Preschool was the last place Ethan wanted to go.
Still, it was necessary. Too much depended on looking like a normal child or at least like a "wonderfully gifted" one, rather than something that triggered questions.
He was four when his mother enrolled him in a private preschool on the Upper West Side. The building was bright and spotless, designed to calm wealthy parents: soft colors, rounded furniture, warm light spilling through wide windows. The teachers were well trained, well paid, and most important attentive. Nobody worked here by accident.
For Ethan, the place was overstimulating. Every day became a test of control, because children had no sense of distance or boundaries. Fortunately, his mind moved faster than his body, so he could learn rules in real time, correct impulses, and match the pace of the room.
The children moved without restraint. They shoved, grabbed sleeves, shouted, laughed too loudly. They crashed into each other and forgot a second later. They lacked control making them dangerous in a different way. Instinct noticed difference long before language could name it.
On the first day, Ethan made a decision.
He would play the part of a bright child who still felt grounded. Not strange. Not too quiet. Not too perfect.
So he began ruining his own precision.
He learned to move inefficiently. To hesitate before standing. To stumble when he ran too fast. To let toys slip from his hands instead of holding them with perfect balance. Sometimes a fall was safer than flawless coordination.
It didn't take much effort. His body already existed far beyond what it showed the world: strength, density, resilience everything hidden beneath the surface. Control didn't mean having no power. It meant refusing to reveal it too soon.
When another child bumped into him, he let himself fall. When someone tugged his arm, he allowed himself to be pulled, as if resistance simply wasn't an option. When teachers watched, he behaved exactly as expected never too fast, never too slow. Smart enough to impress. Never enough to become a problem.
He preferred to stay unnoticed.
And yet growth continued.
He felt it as a steady pressure beneath his skin. Sunlight reached him through classroom windows, through playground fencing, through the glass of his apartment. Even indirect exposure fed the body's evolution. Energy accumulated, stabilized, and locked itself into structures that did not recognize limits.
The interface reflected the changes with ruthless precision. The curves continued rising, but differently than before. Early development had been explosive tiny increments of energy produced visible shifts. Now the lines stretched and flattened, as if the system had moved beyond building foundations into refining something already dominant.
Growth slowed.
Not because it weakened.
Because each step meant far more.
That was comforting.
Slow progress meant safety. Until he became untouchable, there was no reason to risk exposure.
Preschool taught him something else as well: how the world was structured. Children spoke freely, repeating fragments of adult conversations where their parents worked, where they flew, what they bought, how much the new apartment cost. Money slipped into speech as if it were air.
"New condo."
"Private lessons."
"Summer program overseas."
Ethan listened and stored everything.
Teachers were another system worth studying. Rules were applied selectively. Expectations shifted unconsciously. Reputation often formed faster than reality. What a child was "supposed to be" mattered more than what the child actually was.
By five, he noticed something else: memory stopped being an action. It simply existed. One glance and information settled permanently complete, organized, unchanged. When a teacher read, Ethan absorbed the page as a whole: layout, content, punctuation. When a child spoke, he remembered words alongside pauses, tone, and posture.
Nothing faded. Nothing blurred.
His mind didn't feel fast.
It felt wide. Strangely light as if the world had finally shrunk enough to fit inside it.
He started thinking about the future. Not dramatically. Logistically.
He would need resources not now, but eventually. Money meant independence, and independence meant choosing how visible he could afford to be. With a mind like his, violence was inefficient. Why break systems when they could be redirected, repositioned, and used more safely?
He refused to rely on others for income. Especially not Vought.
That meant building something of his own.
Slowly. Quietly.
With perfect memory and growing intelligence, time stopped being an enemy. He could be patient while others rushed.
The slower the growth, the safer everything remained. Every increase in significance demanded caution at least until the day he surpassed Homelander.
By the end of preschool, Ethan Cole was unremarkable in appearance, yet "shockingly intelligent" in the eyes of adults. Teachers called him a wonder child.
Polite. Calm. Bright, but never excessive.
The kind of student remembered vaguely and never worried about.
Exactly as planned.
Inside, the interface continued its silent work. Numbers climbed. Curves stretched. Evolution advanced.
In his previous life, he had tried to force the future.
This time, he let the Sun do the work.
And he waited because he could.
Elementary school was where Ethan learned how precisely the world measured children.
Preschool had been observation without consequences. School introduced documentation: grades, evaluations, permanent notes written by adults convinced of their objectivity. Being unnoticed no longer worked. Now he had to be predictable.
It was a private, heavily funded school with its own campus filled with children from very wealthy families. The kind that quietly funneled students into elite institutions. Clean hallways. Small classes. Teachers with good intentions. Systems that rewarded conformity disguised as "potential."
Ethan recognized the danger immediately.
Genius attracted attention.
Attention attracted control.
From the first year onward, he regulated himself with precision. He read faster than anyone, but never first. He solved problems instantly, then waited before raising his hand. He made small, deliberate mistakes: a missed comma, a reversed digit, an answer corrected after a brief pause.
Teachers described him as highly capable. Quietly intelligent. Never extraordinary.
Perfect.
Sunlight continued shaping him in silence. Wide windows let light in without suspicion. Ethan loved desks near the windows he could spend most of the day in sunlight without asking for anything unnatural.
The interface showed steady accumulation. Growth curves stretched and flattened. Strength increased invisibly. Durability refined itself. Cellular structures reorganized slowly, deliberately.
There was no urgency. Every increase meant far more power than before.
Ethan observed.
Children formed groups quickly. Popularity followed predictable patterns. Wealth revealed itself indirectly through confidence, assumptions, and which rules could be bent without consequence.
Adults pretended not to see.
Teachers enforced fairness selectively. Parents intervened quietly. Systems protected themselves.
Ethan listened more than he spoke. He collected names, careers, companies, investments mentioned casually during pickup. Finance. Tech. Donors.
Information gathered effortlessly.
By third grade, memory became a state. Textbooks, once read, stayed forever. Lectures embedded fully, tone included. Conversations could be replayed word for word.
More importantly, connections formed automatically. Trends discussed in class aligned with overheard hallway talk. Political events on television matched corporate decisions mentioned at dinner.
The world stopped looking like chaos.
It looked like a machine flawed, yet manipulable.
He learned to regulate curiosity. The wrong question could be as dangerous as the right answer delivered too quickly. When praised, he redirected attention. When copied, he allowed it. Being useful made him forgettable.
Money began to matter not as desire, but as necessity. True growth required control over environment: where he lived, how visible he could afford to be, and freedom that was never given for free.
Adults would not last forever.
He started thinking in leverage: intellectual property, early investments, scalable skills.
For now, he absorbed everything languages, mathematics, history, basic computer science taught too slowly to be interesting, yet stored perfectly.
By the end of elementary school, Ethan Cole had a reputation as an "easy" child.
Polite. Reliable. Calm.
Teachers liked him because he never caused trouble. Students accepted him because he didn't compete. Parents barely noticed him.
Exactly as planned.
At night, beneath his bedroom window, long after the sun had vanished and the energy in his body still settled into place, Ethan knew one thing:
He had learned this world's most important rule a long time ago.
Knowledge is everything.
Interface Status (short)
Identity: Ethan Cole
Birth Year: 1995
Age: 9
Location: New York City
Type: Kryptonian-adapted organism
Evolution: infinite, solar-driven
Parameters: 135 cm / 31 kg
Brain: self-optimizing, structural growth ongoing, no ceiling detected
Strength (current phase): superhuman
able to lift a couch one-handed.