The abyss didn’t mess around.
Sunlight hadn’t reached here for millions of years.
Atmospheric pressure was measured in the hundreds of atmospheres.
The trenches could swallow dozens of Everests.
They say life on Earth began here.
If that’s true, the birth wasn’t easy.
Just look at the local inhabitants.
Deformed by pressure, cold, and chronic starvation, their bloated bodies would put any movie monster to shame, from cheap Cronenberg knockoffs to legendary xenomorphs.
Monsters of the deep.
Another toothy sack drifted past me.
A hyper-trophied mouth full of crooked, mismatched teeth.
A long, bag-like body, about twenty meters long.
Tiny eyes barely capable of distinguishing light, shadow, and a couple shades of green.
Its mouth never closed.
I think it hunted by simply swimming with its mouth open, hoping something would accidentally swim inside.
Or maybe its half-blind eyes would spot someone emitting their own light.
Then one of two things: either the toothy sack would swallow the glowworm, or the glowworm would turn out to be bait for an even larger predator.
This place had plenty of those.
My camera, thanks to my new friend’s amazing and versatile power, had already captured a dozen creatures even larger than this toothy sack.
Real, motherfucking leviathans.
Monsters from the abyss.
But they only looked terrifying to the untrained eye.
The local inhabitants, scary on the outside, turned out to be fragile, almost toy-like.
When one of them, noticing me within range of its bio-luminescence, tried to take a bite out of some Viltrumite meat, it only broke its teeth on me.
Literally.
Ten-centimeter fangs in the half-meter mouth of a meter-and-a-half-long fish, which really shouldn’t grow longer than fifteen millimeters by modern scientific understanding, crumbled against my skin like cheap clay.
And it wasn’t even entirely because of my Viltrumite durability.
The biting force was completely laughable for such a terrifying mouth.
If an ordinary person had been in my place, they’d have only gotten bruises and contusions.
The creature’s teeth were as fragile as styrofoam.
Still, the ferocity of the deep-sea fish worked in my favor.
At some point, I realized I could sense their approach before I even saw them in my flashlight’s beam.
I didn’t understand what that sense was based on, or if it would work outside of water.
But in trying to understand and develop it, I even learned to swim here without any light at all.
It was a very strange experience, but interesting.
The abyss was beautiful in its own way.
Those dim little lights flickering here and there, like moving, nearby stars.
You never knew if the next light belonged to a predator trying to eat you or something harmless.
That was the abyss.
Creepy in its own way.
Beautiful in its own way.
But it didn’t live up to my expectations at all.
The local wildlife only seemed dangerous.
In reality, they posed no more threat than a stray dog.
And even that life only existed in oases of thermal abundance, near geothermal vents.
As for the local gigantism, I think it was because the food that reached them was simply too poor.
Even if there was enough for survival, it lacked all the necessary trace elements.
These giant fish were something like rickets victims.
They were literally rotting inside from various deficiencies.
The truly scary creatures, both large and fierce and genuinely strong, lived higher up.
Keeping powerful muscles toned, like Ave Maria’s, required lots of good food.
So she could probably come down here, but she’d have no reason to.
Except out of curiosity, like me, or to lie low, both literally and figuratively.
***
Enough.
I’d finally visited the deepest ocean trench.
I’d even found life here and filmed a whole hour’s worth of material that I could use somewhere, for a nature documentary or an article.
Time to surface.
The ocean had given me a lot.
Since I’d first entered the water, wanting to test my strength under a couple hundred meters of pressure, a lot of water had flowed under the bridge.
I’d become much more durable and stronger.
I’d learned to hold my breath for several hours, I could go longer, but I never had that much free time.
I understood my limits better.
I’d tested myself many times in fights with real sea monsters, not those rachitic bottom-dwellers.
I’d even come up with a few tricks in case I had to fight underwater.
A significant part of that progress was due to training, not just natural aging.
I thought I could take a break from deep diving for a while.
***
I surfaced right by the shore.
I’d traveled the whole way from the continent underwater on one breath.
I was about to grab my things from my hiding spot when I noticed something was wrong.
I hadn’t yet consciously realized it, but I felt something in the air.
No, in the space around me.
Some kind of disturbance.
Something unnatural.
My eye caught a lonely blade of grass, pressed down closer to its middle.
This was a rocky cove.
There wasn’t much grass or sand here, but lots of stones and small pebbles.
This lonely blade stood out by its presence, and by the fact that its stem continued to lie on the stones as if something was pressing on it.
As if someone was standing there.
There it was.
Realizing what I was looking for, I noticed a strange, colorless shimmer in the air.
A human throat, I could tell by the feel of warm skin through the fabric of thermal underwear and the structure of the neck bones, was squeezed in my hand.
I pressed slightly on the soldier’s larynx.
He started to jerk, revealing the outlines of a uniform and helmet.
I squeezed just hard enough to stop him from breathing, but not killing him.
“Who are you, and what do you want from me?” I said threateningly.
“Let him go, you freak!” someone next to me barked, and a rifle barrel pressed against my temple.
“Freak?” I asked coldly.
“Stand down, Corporal.
Lower your weapon.” A familiar voice from my past life.
From the edge of the cliff, right where my clothes were lying, appeared a gray-haired man in a classic suit with a red tie.
“Easy, kid.” He raised his hand in a gesture meant to calm me.
“I’m here to talk.”
A cold gaze from a man who’d seen every conceivable kind of cruelty.
A strong chin with a dimple.
A bald spot reaching his crown, gray hair hanging from his temples to his shoulders.
And of course, the most striking detail: a burn scar pulling his mouth into a smirk when he spoke.
Cecil Stedman.
The current director of the Global Defense Agency.
***
Shit.
It was bad that he’d somehow found me.
But better him than someone else.
If there was anyone in the government I’d risked turning to for help, it was Cecil.
I roughly knew where the line was that he was willing to cross to protect Earth.
But most importantly, I was almost sure his motto was “Earth above all,” not “everything for myself,” like Erickson.
Besides, I didn’t yet know where I’d slipped up or how long they’d been watching my training.
I’d been lazy about changing my hiding spot.
It was just so convenient to hide my clothes there.
And I’d been training in my costume and mask for quite a while now.
They already knew me as the guy who’d helped Atom Eve.
But maybe still not as Mark Grayson.
“Then you should have started with talking, not pointing a dozen guns at my face.” I replied, but I still let the soldier go.
His face was turning blue from lack of oxygen.
Cecil spread his hands.
“Standard precaution.
My security.
I’m just a helpless old man.
You’re more dangerous than all these soldiers with their guns combined.” Then he suddenly smiled, almost paternally.
“You know yourself that an ‘unarmed Viltrumite’ is an oxymoron.
Every single one of you is a weapon.”
Well, fuck.
Cecil gave his men some kind of signal.
They became invisible again and moved a short distance away.
I could hear their footsteps.
A gesture of politeness?
Because really, I could kill him at any moment, and those soldiers couldn’t stop me.
He hadn’t gotten his teleporter yet.
“So you know who I am,” I said, keeping my cool.
I’m not your enemy, or America’s, or Earth’s.”
“Oh, our politicians would argue with the second one.
With that symbol on your costume.” He smiled again.
He smiled too often and made jokes.
Was he trying to win over a teenager?
Or was it just that in my past life, I’d met him after my father’s betrayal and the massacre he’d caused, which put a darker stamp on our conversations?
“That way, no one will suspect I’m Omni-Man’s son,” I explained.
“Yes, I suppose so,” Stedman agreed.
“You still haven’t answered my question.” I walked past Stedman to my things.
The costume might be waterproof, but washing and drying my face wouldn’t hurt.
“The son of Omni-Man, having gained his powers, doesn’t go to his father for advice or guidance.
Instead, he starts training in secret from everyone, almost everyone.” Great, they knew about William and Eve too.
“He orders a costume from a notorious Russian craftswoman on the other side of the planet, just to avoid going to his father’s friend, Arthur Rosenbaum.
And the costume itself.
A red star and a yellow outline on a red background.
You might as well draw a hammer and sickle on your chest.
The whole world thinks Russia has a new superhero, their answer to Omni-Man.
Do you even know what they’re calling you online?”
I shrugged and calmly took off my mask to rinse my face with clean water from a bottle I’d brought.
I wasn’t going to make excuses for the costume’s design.
I didn’t give a shit about politics.
The joke had gone too far, sure, but I’d never signed up to be specifically an American superhero.
Isn’t that what the Guardians of the Globe preach?
Besides, the design was temporary, until the problem with my father was solved.
“How long have you been watching me?” I asked, to buy some time and think about my conversation strategy while drying my hair.
“Where did I screw up?”
“Mark,” Cecil used my name for the first time, sitting his old ass on the largest rock.
His knees must have been tired of standing.
“I’ve been watching your father since his first appearance on Earth.
When he settled in our country, got a wife and a child.
Do you think there was even one chance in a billion that we wouldn’t watch the son of the most powerful superhero?”
“Yes, that’s obvious.” I let a little of my annoyance seep into my words.
“I’ve found your damn bugs in our house a hundred times.
I’m asking about something else.
How fast did you realize I’d gained powers?”
“From the very beginning,” Stedman grinned genuinely, I mean the grin wasn’t caused by his scar.
“We caught your first accidental flight on camera.
When you started sneaking off to train, it got harder.
But thanks to that incident with Ave Maria, we were able to figure out where you entered the ocean and where you’d been running.
So, are you going to answer my question?
Why don’t you trust your own father?
He’s the most popular hero on the planet.
We’ve lost count of how many times he’s saved the world.
Everyone loves him.
Doesn’t such a man deserve trust?
Especially since he’s your own father.”
The way he listed my father’s accolades, the whole conversation.
Stedman thought he understood me and my motives.
And I suspected I understood him correctly.
“Not trust is the wrong word,” I corrected him.
“I’m a hundred percent sure that the story my father told you and the world, about his noble mission to protect Earth and the enlightened Viltrum, is a blatant lie.”
“But he really does protect Earth,” Cecil countered.
And this time I couldn’t tell if the smirk was natural or caused by his crooked face.
I snorted in response, moistened my throat with water from the bottle, then casually threw the half-empty bottle behind me, toward where that asshole corporal who’d called me a freak had been standing.
Behind me came a muffled helmeted shriek of curses and the sound of a body hitting the gravel.
Got him.
I trusted my intuition, that strange sense of wrongness in space, and I got him.
“So he has some other goal, one that for the time being involves protecting Earth.”
“And that goal?” Now the old man couldn’t quite hide the interest in his voice.
Hadn’t they figured it out themselves yet?
“I think it’s me.” Looking the old man in the eye, I answered calmly.
“He’s waiting for his son, a hybrid of a Viltrumite and an Earth woman, to manifest his superpowers.
To show the promise of cross-breeding our species.”