Hey everyone, RoseSaiyan2 here. So you could call this sort of a rewrite of Alien Warriors of Metropolis. I've switched up a few things though. There are Saiyan characters in this story, just not the typical ones. Before we get started... here is a poll for you guys concerning the story:
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What Saiyan/human or Saiyan/alien pairings would you like to see?
Goten/Bulla
Trunks/Rocket
Daikon/Zatanna
Other (leave a comment)
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The only element of Black Clover that's in this story is the magic our main character and those like him will use. So just getting that out of the way. Don't murder me in the comments please.
As you can tell from the title, Supergirl will be with the main character as the main pairing. I'm leaving Superboy and Miss Martian together because that's the best natural fit for either of them. I'm mainly focusing on 5 pairings, so whoever the saiyan characters end up with is up to you guys. And just as a rule, male characters can't end up with another male, vice versa with female characters... I don't write those type of stories, just my preference.
Anyways... I don't own Dbz/Kai/ DBS or Young Justice/Justice League and their characters, I only own the OC's (I have permission to use 2 characters owned by ComparedDreadx).
Chapter One: The One Sleeping Beneath the Ice
◆ I. ◆
Metropolis, U.S.A. March 6th, 2014 — 4:30 P.M.
The city stretched endlessly below her, a living mosaic of steel and glass stitched together by rivers of afternoon traffic. From five hundred feet above Metropolis, it looked almost peaceful — almost small enough to hold in the palm of her hand.
Kara Zor-El let the wind have its way with her golden hair.
She banked lazily on a thermal current, the red of her cape rippling like a slow-burning flame at her back. The blue of her uniform caught the late winter sun, the bold red S crest at her chest a symbol she still had not entirely learned to carry without the weight of everything it implied. Matching boots and skirt, the ensemble of a hero — a costume as familiar to the people of Metropolis as a landmark, though the girl wearing it was still, in many ways, a stranger to this era.
It had been one year.
One full year since she had been pried loose from her icy tomb, and yet some mornings Kara still woke expecting to smell the warm metalite air of Krypton. One year since the shock of learning she had slept for nearly three decades while the universe moved on without her. One year since the even more devastating truth had settled over her like ash: Krypton was gone. Her world, her family, everything she had been hurtling toward when she was placed inside that cryostasis pod — dust and memory.
She had grieved. She was still grieving, in the quiet hours before sunrise when there was no patrol to distract her.
But she had also found a new orbit.
Her cousin Kal-El — Superman to the rest of the world — had anchored her at first. Then had come Young Justice, a team of teenagers with impossible powers and the particular brand of reckless courage that seemed to flourish in young people who had stared down genuine darkness. In the months that followed, Kara had joined them on reconnaissance operations while the Justice League handled the heavier threats — the supervillains, the cosmic disturbances, the tyrants.
And there had been no shortage of those.
The Injustice League. Maxima. Superboy Prime. The creature called Doomsday. Darkseid, most recently — the New God of Apokolips who had descended on Earth with his Parademons and his Omega Beams and his terrifying certainty that the universe was his to subjugate. The Justice League had come together to repel him, and Darkseid had retreated to the hellish world of Apokolips, wounded in some deep, unspecified way that none of them entirely trusted.
Now, the streets below were quiet. The sky was clear.
It had been like that for weeks.
Too quiet, Kara thought, the wind tugging at her cape. She turned slowly in the air, scanning the cityscape with eyes that could peel back brick and concrete if she chose, listening with ears that could pick out a whispered conversation two city blocks away. Nothing. Just the ordinary percussion of a city going about its business: sirens, engines, the distant laughter of children in a park.
She exhaled, slow and deliberate.
"So much has happened this past year," she murmured to the open sky, too soft for anyone below to hear. The words felt strange to say aloud — not because they were untrue, but because they were insufficient. So much had happened, and so little of it had been resolved. Darkseid was biding his time. She could feel it, the way you can feel a storm on the horizon before the clouds arrive.
I just hope nothing else—
The comm link in her ear chimed, sharp and insistent, cutting the thought clean.
Kara pressed two fingers to the receiver, drawing herself upright in the air. "Yes?"
"Supergirl." The voice was clipped, efficient, teenage — Robin, recognizable even through the digital compression. "Batman is calling all Young Justice members back to Mount Justice. Immediately."
She raised an eyebrow, already reading the ambient wind currents to choose the fastest route west. "Immediately? What's going on?"
"New mission. That's all he told me."
A new mission. She suppressed the sigh rising in her chest — not from reluctance, exactly, but from something closer to exasperation. They had barely had time to breathe between assignments lately. Then again, that was the architecture of this life. You accepted it the moment you put on the cape.
"Tell the others I'm on my way," she said.
"Roger that."
The link clicked off. Kara hovered for one last moment, the city spread below her in the golden haze of the late afternoon sun, and then she turned and flew west at speed, the skyline of Metropolis blurring behind her like a half-remembered dream.
◆ II. ◆
Mount Justice — Young Justice League Headquarters 5:30 P.M.
The briefing room had the particular atmosphere of a place where serious things were decided by people who were, technically speaking, still children. The team filed in and found Batman and Wonder Woman waiting, flanked by Green Arrow and Black Canary. Red Tornado arrived moments later, his expression as unreadable as always, his crimson form standing motionless at the edge of the room.
Nobody sat down.
"So what's the new mission?" Robin asked.
Batman's gaze landed on him with the weight of a dropped anvil. Robin didn't flinch — he'd long since developed an immunity to that particular look — but the room stilled nonetheless, everyone instinctively straightening.
It was Wonder Woman who spoke first.
"The League's sensors have detected an abnormally high-energy reading originating from the vicinity of Iceland." Her voice carried the quiet authority of someone who had been conducting war councils for centuries. "We need you to investigate the source."
The assembled teenagers exchanged glances.
"Could be another meta-human," Batman added, his tone making it clear this was a warning, not speculation. "Your objective is reconnaissance only. Assess the situation, determine what you're dealing with, and report back. The League will take it from there."
The League will take it from there.
Kara caught the subtle shift that moved through the room at those words — the carefully suppressed frustration, the way jaws tightened and eyes flicked toward the floor. They had proven themselves against Doomsday. Against Darkseid himself, when it had come to that. And still, every mission ended with the same implicit message: observe and report back to the adults.
She kept her expression neutral.
"Understood," Robin said evenly. "We'll look into it."
Batman nodded, and the holographic display behind him shifted from a world map to a tactical overlay of the North Atlantic. Robin turned to assess the team — they couldn't send everyone; some would need to stay and monitor the base.
The selection was made efficiently: Kara, Aqualad, Rocket, Blue Beetle, Zatanna, Wonder Girl, Static, and Robin would make up the investigative team. Miss Martian, who had been watching from near the door with quiet attentiveness, raised her hand before anyone could suggest ground transportation.
"I can take you in the Bio-Ship," she offered. "It's faster, and I know the terrain."
No one argued. Superboy, as was his custom whenever Miss Martian volunteered herself for something, fell in wordlessly behind her.
The remaining members — Kid Flash, Artemis, Empress, Red Arrow, Starfire, and Beast Boy — drew the unenviable duty of watching the base. Kara caught Starfire's look of mild disappointment and offered a sympathetic half-smile before falling in with the group heading toward the hangar.
She didn't know what waited for them in Iceland.
But standing in the backwash of the Bio-Ship's engines as they lifted off into the grey winter sky, she felt a strange certainty settle in her chest, distinct from the ordinary pre-mission tension she had grown accustomed to.
Something is different about this one.
She didn't know why she felt that. She pressed the thought down and watched the clouds swallow the base below them.
◆ III. ◆
Somewhere Over the North Atlantic
The interior of the Bio-Ship hummed with bioluminescent light.
Kara sat near the curved observation wall, watching the ocean blur past beneath them — a featureless grey expanse interrupted here and there by whitecapped waves. The cold up here was theoretical; she didn't feel temperature the way humans did. But looking at that water, she felt something colder anyway.
She was thinking about Iceland, and about ice, and about being asleep while the world moved on without you.
"You're somewhere else entirely."
She turned. Wonder Girl — Cassie — had settled into the adjacent seat without Kara noticing, which was a testament either to Cassie's stealth or Kara's distraction. Probably the latter.
"I'm fine," Kara said. "Just thinking."
"About what?"
Kara was quiet for a moment, watching the ocean. "This mission," she said carefully. "The League was... vague, don't you think? They told us there was an energy reading and to go look at it. That's not a lot to work with."
Cassie tilted her head, considering. "They were probably still gathering information themselves."
"Maybe." Kara turned back to the porthole. "I don't doubt they had a reason. I just—" She paused, searching for the shape of the feeling. "Something about this feels different from the usual assignments."
Cassie studied her for a moment, then followed her gaze out to the ocean. "Different how?"
"I don't know yet."
Across the cockpit, Zatanna and Miss Martian had been running sensor sweeps for the better part of an hour. The initial scans had returned nothing — just ice, rock, and the ordinary electromagnetic noise of the planet doing its geological business. Kara had tuned it out, letting the hum of the ship absorb her unfinished thoughts.
Then the Bio-Ship's instruments changed pitch.
"What—?" Miss Martian's hands moved quickly across the interface, her green eyes widening.
Superboy was beside her in an instant. "What is it?"
"I'm reading—" She hesitated, as though the words felt strange to say. "A distress signal."
The cabin went alert. Everyone came forward.
"A distress signal?" Robin leaned over the console. "Out here? From what?"
Miss Martian pulled up the coordinates on the display. Kara looked at them, and felt the blood slow in her veins.
She recognized those coordinates.
She'd only seen them once before, during her early briefings with Kal-El, when he had been gently and methodically trying to bring her up to speed on the realities of Earth-16 and her own place within them. He had shown her the location as a matter of record — a place she might one day need to find, if she had no other refuge.
The Fortress of Solitude.
"That's impossible," she said, before she could stop herself.
Everyone looked at her.
"Those coordinates." She pointed at the display, her voice careful now, controlled. "That's the Fortress of Solitude. But only a Kryptonian should be able to access it. As far as I knew, nothing inside could even generate a signal."
The silence that followed was the particular kind that precedes a decision no one wants to be the one to voice.
It was Cassie who said it.
"We're not going to figure it out from up here." She met Kara's eyes. "We go in."
◆ IV. ◆
The Fortress of Solitude — Iceland
The Fortress rose from the tundra like a declaration.
It was not the kind of structure that made architectural sense — great crystalline spires thrusting upward from the permafrost in geometric formations that owed nothing to human engineering, their facets refracting the pale winter light into cold, prismatic colours. Miss Martian set the Bio-Ship down on the only flat ground within half a kilometre, and the team emerged into air cold enough that their breath came out in synchronized clouds.
"This is... exactly as you described," Cassie said, teeth chattering almost immediately.
"It's—colder—than I expected," Rocket admitted, pulling her jacket tighter.
Kara alone seemed unbothered by the temperature, which was a function of her Kryptonian physiology rather than any particular toughness of character. She scanned the Fortress's exterior quickly with her X-ray vision, then looked back at the others.
"Stay close," she said. "And stay alert."
They entered.
Inside, the Fortress was exactly what it appeared to be from the outside: impossible. The interior space was larger than its exterior dimensions suggested, its walls composed of the same translucent crystal that formed the spires above, everything bathed in a sourceless, silver-blue light. The air was cold and perfectly still.
Aqualad and Blue Beetle had been quiet since departure — an unusual stillness for both of them, as though the journey had given each of them something private to process. Zatanna, for her part, had gone inward the moment they landed, her dark eyes moving over the walls with a focused, searching quality that the others had learned to read as she's tracking something.
They ventured deeper.
It was Robin who stopped first.
He had pulled slightly ahead while examining the geometry of the corridor they were moving through, and now he stood motionless with his back to the group, staring at something around the curve of the passage ahead.
"Guys," he said.
The word came out at an unusual register — not alarmed, not casual, but somewhere between them, carrying the quiet weight of something unexpected.
Kara moved up beside him. "What is it?"
"You should all see this."
They came around the curve, and the passage opened before them.
Light — intense, white-gold, almost solar — poured upward from somewhere below, illuminating an entirely different architecture than the crystalline corridors above. Stone. Ancient, worked stone, laid in patterns that predated any human civilization Kara could name. And on the walls—
"These are runes," Zatanna said, moving ahead of everyone else, one hand raised slightly as though feeling for heat. Her voice had shifted into its professional register, quiet and precise. "Magical runes. Old ones."
She traced the nearest sequence with her fingertips but did not touch the stone. Around the runes, carved in relief and painted with pigments that had somehow survived whatever had preserved this place, were images. Not abstract — narrative. A story.
Kara moved slowly along the wall, reading the sequence of images the way you read a sentence. She saw a world — not Krypton, something different, wilder, with architecture that suggested both great technological advancement and something older, something organic. She saw its people: a race she did not recognize, with features that suggested neither human nor any alien she had encountered, caught in poses of ordinary life — celebration, labour, family, art.
Then she saw the dark figure at the edge of the mural.
Even rendered in ancient pigment, there was no mistaking the silhouette. The armour. The Omega symbol.
Her hands curled slowly into fists.
The mural continued. The world burning. The exodus — fleeing vessels, a diaspora scattered across the stars. And then: Earth. A handful of survivors. And finally, a kind of ending that was not quite an ending — a stasis, a suspension, a waiting.
Two thirds of the civilization. Gone.
Many of them had not even been adults.
"Zatanna." Kara's voice came out quieter than she intended. "What are these images telling us?"
Zatanna looked up from her examination of the runes, and Kara saw something unusual in her expression: the particular solemnity of someone who has just been made to witness something they cannot unfeel.
"The story of a race," Zatanna said. "Their history, their fall, their survival — or what was left of it. And the magic here—" She gestured at the runes as a whole. "It's preservation. Protection. Whatever — whoever — is being kept here, this entire place was constructed to keep them safe."
She turned to Kara.
"I can feel the magic getting stronger. It's coming from above us." A pause. "Much stronger than anything I've felt before."
"How much stronger?" Aqualad asked.
"The kind of stronger," Zatanna said carefully, "that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up."
◆ V. ◆
The staircase was long.
It wound upward through the ancient stone with the patient, winding geometry of something built to last centuries — not designed for hurry. The team climbed in near silence, the only sounds their footsteps and the increasingly insistent emanation from above: warmth, which was not supposed to exist here, and light, and—
A sound.
Kara stopped so abruptly that Superboy nearly walked into her.
It was rhythmic. Steady. Unmistakably biological.
"Do you hear that?" she asked.
Superboy frowned, extending his own hearing. A moment passed, and then his expression changed. "It sounds like—"
"A heartbeat," Kara finished.
The others exchanged glances, unable to hear it yet but trusting the Kryptonian perception that was not available to them.
They climbed faster.
The room at the top of the staircase was lit like the interior of a star.
Every surface blazed with that same sourceless gold-white luminescence, here even more intense than in the passages below. Ice coated the walls and floor in sheets and formations, elaborate and architectural, the whole chamber resembling a cathedral built by weather — and in the cathedral's centre, suspended perhaps ten feet above the ground by a force that had nothing to do with mechanical engineering—
He was there.
◈ — BGM: "Licht's Theme" — ◈
The dome of light encasing him was perfectly spherical, rotating slowly on no visible axis, its surface shot through with slow-moving patterns that Kara realized, after a moment, were the same runes she had seen carved into the walls below. They moved across the surface of the dome the way clouds move across a sky — unhurried, inevitable.
And within the dome: ice. A clear, perfect icicle formation surrounding a human silhouette, suspended vertically as though sleeping upright, preserved with a precision that felt deliberate, even tender.
The figure inside looked young.
Dark skin. Long ears, elegantly tapered. Hair — dark blue, deep as the hour before midnight — falling unbound to the middle of his back. He wore layered clothing: a black hooded garment beneath what appeared to be an army-green parka-style coat with brass fastenings, a golden belt, dark trousers, silver combat boots, and steel-grey gloves. On his back, secured by a blue-and-gold sheath, was a sword.
He appeared to be sleeping.
The heartbeat they had all heard filled the chamber — not from the walls, but from him, reverberating outward from the dome as though the magic encasing him was amplifying it, broadcasting it to anyone within range: I am here. I am alive. I am waiting.
Static was the first to find words. "What the—"
"Is that a person?" Rocket breathed.
"He's up there asleep somehow," Aqualad said, his voice quiet with the controlled composure that was his particular gift in moments like this.
Wondergirl looked to Zatanna, who had already moved as close to the dome as she could manage, arms slightly raised, eyes closed, reading the magic around her the way a navigator reads the current of a river.
"Zatanna," Cassie said. "Is he the source?"
Zatanna opened her eyes. She said nothing for a moment — just looked at the floating dome, and the figure sealed within it, with an expression Kara had never quite seen on her face before.
Then she stepped back from the dome with a sharp exhalation, as though she had put her hand too close to a flame.
"Zatanna!" Kara was at her side in an instant. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine." Zatanna steadied herself, pressing one hand flat against her sternum. "I just — the mana coming off of that is—" She exhaled again. "It's not human."
The word landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
"Not human," Superboy repeated.
"What does that mean, exactly?" Blue Beetle asked, speaking for what might have been the first time since they left Mount Justice.
"It means," Zatanna said, looking up at the sleeping figure with something between awe and trepidation, "that whoever is inside that ice is not a human being. That magical signature doesn't belong to any human practitioner, any human tradition, any human lineage. It's something else entirely." A pause. "Something considerably older."
Kara stood at the edge of the dome's ambient light, looking up at the face of the sleeping figure.
Young. Perhaps her own age, by appearance. Long dark lashes resting against dark cheekbones. An expression, even in unconsciousness, that seemed to carry the ghost of some enormous, unresolved feeling — the way people look when they have fallen asleep mid-thought, their waking mind still working through something the rest of them needed to rest from.
How long have you been here? she thought.
What happened to you?
The runes on the dome pulsed gently, as though the dome itself had heard the question and was considering its answer.
"We can't leave him here," Kara said.
It was not a question, or an argument, or even a plan. It was simply the first true thing she had said since they entered the Fortress.
Zatanna looked at her. Then back at the dome.
"No," she agreed. "We can't."
◆ VI. ◆
Getting him down was not simple.
The dome resisted their first several attempts with polite but absolute firmness — ambient magical discharge that sent Zatanna stumbling back each time she tried to engage it directly. For Kara, the experience was more visceral: kryptonians and magic had a longstanding incompatibility, and this magic was beyond any she had encountered. Every attempt to assist Zatanna left her feeling the particular wrongness of a body trying to reject something it had no framework for.
They persisted.
Through what amounted to patient trial, accumulated observation, and the kind of improvisational magic work that Zatanna was genuinely gifted at, they eventually found the approach the dome would accept. Not force. Something more like request. A structured, carefully worded magical persuasion that treated the preservation dome as what it apparently was: not a trap, but a guardian.
The dome descended.
The icicle — intact, their mysterious occupant still sleeping within it — settled to the floor of the chamber with a gentleness that seemed engineered, as though the magic was not merely contained but intentional, right up to the last moment.
He was still breathing. The heartbeat continued its measured rhythm.
"Transportation," Robin said practically, already calculating. "We can't exactly carry that on foot."
Superboy moved to step forward, and Cassie's hand intercepted his arm.
"No," she said, not unkindly. "He's drenched in whatever that magic is. Given your particular—" she chose the word carefully— "relationship with magical forces, that seems like a bad idea."
Superboy looked at the icicle. Looked at his hands. Looked at Cassie.
He stepped back.
"I've got him," Cassie said, and crouched to lift the icicle with the easy grace that came of inheriting Olympian strength, cradling it securely against her shoulder as the group began moving back toward the staircase.
Kara lingered for a moment, looking back at the chamber — at the now-dormant dome, at the runes on the walls cycling through their slow, ancient patterns, at the murals she had been absorbing piece by piece since they entered.
Somewhere behind her, somewhere in the network of passages leading back to the tundra and the Bio-Ship and the world she knew, a sword that had been embedded in the stone floor of the chamber disappeared without sound.
She noticed this peripherally and decided, for now, that it was a question for later.
Then she turned and followed the others back down the staircase, through the illuminated passages, out through the cold crystalline corridors of the Fortress, into the white wind of an Icelandic afternoon.
As she crossed the threshold, one thought settled in her mind with the quiet persistence of something she would not be able to ignore:
If we found one of them—
—how many more are out there?
She boarded the Bio-Ship.
She sat down.
The warmth of the cabin wrapped around her, and she watched through the porthole as the Fortress of Solitude shrank behind them, and somewhere between the warmth and the motion and the long accumulation of the day, she fell asleep.
◆ VII. ◆
The Watchtower — Earth Orbit
The founding members of the Justice League had returned from their respective assignments to find each other in various states of debrief — Superman from Metropolis, Batman from Gotham, Wonder Woman from Coastal City — when the transmission from Robin arrived, and with it, the account of what the team had found beneath the Fortress of Solitude.
Batman's disposition, never what one would describe as warm, had cooled further in response to the team's delay.
"You're late," he said, by way of greeting.
"Sorry about that," Robin said, with the careful tone of someone choosing battles wisely.
Batman said nothing, because Batman's silences were sufficient communication.
"Did you identify the energy source?" he asked.
Robin, to his credit, did not visibly hesitate. "We did. But it wasn't what we expected."
"Define 'not what you expected.'"
"A person. Frozen in ice. And the energy reading—" Robin paused. "It wasn't technological. Zatanna confirmed it. The source was magical. Specifically, the magic of the individual we found."
"Magic." Batman said the word with the particular flatness of someone cataloguing information, not dismissing it.
"Non-human magic," Robin clarified. "Zatanna said it wasn't even in the same class as human magical ability. She had a physical reaction just from proximity to it."
This, at last, generated visible interest from the rest of the room. Wonder Woman, whose history with magic ran considerably deeper than most of her colleagues', leaned forward slightly. Shazam, who had just arrived, paused in the doorway.
"Non-human magic," Wonder Woman repeated. "You're certain?"
"According to Zatanna, completely certain."
"Where is this individual now?" Batman asked.
"We couldn't leave him there," Robin said. "We're bringing him back to Mount Justice."
One of Batman's eyebrows moved approximately three millimetres, which, by his personal scale, constituted a significant expression of displeasure. Before he could translate that displeasure into words, a new voice entered the transmission.
"Batman." It was Kara — Supergirl — and her tone carried something that Robin's had not: the particular tautness of someone fighting to keep their composure around a feeling they have not yet fully processed. "Before you make any decisions about what to do with him — before you turn him over to anyone — wait until he wakes up. He deserves that much."
Superman, standing near the edge of the frame, looked at his cousin with an expression that contained more questions than it showed. "Kara. You don't know anything about this individual. He could represent a genuine threat."
The quality of the silence on Kara's end of the transmission changed.
"And you can stand there and make that judgment?" When she spoke again, her voice was steady, but the control in it was intentional in a way that meant the feeling beneath was significant. "He hasn't done anything. He's been asleep for God knows how long, sealed away in ice while whatever happened to his people happened without him." A pause. "I heard his voice, Kal. Not words exactly — just an impression, from when we were moving him. Pain. Rage. The kind of rage that comes from loss."
"Kara—"
"There are murals on the walls of that chamber. His race's entire history, carved into stone. I read them. Their world was destroyed." Her voice dipped. "And the figure responsible for it — in every one of those images — you'd recognize the silhouette. I guarantee it."
The room on the Watchtower went quiet.
Superman was still for a long moment. When he spoke, it was measured, but the temperature of the room had changed around him. "You're saying Darkseid—"
"Nearly exterminated his entire race," Kara said. "Yes."
The silence that followed was a different kind than before. Every member of the League present processed this with the particular controlled gravity of people who had made a career out of facing terrible things and maintaining functional composure in the face of them. But the name — Darkseid — and the weight of what Kara had described sitting against it, made that composure work harder than usual.
Kara continued, quieter now, but no less certain. "If we found one of them — if there's one survivor in the Fortress of Solitude — there could be others. Other survivors, frozen somewhere else on Earth, waiting for someone to find them."
Batman was silent for a longer stretch than his silences usually ran.
He was thinking, and when Batman thought, he thought with the systematic precision of someone building an architectural model — examining each structural element, testing load-bearing points, calculating for variables. If this was true. If there were more survivors. If this race was — as the magical signature apparently suggested — something beyond human classification entirely. If Darkseid was, as intelligence had suggested, consolidating forces in anticipation of a second attempt at Earth.
The calculus was not simple.
But it was becoming clear.
"The League will convene at Mount Justice," Superman said, settling the matter with the quiet authority that was his particular register for decisions already made. "We'll assess the situation directly."
He looked to the assembled founding members: Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter.
"The six of us will go to the base and see this individual firsthand. We'll determine whether he represents a threat, or an ally."
To the remaining members — Shazam, Hawkgirl, Icon, Cyborg, Jessica Cruz, Aquaman — he delegated the possibility Kara had raised. They accepted without theatrics.
"Leave the search for potential other survivors to us," Shazam said.
"Thank you," Wonder Woman said. "We'll return as quickly as we can."
The six founders moved toward the boom tube stations, and the Watchtower behind them filled, briefly, with the sound of people organizing themselves in response to the unknown — which was, in the end, the most familiar sound in any place where heroes gathered.
◆ VIII. ◆
Mount Justice — Basement Level
The icicle floated.
This was the first thing Kara noticed when they brought it into the basement, and it was the kind of detail that rewired your assumptions about what you thought you knew: the thing should have sat on the floor, heavy and inert, a simple block of ice with a sleeping figure inside it. Instead, the moment they crossed the threshold into the lower level of the base, it lifted of its own accord to the centre of the room and hung there, precisely stationary, as though it had always intended to be exactly here.
The room lit up.
Runes appeared on the walls — not painted, not carved, simply there, luminous and slowly cycling, the same script they had seen in the Fortress, now reconstructed around this new location as though the magic had brought its own architecture with it.
Wonder Girl and Kara looked at each other.
Then the icicle cracked.
It was a single fracture line, thin as a hair, running vertically from top to bottom. Both of them moved instinctively — Kara reaching up, Cassie bracing — and the dome of magic expanded outward from the fracture in a pulse that picked them both up and sent them stumbling backward across the room.
They hit the wall.
Got up.
The dome now surrounded their mysterious guest completely, rotating slowly, the runes on its surface cycling faster than before. And he — still suspended in the air, still apparently sleeping — had changed in one notable way.
The markings on his face.
They had not been visible before, through the ice. Now, with the dome's light playing across his features, Kara could see them clearly: lines of dark ink — no, not ink, something more organic, more fundamental than ink — tracing downward from below his eyes across the lower half of his face in patterns that evoked tribal artistry, geometric and precise, nothing random in them.
An orange luminescence had gathered around him, barely perceptible within the brighter white-gold of the dome, pulsing in synchrony with his heartbeat.
His eyes remained closed.
"What's happening?" Cassie asked from beside her, both of them watching the display with the cautious attention of people who have learned, through experience, that magic is polite right up until it isn't.
"I don't know," Kara said. "But it feels like something changing. Not breaking. Changing."
The rest of the team arrived within the minute — drawn by the sounds, by the pulse of the heartbeat growing louder, by the light now bleeding under the basement door. They filed in and added their silent attention to the collection already directed at the figure hanging in the air.
And then came a second arrival.
◆ IX. ◆
Karen Starr had returned from her own mission to a base that was, by all appearances, operating on an accelerated heartbeat.
This was unusual enough to register.
She was Power Girl — Earth-2's version of Kara Zor-El, though from an alternate timeline she preferred not to dwell on — and she had come back expecting the ordinary chaos of the base at shift change: Beast Boy doing something inadvisable, Artemis sharpening arrows, the faint smell of whatever Kid Flash had found to eat in the last five minutes. She had also come back expecting to find Kara, who was the person at Mount Justice she was most reliably glad to see.
Kara was not immediately visible.
Beast Boy and Raven intercepted her near the entrance.
"Where's Kara?" Karen asked.
Raven began to say something measured and contextually appropriate. Beast Boy, exercising his characteristic talent for achieving maximum information transfer in minimum time by detonating it at someone, said: "She went to Iceland but she's back and she's in the basement with some guy they found frozen in the Fortress of Solitude who apparently isn't human."
Karen looked at him.
"What."
"He is... not wrong," Raven confirmed, with the air of someone accustomed to repairing Beast Boy's collateral communication damage.
Karen was still processing this when the Justice League arrived.
Superman greeted her with his characteristic warmth; she deflected it with her characteristic pragmatism. The formalities were brief. The League had come to see what the team had brought back from Iceland, and Karen, reassessing her priorities, fell in with the group heading downstairs.
She heard the heartbeat before she reached the door.
A sound she had no framework for yet, steady and resonant, moving through the walls of the corridor with an insistence that was more felt than heard. She pressed her hand briefly against the wall and felt it vibrating in the stone itself.
What in the world—
The basement door opened.
The room was luminous, the walls covered in cycling runes, and in the centre, suspended in the air within a dome of slowly rotating magical light, was—
"Is that a person?" Karen said, because sometimes the most accurate response to something is also the most obvious one.
Superman stepped forward, looking up at the figure with the assessment of someone whose job regularly required evaluating unprecedented things calmly. "So," he said, quietly. "This is him."
Kara, standing near one of the rune-covered walls, nodded.
The light in the room shifted through warm and cool registers as the dome continued its slow rotation, and the marking on the sleeping figure's face caught the light in a way that made them look, for just a moment, like they were part of the light itself.
◆ X. ◆
It was Martian Manhunter who accepted the task.
Batman asked with a look; J'onn nodded his understanding. He rose from the ground slowly, levitating toward the suspended figure with the unhurried deliberateness of someone who understood that some forms of perception require patience.
The dome accepted his approach.
Superman's nod was the signal to proceed.
J'onn extended his consciousness across the narrow distance remaining and allowed it to make contact with the sleeping mind within — carefully, as one opens a door in a place where you are not certain of your welcome.
The first thing that met him was not a thought. It was a feeling.
Grief.
Not the quiet, settled kind that lives in people who have had time to work through what happened to them. The raw, unprocessed kind — banked and sealed, the way a fire is banked when you expect to be away for a while, the embers still hot enough to reignite the moment air reaches them. And beneath the grief, threaded through every part of it like structural rebar: rage.
Not diffuse. Not random. The sharpest, most intentional form of rage — the kind with a name attached to it. A single name, and it was aimed like a weapon.
The voice that rose from the sleeping mind was young, and furious, and anguished, and it said:
—Darkseid. TYRANT. You will pay for what you took. You will suffer for taking my father and my people from me. My people — our people — the Arkynorean Dark Elves — we will make you answer for what you did—
J'onn withdrew slowly, and carried the words back down with him to the room below.
The team and the League listened in silence.
When he finished, the silence continued for a beat.
Then another.
Kara's hands, at her sides, had closed into fists so tight that the knuckles were pale against her skin. A thin line of red appeared at her palm.
"His people," J'onn said, carefully. "He is not human. He is—" He paused, as though placing the word correctly mattered. "He is Arkynorean. Of the Dark Elf lineage."
Wonder Woman's expression underwent a visible change. She knew the name — or rather, she knew the history attached to the name, the same way scholars know history: something that exists in records and reference, not in living memory, because nothing of it was supposed to be living anymore.
"Arkynorean," Superman said. "But — they were believed to be extinct."
"No," J'onn said simply. "There are survivors. A handful. But Darkseid's campaign against their people—" He paused, choosing words with the care of someone who understands that accurate language is a form of respect. "It was not conquest. It was extermination."
The word landed exactly as such words do — with weight, with clarity, with the particular horrible simplicity of things that should not be true and are.
Every Kryptonian in the room felt it.
Kara pressed her fists harder against her sides, and said nothing.
J'onn turned back to the sleeping figure above them, and his expression — usually a model of compassionate restraint — held something that looked, plainly and unmistakably, like sorrow.
"There is more to learn," he said. "Shall I continue?"
His eyes shifted, red deepening, and his consciousness reached back toward the sleeping mind of the last Arkynorean they had found beneath the ice.
And the runes on the walls pulsed once, slowly, as though the room itself was listening.
— End of Chapter One —
Next Chapter: "Tragedy and Rage" The Arkynoreans' history, and the night that changed everything.
— Author's Note —
Thanks for reading! The MC's race will be explored in much more detail next chapter, as we learn firsthand what happened to the Arkynorean people. The Black Clover-inspired magic system and elven elements will come into greater focus as the story develops, and our Saiyan characters are on the horizon.
Planned pairings: Odyn × Supergirl | Baron × Wonder Girl | Khanna/Sarai × Trunks | Roy × Power Girl | Goten × (vote pending!) | Pan × Aqualad | Tarro × Blackfire | Daikon × Rocket.
Goten's pairing is the one still open — cast your vote in the comments, or suggest something new. And yes: in this story, Goten carries Gohan's narrative weight. More on that soon.
See you in the next update.