“One more rep.” I exhale and rotate my shoulders and arms. My legs burning and not a single inch of my body was free of sweat. With over 7 weights on each side of the bar and roots holding it up at shoulder height, I rest for a few seconds before doing my last squat and finishing this session.

“A little deeper than last time.” I hear from Richard. This is actually lighter than I can do for a single repetition, but today is not about increasing strength, it’s about stamina.

And so I finish the last of my squats. Over 20 with breaks in between each. I am not sure how effective this type of training would have been back on Earth, but he swears by it and I am going to follow his advice. He is the one who spent the last couple of months studying this, and if the last 3 training sessions in the last 36 hours were anything to go by, he really knew what he was talking about. Each time I stopped by my stats whey up by one point.

With a small step backward, I touch the bar with the back of my neck, fit my arms in position and release the weight from the roots.

I go down and down, taking care not to gain too much speed and when my quads are almost parallel to the ground, I heave lifting the weight of the world and allowing my muscles to go to their maximum output.

Nothing else comes to mind and pushing is all that my world becomes. With the last drags of my stamina, I lift one last time locking the weights in place with my roots and my body feels like a wet noodle ready to splotch on the ground.

As blood starts pumping through my veins and my oxygen-starved brain gets its fill, the world comes back into focus and I look around to find Richard staring at me.

“Ok, really didn’t think you had it in you for this last lift.”

“It’s all in the mind,” I say tapping my right temple. “That part I never had a problem with.”

“And what did you have a problem with?” He asks.

“Pumping iron in a closed room over and over. I was much more of an outdoor person when it came time or exercise.”

“Here looks to be outdoor enough for me.” He says with a grin on his face and I take his meaning.

Already knowing what I need to do next, he doesn’t continue the conversation as I sit on the ground ready to meditate and try to tease out the stat point that this session is bound to bring but something is missing.

Getting up I start working on my katas. It has been a while I haven’t done so given my apprehension of continuing to rely on Aether to increase my stats but this seemed the right action to take.

I follow the calming and soothing rhythm of my forms for a minute limbering up my extremities and not only recovering the normal state but entering an almost meditative state before I sit down.

Not having to maintain my balance my full concentration goes to heading deeper and deeper looking at my entire body and matching each sensation to what it’s supposed to be and imagining each and every single muscle fiber and protein strand becoming stronger in a process not too dissimilar as I have come to look at it with what I learned to do with Aspen’s cells. Though this by the very nature that I don’t have “body mana” or a matching skill to the nature mana that works on Aspen means it’s an inherently more limited and slow process.

The one advantage I have is that I don’t have to actually act on every single cell and the cycling around my body takes only a few minutes to get minute improvements. Improvements that slowly accumulate until the system recognizes my efforts.

As the familiar and dreaded Aether construct from the system shoots off at me, I reflexively try to defend myself.

I don’t know from where the notion came from, but I instinctively form an Aether shield around to protect me, but the construct simply passes through it like the Aether was just a puff of smoke before heading deep within my soul.

Frustration bubbles up for a moment, but I stop and something starts to bubble as I laugh maniacally before opening my eyes.

It doesn't acknowledge my attempt to make a shield and even as it intermingled my own Aether, instead of me feeling a slight budge like I had with the Automaton’s Aether, this one was impossibly stronger and I would have more luck trying to push on a mountain

I’m an ant before the system.

After my failure, though most would disagree with the extra endurance point I now had, I prepare for another meditation session, this one longer and with no focus on stats or skills and therefore no interference from the system. Only a moment into it, as I go take a deeper look into my soul, I feel someone running in my direction. With an inkling in mind, I pull on my mana and draw a repulsive rune underneath me.

A second, then two, and as the connection fully forms, I levitate a couple of inches of the ground.

Not very useful in combat given how much of my attention this consumes, but it’s cool and was like most things that I endeavor to do, it’s good practice.

Opening my eyes, I see a messenger. About 16 years old clad in the typical light leather armor or heavy leather clothing that became their uniform. He looks straight at me as he approaches and before he gets to me, I ask:

“Looking for me?”

“Yes. Come on over quickly, Charlie is calling for you at the command center.”

“Ok.” I head over as he runs to get the commander. Things look to be serious.

A minute later everyone arrived at the command center. The map room may be very useful, but it was troublesome to get the comm array working inside, so they moved it back outside until we could get the monitoring grid properly hooked to the map already there.

Without my direct link my inner world allowed, they had to resort to other less reliable methods.

An overview of the entire grid was represented with a large 1-meter screen that showed the entire circle which had a single green dot on the nearly opposite side of the instance and one red circle near us.

Staring at it, my mind starts to run all kinds of scenarios.

Without relying on the dozen smaller ‘holographic’ screens to find the record of what happened, I connect to the network and access the library and the recording of that red circle.

Some people had hoped the network would be able to identify friends and foes, but it was beyond our current magical capabilities. The different colors were attributed based on where the contacts come from, which in this case was a good indicator of whether we were dealing with someone from the village or a beast from the HLZ. Any dot approaching the line from our side was green and anyone crossing the line from the other end became red.

A red circle a couple of hundred meters from the HLZ. It used to be a dot, but the beast had moved beyond the range of the detectors.

Looking through the records, I find a couple of ‘lines of text’ which recorded the beast's last know position.

I could interpret it manually, which would probably have taken me a few minutes, half an hour at most, but there was a much more convenient way of doing that. A method that I use by running the data stored through another formation. This one is responsible for something almost like math, though limited in nature with the complex ‘calculations’ and substitutions it was capable of in the same order of power as the cheapest calculator. Not even a proper scientific calculator.

I follow the path the beast took.

It sat on the edge of the division, just inside the HLZ for a while. I look over the time stamp. Twenty minutes ago, give or take. Clocks were troublesome things to work into practical designs and we didn’t have unlimited data storage, but that much I could get from the logs.

Going down to the 3 last lines, I locate the path the beast took.

A few meters outside the HLZ, them about 200 meters, and one last appearance at 450 meters out, on the edge of the particular circle of the detector responsible for that region.

I start running scenarios through my head, as I listen idly for the report to confirm what I learned about the situation. A beast was on the loose and unlike the two other cases yesterday, this one didn’t leave for a few seconds, ran a hundred meters and returned straight away. This one was outside the HLZ for 21 minutes already and further from it than any other beast since the detection circle was established.

“What are we gonna do?” Asks someone I don’t quite recall, though for some reason he strikes me as some type of merchant.

Richard, the commander, starts to address his point.

“We have a couple of options. We can bury our heads in the sand and just hide in the village while the beast is roaming.” Hearing that everyone shakes their head, and the same man, now with a little more backbone says:

“Sure and we can just conjure up the resources we need to continue growing and deal with the attacks from the system. Yes, magic them into existence.”

I almost laugh at the dry retort, thinking of my skill creation, it still wasn’t anything to write home about, but eventually, it might be an option to simply conjure up what we need. As long as we had enough mana. Looking at him, I feel he is more frustrated at the situation than the commander and as I’m just about the speak, Richard continues.

“Ohh, I agree, it’s not a good option and even if we do that there are a lot of other villages still vulnerable. We made the detection ring to have advanced warning and we are already informing all the closest villages to this spot on the HLZ already, but that won’t be enough.”

“What other options do we have?”

“If we aren’t hiding, then we need to be aggressive and hunt this beast down. Now the real decision to make is how to go about it. Should we spend most of our forces or only the strongest? Huge hunting parties with a couple of mages in each or smaller ones? Hell, for all we know, even if the entire army runs into the beast it won’t be enough.”

“And what is this beast?” I ask before they, “I mean, it’s all and good to decide what to do, but we must have some idea of what it is from the territory it came from. That knowledge may be useful.” I look over at the most senior scout. Technically they all fell into the command of Richard, but he was their unofficial leader and he speaks:

“It’s a level 138 Wolfkin though we don’t know enough about their habits to speculate much.”

“Well, it was worth a try,” I say. “But even in the face of limited information, we need to make a decision.”

Charlie which had been observing until now, pitches in:

“The only decision that makes sense to me is to send a smaller party of our strongest fighters with support from Nash. Anything else will be too slow to be effective. Even with the beast coming out on the region with the densest region for the detection grid, we still can’t track it in real-time. The best we can hope for are a couple more pings as it crosses the band of the inner ring of villages. Unless it heads straight for us, but even then it will only give us one or two more points chances to detect it.”

“He is right,” I say to Richard. “We don’t have a change in high hell of catching up to the beast on foot and the only effective method on travel with the flying craft relies on me. Stopping every twenty minutes to refill the batteries is way too slow and there isn’t enough mana throughput in the network to rechange the batteries fast enough for higher speeds or bigger crafts.”

“Didn’t you went around the HLZ with a bunch of other people? There were quite a few other people along, each with their own flying craft.” Questions the scout confused.

“Yeah, but most of the mana I put in myself and used a lot of little tricks. Even then the ten slow single-person craft put a severe strain on the network. Closer by we have a more robust setup but it won’t be enough for full speed flight with a large group, not by a long shot and anything other than flying is too slow to be catch up with the beast.”

“Well,” Richard starts to qualify: “We are assuming a lot, we don’t know how fast this wolfkin can move over long distances.”

“Ok, let’s assume that just a single group will leave, what do you suggest we take?” Charlie asks in my direction.

“Myself, Merlin, Alex, Greg, and …say 20 other fighters. We will need people who move fast and that can take a beating.”

“Ohh, I don’t think that is going to be a problem,” Richard says with a wide grin taking over his face.

“Why do you say that?” I ask him.

“We finally have proper metal armor from the smithy. Enough +4 armor sets for 25 people.”

Well, I didn’t pay much attention this last week to Blackwood’s developments at the forge, but this was very good news. On our own we struggled with +1 defense metal armor, this was a large lead ahead against this wolfkin and if we hoped to survive we needed every single advantage we can scrounge up.