After they had lunch, Susan took an hour-long nap while Apex checked her vitals and noted things down. Once she was up, they resumed their training.

“So what are we going to do now?” Susan asked after getting out of bed.

“Let’s start with your thoughts,” he said. “What do you think this power entails?”

“I think I can release a burst of force. Forming a rudimentary force field that pushes things back.”

“Okay, let’s start simple. Try to make a forcefield, but make it stationary. Like a shield.”

She nodded, and a faint distortion appeared in the space between her and Apex as everything turned back to normal. “Done.”

He nodded and raised his palm before pressing it on the force field. “Do you want to test the limit that this can handle now or later? I believe too much might result in a small backlash.”

“I think it’s pretty resilient,” she said confidently. “Use your full power to punch it.”

Apex chuckled at her words. “My full force punch can break a planet in half, Sue,” he said. “You don’t want me to do that here.”

“You’re exaggerating, I don’t believe it,” she scoffed. “You’re a slime. How can you possibly generate such unrealistic strength?”

He didn’t say a word and started slowly pushing her force field. Within seconds, a slightly strained look appeared on her face as his smile widened.

“Okay, okay. I give,” she suddenly made the construct disappear. “I felt like I was being crushed from all sides. This is crazy.”

“This means that these force fields are limited by your physical ability,” he said. “We will add an hour of physical training to our daily roster now.”

She gave him a dirty look and sat down on the bed. “What training are you going to have me do for the force fields?”

“As I understand it, these are limited to your imagination. If, instead of making a rigid wall, you made something stretchable, I wouldn’t have it so easy to break through. Plus, a high-momentum projectile could also be more easily blocked by such a construct. You get my point?”

“Imagination…I got it,” she nodded.

“I don’t think you got it,” he said. “If you have fine control over this, you can project a force field inside someone’s body and give them an embolism. Hell, if you can control shapes, you can just stab someone with an invisible spike. And that’s just the basic stuff. At a higher level, you can interfere with any frequency spectrum because your force fields originate from hyperspace. You could turn someone else invisible, block electromagnetic waves, and tons of more stuff.”

“Easy there, Apex,” she said teasingly. “Let’s take things slow at first, okay? I can’t even imagine how all that stuff would work right now.”

“Though what’s all this about hyperspace?” She asked. “You’ve mentioned it a couple of times.”

“If you think of our reality as a two-dimensional plane comprising space and time, Hyperspace can be visualized like another plane overlaying on top of ours. It is a different dimension where the laws of physics are all different. There, you can surpass the speed of light without the side effect of travelling through time. But that’s not important. What is important is that Hyperspace is the true source of almost all your powers. Both your physique and your psionic construct creation are dependent on Hyperspace. The only variable here is your ability to control ambient cosmic energy. That has nothing to do with Hyperspace and was all because of that cosmic storm.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about?” She asked.

“Lots of things. For example, I don’t know what you want to have for dinner today.”

“Very funny,” she said. “I’m going to start hurling shapes at you now. This room won’t get destroyed, will it?”

“Even if you exert yourself to unconsciousness, this room still wouldn’t get a single scratch,” he said before walking back and sitting down on the couch. “You can go all out.”

“The sheer disrespect,” she scoffed at him. “I’ll make you regret underestimating me.”

“For the time being, we are in completely different leagues, Sue. Until your powers develop to the level of interfering with metaphysical forces, you can’t trouble me.”

With an angry snort, she waved her arm at him. Alex simply raised a finger and tapped it in the air, releasing a sheet of black that shot forward and wrapped itself around the square that Sue had created, stopping it in its path and making her grunt uncomfortably.

“Imprecise,” he said. “Look at the edges, the corners. It all needs to be well-defined to have any real integrity. How will you hone your control if you half-ass your constructs? Again.”

With a grunt, she shot another projectile at him. As he tapped his finger and blocked, she immediately released another, and another. She kept going as Apex calmly blocked every single one of her attacks. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was commenting on every single projectile that he blocked.

“Bad, bad, bad, are you trying to throw a piece of clay at me? Put some thought into the shapes that you create. It won’t take me much effort to crush one of them, and then the backlash will probably leave you with a headache and a bleeding nose.”

“Ugh!” She angrily hurled a massive force field at him, making him raise a brow as he stopped it directly with his finger.

“Not too bad…now we just need to teach you to have that kind of an output without pushing your heart rate above one-sixty,” he said with a glance at the heart monitor.

“You’re being purposefully infuriating,” she said.

“Because you said your powers were triggered by anger. I’m trying to play into those emotions and make you push your powers even further,” he said. “Would you like another demonstration of just how far you can take your force fields?”

“After that stunt you pulled this morning, no chance in hell,” she snapped at him. “Help me make the objects more precise if you’re going to do anything. I’m not letting you take control over my powers just yet.”

“At least there is a chance in the future. Let’s continue.”

They spent the next few hours training until Susan was too exhausted to do anything, at which point she went to sleep for a bit while Alex left her alone to get dinner.

…

Once dinner was over, Apex left Susan with two bookshelves filled with books from all sorts of genres and whatever else she could have wanted, which included a larger armchair than the one he’d made before and a second blanket that was made to custom size.

She was focused on browsing the books on the shelf, even as he left, giving him a half-hearted good night.

‘Okay, it seems that he didn’t notice…’ She thought to herself as she grabbed one of the books that she’d requested he bring her from her personal collection. From the cover, it was a psychology book delving into the psyche of the human mind when processing grief, but opening it, the name was completely different behind the hard cover.

“All right, no turning invisible with this around. Don’t want to accidentally set the pages on fire,” she held the book under her arm and grabbed a bottle of orange juice from the refrigerator, which she had to do some pleading to get him to install. It was nothing more than an icebox filled with enough ice to last a few days, but it did the job, keeping her drinks cool.

With all that done, she discarded the hospital gown, throwing it on the bed before getting into the chair and covering herself up with the blanket. One of her hands slipped under the blanket while with the other she opened the book to a previously bookmarked page. Considering the ease with which she was handling the book with a single hand, she seemed to have quite a lot of experience doing exactly this.

She seemed to make a point to not make enough sounds, which made Alex inside her crackle up all the more. He was enjoying every attempt of hers as she tried to suppress her reactions to touching herself while reading the erotic, smutty story that seemingly had quite a heavy domination and bondage theme. Or at least the scene that she was reading seemed to have that purpose.

‘I’m sure there were lots of lonely nights after being with workaholics like Reed and Doom, but no longer. I’ll help you live through all of these bondage and domination stories that you seem to find guilty pleasure in reading.’

He didn’t stop her or even tease her about it, and let her freely do her thing. There would be time for that later, when he reminded her that the chair she was sitting on and the blanket she was using to cover herself were all made of his body, allowing him to know exactly what she was doing while sitting on it. Naturally, he made sure that whatever release she brought herself to would be unsatisfactory and leave her craving more so that she would do this every night.