Training any skill, be it small or big, always gave some form of a result. It wasn't necessarily an improvement at finesse. Sometimes it wasn't even close to the skill being trained. Sometimes… sometimes it was a life lesson. Charlie had gotten himself a lot of those lessons through his life.

From an early age, he had been the smart one, the big one, the one who would bring home the bread for everybody that needed it. Parents had adored him, teachers had praised him, and his siblings… they had been there. In some form or another, everybody had told him he would be great, that he would make everything better.

Charlie had believed all of that. He had been trained to think highly of himself, to always know that he would be better with time. Nothing was out of his reach. He only needed to grasp after it. And, oh boy, it was an understatement to say that he did. Everything close to him, Charlie learned everything he could about it. With everybody at his beck and call, his every wish to learn was fulfilled.

Everybody would do anything they could to support him. No matter who outrageous his requests were, there was never a moment's hesitation of fulfilling his wishes. There would always be smiles on their faces, as they went down to their knees, praying that Charlie would once again show off his genius.

And that was nice for a while. Up to the ripe age of twenty, he had loved all the attention. Everybody bent the knee, everybody loved what he did, everybody said his name when they saw him. Everybody wanted a piece of him. Yeah… he had loved it. He had loved every second of it. Those happy smiles on their faces, as Charlie once again did the impossible.

The impossible studies, the impossible results, the impossible boy… Everything he tried was successful. People paid him so much just for letting them put his name on their works. Charlie was renowned for so much work, so many people loved him.

When did he realise he had been trained to believe that? Age must have begun to catch up on him, for Charlie could not really remember the time. Maybe it was more of a gradual process. Those smiles people wore. They seemed… awfully thin. It never reached their eyes. They might have done everything asked, but it was as if they always put on a play for him. The first few instances were put off as coincidence, yet when Charlie couldn't stop seeing it all around him, something switched itself on.

People had used him. He was smart, he had always been able to learn it all, it had all come easy to him, yet… that had never been his real source of energy. Charlie enjoyed studying, yes, but it was always the people around him that kept him going. The fact that they cared about him, that they wanted him to succeed, was more than enough to make him continue.

Yet, few had ever really wanted to even know his name. He was the perfect tool in any research, after all. A person who could help lift others research, for the sole price of acting really nice to him.

His parents had rejected the mere notion of it when he had brought it up to them. They said that everything had been for him, that they had only done what was best for him. Charlie had been trained for so long, at that point, that he was not sure whether or not they lied to him. Not that he ever asked again. Any connection had been cut at that point.

Pretty much all connections were cut, actually. Any studies that he had been doing had been stopped. Not officially or anything. Charlie just… stopped going to his workplace. He stayed in his apartment, never wanting anything to do with it anymore. Those months had not done him well. Though, that might just have been what happened when a child prodigy realised how useless they really were.

It was safe to say that he had thought himself above the average person. He had been the smartest boy in the world, after all. The one who would reach the stars with only his mind as a tool. That he was just another of many had been quite the real reform, and… Charlie had not handled it well.

It was around a year until his name stopped being called. When people realised he wouldn't be effective anymore, his name tarnished for everything he left behind, nobody really tried to contact him. It only helped cement that notion of his abilities.

Still… Charlie was smart. He could stand up to anybody in almost all fields. And, with nobody caring where he went off to, there was somebody interested in him. Or, well, some group.

That part of his life after that had been thought of so many times now. Charlie had relived those early years at the facility so many times. People those days had hardly glanced at him. Most knew of his accomplishments, yet they had only been another drop in the bucket for them. He had been amongst people who saw him as an equal. Nothing more and nothing less.

Such an outlook might have been bad for some, yet for Charlie, it had been a new start. A… slightly delayed start but a start nonetheless. It had allowed him to prosper differently than before. Instead of being pulled up by everybody around him, he had been forced to claw his way through every project, no matter how was in charge of it. Nobody had cared, nobody had given him extra attention. It had been one of the greatest times in his life. Though, it hardly came close to his first meeting with-

Darlow.

Charlie had to stop pulling the corpse of the animal he had killed previously. He had fucked up again, letting himself think too far. His young days were safe, but anything close to that time… it was not good. It was bad. There was no real way to stop his mind from wandering, yet the negative feedback should have stopped it! All the pain, all the anguish. Was it not enough for him to stop thinking?

A bit of snow hit the top of his head. It might have hit him a long time ago, only gathering up for long enough to push through his hair. While his body might have begun to fail him, that hair of his continued its presence in all its glory. Charlie took that as a good sign. One of the few that persisted on him.

Getting himself together, the man took the new subject as a worthwhile distraction. With a hard pull, he even started getting the carcass a few meters further away. He was strong, yes, but even the strongest had to get tired after a while. There were no tools present to bury the large animal, so he just had to dump it somewhere far away from the house.

All that training his body helped the process along. If he had been in the same state as what he had been during those early years, Charlie could already tell he would have failed. He really had been a weakling, so obsessed with his own work. He had never learned to care about his own body, always thinking about things outside himself. Training the mind might have been important, yes, but training his body was likely one of the best choices he could have ever done.

It wasn't really a choice. Nor had training his body been a goal in itself. His reasoning for doing so had directly correlated with his own desires for enhancements. Since Charlie had loathed anything related to biological manipulation, for reasons he refused to even think about, he had to move over to the technological aspects instead.

Getting mover over to that department had been a hectic process. So many papers signed, so many agreements made. Charlie barely read half of them, only caring about what he got out of it. He had been allowed full jurisdiction in creating mechanically-based enhancements that he could put freely in human bodies, be they dead or alive.

He had always known that they didn't mean that they could put enchantments on himself, yet it had never said anywhere that he wasn't allowed to do just that. Though they tried to fight the first few tries, there was not much resistance after some more attempts. Maybe they thought he would slow down soon enough. They would have been wrong.

Charlie spent so much time augmenting himself with everything he could think of. Eyes with scanning abilities? Check. Bone-durability-increments? Indubitably. A satyr's appreciation? More than just once. Everything he put in was almost always taken out, just so that he had more space to work with. And… some were just too stupid to keep in.

There were more important features he had always desired. Strength was one of them. After losing in the battle of wits, Charlie had desired for nothing else than to know he could lift a ton in an emergency. It was stupid. He understood that. Yet his mind was always enamoured with the idea of strength, including the metaphorical effects and safety it would let him have.

As luck would have had it, becoming stronger through the use of mechanical augmentation had a clear limit to it. When the body was permanently forced to become better, not through adaptation but constant pushing, it started to break down. Nothing could hold up the pressure for such a long time. Biological augmentation had some fixes to that quandary, but Charlie refused to take that route again.

Instead, he had been forced to go through several loops and tethers, just to make it all work. The first was the pressure issue. If his body could not withstand having access to a higher strength permanently, what could be done? The obvious answer was of course to limit it. Putting a trigger on the enhancement, forcing it to lay dormant until called upon, was easy enough for Charlie to do after enough thinking time.

However, his body had still been without the ability to withstand it. The distance between the two states was too far, and even the smallest time spent going the length was impossible to go through without serious side effects. Hell, the first real test had amounted to a week-long stay at the medical wing.

He had almost given up at that point, if not for an idea passing by his mind. If the problem was the distance, why not work towards shortening it? If the damage grew exponentially, it had to lessen drastically when only minor improvements were made.

And… Charlie was correct on that. After spending months hardening his body, making every muscle in his body feels like hell, he was able to sustain the enhancement for a whole minute without feeling anything but slightly light-headed. A whole year was spent trying to make the time grow higher, yet… There were never any drastic improvements after that. A few more seconds every few weeks, yes, but he never got close to two whole minutes. His nose would bleed, his vision would darken, some effect would show itself.

Charlie had truly and well trained his body as best as he could. And that had continued for a whole decade and then some more. The time he could sustain it might have fallen a bit with time, but never had it been too terrible. His body had always been just as hard as it had been before. His muscles were still corded with muscle. He could still lift entire humans with nothing but his bicep. Only…

Age was getting its hands firm on him. Maybe it was the atmosphere he lived in as well. His skin had started to untighten the slightest bit. His cheeks had begun to lose their colouring. Not that he looked in the mirror much. Troy had been the one who told him about that fact.

…

He was well over a kilometre away from the house now. The body had started to smell. The wind was not being kind to him, yet Charlie could only wrinkle his nose at the stench. He supposed it was lucky they stayed in quite the hilly area. It allowed for cover when needed, and made them hard to spot from a distance. Yet… it also provided ample holes where bodies could be thrown into. He had never looked too deeply himself, yet the initial scan of the area around the house had allowed Charlie to find quite the deep hole.

With a great push on it, the dead carcass began its roll down the steep hill. Bones cracked each time it met the earth. They were surprisingly loud. Or it might have been that Charlie’s ears were attuned to the sound of them.

After some time, the corpse was too far down to really see. It was but a smudge to his eyes, the creature had fallen far more than his eyes could handle. Maybe a few months ago, it would have been easy. Charlie couldn't tell the distance accurately enough to know.

Looking up at the sky, he could see it would only be a few more hours before the sun would rise fully. Normally, now would be the time Troy came back, yet Charlie already knew that wouldn't be. For some reason, the boy found it a good idea to go out scavenging in broad daylight. Or, whatever one could call it with all those clouds. It was more grey than anything else.