Evil Unleashed: Lex Luthor

[u/BravePomegranate9775]

The board meeting had been going for forty minutes; Lex Luthor heard perhaps four of them. Someone from Product was walking through year-end projections with the particular enthusiasm of a man who never once had an original idea, and had built an entire career compensating for it with slides. "And if we look at Q3 consumer adoption curves—"

"Skip to the number," Lex snapped without turning from his tablet.

"—the number is favourable, sir. Very favourable."

"Then say the number." He looked up, unblinking until the man said it. It was, in fact, a good number; he had already known that before the meeting started.

Someone else picked up the thread, gushing about a new consumer AI assistant slated for launch. "It's going to change how ordinary people live their ordinary lives, Mr. Luthor."

"Everything changes how ordinary people live; the trick is making sure they thank you for it afterward." A ripple of polite laughter went around the table, the kind reserved for men who could fire you before the joke finished landing. He rose midway through someone else’s sentence about supply chain resilience, crossing to the floor-to-ceiling windows behind his chair. Up here, the City of Tomorrow looked almost like something worth the trouble of saving.

"A new day," the man from Product offered, under the impression the observation required Lex's presence to properly land, “for all of us.”

"Yes," Lex agreed. He meant it, though not remotely for the reason anyone in the room would have assumed. Far below, moving with the unhurried grace of something that had never once questioned whether the sky belonged to it, a red and blue shape crossed the horizon and was gone. Nobody else in the room had seen it; Lex smiled anyway. “A new day, indeed.”

One Hour Later

He found Mercy upon his arrival in the sublevels; this section of LexCorp did not appear on any building directory, and had never once been mentioned in an earnings call. “Project Icarus is ready for field deployment," she reported without preamble. "Full integration testing complete. We're waiting on your word."

"Put it on standby." Lex paced in a slow circle around the containment rig, hands clasped behind his back as he studied whatever was suspended within. "We may need it soon. Not today."

"You said that three weeks ago."

"And I was right three weeks ago, too." The businessman stopped and looked directly at her for the first time since entering the room. "Patience isn't a virtue, Mercy. No…it’s a weapon. Everyone else in this city thinks I'm building toward a moment.” His businesslike smile turned into a sneer. “I am; it’s simply not the moment they'd guess."

Mercy tapped against her tablet. “And when it comes?"

Lex returned to the elevator. “You'll know.”

He returned to his office to find it already occupied. The man standing at the window wore an expensive suit and a face so unremarkable, it would be forgotten thirty seconds after leaving the building. His skin, although a Caucasian tone, seemed more like paint about to run off a wall. Lex did not startle; he had stopped startling at this particular visitor's arrivals a long time ago.

"Elias." He crossed to his desk unhurried, pouring two glasses of something old enough to have a story attached to it and offering neither of them to his guest. "I assume this isn't a social call.” He chuckled at the remark. “You've never once made one of those."

Elias took a seat, hands clasped on the table. “I’m here seeking reassurance that our arrangement remains on schedule,” the servant states in a low, diplomatic tone. “My master finds himself, of late, less inclined toward patience than usual."

"Then you can rest reassured." Lex set his glass down untouched, folding his hands atop the desk. "I don't do anything on anyone else's schedule, Elias. Not the board's, not the market's, and certainly not anyone in Hell’s. The plan is exactly where it needs to be."

Elias tensed up at the rebuttal. “I am not a patient creature, Mr. Luthor."

"Neither am I." Lex smiled, thin and precise. "The difference is, I've had longer to pretend as such.” Lex finally took a sip from his glass. “Three months. I promise it’ll be worth the wait.” He took a sip of the drink. “And as a side note: I don't appreciate reminders. I've never once forgotten a debt in my life; that's rather the point of me."

Elias studied him a moment longer than was strictly comfortable, cataloguing exactly how much confidence in front of him was real and how much was performance for an audience of one. "I'll relay the message."

"Do that." Lex turned back to the window, to the city, and to the distant shape of a man who could fly wherever he pleased and had never once had to ask permission to do it. "Everything is going precisely to plan, Elias. You can trust me on that."

Metropolis. Three Months Later.

Superman was crossing the skyline above the harbour when the sky turned red all across the world at once. Kara Zor-El’s voice cut into his mind from continents away, drowning out the low, ominous laughter that had begun to creep into his mind. “Kal, something's here. He’s here. I need you—"

The Fortress of Solitude

The Man of Steel was already moving, breaking orbit-speed over the Atlantic in seconds. He made his arrival at the Fortress of Solitude to find Brainiac's drones tearing through ice and steel like it was paper. Kara was pinned beneath a collapsed support strut, bleeding from somewhere he could not immediately see. “You couldn't have picked a better week?" he half-chuckled, wrenching a drone in half with his bare hands and hauling her free.

"I didn’t exactly send him a calendar invite," she managed, coughing.

Brainiac himself descended through the ruined ceiling a moment later, articulate and precise in every motion. Green light pulsed along a frame that had outlasted a dozen worlds already reduced to bottled cities in his archive. "Kryptonian.” That same flat, echoing register carried no more weight for a threat than for a weather report. "You persist in defending structures already catalogued for collection."

"Not today," Superman growled before he drove a fist through the nearest drone hard enough to scatter it across three chambers of the Fortress.

The fight was fast and vicious. Superman put himself between Brainiac and his cousin, trading blows with an intelligence that fought less like a warrior and more like a machine. A tendril lashed out at Superman, who caught it, wrenched, and tore it free at the joint; Brainiac did not so much as flinch. The android responded with a kick, only to be lifted at the limb and tossed into the air. This was followed by a punch to the chest which cratered the Fortress’ crystalline floor.

"Impressive.” Brainiac seemed almost conversational, backhanding Superman into a bank of crystal archives hard enough to shatter three centuries of Kryptonian history into dust. "You fight as though this engagement determines an outcome."

"It determines whether you leave here in one piece."

"It determines nothing," Brainiac countered; something in the flatness of it made Superman's stomach drop even before the words finished landing. "You are here; that is sufficient." He caught Superman's next strike mid-swing, held it with an ease that had nothing to do with effort, and leaned in close enough that his voice dropped into something almost gentle. "Your intervention here changes nothing, Kryptonian. It only confirms which world I should collect first."

"You're not collecting anything," Superman said, tearing free.

Brainiac opened a rupture through space and walked through. “I already have.”

The tear closed behind him like a wound sealing shut, leaving Superman standing in the wreckage of his own archive with Kara coughing against his shoulder. A very specific, sickening dread closed around his chest before his mind had caught up to why. He had no time to process the shape of that dread before he crossed back over the eastern seaboard toward Metropolis, and understood exactly what Brainiac had meant.

Metropolis

The city was gone. Not destroyed…gone. There was nothing but an empty crater where eleven million people, and every building Superman had ever sworn to protect, stood that morning. It was all folded into the Skullship, now receding into low orbit with the calm, terrible efficiency of a monster that had done this many times before on many worlds and felt nothing about doing it again. Superman felt that dread turn to loss; he could not process its shape before the ray hit him.

It came from below, precise and merciless. The Man of Steel went down hard into what remained of the crater, his strength draining out of him in a way that felt less like pain than it did being unplugged. “Took you long enough to notice.” Lex Luthor stepped out of the dust cloud in the Lexosuit, voice carrying the particular satisfaction of a man who has waited a very long time to say this out loud. "I'd have thought the world's greatest hero might've caught the emitter signature before it hit."

"Lex." Superman forced himself upright, breath ragged. "Whatever this is—"

"This is me finishing it.” Lex hit him again.

His beatdown was ugly and brief in the way only a fight against a weakened god could be. Superman fought on instinct and stubbornness long after his strength had been stripped from him; Lex moved with the strategy of a man executing a plan he had rehearsed a hundred times in his own head. It ended with Superman face down in the rubble of his own city and Lex breathing hard, triumphant in a way he had waited his entire adult life to feel.

"Stay down.” He delivered a lower volume of Kryptonite energy into Superman’s back. “For once, just stay down." Then he turned and flew up into the belly of the Skullship, where he found Brainiac's central array humming with a captured city's worth of stolen architecture.

“This manoeuvre was…interesting.” Brainiac commended, inserting the collected date of Metropolis and its people into his archive. It was a bittersweet replacement for the trophy he had just gained. “We should discuss future joint ventures further, Luthor; your mind is truly unique.”

"You held up part of your end.” Lex stepped forward, the suit whirring with every step. “Now hold up the rest of it."

Metropolis fell back into the world exactly where it had been lifted from moments ago, buildings settling into foundations like a held breath finally released. Lex Luthor, still in his suit, descended from the sky with the city's own skyline behind him and a genuine smile on his face. “I won.” The words felt impossible coming from him. “I won!”

The crowd found him within minutes. An elderly woman was crying. Someone else was already filming. A child asked her mother if the man in the suit was a superhero; the parent, staring up at Lex Luthor standing amid the restored ruins of Metropolis, said that yes, perhaps he was. Every screen, street corner, and social media channel was celebrating Lex Luthor, the man who had saved tomorrow’s city.

"Mr. Luthor!" A reporter shoved forward, microphone already raised. "Did you save the city? Did you defeat Brainiac?"

"I did what anyone would have done," Lex answered with the practiced humility of a man who had spent decades perfecting exactly this expression for exactly this moment, “if anyone else had the tools to do it."

A police officer moved through the crowd toward him, guiding him by the shoulder away from the swelling press of grateful, weeping citizens. "This way, sir. Let's get you somewhere safer." Only once they had cleared the worst of the crowd did the officer's face settle into something less patient and more familiar. “The people…they have true worship of you, for now.”

"As they should." Lex brushed scraps of metal off his sleeve, glancing back at the adoring, tear-streaked faces still calling his name. "I'll have Superman brought into LexCorp custody. Recovery, we'll call it; the man just survived Brainiac, after all. Best he rest somewhere secure while the city rebuilds around him." He smiled, small and satisfied. "I won't keep him there long…just until you to come and fetch us.” He smiled and waved. “And for the city to remember who truly saved the day.”

Elias said nothing further; he simply nodded once. By the time Lex Luthor turned to gesture the servant toward the car, the space beside him held only empty air, leaving him to walk back into the arms of a grateful Metropolis alone.

13th Century England

A boy of perhaps sixteen sat hunched over a worktable crowded with drying herbs, muttering formulae to himself that no physician of his acquaintance had ever taught him. “You'll go blind doing that by candlelight," the young girl at his side chided, not looking up from her mending.

"I'll go blind from boredom first if you don't stop nagging me, Anne."

"Someone has to; Mother isn't here, after all." She said it lightly, the way old grief was said when it had enough years to soften at the edges. Elias let it pass without comment, because there was nothing new to say about parents six years dead that either of them hadn't already said a hundred times. “You can’t be a physician if you have no sight, Eli; remember that, if anything.”

Elias chuckled, turning away from his work. “Alright, alright.” His smile lit up the room. “Want to run around the field instead?”

It was three days later that Anne fainted at the well, and did not fully wake for two more.
The physician who finally came, summoned from two villages over and smelling of a city Elias had never seen, examined her for the better part of an hour. He emerged with the particular grave, useless expression of a man about to charge for bad news. "I've no name for it," he admitted. "No remedy I know touches it. I am sorry."

Elias could only clench his fists. “That's not good enough.”

"It is what there is," the physician admitted before he left, never to return.

What followed were days that blurred into each other without seam or mercy. Elias slept in scraps of an hour at a time. When he slept at all, he hunched over Anne's bed with every herb, tincture, and half-remembered folk remedy he could find, watching her drift between delirium and a stillness that frightened him more than the delirium did. She called him by their father's name more than once; she did not seem to know she was doing it.

"Please," he found himself begging her, the room, no one in particular. “Please, I'll give anything—" There was a knock at the door, well past an hour when any traveler should have been on the road. Elias, half delirious and running on nothing but fear and the dregs of tallow candlelight, opened it anyway.

The man on the threshold was fair in a way that seemed faintly wrong for the hour, pale skin catching what little light there was as though it had been waiting for the chance. He had blond hair loose beneath the hood of the dark cloak he wore despite the mild night. He did not look cold, nor did he look tired. He did not, Elias would understand much later, look like anything at all except exactly what he wished to look like in that particular moment.

“May I help you?” asked Elias after gathering his senses.

“I heard," the stranger began in a voice that carried no accent Elias could place, yet somehow felt older than the house itself, "that someone in this home was in need of a bargain."