Marcus stood alone on the highest ridge of the new mountain range he had helped birth through earlier training.
The desert sprawled below in a vast sea of black glass and red dunes, scarred by craters and fissures that marked his passage over the years.
The yellow sun... young, bloated, merciless.. poured raw radiation across the primordial Earth like an open furnace.
His dark skin drank it in without effort, veins faintly luminous beneath the surface.
The sol shard in his chest pulsed in perfect rhythm with the distant tectonic heartbeat of the proto-Godzilla far below in the Hollow Earth.
He had emerged from ten years of stasis changed.
The Venusian phased radiation that once burned him like poison now fed him.
The blue crystal spectra of the Hollow Earth vents had opened new absorption channels.
Every sunrise pushed the multiplier further. Kal had run the diagnostics again that morning. The numbers were no longer theoretical.
Current strength, calibrated against every Kryptonian benchmark in the pod's archives and cross-referenced with the fragmented comic memories Marcus still carried from his old life:
LIFTING STRENGTH :Marcus could casually dead-lift and relocate a tectonic plate fragment equivalent to the mass of modern MADAGASCAR,roughly 9.8 × 10^21 kilograms—in under five seconds with no visible strain.
He had done exactly that weeks before stasis and repeated it yesterday with one hand while thinking about nothing more pressing than the taste of ration coffee from a war that no longer existed.
Post-Crisis Superman (the version most comic readers remembered as the "standard" Man of Steel) had famously bench-pressed the weight of the Earth for five days straight, an effort that left him sweating and taxed.
Marcus could replicate that feat indefinitely while holding a casual conversation with Kal.
Silver Age / Pre-Crisis Superman had towed chains of planets across interstellar distances and moved stars with his breath; Marcus had already shifted entire mountain ranges across continents as calibration exercises and could now replicate planet-moving feats on a similar scale without accelerating his heartbeat.
Superman Prime One Million, after 15,000 years inside a super-sun, existed on a scale of near-limitless cosmic abstraction, capable of reality-warping feats that dwarfed planetary masses.
Marcus was not there yet. But his growth curve, at 3.4× (and climbing) the rate of the strongest recorded Kryptonian analogues, meant he was closing the gap faster than any natural Kryptonian physiology allowed.
No upper limit had ever been defined for his bloodline. The archives simply flagged it as "indeterminate" and rising.
STRIKING STRENGTH and DURABILITY: A full-power punch from Marcus could now shatter a basalt ridge the size of Table Mountain into dust and send the shockwave flattening dunes for eighty kilometers.
He had tested it deliberately the day after emerging from stasis.
The impact registered on the pod's sensors as equivalent to a low-yield nuclear detonation focused into a single point.
Post-Crisis Superman's strongest strikes had cracked moons or redirected planetoids; Marcus exceeded that casually.
Silver Age Superman had survived and dished out blows that moved planetary bodies and withstood galactic-level gravitational forces in some stories.
Marcus's invulnerability had adapted to Venusian molecular disruptors and phased radiation that would have unraveled a standard Kryptonian.
A direct meteor strike (he had caught a twenty-kilometer iron asteroid in low orbit and let it slam into his chest for measurement) now felt like a firm slap.
He could tank the pressure at the bottom of a magma chamber or the acid storms of Venus without flinching.
Only the proto-Titans stirring below or a fully mature Ghidorah, might register as genuine threats. Even then, his cells would adapt mid-fight, the multiplier surging in real time.
SPEED :Unassisted atmospheric flight reached 0.42c before air friction turned to plasma. In vacuum he could sustain relativistic velocities with ease.
He had chased the juvenile proto-Ghidorah sunward at fractions of light speed during the Venus incident.
Post-Crisis Superman topped out at high relativistic speeds in combat; Silver Age versions casually exceeded light speed and time-traveled via sheer velocity.
Marcus was already operating comfortably in that regime and accelerating.
The multiplier meant every hour under the yellow sun shaved more limits away. He could circle the planet in minutes and cross continental distances in heartbeats.
ENERGY PROJECTION (Heat Vision / Freeze Breath):
Sustained heat vision output now exceeded 1.7 × 10^18 Watts , enough to carve canyons through bedrock or sublimate stone into ionized gas in seconds.
He had used it to etch molecular-precision grids across a twelve-kilometer crater floor without collateral damage.
Freeze breath achieved localized absolute zero across a two-hundred-meter cone, flash-freezing lava flows into obsidian sculptures.
The Venusian encounter had taught his body to invert hostile energy spectra; what once poisoned him now fueled him.
Standard Kryptonian heat vision was devastating but limited by solar charge. Marcus's had no practical ceiling under continuous yellow sun exposure.
Overall Power Curve and Growth: Standard Kryptonians under a yellow sun became godlike within days or weeks. The strongest recorded versions, Silver Age Superman at his most absurd, Post-Crisis at his peak planetary feats, or even brief glimpses of Cosmic Armor/Thought Robot levels—represented upper bounds most stories treated as near-infinite but still finite in practice.
Marcus's Kryptonian bloodline had "no limits" explicitly stated in the pod's genetic archives. More importantly, he gained strength at 2.5 times (now effectively higher due to compounding adaptations) the rate of the strongest Superman analogues ever simulated.
Ten years in stasis had not slowed that curve; it had refined it. Every sunrise added measurable density.
Every exposure to new spectra, Hollow Earth blue crystals, Venusian geothermal traces, the proto-Godzilla's radiation bleed.. opened fresh channels.
Where a peak Post-Crisis Superman might require years or extreme circumstances to move planets consistently, Marcus was already doing so as training.
Where Silver Age absurdity allowed planet-towing on a whim, Marcus approached it with the calm precision of a soldier calibrating a rifle.
He was not yet at Superman Prime One Million's 15,000-year godhood or the abstract multiversal scale of Cosmic Armor Superman. But the trajectory was steeper. Faster. Unchecked.
He flexed his fingers once on the ridge. The air around his hand shimmered with contained force.
A casual backhand had relocated mountains.
A full effort could crack the planet's crust if he chose.
The sol shard hummed approval, feeding the excess back into his cells.
Marcus looked north, toward the cracked vent mountain where the proto-Godzilla slumbered and stirred in turns.
Its heartbeat synced faintly with his own through the ground.
Kinship in radiation. Two anomalies on a young world.
Kal's voice carried from the pod far below, projected through the link. "Current projections indicate that within another local decade of uninterrupted solar exposure, your baseline will exceed all archived Kryptonian analogues short of the Prime One Million archetype.
The multiplier continues to compound. No failure point detected."
Marcus smiled.. small, sharp, the soldier's smile that never quite left his face.
"Good."
He launched upward without sound, rising into the thinning atmosphere until the planet's curvature became clear.
Below, the red desert, the glowing Hollow Earth vents, the sleeping Titans, the First People and proto-apes forging their fragile alliances in the dark. All of it felt smaller now. Manageable.
He was still fifteen in body. Dark-skinned, lean and wiry beneath the godlike density.
A former soldier who had liked comics about capes and kaiju.
Dropped here with nothing but memories, a pod, and blood that refused ceilings.
The strongest Kryptonians in the stories had limits, narrative ones, solar flare dependencies, moral anchors. Marcus had none of those.
His strength grew in the dark of stasis. It grew under every sunrise. It grew when he fought, when he explored, when he simply existed beneath this young yellow sun.
He hovered at the edge of space, eyes glowing faintly as he scanned the inner system.
Venus hung like a poisoned pearl. Somewhere out in the void, the juvenile proto-Ghidorah drifted, healing, growing, tasting solar wind on its three tongues.
Marcus clenched a fist. The vacuum around his knuckles distorted.
When the real war came, when the Titans rose, when Ghidorah finally turned its heads toward Earth, when the balance the Hollow Earth ecosystem had maintained for eons finally tipped, he would not be waiting as a side character.
He would be the scale.
And the scale was getting heavier by the hour.
The yellow sun continued its slow climb across the sky.
Marcus descended again, slow and deliberate, already planning the next descent into the Hollow Earth.
There was still more to test.
Still more to become.