The need to hide my training from everyone, especially my father, placed serious limits on my workout routine.
I couldn’t just fly around, not on Earth or in space.
The risk of being spotted by Dad, Cecil’s spies, or even a random camera was too high.
I couldn’t even order a costume from Art because he’s my father’s best friend.
He would have told Nolan everything sooner or later.
Training my strength and endurance the classic way, by getting into fights with some team of heroes or something similar, was also out of the question for obvious reasons.
Even though that’s one of the most effective methods.
I found an unexpected and, I thought, rather elegant solution.
I needed to train my flight speed, endurance, strength, and also learn to hold my breath.
What environment could provide all the necessary stress while also serving as natural camouflage from prying eyes?
The ocean, of course.
The ocean could give me all of that.
From the need to hold my breath during training to the immense pressure of the water column naturally testing my durability.
Swimming underwater was fundamentally no different from flying for me.
I didn’t actually swim, I flew underwater, because swimming implies pushing off the water with limbs, fins, or jet thrust.
I didn’t do that.
The natural mechanism of flight was much more efficient.
The only difference from flying in the atmosphere was greater environmental resistance, which again only benefited my training.
And last but not least, far fewer eyes, cameras, and sensors point into the ocean depths than into the atmosphere or even space.
Visual surveillance is useless underwater, and for other methods like sonar, I might stand out from marine life, but that’s not as critical.
The deep sea often gives my father and other heroes a chance to demonstrate their usefulness to the planet.
At worst, they’d mistake me for another kraken or something.
About a month after gaining my powers, I got a chance to test my theories in practice.
Until then, I’d been keeping a low profile, diligently pretending to be completely absorbed in trying to awaken my abilities.
That day, a Friday, the third of the month, Nolan and the Guardians of the Globe got into a major brawl in the Far East.
Last time, that particular fight ended with him being gone from the planet for nearly a week.
Officially, he’d been kidnapped by aliens, but knowing my father, I suspected he’d chased his rivals into space to deal with them away from human eyes, like he did with the Flaxans.
As luck would have it, our semester grades were being handed out that morning at school, so I couldn’t skip class to start training right after Dad disappeared.
But I wasn’t going to waste time.
As soon as I got home, I charmed my mother with my perfect grades.
That was natural for me, but Debbie never missed a chance to threaten me with the end of the school year and punishments for bad grades, as if I’d ever brought home anything below a B.
After confirming through the news and the internet that the story was following the familiar path, I got ready for a run.
“Yeah, Mom,” I said casually, already putting on my running shoes.
“Since I don’t have homework to do yet, I’m going to run a little longer today.
Maybe stop by the stadium.
They put in new equipment for the student olympics.”
Debbie looked up from the news for a second, gave me a distracted glance, and then what I said finally sank in.
“Just be careful,” she said, surprisingly not arguing.
“If you feel any tingling in your knees or back, or any pain, stop immediately.
Okay?”
“Deal.”
It was surprising.
She didn’t even start her usual speech about how I was too young to run marathon distances.
Was it because of Nolan?
Usually she acts, especially in front of me, like she doesn’t worry about her husband at all.
She just jokes that if he’s not back for dinner, there’ll be more cutlets for us.
But in reality, she always saves a portion for him in the fridge.
“Don’t worry so much,” I tried to cheer her up.
“You know he always comes back.”
“Usually I can sit here and watch on TV as he beats up hundred-foot monsters all day.
But when he disappears into another dimension or into space…” She sighed heavily.
“I can’t help but imagine the worst.”
Mom was being unusually open today.
I should really stay with her for moral support, but I couldn’t miss this training opportunity.
I left Mom to watch the TV and left the house.
I used to worry that after gaining superpowers, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy running anymore.
A normal or even sprinting pace wouldn’t strain my muscles or lungs at all.
But it wasn’t that bad.
Sure, I couldn’t push myself to a seventh sweat like before, but I could still enjoy the music and reach that running trance state where you completely stop paying attention to your surroundings and fully immerse yourself in the music and your thoughts.
And although our physiology means that during physical exertion, including running, blood flows less actively to the brain, which slows down thought processes and makes the brain work less efficiently, I always felt like thinking was easier during a run.
For about fifteen minutes, I ran at a normal pace, but still fast enough that pedestrians turned to look and flinched when I passed them from behind.
Only after I disappeared into the forest, away from prying eyes, did I allow myself to speed up.
Sticking to sparsely populated areas and circling wide around cities, I headed for the Pacific coast.
I’d never thought about it before, but I have another, maybe not super, but still pleasant ability.
I never forget a road.
No, that’s not quite right.
I always navigate easily.
I know where I am, where I came from, and where I need to go.
Even if I close my eyes and fly in a random direction, occasionally changing course, I’ll still know where I came from, how far I’ve traveled, and how to get back, not in meters exactly, but in some intuitive understanding.
It’s like I have a huge three-dimensional model of all the space I’ve explored in my head.
Dad never mentioned it, but it seems Viltrumites don’t need maps.
Maybe it’s part of our natural adaptation to flight, like birds navigate by the Earth’s magnetic field and marine life by ocean currents.
I reached the ocean in ten minutes.
I could have been faster, but then I could forget about being inconspicuous.
Viltrumites are designed for flight, not running.
Yes, we can move quickly on our own two feet, but it’s not nearly as fast as flying, or as fast as that runner on the Guardians of the Globe.
Besides, it’s not very graceful.
I don’t know how that guy gets around the laws of physics, but if I run at full speed, it would be a real disaster for the environment.
The same goes for flying, actually.
Air resistance doesn’t disappear, but I can’t accelerate enough yet for it to be a problem.
I stopped in a rocky cove on the coast.
There was only one fishing village about forty kilometers to the north and no major cities or trade routes nearby.
A pretty secluded spot.
I took off my clothes, hid them among the rocks, and wearing only my swim trunks and MP3 player, finally started the real part of my workout.
At first, I was very cautious.
Afraid of decompression sickness, I made gradual descents to relatively shallow depths.
But no matter how much I experimented, increasing the depth and descent speed, my blood refused to boil.
It seemed that Viltrumite physiology has some natural defense mechanism against rapid pressure changes.
On one hand, that’s good.
On the other hand, that’s one less potential weapon in the upcoming fight with my father, not that I could imagine dragging him to the bottom of the ocean.
The MP3 player, however, wasn’t designed for such dives.
At one point, the water pressure started pressing the buttons on its casing.
The device started glitching, skipping and rewinding songs, and messing with the volume.
I had to surface and hide it with my clothes.
Alright, now let’s see how long I can last.
Swimming away from the shore again, I resolutely flew into the depths.
I quickly discovered that my eyes are not at all suited for deep diving.
It’s not really about me.
Light just doesn’t penetrate the water column very well.
Seaweed and plants only survive in the first hundred or two hundred meters.
Deeper than that, there’s simply not enough light for photosynthesis.
As for the great depths, their inhabitants, though they have highly specialized vision in the bioluminescent spectrum, only need it to see each other and distinguish glowing predators from, say, potential mates.
The yellow and red spectrums disappeared first, almost immediately.
In the first fifty meters, I could see the water in green.
Closer to a hundred meters, the water turned first greenish-blue, then blue-green.
By three hundred meters, all colors had been absorbed by black-blue.
I could still see here, but below me was complete, impenetrable darkness.
And I’ll go down there, but not now.
Orientation underwater presents certain difficulties for a diver.
On the surface, a person navigates using vision, while balance is maintained by the vestibular system, muscle-joint sense, and sensations arising in the internal organs and skin when the body changes position.
They constantly experience the force of gravity and perceive the slightest change in body position in space.
But down here, there’s no familiar support underfoot.
Of all the senses that orient a person in space, only the vestibular system remains, whose otoliths continue to be affected by Earth’s gravity.
But fortunately, I’m not human.
According to my father, I’m ninety-nine point nine nine percent, what did he run a genetic affinity test to cite such precise data?
Thanks to Viltrumite physiology, my vestibular system is on a completely different level compared to a human’s.
But there’s something else helping me orient myself.
I can’t quite pinpoint what it is yet, but I feel myself and my position in the water almost as well as I did in the air.
So even though the depths look pretty scary, I think I can afford to go down there.
But I won’t rush.
I’m currently at a depth of about three hundred meters, and my body is experiencing pressure of about three million pascals, or to be more visual, thirty Earth atmospheres.
That’s a lot, a hell of a lot for a human or any land creature.
Seals swim to such depths, that’s their specialty, but it’s quite tolerable for me.
I can take more, much more, but I also need to consider the greatly increased environmental resistance and the need to account for increased oxygen consumption.
Holding your breath in your bathtub is not the same as holding your breath during a deep dive.
I think this is a good place for my first underwater flight workout and to test what I’m capable of.
Add to library！And Drop Some PS