After hearing the story from his two sons, David, still worried after Clark took the person away, followed him. He accidentally tore his clothes while crossing the school fence, and then saw that Clark had already incapacitated the person...
"You did well, Clark. You saved your brother and everyone else."
Jonathan mused for a moment before speaking seriously.
"While we want you to hide your abilities, it doesn't mean you should stand by when someone is in danger. We believe God granted you these powers for a reason."
"God?" Clark, already feeling a bit awkward that his brother didn't even need saving, felt even more uncomfortable hearing this.
"What's wrong?" Jonathan noticed Clark's expression was a bit off.
"Nothing. It's just that the madman who wanted to kill everyone at the dance was also constantly talking about God granting him powers."
David chuckled.
"The God I'm referring to is heaven, not necessarily that one." Jonathan scratched his face, neither he nor Martha were devout believers.
"Right, about the person you subdued, what happened to him?"
"He... he..." Clark couldn't speak. How was he supposed to answer?
Earlier, when he asked his brother about his condition, his brother hadn't answered, saying they'd talk at home, but he made Clark promise to keep it a secret from their parents for now.
"Clark, you'll keep my secret, right?" he heard his brother's voice in his ear.
"Of course." That was his answer.
"Clark knocked him down and he's now in a vegetative state," David interjected with a smile in the room.
"What?"
Jonathan and Martha were so shocked they almost jumped off the sofa, quickly looking at Clark, whom they had just praised.
"Dad, Mom, you know Clark has always been incredibly strong."
David continued with a smile, "I don't think you can blame him."
Clark felt that sentence structure was so familiar. He remembered what he had said to Chloe and the other person a few days ago when he was late for school: "You know, David never really cared about me..."
"Clark, is that really how it is?"
"Yes... yes."
Seeing his parents' probing gazes and having already promised to keep the secret, what else could Clark say? He gritted his teeth and affirmed.
"Clark, starting tomorrow, you need to secretly practice controlling your strength on the farm."
Jonathan stood up abruptly, his expression turning serious. He placed his hands on his son's shoulders with worry.
"What if you accidentally kill someone next time with just a little more strength?"
"Okay... okay."
Facing his father's worried yet firm words, Clark had no way to explain his predicament and could only nod.
...
While Jonathan and Martha were kind, they weren't overly rigid. Clark had only acted accidentally. More importantly, the person was a murderer who had intended to slaughter students and deserved the death penalty. Therefore, they only sternly and repeatedly warned Clark to practice controlling his strength and prepared to supervise him starting tomorrow.
"You're despicable, David."
In the warehouse, having reached the second-floor attic and finally escaping his parents' nagging, Clark, who had taken the blame, was filled with resentment. Moreover, his brother was quite vengeful.
"Practicing your strength more won't do you any harm," David said, looking at him out of the corner of his eye as he stood with his arms crossed, gazing into the distance at the starry sky through the window.
"Look at how you were facing that guy today, like someone trying to help a hedgehog cross the road."
Whether to touch or not to touch, no idea how to proceed.
"I've always been able to control my strength well, keeping it at a normal person's level."
This was true; otherwise, countless accidents would have happened around Clark over the years.
"But what if your opponent's strength exceeds normal levels and you need to deal with them?"
"How many superpowered individuals do I need to deal with?"
Clark felt David was deliberately picking a fight and trying to cause trouble for him. Their town was so small. He never caused trouble; he couldn't possibly be so unlucky that every so often something would happen to him, and each incident involved superpowered individuals.
"..."
David didn't know what to say upon hearing this.
There were no less than seven or eight superpowered individuals born from the meteor shower Clark brought that had become small-town legends.
As for the rest, who knows how many there are.
"David, can you tell me about your body now?"
Clark asked in a low voice, glancing around.
"Was it like this before, or recently...?"
He had to rush back to school to change his clothes to avoid suspicion, but now that he was home, David had no reason to refuse any longer.
"I've been like this since birth," David replied.
Since he had already revealed his abilities in front of Clark, he wouldn't hide anything about his physique anymore.
"Since birth?"
Clark's eyes widened, finding it hard to believe. "Are you sure?"
"What?
You can't accept that you've been casually exposing your strength for over a decade, while I've been hiding mine so well." He glanced at Clark and retorted.
"To be honest, yes..."
Clark's emotions were complex.
Before he grew up, he had also felt it was a gift from heaven, that he was stronger than anyone else.
Thinking back to how happy he was about it as a child, while David, who had the same innate talent, watched coldly from the side.
He felt... utterly ashamed.
"Are you really sure? I mean... how do you know you were born like this?"
"Memories."
David tapped his head with his finger.
In fact, very few people knew that the Mad Titan Thanos, whose name struck fear throughout the universe, dreamed of becoming a scientist when he was young, and he achieved it as an adult.
Although the technology on his home planet, Titan, was advanced, it had no weapons or murder; everything was incredibly harmonious.
"It wasn't until the birth of the Deviant Thanos that he embarked on the path of science to explore his own differences.
His method of exploration was dissection, starting with small animals, then classmates, and finally the mother who gave birth to him..."
Thanos could be said to have a super-brain. After leaving Titan, relying solely on his acquired technological knowledge, he became the second-in-command of a space pirate ship, beginning his journey as a dark overlord.
David didn't lie when he told Clark he learned martial arts from television.
He genuinely learned just by watching.
"You have to keep this a secret for me, Clark."
"After you used this to make me take responsibility for turning someone into a vegetable just now?"
Clark retorted with some resentment.
"Clark, think about how I look after using my powers. Do you want your parents to worry?"
David said.
He intended to wait until Jonathan and Martha had witnessed more of the abnormal people on Earth before revealing this matter, by which time their acceptance would be much greater.
"Besides, one Clark is enough to keep them worried all day."
Let them have a normal, worry-free son for now.
Mentioning his parents softened Clark's attitude.
"By the way, where did you learn that move to beat someone... into a vegetable?"
"Don't tell me you learned it on TV too."
Bringing up this issue, his tone became very serious again, with worry in his eyes.
The ability to precisely control the force to incapacitate someone with a single blow to the back of the head, rendering them a vegetable, wasn't something found on television, nor could it be mastered through mere practice. It required repeated experimental training.
This meant that the person his brother had turned into a vegetable might not be the only one...
"Gotham isn't far from Metropolis."
David turned and walked towards the stairs, leaving that sentence behind.
"When I was on long holidays from school, I used to visit there sometimes.
You know what the environment there is like."
Simple folk, but rife with villains; if you executed ten people, nine might be innocent, but if you executed half, you might let a few go.
It wasn't difficult to find some villains who deserved to be shot a hundred times to practice that move. He learned it in just a few tries.
"I've long been tired of those storylines where superheroes put villains in prison, only for them to escape countless times."
He decided to do something for this world, such as creating a few more vegetables to provide him with emotional points and, incidentally, to make the world a little more peaceful in the future.
"Gotham?"
The place name seemed to possess a demonic allure that inspired dread and corruption. Hearing that his brother had been there, Clark froze for a moment, then his face changed drastically.
A bit late with the update, wrote an extra five hundred words.
-----------
Machine Translation by: https:// randomtranslator.com/
Read 777+ original & fanfic translations in English, Español, Português, Deutsch, Français, or Русский at: https:// randomtranslator.com/
Join our Discord: https:// discord.gg/NSWvfN7vua
-----------