***Tirnanog***

***Magnus***

The comfortable darkness of semi-unconsciousness permeated my entire being. I was at peace and most importantly, safe.

Then the thought of some monster slurping up human bodies like wet noodles surfaced into my awareness.

“Graah!” I shot upright, returning to the world's harsh reality from one moment to the next while I frantically looked around, remembering that I was on Tirnanog. My animal brain expected to find some predator standing right above me, but there was nothing.

Why had I been asleep? It was mere luck that nothing had eaten me while I was out cold.

The last thing I remembered was that I was forcing myself to chew that stringy saurian tail raw and then… darkness.

How long had I been out? Were the little monsters poisonous? How stupid was I? The possibility that the creatures weren't edible hadn’t even crossed my mind! Not to mention the grossness of eating something raw.

I squinted my eyes, but it looked like it was still the same day.

One moment! Why was the world no longer unbearably bright? And why was everything so blurry?

I rubbed my eyes, but my issues didn’t vanish.

Previously, I had been barely able to look at things as a result of the sun’s brightness, but now it felt like the light of a normal day. Although, everything being some shade of blue with blurred outlines was annoying. Aside from the stones on the shore. They still looked normal and sharp.

And why was I tucked away beneath the forest’s shrubbery? Had I deliriously crawled into the underbrush and thrown branches and leaves over myself?

I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath.

Stop it!

Freaking out wouldn't help me.

I had to do my best to concentrate on one thing at a time. Hadn’t the world been painted in normal colours when I arrived?

Once more, I opened my eyes and the world looked suddenly normal and sharp. Spike-grass was green. Treetrunks were brown. Just as I was used to.

What was wrong with my fucking eyes?

I concentrated and the blue tinge was suddenly back!

Normal.

Blue.

Normal.

Blue.

Several times, I flexed the newly-found switch in my brain, changing back and forth until I managed to control this strange new ability as I desired it. For some reason, it was just like opening and closing my eyes. In fact, it wasn't unlike having an additional set of eyes that I could open and close as I wished to...

Fuck! Just don't freak out again, Magnus. This was only me gaining some new, previously unknown sense.

Ultimately, I decided on going with my normal sight until I found the time to figure out what the blue meant.

I swallowed, noticing only now that my throat felt as dry as a sheet of paper. Slowly, I turned and crawled out of the shrubbery.

That was when my eyes fell onto my bare lower arm.

“Aieeh!”

It was the horrified shriek of someone who had found something moving beneath his skin that shouldn’t be there. Like some woman's reaction to finding a rat on the ground between her feet. It was the primordial angst of parasites that every human shared with our distant ancestors.

I flopped around on the ground like a fish on land, hitting my arm in an ill thought-out, knee-jerk reaction until my brain finally switched back on. Only then did I realize that I had embarrassed myself.

Luckily, the other exiles had already been eaten.

To my great relief, the strange movements weren’t caused by something burrowing through my flesh.

Upon closer inspection, it was revealed as a fucking muscle. One that I could flex!

I laughed a little insanely about my own stupidity when I realized the surreality of the truth. The reason why this had freaked me out was that this muscle shouldn’t be there.

And I had them apparently everywhere.

I wasn’t some expert on human biology, but I knew where I was supposed to see the muscles through my skin. They weren’t supposed to be visibly flexing through the back of my hand when I strained it. Nor on my elbow – at least not with the level of training that I had.

When I opened my shirt, I revealed the toned musculature of a gymnast. Though, a real gymnast would have probably freaked out because normal humans were supposed to have a six-pack. And I had... well...

I decided not to dwell on a little number difference as long as I didn't look too freakish.

Even normal humans could change their appearance from healthy towards unattractive by overdoing it. Like the Mr Muscles who had tried to become the new exiles’ tribe chieftain. That guy had definitely overdone it with the steroids.

But hey, my beer-belly was gone. Well, not gone-gone. But what had been a definite lifebelt could now be easily pinched between two fingers. And it was almost invisible when I drew in my belly. Most importantly, I looked healthy. Like one of those models that were pumped up with beauty treatments and nanite enhancers, combined with a dietary plan that they had to follow religiously.

That counted as 'gone' as far as I was concerned!

I apparently underwent this evolution thing that everyone had mentioned. And two obvious changes were the blue sight and muscles. Many little, tiny muscles all over my body. It still looked like I was a mostly normal human being, but when I poked at my upper thigh, expecting the layer of fat that I was used to, there were steely muscles instead.

Okay. So how about flexing just my biceps?

Suddenly, my left arm experienced a very uncomfortable spasm. As if I had suffered a seizure.

“No. No.” I winced and pressed the entire arm to my chest. “I get it! No more biceps as such! Bad idea!”

There was apparently some disconnection between what my brain was used to and my new physique. Old instincts that didn't play well together with the new.

I slowly tried again, doing my best to not consciously think about the movements, and this time it worked.

Consciously flexing just a single muscle was no longer as easily done as when I had been a baseline human.

Confirming the details would be difficult without cutting myself open, but it felt like my whole musculature and most of my fat tissue had been replaced with a network of countless tiny fibres.

After spending half an hour doing slow stretches and rolling around on the ground, I felt comfortable enough to get back to my feet.

The lakewater was already like a magical attraction by that point.

I stumbled forward until I was a little more than ankle-deep and fell to my knees. Pursing my lips, I lowered my head and drank my fill.

Nothing had ever tasted better in my life.

I should have probably worried about dirt and bacteria, but the mad scientist’s nanites had just rewritten my genome and altered my entire body in less than a day.

Given the survival situation that they had forced upon me, I felt like it would be a grave oversight to allow something as negligible as cholera to kill me.

At least I hoped so.

My worries turned towards an entirely different topic when I noticed the movements beneath the water in front of me.

Still pursing my lips, I raised my head.

The lamprey-eel-anaconda thing rose from the water and looked at me from less than half a metre away.

“Fuck.”

I had barely gotten out the word when the mother-fucker tried to kiss me.

Not knowing what else to do, I just so managed to shove my elbow into its maw instead.

The horror wasn’t particularly concerned by my obvious rejection of its romantic advances and began to chew.

“Aieeeh!” For the second time that day, I screamed with a very unmanly high pitch.

My scream only increased its overture when something else bit into the back of my thigh and I realized there were more than just one of the freaky things!

I grabbed the one that was chewing on my arm with my free hand and squeezed with all my might until my fingers dug through the skin and into the creature’s flesh. But the monster eel wasn't weak either and my efforts ended there.

Then the creatures attempted to wrap me up in their coils and drag me deeper into the water! I could feel myself being rolled around while they tried to squeeze the life out of me.

Existential angst overcame me and at that moment a ripple went through my entire body! It felt like one of those times when an unpleasant tingle overcame your nervous system upon being touched unexpectedly, only magnified a thousand-fold.

It started in my spine, and then the sensation rippled forth from my chest, into my arms and legs, and then struck the world around me like a thunderblow.

The lamprey-eel lit up as an electric shock grilled its head in my arms. There was an audible snap as my fingers broke through its now weakened tissue and rearranged something hard that probably wasn’t supposed to give way.

I was suddenly free as the creatures went limp around me or let go altogether.

Moving faster than ever in my life, I was out of the water and back on the shore. Breathing heavily, I looked back at the churning lake as the other lamprey-eels fled back into deeper waters.

The sensation of something chewing on my elbow brought it back to my attention that the fucker that had tried to kiss me was still attached to my arm. And somehow still alive!

“Arrgh!” I screamed furiously and punched the thing four times until it came loose. Then I stomped on the motherfucker. And when that didn’t make the thing stop twitching, I grabbed the largest stone I could lift in my adrenaline-fuelled rage and brought it down on the creature’s head-maw.

Three times, just to make sure.

When the stone broke in twain on the third impact, I collapsed, leaning onto one half that was the size of my torso.

“I hate this world!”

I looked at my arm and sighed in relief when I saw that it wasn’t as bad as I had feared.

I mean, I was still injured and that was no joke. But I had expected a grave, potentially lethal injury. Instead, the lamprey’s teeth had cut through my skin but had been stopped by the new layers of muscles upon muscles that permeated my entire body.

It looked like that one time when I had been mauled by my enraged cat and had been too stupid to just let it run off to fight the competitor cat who had dared to enter his territory. I only ever made that mistake once. When cats wanted to fight, they fought, and that was it.

“Fuck.” I picked a broken-off tooth out of the wound. “I don’t know when, but I will find some kind of fish poison on this godforsaken world. And when I do, I will drop a ton of it into that fucking lake. So I swear! I will get each and every one of you.”

Fuck environmentalism. Those things needed to die!

I drew in a deep breath to gather my courage and then slowly approached the water once more to clean the wound. This time, I stayed with my feet on dry land and paid very close attention to every ripple that might move in my direction.

Having done the best I could, I decided that without medical supplies there was no other choice but to let it dry. The same counted for the bite in my lower thigh. I would have to count on the power of the nanites to ward off infection.

Then I noticed that I had unconsciously gone back into blue-vision mode during the fight. It allowed me to see a spot of brighter colour approaching me through the lakewater. The winding, blurred outline reminded me of a snake.

Growling, I bent down to pick up a rock and threw it at the spot.

When one of the eel-creatures broke through the surface and quickly changed its course towards the spot where the stone had landed, my suspicion was confirmed.

I wasn’t completely sure how that was possible, but I had something like energy vision.

That was why the stones on the shore still looked normal. I could see the electric fields that were produced by living beings. Given its strangeness and how it blurred the outlines of only living things, I didn’t believe that it was the average heat-vision that so many movies liked to portray.

Maybe it was like the ability that birds used to sense the planet’s magnetic field? Just a million times more sophisticated. Or something similar at least. I had to find a way to prove my theory before I jumped to conclusions.

Something squawked from behind me and I turned, finding that one of the little saurians was back and picking at the horror-eel's corpse.

“That's mine!” I complained and stomped my foot, causing the little creature to flash brightly and dash away.

Then it was back – with friends!

“Oh, no you don't!”

I couldn't save the whole corpse.

Just about a tenth of it.

It wasn't that I could have eaten any more eel-sushi on my own, but after having won a life or death battle against the horror eels, losing to a saurian chicken swarm was a blow to my pride.

The remaining nine-tenths of the eel went to the little monsters. They were worse than piranhas once more than thirty of them got going.

After I had realized how many of them there were, I was kind of glad that they didn't decide to nibble me to death. They could have totally done it if they wanted to, but I apparently didn't fit their prey spectrum.

From the looks of it, the little saurians preferred to be scavengers. Not that I would ever complain about such a development. It made them more likeable than anything else I had met on this planet.

At least it wasn't as if they didn't repay me for getting them a free meal. As the apparent main originators of my new abilities, just watching them do their thing was a learning experience in itself.

The easiest part was to figure out how to do the electric shocks.

My whole body had apparently turned into an oversized super-capacitor. My muscles were the electrodes and by moving them I could statically charge myself. Very much like rubbing a plastic balloon against hair or fur.

Once I had realized that much from watching the little monsters with my new blue-vision, it was easy enough to copy.

The other trick they had to show me was the high-speed movement ability that allowed them to blitz from one position to another.

The first thing I noticed was that whenever they performed their ability, they also always fixated on the spot they wanted to go to. With their destination confirmed, they somehow rippled their whole musculature, forming some kind of wavy pattern of tenseness and relaxation covering their entire bodies.

I didn't know how else to describe it.

Sadly, that little detail was hard to observe because I had to get very close for that and they disliked me getting close.

Once they had pre-charged themselves, their blue auras turned bright and expanded outwards from their bodies right before they dashed off.

I watched them do it for hours, paying close attention to every step they took.

Sadly, I didn't quite get how they managed to control their sprint ability. I had the feeling that it was a matter of training and control. Something that I wouldn't be able to learn in a single afternoon.

At least I managed a bastardised version of it. I thought of it that way because my version was a comparatively slow, brute-force method compared to theirs.

First, I had to charge my muscles as if I wanted to electrocute something. The second stage was to concentrate really, really badly on having my muscles create that unique wavy pattern of tense and relaxed areas. Then I had to let go with the movement that I desired to perform held firmly in my mind.

It was very much like tensing myself for a jump. Though, it required a lot more preparation and forethought.

All I could manage for now was to accelerate a single arm or leg to superhuman speeds.

That didn't help much when it came to my original intention of being able to run away really fast. Another downside was that the skill strained my muscles pretty badly.

But I could throw a stone hard enough to punch a hole through one of the smaller trees. Not the big and old ones that were prevalent in this forest, but as a general rule, if I could hug the trunk with my arms, hiding behind it would be a very bad idea for any enemy of mine.

The thought came to mind that I might be able to do some real damage with a spear.

So, the rest of my time was dedicated to searching the lake’s shore for some good throwing rocks and straight sticks that could be sharpened into primitive spears. All too soon, the daylight started to dwindle without me having moved away from the lake more than a few steps.

The self-loathing that I had felt yesterday was mostly forgotten by that point. Yes, I had mindlessly run off once I found out where my little sisters had been sent to. Also, there wasn't nearly as much planning involved as there should have been.

But I was here. I was alive. And I had managed the first step.

It also had to be said that I had little to no motivation to leave the relatively safe lake at this point.

Aside from the saurians and my mortal enemies, the eels, I got visitors only once. A herd of tripod-like animals visited the lake on the opposite side from where I had been at. They drank some water with their tentacles and then quickly retreated into the forest.

I returned to my own business once I had verified that they weren't after my life.

The lake provided water and food – although eel sushi wasn’t to my liking. And while I wasn’t excited about the idea, I supposed it would be possible to retreat into the water if something more dangerous than the snake-eels showed up.

And, embarrassingly enough, I was still a child of civilisation. In the absence of toilet paper, water was the next best solution.

Without having access to poison, I satisfied myself by training my skills with living targets as I slowly travelled around the lake. Every snake-eel that came within reach was torpedoed with spears and stones and electrocuted before I dragged it on land for the flock of little saurians to feed on.

The swarm of little monsters quickly caught on to what I was doing and followed me on my tour around the lake. They profited from my kills while I got to watch and study them. To my misfortune, word got around quickly within the eel's community and they learned frighteningly fast to keep their distance from me. Certainly faster than I would have expected from an animal.

By that point, I regained a little of my confidence to venture deeper into the lake's water. I wasn't ashamed to admit that I had started a quest of extermination against all eel-kind.

Watching my little comrades, I also wondered whether taming them was a possibility. I definitely would try it once I was no longer concerned about my immediate survival.

On my way, I gathered a sorted collection of sticks and plants that seemed useful, and by the end of the day, I had made myself something like a backpack. It was a carrying contraption made out of sticks and seaweed. It looked like a square framework of sticks that I could carry on two braided seaweed ropes. The things that I found to be useful could be fastened to it with seaweed cordage.

First and foremost among those things was my collection of projectiles, one particularly sharp rock that had proven useful in gutting the eels, Roderick's banged-up crate, and some skeletal eel remains that my saurian friends had left behind.

I wasn't sure what the bones could be used for yet, but something may come up. Maybe I would use the pointy ribs to make spearheads once I found a way to attach them reliably.

While getting a grip on my new surroundings, I had almost made a complete round-trip around the lake and was expecting to return to my starting point by tomorrow morning.

Like that, my first day in this world ended.

Once night came, I learned that my blue-vision, or second-sight as I decided to call it from now on, provided perfect night vision.

Though, seeing perfectly in the dark wasn’t a great help against the eerie sounds that came with the night. My little saurian friends had left me once the sun fell beneath the horizon and being alone didn’t feel great at all.

The solution to my sleeping arrangements came with climbing one of the larger trees as high as I could and using seaweed cordage to secure myself to a fitting, forking-out branch. I simply needed rest at that point and figured that if I stayed awake to defend myself from whatever wanted to eat me, I would be too tired to put up a proper fight anyway.