You watched the footage on loop, hands clenched so tightly around your phone.

Lex was being escorted by agents in black tactical armor. The camera shook slightly as reporters were pushed back, but it caught the exact moment he turned his head, eyes scanning the chaos like he still believed he was the smartest man in the room. Then the doors of the reinforced military transport slammed shut, and he was gone.

You were supposed to agree with the world: Lex had gone too far. Cracking the earth, manipulating power grids, tampering with physics itself… But knowing him as you did, you couldn’t believe he had wanted to destroy the world. You believed he was trying to prove something. And somewhere along the way, it had devoured him.

That same day you returned to the old archive Lex once shared with you about his pocket-dimensional theory when he taught you everything about it.

You’d studied it. And you’d finished what he started. You’d tested it twice. It worked. A self-cloaking portal device, tuned precisely to a destination only you could program.

It took three days to recompile the new code with Lex’s coordinates.

The gateway opened like light cutting through a sheet of water, quiet, brief, and deadly beautiful.

You stepped through.

On the other side, the world was concrete, metal, and cold, meeting him again.

He lifted his head slowly. “You shouldn’t be here,” he whispered, but his voice had no force.

“Neither should you.”

He let out something like a breath of disbelief. “What did you do? What are you doing? I thought you’d hate me.”