The Practice Field…
Tuesday Afternoon
Walt Arnold quietly watched his boys run the plays.
He stood silently at the sideline in the baking late September heat…
clipboard tight in his hand, silver whistle bouncing around his neck…
and watched the complex patterns rapidly unfold across the green field with the sharp eye of a dedicated man who had spent thirty full years reading exactly those patterns.
Exactly where the defensive gaps were.
Exactly where the coverage broke completely down.
Exactly where a nervous player was half a step too slow, or half a step too eager.
He saw absolutely all of it.
He also clearly saw the heavy heat thickly shimmer right above the artificial turf, heavily distorted and dangerously dancing, and physically felt the violent, sympathetic answering heat rapidly blooming deep in his own palms.
Three days now.
Three full days of absolute, burning agony.
He had casually incinerated his entire bag of trash at home last night rather than hauling it out to the heavy curb…
simply stood over the metal bin, held out one bare hand, and instantly set it alight with a single dark thought.
He had instantly boiled cold water for his morning coffee right in a steel pan without even turning on the stove.
He had, highly experimentally, purposefully set his own bare forearm completely on fire for approximately four full seconds in the bright bathroom mirror, and felt absolutely nothing but a very mild, pleasant warmth.
He was completely fireproof.
He was a living furnace.
He was something that absolutely did not have a clear name in the strict language of high school football coaching.
And he definitely had a massive problem.
The problem’s name was Chloe Sullivan.
The stubborn girl’s article drafts had already been successfully intercepted.
She was aggressively digging right into the football team’s impossible performance record, and had successfully found the glaring statistical anomalies that clearly pointed to highly enhanced training aids.
She definitely wasn’t entirely there yet…
she clearly had the hard data but definitely not the whole story, the damning numbers but not the actual explanation.
Still, she was far too close.
And then there was Carter.
Walt had quietly heard all about the strange new kid in the small journalism program…
Very quiet.
Incredibly smart.
The specific one who had apparently instantly jumped right into the freezing Elbow River to bravely help save Lex Luthor.
Walt had absolutely no specific concerns about Carter.
But he possessed a hardened coach’s perfect instinct for tricky players who might cause massive problems down the line, and absolutely something about the boy’s cold manner at the one school assembly they had both attended made the short hairs on the back of his thick neck violently prickle.
He mentally filed that dark feeling away.
More immediately: Sullivan.
And the damning article that simply could absolutely not be allowed to run.
Walt watched proudly as his newly confident quarterback smoothly completed a perfect, clean spiral to a fast receiver who literally hadn’t been able to confidently catch his own shadow three short months ago.
The strange sauna had completely fixed that.
The sauna fixed absolutely everything.
He just desperately needed to firmly protect the sauna.
Protect his entire program.
Protect exactly what he had carefully built.
Whatever it finally took.
The Torch…
Wednesday Afternoon
The article practically wrote itself.
That was exactly the beautiful thing about following cold statistics…
if you patiently gathered enough hard data points, the real story eventually became far too obvious to ever deny.
Chloe easily had all the scoring records.
She had the specific injury rates.
She had the exact historical performance averages directly versus the past six weeks of impossible practice results.
She currently had three separate sources (unnamed, because she was only sixteen and definitely not suicidal) who had quietly confirmed that something highly unusual was actually happening inside the dark sauna right under the boys’ locker room.
She definitely didn’t yet know exactly what was happening in the sauna.
That was the missing gap.
The vital why.
But the undeniable what was clearly enough to proudly publish a preliminary, explosive story: the Smallville Crows football team’s overall performance had aggressively improved at a massive rate that was entirely, statistically indefensible under normal human training conditions.
She was furiously typing the sharp lede when Alex quietly came in directly after his last class and sat smoothly at his desk.
“I need your sharp eyes on the new draft,” Chloe said quickly, without even turning around.
“I am completely aware.”
Alex dropped his faded backpack, pulled his cheap chair directly to her computer, and read silently over her small shoulder in total silence for three full minutes.
“Your second long paragraph makes a direct accusation. The entire rest of the article only presents data. You deeply need to either entirely commit to the bold accusation with supporting, hard evidence, or completely rewrite the second paragraph strictly as a question.”
“The hard evidence is the massive statistical anomaly.”
“The anomaly heavily supports a question. You absolutely have not identified a physical mechanism. What exactly is actually happening inside that sauna?”
“That is exactly what I am desperately trying to find out.”
Alex was deeply quiet for a long moment.
He looked carefully at the massive statistical table she had meticulously assembled.
Then, he looked right at the chaotic Wall of Weird.
“The toxic meteor rocks are deeply buried in the ground all over Smallville,” Alex said slowly, his tone totally flat.
“They quietly leach directly into the water. Into the soil. They slowly irradiate fragile biological systems very gradually.” He paused smoothly.
“What exactly are the hot sauna rocks made of?”
Chloe instantly stopped typing.
She turned incredibly slowly and looked directly at him.
“You really think…”
“I completely think that highly prolonged, intense heat exposure to heavy rocks that might be severely contaminated with trace meteor radiation could definitely have bizarre effects that are incredibly difficult to ever characterize directly from the outside.”
Alex shrugged casually.
“It is just a hypothesis. You would desperately need to actually get inside the sauna to physically confirm it.”
“Which I absolutely cannot do, simply because it is deep in the men’s locker room.”
“Correct.” Alex calmly stood up and smoothly picked up his heavy backpack.
“I have to quickly go. Practice editing. You must commit to the mechanism or entirely cut the accusation.”
He quietly left.
Chloe turned slowly back to her bright computer screen.
She thought: How utterly stupid of me.
Such an incredibly obvious clue right in plain sight, exactly how could I have completely missed that?
Scooped entirely by the new boy.
But exactly how did he somehow know about it in such specific detail and with such absolute certainty?
Her sharp mind instantly provided the rapid answer: Probably the exact same crazy way someone actively knows exactly how to expertly route a totally untraceable email…
She quickly grabbed the nearest yellow notepad, furiously typed the bold words ANONYMOUS BENEFACTOR right in the corner, and drew three heavy circles directly around it.