For a brief moment, time seemed to slow.
Inside the sinking school bus, the rushing river water moved as if it were flowing through thick syrup. A girl's long hair floated around her face as she struggled to keep her balance. A boy shouting in terror sent droplets of saliva drifting slowly through the air. A plastic cup bobbed on the rising water surface.
Everything appeared to be moving a hundred times slower.
Victor calmly assessed the situation.
Then he struck.
His fist shattered the glass beside him with a quiet crack. In the next instant, his body shot through the opening like a torpedo, slicing through the water outside the bus.
The front of the vehicle tilted upward as it sank deeper.
Inside the bus, the panicked students were too frightened and confused to notice anything unusual happening outside.
Victor didn't even bother holding his breath.
His expression remained completely relaxed.
"The physiology of the Eternals," he thought calmly, "allows survival without food, water, or even air."
Members of the Eternal race could survive in the vacuum of space at temperatures below minus two hundred degrees Celsius.
Compared to that, being underwater was nothing.
Victor pressed his palm against the front of the bus.
The metal groaned faintly under the pressure of his knuckles.
Then he pushed.
It looked as casual as someone brushing a person aside in a crowded hallway.
But the result was anything but casual.
The ten-ton school bus suddenly shot backward through the water like a cannonball fired from a massive artillery piece.
A violent explosion of water erupted as the vehicle burst through the surface of the river.
Boom!
The bus arced through the air for more than ten meters before slamming down onto the grassy riverbank.
Mud splattered everywhere as the heavy tires crashed against the ground. The impact shook the entire vehicle violently.
Several windows shattered instantly.
Glass fragments scattered across the interior.
"Ahhh!"
The sudden shock sent the students tumbling over each other inside the bus. Several of them covered their heads instinctively as shards of glass clattered across the floor.
"What just happened?"
For a few seconds, no one moved.
Then slowly, the students began standing up.
They stared out the broken windows in disbelief.
Only moments ago they had been trapped at the bottom of a dark, rushing river, facing certain death.
Now they were sitting on a sunlit riverbank.
Birds were singing somewhere nearby.
The sound was so peaceful that it felt surreal.
"Are we… dreaming?" one student whispered.
Several others looked around in stunned silence.
"Oh God…"
The bus driver removed his hat, staring toward the river with wide eyes as if expecting an angel to appear from the water.
"It's okay, Chloe."
The voice came from beside her.
Chloe Sullivan turned slowly, her face pale from shock.
Victor stood nearby, just as soaked as she was. Water dripped from his clothes and hair, but his expression remained calm and composed.
There wasn't even a hint of fear on his face.
"Are all the Kents this calm?" Chloe wondered in disbelief.
"N-no… I'm okay," she said weakly.
Her mind still struggled to process what had just happened.
"I thought the next time we saw sunlight," she said slowly, "it would be when someone used a crane to pull our bus out of the river… along with our bodies."
Around them, the same question echoed through everyone's mind.
What had happened?
Who had saved them?
Had God answered their prayers?
"Everyone off the bus!" the driver shouted suddenly.
He had regained enough composure to understand the danger.
"If this thing slides back into the river, we're all dead!"
The soaked students quickly scrambled outside onto the muddy bank.
Victor wrung water from his shirt casually before stepping off the bus along with the others.
"It looked like something knocked us out of the water!"
The driver stared at the front of the bus.
The metal panel had been dented inward, as if something massive had struck it head-on.
The shape looked almost like the impact mark of an elephant charging full speed.
"Is there some kind of monster in that river?"
The students gathered nearby, whispering nervously while staring at the rushing water.
"Our bus hit it," someone said, "and it threw us out?"
Victor glanced briefly at the mark he had left.
Then he looked away casually.
The mutant physiology of Thanos—an Eternal hybrid—granted incredible strength, endurance, and resilience. His skin was nearly indestructible, highly resistant to heat, cold, electricity, radiation, toxins, and aging.
His body was stronger than most known metals.
And his raw strength was enough to challenge gods.
Even at only eighty-one percent template integration, Victor still hadn't discovered the true limits of his power.
Lifting pickup trucks and boulders felt no heavier than lifting a chair.
In his own estimation, he could easily catch a falling airplane, drag a thousand-ton warship, or lift a multi-story building.
The real problem wasn't strength.
It was restraint.
Unlike Superman, Victor didn't possess a biological force field protecting objects he touched. If he wasn't careful, anything he grabbed might simply disintegrate.
Even earlier underwater, he had barely used any strength at all.
If he had pushed too hard, the students might have skipped drowning entirely and gone straight to meeting God.
Everyone moved farther away from the riverbank and sat down to wait for rescue teams and their parents.
The crash had thrown many students around violently inside the bus. Some had bruises, broken bones, or minor head injuries.
The idea that a sinking school bus had been knocked out of the river by an unknown creature was undeniably bizarre.
But in Smallville…
It wasn't that shocking.
Ever since the meteor shower more than ten years ago, strange things had happened constantly in this town.
Coma patients waking up and disappearing overnight.
Giant wolves spotted in the woods.
Children appearing in graveyards at midnight only to vanish seconds later.
Creatures with impossible speed carving deep trenches through mountains in the darkness.
Smallville had seen everything.
When parents heard that a bus accident had nearly killed their children, they rushed to the river immediately.
Victor spotted Martha's car pulling up beside the road.
He walked toward her.
"David!"
Martha ran toward him the moment she saw him.
Her face was pale with worry as she grabbed his shoulders and examined him carefully.
"Are you hurt? Does your leg hurt? What about your chest? Did you inhale water?"
"I'm fine, Mom."
Victor patiently reassured her several times before she finally calmed down.
He gently took her cold hand.
"Why are you here alone?" he asked.
"Where's Dad?"
He had considered revealing his abilities to his parents before.
But unlike Clark, his powers came with visible changes—purple skin and the strange ridges forming on his chin.
Compared to Clark's normal human appearance, Victor looked far more alien.
He worried that Jonathan and Martha might not accept that easily.
"The police called," Martha said worriedly. "Your brother had an accident on another bridge. A car knocked him into the river. Your father went to see him."
Victor blinked.
"A car accident?"
He frowned slightly.
"Did he crash into someone else's car?"
Martha stared at him.
"Is the driver okay?" Victor continued thoughtfully. "Clark won't have to pay for damages, right?"
The situation sounded strangely familiar.
Why had Clark still ended up falling into a river?
"David," Martha said helplessly, "Clark is your brother."
"I know."
Victor shrugged.
"But a truck couldn't break his body anyway."
He spread his hands.
"Even if it did, just leave him in the sun for a while and he'll be fine."
After speaking briefly with Martha, Victor said goodbye to Chloe and climbed into the Kent family's aging pickup truck.
The vehicle had served the family for more than ten years.
Soon the mother and son drove away.
Back at the riverbank, Chloe sat wrapped in a blanket provided by the rescue team.
She shivered slightly from the cold.
Suddenly something caught her attention.
A footprint.
Just a few meters away from the riverbank.
Beneath the footprint lay crushed strands of bright green aquatic plants.
Chloe frowned.
"…Huh?"
Confusion filled her eyes.
The bus had landed on the bank before anyone could break a window to escape.
So why were there footprints covered in river plants?
Whose were they?
…
By the next afternoon, life had mostly returned to normal.
Aside from a few injured students—and a few others who exaggerated their injuries to skip school—classes continued without delay.
Victor couldn't help admiring the resilience of Smallville residents.
"People here really are tough," he thought.
The next day at dusk, Victor and Clark walked home together from school.
As they approached the farmhouse, something unusual caught their attention.
A brand-new red pickup truck sat parked in the driveway.
Its shiny paint reflected the golden sunset, and a ribbon was tied across the hood like a gift.
Clark stared at it in surprise.
"Whose truck is that?"
He spotted Martha walking out of the barn and jogged toward her excitedly.
"Mom, are we finally replacing the old truck?"
Martha smiled slightly.
"This one's yours, Clark."
"Mine?"
"You saved someone yesterday," she explained. "He sent the truck to thank you."
She handed Clark a letter.
Victor remembered hearing about the incident.
Clark had been knocked off the bridge by a runaway car.
He walked away without a scratch.
Meanwhile, the car's driver nearly drowned.
Clark had pulled him from the river.
"Dear Clark," Clark read aloud excitedly, "drive carefully… and don't end up like me."
He continued reading.
"I can never thank you enough for yesterday. —Lex Luthor."
Clark's eyes lit up.
He was already imagining himself driving this truck to school and finally getting some attention from his classmates.
Victor, however, had been paying only half attention.
Then he heard the name.
His eyebrows rose slowly.
"Wait," he said.
He looked directly at Clark.
"You saved Lex Luthor?"