As The Deep In The Boys

Figuring out the right amount of seawater he'd need for his experiments, Kevin said goodbye to the dolphin and sprinted at top speed to the nearest gas station to buy a few bottles of water.

Having collected his personal Kryptonite, Kevin chuckled again at how insane the world of One Piece was, where the price of power was the ability to swim in a world with very little land and a predominantly seafaring human population.

Placing the filled bottles on the closed crate, The Deep finally decided to start training.

First, he tried to concentrate the power of the fruit in one place and create something that could be described as hard light. 

After a couple of hours of getting nothing but flashes and something resembling a ball of light that dissipated a few seconds after he stopped trying to compress it, Kevin let out a quiet howl of frustration at the difficulty of controlling his element. 

He knew that light was probably one of the strongest Logia types, but that didn't make it any easier to master and understand.

Liquid-type Logias had a much easier time mastering their abilities, which were almost identical to the normal properties of their element. 

The Flame-Flame Fruit, besides creating waves of fire and concentrating the element to increase temperature, didn't have much room for experimentation. 

The Ice-Ice Fruit also just allowed for the creation of objects from already solid ice and freezing things. 

The Dark-Dark Fruit was a mystery as to why it was even classified as a Logia. 

The most important thing was that almost all known Logias had a standard, intuitive set of abilities from the very beginning, all except the Light-Light Fruit. 

When you thought about special applications of light powers, only flashes, invisibility, and mirages came to mind, but he had no idea how to implement these features of the Devil Fruit.

Deciding to hit the internet for training information when he got home, Kevin logically abandoned his attempts at forming hard light and switched to the destructive properties of his lasers.

….

Making a finger gun, Kevin aimed at the ocean and fired. 

To his own surprise, he easily replicated the laser blast, but immediately after the burst of joy from his success, he ran into a problem with the attack's range and piercing power. It was far too strong. 

He simply couldn't use it against enemies. Even Homelander kept his kills out of the public eye, so 

The Deep logically predicted that people wouldn't react well to an unknown superhero outright executing criminals. 

And with the attack's piercing power, he'd probably punch through a few buildings and fatally clip some unlucky civilians.

Realizing he'd need a lot more practice to get a satisfactory result, The Deep began training to control the force of his shots to make them non-lethal. 

After hundreds of blasts, he started to feel tired, as if he'd strained an invisible muscle that was now aching from the workout. 

But at the same time, he'd made progress in controlling the lethal aspect of his attacks. 

He hadn't learned to reduce the laser's power at will, but he could increase the beam's diameter. 

When it reached about twenty-five inches, it barely left a mark on the perforated container he was using as a test target.

While practicing his shots, Kevin noted a pressing need for good targets to train his accuracy and a few chunks of meat to find a power level that wouldn't leave criminals with fourth-degree burns.

At the end of his training, he decided to go all out. He pointed all his fingers at the ground and fired the most powerful laser beam he could currently muster. 

As a deadly beam shot from each finger, burning holes of unknown depth into the beach and turning some of the nearby sand into cloudy glass, Kevin was surprised to notice a feature of his powers he'd been overlooking the whole time.

The beams he was firing were coming directly from his fingers, not concentrating on the outside of his glove. 

He immediately remembered the moment in the anime when the admiral was cut in half but calmly reconnected his body, his suit perfectly intact. 

This ignored aspect of his fruit's power sparked Kevin's curiosity. He wanted to know how far the fruit's power field extended from his body if it was enough to cover his clothes and the cloak on his shoulders.

But after thinking about experiments in that area, he decided not to sacrifice his only superhero costume and find something less valuable. Making a mental note to order some clothes and find some good targets, Kevin headed home.

Back home, Kevin dove into various scientific articles, trying to piece all the knowledge together in his head. 

To his surprise, he realized his new body had an excellent memory. Things that had been difficult for him in his past life seemed easier to analyze and process. 

Maybe it was because of his perfect body, which had been abnormally durable since childhood and had no even minor injuries or abnormalities. 

Or maybe it was a general enhancement given to everyone who took Compound V. Neither the old Kevin nor the new one knew. 

After finishing his study of the seemingly endless information on the internet for the time being, The Deep checked his feelings and, realizing his powers had almost fully recovered from the day's training, headed to the completely enclosed bathroom to test his newfound knowledge.

Closing the door behind him to avoid attracting spectators with light flashes, The Deep began to replicate the Princeton experiments on creating solid light. 

As he went through the steps, Kevin bypassed the need for complex scientific equipment by directly controlling the photons. 

A few minutes later, he was able to watch a three-dimensional crystal, about an inch in diameter, form on his hand.

The successful replication of the experiments thrilled Kevin, opening up a new facet of his element's powers. 

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.