Chương 11: Physical Testing

The secret lab on the top floor of Wayne Enterprises ran cold white light evenly across a polished metal floor, dozens of precision instruments humming under it in a low, steady drone. Bruce Wayne had dropped the easy charm from before and swapped it for a white lab coat, something steadier and sharper settling into his face. This was closer to the Batman Kaelvorn had pictured.

"First up. Baseline strength test." Bruce hit a button on the console, and a load-bearing platform at the center of the lab rose slowly into place. Behind it sat a massive shock-absorbing structure, mountain-sized, hundreds of interlocking piston assemblies stacked together like some kind of mechanical beast. The screen up front lit up with the starting parameters.

"Hit the plate at full power. Don't hold back." Kaelvorn frowned a little. The metal monster in front of him looked intimidating enough, but over the course of his fighting life he'd taken apart things that made this look tame.

"You sure?" Bruce just laughed.

"It's custom-built. Superman's tested on this exact rig." That single line dissolved every doubt Kaelvorn had. He filed it under black-box tech he wasn't going to understand and let it go. He nodded and stepped up to the platform. Kaelvorn pulled in a breath, and the dormant strength inside him woke up slowly. The muscle along his right arm went tight in an instant, visibly thickening past its normal shape.

A half second later his fist slammed into the alloy plate with a crack that split the air, the impact rolling through the sealed room in one heavy boom. The machinery behind the platform groaned to life, dozens of lever-driven piston assemblies engaging in sync to spread the load out. BOOM. The numbers on the console screen went haywire, then finally settled on something genuinely disturbing. Bruce's pupils contracted. His fingers moved fast across the display, checking and rechecking the data.

"One hundred twenty-seven thousand tons of force in a single strike... which puts static load tolerance somewhere north of eight hundred million tons." He said it under his breath, a shock in his voice he wasn't hiding well.

"That's enough force to lift a mid-sized island shelf. For reference, even Australia's smallest offshore territory clears six hundred million tons. And I'm told you're still not fully adapted to your current strength."

"Uh, right. Before I got off Viltrum I went through what was probably the worst fight of my life. Viltrumites can pull a pretty significant strength gain out of combat, in a way that's fairly predictable." Kaelvorn wasn't especially surprised by the number. Raw power had always been the signature Viltrumite trait. What he hadn't expected was for it to spike this hard coming out of one recovery. He rolled his wrist, feeling the strength surging under his skin.

"I can tell this isn't actually my ceiling yet." Next came speed and reflex testing. A track along one side of the lab lit up, and a target began streaking along it at several times the speed of sound, leaving a blur trailing behind it. Kaelvorn moved, folding into a smear of black chasing it down, but he clipped it late a few times, and once he came in too hot and shattered several targets outright on contact. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Fortunately, Viltrumite flight control was solid enough to pull off tight, high-difficulty curves in cramped space. That was the only reason he didn't lose control entirely and put himself through a wall. It did highlight one thing, though. Viltrumite flight didn't run on the same principle Superman's did. Superman's whole magnetic-field-cutting style of flight couldn't produce this kind of tight, elastic redirect in a confined space. That guy tended to fly and land in big, wide sweeps.

But Kaelvorn's braking and recovery after shattering a target, threading a curve within fractions of a millimeter, looked closer to something small and quick. Something built for precision.

"Speed results. Peak instantaneous velocity, Mach 5. 7. Well past baseline metahuman standard. Neural reaction time is only keeping pace with a Mach 3. 8 movement state." Bruce studied the motion trace on the screen as he talked it through.

"Your nervous system can't keep up with how fast your body's gotten. There's a real gap between the two." Kaelvorn was already adjusting his stance and starting the run again before Bruce finished talking. This time he deliberately eased into it, dialing his own limits in bit by bit. As the test kept running, the margin of error on screen kept shrinking, and within ten minutes he was tracking every target cleanly at Mach 5. Every hit landed clean too. Every target he touched came apart completely.

The surprise in Bruce's eyes deepened.

"That's an extremely fast adaptation curve. Faster than any known metahuman species. Is that a Viltrumite trait specifically?" Kaelvorn didn't answer. He just stopped and waited for the next test. He knew exactly where that adaptability came from. It had been beaten into every Viltrumite by the simple fact that death was the alternative. Anyone who couldn't keep pace with an enemy's speed ended up a corpse fast. For the defense test, once Kaelvorn had his shirt off, Bruce started with a high-yield energy cannon.

The beam hit him square in the chest with a sharp hiss, and left nothing behind. Not even a mark. Next Bruce wheeled over an alloy case loaded with an assortment of weapons.

"Penetration testing next. All of these have Nth metal worked into them." Seeing the confusion on Kaelvorn's face, Bruce explained.

"Nth metal comes from Thanagar. Hawkman's home planet. It's got anti-gravity properties, energy conduction, and a strong penetrative quality built in. It interferes with most metahuman bio-force fields, and it can even damage certain god-tier physiologies. Genuinely rare material, even by galactic standards." A mechanical arm rose out of the floor holding a long blade worked with Nth metal, and swung it at full force into Kaelvorn's arm.

The blade met skin with a sharp shriek of metal on metal, and left a shallow line of blood across his arm that healed shut again almost as fast as the eye could track.

"Blade gets through." Bruce logged the data, then swapped the arm's weapon for a purpose-built pistol.

"Now testing Nth metal rounds." BANG. The gunshot cracked out, and an Nth-metal round streaked toward Kaelvorn's shoulder at high velocity. On contact, the round ricocheted off and buried itself in a small crater in the wall, while Kaelvorn's shoulder was left with nothing but a faint red mark that faded almost instantly.

"Strange." Bruce's brow pulled tight, fingers tapping the console.

"Blade penetrates. Bullet doesn't. Same Nth metal concentration in both. Only real difference is contact area and impact profile." He sat with it a moment, and something clicked behind his eyes.

"Whatever's driving your ability might be tied to a microstructure specific to Viltrumite physiology. Something that can disperse a point impact but struggles against a linear cutting force." The discovery only sharpened his caution further. A Viltrumite body was turning out to be considerably more complicated than he'd assumed. He didn't push the theory any further out loud, and instead pulled out a sterile vial.

"I need a small blood sample for baseline analysis. This won't hurt." Kaelvorn held his arm out without resistance. A specialized needle tip activated at some flipped switch, vibrating at a frequency too fast to see, and worked its way into his skin with what still looked like real effort. The draw itself went smoothly after that. Once it was done, Kaelvorn spoke up.

"Viltrumites have a known weakness. Sonic weapons." Bruce went still for half a second. Kaelvorn kept going.

"High enough sonic output disrupts our eardrums and brain function directly. Bad enough, and it puts the body out of control entirely. Combat-ineffective." Bruce was quiet for a moment, then looked up at him.

"I get that you want your actual limit tested. But the blade and bullet tests were both calculated within a safe range based on your strength data. The goal was mapping your capability, not hurting you."

"A sonic weapon would do real damage. That's outside the scope of what we're doing here."

"I need to know where my limit actually is." Kaelvorn's voice stayed firm.

"On Viltrum, anyone who doesn't know their own breaking point doesn't survive their first real trial." Bruce shook his head anyway.

"I don't have a sonic weapon on hand. Development and storage on something like that lives at Batman's end, not here. If you're set on it, I can arrange something down the line. Not today." Seeing how firm he was, Kaelvorn let it go. +40 advanced chapters on Patreon [email protected] /YATOOO For 24H, get 30% off your first month of " Celestial" with code 33B08. Not satisfied? Full refund, no questions asked. 🔥