Villain Reactron

Once upon a time, there was a hero who learned that the best weapon in a fight is not always strength.

Sometimes it is patience. And geography.

Ben Krull had not always been dangerous. He had been a soldier once, and then a test pilot, and then a very unlucky man who survived an accident that would have killed anyone else only because military engineers rebuilt part of his chest with a nuclear-powered core.

The result was a suit of armor that hummed and crackled with atomic energy. They called it the Reactron suit. And at the center of it, carefully engineered, was a generator that produced gold kryptonite radiation — the one flavor of that terrible green rock that was specifically tuned to hurt Kryptonian biology.

Ben Krull had a long grudge against Superman, stretching back years. But on the morning he decided to act on that grudge, Superman was in Metropolis dealing with something urgent.

So Reactron drove toward Midvale instead.

He came at dawn, when the town was just beginning to wake up, and he announced himself by blasting several large craters into the main road outside town. He was not quiet about it. He did not try to be.

Kara was in the air before he reached the rail bridge.

They met above the bridge in a crash of fists and energy — KRAANG — and Kara felt it immediately: the radiation off the suit was wrong in a way that kryptonite was wrong, pressing into her cells like something cold and grinding. She had felt kryptonite before. This was different but related, and it drained her in a similar way.

She backed off to twenty feet and hovered, watching.

Reactron fired again. The blast was enormous, maximum power, no holding back.

Kara dodged it easily.

She watched him line up another shot. He was powerful — she would not pretend otherwise — but every attack was a straight line. Maximum force, direct approach, soldier's training that said hit as hard as possible and the problem goes away. He did not adjust. He did not adapt. He simply kept coming at her in the same way, harder each time, certain that eventually the power would be enough.

Kara had grown up with a scientist for a father, and she was thinking very clearly.

She began to move differently. Instead of trading hit for hit, she flew in wide curving arcs, unpredictable as a marble rolled across a bumpy floor. WHOOSH east. WHOOSH south. She used the rail bridge's iron girders as cover and then abandoned them before Reactron could track her movement. His blasts hit steel and stone and empty air. She was already somewhere else.

She was also moving him.

Step by step, arc by arc, she drew him away from the town. Away from the houses and the shops and the early-morning walkers who were still looking up in alarm. Away from the water tower and the school and everything that could be accidentally damaged by a nuclear blast aimed poorly.

She drew him toward the quarry.

The old quarry sat at the eastern edge of Midvale — a wide bowl of rock that had been abandoned for years, with tall walls on three sides and open sky above. Kara had flown over it a hundred times. She knew its dimensions exactly.

When Reactron followed her into the quarry — and he did, because he was angry and not paying attention to where he was going — Kara put on a burst of speed.

WHOOOOOOSH.

She went around him in a complete circle, faster than he could track, coming up directly behind him. She locked onto the spot on his back where the nuclear core housing was — she had memorized the suit's design from a brief visual scan during their first exchange — and she hit it with both fists.

KRAANG.

The shielding cracked in a clean line. The gold kryptonite generator sputtered once and went dark.

The suit stopped humming.

Reactron turned around slowly, and there was a long moment where they both looked at each other.

What followed was a more ordinary sort of fight — the kind that simply involved two people grappling and wrestling, without any nuclear complications. It lasted several minutes and left a considerable dent in the quarry wall. But it ended with Kara holding Ben Krull firmly against the rock face while she used the communicator woven into her cape to call the Department of Extranormal Operations.

"I'll come back better equipped," Reactron said, between breaths.

"I know you might," Kara said. She was not frightened. She was already thinking about what she would study that afternoon. "I'll be at S.T.A.R. Labs tonight reading everything on file about gold kryptonite and nuclear-suit engineering. I'll know more about your armor than you do by morning."

Reactron looked at her for a moment. Then he stopped struggling.

The DEO arrived twenty minutes later and took him into custody.

Kara flew back to Midvale slowly, watching the sun come the rest of the way up over the rooftops. The town looked ordinary and peaceful, exactly as it was supposed to look.

She kept her promise to herself. That evening she sat in a research room at S.T.A.R. Labs, surrounded by technical files, and she read every one of them. She took notes in the careful, precise handwriting her father had taught her. She drew diagrams in the margins.

Because being ready was not about being the strongest person in the quarry.

It was about being the most prepared.

Her father would have been proud.