Marcus stood on the ridge where he had first measured his strength against a relocated mountain range, but the ridge itself was gone now, eroded by fifty years of his own passage, by tectonic shifts he had accelerated with casual landings, and by the slow grind of a planet still cooling from its violent youth.
The desert below had transformed into a fractured expanse of black glass seas and rust-red dunes, veined with new lava rivers that glowed like open wounds.
Fissures yawned wider, Hollow Earth vents leaking blue radiation in steady pulses.
The yellow sun.. older by a breath, still bloated and merciless.. poured down without pause.
Fifty years under its light had done what no comic panel had ever dared quantify.
He was still fifteen in face and frame when the years began, dark-skinned, lean with the wiry muscle of a soldier who had once carried an M4 through Helmand dust.
Now, chronologically sixty-five, his body refused to age beyond the late teens his Kryptonian bloodline allowed.
The sol shard in his chest had grown subtly larger, a buried star that no longer needed extraction.
Veins traced luminous paths beneath his obsidian skin, pulsing in faint sync with the proto-Godzilla's heartbeat far below.
The multiplier had never slowed. It compounded. Every sunrise, every new spectrum absorbed from the depths or the void, pushed him further into the indeterminate.
The years passed slow and dark, the way the planet itself aged.
At first the fights were rare, echoes of the swarms he had crushed before stasis.
Burrowers erupted from fresh fissures, drawn by the pod's reactor or the blue-crystal leakage he left in his wake.
He met them on foot, no flight, letting the ground shake under his bare soles.
One pack, eighty meters of armored segments and acid mandible, coiled around him like living chains.
He tore through them methodically, the way a soldier clears a trench: one punch per segment, calibrated to shatter carapace without scattering the radiation they carried.
Their dying bodies leaked geothermal fire; he absorbed it through the sol shard, the taste metallic and ancient on his tongue.
He killed three that year for sustenance, the first time he had eaten since arrival. Not flesh for hunger, but the concentrated isotopes in their cores, metabolized like fuel rods.
The rest he left broken but alive, dragging themselves back into the vents. They had been protecting a spawning ground. Territory. Balance.
He respected it the way the proto-apes and First People respected each other in the dark.
The Hollow Earth called him more often after that. He descended every few months, walking the crystal-veined tunnels as the ecosystem stirred faster.
Radiation levels climbed. New vents opened. Titans, small at first, precursors barely larger than buildings began testing the surface through cracks he had widened.
The first true kaiju fight came in year seven.
It rose from a southern fissure: a serpentine thing, eighty meters long, scales like blackened iron fused with glowing blue veins. Not a full Titan. Not yet. An early offshoot, something that might have become a MUTO ancestor or a lesser hydra in later eons. It hunted the spore-mats near the pod, drawn by the sol shard's signature.
Marcus met it at dawn, standing in its path as the creature reared, mandibles dripping acid that smoked on glassed sand.
He did not roar. He simply stepped forward.
It struck first, coils slamming down like living cables. The impact cratered the desert for a kilometer.
Marcus felt it: pressure against bones denser than osmium now, a sting that registered as real for half a second before his cells adapted.
He grabbed the head, twisted once, and snapped the neck with a sound like grinding continents.
The body thrashed, leaking radiation-rich blood that pooled and crystallized on the sand. He killed it cleanly. No mercy, no waste.
He dragged the carcass back to the pod over two days of slow flight, the weight nothing to him.
Kal analyzed it while Marcus absorbed the core isotopes through the sol shard, raw power flooding his cells, the multiplier ticking upward in quiet increments.
The creature had been protecting its own spawning pool in the upper Hollow Earth layers. But it had come to his territory first.
He felt no guilt. Only the dark satisfaction of the soldier who had measured another threat and removed it.
More came. Year twelve: a pack of four crab-like precursors, proto-MUTOs with conductive silk and EMP-like pulses that shorted the pod's outer shields for minutes.
He fought them in the glassed dunes at night, their bioluminescent eyes the only light.
One pulse struck his chest, pain like the Venusian disruptors, but duller now.
He adapted mid-fight, the sol shard inverting the energy and feeding it back.
He killed two for their crystal-laced cores.. food, fuel, growth. The other two he let flee, dragging their wounded alpha back into a vent.
They had been defending a fungal forest the First People relied on. Territory. He watched them go, the loneliness that had carved him hollow easing by a fraction.
The ecosystem was learning his shape. So was he.
Year nineteen brought the first strange Titan.
It erupted from a northern vent Marcus had never sealed: a reptilian form, sixty meters tall, dorsal ridges stubby and flickering with weak plasma.
It looked like Godzilla—scaled hide obsidian-black, heavy tail, powerful limbs but smaller, weaker, an offshoot branch that would never reach the alpha lineage.
Its atomic breath was a sputtering blue flame, barely carving trenches instead of canyons.
It charged him near the pod, territorial rage in its golden eyes, drawn by the radiation he leaked like a second sun.
Marcus met it hand-to-hand. No powers at first. He wanted the feel of it, the clash of two radiovores testing dominance.
Fists met scales. The creature's claws drew shallow lines across his ribs that sealed before blood could fall. Its weak breath washed over him like warm wind.
He countered with measured strikes, cracking ribs, dislocating a shoulder.
The fight lasted hours.. slow, grinding, the way the planet itself moved. In the end he pinned it, forearm across its throat, staring into those ancient eyes. Recognition flickered.
Kinship, faint and distorted. This was a cousin to the proto-Godzilla he had touched years earlier, same lineage, lesser blood. It had been protecting a nursery of its own kind deeper in the vents, the eggs he had once glimpsed.
He released it. Let it crawl back into the fissure, limping but alive. No kill. Territory respected.
The creature glanced back once before vanishing.. something like respect in its gaze. Or warning.
More followed. Over the next decades the strange ones appeared with increasing frequency: weaker Godzillas, variants with mismatched spines or stunted breath weapons, products of the accelerating radiation leaks Marcus's presence had caused.
Some he fought to stalemate.. testing, learning their patterns, absorbing their weaker spectra to refine his own. Others he killed when they encroached too far, draining their cores for the multiplier's hunger.
One in year thirty-four, a hulking brute with crystalline growths fused to its back.. nearly matched him for minutes. Its breath scarred his shoulder deeply enough to sting for days.
He ended it with a single heat-vision lance through the chest, then consumed the remains over a week, the sol shard glowing brighter with each absorbed isotope.
That one had been defending nothing but its own rage. No mercy.
The true Titans.. larger, older, began surfacing in year forty-one. Not the kings yet. Precursors. A proto-Rodan analog took flight from a volcanic caldera, leathery wings generating wind shear that flattened dunes.
Marcus intercepted it mid-air, grappling at relativistic speeds above the clouds. The creature's talons drew blood.. real blood, that sealed instantly. He let it live after it submitted, wings folding in exhaustion.
It had been hunting burrowers threatening a First People spore-field far below. Territory. Balance. He watched it glide away, a shadow against the bloated sun.
Another in year forty-seven: an ice-wielding behemoth, early Shimo kin, rising from a polar fissure that had not yet frozen into true Antarctica.
Its frost breath bit deeper than the first proto-Shimo he had subdued, cold that reached the sol shard and made it stutter for heartbeats.
They fought across forming ice sheets for three days and nights, slow and deliberate, continents of frost versus solar fire.
Marcus won, pinning it beneath a mountain he lifted one-handed.
He could have killed it. Instead he carried the creature to a deeper Hollow Earth chamber and sealed the entrance with precise heat vision. Mercy wrapped in darkness.
It had been protecting its own nascent clutch of eggs. The ecosystem's balance still held because of such acts.
He killed only when necessary. Food. Fuel. Growth. The dead ones, burrowers, lesser kaiju, the raging offshoot.. fed the multiplier in ways the sun alone could not. Their radiation spectra were raw, primordial, opening channels no Kryptonian archive had ever recorded.
The living ones taught him restraint. Territory. The slow, dark patience the planet demanded.
Fifty years.
The pod had become a fortress of black crystal fused with native stone, Marcus's own additions, built during quiet intervals between fights. Kal's orb still hovered, patient as stone.
The desert around it was a monument range now: canyons carved by his heat vision, glassed plains from training impacts, ridges he had relocated like chess pieces.
Marcus stood on the tallest of them at local dusk, the yellow sun sinking behind him.
Fifty years of constant solar exposure, Hollow Earth descents, kaiju blood and crystal isotopes.
The multiplier had long since passed 3.4×. It compounded relentlessly. No upper limit. Only the slow, inevitable climb.
Current strength, calibrated against every Kryptonian benchmark the pod's archives could still simulate and every comic memory Marcus retained:
LIFTING STRENGTH :
He could now dead-lift and hurl a tectonic plate fragment the size of the entire modern African Continent approximately 2.4 × 10^23 kilograms, across orbital distances in under thirty seconds.
Post-Crisis Superman had required sustained, visible effort to move the Earth itself; Marcus performed equivalent feats as morning calibration while Kal recited ecosystem updates.
Silver Age Superman had towed multiple planets on chains; Marcus had relocated entire supercontinents in training exercises over the decades, adjusting their drift with casual pressure.
Superman Prime One Million's feats, cosmic abstraction after millennia inside a super-sun.. remained theoretical abstractions in the archives.
Marcus's trajectory had already surpassed every finite benchmark.
He could crack the planet's mantle with a backhand if he chose.
The sol shard fed the excess back instantly.
STRIKING STRENGTH and DURABILITY :
A full-power punch registered as a focused seismic event equivalent to the Chicxulub impactor, but contained to a point.
He had tested it on a barren supercontinent ridge last year; the shockwave had flattened terrain for three hundred kilometers and triggered new vents.
Invulnerability had adapted to every spectrum he had encountered: Venusian disruptors now nourished him, proto-Titan plasma breath felt like warm rain, the ice of Shimo-kin only slowed him for heartbeats before the multiplier inverted it.
A direct strike from a fully mature proto-Godzilla (he had sparred the original twice in the last decade) left faint bruises that healed mid-fight.
Only a coordinated assault by multiple true Titans might register as genuine Threat and even then, his cells would adapt faster than they could damage.
SPEED :
Atmospheric flight now sustained 0.78c before plasma sheathing became impractical.
In vacuum he crossed the inner solar system in subjective minutes. He had chased the juvenile proto-Ghidorah (now larger, healed, circling the gas giants) at relativistic velocities multiple times, always breaking off before engagement.
Post-Crisis Superman's top combat speeds were high relativistic; Silver Age versions exceeded lightspeed casually.
Marcus operated comfortably beyond both, the multiplier shaving limits away with every heartbeat under the sun.
ENERGY PROJECTION :
Heat vision sustained output exceeded 4.2 × 10^19 Watts, enough to sublimate mountain ranges or boil shallow seas in minutes.
He had carved precise monuments across continents during quiet years, molecular-accurate grids spanning hundreds of kilometers.
Freeze breath achieved system-wide absolute zero in targeted cones, flash-freezing lava oceans into obsidian continents.
The decades of absorbed Titan spectra had refined both to near-infinite precision and power.
Overall Power Curve and Growth:
Fifty years of uninterrupted yellow sun, compounded by Hollow Earth blue crystals, kaiju cores, and Venusian echoes, had pushed his baseline far beyond any archived Kryptonian analogue short of the abstract multiversal tiers.
The 2.5× (now effectively 4.7× after compounding adaptations) growth rate meant every local decade added measurable cosmic mass to his cellular density.
Where peak Post-Crisis Superman required extreme circumstances for planetary feats, Marcus treated them as rest.
Where Silver Age absurdity allowed star-moving on whim, Marcus approached it with the calm precision of a soldier who had fought kaiju for half a century.
He was not yet at Superman Prime One Million's 15,000-year godhood. But the gap had narrowed to decades instead of eons.
No upper limit. Only the slow, dark certainty that the next sunrise would make him more dangerous than the last.
Marcus flexed his fingers once. The air around his hand warped visibly. Below, a new fissure cracked open in the desert, another precursor stirring, drawn by his presence. He watched it without moving. The fight would come soon. He would measure it, kill or spare according to the balance he had learned to keep.
The sol shard hummed approval.
The yellow sun set behind him, but its radiation lingered in the upper atmosphere, feeding him still.
Fifty years.
He had grown.
And the war.. still two billion years distant in human time, would find a scale heavier than any Titan had ever imagined.