A streak of crimson tore through the night sky like a falling meteor, carrying boundless speed, monumental strength, and a torrential, blinding fury before violently slamming into the pavement just a short distance from Constantine!
The concrete street shattered instantly upon impact, fracturing into a shallow crater patterned with a dense spiderweb of cracks.
As the dust and debris gradually billowed outward, a mountain of a figure stood tall amidst the haze. His crimson cape whipped and snapped furiously in the wind, his corded muscles rippling beneath the deep blue alloy weave of his tactical suit.
The face that usually radiated boundless hope, warmth, and gentleness was currently completely contorted by a storm of pure, unadulterated rage and ferocity.
Superman—Clark Kent—had finally arrived. Yet, much like every superhero entangled in a crisis involving their own family, he had arrived a critical step too late, narrowly missing the optimal window for a successful rescue.
Despite Clark being exponentially more powerful than he had ever been in the past, his intervention remained a fraction of a second behind. It was as if this was an immutable, deterministic rule woven directly into the structural fabric of the DC universe, universally binding every single superhero within its reality.
It wasn't just the Flash—the fastest man alive—who was fated to always be a step behind. Whenever a crisis actively threatened a hero's family, it seemed no superhero within the entire DC cosmos possessed the capacity to permanently crush the threat while it was still gestating in its cradle.
*Huff... Huff... Huff...*
Through the air.
The heavy, ragged rhythm of Clark's breathing echoed out, completely destabilized by the sheer volatility of his emotional state.
His eyes, burning with a piercing blue atomic radiance, first swept across the completely deserted street before locking with absolute, dead-eyed precision onto the lone "adult" present at the scene—the individual his senses confirmed had been standing with the children at the very end: John Constantine.
That gaze.
It was colder than ten thousand winters frozen deep within the Arctic core.
It carried a burning, crushing fury and an absolute demand for answers that possessed more than enough weight to freeze a mortal soul completely solid.
"..."
Constantine felt his throat go entirely dry.
He knew with absolute certainty that the worst-case scenario had just unfolded. Furthermore, the magnitude of this impending disaster would undoubtedly dwarf every single mystical nightmare he had ever navigated throughout his entire career.
"Don't do it! Back off!"
Sensing Superman's suffocating, physical pressure crushing down upon his chest, Constantine's baseline survival instincts flared to absolute maximum capacity! Without a single shred of hesitation, he violently thrust both hands high into the air, surrendering immediately.
The motion was executed so blindingly fast it practically left physical afterimages in the air. His words tumbled out in a frantic, rapid-fire blur, driven by a very real, paralyzing terror that if he paused for even a single fraction of a second, Superman would instantly incinerate him into a pile of molecular dust, leaving not even a trace of ash behind.
"Hey! Calm down, Kryptonian! Their disappearance had absolutely nothing to do with me! Seriously! I swear on my life!" He did everything within his power to force his expression to look completely earnest and innocent.
"I noticed something was deeply wrong with this object and actively scrambled over here to save those three kids! But... I didn't make it in time! I missed them by a bleeding fraction of a second!"
As he rambled, his eyes frantically darted toward the statue standing nearby—which had fully unveiled its monstrous ferocity and lunging posture—desperately emphasizing the coordinates of the true threat.
Constantine didn't dare pull his eyes away from the angel sculpture for even a split second, knowing all too well that these cosmic predators possessed a distinct knack for targeting the absolute weakest link in a group.
"I know."
Faced with Constantine's frantic defense, Superman didn't offer a single word of rebuttal.
His globally reaching super-vision and super-hearing had indeed intercepted the anomalous energy fluctuations across this sector at the absolute last second, alongside Constantine's desperate, ragged warning.
He was fully aware that his own failure to arrive in time was the primary catalyst behind his children's disappearance. Constantine's sudden presence was merely an erratic variable that had ultimately accelerated the timeline of the ambush.
Right now, an agonizing mixture of anxiety, blinding fury, and lingering dread swirled violently within his chest, making it entirely inevitable that a fraction of his misplaced wrath would bleed onto this fundamentally untrustworthy bastard—an individual practically drenched in the stench of stale tobacco smoke and foul, rotting magical residue.
After all, if Constantine hadn't suddenly shouted and drawn the children's attention, they might not have diverted their lines of sight so effortlessly.
Perhaps, if their eyes hadn't wavered, he could have torn through the atmosphere and arrived before that horrific, anomalous displacement ever triggered!
The margins were a matter of mere decimal points of a single second. Yet within that microscopic window of hesitation, the movement of the statue had entirely bypassed his advanced perception, leaving his children completely vanished from the physical plane.
"This statue..." Superman shifted his icy, deadened gaze toward the monstrous "angel," the raw fury burning within his eyes crystallizing into a dense, unyielding will to enact absolute annihilation.
His pupils abruptly flared with a blinding, agonizing crimson light, resembling two miniature, compressed suns. A cataclysmic, terrifying volume of thermal energy rapidly coalesced and swirled within his eyes, causing the ambient atmospheric pressure around his face to warp and distort from the sheer heat density!
A golden-crow-like solar brilliance blazed from the absolute depths of his pupils—the structural hallmark that an evolved variant of his Heat Vision was locked and loaded for immediate release.
He clearly intended to utilize the most direct, overwhelming application of raw force to entirely atomize the monstrosity responsible for making his sons vanish!
"Hold on! Bloody hell, don't!" Seeing the structural tell-tales of the incoming blast, Constantine felt his soul nearly leap straight out of his throat. Completely disregarding his terror of Superman's wrath, he forced his voice through the suffocating pressure to shout a desperate interception!
"You cannot destroy it! At least not right now!" Constantine's voice cracked, jumping into a sharp, desperate register. "If you want even a microscopic chance of saving those kids, this bloody thing has to remain intact!"
To prevent the entire scenario from deteriorating into an irreversible catastrophe, Constantine was forced to bite the bullet and explain the mechanics, even if it meant risking being accidentally incinerated by a Superman currently operating at the absolute peak of emotional devastation.
"This entity... it possesses highly specific properties! It didn't murder those children... it 'sent them away'! Its physical anchoring within our timeline seems to be structurally entangled with the exact temporal coordinates where it dumps its prey!"
"If you atomize its physical form right now, Heaven only knows what desolate sector of history those kids will be cast into! They could easily end up permanently untethered, floating blindly inside the temporal slipstreams of the time-vortex!"
"If that happens, they are truly as good as dead!"
While he wasn't entirely certain whether Superman's Heat Vision possessed the structural capacity to completely obliterate a high-dimensional lifeform classified as a "Weeping Angel"—especially since they lacked standard biological metrics like a heartbeat, blood circulation, or organic tissue, rendering conventional physical and magical assaults almost entirely useless—he simply couldn't afford to gamble.
After all, the person preparing to strike was Superman, a being notorious for manifesting absolute miracles through raw willpower.
If Superman actually managed to bypass those conceptual defenses in a fit of blinding rage, the survival odds for those three children would plummet to absolute zero. The cascading butterfly effects that would ripple across the timeline from such an event were something Constantine didn't even dare to contemplate.
He was one of the incredibly rare mortal entities who possessed the capacity to interact with the broader layout of the multiverse, having personally guided his spiritual form through numerous alternate realities.
He knew with absolute clarity what became of a planet Earth, and by extension, an entire universe, when a version of Superman permanently lost his family. He had zero desire to watch the reality he currently inhabited slide down that exact identical precipice.
His baseline intuition and tactical judgment explicitly warned him that this wasn't a crisis one could simply survive by fleeing to an alternate universe. The Superman native to this specific reality was far too powerful, and far too fundamentally anomalous.
Because he needed to monitor the real-time shifts in Superman's facial expressions while simultaneously maintaining an uninterrupted watch on the angel statue to prevent a sudden strike, Constantine quietly catalyzed a localized spell.
A vertical, unblinking third eye fractured open across the skin of his forehead, dedicating its sight entirely to observing Superman.
His own biological eyes remained locked dead-center on the Weeping Angel, ensuring he wouldn't accidentally trigger a sudden jump-scare assault. Facing Constantine's exotic sensory spell, Superman chose not to enact any immediate retributive strike.
"You possess advanced data regarding this specific classification of entity?" Hearing that his children might not be permanently erased from existence, but had merely been "sent away," the star-melting crimson radiance churning within Superman's eyes gradually receded and vanished.
Forcing down the absolute, overwhelming impulse to grind the stone construct into dust, he demanded answers in a low, urgent, and resonant tone. His children were still breathing. Therefore, as of this exact microsecond, tracking down and recovering them was his absolute, singular operational priority.
Witnessing the heat vision dissipate, Constantine quietly exhaled a breath of relief, though he didn't dare slacken his posture for even a millisecond. Keeping his eyes anchored to the stone figure, he rapidly launched into a clinical overview of the entity's lore.
"This classification of entity is designated as a Weeping Angel," Constantine rattled off at a blistering pace, drawing upon deep repositories of ancient, esoteric knowledge. "They represent one of the oldest, and most thoroughly malevolent predatory species scattered across the cosmos!"
Evidently, Constantine lacked the sensory capacity to detect or perceive that this entity was an intrusive lifeform originating from a completely foreign reality outside their own. Within his current cognitive framework, Weeping Angels were simply an extraordinarily obscure element native to the broader tapestry of the DC universe.
"Their core defining trait is a mechanism known as quantum-locking," he explained, gesturing tightly toward the statue.
"The exact millisecond you maintain direct, uninterrupted visual observation on its form, its physical structure locks into absolute, inert stone. It becomes completely incapable of movement. However, the precise microsecond you sever that line of sight—even if it's just for the duration of a single biological blink—it gains the capacity to move at hyper-light velocities, instantly closing the distance to manifest right in front of its designated target!"
"Conventional telemetry is entirely incapable of mapping their physical trajectory."
"Their methodology of predation revolves entirely around casting your physical body back into a specific coordinate within the past," Constantine's expression grew profoundly grave.
"Once you are stranded there, they actively 'feast' upon the latent temporal energy of the potential timeline you were originally fated to live out in your native present. To put it simply, they sustain their existence by systematically stealing the infinite possibilities of your biological lifespan!"
"Anyone who receives direct physical contact from their hands is instantaneously hurled into the past, left entirely to survive or perish on their own!"
"Because their survival requires extracting and consuming the specific block of time originally allocated to your existence."
"They typically refrain from inflicting direct, lethal trauma on their prey. Instead, they leave you to wander in absolute, isolated exile through the corridors of time, or let you trigger a massive temporal paradox disaster by inadvertently altering historical data!"
"They are living, breathing stone statues. Predators of time itself." Constantine truly possessed an exceptionally thorough understanding of the Weeping Angels, fully recognizing their existence as a highly specific, high-dimensional predatory lifeform.
Listening to this entirely unprecedented, deeply bizarre set of operational rules, Superman's brow furrowed into a tight, dense line.
"How could an entity of this classification manifest inside a major metropolitan hub? Positioned directly outside the front steps of a civilian residence?"
Clark's voice vibrated with a tightly suppressed pocket of rage and profound bewilderment. He wasn't expecting Constantine to possess the answer to that specific question.
Instead, his gaze transformed into two searching spotlights, violently whipping toward the lavish villa—focusing squarely on the occupant hiding deep within the interior, whose accelerating, terrified heartbeat was pounding clearly against his auditory senses!
"No! Please, no!"
Inside the villa, the female homeowner who had been crouched behind the heavy velvet curtains, covertly monitoring the street dynamics, had already felt her soul detach from her body the exact millisecond Superman made planetfall.
She had merely wanted to offload a localized curse onto someone else.
How on earth had her actions managed to draw the attention of Superman himself?
The moment she realized that Superman's icy, piercing gaze had cut cleanly through the reinforced concrete walls of her home to lock with absolute sniper precision onto her coordinates, she let out a hysterical, blood-curdling shriek, resembling a feral cat getting its tail violently stomped on.
Spinning on her heel, the woman scrambled frantically toward the rear exit, desperately trying to flee!
However, her feet had barely crossed half the distance to the threshold, and before her eyes could even trace the outline of the back door's handle, an absolute, completely unyielding wall of crushing pressure materialized directly behind her spine!
Rigidly, millimeter by agonizing millimeter, she forced her head to turn.
Standing right there, the figure clad in the iconic blue tactical suit and flowing crimson cape had materialized behind her like a silent, spectral wraith, completely bypassing the physical limitations of sound and air displacement.
He was within arm's reach!
Those deep blue eyes contained absolutely zero warmth. There was only a suffocating, monumental authority that paralyzed her nervous system.
"Ah—!" The woman screamed in pure terror, her knees buckling instantly beneath her weight as she collapsed heavily onto the floor. She scrambled backward using her hands and feet in a frantic, uncoordinated crawl until her spine slammed hard against the cold, unyielding surface of the drywall.
There was nowhere left to retreat.
"Don't... stay away from me! This has nothing to do with me! Nothing to do with me!" Her voice hit a piercing, ragged pitch, laced heavily with tears as she launched into a frantic, incoherent verbal defense, desperately trying to sever any legal or moral connection to the event.
"Don't you dare blame me! Leaving the baseline facts aside for a moment, don't you superheroes bear an absolute responsibility for this?! Why didn't you put preventative measures in place to stop a monster like that from manifesting inside a civilian sector?!"
"Why didn't any of you show up to rescue me the exact moment I unburied that thing?! Therefore, it's entirely your fault! Every single bit of this disaster falls squarely on your shoulders!"
"I'm just a girl! What could possibly be wrong with me doing whatever it takes to save my own skin?! Besides, I've already graduated with a Ph.D.! I possess a vastly superior level of societal utility compared to the average population!"
She frantically attempted to utilize weaponized confusion, gaslighting, and shifting focal points to muddy the waters of accountability, even subtly weaving in modern, hyper-progressive social justice rhetoric.
She was actively attempting to leverage her gender and self-proclaimed status as a vulnerable minority to serve as an absolute, untouchable shield against consequences.
"Heh."
Staring down at the pathetic spectacle before him, the muscles across Superman's jaw tightened violently as he manually suppressed the fury brewing within him.
It was precisely this specific brand of self-absorbed, unhinged societal degenerates that kept America, and by extension the wider world, locked in a state of absolute, chaotic degradation.
He took a single, deliberate step forward, his towering silhouette casting a massive, absolute shadow that entirely engulfed the woman on the floor.
Terrified out of her mind by his closing proximity, a sudden wave of damp warmth flooded the fabric of her trousers, her bladder completely failing under the sheer weight of her panic.
Yet, even as she shuddered in her own waste, her voice retained a vicious, venomous edge as she spat out a shrill, desperate threat.
"What... what do you think you're doing?! I'm warning you! I am actively recording this entire interaction! If you dare lay a single finger on my body, I will sue you into oblivion! I will formally charge you with intent to commit sexual assault!"
"I command a following of three hundred thousand active users on Twitter! I possess the power to entirely destroy your public legacy and make you completely radioactive to society!"
"I have zero connection to that statue! I don't know a single thing about it! Whatever happens to anyone out there is their own problem, leave me out of it! Aren't you supposed to be Superman? The ultimate symbol of justice? Does justice no longer require listening to reason?! Does justice no longer respect the fundamental rights of ordinary citizens?! If you dare touch so much as a single hair on my head, tomorrow's front-page headline across every global outlet will read: 'Superman's Brutal Tyranny: An Attempted Assault on an Innocent Woman!'"
"The entire planet will know that you are nothing more than a lawless, unhinged thug!" The further she plunged into her tirade, the more emotionally charged her delivery became, rapidly convincing her own mind that she was the absolute victim in this scenario.
She genuinely believed that if she simply screamed loud enough, the sheer volume of her rhetoric would completely wash away her criminal liability.
This woman was actively attempting to wield modern public relations machinery and legal frameworks as an offensive weapon to enforce her immunity.
Superman quietly observed her—taking note of how she was simultaneously vibrating with an absolute, paralyzing terror, yet still possessed the sheer malice required to construct such a vile, underhanded strategy to insulate herself from the consequences of her actions.
Ultimately.
Superman couldn't help himself. A cold, dark chuckle broke past his lips.
That laughter was entirely devoid of warmth. It sounded like the whistling of a bitter, desolating wind sweeping across the Siberian tundra.
"I have absolutely zero interest in the depraved, accountability-dodging nature of your baseline character," Superman's voice dropped into a register that was terrifyingly flat, as if he were clinically summarizing a factual dataset that held no personal relevance to his life.
"However, you are going to provide me with two specific pieces of information—why did you deliberately place a lethal hazard out in a public space? And from what exact coordinates did you originally unearth that object?"
His questions sliced directly into the structural core of the crisis, leaving absolutely zero room for evasion.
The woman swallowed hard, her eyes darting erratically across the room, clearly indicating she possessed full knowledge of the timeline. Yet, the deep-seated path dependency forged from years of weaponized social justice rhetoric caused her to double down, her voice snapping back into a sharp, venomous screech.
"And... and what if I choose to say absolutely nothing?! What are you going to do about it?!" She thrust her chin upward, desperately trying to project a posture of unyielding defiance.
"You are Superman! You are a hero! Your core directives explicitly forbid you from executing physical violence against an ordinary civilian! Those are the rules you operate under! I dare you to lay a hand on me! Try it! I possess a dozen different strategies to make the public believe you attempted to violate my physical autonomy!"
She was banking entirely on the fact that Superman was permanently shackled by a strict moral matrix and a desperate need to preserve his global reputation.
She was utterly convinced he wouldn't dare utilize raw physical violence against her.
She was treating his morality as an absolute insurance policy.
To this, the cold smile plastered across Superman's face deepened significantly. He slowly nodded his head, as if he were in total agreement with her legal assessment.
"Yes. Your analysis of the situation is entirely accurate."
Superman's voice remained unsettlingly calm. "The upbringing I received from my parents, alongside the core tenets of the belief system I choose to uphold, dictates that even when I am standing directly in front of an undeniable piece of human garbage, I am fundamentally restricted from applying the full weight of my power against you."
Hearing those words manifest from his own lips, the female homeowner instantly let out a massive, sweeping sigh of relief.
A look of post-crisis triumph and a subtle, barely masked arrogance began to creep back onto her features. See? These so-called grand heroes were nothing more than absolute idiots permanently trapped within the boundaries of their own self-imposed rules and regulations!
She even began preparing her jaw to deliver a few additional layers of mocking derision, fully intending to cement her absolute "victory" over the Man of Steel.
However, the exact millisecond her lips began to curl to form the initial syllables—Superman abruptly pivoted his rhetoric, his tone dropping into a register of icy, absolute finality.
"However..."
"...when it comes to dealing with an utterly irredeemable entity of your exact classification... there happens to exist an alternate operative whose profile is perfectly optimized for the task. At this precise moment in time, I find myself in absolute, total alignment with the philosophy that the superhero community must maintain a diverse spectrum of operational methodologies."
The moment the final syllable left his mouth, Superman didn't grant her a single additional glance. Turning smoothly on his heel, he maintained a measured, unhurried stride as he walked cleanly out of the residence, acting as though his presence was no longer required within the space.
"What kind of absolute gibberish is he rambling about? Did losing his kid cause his brain to completely short-circuit?" The sudden, clean transition left the woman entirely stunned, her mind spinning in total confusion as she struggled to comprehend the dynamic.
Her internal thoughts raced as she watched Superman's retreating silhouette disappear through the exit. She rapidly arrived at the conclusion that Superman was simply terrified of tarnishing his precious public image—he had blinked first, he was completely powerless against her strategy, and he had been forced to rely on empty threats before slinking away like a beaten dog.
A sudden, unearned surge of courage flooded her veins once more. Staring at the empty doorway where Superman had just exited, she couldn't resist the overwhelming urge to bark out a few final, venomous taunts, desperately trying to salvage the face she had lost when she was hyperventilating on the floor.
"Hmph! Keep acting tough! You still didn't have the guts to do a single damn thing to me! I'm telling you right now, this isn't over! First thing tomorrow morning, I am marching straight down to..." Before her threat could fully materialize.
*BOOM!!!*
A monumentally catastrophic detonation shattered the structural integrity of the ceiling directly above her skull! The heavily reinforced roof of the villa disintegrated instantly, as if it had been struck dead-center by a high-caliber artillery shell!
Shards of splintered timber, heavy chunks of drywall, and dense clouds of plaster dust cascaded downward like a violent, suffocating torrential downpour!
A silhouette of absolute, pure midnight—perfectly integrated into the surrounding shadows—descended amidst the falling structural debris, dropping from the heavens with the catastrophic velocity of a localized thunderbolt!
"Who! Who the hell is destroying my property?!"
"Superman! Where is Superman?!" Within the woman's absolute, paralyzing terror, and long before her cognitive faculties could even attempt to process the visual data, the heavy, armored sole of a combat boot expanded exponentially within her pupils.
*BANG!*
A sickening, heavy impact echoed through the room!
That boot slammed down with absolute, merciless precision, pinning the woman's skull directly against the floorboards! The head she had just desperately managed to lift as she scrambled to her feet was violently, ruthlessly smashed back into the hardwood, burying her face into the dirt.
The dust slowly began to settle through the fractured air.
The ambient light illuminated the sharp, predatory contours of a helmet adorned with elongated, demonic bat ears. Beneath the moonlight pouring through the shattered remnants of the collapsed roof, a symbol stood out with absolute, chilling malice—the stylized emblem of a bat carved across a chest of obsidian tactical armor!
His entire frame was swathed in a heavy, flowing cape that unfurled like the wings of a predatory bat, his right boot maintaining an absolute, unyielding downward pressure on the back of the woman's head, locking her completely rigid against the floor.
"Ugh... Ah—!"
She managed to let out a short, strangled gasp of agony, her cheek pressed flat against the splintered wood, entirely incapable of forming another coherent syllable.
Batman stared down at her with an absolute, deadened detachment, his voice emerging from the depths of his cowl like a low, modulated echo straight from the trenches of the underworld.
"You were entirely correct in your assessment. Superman is fundamentally restricted from touching you."
He slowly descended into a cold, clinical crouch, the eyes behind the white lenses of his cowl gleaming like twin stars of absolute zero.
"But I am not."
The gaze burning within Batman's eyes carried an aura of absolute, uncompromising cruelty.
"The ancient dynasties possessed seventy-eight distinct methodologies of state-sanctioned torture. Imperial Rome retained thirty-two independent variants. Flaying, lingering death by a thousand cuts, the Iron Maiden, the rack, the breaking wheel... We can take our time selecting a baseline to initiate our session."
The midnight wind howled through the ruined structure.
Deep within the confines of this shattered villa.
Justice had manifested through a drastically alternate set of parameters.