As The Deep In The Boys

Although he couldn't yet think of how to apply this new form of his light abilities, just the act of converting energy into something physically dense that could exist without being powered by him boosted his mood by several levels.

Kevin then continued his experiments outside the bathroom, as there were no light flashes and almost zero risk of being discovered. 

He turned on his laptop, having taped over the camera beforehand, put on some energetic music, and began to repeat his experiment over and over to explore this new facet of his abilities. 

Kevin was mesmerized by the sight of a crystal appearing from nothing in the middle of his hand and simply couldn't stop admiring the process. 

Maybe later he'd get used to it and be able to treat this ability more casually, but as funny as it was, only the powers of the Devil Fruit truly gave the superhero the feeling of being superhuman. 

Super strength, endurance, and speed were certainly an adrenaline rush, but they were still confined to a normal human body, without access to something... divine. 

Only by firing lasers capable of burning through a house from a simple finger, gaining complete invulnerability to physical attacks, and now creating a solid object from "nothing" did Kevin truly feel special, someone who had transcended human limitations and stepped onto a new plane of existence.

Carried away, The Deep only snapped out of his tests around five in the morning, when the music suddenly stopped, his body went rigid, and his fruit's powers became extremely unresponsive. 

A second after the initial shock, everything returned to normal. This happened three more times over the next two hours, which scared Kevin quite a bit.

Right before the last incident, Kevin had wanted to stop his tests, but then he looked around the room, which was littered with crystals of various shapes and sizes, sighed, and decided to create a final, largest crystal to beautifully end today's training session. 

Lost in his thoughts, he didn't notice that one of the piles of his creations was about to collapse at any moment. As he began to form the crystal, Kevin became engrossed in his work. 

Just as the most voluminous and, most importantly, almost basketball-shaped crystal was ready, the attack happened again. 

A second earlier, the mountain of homemade trinkets had begun to crumble, and the crystals started to fall. 

Feeling his body become unresponsive and his power weaken tenfold again, Kevin looked around the room with bitterness and, a moment later, his gaze was fixed on an astonishing sight. 

The falling crystals were frozen in mid-air, as if they were just hanging there, defying the laws of gravity. 

But using his new vision, Kevin noticed a minimal, almost imperceptible movement of the objects towards the ground.

Snapping out of his shock, Kevin returned to the normal flow of time, and the crystals finally hit the floor.

"What the hell was that?" The Deep asked the empty room, finally noticing the late hour. 

But feeling no fatigue whatsoever, he gave in to his curiosity about the new phenomenon and decided to sacrifice sleep to think it over.

What he had just experienced immediately reminded him of a similar ability available only to speedsters and, as A-Train had once told Kevin, to Homelander. 

This feature was called accelerated perception, and it allowed them to see the world in slow motion. 

Without this aspect of their superpowers, speedsters simply couldn't use their abilities effectively. 

The human brain can't process the visual information coming at it when you're moving at near-fighter-jet speeds, and the surrounding world blurs into incomprehensible streaks of color, among which are both people needing rescue and obstacles in your path. 

Without this ability, speedsters would be incredibly lethal. It's one thing to run through a person, who is essentially a soft, squishy bag of meat and bones, and another thing entirely to slam into a concrete wall or a mountain at full speed.

This power also had applications in everyday life. Kevin remembered the scandals surrounding a speedster named Barry West. 

The little boy had been overjoyed at discovering his superpowers and immediately ran to Vought to learn the limits of his newfound abilities. 

But after the tests, he was hit with a harsh reality: there were about twenty other speedsters faster than him, and the speed gained upon awakening a gift could rarely be increased by more than double. 

Even then, there were still about nine faster speedsters. The newcomer A-Train, who had just debuted, was eight and a half times faster than him from the moment he got his powers.

Despite his crushed hopes, the kid didn't give up. He and his parents came up with a more interesting way to achieve fame. 

He hid his speedster identity and took up track and field, aiming for the Olympics. 

At first, bribes helped him advance and divert people's attention, but the higher he climbed, the more problems arose. 

At some point, he couldn't bribe or deceive the officials anymore, and people found out about his bulletproof skin and his supe identity.

A scandal erupted, but his father, who had already made some money off his child, managed to resolve the conflict by announcing Barry's retirement from sports. 

Of course, this didn't happen without Vought's help, as they didn't need problems with superheroes attracting attention to the government's lack of control over them and the potential for cheating in many areas of life.

But even that didn't stop Barry. A few years later, he debuted as a professional gamer, where his terrifying reaction time made him a monster in shooters, landing headshots even better than cheaters.

With his team, he managed to win several world tournaments and earn millions from streaming before someone leaked Vought's test data on the young speedster from a decade ago, revealing the secret of West's victories to his fans. 

This was followed by a slew of canceled contracts and lawsuits, but it was extremely difficult to sue a speedster for a God-given gift. 

Nowhere in the constitution could natural abilities be equated to rule-breaking or anything illegal. 

No one sues exceptionally tall basketball players for their height or boxers with superior physical durability for their powerful bodies.