Chapter 7: STRANGE STRENGTH
[DEO Headquarters, Training Room Three — September 2016, 6:47 PM]
The weight should have crumpled like wet cardboard.
I stood alone in the training room, Kara gone to patrol the city, the DEO's evening shift settling into quiet efficiency. The dumbbell in my hand was standard gym equipment—iron, maybe fifty pounds by Earth standards. Nothing special.
My grip tightened. Daxamite strength, even at my current underdeveloped level, should have reduced this thing to scrap metal. The show had established that clearly enough—Mon-El accidentally destroying doors, furniture, anything he touched with too much pressure.
But the weight held.
I squeezed harder. Felt the power in my hands, the solar energy flowing through enhanced muscles. The metal should have yielded. Should have bent, twisted, screamed in protest.
Nothing.
I set the weight down carefully. Picked up a glass beaker from a nearby table—someone had left it there, probably from an earlier experiment. Thin glass. Fragile. The kind of thing that would shatter if I so much as sneezed in its direction.
My fingers closed around it.
The glass didn't break.
I applied more pressure. Watched my knuckles whiten. Felt the strength building, enough force to crush stone. The beaker remained intact, sitting in my palm like I was cradling an egg.
"What the hell," I muttered.
More tests. A paper cup from the water cooler—filled it, gripped it tight enough to pulp wood. The cup held, water sloshing gently inside. A pen from the desk—clicked it, wrote my name on a scrap of paper, pressed until the plastic should have snapped. The pen survived.
But when I threw the weight at the far wall, it hit with enough force to dent reinforced steel. When I punched the training dummy, the impact meter registered numbers that made the display flicker. The strength was real. Just... selective.
I remembered the restraints in the containment cell. The way they'd shattered during my nightmare, metal fragments embedding themselves in the wall. That hadn't been controlled. That had been panic, unconscious reaction, strength without intention.
This was different.
I picked up a sheet of paper from the desk. Blank, printer-quality, flimsy as tissue. My massive hands should have torn it the moment I tried anything delicate.
Instead, I folded.
The muscle memory came from somewhere deep—a lifetime ago, a different body, rainy afternoons with nothing to do and YouTube tutorials for company. Fold here. Crease there. Turn, fold again. The paper moved beneath my fingers like it knew what I wanted, responding to pressure that should have destroyed it.
When I finished, a perfect crane sat in my palm.
I turned it slowly, examining each fold. Crisp lines. Clean angles. No tears, no wrinkles, no evidence that superhuman hands had shaped it. The crane was delicate, beautiful, impossible.
"Interesting."
I spun toward the door. J'onn J'onzz stood in the entrance, arms crossed, ancient eyes studying me with that penetrating focus that made my skin crawl.
"How long have you been watching?"
"Long enough." He stepped into the room, movements slow and deliberate. "The beaker. The pen. The crane." He stopped a few feet away, gaze dropping to the paper bird in my hand. "Your strength isn't purely physical, is it?"
I looked at the crane. Thought about how to answer.
"I don't know what it is," I admitted. "Things I touch... they don't break the way they should. But when I throw something, when I hit something—"
"The force is real." J'onn nodded. "I've seen similar phenomena before. Rarely, but it exists."
"What is it?"
He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he picked up the glass beaker I'd tested earlier, examined it against the light.
"On Mars, we had a term for it. Th'arr—roughly translated, 'the extension of will.' Some Martians could project their consciousness into objects, reinforce them through mental focus alone." He set the beaker down. "Kryptonians have it in limited form. The way their cape remains intact, the way their clothing doesn't burn when they use heat vision—there's a field effect beyond simple durability."
"A field," I repeated slowly.
"Unconscious, usually. Something that protects what you touch, what you wear, what you're connected to." His gaze sharpened. "But you're doing it with everything. Every object. Without training."
The implications settled over me like cold water. Tactile telekinesis—I'd read about it in the power documents, theorized about what it might mean. But theorizing was different from experiencing it firsthand.
"Is that dangerous?"
"Potentially." J'onn's expression didn't change. "Uncontrolled, it could extend beyond objects. People you touch might become resistant to damage—or, if the field inverts, more vulnerable. You need to understand this ability before it surprises you in a crisis."
"How do I understand something I didn't know I had?"
"Practice. Testing. Careful observation." He moved toward the door, then paused. "I'll arrange proper assessment sessions. Different from the standard power evaluation—focused specifically on this phenomenon."
"Thank you."
He nodded once. "Mon-El."
"Yes?"
"The paper crane." His eyes found mine. "That's an Earth technique. Japanese, if I'm not mistaken."
My stomach dropped. The crane sat in my palm, perfect and damning, evidence of a life I wasn't supposed to have lived.
"I saw someone make one," I said carefully. "Before the crash. A human, at the pod's entry point. She was... teaching a child." The lie came out smooth, practiced. "I found it beautiful. Decided to try."
J'onn studied me for a long moment. I couldn't tell if he believed it.
"Interesting," he said finally. "That you would remember such a detail, from a single observation, while claiming amnesia about your own past."
He left before I could respond.
I stood alone in the training room, heart pounding, the paper crane trembling slightly in my grip. Too close. That had been too close.
J'onn was watching. Analyzing. Putting pieces together that I desperately needed to keep separate. His Martian intuition had already flagged me as unusual, different, wrong somehow. Every slip-up fed that suspicion.
I needed to be more careful. But I also needed to understand what I was becoming.
The crane sat in my palm. Perfect folds. Impossible precision. Evidence of a power I hadn't known I possessed, triggered by muscle memory from a dead man's life.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe the transmigration hadn't just transplanted my consciousness into Mon-El's body—maybe it had changed something fundamental about how that body worked. Merged human knowledge with Daxamite physiology. Created something new.
Or maybe I was overthinking this. Maybe Daxamites had always possessed this ability, and the show just hadn't shown it. Maybe Mon-El in the original timeline had developed tactile telekinesis too, just off-screen.
I didn't know. Couldn't know. The uncertainty was maddening.
I pocketed the crane and left the training room. Whatever this power was, I needed to understand it before anyone else figured out what it meant.
Tomorrow. J'onn would arrange testing tomorrow. Until then, I had questions and no answers.
Business as usual, apparently.
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