Chương 8: The Depths of the Sea

Kaelvorn did not, strictly speaking, stick to Tom's rules. They'd sailed out to some patch of open water with Tom, set the nets, propped up the rods, and waited through a patient, uneventful morning. Kaelvorn looked at the bucket, still empty, and stood up. Tom seemed to know exactly where this was going, sighed, and tried anyway.

"Water's filthy out here. Not great for a wound." Kaelvorn's answer was to tear his shirt open and point at his own chest, where the wound had shrunk down to a few faint pink lines.

"Appreciate the concern, Tom. Watch, I'll go grab you something worth eating." He tapped one toe against the deck, light as anything, and drifted straight up off Tom's little boat. Carefully. Barely any push at all. He'd had a few rare days to relax, but his body still remembered fighting at full output, and with no real opponent to test himself against and his strength up more than double overnight, one careless kick could turn Tom's entire livelihood into splinters.

He floated up two or three meters over the water, stretched his arms out, pulled in a lungful of salt air, and dropped straight down into the deep blue. The cold closed around him, and it felt clean. A Viltrumite body didn't need to worry about pressure or oxygen, and the dark of the deep water looked no different to him than daylight. Fish scales caught what little light there was, their whole path through the water slowed down to something he could track easily, several times over.

Slower than the targets back at the training camp. He dipped down and went after a school of mackerel drifting by. He kept it deliberately slow, and just as his fingers were about to brush the tail fin of the one on the edge, the fish jolted like it had been stabbed and shot away. The whole school scattered in every direction at once, leaving nothing behind but a trail of bubbles rising through the water. Kaelvorn blinked, then frowned.

He'd kept his movement about as gentle as it could get, even reined in his own presence on purpose. So how had it noticed him? He wasn't about to accept that. Two lives, and neither one had ever put him in the water fishing, sure, but he'd survived Viltrum with top marks. A few lowly Earth fish weren't going to be the thing that beat him. He circled for a while and locked onto a grouper drifting by on its own. Thick-bodied, moving slow, looking about as coordinated as a brick.

This time he slowed his own heartbeat down and closed in like a hunter working a stalk. Inside a meter of it, his hand shot out, fingers aimed precisely at the fish's body. Right as his fingertips were about to close on scale, the grouper snapped into motion, its whole body twisting slick and fast, and it slid straight out through the gap in his fingers, kicking up a cloud of silt that blurred his view. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Damn it." He muttered it, waving the murk out of his face. Two misses in a row had him wondering if his grip on this new strength wasn't as clean as he thought. His power had roughly doubled coming out of that recovery, and he clearly hadn't fully adjusted to the shift yet. Back in the cottage, holding back on purpose never felt like a problem. Maybe out here, this relaxed, he was slipping without noticing. He closed his eyes, settled himself, and locked onto the next target.

A mid-sized yellow croaker, drifting along steady, apparently unaware of any danger. This time he was extra careful, power dialed all the way down, and closed his fingers gently around the fish's body. Cold, slick to the touch. He'd just started to firm up his grip when he heard a wet slip, and the croaker whipped its tail and slid clean out of his palm, coated in slime, leaving nothing but wet fingers behind.

Three misses now, and his patience was still fine, but his heart had started pumping a little harder without his permission. Heat crept up through his chest. Back in Viltrum's training camps, he had never once tripped up on what should have counted as a low-difficulty target. No. This wasn't even low-difficulty. By his own standard, this should have been a game.

"Hold still!" He dropped the whole slow-and-careful act and shot forward like a loosed arrow, straight at a decent-sized sea bass up ahead. The bass seemed to register something lethal closing in and bolted in a panic, and even at full effort its speed looked laughably slow to him. Right as he closed the gap, he snapped his hand out. This time, the instant his fingers touched scale, there was a sharp crack, and the bass's spine snapped clean under his grip, its body going limp on the spot.

Blood leaked out between his fingers and spread into the water in a slow bloom. He looked at the dead weight in his hand for a moment, then tossed it aside without much ceremony. His eyes drifted further out into the deep, where a large dark shape was moving, slow and steady. A tuna. The thing had to be well over a meter long, easily eighty pounds, cutting through the water with real weight behind it. Kaelvorn dropped low and shot forward like a cannon shell. This time he didn't even bother reaching for it.

He just planned to hit it with his whole body and stop it cold. The impact landed with a dull, heavy thud, loud in all that silence, and the force alone shattered the tuna on contact. He felt the exact texture of bone giving way, the same sensation he'd felt more than once punching through a Viltrumite opponent. A second later blood erupted out of the tuna like a burst pipe, blooming into a thick red cloud that swallowed his whole field of view.

Kaelvorn hung there in the middle of it, looked down at his own hands, and let out a tired, helpless laugh. These were the same hands that could tear the hull off a starship. That could shatter solid asteroid rock.

"I think some of Viltrum's culture got into me somewhere I wasn't watching." He stayed down there another half hour or so, no longer in a hurry, working out the actual range of his own strength one careful attempt at a time. Every time his fingers touched a fish, he'd feel out the slickness of the scales first, then adjust the pressure by feel. Even so, a few more still ended up either crushed or gone. An hour in, he finally started to get the hang of it.

He held his breath and closed gently around two mid-sized fish, silver all over, species he didn't recognize, careful to hold them just tight enough to trap them without doing any damage. Right as he started to surface, one of them thrashed, and his hand tightened out of pure reflex. There was a crack, and the fish's skull caved in under his fingers, blood running down his hand. He stared at what was left of it and let out a defeated sigh.

He gave up trying after that, closed his hand around the one fish still intact, and shot back up toward the surface. The moment he broke through, he shook the water out of his hair, pulled in a deep breath of clean air, and looked over to find Tom sitting in the boat with a fishing rod in hand, watching him without a trace of surprise.

"How'd it go?" There was a laugh buried somewhere in Tom's voice, his eyes settling on the one visibly misshapen fish in Kaelvorn's grip. Kaelvorn made a face, tossed the fish into the empty bucket on deck, and answered with more than a little wounded pride in it.

"The fish here are too sensitive. Also... I'm still not used to Earth's gravity." Tom smiled, set the rod down, and scooped a bucket of seawater over the fish to keep it fresh.

"Fishing's not about muscle. Same as you knowing your enemy on a battlefield. Out here, you've got to know the sea." Kaelvorn lifted off the deck, tipped his head back into the sunlight, spun once, and shed every drop of water off his skin in a single motion, faster than the eye could track. He touched down light and steady, and had barely found his footing on the boat when Tom's voice came out of nowhere.

"You ever think about becoming a superhero?"