The two teenage lovers looked at me quizzically, their emotions instantly becoming even more conflicted with a strange bourgeoning hope. I smiled at them, relaxed and uncomplicated in comparison.

“W– What do you mean?” Alena said, her voice wavering with the words. I put on a show of thinking about the words I was going to say and then turned to the two, face a mask of serious.

“I don’t believe I ever said that I’d disallow any particular person from joining me on our travels. The only thing that they would need to display is their worth.” Alena’s face scrunched, eventually equalising to dismay.

“But what do I have to give? I don’t have anything valuable–” I shook my head.

“Not what you have, but what you can provide.” Alena’s face reddened with anger.

“I don’t have any of that either, unless you are speaking of bedtime ‘duties’.” Her expression was scathing, but I just raised an eyebrow, unimpressed.

“You thinking that you do not have worth is frankly absurd,” she recoiled slightly at that, confusion marring her face, “you are a life shifter, as well as someone at least rudimentarily trained in the sciences, including knowledge necessary for being an accomplished physician. These skills are incredibly valuable, far more valuable than what your father currently makes it seem to be by wasting his life away in this town of nothing.”

“Skills I can’t use because no-one would trust me to use them, and taboo shifting abilities that I would be killed on sight for!” Her voice continued to increase in volume, anger overtaking the overwhelming array of emotions. Rethi just looked dumbfounded, staring off into space with his eyebrows furrowed. I looked at Alena with a continually unimpressed expression.

“You are only devaluing yourself and your abilities here. I’m sure that you’ve tested your medical and shifting abilities in small animals and other specimen, likely at the behest of your father? At least to some degree?” She swallowed down a snarky line at seeing my unimpressed visage and just nodded. I nodded along as well, placing a hand on my chin.

“Then the solution to many, if not all of these problems, is to find a willing subject.”

“A willing subject?” Alena shot to her feet, the anger radiating off of her in truth now, “Are you out of your mind? Who would willingly let me experiment on them and accidentally turn them into a monster?” I looked at her dryly, rolling my eyes all the while. I picked up a simple knife out of one of my many side pockets and stabbed myself in the arm, easily going all the way down to the bone.

Internally, however, I was telling my body to not regenerate, something I had worked out I could do in training when Mayer had relented the fact that I would never learn to truly fight with an injury. As almost a joke I had tried to resist the urge for my body to regenerate and I was wounded ‘normally’. I don’t understand why that would even be allowed, but this was a particularly unique situation where it was actually useful.

I pulled the sharp but common knife out of my flesh, carving a massive chunk out of my arm without even flinching, bleeding profusely from the wound that was staying stubbornly unregenerated.

“Oh gee, it seems that I suddenly have a massive wound that is not healing, in comparison to it normally regenerating in less than a few seconds. Who could possibly help me?” My tone was exceedingly dry, entirely monotone. The two teenagers looked to the self-inflicted wound, and then back to me over and over again. Alena specifically was extremely put out, glancing at the massive chunk of flesh that had fallen into the dirt. I sighed heavily.

“Alena, fix the goddamned arm.” I growled, motivating her to snap out of her daze and rushing forward, grabbing a full waterskin from Rethi and quickly dumping the water on the wound, washing away some of the quickly drying blood so that she could see the wound better.

“I’m going to–” She started, looking up to me to explain what she was going to do, but I waved her away.

“Just do it.” I said, my voice calm and devoid of the strain of pain. She looked at me, worried by the abruptness of the situation. She closed her eyes, placing her hands on my upper arm and my wrist, leaving the wound between the two hands. She gripped my arm tightly, probably tightly enough to cut of circulation relatively well if I were normal.

Suddenly, energy began to be pushed through the hand that was clasped around my wrist, flowing into my arm with haste that felt hurried and somewhat reckless. I could feel the energy burn through my arm, analysing and surveying its structure haphazardly before reaching the wound.

The energy began freaking out, desperately trying to fix the issue in any way that it could think of. Suddenly it started to draw on the reserves of my own energy which was, as far as I am aware, endless.

The flesh started growing exponentially, faster initially than what I usually regenerated at without pushing it, but as soon as the flesh filled back into the space that was missing, it began to overflow, massive tumours began to form on my arm, Alena’s power still drawing on the energy within me to create more and more flesh on my arm. The tumours of fat, muscle, some bone, covered in various layers of skin.

I looked to Rethi, whose face had gone completely white with horror, and smiled.

“Can see why they call them Abomination Makers, huh?” His eyes turned to my smiling face with confusion, and then understanding, followed by a calm curiosity at the rapidly growing pile of tumours. It was an interesting sight to see, the mass growing bigger, slowly taking over my body. It was a curiosity case, really.

Alena opened her eyes and screamed, horror filling her completely. She took her arms off of mine, but it was too late, her own energy was still remaining in my arm, the process now having even less oversight. I realised that it had begun moving further up my arm, closer and closer to my chest.

I wasn’t going to let it reach my chest and play around in there, that didn’t sound like much fun. I swiftly grabbed my upper arm and yanked. With relative ease my arm, from my shoulder down, had been entirely ripped off. Alena’s power went even more berserk, consuming the flesh of the arm to run its own processes due to not having my own energy to run on—eventually self-destructing and turning the remains of the arm into a blob of tumours.

Alena looked at me, horrified. She fell to the ground, too unsteady on her legs.

“Oh– Oh Gods, what have I done.” But I didn’t let her rest, pulling her up from her kneeling position.

“Be quiet and watch what happens next, Alena. Not everyone gets to see an arm regrow itself every day.” I chuckled as her eyes went wide, watching as the bone itself regrew before her eyes, forming like a crystalline structure. The regeneration was normally extremely fast but if I could stop the process altogether, I could both slow it down and speed it up. I had become a master of doing all of these things. I even created a Sharah kata for it, where I would do moves that broke my bones to complete them, and then regenerate before the next step.

The ligaments came back next, bonding the bones together, allowing the bones to hang limply at my side. Next, the layers of muscle starter to come in, as well as the nerves and blood vessels. The nerves were always the worst when growing back, but I was well and truly used to the pain by now. The hand was forming simultaneously, the small bones all neatly fitting into place with a precise perfection.

In only another few seconds my entire arm and hand were fully formed once again.

“There you have it.” I said, my voice nonchalant. Rethi looked on in amazement like every time Mayer had done that much damage to me. Rethi hadn’t ever managed to entirely take off an entire arm before, though he had mangled my hands a few times.

Alena, however, was borderline shellshocked. Looking at my arm like it was black magic, and then looking down at the puddle of tumours at my feet.

“H– How did you even…” She trailed off, her mind wandering. I just smiled at her ultimately confused face.

“Sorry to break it to you, girly. You aren’t the only special one in the world. There are quite a few more that are just like me, as well.” I laughed at her shocked and also morbidly curious expression.

“You may not know how to use any of your abilities and skills right now, but what about if you met someone who is nigh unkillable, can heal from almost anything, has infinite energy reserves, and can deal with unimaginable pain like nothing?” I smiled gently at her.

“I am going to make you the greatest life shifter that has ever lived.” Her eyes lit up like beacons. And for the first time since I’ve met her, the maelstrom of emotion that continually whirled through her stopped in its tracks, being entirely subsumed by one emotion.

Hesitant, oh so very hesitant, determination.

I patted her gently on the shoulder. Passing her by and moving into my tent.

“You two can take first shift tonight. Rethi, make sure that you are rested enough to go trapezing through the woods looking for a fight tomorrow.” Rethi nodded, a shit eating grin returning to his face as he turned to his girlfriend, probably getting ready to rub in her face how shocked she was, and how he was right all along all that time.

Alena just looked stunned, the girl still trying to process all of the events of only past five or so minutes.

The hours passed in my tent, simply meditating like usual. Before long, Rethi moved into my tent and lightly tapped me on the shoulder before leaving, signalling the beginning of my shift.

I quietly moved outside, my eyes tracking the shadows through the trees, letting my brain be overtaken with the simple task of detecting predators and attacker. I certainly heard things from the woods, my senses sharp from doing similar tasks for thousands of hours. There were definitely wolves, and quite a few of them too. Maybe even multiple different packs.

But they were too close to the edge of the forest, they usually dwelled way further in, preying on smaller prey animals deeper in the heart of the forest. It worried me. It was becoming more and more apparent that there was something else in there, something that I’m sure that Mayer was aware of, but didn’t tell us going into it.

I wasn’t sure if it was something to be worried about, at my level of strength, but I was now pretty sure I didn’t have much of an ability to wield my hammer, bringing down my ability to fight quite drastically.

I summoned the hammer from within me, forming rapidly in my hands before the head thumped into the ground. The soft white light that the runes glowed with illuminated the earth it was lodged in.

I stood and tried to pick up the hammer, struggling with all my might. It was basically pointless. No matter how hard I strained, the hammer wouldn’t move enough to actually be a viable attack.

I managed, after a few seconds, to lift the thing to a point where I was able to swing the hammer down into the earth by just letting it fall, which got the head stuck deeply into the ground. I just sighed, looking intensely at the hammer, as if it would float up out of the ground for me.

An even heavier hammer wasn’t something that was on my to-do list, and now that it had happened out of nowhere, I suddenly had to figure out how to wield the thing without spending thirty minutes on a single attack.

I unsummoned it and made an attacking motion, swinging like normal, and summoning the hammer into my hands on the way down, which worked, and was the most viable attacking method I had, but when it came down to it, it broke up the flow of the Sharah severely, which was terrible for my combat ability.

At the moment, it was looking more and more like I’d simply be using the hammer for massive attacks to kill something in one hit, and for everything else I’d just be punching them.

Good thing that I was just about as proficient as a pugilist than as a hammer wielder.

I started creating a new Sharah kata to accentuate the odd big hit from my hammer, along with the majority of punches, along with a kick or two. It flowed relatively smoothly but was nowhere near as efficient a kinetic shifting sentence structure, just a little off. It was like if someone was speaking in a second language with almost perfect grammar, but it was just bad enough to entirely break the illusion of their fluency.

It was heartbreaking to see all the work for the Sharah kata, created for usage with my hammer, to go to waste like it had.

If I could wield this new hammer, I was entirely certain that I would be many times more powerful, even with the access to raw kinetic potential at all.

But none of this mattered as I watched the sun creep out from behind Orisis as it slowly orbited Virsdis.

It was the dawn of a long day of battle.