To avoid melting someone else's bathroom, Henry had no choice but to keep experimenting on himself.
After some trial and error and a bit of low-stakes bodily harm he finally started to understand how it all worked. The secret wasn't just his supercharged Kryptonian cells. It was something... extra.
A field. A biofield.
If the sun altered his body, it didn't use all its energy just to make him strong and invulnerable. A chunk of that energy got stored throughout his body, right under the skin, wrapped around every cell like an invisible layer.
That invisible sheath was the real reason his hair, his skin even the stuff outside his body like beard stubble was so damn hard to cut. His indestructibility wasn't just tough tissue. It was this… energy membrane.
Once he learned how to control it, even a little, he could do things that felt downright magical.
Like... say... shave using a laser beam.
It sounded insane, but it worked.
Henry focused his heat vision newly unlocked thanks to some extremely questionable mental imagery and bounced it off the cracked bathroom mirror. It ricocheted back at just the right angle, skimming the surface of his chin.
He flinched, expecting third-degree burns.
Instead, the laser seared off the stubble like a hot knife through wax, without even touching the skin.
He checked the mirror. No red marks. No singeing. Just a smooth jawline. He grinned, amazed.
The mirror should've shattered. The beam should've sliced him open. But it didn't. Because he didn't want it to.
The field had responded. It shaped itself around his intent.
It wasn't that he was burning hair—it was more like he was telling the energy what he wanted, and it made it happen.
Honestly? It was freakin' cool.
But also terrifying.
Because this wasn't just strength or speed. This was reality-bending. Sure, it followed some kind of energy conversion rules—his "battery" drained a little when he used the laser vision, or when he focused the field to let certain things through—but still, it felt like he could will the universe to bend if he concentrated hard enough.
And that wasn't even the scariest part.
He raised a hand and snapped his fingers. Just for fun.
A little flame sparked at his fingertips. Real fire, dancing like a lighter's flame between his thumb and forefinger.
Magic?
He wanted to laugh.
The amount of energy it drained was enormous compared to heat vision. Just maintaining the flame for a few seconds siphoned thousands of times more from his internal reserves than burning off stubble ever had.
Superman had never bothered with magic because, frankly, it was inefficient as hell.
Why conjure fire when you could move at Mach 5 and cause enough friction to light a campfire with your bare hands?
Trying to play wizard with solar energy was like fueling a nuclear reactor to toast a marshmallow. Possible? Sure. Worth it? Not remotely.
Henry let the flame flicker out and shook his head. "No wonder Superman never became Doctor Strange."
Still, the fact that he could do it made his head spin.
And it raised another question.
Was he really a Kryptonian?
Because there was another race that looked just like them. Daxamites. Descendants of Kryptonians who'd intermingled with other species. They also absorbed sunlight and had the same powers, but with one key difference:
They were allergic to lead.
Lead, as in everywhere on Earth lead.
A Kryptonian might fear Kryptonite. A Daxamite? A single bullet could put them in the morgue.
Henry stared at his hand, which was still wrapped in a strip of damp cloth torn from his old shirt. The flesh underneath was healing, slowly knitting together with soft crackling sounds. It hurt—but not much.
Pain, after the horrors of the research facility, was basically just background noise now. If he could survive human experimentation, he could survive a burned palm.
Still... he didn't like not knowing. Kryptonian or Daxamite?
What exactly had he been reborn as?
Had he encountered lead recently? Paint, bullets, water pipes?
No obvious reaction. But that didn't mean much.
He'd have to find a way to test it carefully.
Once he'd washed off the last of the salt and crab stink, and made himself presentable (minus the bandaged hand), Henry stepped out of the bathroom and into Tom's cluttered office.
The old man was reclined at his desk, legs up, aviators still on, looking like a character who'd been cut from The Big Lebowski for being too sarcastic.
The moment he saw Henry's bandaged hand, Tom opened his mouth—and then shut it again. A long pause. Then, with a glint in his eye and a voice thick with implication, he said:
"Look, kid. I get it. You've got... energy. You're young, full of hormones. You just spent a week at sea with nothing but smelly dudes and frozen seafood. Hell, if you need a little release, there's a strip club just outside of town. Real discreet. Clean-ish. You slip the right girl a few extra bills, she'll treat you like a king for a night."
He pointed lazily at the bandage.
"But c'mon, man. Don't go beating yourself bloody. Literally. That's not a private moment, that's masochism."
Henry stared at him. Speechless.
Of all the explanations for his injury, that was not the one he'd expected.
And honestly? Of all the things Henry wanted to test his heat vision on... Tom's skull just jumped to the top of the list.
Would it melt like butter? Explode like a microwave potato?
He squinted at Tom's smug face. So tempting...
But he didn't fire.
Barely.
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