After his lesson with Srinivas, Mike drove back to the apartment, then got out to walk. He pulled precursor into himself as he strolled around the dark block until he felt ready to burst apart. Nous to vast his mind. Animas to lighten his weight and provide him tactile feedback of his surroundings. Gravitas to strengthen his skin in case any of this went wrong.

Between street lights, Mike took a great leap to plant his feet on the side of one building in a deep squat and then spring in the opposite direction. He seized a splintery telephone pole to halt his momentum, hardened skin impervious to damage. In moments, Mike clambered to the top of the pole, dodging the wires with the benefit of his corona.

Standing atop the pole, he eyed the steeply peaked roof across from him. He hesitated only a moment before making the leap. Mike sailed across the gap and scrambled on shingles slick with dew to gain purchase, hands and feet eventually pulling him to the top. Below him came the sounds of people rousing, no doubt disturbed by the racket above their heads. He jumped before anyone could emerge from the house, moving towards the next building, this one a flat-topped dollar store. His slow fall transitioned to five bounding steps across that roof, then he soared in an arc across the street to land on a railing belong to the balcony of an apartment.

Mike jumped straight up, grabbed the floor of the balcony above him, pulled hard to send himself high enough to grab the top of another railing, planted his feet atop the same surface a split second later. Now exactly one floor higher on the building, the roof not far above him, Mike tightrope-walked along the railing to the exterior wall and began to climb the brick siding. His corona could just barely provide enough force to permit this insane test of grip strength.

When he swung over onto the roof, Mike took a moment to catch his breath as he looked down to the street below. Lights were coming on in a number of the homes he had disturbed. Time to move on. Mike ran across the roof and jumped hard, his corona providing both upward and forward pressure to send him sailing past several smaller homes before he stomped across the top of a steeply sloped Cape Cod and dropped off the side to bounce off a car and onto the street.

Not pausing, Mike lightened his weight and lengthened his stride until he raced at a pace faster than any unassisted human could achieve. When he finally arrived back at the apartment, Mike had to take a knee while great heaving breaths possessed his body. The moment he could stand once more, he let himself inside the apartment and collapsed onto his bed. This was the type of training he needed to be doing. No more lifting furniture.

What other exercises had Marius given him? Body sculpting, he recalled. Mike turned his teleotic talent on himself, feeling for the patterns of his internal organs. Beneath the rubbery sheet of skin stretched fibrous slabs of muscle marbled with blubber and fluid-filled tubing. Cable-like tendons emerged from the muscle fiber to twist together and attach to the exterior layer of crystalline bone, which held a honeycomb interior filled with gelatinous marrow. If he looked closer, gossamer thin threads belonging to the nervous system came into focus.

For hours, Mike studied himself through his talents, filled with a fascination biology textbooks had never managed to inspire in him. He traced the various systems with his mind. Digestive, respiratory, neural, skeletal, muscular, circulatory. He couldn't understand most of it. But he began to figure out how to truly harden his body. Rather than just make his skin impervious, he could turn bone, muscle, tendons, ligaments, arteries, veins, and everything else into durable entities. Every organ and every layer of muscle required a separate effort to harden, he learned. Bind the interface between two muscles together and they could no longer slide over one another as they wanted to stick, effectively immobilizing a limb.

He got up and moved around as he practiced his hardening to ensure he could still function. It took more hours before he was able to effect a single leg. The amount of precursor he burned through amazed him and the mental effort required made him wonder how he would ever be able to harden his entire body.

Varanelli emerged from her room to discover him in the process of slamming a cast iron skillet into his shin. She blinked twice, shook her head, and disappeared into the bathroom. Then, as Mike lifted his implement for another test, she emerged once more. "You're so weird, Ski."

"Love you, too, roomie."

"Have you been awake all night?"

"I guess I have."

"And now you have figured out how to make yourself indestructible? Or are you hurting yourself like a sleep-deprived lunatic?"

Mike scrunched up his face. "It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. I'm pretty sure my leg would be fine if a tank ran it over. But the frying pan still hurts. Not as much as it should, but my shin is telling me that it ran into something hard. It's no worse than shin conditioning in the gym."

"You're so weird."

"You already said that."

"It bears repeating." She put a hand to her head. "Sorry about yesterday. I shouldn't blame you for my problems."

"It's all good, Varanelli. Just don't stock the fridge with beer again. I'm not an alcoholic or anything, but impulse control is something I struggle with."

"Well, I'm happy you get to be a paragon and have all the powers. You deserve a chance to get your life back on track."

Mike flashed a smile. "Back on track? Come on, Varanelli, you know I've been living the dream."

"You do live with a hot babe . . . ."

"I've also got the house, the car, and the bank account of a real winner."

Varanelli winced. "Do I have to be in the same list as your bank account? I don't know if my ego is up to the comparison."

"You could be doing this too, you know."

"Hitting myself with cast iron cookware?"

"Hardening your body. You could be frickin' Wonder Woman and have bullets bounce off of you. Or like Wolverine with the instant healing."

"And how would I take out the bad guys? Punching them? Using a gun? Come on, Ski."

"Just do some teleotic trickery and break some bones. Bam. Guy can't run away because he's on the ground with two busted femurs."

Her jaw dropped. "Why would I do that to a man running away from me? The whole point of having superpowers is that you can restrain people without causing harm."

"Naw, that's comic bullshit," Mike said. "There's no reason to handle violent criminals with kid gloves just so you can send them to a jail where they get stabbed and sodomized. Besides, I get the impression Marius wants us to go full psycho on the Chekowan when they arrive. We'll probably need to mess up some Angmari before then. Might need to do the same to some locals if things get tense."

"Locals? Are you calling people from our own planet locals?" Varanelli turned her back on him. "You know what, I'm glad I got out of the 'Insane Marius Army'. I don't want to run around mashing people's brains to mush."

"We'll probably be flying when we do the brain mashing, if that helps."

Rather than respond, Varanelli locked herself in the bathroom to continue her morning routine. Mike had never really understood what all it entailed, but he knew it involved the bathroom being off limits for half an hour. Which he thought really inconvenient at the moment, considering he just realized he had to pee. Of course, he had alternative spots lined up. Like between their cars when it was dark at night. And there was always the kitchen sink . . . . "I don't have to go that bad," he muttered.

Rather than go on with his exercises, Mike set an alarm and hopped into bed to wait on the bathroom becoming unoccupied once more.