This battle takes place in the ruins of Metropolis, and features the deaths of several well-known DC Comics characters. The battle culminates with the death of Superman at the hands of Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor stands back to proclaim his victory, only to see Brainiac’s war fleet fill the skies. The scene then shifts to the present-day Watchtower, where the future Lex Luthor is telling the story to the present-day Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Lex Luthor explains that the deadly final war between the heroes and villains was triggered by the subtle manipulations of Brainiac (who had been slowly downloading their powers over time). With the planet’s most powerful beings dead, Brainiac intended to use the pirated data to create an army of metahumans under his control, facilitating his conquest of Earth. As the only survivor of the war, Lex Luthor could do nothing to resist Brainiac’s subjugation of the planet. Lex Luthor explains that he was able to survive in secret and eventually steal the stolen data and energy from Brainiac’s mothership in the form of “Exobytes” (nanobot-sized devices that can bond to a living host and give them their own superpowers). After finally designing a time machine (or possibly stealing one from Brainiac’s technology), Lex Luthor has traveled into his past to release the exobytes into the atmosphere of present-day Earth. The heroes are outraged, but Lex Luthor explains that because he has done this, soon thousands of new metahumans will be created from ordinary humans (becoming the characters that players design and play with). He implores the Justice League to find and train these new metahumans, because Brainiac is coming and the Earth must be ready to succeed where it was once doomed to fail.