The skies over Mindoir were cloudless, vast and blue, stretching over the vast fields of grain.
It was the kind of afternoon where time felt like it slowed down, where heat shimmered off the plasteel roofs of farming outposts, and children played barefoot through irrigation channels.
Drones buzzed above the fields, tending crops genetically modified to grow in alien soil.
A weather-control beacon pulsed low and steady from the central hill, maintaining ideal humidity for the coming harvest.
Wind turbines rotated lazily, feeding power into the settlement grid.
There were no skyscrapers here, no roaring spaceports. Mindoir was a place for growing not just crops, but people.
Among the handful of those people was a girl, her auburn hair pulled into a loose ponytail as she guided a freight hauler through a dusty path.
Her name was Jane Shepard, and she was sixteen.
She squinted against the light as she approached the homestead as her father's voice was already barking through her omni-tool.
"Cargo's three minutes late, Jane. You forgot the way home?"
"Didn't realize three minutes made or broke our survival," she shot back with a smirk.
"That's three minutes a varren could eat my tractor."
"You're the one who said keeping a varren was 'economical.'"
The hauler whined to a stop beside the grain silo. Jane leapt off, boots crunching into the dry red soil.
Her mother emerged from the shade of the hab-dome, wiping sweat from her brow, datapad tucked under one arm.
"You keep talking back like that," her mom warned, half-hearted, "you'll end up in politics."
Jane snorted. "God forbid."
Laughter. Light and unburdened.
Shepard has no idea what she'd become in the years to come. No one did. Right now, she was just a girl on a frontier world, carrying crates and talking shit.
She'd never even held a real gun, only a hunting rifle, once or twice, to scare off native predators.
Her father had Alliance training, back in the day. He swore he'd teach her more when she turned seventeen.
That would never happen.
The first sign was static. Comms chatter went dark. The Mindoir Orbital Relay, a low-orbit beacon that linked the colony to the greater extranet, flickered and died.
Then the sky screamed.
Jane looked up, frowning, as something cut across the blue: a flaming line of descent.
Not meteors but ships. Dozens. Angular, spiked silhouettes, descending in tight formation like vultures over a carcass.
"Dad?" she asked through her omni-tool.
Silence.
Then...
"Everyone, GET INSIDE! Lockdown! This is not a drill!"
The broadcast crackled through every loudspeaker in the colony.
People screamed. Jane saw her neighbor, old Garron, drop the water tank he was inspecting and run for his home.
Drones spiraled out of the sky, caught in EMP blasts. Above them, the invading ships began to open their bellies.
Drop-pods screamed through the air like artillery shells, crashing into everything and splintering steel and soil alike.
When they split open, hulking figures spilled out: Batarians.
Four eyes. Jagged armor. Slavers.
They didn't wait.
One woman tried to run but her back was torn open by a shredder round.
Children cried.
Plasma fire seared the air.
Jane stood frozen, eyes wide as a Batarian in a rust-red exo-suit began approaching her, blood already drying on his gloves.
He pointed a rifle at her.
And then the barn exploded. Her father had fired an old kinetic launcher Jane thought was ornamental.
The Batarian went flying, armor crumpled.
"RUN, JANE!" her father shouted.
She did.
Chaos. Heat. Screams. The scent of burning grain mixed with ozone and blood. The Batarians weren't taking the colony. They were gutting it.
A family tried to board a shuttle. It lifted two feet off the ground before an anti-air burst struck it.
Flaming debris rained down over the field. Jane ducked behind a half-collapsed fence, heart pounding so loud she couldn't hear her own thoughts.
From her position, she saw what they were doing.
People were being taken.
Stun grenades dropped into bunkers. Those who surrendered were lined up, tagged, and marched into holding cages.
Some screamed. Others were already silenced by slave collars that pulsed with bright, red light.
One Batarian barked in guttural English:
"Move, animals! You work better alive!"
Another, younger, sneered, spitting on a dying farmer:
"This is what you get for squatting on our worlds."
It was systematic. Efficient. Cruel.
She found her mother lying by the house, unmoving, limbs curled in on herself like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Jane didn't have time to grieve.
An explosion ripped through the main storage dome. That was where her father had gone. Jane turned to run and a shockwave lifted her off the ground.
Everything went dark.
Silence.
Then... light filtered through dust.
Her ears rang. She coughed, lips cracked and dry. A sharp and stabbing pain was felt across her chest. Her ribs were bruised, maybe even cracked.
She was buried under something metal, concrete, part of the support beam from the silo dome, maybe. Her breath came in shallow gasps.
She nearly passed out.
The world around her was muffled, like she was underwater. Sounds were distant and distorted with faint screams, the drone of ships overhead, the crackling spit of fire still feeding on fuel lines.
From her half-buried vantage point, she could only see a narrow slit of the ruined world outside.
Just enough to witness flickering flames licking up what remained of her home.
A child's plush toy lay in the dirt nearby, burned on one side, staring at her with a melted button eye.
The Batarians were still here. She could hear them shouting. Orders barked in their throaty, gravel-strewn language.
Laughs. Boots crunching debris.
Somewhere, someone was crying. Then a plasma bolt. Then silence again.
She wanted to move. Her arm twitched but couldn't reach the shard of twisted steel pinning her leg. Her other hand lay limp in the dust, fingers curled around nothing.
She was going to die here. Like this.
But the galaxy had other plans.
Far above, outside Mindoir's atmosphere, a modest fleet of Systems Alliance patrol ships blinked into existence with the shimmer of FTL reentry.
The ships were lean, functional, built for patrol not combat. Just enough to make a report and hold the line until the big guns arrived.
In any other scenario, the Batarians would've laughed and they did.
"Is this it?" one batarian commander sneered over comms, twitching in disdain. "Barely worth the effort."
"Let them watch," another said, already inputting targeting solutions. "Then we take them, too."
But then came something else. A distortion. Not a ship.
A boy.
Sixteen years old.
Clad in a suit of dark, metallic armor edged with glowing lines of pale blue-white energy. His red cape fluttered behind him like a banner.
The suit's chest bore an S symbol, stylized in silver-gray, faintly glowing against the armored plate.
The Batarians didn't recognize it. They would learn to fear it.
Kalen.
No one on Mindoir knew his name. Few in the Alliance even did. But the soldiers on those patrol ships? They'd been briefed. A special project.
A classified asset retrieved from DC1938, a minor garden world that orbited SM2183 Rua, a red supergiant star far outside the usual lanes of travel.
The planet was noted for its crystalline technology. It had a uranium-rich core, and that the collapse had triggered a core fusion event.
Something so rare that most physicists considered it a theoretical impossibility.
Five billion souls, incinerated in less than two minutes.
And yet, he had survived.
A boy forged in secrecy, whose power exceeded that of any soldier, any weapon, any hope humanity had ever dared to dream.
And now, it was time to prove himself.
He didn't speak. He didn't hesitate.
In a single breath, Kalen moved.
A crimson blur streaked through space, trailing plasma and red light.
He tore through the engine core of the nearest Batarian ship. Not a glancing blow. Not sabotage.
He ripped through it with his own body clean through causing it to erupt in a thunderclap of fire and shrapnel. The explosion lit the dark of orbit, turning wreckage into raining sparks.
Before the Batarians could process it, he was gone again.
And then...
Another ship exploded.
And another.
And another.
Four gone in under thirty seconds.
One batarian pilot screamed, his claws flying across the controls. "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING?!"
"FIRE! FIRE EVERYTHING!"
Too late.
A blur of red and silver struck the hull like lightning.
Kalen moved like a living comet, his fists cracking reinforced alloys, his heat vision slicing through engine chambers and fuel tanks with surgical bursts.
No wasted effort. Every movement was precise. Every strike was devastating.
On the surface, the Batarians felt it before they saw it.
Fear.
They looked skyward just in time to see burning pieces of their ships raining from the sky. And then, he was there.
The wind roared behind him. One slaver barely turned before a gust of red cape and glowing lines slammed into him, sending him flying unconscious into a shattered wall.
Kalen hit like thunder, and left only silence.
Another batarian raised his rifle only to watch Kalen freeze it mid-air with a blast of icy breath.
The weapon cracked, brittle and useless. Kalen's fist caught the slaver's jaw a heartbeat later, putting him down.
Some Batarians scattered. Others tried to take hostages.
One grabbed a civilian woman and shoved her forward, using her as a meat shield. Kalen didn't slow.
He appeared behind the slaver in a blink, gently pulling the woman aside and sending her stumbling to safety before crushing the slaver's weapon in his hand.
Another squad opened fire.
The rounds pinged off his suit like pebbles on glass. He didn't flinch.
He turned, eyes glowing bright red.
A controlled burst of heat vision melted their guns to slag.
By the time the Alliance Marines began their descent, their boots hitting the dirt, the battlefield had already shifted.
"That's... that's the asset?" one whispered.
"He's just a kid..."
"Yeah. But he's winning."
The Marines spread out, following Kalen's lead by clearing buildings, securing captives, tending to survivors.
Many had watched the classified footage. None of it compared to seeing him in motion.
For all his power, the boy wasn't cruel. He didn't kill. He was kind. Measured. Human.
Then came a crackling scream. A child, no more than six, was dragged out of a bunker by a panicked slaver.
"BACK OFF!" the batarian shouted, clutching her in front of him, gun to her head.
"You think you're a god, freak?! You're nothing! A mutation! What kind of monsters are the humans building now?!"
Kalen hovered inches above the ground, eyes glowing but calm.
"No one's dying today," he said.
The slaver snarled. "I swear, I'll..."
A flash of heat vision struck his hand, a pinpoint beam that didn't cut but burned, causing him to drop the weapon with a scream.
Kalen surged forward like a blur of color, catching the girl with one hand and seizing the slaver's throat with the other.
The batarian struggled.
Kalen's expression didn't change.
He squeezed just enough and the slaver was knocked unconscious.
He looked at the girl. "You're okay. You're safe."
She nodded tearfully, burying her face into his shoulder. He carried her to the medics.
To the soldiers watching, it was clear: this wasn't just a weapon. This wasn't just an experiment.
This boy was a symbol.
That was when he heard her.
Faint signals. One weak heartbeat , but steady.
Kalen turned.
In a blink, he was at the edge of the blast crater. His eyes narrowed, scanning through the debris. His enhanced vision pierced the wreckage until he found her.
Jane Shepard.
Barely conscious. Blood in her hair. Dust in her mouth. Trapped beneath twisted steel.
Their eyes met.
The sun was rising behind Kalen, casting a golden halo around his figure. The red cape fluttered. His glowing lines pulsed softly like veins of energy. But Jane didn't notice any of that.
She saw his smile.
Warm. Reassuring.
Hope.
He placed one hand on the debris and lifted it like paper, setting it gently aside.
Then, slowly, carefully, he reached down and picked her up, cradling her like something sacred.
"You're safe now," he said.
Jane didn't respond. Couldn't.
But in that moment, her fear melted.
She would remember his face for the rest of her life.
As Kalen carried her toward the medical tents, Alliance soldiers made their way. The fighting was over. The dead mourned. The wounded were treated. The slavers shackled.
But something had changed.
In that battered field on Mindoir, a legend was born.
Not just of the girl who survived.
But of the boy who could fly.
This wasn't the end. This was the beginning.
Kalen would go on to shake the very foundation of the galaxy, not just as a soldier... but as a symbol.
Not a weapon. Not a freak. Not a god.
But a Superman.