Chapter 3: Training

The need to hide my training from everyone, and from my father in the first place, imposed significant restrictions on this training program.

I couldn't fly safely, either on Earth or in space - the risk of getting caught by my father, by Cecil's spies, or simply by the lens of a random camera was too great. I couldn't even order a suit from Arthur-he was my father's best friend, and sooner or later he was bound to tell him everything.

Training in strength and stamina by classical methods-beating someone, getting into a fight with a team of heroes, or anything like that-was also out of the question, for obvious reasons. It is one of the most effective methods, though.

I found an unexpected and even, it seems to me, quite elegant way out. I need to train my flight speed, my stamina, my strength, and I should learn to hold my breath. What environment can provide me with all the exercise I need and still serve as a natural camouflage from prying eyes? I'm talking about the ocean, of course.

The ocean can give me it all. From the need to hold my breath during training to the tremendous pressure of the water column naturally testing my stamina. Swimming underwater for me was not fundamentally different from flying - strictly speaking I was not swimming, but rather flying underwater, because swimming involves pushing away from the water, through limbs, fins or jet propulsion, which I did not do, because the natural mechanism of flight was much more efficient. The only difference from atmospheric flight was the greater resistance of the medium, which, again, only benefited my training. And last but not least: there are far fewer sights, cameras and other devices directed to the sea and ocean depths than to the atmosphere or even to space - in water visual means of observation are simply meaningless, and on others, like sonars, though I will differ from a sea dweller, but it is not so critical. The depths of the sea quite often give my father and other heroes a chance to demonstrate their usefulness to the planet. At the very least I'll be mistaken for another Kraken or something like that.

About a month after I got my powers, I had the chance to put my theoretical conclusions to the test-I'd kept my head down until then, pretending to be absorbed in trying to awaken my powers. That day - it was Friday the third - Nolan and the Earth Defenders were involved in a big mess in the far east, the last time he'd been away from the planet for almost a week. The official version is that he was abducted by aliens, but knowing my father, I suspect that he himself rushed to chase his rivals into space to deal with them away from human eyes, as he did with the Flaxans.

As luck would have it, we were being graded for the semester at school that morning, so I couldn't skip class to start training right after my father disappeared. But I had no intention of wasting time. As soon as I got home, I placated my mother with my perfect grades-which was natural for me, but Debbie never missed an opportunity to hurt her son with the end of the school year and punishments for bad grades, as if I had ever brought home anything below a B-and, after making sure with the help of the news and the Internet that history was going my known route, got ready for a run.

"Yeah, Mom," I say, as if casually, as I put on my sneakers. "Since I don't have any homework to do yet, I'll go for a long run today, maybe stop by the stadium to get some new equipment for the Student Olympics."

Debbie looked away from the news for a second-the details of this morning's battle were once again being recounted-then looked at me distractedly for a few seconds before what I said entered her head.

"Just be careful," she suddenly didn't object. "If you feel any tingling in your knees and back, or any pain, stop right away. All right?"

"It's a deal."

Surprisingly, she didn't even start her song about it being too early and dangerous to run marathons at my age.

Is this about Nolan? She usually pretends, especially to me, that she's not worried about her husband at all and just jokes about how if he's not back for dinner, we'll get more meatballs... when, in fact, she's always putting her father's portion in the refrigerator.

"You don't have to worry so much," I tried to cheer my mother up. "You know he always comes back."

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"Usually I can sit here and watch him on TV and watch him mow down hundred-foot monsters all day, but when he disappears into another dimension or into space..." she sighed heavily. "I can't help but assume the worst..."

My mother's been a little outspoken today... in a good way, I should be with her for moral support, but I can't pass up this opportunity for training. Leaving my mother to continue to watch the TV, I left the house.

I used to fear that, having gained superpowers, I wouldn't be able to enjoy running anymore, because the normal or even sprinting pace was no longer straining my muscles and lungs at all. But it turned out to be not so bad. Yes, I can't work myself up into a sweat like before, but I can still enjoy the music and catch that running trance state, when you stop paying attention to your surroundings and fully immerse yourself in the music and your thoughts. Although our physiology is such that during physical activity, including running, blood is less active in the brain, which slows down the thought processes and makes the brain work less efficiently, I always felt that during a run I could think easier.

For fifteen minutes I ran at a normal pace-but still fast enough to make passersby turn behind me and flinch when I overtook them-and only when I was out of sight in the woods did I allow myself to speed up.

I stuck to the sparsely populated areas and skirted the cities in a wide arc, heading for the Pacific coast. I'd never thought about it before, but apparently I have another, perhaps not super, but still pleasant ability. I never forget the way. No, not even that, I always know my way around easily, I know where I am, where I came from and how I came and where I need to go. Even if I close my eyes and fly in a random direction, periodically changing direction, I will still know where I came from and what the distance traveled and the return distance is - not in meters, of course, but in a kind of intuitive sense. It was as if I had a huge three-dimensional model of all the space I had explored in my head. My father never talked about it, but it seems like the Viltrumites don't need maps. Perhaps it's part of our natural adaptation to flight, just as birds navigate the earth's magnetic field and sea creatures navigate underwater currents.

It took me ten minutes to reach the ocean, and I could have done it faster, but then I would have forgotten about stealth. After all, viltrumites are designed for flying, not running. Yes, we can move fast on our own two feet, but it's not even close to the speed of flight, or to that runner from the Defenders of the Earth. Plus, it would be a lot less graceful. I don't know how that guy manages to evade the laws of physics, but if I run at full speed, it would be a real disaster for the environment. That goes for flying, too, though. Air resistance isn't going anywhere, but I can't accelerate enough to be a problem yet.

I stopped in a rocky bay on the coast. There was only one fishing village nearby - forty kilometers to the north - and no major town or trade route. All in all, it was a pretty secluded place. After taking off my clothes, I hid them in the rocks and left in just my swimsuit and my Walkman, I finally got down to the real part of the training. At first I was very cautious and, fearing an attack of bends, made gradual dives to relatively shallow depths. But no matter how much I experimented, increasing the depth and speed of the dive, my blood was in no hurry to boil. It seemed that the physiology of the Viltrumite had some natural mechanism to protect me from sudden changes in pressure. On the one hand, that's a relief, but on the other, minus one potential trump card in the coming battle with my father... though I can't imagine how I'd drag him to the bottom...

The Walkman, on the other hand, was not designed for this kind of diving. At one point, the water pressure began to clamp the buttons on his body, causing the device began to frantically stumble, flipping and rewinding songs and screw with the volume, it had to surface and hide it on dry land, along with clothes.

Well, now let's see how long I'll last...

Swimming away from the shore again, I flew resolutely to the depths. Very quickly it turned out that my eyes are not adapted to deep diving. More precisely, it's not that it's not me, just the light is very difficult to penetrate through the thickness of the water. The same algae and plants survive only in the first hundred or two meters, further they simply do not have enough light for photosynthesis. And if we talk about the depths, their inhabitants, although they have a highly specialized - in the bioluminescent spectrum - vision, they need it only to see each other and to distinguish luminous predators from, for example, potential partners for reproduction.

The yellow and red spectra disappeared first, almost immediately. In the first fifty meters I could see the water in green, by about a hundred the water had turned first green-blue and then blue-green, and by three hundred all the colors had been absorbed by the black blue. I could still see here, but below, below me, it was already completely impenetrable darkness. And I would go down there, but not yet.

Orientation under water presents certain difficulties to the diver. On the surface, a person navigates his surroundings with vision, and his balance is maintained with the help of the vestibular apparatus, the musculo-articular sense, and sensations in the internal organs and skin when the body position changes. He always experiences the action of gravity (sense of support) and perceives the slightest change in the position of the body in space. But here there is no habitual support under the feet, of all the senses that orient a person in space there is only the vestibular apparatus, on the otoliths of which the forces of the earth's gravity continue to act. But fortunately, I was not human, according to my father, at ninety-nine point nine percent - did he conduct a genetic affinity test to appeal to such precise data? Thanks to the Viltrumite physiology, my vestibular apparatus was on an entirely different level from that of a human, but there was something else that helped my orientation... I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but I was almost as good at feeling myself and my position in the water as I had been in the air.

So even though the depths look pretty creepy, I think I can afford to go down there. But I won't be in any hurry. I'm about three hundred meters deep right now and my body is experiencing a pressure of about three million pascals or, to be clearer, thirty earthly atmospheres. That's a lot, a hell of a lot, for a human being or any terrestrial creature. Seals swim to such depths, after all, that's their specialty, but it's perfectly acceptable for me, too. I can withstand more, much more, but I should also not forget the multiply increased resistance of the environment and the need to consider the increased oxygen consumption - holding my breath in my bathtub is not the same as holding my breath during a deep-sea dive - I think here we can arrange the first training of underwater flights and check what I can do now.

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