SUPERMAN: THE MAN OF TOMORROW A My Hero Academia Fanfiction

The last thing Marcus Cole remembered before dying was the smell of old comic book pages.

Not the sterile, glossy scent of a modern trade paperback fresh off an Amazon delivery truck. No. This was the deep, warm, slightly musty perfume of a longbox—the kind you found in the back of a comic shop that had been open since 1986, the kind run by a guy named Earl or Gus who didn't care about variant covers or speculation markets and just wanted to talk about whether Curt Swan or Wayne Boring drew the definitive Superman. Marcus had been sitting cross-legged on the floor of his apartment in Cincinnati, Ohio, surrounded by a fortress of those longboxes, rereading All-Star Superman #10 for what had to be the four hundredth time in his thirty-one years of life. The issue where Superman, dying of solar radiation poisoning, takes a single afternoon to do impossible things. Where he talks a girl off a ledge. Where he holds her and tells her that her doctor really was on the way, and that he'd heard her heart was broken, and that he was sorry, and then—the line that Marcus had tattooed on the inside of his left forearm in simple typewriter font because he believed it more than he believed in anything else in his entire life—

"You're much stronger than you think you are. Trust me."

Marcus had been reading that panel, tracing his thumb over the words the way a man might trace the face of someone he loved in a photograph, when the aneurysm happened. There was no warning. No headache. No dramatic clutching of the chest. The blood vessel in his brain simply failed—a manufacturing defect in the machinery of Marcus Cole that had been there since birth, ticking silently, patiently, counting down through every single one of the 11,415 days he'd been alive. He was looking at that page, and then there was a sound like a camera flash going off inside his skull, and then he was looking at the ceiling, and then he was looking at nothing at all.

He died on a Tuesday. He died in sweatpants and a faded blue t-shirt with the Superman S-shield on the chest. He died with All-Star Superman #10 open on his lap. He died alone, and he died quietly, and the paramedics who found him two days later when his landlord came to check on the smell would note in their report that the deceased appeared peaceful, almost smiling, and that the apartment contained an estimated six thousand comic books, the overwhelming majority of which featured Superman.

The obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer was four lines long. Marcus Cole, 31. No surviving family. No service planned. Donations to the Cincinnati Public Library in lieu of flowers.

It did not mention that Marcus Cole had spent every Saturday for seven years volunteering at the Hamilton County juvenile detention center, reading comics with kids who had never been read to. It did not mention that he'd once talked his neighbor, a seventy-four-year-old Korean War veteran named Harold Park, through a panic attack at three in the morning by sitting on the hallway floor outside Harold's door and calmly, gently, patiently talking about the 1978 Christopher Reeve film until Harold's breathing slowed and the old man opened the door and wept into Marcus's shoulder. It did not mention that Marcus had, on nine separate occasions, given his entire paycheck from the warehouse where he worked to people he barely knew because they needed it more than he did and Marcus believed—truly, deeply, in the marrow of his bones believed—that the measure of a person was not what they did when the world was watching, but what they did when nobody was watching at all.

The obituary did not mention any of this because nobody knew. Because Marcus did not do these things so that people would know. He did them because they were the right things to do. He did them because when he was eight years old, he had read Superman #247, the one where Superman realizes he cannot solve every problem for humanity because humanity needs to learn to solve its own problems, and young Marcus had understood, with the crystal clarity of a child who grasps a truth that most adults spend their entire lives running from, that being good was not about power. It was never about power. It was about choice.

Marcus Cole chose to be good. Every single day. In a world that did not reward him for it. In a world that did not even notice.

And then he died, and his story should have been over.

It wasn't.

Consciousness returned to Marcus Cole like sunrise.

Not the way sunrise happens in a movie—sudden, dramatic, swelling orchestral score. No. The way it happens in real life. Slowly. Imperceptibly at first. A gradual lightening of the darkness behind his eyelids, a warming of the black void from nothing to something, from absence to presence, from death to—

Sound.

It was the first thing that came back, and it came back all at once.

Not sound the way he had known sound when he was Marcus Cole of Cincinnati, Ohio, who worked at a warehouse and read comic books and could hear his neighbor's television through the apartment wall if Harold had the volume up too high. This was something else entirely. This was everything. This was every sound in the world arriving at his ears simultaneously, a tidal wave of noise so vast and so complex and so overwhelmingly, impossibly detailed that for a long, terrifying moment, Marcus thought he had been sent to Hell, and Hell was noise.

He could hear heartbeats. Not a heartbeat. Heartbeats. Plural. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Millions. A symphony of wet, muscular percussion, every single one slightly different in rhythm and intensity, and he could hear them all, layered on top of each other like the world's most complicated piece of music. He could hear blood moving through veins, the liquid whisper of it, and he could hear lungs expanding and contracting, and he could hear the electrical signals firing along neural pathways, a crackling, popping static like a distant radio. He could hear conversations—not one, not two, but an uncountable number of them happening simultaneously in languages he had never studied but somehow understood. He could hear a woman in an apartment building arguing with her husband about money. He could hear a child crying in a hospital room. He could hear a dog barking in a park. He could hear the tectonic plates of the Earth grinding against each other miles below the surface, a deep, geological groan that was less a sound and more a vibration, a frequency so low it shouldn't have been audible to anything organic. He could hear the wind moving between buildings. He could hear traffic—but it was wrong, the cars sounded different, the engines had a hum to them that wasn't gasoline or diesel, and the honking horns played musical notes he didn't recognize. He could hear power lines buzzing. He could hear the hiss of gas lines. He could hear water running through pipes beneath streets. He could hear the planet's magnetic field, a deep, resonant hum that pervaded everything, underscoring the cacophony like a sustained bass note.

And beneath it all—beneath the voices and the heartbeats and the machinery and the geology—he could hear something else. Something that made his new heart stutter in his new chest. He could hear a star. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. He could hear the sun. He could hear the thermonuclear fury of a yellow dwarf star ninety-three million miles away, the constant, furious, never-ending detonation of hydrogen fusing into helium at temperatures beyond human comprehension, and it sang to him. It sang to every cell in his body. It sang, and his body sang back, and Marcus Cole understood, with a certainty so profound it made him want to weep, that whatever he was now, he was not what he had been before.

He opened his eyes.

And promptly screamed.

Not because of pain. Because of vision. Because Marcus Cole—or whatever Marcus Cole had become—was seeing the electromagnetic spectrum. All of it. Simultaneously. He was seeing visible light and infrared and ultraviolet and X-ray and gamma radiation all at once, overlaid on top of each other in layers of impossible color that human language did not possess words for. He was seeing the thermal signatures of every living thing in a five-mile radius, blooming orange and red and white against the cooler blues and greens of buildings and pavement. He was seeing the skeletal structures of people walking on the street below him—below him? He was high up, he was on a roof, how was he on a roof?—their bones bright white beneath translucent skin, their organs pulsing, their blood flowing. He was seeing the internal wiring of the building beneath his feet, a nervous system of copper and fiber optic cable. He was seeing radio waves and cell phone signals as shimmering, gossamer threads stretching between towers, between satellites, between the phones in people's pockets, a vast invisible web of information that blanketed the city like a second atmosphere.

He squeezed his eyes shut. The world didn't go away. He could see through his own eyelids. He could see through the building. He could see through everything.

Focus, said a voice in his head that was not quite his own. It was calmer than Marcus felt. It was steadier. It was the voice of someone who had done this before, who understood this body and its impossible capabilities, who knew how to narrow the aperture from everything to something. One layer at a time. Start with the light you know.

Marcus breathed. In and out. He felt his lungs fill—and they filled differently than lungs should fill, the air was fuel, the oxygen was energy, his body was processing it at a molecular level and converting it into something that felt like liquid sunlight coursing through his bloodstream—and as he exhaled, he concentrated. He willed the X-ray vision away. He willed the infrared away. He willed the ultraviolet away. Layer by layer, he peeled back the electromagnetic spectrum until he was left with just visible light, just the world as a normal pair of eyes would see it, and when he opened his eyes again, he saw—

A city.

A city he did not recognize.

It was enormous, sprawling to the horizon in every direction, a dense urban landscape of glass and steel and concrete that reminded him of Tokyo, or what he imagined Tokyo might look like if you gave it another fifty years of development and a radically different architectural philosophy. The buildings were tall but oddly shaped, some of them curving in ways that defied conventional engineering, others topped with structures that looked like they served no purpose Marcus could identify. The streets below were packed with people and vehicles, the traffic flowing in patterns that were familiar but slightly off, like a song played in a key he didn't recognize. There were billboards and signs everywhere, and they were all in Japanese, but Marcus could read them, which was strange because Marcus Cole had never spoken or read a word of Japanese in his life, and yet the characters resolved themselves into meaning the instant his eyes touched them, as naturally as if he were reading English.

MUSUTAFU CITY, read a large sign on the building across the street. And below it, in smaller text, HERO DISTRICT 7 — ALL MIGHT TERRITORY.

Marcus stared at those words. His new heart, which he was beginning to realize beat considerably slower than a human heart—maybe once every thirty seconds, a deep, powerful, resonant thump that sent shockwaves through his entire body—gave an extra beat.

Hero District. All Might.

He looked down at himself. He was tall—much taller than he had been as Marcus Cole, who had stood five feet nine inches in his socks and had the soft, unremarkable build of a man who spent most of his time sitting. This body was six feet four, maybe six feet five, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and arms roped with muscle that did not look like the muscle of a bodybuilder but rather the muscle of something functional, something built for work, for purpose. His hands were large and clean and unmarred by scars or calluses, and his skin was a shade lighter than it had been, though not pale—warm, sun-kissed, as if every cell had been steeped in starlight. He was wearing clothes he didn't recognize: a plain white t-shirt and gray sweatpants that were slightly too short, as if they had been made for a smaller person. His feet were bare.

And on his left forearm, where Marcus Cole had once had a tattoo of Superman's words to a suicidal girl—

Nothing. The skin was smooth and unblemished.

But the words were still there. They were inside him now, written on something deeper than skin.

"You're much stronger than you think you are. Trust me."

Marcus looked up at the sun. It was the same sun—he knew it, he could feel it, he could hear it—but it felt closer, somehow. More present. More personal. Like a parent watching over a child. The light hit his skin, and his body responded with a surge of energy so immense that for a moment Marcus worried he might fly apart, might simply detonate into a supernova of stored solar radiation. But the body held. The body was designed for this. The body was, he was beginning to understand, designed for exactly this.

He held up his right hand. He looked at it. He flexed his fingers.

Then, very carefully, he turned his attention to the concrete ledge of the rooftop on which he stood. He reached down and pressed his index finger against it. Gently. The way you might press your finger against the surface of water. The concrete yielded. His finger sank into it as if it were warm clay. He pushed further, and the concrete didn't crack or shatter—it simply parted around his finger, unable to resist even the most casual application of his strength.

He pulled his finger out. He looked at the smooth, finger-shaped hole in the concrete. He looked at his finger. Not a scratch. Not a speck of dust.

Marcus Cole sat down on the roof of a building in a city called Musutafu in a world where the words "All Might" were written on billboards and heroes were organized into districts, and he put his head in his hands, and he spent a very long time in silence.

He was dead. He knew this. Marcus Cole, the man from Cincinnati who loved Superman, who had lived a quiet and unremarkable and deeply good life, was dead. His brain had betrayed him and he had died on his apartment floor with a comic book in his lap.

And now he was here. In a new body. In a new world. With the powers of the man he had admired more than any other person, real or fictional, who had ever existed.

He was Superman.

Not a version of Superman. Not an approximation. Not a "Superman-inspired quirk" or a "Kryptonian-type ability." He was Superman. He could feel it in the way his cells drank the sunlight. He could feel it in the density of his molecular structure, the way his body was fundamentally different from human tissue at a subatomic level, every cell a microscopic solar battery storing and processing energy from a yellow sun. He could feel the heat vision coiled behind his eyes like a sleeping dragon. He could feel the cold breath in his lungs, capable of freezing a river solid or extinguishing a wildfire. He could feel the flight—oh, God, the flight—not as an ability but as a sense, a sixth sense, an awareness of his relationship to gravity that told him he could reject it at will, could simply choose to go up, and up would have him.

He was Superman. In the world of My Hero Academia. And as the shock faded and the reality settled and the sun continued to pour its energy into him like a river into an ocean, Marcus Cole—Superman—began to hear something.

He heard a heartbeat falter.

He heard a sharp intake of breath.

He heard the scuff of shoes on concrete—not the confident scuff of walking, but the hesitant, shuffling scuff of someone standing on an edge.

He heard a man crying.

Marcus turned his head. His telescopic vision engaged instinctively, the world zooming in with a clarity that made binoculars look like smeared glass, and suddenly he was looking at a rooftop eight blocks to the northeast. There was a man standing on the edge. He was small—five feet four, maybe five five—and thin, with the kind of thinness that spoke of missed meals rather than fitness. He was wearing a rumpled business suit. His tie was undone. His hair was uncombed. His shoes were polished but old, the leather cracked at the toes. He was somewhere in his early forties, and he had the face of a man who had been crying for hours, the skin blotchy and swollen, the eyes red-rimmed and distant. His hands were shaking. His left hand held a cell phone. His right hand held nothing, and the fingers of that hand kept opening and closing, grasping at the air as if searching for something to hold onto and finding nothing.

He was standing on the very edge of the roof, his toes hanging over the precipice, and he was looking down at the street forty stories below.

Marcus could hear his heartbeat. It was fast—too fast—thready and irregular, the heartbeat of a man whose body was pumping itself full of adrenaline and cortisol and norepinephrine, a man in the grip of a fight-or-flight response so severe that his nervous system was essentially screaming at him to step back, to survive, to live, but whose mind had overridden every single one of those biological imperatives because his mind had decided that the fall was preferable to whatever was waiting for him if he stayed.

Marcus could hear his breathing. Short, shallow, hitching on every inhale. The breathing of a man who was trying not to sob.

Marcus could hear his phone. It was playing a voicemail on speaker, and the voice on the voicemail was a woman's voice—tired, angry, final—and the words she was saying were:

"I'm not doing this anymore. I've taken Yuki and we're at my mother's. Don't call me. Don't come looking for us. I've already talked to a lawyer. You said you'd change and you didn't. You said you'd stop drinking and you didn't. You said you'd be better and you weren't. I can't keep believing you. I can't keep waiting. I'm sorry. Goodbye."

The voicemail ended. The man on the roof played it again. He had been playing it on a loop, over and over, for what Marcus estimated—based on the battery level of the phone, the degree of repetitive wear on the play button, and the depth of the emotional erosion evident in the man's vital signs—had been approximately three hours.

Three hours standing on the edge of a building. Three hours listening to the woman he loved tell him she was done. Three hours working up the courage to step forward into nothing.

Marcus didn't think.

He didn't deliberate. He didn't weigh the pros and cons. He didn't calculate the social implications of revealing his abilities in a world where abilities were regulated and licensed and organized into a rigid caste system of "heroes" and "villains" and "civilians." He didn't consider what it would mean for him, this newly born Superman in a world he didn't understand, to act without authorization, without a license, without permission.

He simply went.

The flight engaged like a memory his body had never forgotten. One moment he was standing on the rooftop, and the next he was in the air, and there was no transition, no jump, no running start. He simply rose, his relationship to gravity shifting from subject to sovereign in the space between one heartbeat and the next. The air parted around him without resistance. There was no sonic boom—he was moving fast, but not that fast, not yet, he was being careful, being gentle, because the last thing the man on that ledge needed was to be startled by a thunderclap.

The wind was in his face and it meant nothing to him. The buildings blurred past below him and they might as well have been drawings. The distance between his rooftop and that man's rooftop—eight blocks, roughly half a mile—collapsed in less than three seconds, and then Marcus was there, hovering, floating twenty feet away from the man on the ledge, hanging in the sky like he had always belonged there.

And the man hadn't noticed him.

The man was looking down. The man was listening to the voicemail again. The man's right foot was sliding forward, the toe of his polished, cracked shoe extending further over the edge, and Marcus could see—with a physician's precision made possible by vision that could resolve individual cells—that the man's center of gravity was shifting, that in approximately four seconds the physics of the situation would become irreversible, and the man would fall.

Marcus did not grab him. He did not swoop down and snatch him from the ledge in a dramatic rescue. He did not shout or yell or command the man to stop. He did not use his heat vision to weld the man's shoes to the concrete or his freeze breath to create an ice barrier or any of the hundred other things his body was telling him it could do.

He spoke.

Quietly. Gently. The way you speak to someone who is holding something fragile.

"Hi."

The man flinched. His head snapped up. His eyes—bloodshot, swollen, filled with a grief so deep it looked like it went all the way down to the bedrock of his soul—found Marcus, and for a long moment, the man simply stared. His mouth opened. Nothing came out. He stared at this tall, broad-shouldered stranger hovering in midair twenty feet away with no visible support, no wings, no jet boots, no glowing aura, just a man in a white t-shirt and too-short sweatpants floating in the sky as naturally as a cloud.

"...What?" the man finally managed. His voice was hoarse, scraped raw by three hours of crying.

"My name is..." Marcus paused. He almost said Marcus. But Marcus was dead. Marcus was on the floor of an apartment in Cincinnati with a comic book in his lap and a four-line obituary in the Enquirer. The person floating in the air right now was someone else. Someone new. Someone with a responsibility that was both heavier and simpler than anything Marcus had ever carried.

"My name doesn't matter," Marcus said. "What's yours?"

The man blinked. Of all the things he had expected from the floating stranger—and to be fair, his expectations had probably been limited to "nothing" because he hadn't expected a floating stranger at all—a question about his name was clearly not among them. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"...Takeshi," he said. "Takeshi Yamamoto."

"Takeshi," Marcus repeated. He said it carefully, respectfully, giving the name weight. "That's a good name. Strong name." He floated a little closer. Not much. Not enough to invade the man's space or make him feel cornered. Just enough to be present. "Can I ask you something, Takeshi?"

Takeshi stared at him. His right foot was still extended over the edge. His center of gravity was still precarious. But his eyes were on Marcus now, not on the street below, and that was something. That was everything.

"You're... you're flying," Takeshi said, as if this were the most important thing in the world.

"I am," Marcus agreed. "Can I ask you something?"

"Is that... is that your quirk?"

"Something like that. Takeshi, can I ask you my question?"

Takeshi's jaw worked. A muscle in his cheek twitched. His phone, still clutched in his left hand, began to play the voicemail again. "I'm not doing this anymore—" Takeshi's face crumpled, and his foot slid forward another half inch, and Marcus could see the decision forming behind the man's eyes, the last wall crumbling, the final surrender to gravity and despair—

"What's your daughter's name?" Marcus asked.

The foot stopped.

Takeshi looked at him. His face was a ruin, but something flickered in the wreckage. Something small and stubborn and refusing to go out.

"How did you—"

"The voicemail," Marcus said, gently. "She mentioned someone named Yuki. Is that your daughter?"

Takeshi's throat worked. He swallowed hard. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper, carried to Marcus's ears by hearing that could pick up a whisper in a hurricane.

"She's... she's six."

"Six," Marcus said. "That's a great age. Is she in school?"

"First grade." Takeshi's voice cracked on the word. Tears were flowing freely down his face now, but they were different tears than before. Before, they had been the tears of a man who had given up. Now they were the tears of a man who was remembering something. "She... she likes dinosaurs. She wants to be a paleontologist." A sound escaped him that was half laugh and half sob. "She can barely say the word."

Marcus smiled. It was a real smile, warm and unguarded, and it reached his eyes in a way that Takeshi could see even through his own tears.

"Does she have a favorite dinosaur?"

"Triceratops. She says it's because..." Takeshi's face twisted. His hand tightened on the phone. The voicemail was still playing. "—you said you'd change and you didn't—"

"Because?" Marcus prompted, gently.

"Because it has armor to protect its friends," Takeshi finished, and then his legs buckled, and Marcus moved.

He didn't lunge. He didn't dash. He simply was there. One moment he was floating twenty feet away, and the next he was beside Takeshi on the ledge, his feet touching the concrete with a softness that belied his mass, and his hand was on Takeshi's arm—gentle, so gentle, holding the man the way you'd hold a baby bird—and he was guiding Takeshi back from the edge. One step. Two steps. Three. Away from the precipice. Away from the forty-story fall. Away from the ending that Takeshi's pain had convinced him was the only option.

Takeshi collapsed against him. The man weighed nothing—to Marcus, he weighed literally, physically, measurably nothing, he could have been made of tissue paper—but Marcus held him as if he were the most important thing in the world, because in that moment, he was. Takeshi buried his face in Marcus's chest and wept, great heaving sobs that shook his entire body, and Marcus stood there on that rooftop in the afternoon sun and held him and said nothing because sometimes there were no words. Sometimes all a person needed was to know that they were not alone. That someone had shown up. That someone was there.

They stood like that for a long time. Marcus didn't keep track of exactly how long. Time didn't matter. What mattered was that Takeshi was breathing. What mattered was that Takeshi's heartbeat, which had been racing at 167 beats per minute when Marcus arrived, was gradually slowing, settling, finding a rhythm that was less about panic and more about exhaustion. What mattered was that Takeshi was alive.

After a while—minutes? Ten? Twenty?—Takeshi pulled back. He looked up at Marcus with eyes that were swollen nearly shut from crying but that contained, somewhere in their depths, a tiny ember of something that had not been there before. It wasn't hope, exactly. It was too early for hope. It was something more fundamental. It was the simple, animal recognition that he was still here, still breathing, still standing on solid ground, and that someone was standing with him.

"I don't..." Takeshi began. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. "I don't know what to do."

"That's okay," Marcus said. "You don't have to know right now. You just have to be here."

"She took Yuki. My wife. She took her and she left."

"I heard."

"I drink," Takeshi said, and the word came out of him like a confession, like a stone he'd been carrying in his throat. "I drink too much. I've always drunk too much. My father drank. His father drank. I told Hana—my wife—I told her I'd stop. I told her so many times." He laughed, and it was the most painful sound Marcus had ever heard. "I'm a liar."

"No," Marcus said. "You're a man who made promises he wanted to keep and couldn't. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"Yes. A liar doesn't care that he's lying. You care. You care so much it brought you to the top of this building."

Takeshi stared at him. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"Who are you?"

"Right now? I'm the person who's going to help you get off this roof. And then I'm going to help you find a phone number for a counselor. And then you're going to call that counselor, and you're going to start doing the work that you need to do so that when Yuki grows up, she can tell people that her dad had a hard time once, but he got through it, because he's a triceratops too. He's got armor, and he protects the people he loves."

Takeshi's face crumpled again, but this time the tears were different. This time, when his body shook, it wasn't from despair. It was from something else. Something Marcus recognized because he had seen it before, in the faces of the kids at the juvenile detention center when someone finally, finally told them that they mattered. It was the sound of a wall breaking, and behind the wall, buried under years of silence and shame and self-destruction, was a person who still wanted to live.

"I can't fly," Takeshi said, weakly, and Marcus—Superman—smiled.

"That's okay. I can."

He lifted Takeshi gently—so gently, an arm beneath the man's knees and another behind his back, cradling him like a child—and he rose from the rooftop. Takeshi made a sound, a small, involuntary gasp, and his hands clutched at Marcus's shirt, but Marcus held him securely, and the grip of those arms was the most stable thing Takeshi Yamamoto had ever felt. They floated down, slowly, forty stories of vertical space collapsing beneath them at a pace that was barely faster than an elevator, the wind soft and warm around them, the sun on their faces.

Marcus set Takeshi down on the sidewalk outside the building's lobby. There was a convenience store across the street with a public bench outside it, and Marcus guided Takeshi to that bench and sat him down and went into the store and came back forty-five seconds later with a bottle of water and a packaged rice ball.

"Eat," he said, handing them to Takeshi. "You haven't eaten today."

"How did you—"

"Your blood sugar is low. I can tell." He could, in fact, tell. His vision could analyze the chemical composition of Takeshi's blood through his skin. But that seemed like an alarming thing to explain in detail, so he left it at that.

Takeshi ate. Marcus sat beside him on the bench. A few pedestrians walked past, glancing at them with the incurious eyes of city dwellers accustomed to minding their own business. Nobody stopped. Nobody asked if Takeshi was okay. Nobody noticed that the man eating a rice ball on a public bench had, three minutes ago, been standing on the edge of a forty-story building preparing to end his life.

Marcus noticed. Marcus would always notice.

When Takeshi had finished eating, Marcus pulled a pen from the convenience store—he'd picked it up along with the food, leaving money on the counter because the cashier had been on her phone and Marcus hadn't wanted to wait—and wrote a number on a napkin.

"This is the number for the Musutafu Mental Health Crisis Line," he said. The information had come to him easily; he'd scanned a public health poster on the wall of the convenience store with his telescopic vision while Takeshi was eating. "They're open twenty-four hours. Call them today. Not tomorrow. Today. Will you do that?"

Takeshi looked at the napkin. He looked at Marcus. His eyes were still red, still swollen, but the emptiness that had been there on the rooftop—the vast, hollow, finished quality that Marcus had seen in those eyes—was gone. In its place was something fragile and uncertain and very, very new. It was the thing that came before hope. It was the decision to try.

"Okay," Takeshi said. "Okay. I'll call."

Marcus put his hand on Takeshi's shoulder. He squeezed gently—calibrating his strength with an instinctive precision that he was only beginning to appreciate, because this body could crush coal into diamonds and he was using that same hand to comfort a grieving man without leaving so much as a red mark on his skin.

"Takeshi," Marcus said. And then he said the words. The words that had been tattooed on his old arm. The words that had been written on his old heart. The words that had been true when Curt Swan drew them and when Frank Quitely drew them and when every artist in between and after drew them, because some truths didn't belong to one world or one lifetime. Some truths belonged to every world and every lifetime, and this truth was one of them.

"You're much stronger than you think you are. Trust me."

Takeshi Yamamoto looked at the stranger sitting next to him on the bench. The tall, impossibly strong, impossibly gentle stranger who had flown through the air and spoken softly and held him while he wept and hadn't judged him for a single second. And Takeshi nodded, once, and clutched the napkin with the phone number to his chest like it was a lifeline.

Which, Marcus thought, it was.

Marcus stood up. He looked at Takeshi one more time, fixing the man's face in his memory—not because he needed to, his memory was now eidetic, perfect, incapable of forgetting—but because he wanted to remember. He wanted to remember the first person he had saved in this new life. He wanted to remember why.

"Thank you," Takeshi whispered.

Marcus smiled. And then he was gone, rising into the sky like a prayer answered in reverse, and Takeshi Yamamoto was left sitting on a bench outside a convenience store in Musutafu City, holding a napkin and a half-empty water bottle, alive.

The fire started at 3:47 in the afternoon.

Marcus heard it from six miles away. The sound was distinctive—not the gentle crackle of a fireplace or the contained roar of an industrial furnace, but the chaotic, hungry, predatory sound of structural fire. Fire eating wood. Fire eating drywall. Fire eating the synthetic polymers in furniture and carpet and curtain and clothes, producing toxic smoke that was, in many cases, more lethal than the flames themselves. He could hear the wood fibers splitting as the heat caused the moisture in them to expand and rupture. He could hear the glass in the windows expanding, stress fractures propagating through the panes in patterns that his vision could track in real time, counting down to the moment each window would blow out and introduce fresh oxygen to the inferno. He could hear the steel structural beams beginning to expand, the bolts holding them in place groaning under thermal stress.

And he could hear the screaming.

A lot of screaming.

He changed course in midair, banking to the south, and covered the six miles in under two seconds. The building was an apartment complex—eight stories, residential, old construction, the kind of building that existed in every city in every world, the kind of building where regular people lived regular lives. The fire had started on the third floor, and it was spreading fast, racing through the walls and ceilings with the relentless efficiency of a thing that was very, very good at its job. Flames were already visible on the fourth and fifth floors. The third floor was an inferno. Smoke was pouring from every window on the upper floors, thick and black and toxic, and Marcus could see—with his X-ray vision, engaged now without conscious effort, his body adapting to the situation with an intelligence that went beyond thought—the people still inside.

Third floor: two people, both unconscious, their heartbeats weak and irregular. Smoke inhalation. They had minutes, if that.

Fourth floor: a family. Mother, father, two children. They were in a back bedroom, huddled together, the father trying to block the gap beneath the door with wet towels. The fire was in the hallway outside their room. The children were crying.

Fifth floor: an elderly woman in a wheelchair. She was alone. She was trying to wheel herself to the window. She wasn't going to make it. The smoke was already in her lungs, and her oxygen levels were dropping.

Sixth floor: a teenage boy on the fire escape. The fire escape was old, rusted, and the bolts connecting it to the building were failing under the heat. He had approximately ninety seconds before the entire structure collapsed and took him with it.

Seventh floor: clear.

Eighth floor: a couple, both in their thirties. They were on the roof access stairway, trying to get to the roof. The door was jammed. The woman was pregnant.

There were fire trucks on the way—Marcus could hear their sirens, four of them, the nearest still two minutes out. There were heroes on the way too—he could hear radio chatter, hear the dispatchers coordinating, hear the bureaucratic machinery of professional heroism grinding into motion. Two minutes. Maybe three.

The people in that building did not have two minutes. The woman on the fifth floor did not have two minutes. The couple on the eighth floor did not have two minutes. The family on the fourth floor, huddled in a bedroom while fire ate the hallway, did not have two minutes.

Marcus went in through the fifth floor window.

He didn't break the glass. He didn't need to. The window was already cracked from the heat, and he phased through the opening with a precision that left the remaining shards undisturbed. The smoke hit him and meant nothing—his lungs could process any atmosphere, and his body was invulnerable to heat, to toxins, to everything—and he moved through the smoke-filled hallway toward the elderly woman in the wheelchair.

She was unconscious when he reached her. Her heartbeat was thready, her oxygen saturation dangerously low. Marcus scooped her up—chair and all, lifting the entire apparatus with one hand as if it weighed nothing, because to him it did—and carried her to the window. He used his heat vision, just a touch, a microsecond burst of focused thermal energy calibrated to the exact melting point of the window glass, and the pane dissolved into a perfectly circular opening. He floated out through it, descended to the street, and set the woman and her wheelchair down on the sidewalk, gently, so gently, the rubber wheels touching asphalt without a sound.

A crowd had gathered. Of course it had. People were staring. Phones were out. Marcus could hear the digital shutters of a hundred cameras firing, could see the screens of phones pointed at him, could read the text messages being typed in real time: "holy shit someone's flying" and "is that a new hero??" and "who is that guy" and "he's in sweatpants lmao."

He ignored them. He went back into the building.

Sixth floor. The teenager on the fire escape. Marcus flew to the outside of the building, found the boy—seventeen, maybe eighteen, his face streaked with soot and tears, his hands white-knuckled on the rusted railing—and extended his hand.

"Hey," Marcus said, floating beside the crumbling fire escape as casually as if he were standing on solid ground. "Let's get you down."

The boy stared at him. "You're—you're flying—"

"Yep. Grab my hand."

The boy grabbed his hand. Marcus pulled him close, cradled him against his chest, and floated down to the street. Twelve seconds. He set the boy down next to the elderly woman, who was being attended to by bystanders who had, to their credit, begun administering first aid without being asked.

Back into the building. Fourth floor. The family.

The hallway was fully engulfed. The flames were floor to ceiling, a wall of orange and white that radiated enough heat to melt steel. Marcus walked through it. The fire parted around him not because he was fireproof—although he was—but because his body was so dense, so fundamentally other, that the fire simply could not affect him. It was like watching water try to burn. The flames licked at his skin and his clothing—the white t-shirt, the gray sweatpants, both of which were, he noted with mild amazement, completely unharmed, as if the Kryptonian aura that protected his body extended to whatever he was wearing—and did nothing.

He reached the bedroom door. He could hear the father on the other side, talking to his children in a voice that was trying very hard to be calm and failing. "It's going to be okay. The heroes are coming. They're going to get us out of here. Just keep your faces in the towels, okay? Breathe through the towels."

Marcus knocked on the door.

There was a silence. Then the father's voice, incredulous, afraid: "H-hello?"

"Hi," Marcus said, through the door. "My name doesn't matter. I'm here to get you out. I'm going to open the door, and when I do, I need you to not be afraid of what you see. Can you do that?"

Another silence. Then, smaller, a child's voice: "Mama, is it a hero?"

And the mother's voice, exhausted and terrified and clinging to whatever she could cling to: "I think so, baby."

Marcus opened the door. The fire from the hallway surged toward the room, seeking the fresh oxygen, but Marcus stood in the doorway and the fire broke around him like a wave around a rock. Not a single flame passed him. Not a single wisp of smoke entered the room. He stood there, framed by fire, untouched by it, and the family stared at him with wide eyes.

The father was holding a wet towel. The mother was holding both children—a girl, maybe seven, and a boy, maybe four. The children were crying. The mother was crying. The father was not crying, but only because he had decided that someone in this family needed to not be crying, and he had elected himself.

"I'm going to carry all of you," Marcus said. "It's going to feel a little strange, but I promise you're safe. I won't let anything happen to you."

"Who are you?" the father asked. His voice was steady, but Marcus could hear his heart hammering at 180 beats per minute. This man was terrified. This man was also, Marcus noted, standing between his family and the door, between his family and the fire, and he had been standing there for the entire time, his back to the inferno, his face to his children. This man was brave in the way that mattered most: the quiet way, the unglamorous way, the way that never made the news.

"I'm someone who can help," Marcus said. "Let's go."

He gathered them. The mother and the children first—he lifted them together, the mother's arms still wrapped around both kids, and tucked them against his left side. Then the father, who was heavier but still weighed nothing to Marcus, tucked against his right side. Four people, held against his body with an effortless security that no seatbelt or safety harness could match, and he turned and walked through the fire.

The children screamed. The mother screamed. The father made a sound that was not a scream but was very close. The fire was all around them, a tunnel of flame, the hallway ceiling sagging as the structural supports above gave way, and chunks of burning debris rained down on Marcus's head and shoulders and dissolved into ash against his skin. He walked—not ran, walked, because running would have frightened the children more—through the inferno, down the hallway, to the shattered window at the end of the corridor, and out.

Into the air. Into the sunlight. The family gasped as the heat vanished and the wind replaced it, cool and clean, and Marcus descended to the street and set them down on the sidewalk, one at a time, with the care of a man handling antique porcelain.

The mother collapsed to her knees and clutched her children to her chest and sobbed. The father stood beside her, his hand on her back, his face turned up to the sky, tears cutting lines through the soot on his cheeks. The four-year-old boy looked up at Marcus with enormous brown eyes and said, with the absolute, unquestioning certainty that only a four-year-old can muster:

"Are you All Might?"

Marcus smiled at him. "No," he said. "I'm just a guy who was in the neighborhood."

He went back. Third floor. The two unconscious people—a man and a woman, both in their sixties, both suffering from severe smoke inhalation, both going to die within minutes if they didn't receive medical attention. Marcus retrieved them simultaneously, one under each arm, and delivered them to the street, and then he took a deep breath—a real deep breath, a breath that filled his lungs with enough air to fill a blimp—and he turned his face toward the building and he blew.

Arctic breath. Not just cold air, not just a gust, but a focused, sustained exhalation of air cooled to temperatures approaching absolute zero. It hit the building like a wall of winter. The fire, which had been raging across five floors and threatening to engulf the entire structure, simply stopped. It didn't die gradually. It didn't sputter and fade. It stopped. The flames froze in place, became crystals of ice, became a strange and beautiful sculpture of frozen fire that clung to the building's facade for a single, surreal moment before the ice sublimated into vapor and the vapor dissipated into the air and the fire was gone.

The building stood. Charred, damaged, smoking faintly, but standing. The structural integrity was compromised—Marcus could see that with his X-ray vision, could see the stressed beams and weakened joints—but it would not collapse. Not today.

He floated back to the street. The eighth floor—he'd almost forgotten. The pregnant woman and her partner, trapped behind the jammed roof access door. He was in the air again instantly, rising to the roof, landing on the tar paper surface with a gentleness that left no footprint, and walking to the roof access door. He could hear them on the other side—the woman panting, the man banging on the door with his fists, both of them coughing from smoke that had seeped up the stairwell.

Marcus gripped the door handle. It was a heavy steel fire door, the kind designed to withstand tremendous force, and the lock mechanism had warped in the heat, fusing the door shut. Marcus turned the handle. The steel groaned, complained, and then yielded, the warped mechanism simply reshaped by the casual, irresistible force of his grip. He pulled the door open.

The man on the other side stumbled through, coughing, his eyes watering. Behind him, the pregnant woman leaned against the stairwell wall, one hand on her belly, breathing hard. She looked up at Marcus and her eyes went wide.

"Easy," Marcus said. "The fire's out. You're safe."

"The fire's out?" the man croaked. "The whole building was—"

"It's out," Marcus repeated, calmly. "Take a breath. Let's get your partner downstairs. Or, if you prefer, I can fly you down."

They stared at him. They chose to walk. Marcus escorted them down eight flights of stairs, carrying the woman in his arms when her legs gave out on the fourth floor landing, and delivered them to the street where paramedics—who had arrived while Marcus was inside, along with the fire trucks and, he could see, two pro heroes in garish costumes—were setting up triage stations.

Marcus set the pregnant woman down beside the closest paramedic and said, "She's approximately thirty-two weeks. Vitals are stable but she's inhaled moderate amounts of smoke. The two elderly patients over there need intubation, their O2 sats are in the low eighties." He pointed to the couple from the third floor, who were being attended to by EMTs.

The paramedic stared at him. "Are you a doctor?"

"No."

"Are you a licensed hero?"

And there it was.

Marcus looked at the paramedic. The man was young, maybe twenty-five, and he was asking the question not because he cared about bureaucratic licensing in the middle of a mass casualty event, but because it was the question he had been trained to ask. It was the question this society had taught him to ask. It was the question that this world—this world of heroes and villains and quirks and regulations—had decided was the most important question you could ask someone who had just saved nine people from a burning building.

Not "Are you okay?" Not "How can I help?" Not "Thank you."

Are you a licensed hero?

Marcus looked at him, and he felt something settle in his chest. Not anger. Superman didn't do anger, not like that. What he felt was clarity. The clear, quiet certainty of a man who understood, with perfect and absolute conviction, what he was and what he was not.

"No," Marcus said. "I'm not."

And he turned and walked away.

Or rather, he floated away, because the two pro heroes—one of whom was a woman in a red and white costume with some kind of fire-related quirk, the irony of which was not lost on Marcus, and the other of whom was a man in a blue bodysuit with a visor that made him look like a minor character in a tokusatsu show—were moving to intercept him, and the woman was already calling out, her voice carrying that particular mixture of authority and indignation that Marcus recognized from every bureaucrat he had ever dealt with in his old life:

"Hey! You! Stop right there!"

Marcus did not stop right there. He rose. Twenty feet. Fifty. A hundred. The heroes craned their necks. The woman with the fire quirk shot something into the air—a flare? A signal?—and the man with the visor was speaking into a communicator, his words rushed and urgent: "—unregistered individual, male, approximately 190 centimeters, wearing civilian clothing, demonstrated flight, super-strength, and what appears to be an ice-based breath attack. He's leaving the scene. Do we pursue?"

Marcus could hear the reply from the dispatcher, tinny and distant: "Negative, do not pursue. Document and report. We'll flag it for the Hero Commission."

Marcus rose higher. The city spread out beneath him, vast and glittering in the late afternoon sun, and the sun itself hit his face and his body drank it in and he felt—

He felt good.

Not powerful. Not triumphant. Not the rush of victory or the thrill of combat. He felt good. The simple, uncomplicated, profoundly human goodness of having helped people who needed help. Nine people were alive because he had been there. A man named Takeshi was sitting on a bench calling a crisis line instead of falling forty stories to his death. An elderly woman in a wheelchair was being loaded into an ambulance instead of suffocating in a smoke-filled hallway. A family of four was huddled together on a sidewalk, shaking and crying and alive. A pregnant woman was being treated by paramedics, and her baby—whose heartbeat Marcus could still hear, a fast, strong, perfect little drum—was going to be fine.

This was what it was about. This was what it had always been about. Not the flying. Not the strength. Not the heat vision or the freeze breath or the invulnerability. Those were tools. Those were means. The end—the only end that mattered—was this. People helped. People saved. People reminded that they were not alone.

Marcus floated above Musutafu City and listened. He listened to everything, the entire city, all of it at once, the immense and overwhelming symphony of human existence, and he heard—

He heard a lot.

He heard arguments and laughter and television sets and cooking and traffic and construction and music and barking dogs and crying babies and the thousand thousand tiny sounds of people living their lives. He heard joy and frustration and boredom and love and anger and contentment and grief and hope, all of it tangled together, all of it real, all of it mattering.

And amid all of it, he heard someone who needed help.

The mugging was happening in an alley in a neighborhood that Marcus's growing mental map of the city told him was in the southeastern district—lower income, less hero patrol presence, the kind of neighborhood that the professional hero system, for all its flashy costumes and ranking lists and corporate sponsorships, tended to underserve. The kind of neighborhood where people learned early that if you were in trouble, you handled it yourself, because the heroes were too busy posing for cameras in the shopping districts to bother with a dark alley in a part of town where the property values didn't justify the response time.

There were three attackers and one victim. Marcus could hear it all from a mile away, and by the time he arrived—three seconds later, a controlled descent into the alley's entrance that displaced less air than a falling leaf—the situation had progressed to the point where one of the attackers had a knife.

The victim was a young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty, wearing a convenience store uniform. She had a bag over her shoulder—her purse, Marcus's X-ray vision told him, containing a wallet with approximately 4,000 yen in cash, a student ID for a local university, a phone with a cracked screen, and a small canister of pepper spray that she hadn't been able to reach before the three men had surrounded her. She was backed against a wall, her eyes wide, her breath coming in short, panicked bursts. She was afraid. She was very afraid. Her heart was beating so fast that Marcus's medical knowledge—newly acquired, downloaded into his brain along with everything else, as if the universe had decided that Superman needed to know everything about everything—told him she was approaching tachycardia.

The three attackers were young men, early twenties, and they had the look of petty criminals—not supervillains, not quirk-enhanced threats, just three men who had decided that the easiest way to get what they wanted was to take it from someone weaker. One had the knife. One had what appeared to be a minor physical mutation quirk—his hands were slightly larger than normal, the fingers thicker, suggesting enhanced grip strength but nothing extraordinary. The third was the talker, the leader, the one doing the intimidating while his friends provided the muscle.

"Just give us the bag," the talker was saying, his voice a practiced drawl designed to sound casual, reasonable, as if this were a transaction rather than a robbery. "Come on, don't make this harder than it has to be. Just the bag and we're gone."

The girl shook her head. She was crying, but her jaw was set, and Marcus could see—in the tension of her muscles, in the angle of her body, in the way her fingers were curling into fists even though she was terrified—that she was considering fighting back. Which was brave. Which was also, given the knife and the three-to-one odds, likely to get her hurt.

"Hey," Marcus said.

All four of them turned.

He was standing at the mouth of the alley. The late afternoon sun was behind him, framing him in silhouette—tall, broad-shouldered, backlit, casting a shadow that reached all the way to the three men and the girl behind them. He had his hands at his sides. His posture was relaxed. His expression was calm.

The talker squinted at him. "Who the hell are you?"

"Nobody special," Marcus said. He took a step forward. "But I think you should leave that girl alone."

The talker looked at his friends. The one with the knife shifted his weight. The one with the big hands cracked his knuckles—an unconscious gesture, a threat display, the primate brain asserting itself.

"Mind your own business, man," the talker said. "This doesn't concern you."

"Yeah, it does," Marcus said. He took another step. "Anything that happens in front of me concerns me. Especially when it involves someone being hurt."

The talker's expression shifted. The casual, reasonable mask slipped, and beneath it was something harder, meaner, the face of a person who had learned that the world was a place where you either took or were taken from, and who had decided a long time ago which side of that equation he was going to be on.

"Last chance, hero," the talker said. "Walk away."

"I'm not a hero," Marcus said. "And I'm not walking away."

The one with the knife moved first.

He was fast—for a human. He closed the distance between himself and Marcus in about a second and a half, leading with the knife, a straight thrust aimed at Marcus's midsection. It was a competent attack. The kind of move that suggested this wasn't the first time this man had used a knife on someone.

The knife hit Marcus's abdomen.

And broke.

Not bent. Not deflected. Broke. The blade, which was a cheap but serviceable folding knife with a four-inch steel blade, hit the surface of Marcus's body and shattered as if it had been driven into a block of solid titanium. The steel fragmented into pieces, the shards falling to the alley floor with a tinkling sound like wind chimes, and the attacker was left holding a handle with a half-inch stub of broken blade protruding from it.

He stared at the handle. He stared at Marcus's stomach, which bore no mark, no scratch, not even a wrinkle in his t-shirt. He looked up at Marcus's face.

Marcus looked at him with an expression of profound, almost paternal patience.

"That was a mistake," Marcus said. Not threateningly. Not angrily. The way a teacher might tell a student that their math was wrong. "But it doesn't have to define the rest of your evening. You can still walk away from this."

The one with the big hands charged.

He came from Marcus's left, swinging a fist that, enhanced by his quirk, could probably have punched through a car door. The fist connected with Marcus's jaw. There was a sound—a dense, meaty thwack—and then the man with the big hands screamed, because the impact had shattered every bone in his hand. His knuckles, his metacarpals, his wrist—all of it, reduced to gravel inside a glove of swelling flesh. He staggered backward, clutching his ruined hand to his chest, howling in pain.

Marcus hadn't moved. He hadn't flinched. He hadn't even blinked. The punch had landed flush on his jaw and had done exactly as much damage to him as a raindrop falling on a mountain.

The talker stared. The knife man stared. The one with the broken hand continued to scream. The girl pressed against the wall stared.

Marcus looked at the talker.

"I want to be clear about something," Marcus said, and his voice was still calm, still patient, still carrying that quiet, unshakable certainty that was not arrogance but simply truth. "I'm not going to hurt you. I don't hurt people. But I am going to stand here, between you and that girl, and you are not going to get past me. Not with a knife, not with your fists, not with anything. You could bring a hundred men into this alley and they could all hit me at once and I would still be standing here and I would still be saying the same thing."

He paused.

"Leave. Her. Alone."

The talker's face went through a rapid series of expressions—anger, confusion, fear, calculation—and then settled on the one that Marcus had been hoping for. It was the face of a man who was recognizing, perhaps for the first time in a very long time, that he was in a situation he could not control, and that the smartest thing he could do was stop trying.

"Let's go," the talker muttered to the knife man. He grabbed his friend with the broken hand by the elbow. "Let's go."

They went. They stumbled out of the alley, the broken-handed man still whimpering, and disappeared into the street. Marcus listened to their footsteps and their heartbeats as they retreated, tracking them until they were six blocks away and still moving, and then he turned to the girl.

She was still pressed against the wall. She was still crying. But her heartbeat was slowing, and the fear in her eyes was being replaced by something else—not quite understanding, not quite gratitude, but something adjacent to both.

"Are you okay?" Marcus asked.

She nodded, jerkily. Then shook her head. Then nodded again.

"Take your time," Marcus said. He didn't move closer. He stood where he was, giving her space, letting her come to him or not as she chose. "You're safe now."

"Who... who are you?" she asked, her voice small. "Are you a pro hero? I've never seen you before. What agency are you with?"

"I'm not with an agency," Marcus said. "I'm not a pro hero."

"Then... a vigilante?"

Marcus thought about this. The word "vigilante" carried a specific connotation in this world—he knew that instinctively, the way he knew everything about this world, as if the knowledge had been part of the package when he'd arrived. In this society, "vigilante" meant "criminal." It meant someone who used their quirk without authorization, who operated outside the hero system, who was, by definition, a lawbreaker. The Vigilante Act. The Quirk Regulation Laws. The entire apparatus of the Hero Commission, which existed not to help people but to control who was allowed to help people and how and when and under what circumstances and for what price.

Marcus thought about this, and he thought about Takeshi on the ledge, and the family in the burning building, and the girl in this alley, and he thought about every single Superman comic he had ever read, every panel, every page, every moment where Clark Kent—the real Clark Kent, not the grimdark deconstruction, not the fascist strawman, not the brooding alien, but the genuine, honest-to-God Superman—had looked at a person who needed help and had helped them. Not because the law said he could. Not because a regulatory body had issued him a license. Not because there was a camera pointed at him or a ranking to climb or a paycheck to earn. Because it was the right thing to do.

"I'm just someone who helps," Marcus said. "That's all."

The girl stared at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, she pushed herself off the wall. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She picked up her bag from where it had fallen on the ground. She squared her shoulders. And she said, in a voice that was steadier than it had any right to be:

"Thank you."

"You're welcome," Marcus said. "Do you have someone who can walk you home?"

"My roommate. I can call her."

"Good. Call her. And—" He hesitated. Then he reached out and, very gently, very carefully, placed his hand on her shoulder. "You were brave. Standing up to them. Even when you were scared. That's not nothing."

She looked at his hand on her shoulder. She looked at his face. And for the first time since the ordeal had begun, she smiled. It was a small smile, fragile and uncertain, but it was real.

Marcus smiled back. Then he let go, and he rose, and he was gone, and the girl in the convenience store uniform stood alone in the alley and looked up at the sky where the stranger had been and wondered if she had dreamed it.

She hadn't. The broken knife on the alley floor confirmed that.

The sun was setting over Musutafu City.

Marcus floated above the skyline at an altitude of approximately two thousand feet—high enough to be invisible to the naked eye, low enough to see and hear everything. The city was transitioning from day to night, the rhythms changing, the sounds shifting, the light transforming from the sharp, honest clarity of afternoon to the soft, golden warmth of evening. Below him, millions of people were going about the ordinary, extraordinary business of being alive. They were cooking dinner and doing homework and watching television and arguing and laughing and worrying about money and telling their children to brush their teeth and falling in love and falling out of love and being bored and being happy and being scared and being brave and being, in all the ways that mattered, exactly the same as the people Marcus had known in his old life, in his old world, in Cincinnati, Ohio, where there were no quirks and no heroes and no villains and no one could fly.

People were people. That was the universal truth. The one constant across every world, every timeline, every iteration of reality. People were fragile and strong, selfish and generous, cruel and kind, broken and whole, all at once, all the time. And they needed help. Not the dramatic, punching-villains-through-buildings kind of help that the hero industry in this world had turned into a spectacle and a commodity. They needed the other kind of help. The quiet kind. The kind that didn't make the evening news or trend on social media or boost anyone's ranking on the hero charts.

They needed someone to listen. They needed someone to show up. They needed someone to care.

Marcus hung in the sky and listened to the city, and as the first stars appeared above him—faint, distant, barely visible through the light pollution, but there, burning, persisting—he heard something that made him change direction.

It was a small sound. So small that no one else in the city could have heard it, not even the heroes with enhanced hearing quirks, because it was not a sound that was meant to be heard. It was the sound of a child crying alone in a dark room, muffling her sobs in a pillow so that no one would know.

And then, layered beneath the crying, another sound: a cat meowing. Plaintively, persistently, from somewhere high up. A tree, Marcus's hearing told him. A cat stuck in a tree.

Two needs. Two directions. Both small. Both, in the grand calculus of a city full of crime and disaster and the constant, theatrical clash between heroes and villains, insignificant.

Both mattering.

Marcus went to the cat first because the child's need, while real, was not immediately dangerous, and the cat—a tabby, orange and white, about four years old based on the condition of its teeth—was stuck sixty feet up in a camphor tree in a residential neighborhood and growing increasingly distressed. He descended through the branches without disturbing a single leaf, scooped the cat into his hands—it hissed at him, briefly, and then relaxed, because animals, Marcus was discovering, responded to the fundamental rightness of his presence in a way that humans, encumbered by suspicion and fear and the need to categorize everything, often couldn't—and floated back down to the ground.

An elderly man was standing beneath the tree, looking up, his hands wringing together. He wore a cardigan and slippers and the expression of a person who was deeply, viscerally worried about something he loved.

"Is this yours?" Marcus asked, landing on the grass beside the old man and holding out the cat.

The old man's face transformed. It went from anxiety to disbelief to joy in the space of a single second, and he reached out and took the cat and pressed it to his chest and the cat purred, loudly, and the old man looked at Marcus with eyes that were suddenly bright with tears.

"She's been up there since this morning," the old man said, his voice quavering. "I called the fire department but they said they don't—they said it wasn't a priority. I called the hero hotline and they said a cat in a tree wasn't—" He stopped. He looked at Marcus, really looked at him, and something in his expression shifted. "You came. Just for my cat?"

"Of course," Marcus said.

The old man's chin trembled. He stroked the cat's fur. "Thank you," he whispered. "She's all I have."

Marcus wanted to say something. He wanted to say that a man's cat was not a trivial thing, that a lonely person's companion was not a low priority, that the fact that neither the fire department nor the hero system had come when this man called was not a reflection of the cat's importance but a reflection of the system's failure. He wanted to say that the hero industry in this world had become so obsessed with rankings and ratings and spectacular, camera-ready battles that it had forgotten the most fundamental truth of heroism: that it was not about the size of the problem. It was about the person with the problem.

But he didn't say any of that, because the old man didn't need a lecture. The old man needed his cat, and he had his cat, and that was enough.

Marcus put his hand briefly on the old man's shoulder—gently, always gently—and then he was in the air again, rising through the branches of the camphor tree, rising past the rooftops, rising into the deepening violet of the evening sky.

He turned toward the sound of the crying child.

But on his way there, something happened.

His hearing, which was perpetually monitoring the city in a passive, background sort of way—the way a computer runs processes you don't see—flagged a conversation. It was happening on a rooftop four blocks to his left, between two people who were not civilians. They were heroes. Marcus could tell because they were wearing costumes and speaking into communicators and using jargon that was specific to the professional hero industry.

He didn't mean to eavesdrop. But his hearing didn't have an off switch—not yet, not until he learned more refined control—and the conversation was happening in his range, and the words caught his attention like a fishhook.

"—unregistered. No license, no agency affiliation, no record in the Commission database. We're running his description through facial recognition but nothing's coming back."

"What did he do?"

"Put out the fire on Sakura Street. Rescued nine civilians. Then stopped a mugging in the southeast district. Witnesses say he was flying, demonstrated superhuman strength and durability, and some kind of—I don't know, cold breath? Froze the fire solid."

"That's a powerful quirk set. Why isn't he registered?"

"That's what the Commission wants to know. They've flagged him as a priority. If he shows up again, we're supposed to engage and request identification. If he refuses to comply, we escalate."

"Escalate to what? You heard the description. A knife broke on his skin. A quirk-enhanced punch didn't even make him flinch. What are we supposed to do, ask him nicely?"

A pause. Then: "Orders are orders. The Commission doesn't like unknowns. Especially unknowns this powerful. There's talk of reaching out to Endeavor. Or even All Might."

Marcus had heard enough. He banked away from the conversation, rising higher, putting distance between himself and the two heroes on the rooftop. He wasn't afraid—fear was, he was discovering, a concept that his new body processed differently than his old one had. He could recognize fear as an intellectual construct, could understand why a person would feel it, but his body didn't produce it. Not because he was incapable of emotion—he felt everything, more intensely than he ever had as Marcus Cole—but because his body simply did not perceive anything in this world as a threat. Nothing here could hurt him. Nothing here could even inconvenience him. He knew this with the same certainty that he knew the sun was a star.

But the conversation troubled him. Not because he was worried about Endeavor or All Might or the Hero Commission. He was troubled because the conversation revealed something about this world that he had suspected and was now confirming: that the hero system was not about helping people. It was about control. It was about determining who was allowed to help and punishing anyone who helped without permission. The Commission didn't care that Marcus had saved nine people from a fire. They cared that he had done it without their authorization. They didn't care that he had stopped a mugging. They cared that he had done it without a license.

In this world, heroism was not a calling. It was a career. It was an industry. It was a brand. And Marcus—Superman—was an unbranded, unlicensed, uncontrollable variable, and the system did not tolerate variables.

Good, Marcus thought. Let them be uncomfortable. Let them be confused. Let them send Endeavor. Let them send All Might. Let them send whoever they wanted. He was not going to stop helping people. He was not going to register with a commission or join an agency or wear a costume with corporate logos or compete for a ranking on a chart. He was not going to ask permission to do what was right.

He was Superman. And Superman didn't answer to bureaucrats.

He did, however, answer to a crying child.

The child's name was Mei. She was eight years old. She lived in a small apartment in a quiet neighborhood with her mother, who worked nights at a hospital, and her father, who was not in the picture because her father had left when Mei was three and had not come back. She was crying because she had been bullied at school—three girls in her class had told her that her quirk was useless, that she was useless, that she would never be a hero because her quirk—the ability to make small objects glow faintly, a luminescence that was more decorative than functional—was pathetic and weak and not worth anything.

Marcus learned all of this in the ninety seconds it took him to locate the apartment, float outside the window, and listen. He did not enter. He did not knock. He did not announce himself. An adult man appearing at an eight-year-old girl's window at night would be, he recognized, alarming rather than comforting, regardless of his intentions.

Instead, he thought. He floated outside that window in the cool evening air, listening to Mei cry into her pillow, and he thought about what Superman would do. Not what a hero in this world would do—not what All Might or Endeavor or any of the ranked, licensed, branded professionals would do. What Superman would do.

Superman would find a way to reach her. But he would do it right.

Marcus descended to the street. He landed in a shadow—not because he was hiding, but because he was thinking, and shadows were good for thinking. The apartment building had a lobby. The lobby had a mailbox. The mailbox had a name: Takahashi, Apt. 4C.

He walked into the lobby. There was no doorman, no security camera. He found a piece of paper in the recycling bin—the back of a grocery store flyer—and the pen he'd taken from the convenience store earlier was still in his pocket. He sat down on the lobby floor, cross-legged, the way he used to sit on the floor of his apartment in Cincinnati surrounded by longboxes, and he wrote.

He wrote a letter to an eight-year-old girl he had never met, and he chose every word with the same care and precision with which he had used his heat vision to melt a perfect circle in a window.

Dear Mei,

I know you're having a hard day. I know some people said things to you that made you feel small. I can't take those words back, and I can't make those people be kind, because kindness is something people have to choose for themselves. But I can tell you something that I know is true, and I hope you'll believe me, because I'm someone who has thought about this a lot.

Your quirk makes things glow.

Do you know what else makes things glow? Stars. Stars are just big balls of gas, and all they do is sit there and shine. That's it. That's their whole job. They don't punch villains. They don't win fights. They don't show up on TV or get ranked on charts. They just shine.

And without them, the entire universe would be dark.

Every quirk matters. Every person matters. You don't have to be the brightest star or the biggest star. You just have to be YOUR star. You just have to shine.

And if anyone tells you that your light isn't important, I want you to think about the night sky and remember: the smallest stars are often the oldest. They've been shining the longest. They're the most patient, the most enduring, the most faithful. They were there before the big, flashy stars were born, and they'll still be there long after the big, flashy stars burn out.

Keep shining, Mei. The universe needs your light.

From a friend

He folded the letter. He flew up to the fourth floor. He slipped the letter under the door of apartment 4C, pressing it flat against the floor with a finger that could have pushed through the door like tissue paper but instead moved with the delicacy of a jeweler setting a diamond.

Then he rose, back into the sky, back into the night.

He didn't see Mei find the letter. He didn't see her unfold it and read it, her tear-swollen eyes widening, her breath catching. He didn't see her read it again, and again, and once more after that. He didn't see her get out of bed and go to her desk and hold the letter up to her bedside lamp and activate her quirk—just barely, just a whisper of luminescence—and watch the letter glow in her hands, soft and warm and golden, like a small star.

He didn't see her smile.

But he knew. He knew the way the sun knows that its light reaches the Earth, even though the sun can't see the flowers that grow because of it.

The night deepened. The city quieted—not silent, never silent, a city of this size was always murmuring, always breathing—but the rhythm changed, the tempo slowing, the urgency dimming. Marcus floated above Musutafu and listened and watched and waited, and when people needed help, he helped.

He helped a teenager change a flat tire on a dark road, landing beside the kid's car and kneeling down and lifting the vehicle with one hand while the teenager stared, slack-jawed, and then showing the kid how to swap the tire because it was important that people know how to do things for themselves, and then he was gone.

He helped a woman carry her groceries up six flights of stairs because the elevator was broken and she had a bad knee and four bags of food and nobody had offered to help. He carried all four bags in one hand and walked beside her, matching her pace, and they talked about the weather and her grandchildren and the price of rice, and when they reached her floor, she insisted on giving him an apple from one of the bags, and he took it, and he thanked her, and he ate it on the roof of her building and it was, he decided, the best apple he had ever tasted.

He helped a stray dog. It was limping, favoring its right front leg, and Marcus landed beside it in a park and examined the paw with his X-ray vision and found a shard of glass embedded between the pads. He removed it—gently, so gently, his fingers more precise than any surgical instrument—and the dog licked his hand and wagged its tail and followed him for three blocks before finding a warm spot under a hedge and lying down to sleep.

He helped, and helped, and helped, and every time he helped, the heroes didn't come. The system didn't activate. The Commission didn't respond. Because these were not the kinds of problems that the hero system was designed to address. A flat tire was not a villain attack. Groceries were not a crisis. A stray dog was not a threat level. These were the cracks in the pavement of society, the small, quiet, invisible needs that fell through the gaps of a system built to handle spectacle and scale, and nobody—nobody—was filling those gaps.

Until now.

It was nearly midnight when Marcus landed on a rooftop in the center of the city—a tall building, one of the tallest, giving him a vantage point that encompassed the entire metropolitan area. He sat on the edge, his legs dangling over a drop that would have killed any human being, and he looked out at the city he had spent the past eight hours serving.

He thought about Marcus Cole. He thought about the man who had read All-Star Superman #10 and died with it in his lap. He thought about kingdom come, about the Superman who had retreated from the world and then come back because the world needed him whether it wanted him or not. He thought about Superman: Birthright, about the Clark Kent who sat at a desk in the Daily Planet and used words to fight for truth because punching wasn't always the answer and sometimes the most powerful thing you could do was tell the story. He thought about For the Man Who Has Everything, about the Superman who was shown a perfect dream of everything he had lost and chose to wake up because the real world, imperfect and painful and broken, was still worth fighting for.

He thought about all the bad Superman stories, too. The ones that got it wrong. The ones that confused power with authority, that turned the symbol of hope into a symbol of control, that took the most compassionate character in the history of fiction and made him cold, or cruel, or tyrannical, because the writers couldn't understand that a good man with unlimited power would not become a dictator. Because they couldn't understand that the entire point of Superman was that absolute power did not have to corrupt absolutely. That a man who could conquer the world could choose, every single day, to save it instead. That the greatest strength was not the ability to punch through mountains but the ability to hold back, to be gentle, to restrain the impossible force of your own body so that you could hold a crying man on a rooftop without breaking him.

That was Superman. That had always been Superman. Not the angry, brooding alien of lesser interpretations. Not the government stooge. Not the naive boy scout (and "boy scout" was never an insult; the Boy Scouts at their best taught service, kindness, preparedness, the value of helping others without expectation of reward, and if those things were worthy of mockery, then the world was more broken than even Marcus had thought). Not the dictator. Not the executioner.

Superman was a man who caught cats from trees and wrote letters to sad children and held suicidal strangers and carried groceries up stairs and removed glass from dog paws and put out fires and stopped muggers and did all of it—all of it—without asking for a license or a ranking or a paycheck or a round of applause.

Superman was, and had always been, the answer to a simple question: What would a good person do if they could do anything?

They would help. They would always help. In every way they could. For as long as they could. Without condition. Without exception. Without end.

Marcus sat on the rooftop and looked at the stars.

"I don't know if you can hear me," he said, to no one in particular. Or maybe to everyone. Or maybe to the memory of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two kids from Cleveland who had created the greatest fictional character in the history of human storytelling because they believed that goodness was a superpower. "I don't know why I'm here, or how, or what the rules are. I don't know if there's a purpose to this or if it's just random. But I know what I'm going to do."

He stood up. The wind caught his hair. The moon was out, full and silver, and its light fell on him and made his skin glow faintly, as if even the moon recognized what he was.

"I'm going to be Superman," he said. "Not a hero. Not a vigilante. Not a symbol or a brand or a ranking. Superman. I'm going to help people. All people. Every person who needs help, whenever they need it, however they need it. And I'm not going to stop. Not for the Hero Commission. Not for the law. Not for anyone."

He paused.

"I'm going to do what's right. Because it's right. That's the only reason. It's the only reason that matters."

Below him, the city slept. Above him, the stars burned. Around him, the world turned, indifferent and beautiful, broken and worthy of saving.

Marcus Cole—the man from Cincinnati who loved Superman more than anything else in the world—was dead.

Superman was alive.

And tomorrow, the sun would rise, and he would rise with it, and he would start again. He would find the people who had been forgotten, the ones who had fallen through the cracks, the ones the hero system had decided were not worth the response time. He would find the man sleeping under the bridge and the woman afraid to go home and the child who had been told their light was too small. He would find them, and he would help them, and he would not ask for anything in return except the chance to do it again the next day.

Because that's what Superman does. That's what Superman has always done. In every world, in every story, in every version that got it right.

He doesn't fight for truth and justice because someone gave him permission.

He fights because it's right.

He doesn't need a license.

He doesn't need a ranking.

He doesn't need anyone's approval.

He just needs the sun, and the will to be good, and the understanding—the deep, unshakable, bone-deep understanding—that every single person on this planet matters. That no problem is too small. That no one is too unimportant. That the true measure of power is not what you can destroy but what you can protect.

Superman floated above the city.

And the city, though it didn't know it yet, was a little bit safer for it.

And somewhere, on a bench outside a convenience store, a man named Takeshi Yamamoto was on the phone with a crisis counselor, and he was talking, and he was crying, and he was alive.

And somewhere, in a small apartment, an eight-year-old girl named Mei was asleep with a letter clutched to her chest, and in her dreams, she was a star.

And somewhere, in an alley, a broken knife lay on the ground, and the girl who had been saved would walk home tomorrow without looking over her shoulder, and the three men who had tried to rob her would not try again, because they had looked into the eyes of a man who could have crushed them like insects and had chosen not to, and they would never forget that look, the look of a person who saw not what they were but what they could be.

And somewhere, in a neighborhood where the heroes never came, an old man sat in his living room with an orange and white tabby cat on his lap, and the cat was purring, and the old man was smiling, and neither of them was alone.

And in the sky above all of it, floating in the dark between the stars and the streetlights, between the infinite and the intimate, between the cosmic and the mundane, a man who had been given the power of a god used that power the way it was always meant to be used.

Not to conquer.

Not to control.

Not to punish.

To help.

End of Chapter One