The training room was completely empty when he got there, which wasn’t a surprise given the hour. But the form that it took was surprising for him, even if it probably shouldn’t have been.

  It was a rearranged gym — a large, rugged, yet oddly sterile thing.

  There was an entire floor-to-ceiling glass window on the far side of the room opposite of where he came in, but it had been boarded up with sheets of metal and wood in a disorganized, DIY-kind of pattern. He could see bits of moonlight streaming through where the people who’d boarded it up hadn’t been completely thorough.

  Benches and squat racks lined the mirrored walls, while free weights dotted the mats near the middle where people hadn’t quite fully cleaned up after themselves. All in all, aside from the window, that area looked fairly untouched compared to his mental image of what it could have looked like before.

  But that space only took up half the room. The equipment on the other half had likely been moved off somewhere — all the machines that required electricity were unable to be used anymore — and they had been replaced with something much more abstract.

  The floor was completely clear in this part of the room, save for some rough fences that had been laid out in neat little rows. They were spaced out a dozen feet apart, and they filled the entire half of the room wall-to-wall like bowling alleys. And at the ends of those makeshift alleys were training dummies.

  This was a firing range.

  Some faded motivational posters were still hanging on the walls behind them, half-scorched or torn by the aftermaths of these people’s training, he guessed. And around that entire side of the room, there was this magical blue shielding similar to the one he’d seen block that incoming attack right after he’d woken up. The magic flickered slightly as it hummed just inches away from the wall.

  He could smell the scent of sweat and ash and ozone.

  Magic.

  Tyler drank it all in as he limbered his joints up. This was the perfect place to test his new power — a quaint little playground where he wouldn’t have to worry about breaking things.

  He examined his potential targets, and one caught his eye. The leftmost training dummy was nothing but a big boulder that was taller than he was — oddly reminiscent of the one in the cave that he’d often used for his bone-strengthening exercises. It was flush with Resilience, indicating to him that it had probably survived a number of beatings in its day.

  He smiled at it all. Things were so different here, but he supposed some things never changed.

  Tyler willed his mana into action, relishing the rush of power that thrummed through him as he engaged the Flowing Sands. His Journeyman mana suffused him with a density that it had never had at Novice, and he mentally pictured the face of that skeletal bat overlayed with the boulder in front of him.

  Then he took his first steps.

  In a flash, he was next to the stone, and his warmup strike landed with a level of force that would have been incomprehensible for him just weeks before. His forearm pounded against the rock with a sharp crack that rang through the room, and the blow was instantly followed by a second as he ran through the first set of exercises prescribed by the Ancestors’ Carvings.

  This version of the Flowing Sands lent him a level of speed and control that he’d never otherwise achieved, and he let the feeling of mastery over his own body wash over him like a rising tide. With each motion he worked himself into a greater frenzy, coaxing his limbs faster and faster as he assaulted the boulder in a whirling jackhammer of blows.

  Everything had gone so fast — from the events of the past two days to the second appearance of the Storm to the weeks of cultivating with the magic bananas before that — that he hadn’t really gotten the time to process it all. Even on the island, when he’d spent so much time thinking about the Storm and how he’d ended up there, he’d been in a different mental state — a context solely dedicated to survival and advancement in this strange place where the world he knew previously held no bearing.

  Now that he was back in some semblance of civilization, it was like a switch had been flipped in his brain. Those old thoughts and mental processes that he’d worn for the first two decades of his life had been dusted off and re-inserted into his mind, and he had to deal with the awful clash of those mindsets with the ones that he’d formed while on the island, all while in an environment that was itself nothing but a clash of these two worlds mashed into one.

  Those were the types of thoughts that he’d purposefully tried to avoid when he was going stir-crazy while locked in the cave — the ones that had become even more overwhelming yesterday when he was laying still in bed, trying to let sleep take him.

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  But in this frenzied, powerful moment, that task felt so much more manageable. The motion lent him an outlet for his struggling brain, a physical sensation to focus on and ground him in the roaring sea that had awakened in his mind. And as sweat dripped down his brows and his calloused skin began to crack against the hard stone, he found that those two mental contexts had begun to blur together to match reality. It was still weird — chaotic and overwhelming and mismatched — but he supposed that was just his life, now that the apocalypse had begun.

  This new environment was still confusing as hell, and he was still reeling from the loss of the island and the tree, but now it was all feeling just a bit more navigable.

  How would the ancient Reamans feel about me wasting so much water in that shower? When for them water was this rare resource, used only for drinking and sacred rituals?

  The thought arose randomly in the back of his mind, and he almost laughed at the absurdity of the image. It was like he was culture shocking himself.

  This really was an entire culture that he’d been immersed in, given that those cave carvings and the Analysis screens about them were the only things even remotely resembling socialization that he had access to on the island. It was amusing to think about now — what would they think of some random human waltzing into their cave and making it his home, all the while stealing their techniques?

  Then again, Tyler thought he knew. The Reamans were a warrior people. They respected strength.

  And if there was anything that Tyler knew, it was that he would keep getting stronger.

  He was putting more force into the forms now, aiming to not just go through the motions but to really hammer fortitude into his limbs, as they had been intended to do. Before, that had been a fairly mundane exercise.

  But his new strength made even the mundane spectacular.

  His fists became a blur as they cracked like machine gun fire against the solid rock, and he could feel that the floor was beginning to tremble with the force of his attacks. His knuckles were beginning to scrape, and his inflammation was whining in the back of his mind, screaming that it wasn’t okay to push his body this hard again.

  But he was feeling powerful, riding this high of advancement and pushing his body to the very limit. Every blow felt like a victory, a step forward, a physical demonstration that he would keep going and that he would never stop.

  Before Tyler knew it, he wasn’t envisioning a fight against the Chiropteran Boneweld, but putting his fist through that tiny bird with the strength of a wrecking ball.

  That thing had been so far above him — so immensely powerful that he hadn’t even been able to scratch it. Next time, he wouldn’t let anything take him down so easily.

  His blows were really throttling the boulder now — its humongous bulk and the little divot that it was settled upon were the only things keeping the thing from physically moving. That was better for him, though. He didn’t want to move it.

  He wanted to break it.

  An elbow, a knee, a sweeping kick downwards that sent him shooting into the air involuntarily.

  Tyler landed in a crouch and sprang right back, slamming into the thing with fist after fist after fist. He was making progress. He thought his strikes were landing just slightly differently, his fists becoming tougher as his mana instinctually moved to resist the damage coming back from his own blows.

  He forced his mana deeper, and the Flowing Sands came to a mighty wave that veritably flooded through his limbs. His arm physically trembled with the power — too much to use in any real fight. Against this stationary object, though, he could control himself just enough to throw it into the most powerful haymaker he’d ever thrown.

  His fist flashed through the air, his body twisting as he imagined tearing through a mountain of magic, working to impart as much force as physically possible into the strike —

  And then whump.

  Tyler was on the floor.

  He let out a breathy gasp, laughing a bit at the circumstance.

  He’d slipped. When was the last time he’d slipped on anything? Like with when he’d tanked the skeletal bat’s attack, he supposed the drawbacks of superhuman strength were beginning to show themselves.

  Especially since he was barefoot on polished tile.

  “Oh well,” he chuckled. “I’ll have to keep experimenting with that, I guess.”

  As he wiped the sweat from his brow, he realized that streams of sunlight were coming in through those cracks in the boarded-up window. He could hear the sounds of people waking up and beginning to go about their days.

  Wow, he thought to himself. How long have I been training for?

  For a couple of minutes he just sat there, taking in the sounds and cultivating the small amount of Resilience that his training had accumulated within him.

  It was nice. Peaceful.

  Then, he heard a herd of footsteps approaching the room.

  Tyler blinked, quickly breaking from his cultivation and wiping his hands off on his pants. He was hyper-conscious of just how much of a mess he was currently, and after making headway into the realm of social acceptance he really didn’t want to ruin his progress with a bad impression.

  But as Everett Brown waltzed into the room like he owned the place, followed by a gaggle of smirking followers, Tyler found himself giving up on any hope of a friendly conversation.

  He’d never had a good experience with this kind of encounter.