Marcus launched from the ridge at local dusk, no announcement to Kal, no calculated vector logged in the pod's archives.
The decision had crystallized during the long walk back from the kaiju fight three days earlier: the sol shard still hummed with the creature's unstable atomic plasma, and the multiplier had ticked upward again in quiet increments.
Fifty years of surface fights, Hollow Earth descents, and measured growth had taught him patience, but the adventurer in him, the boy who once traced Superman's flight paths in stolen comics under bunk light, wanted to push the only limit he had never truly tested.
SPEED.
Not atmospheric sprints across continents. Not the relativistic chases after the juvenile proto-Ghidorah through the inner system.
True vacuum. Unfettered. He would see how far the bloodline could go when Nothing air, gravity, the planet's own curvature, stood in the way.
He rose slowly at first, black fatigues whipping in the thinning wind, dark skin drinking the last red rays of the bloated yellow sun.
The desert fell away beneath him: glassed plains, new fissures leaking blue radiation, the cracked vent mountain where the proto-Godzilla still stirred in its long gestation.
No sonic boom. He had learned restraint decades ago. The sol shard pulsed once in his chest, eager, feeding on the solar wind that already brushed his face like static.
At the edge of the atmosphere he paused, hovering at the boundary where the sky turned black.
Earth curved below, supercontinents still forming, red and black and glowing at the seams.
The pod was a silver speck on the horizon, Kal's orb undoubtedly already noting the anomaly in his vitals. Marcus ignored it.
He oriented himself toward the outer system, beyond Venus, beyond the gas giants, into the true dark where no timeline had ever been written.
Then he accelerated.
Not the casual 0.78c he had reached in previous tests. He pushed. The sol shard drank the unfiltered solar radiation pouring from the star behind him and flooded his cells with raw power.
The multiplier surged, 4.7× baseline, then 5.1, then higher as the feedback loop tightened.
His body became a living engine. Muscles denser than neutron star matter flexed once. Eyes glowed white-hot for a heartbeat before the light bent around him.
0.9c.
The stars ahead began to streak. Relativistic aberration turned the void into a tunnel of blue-white light.
Time dilation crept in at the edges of his perception, subjective seconds stretching while the universe outside compressed. He felt no strain.
The sol shard sang, converting the kinetic backlash into more fuel. This was what the comics had only hinted at: Silver Age Superman casually exceeding lightspeed, towing planets while time-traveling on sheer velocity. Marcus was already past that. He pushed harder.
0.99c.
The inner planets blurred behind him. Venus's poisoned clouds flashed past like a yellow smear.
Mars was a red spark and gone.
The asteroid belt became a glittering river he sliced through without collision, his invulnerability turning micrometeorites into harmless plasma that trailed him like a comet's tail.
Jupiter's radiation belts washed over him, the sol shard greedily absorbing the new spectrum, refining it alongside the kaiju plasma and Hollow Earth blue.
His speed climbed again. The multiplier responded in real time, cells dividing faster than any archive had ever recorded.
1.0c.
Lightspeed.
The universe folded. Stars stretched into lines of pure color. Marcus felt the sol shard flare brighter than it ever had, Kryptonian crystal lattice now glowing with faint blue veins from decades of absorbed Titan spectra.
He was no longer flying through space. He was tearing a seam in it. The original time-space portal that had dropped him here two billion years ago had been an external rift.
This was internal. His own power, unchecked, interacting with the young sun's gravity well and the quantum resonance he had deliberately removed from the shard decades earlier.
He felt the tear before he saw it.
A sudden pressure, not physical...deeper. Spacetime itself resisted for one impossible instant, then gave way with a soundless snap that echoed inside his skull like the portal flash from his old life.
The tunnel of light fractured. Colors inverted. He was no longer accelerating forward.
He was falling sideways, through layers of reality that had no names in any Kryptonian archive or comic panel.
The sol shard screamed in his chest not pain, but overload. It drank the rift energy, multiplied it, fed it back into his cells at an exponential rate the multiplier had never been designed to handle.
Marcus's vision whited out. Memories flashed in the dark: Helmand dust, comic pages tearing, Venusian eyes whispering You could end it. Or become it.
The proto-Godzilla's golden gaze. The kaiju he had spared three days ago, blood crystallizing on the sand.
Then silence.
He emerged into normal space again, but the coordinates were wrong.
The star behind him was still Sol, yellow, bloated, familiar but the configuration of planets had shifted by fractions only a god would notice.
No supercontinents below. No red desert. No Hollow Earth vents leaking blue into the crust.
A blue world. Modern. Cities glittering on the night side like scattered jewels.
Marcus slowed instinctively, the multiplier already recalibrating to the new solar spectrum.
He hovered at the edge of orbit, breath steady, dark skin still luminous from the transit.
Below him stretched the Pacific, familiar coastlines, but the lights were wrong. Tokyo, or what would become Tokyo, glowed in dense urban grids.
Human civilization. Not the First People's click-songs or proto-ape grunts. Actual cities. Aircraft contrails. Radio chatter his super-hearing picked up in fragments: news broadcasts in Japanese, English, Mandarin. Dates. 2018. Early 21st century.
A few years before.
He knew the feeling in his bones before Kal's voice could have confirmed it even if the pod had followed.
This was not his timeline. The Hollow Earth heartbeat was absent, no proto-Godzilla stirring beneath the crust, no blue crystal radiation bleeding upward.
The ecosystem below was surface-only: oceans, forests, human sprawl. No Titans yet. No war. But the air tasted different. Charged. Something ancient sleeping in the deep trenches, waiting for its cue.
The anime verse.
He had crossed timelines. His unchecked speed, the sol shard's modified resonance, the young sun's gravity, all of it had torn a hole and dropped him here.
A few years before Godzilla would appear to modern humanity.
Before the kaiju awakening that would drive the exodus fleets into space. Before the planet became the domain of the ultimate radiovore.
Marcus floated motionless, the vacuum pressing against him like cool silk.
His fatigues were still torn from the recent kaiju fight, golden ichor flaking away in the zero-g.
The sol shard pulsed steadily now, adapting to the new Earth's magnetic field, the different solar wind. No panic. Only the slow, dark weight of realization settling into his chest.
He had left his ancient Earth behind. The pod. The monument range.
The proto-Godzilla he had touched in its cradle.
All of it sealed in a timeline he might never return to.
Below, humanity moved on unaware. Satellites drifted in low orbit.
A commercial jet crossed the Pacific, its lights blinking. Marcus's super-hearing caught a news snippet from one of the aircraft: speculation about seismic anomalies in the Philippine Trench. Early tremors. Precursors.
Godzilla's approach, still years distant.
He descended slowly... deliberate, no sonic boom.. angling toward the night side of the Pacific, away from the brightest cities.
The ocean rushed up to meet him. He broke the surface without splash, sinking into the cold black until the pressure wrapped around him like the stasis gel had once done.
Bioluminescent plankton glowed around his body. No Titans here yet. Only the faint, sleeping echo of something vast and old stirring in the trenches far below.
Marcus hovered in the deep, eyes open in the dark.
The sol shard fed on the trace radiation leaking from the seafloor vents, different spectrum, but familiar enough. His cells adapted in heartbeats.
The multiplier ticked upward again, already calculating the new baseline.
A few years.
He had time.
The soldier in him catalogued risks: unknown kaiju lore in this verse, humanity's weapons, the eventual emergence of the king he had read about in fragmented comics back home.
The adventurer felt the pull of the frontier again, modern cities, new fights, a world that had not yet learned what a dark-skinned god from another timeline could do.
The dark core whispered of balance, of territory, of the scale he had become.
He rose from the depths at dawn, breaking the surface off the coast of what would one day be the site of the first major sighting.
Mist clung to the water. Distant fishing boats moved on the horizon. No one saw him.
Marcus stood on the waves, bare feet planted on the ocean as if it were glass. The yellow sun, same star, different timeline, climbed behind him.
He looked toward the land where lights still burned against the coming day.
Godzilla would appear here soon enough. A different king. A different war.
Marcus smiled once, small, sharp, the soldier's smile that had never left his face across two billion years and now across realities.
He was ready.
The sol shard hummed in agreement beneath his sternum.
The multiplier never slept.
And neither would he.