Warsuit Showdown

Once upon a time, Lex Luthor had an idea so big it kept him up at night, sketching by lamplight until the sun came up.

If a small beam of kryptonite could knock the mighty Superman down to one knee, Lex reasoned, then what would happen if he built an entire suit of armor around one? Not just a weapon to fire from far away, but something he could wear — something that would let him stand chest to chest with the Man of Steel and finally, truly, fight him as an equal.

So Lex Luthor disappeared into the LexCorp research labs for an entire year. He barely slept. He barely left. Engineer by engineer, sheet of metal by sheet of metal, he built a towering exoskeleton — armor of gleaming green and deep purple, tall enough to fill a doorway. Its chest plate held a special housing for a kryptonite core, small and steady and glowing. Its arms were rigged with powerful hydraulic pistons, strong enough, Lex calculated, to bend the hull of a battleship. And across the front of the helmet, a purple visor curved down to cover his eyes.

He called it the Warsuit.

The first time Lex climbed inside it, felt the metal plates lock tight around his arms and legs with a series of quiet, satisfying clicks, something happened that hadn't happened to him in a very long time.

He laughed. Right there, alone in his workshop, Lex Luthor threw back his head and laughed out loud, because for the first time in years, he felt unstoppable.

He did not wait long to test it.

Lex marched the Warsuit up to the rooftop landing pad of LexCorp Tower, switched on an open broadcast signal, and let every news channel in Metropolis hear him say Superman's name, loud and clear, like a challenge thrown down in the street.

It did not take long for an answer to come. A streak of red and blue tore across the afternoon sky, and high above the rooftops of Metropolis, in full view of a hundred camera phones held up by a hundred amazed onlookers, the fight began.

The Warsuit hit hard. Its enormous fists rang off Superman's chest like a great bell tolling, and its kryptonite core glowed steadily behind the purple visor, drawing away Superman's strength with every passing second. For the very first time in his long rivalry with the Man of Steel, Lex Luthor was winning.

He intended to enjoy every last moment of it.

But armor, even the most brilliant armor in the world, has weaknesses that flesh and blood simply do not carry. Superman, growing weaker by the second but still thinking as clearly as ever, made a decision. He did not aim his heat vision at Lex. Instead, he aimed it carefully, precisely, at the thin coolant lines running down the back of the Warsuit.

The suit's systems overheated within seconds. Warning lights flashed red across the inside of Lex's visor, and the kryptonite core, sensing danger, locked itself down into emergency shutdown. Its glow faded — and then vanished completely.

The very moment the radiation cut off, Superman's strength came flooding back all at once, like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. One carefully placed punch — controlled, precise, nothing more than was needed — sent the entire Warsuit tumbling backward through the air. It crashed into LexCorp Tower's rooftop water tank with a tremendous splash, drenching Lex Luthor from head to toe inside his own armor.

Firefighters arrived twenty minutes later and pried open the dented, dripping suit to find Lex Luthor sitting inside, soaked through, arms crossed over his chest, muttering under his breath about coolant tolerances and material stress limits. He was arrested that very afternoon.

By evening, he was out on bail again, LexCorp's team of lawyers already filing paperwork before the ink on his police statement had even dried.

Superman visited him once after that, at the top of LexCorp Tower, not to gloat over the victory, but simply to ask why. Why keep trying? Why keep building bigger, more dangerous machines, again and again, when the answer always ended the same way?

Lex only smiled — a small, stubborn, unshaken smile — and looked Superman straight in the eye.

"The coolant lines," he said quietly, "will be fixed by next time."

And Superman, who had heard some version of those words before and suspected he would hear them again, simply nodded, turned, and flew back out into the wide Metropolis sky, wondering how long it would take for Lex Luthor to learn that some battles were never truly about winning at all.