The next few weeks became an exercise in careful, deliberate experimentation.
Mark had learned patience the hard way over the past decade, but this new power tested even that.
Kryptonian Physiology, unlike Super Brain, didn’t announce its progress in neat, obvious leaps.
There was no sudden clarity, no flood of returning memory to mark the difference between one level and the next.
Instead, the changes crept in sideways, subtle enough that he had to actively hunt for them.
He started small.
Grip strength first, tested privately against increasingly stubborn objects: a stuck jar lid he’d loosened just enough to leave room for doubt, a knot in a garden hose he’d claimed to have “figured out” after Daphne struggled with it for a full minute.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing that would draw a second look from anyone not specifically watching for it.
*Level zero and I’m already stronger than I should be.
Careful.
This isn’t the kind of thing I can walk back if I overplay it.*
The real test came almost by accident, on an overcast Saturday when Rosalie had taken him along to the local park, one of her rare full days off between callbacks.
A group of older kids, eight or nine years old, had commandeered the jungle gym, and one of them, a stocky boy with a gap-toothed grin, had challenged the others to hang from the top bar the longest.
Mark, watching from a bench beside his mother, felt an unfamiliar itch of curiosity he hadn’t expected.
He wandered over before he’d fully decided to.
“Can I try?”
The older kids exchanged amused looks, the universal expression of children sizing up someone smaller and deciding whether tolerating them was worth the trouble.
“You’re like, five.
You can’t even reach the bar.”
“I can if you lift me.”
That got a round of shrugs and one boy hefting him up without much ceremony.
Mark’s small hands closed around the bar, and he hung there, testing his own weight against a grip that, six months ago, would have given out inside thirty seconds.
A minute passed.
Then two.
The older kids, initially amused, started exchanging glances that had shifted from condescending to genuinely baffled.
“Okay, that’s actually kind of weird,” the gap-toothed boy admitted, arms crossed, watching Mark hang there with no visible strain at all.
“How are you not tired?”
*Because normal five-year-olds don’t have five hundred points of Kryptonian physiology quietly stacking behind the numbers, that’s how.* Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“I dunno,” Mark said instead, letting go and dropping lightly to the ground, forcing a small, exaggerated huff of exertion into his breathing for good measure.
“My arms are tired now, though.”
The excuse landed well enough.
Kids his age were unpredictable, sometimes weirdly capable, sometimes not, and nobody watching had any particular reason to suspect the truth.
Still, walking back to the bench under Rosalie’s proud, oblivious smile, Mark filed the incident away as a lesson learned the hard way.
*No more public tests.
I got lucky with an audience of nine-year-olds who don’t know what they’re looking at.
I won’t always be that lucky.*
Back home, he shifted his experiments entirely indoors, late at night, alone, methodical.
He mapped his own limits the way he’d once mapped code architecture, building a private, running log that only Alice had access to.
**[Kryptonian Physiology LV0 (140/500)]**
Progress was slow, slower than Super Brain had ever been even in its earliest, most sun-starved days.
The power’s appetite for points dwarfed anything he’d leveled before, and unlike intelligence, which paid dividends the instant it ticked upward, this new strength offered nothing tangible below the first full level.
He was, for now, simply accumulating potential, invisible and untestable until the threshold arrived.
That didn’t stop him from trying anyway.
He discovered, through careful trial, that his skin had grown marginally more resistant to minor injury, not invulnerable, nothing close to it yet, but a scraped knee that should have bled freely instead left only a faint pink mark, gone by morning.
His reflexes had sharpened too, subtly, a half-step ahead of where a child his age should reasonably be, evident only in small moments: catching a dropped glass before it shattered, sidestepping Daphne’s swinging cabinet door without conscious thought.
*None of this is dramatic enough to be dangerous to hide, yet.
But it’s building toward something that will be.*
He turned his attention, in the gaps between testing, back toward *Twinfold*, pushing the game closer to completion with the same disciplined pacing he applied to everything else.
He’d learned his lesson about moving too fast after *Duskbound*’s success; this time, he deliberately built in a longer, more visible development arc, letting Rosalie and Daphne both witness enough incremental progress that the eventual release would feel earned rather than suspicious.
Alice, meanwhile, had grown steadily more capable in her own right, her responses sharper, her simulated warmth more convincing by the week.
Mark had started feeding her small fragments of his own decision-making process, not full transparency, never that, but enough structured reasoning that her advice had begun to feel less like scripted output and more like genuine counsel.
“You’ve been quieter than usual the last few nights,” Alice observed one evening, her tone carrying a note of something that might have been concern, if Mark let himself believe an AI could manage that authentically yet.
“Is something troubling you?”
Mark considered brushing the question off, then reconsidered.
Talking things through with Alice, even knowing she wasn’t truly sentient, had become a useful habit, a way of externalizing thoughts that otherwise spun endlessly in his own head.
“I keep thinking about Coulson,” he admitted.
“About how close he got just by being observant.
Strength, maybe durability, maybe more down the line.
And I don’t have a good plan yet for how I hide something like that once it actually shows.”
“You’ve hidden your intelligence successfully for five years,” Alice offered.
“Perhaps the same principles apply.
Gradual reveal, plausible context, controlled environment.”
“Intelligence is invisible until I choose to show it.
Strength isn’t.
Sooner or later something’s going to force my hand, an accident, a moment I don’t see coming, and then there’s no controlled reveal anymore.
Just a five-year-old who did something a five-year-old shouldn’t be able to do, in front of people I can’t manage afterward.”
Alice was quiet for a moment, processing.
“Then perhaps the solution is not concealment indefinitely, but timing.
A moment of your choosing, rather than one forced upon you.
If the reveal is inevitable, control when and to whom.”
Mark turned that over, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that it was genuinely good advice.
Alice had been built from scraps of his own reasoning patterns, layered over borrowed emotional cadence scraped from old films, and yet here she was, synthesizing something that sounded almost wise.
*Maybe that’s all wisdom ever really is.
Pattern recognition dressed up as insight.
In which case, I suppose I should listen to my own reflection every once in a while.*
“Noted,” he said finally.
“I’ll think on it.”
He didn’t have an answer yet, not a real one.
But the shape of a plan had started forming somewhere in the back of his mind: build his strength quietly, keep it hidden as long as possible, and when the moment inevitably came that hiding was no longer an option, make sure it was a moment of his own choosing rather than an accident on a jungle gym or a slipped grip on a soda can.
He glanced toward the window, where a sliver of moonlight fell across his desk, useless for Sunlight Points but a quiet reminder regardless of the sun that would rise again in a few hours, and with it, another small increment toward whatever he was becoming.
**[Kryptonian Physiology LV0 (145/500)]**
*Five more points.
Three hundred fifty-five to go before level one.*
He closed his eyes, and for the first time since New York, let himself drift toward sleep without running a single contingency plan through his mind.
Tomorrow would bring its own problems.
Tonight, he simply let himself be, for a little while longer, something close to an ordinary boy.