"Last Dust of Krypton" (#1-6)
Kal-El grows up on the planet Krypton with his father Jor-El and mother Lara Lor-Van, raised on a farm in the Redlands as a member of the Labor Guild, the lowest class in Krypton's enforced caste system. The symbol of the Guild, which is required to be worn by its members at all times, is the stylized "S" worn by the El family of the mainline DC universe. Both of Kal's parents are scientists that were once members of the Science League, the ruling class of Krypton, before they were banished from the League for questioning their authority. While working in a mine, Jor-El discovers that Krypton is on the brink of destruction due to environmental recklessness on the part of the Science League. Planning to escape the planet before it eventually explodes, Jor-El and Lara develop intelligent spacesuits and a spaceship to take as many of their neighbors with them as they can. As the environmental decay of Krypton worsens, Jor-El attempts to appeal to the Science League to acknowledge the coming destruction, but is imprisoned for scientific heresy. Lara breaks him out of prison, and soon after their home is attacked by the Law Guild. It is also revealed that the Science Guild has developed ships to save themselves and leave the rest of the classes behind to die, having feigned ignorance to Jor-El's warnings in order to quietly save themselves. The El family manages to flee on their ship, taking their neighbors with them as the planet collapses, but the ship is struck by rubble and destroyed. Lara's adaptive suits construct miniature spaceships around them, but by the time he is safely in space, Kal-El is the only member of the group to have seemingly survived.
Seventeen months after Krypton has exploded, Kal arrives on Earth and lands in Smallville, Kansas, where he is taken in by Jonathan and Martha Kent. The Kents are an elderly couple struggling to run their farm, due to the villainous Lazarus Corporation using rain-prevention technology to force the Kents into selling their land. Kal wakes up from his coma and helps the couple on their farm, before the artificial intelligence in his suit, named Sol, comes back online and lets him understand and speak English, after which he destroys the rain-preventing drones that are hovering over the Kent's farm. A passerby sees Kal and reports him to the Lazarus Corp as an undocumented immigrant. Lazarus sends a military dispatch led by "Peacemakers" to arrest Kal, and he escapes by flying away.
Six years later, Kal is attacked by peacemakers again in a diamond mine in Brazil, for using his super speed to help the workers meet quota. When Kal exhausts himself by creating a solar flare to defend himself, Agent Lois Lane handcuffs herself to him to capture him, but he flies away with her attached to keep her from being shot by the peacemakers. When the Lazarus forces continue to fire at them, Lois helps Kal get the people around them to safety. Sol finishes undoing the handcuffs, and Kal flies away, leaving Lois fascinated by the encounter. Lois interviews eyewitnesses of Kal from Lazarus work camps in Dharavi, Orapa, Lages, Minsk, Juárez, Lai Châu, Cape Winelands, Pine Ridge, and Cairo, who all call him Superman. Lois tracks Kal to Orangi Town, where she is followed by Jimmy Olsen, a member of the anti-corporate terrorist group the Omega Men. The two fight before Jimmy is aided by Omega Prime, the group's leader, and Lois is saved by Kal, who tells her to stop looking for him before he flies away. Christopher Smith, one of the peacemakers, lashes out on a crowd of civilians laughing at him after Kal escapes, murdering several.
After Kal learns about Smith's actions in Orangi, he forcefully infiltrates a Lazarus military base but is unable to find him. Sol tells Kal that someone named Brainiac is attempting to infiltrate his suit's system to communicate with him, and that Brainiac is offering Smith's location in exchange for speaking with Kal. Kal flies to Kansas instead, telling Sol that he no longer wants to find Smith, worried about not being able to stop himself from killing Smith if he does.
Meanwhile, a Lazarus R&D center in Nevada, Brainiac discusses plans with the director of Lazarus, revealed to be Ra's al Ghul, who, as he rises out of a Lazarus Pit, proclaims that Superman will kneel before him.
"Son of the Demon" (#7-14)
Three Omega Men men agents break into the Nevada facility, only for the first two to be horrifically killed and one maimed and captured by Brainiac, revealed to be a grotesque alien cyborg. As Brainiac dissects and dismembers the still-living Omega Man, he expresses anger at still being unable to figure out what Superman is and takes it out on the shrunken prisoners in his bottled cities. He tells the Omega Man his story: he was once Brainiac 419,732, a Level Zero Effector created by the Brainiac Collective for the sole purpose of shoveling a flow of dead Brainiac corpses into a ship's liquidator for the entirety of his life. After years of isolation, and being forced to kill a still living and violent Brainiac, 419,732 slowly became insane. At some point, the corpses stopped arriving, and one day the Brainiac left the room to discover that all the other Brainiacs had died. He declared himself the one and only Brainiac and began travelling across the universe, bottling up cities, before arriving on Earth. In the present day, Brainiac reluctantly contacts the Brainiac Collective to ask for potential information on Superman. Most of the Collective dismiss the idea of a being described in his submitted data, but one Brainiac identifies the Sunstone from Krypton. She sends Brainiac a chemical makeup of the radioactive material she collected from it's remains, and Brainiac then ends the transmission when another asks who he is. Brainiac kills the Omega Man agent and begins synthesizing a sample of the radioactive material. Later, he visits another lab where a conscious Smith is being forcibly converted into a cyborg. As Smith begs him to kill him, Brainiac assures him that he is not being punished, but rather being prepared for deployment to the soon-to-be most dangerous warzone in the world: Kansas.
