Kryptonite Scheme

Once upon a time, six months after his robot's very public failure, Lex Luthor got a phone call that would change everything.

A LexCorp mining survey, digging in a crater far outside Metropolis, had found something strange buried deep in the earth. It glowed — a soft, eerie green — and it made every instrument nearby spin and buzz and malfunction. Lex drove out himself that very afternoon to see it with his own eyes.

His geologists gathered around him, speaking carefully, almost nervously. "It's not from Earth," one of them explained. "We believe it's a fragment of the planet Krypton — blasted across the galaxy when that world exploded, long ago."

Krypton. Superman's home planet.

Lex Luthor stood very still for a long moment, looking down at the glowing green stone in its container. And slowly, a new understanding settled over him. He was holding, in that ordinary metal crate, the one thing on all of Earth that could finally even the odds between himself and the man who could fly.

He got to work immediately.

First, Lex built a small ring, lined carefully with lead, with a tiny sliver of the green stone tucked safely inside. Lead, his scientists had confirmed, could block the kryptonite's strange radiation completely — which meant Lex could carry it close, wear it even, without any danger to himself. Then he built a sealed case. Then a reinforced chamber. And finally, after months of careful, patient work, he built something new entirely: a beam projector, powerful enough to spread the kryptonite's glow across an entire city block.

Lex tested none of it on people. Not yet. He simply wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, for Superman to know — just once — what it felt like to be ordinary.

His chance came on an afternoon Lex hadn't planned at all. A robbery broke out at Metropolis Central Bank, three masked men holding the tellers at gunpoint, and Lex happened to be nearby with his projector, waiting, hoping, the way a spider waits at the edge of its web.

When the alarm sounded, Superman came, just as Lex knew he would. He flew straight through the bank's shattered front doors, a blur of red and blue, ready to stop the robbery in seconds.

And that was when Lex switched on the beam.

The green light spread across the bank lobby, and something happened to Superman that had never happened to him before — not like this, not so suddenly. His strength drained away, like water slipping out through his fingers, faster than he could hold onto it. He staggered in midair. He landed hard on the marble floor, one knee buckling beneath him, his breath coming shallow and strained.

For one long, quiet moment, Lex Luthor allowed himself to feel triumphant. The invincible alien — the one who had stolen every headline, every ounce of the city's admiration — was finally on the ground. And Lex Luthor had put him there.

But Superman was not finished. Gritting his teeth against the ache spreading through every part of him, he began to crawl — slowly, painfully, one hand and then the other — toward a thick concrete support pillar across the lobby. The moment its shadow fell between himself and the green glow, something shifted. His strength came surging back, warm and sudden, like sunlight breaking through clouds.

He was airborne again before Lex could even reposition the projector. In moments, the three bank robbers found themselves tied together with a bent steel railing, and Lex's beam generator lay crushed flat beneath one boot.

By the time the police arrived, Lex Luthor was standing calmly beside the wreckage of his own machine, hands folded, insisting — smoothly, convincingly — that he had only built the device to study kryptonite's radiation safely, for the good of science. Nobody in that lobby quite believed him. But nobody could prove otherwise, either.

Superman said nothing to the officers about what had truly happened between himself and Lex. He simply looked at him for a long moment — not with anger, but with something quieter and sadder, something closer to disappointment — before rising into the sky and flying off over the rooftops of Metropolis.

Lex watched him go, and, very quietly, he smiled.

Because now Lex Luthor knew something that no one else on Earth knew. Superman could be beaten. He had seen it happen with his own eyes.

He would simply need to build a bigger beam.

And somewhere high above the city, Superman flew on, wondering — not for the first time, and certainly not for the last — what it would take to make Lex Luthor understand that some things could never truly be won.