It seemed that Shazam didn't have to worry about meeting the Flashpoint Superman.
That is assuming Shazam could still find enough courage to step back into the fight again.
Viktor slowly flew upward into the sky, stopping only when he reached the same altitude as Flashpoint Superman, who looked pale and sick.
Flashpoint Superman's gaze lingered on the locator in Viktor's left hand for a moment, and an unmistakable desire showed in his eyes.
But then his brow furrowed slightly.
He smelled blood—very fresh blood.
Noticing that this Superman hadn't immediately attacked like the soldiers before, Viktor tried talking to him to see if he could get some useful information out of him directly.
"We don't actually have to fight to the death here. If you're willing to give me more information, I have another locator device right here."
Flashpoint Superman was so thin his bone structure was beginning to show. He looked at Viktor, was silent for a moment, and simply shook his head.
"I don't even trust the people of this world. Why would I trust someone from another world?"
Viktor frowned.
It made sense that the Flashpoint Superman would be suspicious to everyone.
After all, in this world, the moment this Superman arrived on Earth, he was locked up by the U.S. military and spent decades in underground labs and prisons without ever seeing sunlight.
"Then why would you willingly come to this place that is destined to be destroyed? If none of us had randomly entered this timeline, you would just die here."
Superman didn't answer right away. He simply turned and looked at the sunset sinking below the horizon.
After he turned back, Superman's eyes were filled with a deep longing for freedom and a trace of pity.
Then those complex emotions were swallowed by a flash of red light.
"If you can take my hope from me with your own hands, then I'll answer your question."
Viktor's expression became serious, and he quickly flew backward.
This was his first time fighting Superman.
Even though he roughly knew what abilities Superman had, Viktor had never experienced them in real combat.
But the heat vision caught up to Viktor even faster than he moved.
A burning sensation hit his chest, and a red beam of light blasted him straight into the building behind him.
After being pushed by the incredible force of the heat vision, Viktor crashed through several buildings one after another before finally twisting his body sideways to dodge out of the beam.
He then exploded and charged straight at Superman.
Superman, who had clearly barely ever used his heat vision before, kept firing it continuously.
After sensing Viktor closing in rapidly, he hurriedly shut his eyes, curled his whole body up, and made a very clumsy defensive pose.
Then Viktor grabbed Superman by the hair with one hand and delivered a devastating gut punch with the other.
Superman let out a miserable cry.
Viktor showed no mercy, holding Superman in place and hitting every weak point in his defense.
Superman screamed incredibly loudly as he got beaten continuously.
Having never actually fought before, Superman wailed, and without even remembering he could fight back, Superman just wildly swung his arms in completely random punches.
These completely random attacks didn't even graze Viktor.
In his frantic panic, Superman opened his mouth to unleash a freeze breath, but Viktor had already seen it coming and slammed his palm hard up into Superman's chin, making his teeth crash together.
Afterwards, Superman's head was rattling from the impact, and Viktor grabbed him and drove him straight down from the sky into the ground.
He picked Superman up by the collar and stood him up with his brow tightly furrowed. He hadn't gotten any kind of equal fight out of this at all.
Even though Superman's physical strength was just barely enough to break through Viktor's defenses at minimum, this Superman had clearly never been in a single fight in his life.
The decades of imprisonment had left even his basic movement looking incredibly weak.
"You're no match for me. Tell me what you know. Otherwise, not only will I beat you to death, but every last one of your resistance soldiers scattered across the different timelines will die by my hands."
He paused his attack and tried once more to persuade Superman.
Surprisingly, Superman actually forced himself to stop screaming at those words.
Suddenly, Superman grabbed Viktor's arm and pulled himself free, even ripping out his own hair and scalp in the process.
Viktor couldn't understand this Superman's behavior at all.
"You were abused by the humans of this world. Why are you fighting this hard for them...?"
"If your world is full of people like you..."
Superman clenched his fists again, staring at Viktor with eyes full of rage.
"Then there's no way I'm telling you anything!"
"...A completely unreasonable stubbornness."
Just as Viktor was about to raise his fist again, a bolt of red lightning tore through the temporal barrier and appeared right next to the deep crater Viktor had just smashed Superman into.
Reverse-Flash came to a stop and looked emotionlessly at the Superman in the crater and at Viktor.
"You still have time to slowly trade punches with a Superman?"
Viktor lowered his fist helplessly.
"I was trying to get more information, but he won't say anything."
Flashpoint Superman turned back with visible shock.
The moment he saw Reverse-Flash, his whole body started trembling, and his voice came out filled with pain.
"How do you people still have another speedster?!"
Before the words even finished leaving his mouth, Superman's eyes suddenly flared with red light again.
Viktor's eyes flashed with sudden understanding, and he finally got a useful piece of information.
He charged forward and shoved him back down into the crater before he could sneak-attack Reverse-Flash with his heat vision.
The soil and stone in the crater were scorched into glowing orange lava by the heat vision.
Superman struggled furiously, and his thin head twisted wildly in the flowing lava.
Ignoring the spatters of lava landing on his arms, Viktor held Superman down with all his weight and looked up at Reverse-Flash.
"Did you get anything useful on your end?"
"After I noticed the timeline had been split, I figured those survivors might be hiding in the timeline furthest away from the moment of destruction. I then avoided all enemies in every timeline and kept running and searching toward the furthest timelines."
Reverse-Flash's static-filled voice carried a tone of genuine surprise.
"However, I was wrong. They didn't choose to hide in the safest timelines."
Reverse-Flash reached out his hand toward him.
"We can't waste any more time. We have to keep moving toward the timelines on the verge of destruction right now."
After hearing those words, Superman suddenly roared and exploded with a burst of power that Viktor hadn't expected at all.
He tore free from Viktor's grip, destroyed an entire street, and shot up into the sky at full speed.
"Don't worry about him. Completely beating a weakened Superman to death is just a waste of time."
Reverse-Flash blinked instantly to Viktor's side and grabbed his shoulder.
Suddenly, Cyborg's voice came through both of their earpieces.
"No—stop him! Now!"
There was no time to wonder how the cross-dimensional communication technology had been figured out.
Viktor launched straight up into the sky and chased after Superman.
Even though the two of them closed the distance fast, Superman still broke through the atmosphere a step ahead.
Using his bioelectric field as a way to send his voice through the vacuum of space, Superman screamed with everything he had into the emptiness.
"Luthor! They have another speedster!"
A massive satellite with some kind of cutting-edge stealth technology slowly rotated in orbit.
The layered deflector panels distorting around it looked like a tiny, blurry patch of static floating outside the empty Earth.
"I see. Thank you."
An unfamiliar voice accompanied the sound of vibration.
Then, just as Viktor grabbed Superman by the shoulder, a blinding white explosion swallowed everything.
After a few moments, Viktor descended from the sky, smoke rising from his entire body, with the now completely dead Superman in his arms.
The satellite explosion hadn't hurt him, but the name they had just heard made everyone uneasy.
...
1200 POWER STONES = 1 BONUS CHAPTER
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