The days that followed settled into something almost peaceful.
Rosalie threw herself back into auditions with a newfound confidence that came from having a real credit to her name, even if the film itself was still months from release.
Caleb had already started talking her up around town, and two smaller casting directors had reached out on his recommendation alone.
Daphne resumed her usual routine of managing the household and fussing over Mark’s sun exposure, a habit she’d never quite broken even after all these years, though she’d long since given up trying to enforce it with any real conviction.
Mark split his time between *Twinfold*’s development, Alice’s continued refinement, and the quiet, patient accumulation of Sunlight Points that had become as natural to him now as breathing.
**[Sunlight Points: 4,890]**
He’d taken to spending long stretches of the afternoon out in the yard, ostensibly playing, in reality lying flat on his back in the grass with his eyes closed, soaking in every available minute of sunlight while his mind worked through code architecture or game balance or, more often lately, contingency plans for a world he knew was about to get considerably more dangerous.
*Obadiah Stane.
The Ten Rings.
Afghanistan.
If the timeline’s holding anywhere close to the comics and the version of events Jarvis let slip, Tony’s got what, seven or eight years before that cave?
Maybe less, if this world’s already diverging.*
He had no way to be certain how faithfully this version of events would track the story he remembered.
Cathy Dale’s downfall hadn’t happened in any timeline he knew of, which meant his own presence had already started rippling outward in ways he couldn’t fully predict.
That uncertainty gnawed at him more than he liked to admit.
A world he could no longer perfectly predict was a world where his foreknowledge, his greatest hidden advantage, grew less reliable by the day.
*All the more reason to get stronger on my own terms, instead of leaning on secondhand memories of a story that might not even play out the same way anymore.*
**[Sunlight Points: 5,000]**
The number Mark had been waiting for finally arrived on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, sunlight pouring warm and unbroken across the backyard grass while Daphne busied herself inside with laundry, entirely unaware that the boy dozing peacefully under a tree was, in fact, wide awake and about to cross a threshold five years in the making.
*Finally.*
Mark sat up slowly, glancing toward the house to make sure no one was watching, then closed his eyes and focused inward.
*Level up Super Brain.*
**[Super Brain LV9 → LV10]**
**[MAX LEVEL REACHED]**
**[New Superpower Unlocked: Kryptonian Physiology (Base)]**
The notification hit him like a physical jolt, a rush of sensation that had nothing to do with intelligence at all, unlike every previous level-up before it.
His skin prickled.
His pulse, already unnaturally steady thanks to years of Super Brain’s influence, seemed to slow further, settling into something calmer and more deliberate. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping dot com.
The sunlight on his skin, always pleasant, always the source of his points, now felt like something else entirely, warmth sinking past skin and muscle, settling somewhere deeper, humming faintly under his ribs.
*Kryptonian physiology.
Not just brains anymore.*
He held very still, cataloguing the changes with the same careful precision he applied to everything else, refusing to let excitement override caution.
He reached out and picked up a stone from the garden border, turning it over in his small hand, testing his grip.
Nothing dramatic yet, no obvious surge of strength, though something in the way his fingers closed around the stone felt subtly different, more assured, more solid.
**[Kryptonian Physiology LV0 (0/500)]**
*A new meter.
Of course.
Nothing comes free.*
The cost had jumped considerably, five hundred points for the first level of this new power compared to the mere hundred that had unlocked Super Brain’s first tier all those years ago.
At his current, admittedly improved collection rate, that would still take weeks, maybe longer, depending on how aggressively he chased sunlight going forward.
He sat with the revelation for a long moment, turning the stone over and over between his fingers, feeling the last decade of struggle, sunburns dodged, tantrums faked, hours spent lying in patches of light while adults fussed over him, finally, tangibly, pay off into something new.
*Ten years of raw intelligence.
Now the body starts catching up.*
He thought back to the comic he remembered from his old life, the one that had somehow followed him into this one and rewritten the rules of his entire existence.
Superman’s powers hadn’t come all at once, not in most tellings.
Flight, invulnerability, heat vision, super strength, super speed, freeze breath, each one a separate thread woven from the same underlying physiology, all of it fueled by a yellow sun.
*If this power scales the way Super Brain did, level by level, then somewhere down that five-hundred-point road is durability that shrugs off bullets.
Strength that could lift a car.
Maybe more, eventually, if the comic’s cheat is generous enough to go all the way.*
The thought sent a thrill through him that had nothing childish about it at all, despite the small body it moved through.
*I won’t just be smart anymore.
I’ll actually be able to do something with it.*
That evening, once Rosalie had come home from a callback that had gone, by her own excited account, “better than any audition of my entire life,” and once the house had settled into its familiar post-dinner quiet, Mark sat alone at his computer, running a private diagnostic he’d built specifically for moments like this.
“Alice, I need you to log something for me.
“Understood.
Recording.”
“New capability unlocked today.
Details to follow as testing permits.
For now, mark it as classified, tier one, no external access under any circumstance.” He paused, considering.
“Not even for Jarvis, if he ever comes knocking again.”
“Noted and secured.”
Mark leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, mind already racing ahead to the practical questions this new power raised.
How would he test strength without drawing attention?
How would invulnerability, if and when it arrived, interact with the ordinary bumps and scrapes a five-year-old was expected to accumulate?
He couldn’t very well walk away from a fall down the stairs without a scratch and expect Daphne not to notice.
*Slow.
Careful.
The way I’ve done everything else.*
He’d have to test in private, incrementally, the same disciplined patience that had kept his secret intact through hacking incidents and SHIELD surveillance and a face-to-face conversation with a government agent on a New York boardwalk.
Rushing now, after everything he’d survived to get here, would be its own kind of foolish.
Still, alone in his room with the lights off and the house quiet around him, Mark allowed himself one small experiment.
He picked up a pencil from his desk, gripped it between two fingers, and squeezed, gently at first, then harder, watching for any sign of unusual resistance in the wood.
*Crack.*
The pencil snapped clean in half, nothing remarkable in itself, any child could break a pencil.
But Mark had felt the exact moment it gave, the wood’s structure yielding to a pressure that hadn’t required nearly the effort it should have.
A small thing.
A meaningless thing, on its own.
But a beginning.
He swept the broken pieces into the trash, wiped down the desk out of habit more than necessity, and climbed into bed with a rare, unguarded smile on his face, the kind he hadn’t worn since long before Coulson had sat down beside him on that boardwalk.
*Ten years down.
However many more it takes, I’m not doing this halfway.*
Outside his window, the last of the day’s light faded into a deep California dusk, and somewhere in the quiet dark of his room, five thousand points spent and counting steadily back upward from zero, Mark closed his eyes and, for the first time in longer than he could remember, slept simply because he wanted to, not because the performance demanded it.