The defeat of the Architect was a hollow, silent victory. The moment the lead box closed, the purple energy around Superman’s temples vanished like smoke. His eyes, milky and vacant moments before, refocused with crystalline clarity. He looked at his hands, then at our battered forms, then at the destruction around him. And he remembered.

We stood with him days later in the cavernous, silent Hall of Justice, the memorial holograms of our fallen friends flickering where they once stood. Kal’s guilt was a physical presence, a shroud of darkness that seemed to dim the light around him.

“I can’t,” he whispered, his voice thick with a self-loathing that was painful to hear. He wouldn’t look at us.

“Kal, it wasn’t you,” I pleaded, my voice breaking. I stepped towards him, but he flinched away as if my touch would burn him. “It was the Architect! He controlled you, he forced you…”

“With my hands, Kara!” he finally roared, his eyes blazing with anguish, not anger. “With my strength! I felt their bones break. I saw the light leave their eyes. Bruce… Barry… they were my brothers. I laid them out like trophies!”

“We have all been made to do things against our will, Kal-El,” Diana said, her voice steady but laced with a profound sadness. “Evil does not taint the weapon, but the hand that wields it. The world needs you. Now more than ever.”

“The world?” he scoffed, a bitter, broken sound. “This world? The one that watched you suffer? The one that cheered for your torture?” He finally looked at us, his face a mask of utter despair. “I can’t be their hero. I can’t be anyone’s hero. Not after this. Every time they look at me, they’ll see a monster. And they’ll be right.”

He turned and began to float into the air.

“Don’t do this,” I begged, tears streaming down my face. “Don’t leave us alone.”

“I have to,” he said, his voice a ghost on the wind. “The universe is vast. Maybe somewhere out there, I can find a place where these hands can do something other than destroy.”

And with that, he was gone, a blue and red streak ascending into the heavens until he was just another star, leaving the two of us, the last of Earth’s great heroines, alone in a hall of ghosts.

The world we were left with was a colder, crueler place. The Architect, sitting in a maximum-security prison, became a legend. To the disenfranchised, the resentful, and the hateful, he was a folk hero. He was the man who had exposed the gods as fragile, breakable things. He was lauded on dark corners of the internet for the way he put those “uppity women” in their place. His trial was a circus, his unrepentant monologues broadcast globally, poisoning the well of public trust forever.

And the poll… we could never forget the poll. Ninety-two percent. Ninety-two percent of the world had voted to see us dismantled. How could we protect a world that saw our suffering as entertainment? How could we justify bleeding for people who had cheered for it?

The Architect had also given our enemies a gift. The live streams had been a tutorial. The precise frequency of Red Sun radiation needed to weaken a Kryptonian, the specific alloys that could dampen divine energy—our weaknesses were now public knowledge, a blueprint for our defeat downloaded onto every criminal server on the planet. We had targets on our backs, not just from supervillains, but from any common thug who dreamed of being a legend-killer.

So we made a choice. We disappeared.

The red cape and the star-spangled armor were put away. Wonder Woman returned to her life as Diana Prince, a quiet curator of antiquities. I, Kara Danvers, went back to being a journalist. We melted back into the world that had betrayed us. We still helped, but not as before. Our powers were used sparingly, anonymously. A blur of motion preventing a car crash. A mugger in an alley suddenly finding himself webbed to a wall by a miraculously strong fire escape. No costumes. No interviews. No symbols.

In a way, the Architect had won. He sat in a prison cell, but his philosophy now ruled the world. He had ended the age of heroes not by killing us, but by making it impossible for us to exist.

And the threat never faded. It grew. Across the globe, criminals big and small began to build their traps. They studied the Architect’s methods, refining them, perfecting them. Each one, from the major crime lords to the petty street thugs, harbored the same dark fantasy, the same ultimate prize that had become the new symbol of victory over a hero: to be the one to finally capture us, to hold us helpless, and to slowly, deliberately, remove our boots.

Our peace is a fragile illusion. We walk through our new lives, always looking over our shoulders, knowing that the world is watching, waiting, and hoping to see us fall. It’s just a matter of time before we’re captured and helpless again.

The end.