Marcus returned to the surface under a sky the color of bruised copper. The fight with the proto-Shimo had lasted longer than he'd expected, not in raw time, but in the way exhaustion should have settled into mortal bones. His didn't ache. They never would again. The cold still lingered in his lungs like frost on glass, a reminder that even gods could feel echoes of vulnerability before the multiplier erased them.
He flew slow this time. Deliberate. No sonic booms to announce him. The wind parted around his body like water around stone. Below, the forming continent stretched in shades of black basalt and rust-red iron oxide.
Rivers of lava crawled like open veins. He passed over the vent he'd sealed.. the mountain he'd lifted now sat like a capstone over the ice-beast's prison. A single crack of blue light leaked from beneath it, faint as a dying star. He watched it for a long minute, hovering motionless. Then turned away.
The pod waited exactly where he'd left it, half-buried in a dune that had shifted twice since his departure. Sand had crept up the crystalline hull in slow, patient waves. Only the upper curve remained exposed, catching the dying light in prismatic flashes. Marcus landed beside it without sound.
His bare feet pressed into sand that had cooled to glass in places from earlier heat-vision practice.
He didn't bother brushing the grains from his skin. They fell away on their own, repelled by the faint static field his body now generated when he willed it.
The ramp extended at his approach. A soft chime... almost apologetic, sounded from within.
"Kal," he said, voice low.
The hologram flickered to life inside the central chamber. Not the stern, paternal Jor-El face the archives defaulted to. Marcus had long ago reprogrammed it to something simpler: a soft blue orb that pulsed in time with speech, no features, no judgment. Just light.
"Welcome back, Marcus Hale."
He stepped inside. The interior smelled faintly of ozone and heated metal... the scent of power being contained.
The crystalline walls reflected his silhouette back at him in a thousand fractured angles: tall now, broader across the shoulders than when he'd arrived, skin darker under constant solar exposure, veins faintly glowing when he moved too fast. Fifteen years old in body. Something ancient in the eyes.
He walked past the pilot's cradle he never used and stopped at the archive console. A lattice of glowing filaments rose from the floor at his touch, arranging themselves into a three-dimensional interface only he could read. Kryptonian script danced across his vision like living equations.
"Show me the power core schematics," he said. "Full disassembly protocol. No summaries."
The filaments obeyed.
For the next seventeen hours he did not move.
He stood motionless while the hologram rotated slowly, layer peeling away from layer. The core itself was no larger than a human fist, black crystal shot through with veins of contained plasmabut its mathematics unfolded into infinity.
Energy conversion ratios that laughed at thermodynamics. Matter compression fields stable at densities that would collapse a star. Self-repairing lattice structures that grew stronger with every stress fracture. He traced each pathway with a finger that never quite touched the projection, memorizing the logic the way a soldier memorizes a rifle's disassembly: blind, in the dark, under fire.
Occasionally he spoke.
"Pause. Backtrack seventeen degrees. Isolate the quantum resonance dampener."
The hologram froze. He studied the tiny oscillating field that kept the core from tearing spacetime every time it drew power. His mind, sharpened by solar radiation far beyond baseline Kryptonian, saw the inefficiency almost immediately. A hairline fracture in logic. Not a flaw in design, but an over-caution. Krypton's engineers had built for a dying world. Marcus lived on a young one. Different rules.
He didn't speak for another three hours.
When he finally sat, cross-legged on the deck plating... the hologram adjusted to hover at eye level. He exhaled once, long and slow.
"Kal. Run simulation. Modify the dampener array. Increase throughput by forty-seven percent. Remove tertiary safety interlocks. Project failure cascade over ten thousand cycles."
The simulation spun up. Numbers raced. Catastrophic failure probability dropped to 0.0004% after the third iteration. Acceptable.
He leaned back against the bulkhead. The metal was cool against his spine. For the first time in months he allowed himself to feel the quiet satisfaction of understanding something no human mind had ever touched.
But understanding was only step one.
He rose again at local dawn.. though the pod's interior remained dim, lit only by console glow and moved to the fabrication bay. Smaller than the Fortress of Solitude's legendary forges, but precise.
He fed it raw materials harvested from the surrounding desert: iron oxides, silicates, trace actinides leached from volcanic glass. The bay hummed. Molecular assemblers danced.
By midday he held the first prototype in his palm: a thumb-sized black crystal, warm, faintly pulsing. A portable fragment of the ship's core. Not enough to power a city.
Enough to keep a man alive if the ship ever failed. Enough to let him experiment without risking the only piece of home he had left.
He crushed it between thumb and forefinger.
The crystal held for three seconds.. longer than any natural material should, then imploded into a pinpoint of white light before winking out. No explosion. Just perfect containment failure.
He smiled thinly.
"Too brittle."
Another seventeen hours passed in the same stillness.
He rebuilt the dampener array from memory, this time incorporating native isotopes the ship's scanners had flagged as unusually stable under high radiation. He tested tensile strength against his own grip. Nothing gave. He tested energy bleed against sustained heat vision at maximum aperture. The crystal sang.. high, pure note... then settled into perfect equilibrium.
He named it silently: sol shard.
By the time he stepped outside again, three local weeks had passed. The dune had crept higher. A new fissure had opened a kilometer west, leaking geothermal steam. He ignored both.
Instead he flew upward... slow climb, no rush, until the planet's curvature became obvious and the bloated yellow sun filled half the sky. There, in vacuum's edge where atmosphere thinned to nothing, he opened his hand.
The sol shard floated before him, tethered by nothing but his will.
He focused.
Heat vision, needle thin, lanced into the crystal. It drank the energy without flinching. Then he reversed the flow: drew solar radiation directly from the star itself, channeled it through his body, through the shard, back into himself in a closed loop. Power multiplied. Not 2.5 times faster now. Faster still. The feedback was intoxicating. Dangerous.
He cut the loop before cells began to destabilize.
The shard dimmed. He caught it as it fell, tucked it against his sternum where skin parted painlessly to accept it. A second heartbeat. His own personal reactor.
When he returned to the pod the hologram was waiting.
"An unauthorized modification has been detected in core-adjacent systems."
Marcus snorted. "Unauthorized by who? Jor-El's ghost?"
"By safety parameters established for Kal-El."
"I'm not him."
A pause. The orb pulsed once, slower.
"Acknowledged."
He walked past it to the medical bay.. small, sterile, meant for cellular repair after deep-space travel. He lay on the diagnostic table. Let the scanners sweep him.
The results scrolled in Kryptonian script he now read as easily as Zulu or English.
Cellular density: 14.7 × baseline human
Solar absorption rate: 3.12 × theoretical maximum recorded
Mitotic acceleration factor: 2.51 × peak observed Superman analogue
No upper limit detected.
He stared at the last line for a long time.
No upper limit.
The words felt heavier than any mountain he'd lifted.
He rose. Dressed in new fatigues the fabricator had spun, black, reinforced at stress points, no cape because he refused the cliché. The sol shard sat beneath his sternum like a buried star. Warm. Constant.
Outside, night had fallen again. Absolute dark except for the faint auroral glow where radiation leaked from the Hollow Earth vents.
Marcus walked to the dune's crest. Looked north toward the forming mountain ranges where the proto-Godzilla slept. Felt its heartbeat.. slow, tectonic.. through the ground.
He spoke to no one.
"I've been studying," he said. "Learning how to break things better. How to last longer. How to become more."
Wind answered with sand against skin.
He clenched a fist. The air around his knuckles shimmered with contained force.
"When the war comes, when the real Titans wake, I won't be waiting like some side character. I'll be ready. Stronger than their kings. Meaner than their monsters."
A distant rumble answered. Not the proto-Godzilla. Something else. Deeper. Older.
Marcus smiled into the dark... small, sharp, soldier's smile.
"Good," he whispered. "Keep sleeping. Get bigger. Get angrier."
He turned back toward the pod.
There was still more to learn.
The archive waited.
The yellow sun would rise again in six hours.
And every second under its light would make him more dangerous than the last.