Marcus stood at the edge of the crater he had carved three weeks earlier, the one that now measured twelve kilometers across and half a kilometer deep. The walls were vitrified glass, still faintly glowing from the heat-vision test he had run at dawn.
He flexed his fingers once, feeling the familiar surge of solar energy that never quite slept anymore.
Current strength, measured against every recorded Kryptonian benchmark the pod's archives could provide:
He could dead-lift a tectonic plate fragment the size of Madagascar without accelerating his heartbeat. The pod's gravimetric scanners confirmed it.... 9.8 × 10^21 kilograms, shifted six hundred meters vertically in four seconds.
Superman Prime (the post-Crisis version who once towed planets through hyperspace) would have required sustained effort and visible strain. Marcus had done it while thinking about the taste of ration coffee from a war he no longer remembered.
His flight speed, unassisted, reached 0.42c in atmosphere, Mach 124,000 before friction turned the air into plasma that parted like silk.
The strongest Silver Age Superman had needed the Phantom Zone to approach those numbers without planetary destruction. Marcus simply exhaled and the shockwave flattened dunes for eighty kilometers behind him.
Heat vision now sustained a continuous output of 1.7 × 10^18 watts.. enough to boil an ocean trench in eleven minutes. He had tested it yesterday on a basalt ridge; the stone had not melted. It had sublimated, vanishing into ionized gas that rained back as metallic snow.
Freeze breath achieved absolute zero in a cone two hundred meters wide.
The proto-Shimo's ice still lingered in his lungs as a memory; he had weaponized the echo, flash-freezing a volcanic lake into a mirror-black sheet that reflected the bloated sun like obsidian.
Invulnerability: a direct impact from a twenty-kilometer meteor (he had caught one in orbit and let it strike his chest for calibration) registered as mild pressure, no more than a firm hand on the shoulder.
The sol shard beneath his sternum hummed approval, feeding the excess kinetic energy back into his cells.
And the multiplier was still climbing. 2.51 times the growth curve of the strongest Superman analogues ever simulated.
Every sunrise added measurable density to his muscle fibers. Every hour of exposure shaved another decimal from the "theoretical maximum" the archives kept trying and failing to define.
No upper limit.
The words had stopped being a warning. They were simply fact.
Marcus turned from the crater and walked back toward the pod. Sand that had once burned his old human feet now felt like cool powder. He did not hurry. The training arc he had decided upon would be slow, deliberate, the way a soldier prepares for a war whose first shot is still centuries away. He would not rush godhood. He would study it, break it down, rebuild it inside himself until the planet itself became the sparring partner.
Deep beneath the surface, where the Hollow Earth's inverted gravity tugged upward like a second sky, the air was thick with geothermal steam and the copper smell of ancient blood.
A ring of firelight.. actual fire, not radiation glow, flickered inside a cavern the size of a cathedral. Stalactites hung like spears from the ceiling two kilometers overhead. The walls were carved with crude spirals and handprints: the work of the First People, a civilization that had never seen sunlight, born from spores and radiation long before any surface primate would walk upright.
They were small, dark-skinned like Marcus, hairless, eyes large and luminous from generations in the gloom. Their language was clicks and low throat-songs. Their tools were bone and obsidian and the occasional shard of Titan-scale claw.
They faced the apes.
Not Kong. Not even the Kong bloodline proper. These were the long ancestors... taller than later generations, shoulders broader, fur coarser and streaked with volcanic ash. Thirty meters at the shoulder.
Eyes the color of wet iron. They moved with deliberate intelligence: knuckles dragging only when they chose, backs straight when they stood to full height. One carried an axe hafted from a fallen Rodan-scale rib and a meteorite head, already the signature weapon of their kind. Another wore a necklace of glowing crystal vertebrae taken from a dead MUTO precursor.
Canon behavior, unchanged across two billion years: the apes were hierarchical.
The largest male... scarred across the chest from an earlier skirmish with a burrowing centipede swarm, stood at the center. He did not roar. He simply stared, chest rising and falling like bellows.
Subordinate males flanked him in a loose crescent, fists loose but ready. Females and young remained behind, one juvenile clutching a smaller axe, learning. They were territorial, protective of their dead, and pragmatic. They did not kill for sport. They killed for balance.
The First People had brought tribute: baskets of luminescent fungi that absorbed ambient radiation, turning it into soft blue light and edible protein. In return they asked for safe passage through the ape clans' hunting grounds. A small Titan, something serpentine and half-formed.. had been raiding their spore-fields. The apes had already killed two of its kind.
The alpha ape reached down with one massive hand. Fingers the thickness of tree trunks accepted a single basket. He sniffed, grunted once, approval.
Then he turned the basket over and poured the fungi onto the cavern floor in a deliberate circle. A gesture of shared territory. The First People responded with their throat-song, rising and falling in three measured notes. Agreement.
No words passed between species. None were needed. The apes understood reciprocity the way they understood gravity: it simply was. One younger ape, curious, impulsive, reached out and gently touched the head of a child among the First People.
The touch was careful, claws sheathed. The child did not flinch. This was how alliances had formed for millennia: mutual survival against the things that crawled up from deeper layers.
The alpha ape lifted his axe once, pointing it toward the southern fissure where the serpentine Titan had last been seen. Then he turned and led his clan away, footsteps shaking dust from the ceiling. The First People watched them go, then began gathering the spilled fungi. The firelight dimmed as they moved deeper into their own tunnels. Balance, for now, held.
Marcus felt the tremor through the soles of his feet before the pod's sensors even registered it.
He was standing on the fabrication deck, naked to the waist, welding a new lattice into the sol shard with sustained low-power heat vision. The tremor registered as 0.3 on the Richter scale at surface, nothing. But the frequency was wrong. Hollow Earth resonance. Something large had moved with purpose.
He closed his eyes, focused. Super-hearing pierced the crust like a needle. He caught fragments: the low grunt of an ape, the click-song of something smaller, the scrape of obsidian on stone. Then silence again.
He opened his eyes. The training arc began now. Not with spectacle. With discipline.
Day One.
He started at the cellular level.
Marcus lay on the diagnostic table inside the pod. The medical scanners swept him in slow passes. He instructed Kal to isolate every muscle group, every tendon, every capillary. Then he began contracting them one fiber at a time. No movement. Just isometric tension held for six hours..
The sol shard pulsed in time with his heartbeat, feeding micro-bursts of solar energy directly into the mitochondria. Pain, real pain, bloomed and faded as cells tore and rebuilt stronger.
He catalogued it the way he once catalogued wound channels in the field: location, intensity, duration. By hour five the pain had become a language he could speak.
When he stood, the deck plating beneath him had developed hairline fractures. He noted the exact pressure per square centimeter.
Day Two.
Precision.
He flew to the crater he had made earlier. Hovering at its exact center, fifty meters above the glass floor, he began etching. Heat vision at minimum aperture, needle thin, carved a single line into the vitrified surface.
One kilometer long, one molecule wide. He did not waver. Wind, thermal updrafts, the planet's rotation, none of it mattered. The line completed itself at dawn. He repeated the process at ninety-degree angles until a perfect grid covered the crater floor. Each intersection was a potential target.
Then he practiced switching. Heat vision to freeze breath in the same breath. A single square of the grid would flash-melt, then flash-freeze into fractal ice before the melt could flow. He did this for two hundred squares. The rest of the crater remained untouched. Control.
Night fell. He did not return to the pod. He sat cross-legged on the grid's center and listened to the planet breathe.
Day Four.
Mass.
He chose a mountain range three hundred kilometers north, young, still rising from tectonic collision. Black basalt, iron-rich. He landed at its base. No flight. He walked up the slope, bare feet cracking stone. At the summit he placed both hands against the rock face and pushed. Not a shove. A slow, steady pressure measured in millimeters per minute.
The mountain resisted for eleven hours. Then it began to slide. Not collapse, slide.
The entire massif, 1.4 × 10^12 tons, moved laterally across the desert floor like a glacier obeying a god. He walked behind it, guiding, adjusting. When he finally stopped, the mountain had relocated twelve kilometers.
A new valley lay behind it, raw and bleeding lava.
Marcus's shoulders did not burn. His pulse was seventy-two. He sat on the new summit and watched the lava cool. The sol shard hummed louder now, happy.
Day Seven.
Combat memory.
He instructed Kal to run holographic simulations inside the pod's training sphere, a spherical chamber the ship extruded from the hull. The holograms were perfect: mass, inertia, thermal signatures.
First opponent: the proto-centipede he had killed months ago. Scaled up. He fought it hand-to-hand, no powers except strength and speed. The creature lasted forty-three minutes before he tore its head off.
Second opponent: the juvenile behemoth from the Hollow Earth vent. This time he allowed it to land blows. He studied the impact angles, the way its claws skated off his skin now.
He countered with joint locks a human soldier would have used in a bar fight, scaled to planetary mass. The hologram shattered when he applied a rear naked choke that would have snapped a mountain range.
Third opponent: himself. A mirror duplicate running at 80% power. They fought for nine hours. Neither won. When the simulation ended, Marcus was bleeding from the lip.. first blood he had tasted since arrival. He licked it, smiled once, and told Kal to increase the duplicate to 95%.
Day Twelve.
Sensory expansion.
He flew to the edge of the atmosphere and stopped. Eyes closed. He pushed his senses outward. Hearing first: every lava bubble popping, every microbial mat shifting, every ape grunt two hundred kilometers beneath the crust.
Then vision: he could resolve individual bacteria on the stromatolites from low orbit. Smell: the faint ozone of his own heat-vision residue still lingering on the crater grid. Touch: he felt the solar wind brushing his skin like static.
He stayed there until the sun set and rose again. When he descended, the loneliness had gained weight. It was no longer an enemy. It was ballast.
Day Nineteen.
The first real fight since the training began.
A new swarm had risen.. smaller than before, but coordinated. Burrowers with crystalline stingers that conducted radiation like wire. They erupted around the pod at dusk, drawn by the sol shard's signature. Marcus met them on foot. No flight. He wanted the ground under him.
The first stinger punched into his forearm. It broke. The second drew a thin line of blood across his ribs. He felt it. Savored it. Then he moved.
Slow. Methodical. One punch per creature. Each impact calibrated to shatter the carapace without scattering the swarm.
He worked through them like a surgeon, learning their hive-mind frequency. When the queen emerged, larger, glowing... he knelt, placed one hand on her thorax, and squeezed until the glow dimmed to nothing. The swarm collapsed around him.
He stood in the carnage for a long time, breathing the copper and ozone. Then he dragged the queen's carcass back to the pod and fed it to the fabricator. The ship would analyze the crystal stingers. He would incorporate the conductive lattice into his next upgrade.
Day Twenty-Seven.
Internal.
He sat inside the archive chamber, surrounded by every Kryptonian text the pod contained. He read them aloud in the original tongue, translating simultaneously into the Zulu of his childhood and the English of his soldier days. The words were about exile, about last sons, about bearing the weight of dead worlds. He felt none of it. Krypton had died. This world was still being born. Different calculus.
When he finished, he stood and spoke to the blue orb.
"Kal. Record new protocol. Designation: Hale Ascent. No safety governors. Growth curve accepted as infinite."
The orb pulsed once in acknowledgment.
Marcus walked outside. The desert had changed again, his repeated landings had turned a hundred square kilometers into black glass. He looked north, toward the Hollow Earth vents. The ape grunts and human clicks still echoed in his memory.
He smiled the small, sharp soldier smile.
"Keep moving down there," he whispered. "Build your axes. Sing your songs. When the real war starts, I'll be the scale that tips it."
He turned back toward the pod.
The training arc was only beginning.
The sun would rise tomorrow.
And tomorrow he would be stronger still.