Darius drove a fist straight into General Zod's face hard enough to slam him into the ground.
The second punch shattered his nose.
Blood splattered across the white stone beneath them.
"And you call yourself a Kryptonian?" Darius roared. "Krypton never produced a weakling like you!"
Even speaking normally, Darius sounded louder than most people screaming.
General Zod wiped the blood from his nose and frowned.
Sothing about this felt wrong.
Darius wasn't just aggressive.
He seed... excited.
Then Zod realized it wasn't only Darius.
Esdeath stood nearby with her arms crossed and a dangerously eager expression.
Gladiator looked equally interested.
Captain Marvel cracked her knuckles.
Even the angelic Kryptonians circling overhead seed ready to join in.
"General!"
Faora and the others shouted encouragent imdiately.
No matter what happened, they couldn't allow Kryptonians from another universe to look down on them.
General Zod rose silently and resud fighting.
Unfortunately for him, he had no idea Drex had already upgraded the empire's artificial soldiers with a triple genetic template:
Kryptonian.
Saiyan.
Strontian.
At this point, there were barely any beings left in the universe capable of suppressing them physically.
The Reality Stone truly was absurdly useful.
Darius fought like an adult bullying a child.
General Zod was overwheld almost instantly.
Then Esdeath took her turn.
She beat him so brutally that Zod genuinely started questioning his understanding of reality.
After her ca Gladiator.
Then Captain Marvel.
Then the angel legion.
By the end of it, General Zod looked spiritually traumatized.
Fortunately, Kryptonians recovered rapidly beneath the constant radiance of the Plasma Spark Towers. New Krypton had no true night cycle. The overwhelming solar radiation healed injuries within monts.
Still...
Zod couldn't understand sothing.
When the others sparred against his subordinates, they acted normally.
Even politely.
So why had he been singled out for repeated humiliation?
The shocks didn't stop there.
General Zod and his people soon witnessed New Krypton's Ultran.
Hundred-ter-tall giants.
Living war machines.
One punch from an Ultraman was enough to injure even General Zod directly.
As a career military commander, he instantly recognized their strategic value.
Traditional battleships suddenly looked outdated by comparison.
Ultran possessed mobility, adaptability, and close-range combat capabilities impossible for standard fleets to replicate.
According to New Krypton's soldiers, so Ultran could even perform spatial jumps and faster-than-light travel, though it consud enormous amounts of energy.
Faora narrowed her eyes thoughtfully.
"General... New Krypton operates differently from ours."
"How so?"
"They prioritize super soldiers above everything else."
General Zod considered that for a mont before shaking his head.
"Not really."
He looked across the planet.
"This is still an empire."
And he was right.
New Krypton currently ruled over more than a thousand inhabited worlds, alongside tens of thousands of resource planets.
The only reason expansion had slowed was a lack of manpower.
Which led directly to the question bothering him most.
"If the Codex exists," Zod said, "why not simply create more Kryptonians?"
To him, the answer seed obvious.
No manpower?
Then manufacture more citizens.
But New Krypton no longer functioned like old Krypton.
Compared to this empire, General Zod and his soldiers felt almost ancient.
Outdated.
Unnecessary.
For the first ti in his life, Zod genuinely didn't know what role he was supposed to serve.
Not that his genetics encouraged independent thinking.
Kryptonian military conditioning prioritized obedience above all else.
The supre ruler, Drex Valen, would decide everything.
The empire rely carried out his will.
Still...
"It's better than the Council," Zod admitted eventually.
That was as far as his thinking really went.
Anything beyond that wasn't sothing he had been designed to handle.
And honestly, Drex didn't have much use for them anymore.
If General Zod and Faora had appeared during Drex's earliest days in this universe, things might have been different.
They could've beco his right and left hands.
Or perhaps Drex would've ended up serving beneath them instead.
But too much ti had passed.
The Kryptonian Empire had already evolved far beyond needing a handful of surviving old-world Kryptonians.
Besides, Drex still disliked one particular flaw in standard Kryptonian biology.
Too many exploitable weaknesses.
Kryptonite.
Red sunlight.
Both were dangerous enough that he'd upgraded his own artificial soldiers specifically to counter them.
The new Kryptonians weren't like General Zod's generation.
They hadn't grown up beneath red sunlight while constantly exposed to Kryptonite radiation. Losing their powers wouldn't reduce them to helpless civilians.
Granted, their Kryptonian armor helped with that too.
anwhile, Drex imrsed himself completely in the Kryptonian ship's knowledge archives.
Thanks to the careful preservation work of the two Kryptonian scientists aboard, over ninety-five percent of the database remained intact.
The sheer amount of information stunned even him.
And buried within those archives...
He found that project.
The weaponization of Kryptonian corpses.
Doomsday.
Drex recognized the technology imdiately.
He stared at it silently for a long ti before deleting the entire research tree personally.
So things were better left buried forever.
Afterward, his superbrain accelerated into overdrive as he absorbed the remaining Kryptonian sciences.
Artificial intelligence.
Spatial engineering.
Energy systems.
Genetic manipulation.
Nanotechnology.
Krypton's AI technology alone surpassed the Black Queen's previous architecture by an enormous margin.
Whether it exceeded the Kree Supre Intelligence was another question entirely.
Though if Kryptonian AI ever had reached that level, the Kryptonian Council probably would've destroyed it imdiately rather than risk losing control.
Using the newly acquired technology, Drex upgraded the Black Queen completely.
The improvents were staggering.
Administrative processing speeds exploded upward almost overnight.
Her growth rate accelerated continuously.
Then Drex gave her sothing even greater.
The entire underground structure of Krypton beca her physical core system.
Yggdrasil.
That was the na of the new supernetwork.
Its systems spread beneath the entire planet like roots beneath a world-tree. The planetary core itself acted as the central energy source, while countless Plasma Spark Towers fed additional power into the network.
Combined with the angelic Kryptonian legion and tens of thousands of Ultran, there were very few forces left in existence capable of threatening her directly.
Governance across more than a thousand inhabited planets beca almost effortless.
Resource extraction across tens of thousands of worlds was optimized instantly.
Logistics.
Infrastructure.
Administration.
All of it processed at superluminal speeds through Yggdrasil.
Which ant Drex himself beca dramatically less busy.
Not that he cared much about authority in the first place.
Power mattered more than titles.
Even now, despite the terrifying scale of the Kryptonian Empire, Drex knew perfectly well that he could erase the entire civilization by himself in a single mont if he truly wanted to.
And that fact mattered far more than any throne ever could.
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