Year One:
The Citadel — Simulation Arena
The heavy blast doors sealed with a pressurized hiss, followed by the deafening CLACK of the locking mechanisms engaging.
The arena was massive, a sterile expanse of reinforced Flaxan alloys and hard-light projectors. Above me, behind thick layers of kinetic glass, Angstrom Levy and the Mauler Twins stood in the observation deck.
"Serum integration is at twenty percent and rising," one of the Maulers' voices echoed through the overhead speakers, stripped of any usual snark. "Your cellular structure is beginning to rewrite. Brace yourself, Grayson."
I rolled my shoulders, readying my stance. "I'm fine. Boot up the Anissa simulation. Max lethality."
"You shouldn't—" Angstrom started over the comms, but I cut him off.
"Do it."
The air across the room shimmered. A nanotech constructed hard-light projection of Anissa materialized. She wore the same pristine white uniform, the same condescending smirk, and possessed the exact same kinetic data Angstrom had pulled from my suit's recordings during our fight on the beach.
The Maulers said this projection could kill me, so I'd have to engage it with extreme caution, I recalled, pushing off the ground to blitz her. Let's see how round two goes.
Or, so I tried to.
The moment my brain sent the signal to my legs, my body rebelled. It wasn't a cramp or a muscle spasm. It felt as if someone had injected liquid lead directly into my bones.
I stumbled, my boots dragging against the metal floor. My vision blurred, swimming with a blinding, searing heat.
What the fuck?!
"Integration at forty percent," the second Mauler announced, his voice sounding miles away. "His smart atoms are compressing. The density shift is compounding."
Before I could even raise my guard, the Anissa hologram was on me.
WHAM.
The construct's fist buried itself into my chest. The impact was a perfect one-to-one ratio of her actual strength. I gagged, tasting copper, but when I tried to swing back, my arm felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
My heart rate spiked. Anger, hot and irrational, flooded my system.
Move, dammit! I screamed at myself. Move!
Instead, my veins literally began to glow through my skin. A sickening, burning fever washed over me, so intense it felt like my organs were melting. I gasped for air, but my lungs couldn't process the oxygen fast enough.
The projection didn't hesitate. She stepped inside my guard, swept my incredibly heavy legs out from under me, and drove a heel down onto my stomach.
[SIMULATION TERMINATED - LETHAL DAMAGE SUSTAINED]
The projection dissolved, leaving me coughing on my hands and knees on the cold metal floor. Steam was radiating off my skin.
"I warned you," a Mauler said, sounding more fascinated than sympathetic. "You are experiencing a fundamental biological paradox. Your body is accustomed to operating like a combustion engine—burning calories and kinetic energy to move. But the serum is forcing your newly densified smart atoms to collect energy instead."
"It... burns," I choked out, clutching my chest.
"Of course it burns!" the other Mauler chimed in. "You are pulling in ambient radiation, but your nervous system doesn't know how to process it yet. You're overheating. Every time you get angry, your heart rate spikes, forcing that raw, unrefined energy through your system. You're essentially cooking yourself from the inside out."
Every time?! But I'm filled with nothing but anger.
I slowly pushed myself up. My bones felt like they were actively being crushed in a hydraulic press. Instead of taking centuries to naturally accumulate the physical density of an elite warrior like Thragg, the serum was forcing the compression to happen right now. Every micro-tear in my muscles from the hologram's strike was already rebuilding, vastly denser and heavier than a minute ago.
"The capacity is currently negligible," Angstrom's voice added, looking at a data pad. "Your cells can only store a tiny fraction of this solar energy before they overflow. When you instinctively draw on it with your heart racing like that, you burn through your stamina instantly and crash."
I spat a glob of blood onto the floor and forced myself to stand under the crushing weight of my own evolving skeleton.
"Reset it," I said, my voice hoarse.
"Grayson, you need to acclimate—"
"I'll adapt," I cut in. "No pressure, no diamonds. And I need all the diamonds I can get my hands on. Load that bitch up!"
The projection materialized: she blitzed, I burned, and she "killed me" again.
Years Two To Five:
The first twenty-four months in the Citadel were not a training montage. They were a continuous execution loop.
I lost count of how many times the Anissa simulation killed me. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand?
The pain of the serum was a constant, waking nightmare. My blood felt like hot sludge. My muscles felt like they were wrapped in barbed wire. But the physical agony was nothing compared to the psychological torture.
Every time I let my frustration get the better of me—every time I remembered the real Anissa standing over me on the beach, treating me like an insect—my heart rate would climb. And the moment I fought with anger, the mutating smart atoms in my blood reacted by violently rejecting the solar energy they were trying to store.
I would overheat. My limbs would go numb, heavy, and useless. And the hologram would finish me off.
"You're telegraphing again," Angstrom's voice clipped through the speakers on what must have been day six hundred. I was lying in a crater in the center of the arena, nursing a bruised spine. "Your emotional state dictates your kinetic output. Anger is a luxury you can no longer afford."
He ain't wrong, I thought, staring up at the sterile ceiling, my veins glowing with that sickening sensation.
The overconfident guy who thought he could out-muscle the universe had to die in this room. If I wanted to overwhelm the elites of the Viltrumite Empire, I needed to be more honest with my capabilities.
I closed my eyes, forcing my breathing to slow. I focused on the searing heat in my veins, mentally visualizing the chaotic energy. Instead of trying to push it down with sheer force, I stopped fighting the current. I forced my heart rate down to a slow, rhythmic beat.
The glow beneath my skin faded. The crushing weight of my dense bones remained, but the burning fever finally broke.
I opened my eyes. The anger was gone. What replaced it was a terrifying clarity.
"Let's run it again," I said, my voice eerily calm, stripped of any inflection.
Up in the booth, the Maulers exchanged a look.
From that day on, the pain slowly began to subside. By year three, my smart atoms had stabilized at their new, terrifying density. That was when Angstrom and the Maulers stopped testing my patience and started testing my limits.
Hyper-Gravity:
"Let's see if those new bones can hold," a Mauler said over the comms. "Last time you were here, you struggled at 300 times Earth's norm."
"But that was when you were just a developing Viltumite," the second Mauler continued. "Now you're something else entirely, so we need to reestablish how far you can go."
"Cranking artificial gravity to fifty times Earth's norm," the other one said, hitting the pads. "Let's see how that new density feels."
The air in the room instantly felt like solid concrete. Gravity is just constant kinetic pressure, and under 50x—then 150x, then 300x—my smart atoms were forced to continuously burn my tiny reserves of stored solar energy just to keep my skeleton from collapsing into dust.
To survive, my body learned it couldn't just rely on dense muscle anymore. A microscopic, skin-tight bio-electric field began to hum just millimeters above my skin, pushing back against the gravity. By simply standing up under this localized singularity, I was actively training my cells to process and output solar energy as a continuous, stable force field, rather than just explosive bursts.
Kinetic Absorption:
Next came the heavy artillery.
I stood at the center of the arena while the Maulers unsealed automated Flaxan railguns and concentrated plasma cannons from the walls.
The exercise was simple; I wasn't allowed to block or dodge.
When the first railgun slug hit my chest, it didn't just hurt—it threatened to overload my system. The mutated smart atoms actively ate the thermal and kinetic energy of the blast. If I didn't regulate it, the sudden influx of energy caused my body to involuntarily and violently discharge it in uncontrolled shockwaves.
Something an elite Viltrumite would easily exploit.
I had to stand there, take tank shells and plasma bolts directly to the face, and force my body to absorb the kinetic payload perfectly. I learned to store the violent energy deep in my cells without a single spark bleeding off my skin.
Atmospheric Deprivation:
"Venting the room," Angstrom announced flatly.
The massive vents cycled, sucking every molecule of oxygen out of the arena, dropping it to a near-vacuum. Normal Viltrumites could hold their breath for weeks, but they still ran on a biological combustion-like engine. When I tried to fight the Anissa hologram in the vacuum, I burned through my oxygen reserves in minutes.
My body panicked as my vision began blurring. But as I suffocated, my smart atoms were forced into a paradigm shift. To keep my brain alive, the atoms stopped looking for oxygen and began synthesizing my stored solar radiation directly into life-sustaining cellular energy.
I didn't need to breathe anymore. The switch from a combustion engine to a nuclear battery was complete.
I stood in the airless, silent vacuum, the crushing weight of four hundred times Earth's gravity pulling at a body that had just absorbed the payload of a Flaxan artillery strike.
I looked up at the observation deck and gave a slow, single nod.
By the end of the fourth year, my body was a fortress. The environmental drills had forged my cells into a perfect, self-sustaining reactor.
However, I knew I still needed to refine the raw power of that reactor.
The Swarm:
"Initiating Endurance Protocol," Angstrom said over the comms. "Loading the Reanimen swarm."
Thanks to the flash drive I had ripped from D.A. Sinclair's lab back when he first attacked, the Maulers had perfectly digitized the Reanimen's combat data. The hard-light projectors whirred to life, and suddenly, I was surrounded by thousands of augmented, cybernetic corpses.
The rule was simple: no massive shockwaves that could wipe them out in a single, continent-shattering blast. I had to dispatch them with only hand-to-hand combat.
For the first few weeks, it was exhausting. But things changed when a Reaniman finally managed to land a blow against my chest, I didn't just tank it—my bio-electric field instinctively absorbed the kinetic impact, converting it into a micro-charge of energy. In the exact same motion, I expended that exact amount of energy to rip the cyborg's head off.
The Maulers called this phenomenon Thermodynamic Equilibrium.
The input matched the output, and the kinetic loop was flawless. I fought the Reanimen continuously for an entire month, without sleep, without food, and without a single drop of sweat. When the final Reaniman fell, I wasn't just standing—my battery was fully charged. My stamina had become truly, terrifyingly infinite.
Handicap Sparring:
To ensure I wasn't just relying on my new strength, the Maulers stripped it away.
"Flight stabilizers locked. Offensive kinetic strikes locked," a Mauler announced. "Loading Proxy: Battle Beast."
A massive, feline brute wielding a heavy energy mace materialized in the arena. I couldn't fly, and I couldn't throw a punch. I was only allowed to win through grapples, parries, and counters.
The proxy roared, swinging the mace with enough simulated force to level a mountain.
I didn't try to stop it with brute strength. I stepped inside the swing, caught the proxy's wrist, and siphoned the kinetic momentum of his own swing directly into my reserves. The massive mace instantly decelerated, while my own body supercharged.
Using his stolen momentum, I twisted his arm, shattered his elbow, and drove him into the reinforced floor with a localized gravity lock. The proxy dissolved into pixels.
The Anissa Loop:
It all came down to this. The benchmark.
"Boot it up," I said softly to the empty room.
The Anissa projection materialized. We had done this dance tens of thousands of times. I knew her every micro-movements. I knew the exact twitch of her shoulder before she threw a strike.
But this time, I wasn't a leaky reactor; I'd mastered absolute energy suppression.
She launched forward, moving at that impossible, blinding speed. She threw the exact same straight right that had crushed me back on the beach.
I kept my internal energy as calm as a dark, still ocean beneath my skin.
WHAM.
I caught her fist.
The shockwave rippled through the arena, but I didn't move an inch. My bio-electric field absorbed the kinetic payload instantly.
Anissa's hologram tried to pull back, but my grip was like a vice. In the exact 0.001-second window of impact, I released a single, concentrated fraction of my stored solar-kinetic energy.
I smoothly stepped forward and drove a palm strike into her throat. The kinetic output was so perfectly concentrated, so absolutely devoid of wasted energy, that the hard-light projector sparked and overloaded, instantly terminating the simulation.
The silence in the arena was deafening. My breathing was perfectly even. My heart rate hadn't risen a single beat.
I looked up at the observation deck. Angstrom and the Maulers were staring down at me, completely silent. The condescension from year one was entirely gone, replaced by the quiet, heavy realization of what they had just built.
"Angstrom," I called out, my voice cutting through the stillness like a knife.
"Yes, Mark?" he replied, sounding more like a subordinate than a partner for the first time.
I rolled my shoulders, feeling the terrifying, silent power humming perfectly beneath my skin.
"Let's get the dimensional gate rolling," I said. "I think we're done playing in the sandbox. It's time to go get some variants."