(TSSFH) INTERLUDE: ZION

The world turned beneath him.

Clouds parted around the edges of his form, golden light washing over the ocean far below. Wind tugged at nothing; he did not truly fly so much as exist between points. Movement, for him, was a choice, not a process.

And yet, he lingered.

Beneath him, a solitary fishing boat drifted off-course. The man inside was slumped against the hull, his lips cracked, his eyes open but unseeing. Dead from dehydration and exhaustion. A gull circled above once,  then veered away, wings catching a gust that didn’t reach him.

There was no need to intervene.

Zion—called Scion by the humans—had not interfered in some time. Not meaningfully anyway. 

Once, he had. Once, he had appeared when the world cried out, lifting fallen buildings from bodies still breathing. Once, he had appeared in cities aflame and parted the smoke with golden light. He had caught missiles in midair, held children gently in the crooks of his golden arms. He had stood beside capes and smiled at them, even when he did not understand why they smiled back or the ideals they spoke of.

Because a man named Kevin had told him to.

“Help them,” the man had said. “Make a difference.” 

He had been given instructions, a purpose, and it had been enough. For a time. 

But Kevin was long dead. A victim of inevitability.

And now, there was an anomaly.

Scion turned his attention inward.

For years, his actions had followed the same pattern: seed. Observe. Harvest. Repeat. An immutable cycle. And in the same vein, the simulacrum that governed his human mind was constructed as a means of understanding the host species of this reality just enough to use them. To observe, evaluate, and intervene when necessary. 

As such, he understood everything else: the slow decay of humanity under applied pressure; the parahumans using fragments of himself and his counterpart to complete the cycle; the forced escalation to learn; and the need to find a solution to the end of the universe. 

He understood conflict, resolution, and survival.

But he did not understand him.

Superman.

Superman did not follow the established pattern of the past three thousand cycles. He wielded power not born of shards, and wasn't linked to the cycle. When he fought, it was with restraint. When he won, he rebuilt.

More than that—he inspired.

Scion had watched the battle. Had seen the being reduce Behemoth to ash. Had seen him stand, unshaken, before something that even the strongest capes struggled to stand against. Had seen the humans cheer him. Not as a weapon. Not as a god.

But as a beacon of hope.

Even now, Scion could feel the effects of the being’s presence ripple across the shard network. Echoes of confusion. Friction. Anomalous readings. Shards reacted to the idea of Superman not as a threat, but as an inconsistency in the progression of the cycle. 

And so Scion looked to the past. A costly process—months shaved from the finite reservoir of his existence—but necessary. His sight rewound through this reality’s lattice of space-time, combing for any information on the being. Nothing. Superman had not existed on this planet before, or had any mention of him appeared before. No records in any conflict. 

He was not of this world.

An alien. 

A threat.

Superman was a variable that could not be plotted. A force immune to the rhythms that had governed this reality since the Entities had seeded it. And Scion’s human mind—its vestige of emotion—felt something new.

Not confusion. That emotion was distant.

Not fear. The simulacrum had never been designed to include fear.

But a pause.

An undefined interval in the endless string of actions. 

There was a process to his existence, old and etched into the bedrock of the cosmos.

It had been disrupted once, by the death of the counterpart.

And so, Scion moved.

No sound, but faster than the eye could see. A golden trail of light was left in his wake, quickly fading. 

Asia, now.

A valley. Once fertile, now dead. The foliage killed by drought. The soil cracked. The bones of animals lay half-buried near a dried creek, bleached white. 

There were people nearby. Starving. He could see their ribs through the walls of the ramshackle shelter. A child cried.

He watched them for 7.8 seconds.

Then he left.

Because the cycle demanded completion. Because the anomaly needed to be corrected. Because the pause had lasted too long already.

There would be no third interruption.

Not by him.

The cycle would proceed.

And Superman would be erased.