By age seven, Mason had reached a realization that would have made his former twenty-six-year-old self laugh: the hardest thing about having the power to shatter a mountain wasn’t the combat, it was the acting.
He was currently sitting in a second grade classroom, surrounded by children who were essentially made of wet tissue paper and loud noises.
The teacher, Mrs.
Gable, was droning on about long division, while Mason was busy trying to hold a pencil without snapping it like a twig.
‘Focus, Mason.
It’s just graphite and cedar.
It’s not a weapon.
It’s a tool for mediocre education,’ he thought, his brow furrowed in intense concentration.
A kid named Tyler, a bowl-cut enthusiast with a penchant for being an absolute prick, leaned over and hissed, “Hey, weirdo.
Why are you sweating?
It’s just math.”
Mason didn’t look up.
‘Because, Tyler, if I lose focus for one second, this pencil becomes a kinetic projectile that will exit your skull and traverse three zip codes.
Shut the fuck up.’
“I’m fine, Tyler,” Mason said aloud, pitching his voice into the perfect ‘mildly annoyed but harmless’ register.
“You’re a freak,” Tyler whispered, emboldened by the lack of reaction.
He reached out and flicked Mason’s ear.
In a normal world, that’s a playground nuisance.
In this universe, for a Saiyan whose cells were vibrating with the energy of a localized sun, it was a test of god-tier restraint.
Mason felt the ‘itch’, that deep, primal Saiyan urge to turn around and paint the chalkboard with Tyler’s lunch.
Instead, Mason let out a long, slow breath.
He felt the green heat under his skin recede.
Mason then looked up at the ceiling and thought, ‘Steve, if you’re watching this, I hope you’re enjoying the blue balls.’
The ‘fun’ usually started after school, in the “Safety Room.”
David had spent the last three years turning their basement into a bunker that would have made a survivalist weep with envy.
It was reinforced with layers of scrap tank plating and high-density rubber.
It was the only place Mason could breathe without feeling like he was walking on eggshells.
“Okay, Mase.
Target practice,” David said, donning a pair of heavy-duty industrial earmuffs.
He pulled a lever, and a heavy iron plate swung out from the wall.
“Give it ten percent.
Just ten.”
Mason stood in the center of the room.
He closed his eyes, letting the ‘Hold Back’ mask slip.
For a second, his hair drifted upward, caught in a static discharge of his own making.
‘Ten percent.
Right.’
He lunged.
It wasn’t a punch; it was a blur.
The sound wasn’t a thud, but a crack that reverberated through the foundation of the house.
The iron plate didn’t just dent; it folded like origami, the center of it torn clean through.
David stared at the wreckage, then at his seven-year-old son.
“Ten percent, Mason.
I said ten.”
“That was ten, Dad,” Mason said, his voice flat.
He wasn’t trying to show off; he was just stating a terrifying fact.
“I think it’s actually closer to eight.
My internal scale is shifting.”
David rubbed his face, his hands trembling slightly as he reached for a clipboard.
“At this rate, by the time you hit puberty, you’re going to be a walking extinction event.
Your mother is already looking into buying a literal mountain in the Rockies just so you can sneeze in peace.”
“Is she still on the ‘burn-book’ thing?” Mason asked, hopping onto a reinforced crate.
“She’s moved on to tracking satellite trajectories,” David muttered.
“She’s convinced the Global Defense Agency has a ‘signature’ for people like you.
She’s been building a Faraday cage for the entire attic.”
Elena walked down the stairs then, carrying a tray of protein-dense sliders—about twenty of them.
She looked at the ruined iron plate, then at Mason.
She didn’t scold him.
She just walked over and ruffled his hair.
“You did well, honey,” she said, her voice like velvet wrapped around a razor blade.
“But remember what we practiced.
If a supe ever lands in the street?
If you see a cape?
What do you do?”
“Run, hide, and act like a coward,” Mason recited, grabbing three sliders at once.
“Exactly,” Elena said, her smile not reaching her eyes.
“Let the idiots in spandex die for the cameras.
You are not a pawn, Mason.
You are our son.
And if any ‘Hero’ tries to draft you into their little war, I’ll find out what they’re allergic to and feed it to them in their sleep.”
‘God, I love this woman,’ Mason thought, mid chew.
‘She’s absolutely batshit, but she’s the only one who realizes that in this world, being a “Hero” is just a fancy way of saying “government-funded casualty.”‘
“I saw Omni-Man on the news today,” David said, his voice dropping an octave.
“He saved a cruise ship in the Atlantic.
People are calling him a god.”
Mason froze.
The name hit him like a physical weight.
He knew the truth.
He knew what was coming.
He knew that the ‘god’ in white and red was currently scouting the planet for a hostile takeover.
‘And here I am, eating sliders and learning long division,’ Mason mused, looking at his small, powerful hands.
‘I’ve got the engine of a star, but I’m living in a house held together by scrap metal and a mother’s paranoia.’
He looked at David and Elena, two normal, fragile humans who were risking everything to keep a monster in a cradle.
‘I’m not going to let him do it,’ Mason decided, the golden light in his chest flared for a microsecond.
‘When the time comes, I’m not playing the coward.
I’ll be the thing that keeps the shadows off this house.
Even if I have to tear the sky apart to do it.’
“Mase?
You okay?” David asked, noticing the intensity in his son’s gaze.
Mason blinked, the “normal kid” mask sliding back into place with practiced ease.
“Yeah, Dad.
Just thinking.
Can I have more milk?”