sat for a while, observing carefully, and was pleased to find that Supergirl seemed to have really weakened. It seemed today was her lucky day; perhaps she should consider buying a lottery ticket after it was over.
She jumped up, unable to contain her enthusiastic smile, walked over to the Super Girl who was kneeling on one knee, panting, arrogantly circled her once, and then said, "It seems that someone has finally done what they should have done a long time ago: drive you alien pests out of Earth."
Almost every cell in her body was protesting. Kara struggled to pull herself together, a flood of questions rushing through her mind: Who did this? Why did they do it?
The silver banshee circled her victoriously once, finally stopping in front of her and taking a deep breath. With a sharp "whoosh," all the glass in the street shattered, and the resulting sonic boom sent the green air arcing through it like a green tide rushing towards Kara.
The deafening pain pierced her eardrums for only a moment, but then she could hear nothing at all. Blood gushed from her ear canals, and she was blown away like a red feather by the sound waves, bouncing off the ground and onto the wall at the back of the room, where she was swallowed up by a thick layer of dust along with the broken wall.
The Silver Banshee was almost unable to contain her excitement. She had faced off against Supergirl many times before, but each time her prized sonic prowess had failed her. Though she was reluctant to admit it, deep down she had long felt that this beautiful blonde was too powerful to defeat.
This was the first time she had seen Super Girl so fragile, as fragile as a flower in the wind, so easily broken, almost heartbreaking. But she would not show mercy to her nemesis; this might be her only chance to completely end Super Girl, and the first time she would defeat this invincible opponent.
She planned to enjoy it all.
"Come on, girl, don't you know how to fight?" The silver banshee sneered as she walked to the ruins of the collapsed city wall. "I haven't had enough fun yet."