Morning in the forest always smelled the same: rotting pine needles, damp earth, and something faintly, unmistakably lethal.

  I woke because my own body decided to put me through a personalized hell. A sharp, barking cough tore through my chest, leaving a sticky taste of old copper on my lips. Yesterday’s experiments with mana flow hadn’t gone unnoticed—tiny capillaries in my sinuses simply couldn’t withstand the pressure I’d created.

  I sat up on the stiff straw mattress, and every muscle in this body answered with a protesting creak. In my previous life, I used to complain about a stiff neck after eight hours in a lab chair. Here, it felt like someone had shoved me into an industrial cement mixer, poured in gravel, and forgotten to switch it off.

  Biological wear: critical. Recalibration required, I noted automatically.

  I logged the data with the same cold detachment I once used when reading production reports. Emotions interfere with calculations, and right now I just needed to figure out how to make this bundle of bones and muscle keep moving.

  Zeno stood by the window, studying his bony fingers against the gray wash of dawn.

  “Still fouling the sky with your smoke?” he rasped without turning around. “You were humming in your sleep yesterday like a broken furnace. I nearly dragged you outside before you burned my hut down with that inner heat of yours. You can’t abuse mana like that, boy. It’s a river. You’re meant to drift with it—but you’re trying to force the whole flood through the eye of a needle.”

  I didn’t answer. My throat still burned.

  He didn’t understand the core principle. To him, mana was mysticism—a whisper of the forest, a blessing or a curse. To me, it was energy. Pure, untamed potential governed by efficiency laws.

  The problem wasn’t the mana.

  The problem was my hardware.

  Veins too narrow. A heart too weak to handle that kind of current. My mind was a broadband channel; my body, an old copper wire melting under load.

  “Eat.” Zeno tossed a strip of dried Bone Wolf meat into my lap.

  It was tough as an old tire and reeked of wet fur. In my former life, I wouldn’t have touched it without gloves. Now I tore into it with my teeth, barely tasting it. My brain needed glucose. My cells needed protein. Without fuel, I wouldn’t last until noon.

  At this fiber density, natural digestion would take six hours. Unacceptable efficiency.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Will to Live,” I commanded.

  The hum at the base of my skull deepened, steady and familiar. I directed a microscopic, precisely calibrated pulse of mana into the lining of my stomach—high-frequency vibration. Artificial catalysis.

  I began breaking the meat down into amino acids directly inside my body, bypassing the sluggish enzymatic process.

  Heat surged through me. Sweat beaded instantly across my forehead. My abdomen churned audibly. It was a necessary cost—I was refueling the reactor mid-operation.

  “Again…” Zeno muttered, watching the steam rise off me. “Will you ever learn to just wait?”

  “Waiting is a luxury we don’t have,” I replied, forcing down the last bite.

  A month passed.

  The image of a clean-shirted engineer faded completely, replaced by the reflection of something feral in the stream. Wind-cracked skin. Lean, corded arms. Eyes locked in permanent calculation. I sat on a stump outside Zeno’s hut, finishing the main project of the season.

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  The Bone Wolf’s hide had become my first real armor.

  But I hadn’t simply stitched leather together.

  I treated it like a composite structure.

  Between two layers of tough hide, I embedded the wolf’s bone plates. Not rigidly fixed—overlapping like scales, suspended in a thin layer of stabilized mana woven through the material. In my world, they would have called it adaptive armor.

  Under normal movement, it remained flexible and breathable. But I knew that under sudden impact, the mana field between the plates would spike in viscosity for a fraction of a second, distributing force across the entire surface.

  Zeno walked up and poked the chest piece.

  “Too complicated, boy. A standard mana shield is more reliable. Why build a contraption out of bones and thread?”

  “A mana shield requires active concentration and drains energy every second,” I said, tightening the last strap along my forearm. “This system is passive. It works on inertia. I conserve strength for what actually matters.”

  “And what’s that?” he narrowed his eyes.

  “Target elimination.”

  I raised my knife—fashioned from the same wolf’s fang. I fed it a thin stream of mana, and the blade began to vibrate faintly.

  “I need regeneration data. Small creatures die too quickly. I can’t properly measure tissue recovery rates. I need something larger.”

  Zeno studied my face for a long moment, as if searching for traces of humanity. Then he spat into the dirt and pointed his staff toward the lowlands.

  “There’s a Troll beyond the Black Pines. Huge. Dumb. He heals faster than you can pull your blade free. Go. If he doesn’t crush you in the first minute, maybe you’ll learn that raw numbers don’t replace real power.”

  I didn’t argue. I stood and headed into the forest.

  My footsteps made almost no sound now. I’d mastered basic acoustic interference—each step generated a subtle counter-wave that canceled the noise of the previous one. It required focus, but it was becoming instinct.

  The Black Pine lowlands greeted me with the stench of rot and stagnant water.

  I found the Troll quickly—by the steady crunch of splintering wood. He was massive. A three-meter bulk of knotted gray flesh lazily chewing through a young pine, bark and all.

  Estimated mass: two tons.

  Skin density: comparable to reinforced rubber.

  Regeneration rate: approximately five millimeters per second.

  A direct cut won’t suffice. I’ll exhaust myself before he registers pain.

  I crouched in the ferns. The Will to Live spiked my pulse. The world sharpened. I could see muscle fibers rolling beneath his greasy hide, track the rhythm of his breathing.

  I didn’t need to “defeat” him.

  I needed to collapse the system.

  I broke cover when he reached for another branch.

  The Troll roared. The sound wave made my teeth ache, but I was already moving. Hard vector right. Slide beneath the massive limb.

  The vibrating fang slipped into his ankle without resistance. I wasn’t cutting flesh in the conventional sense—I triggered cavitation within major blood vessels. Internal pressure spiked instantly, rupturing valves and veins from the inside.

  The Troll howled and dropped to one knee, shaking the ground. The wound began to bubble and seal at once—gray flesh knitting at an absurd pace.

  “Too slow,” I hissed, already climbing onto his back.

  I locked onto the folds of his neck and pressed my palm to the base of his skull.

  Objective: protein denaturation in neural tissue.

  Method: localized inductive heating via mana.

  No flames. No spectacle. Just vibration at a frequency that rendered living tissue inert.

  A microwave in miniature.

  The Troll’s eyes clouded. He convulsed violently, trying to throw me off. Regeneration engaged at full capacity—new neural pathways forming—but I destroyed them faster than they could stabilize.

  Then he hit me.

  A massive paw slammed into my side.

  I crashed into a pine tree with a crack that echoed through the forest. My armor locked instantly, distributing the monstrous force across the bone plates—but physics cannot be cheated. The impulse drove through, crushing ribs and blasting the air from my lungs. The world dimmed.

  Internal bleeding. At least two fractures. Darkness creeping in.

  The Troll staggered. His movements turned erratic, coordination gone—my thermal assault had burned through part of his cerebellum. He tried to roar, but only a broken rasp escaped his throat.

  I forced myself upright, swaying. Blood streamed from my mouth. The knife in my hand buzzed like an enraged insect.

  “Regeneration is just accelerated synthesis,” I muttered, stepping toward him. “And synthesis cannot survive destructive resonance.”

  I drove the fang beneath his jaw to the hilt and pushed the mana flow to maximum.

  Bzzzt.

  Something inside his skull collapsed with a wet, final sound. The enormous body went slack, collapsing into a heap of inert flesh. Neural impulses ceased. There was nothing left to regenerate.

  I dropped to my knees beside the corpse. My brain burned. Blood flowed steadily from my nose.

  The important part—I was alive.

  I had beaten this world’s biology with nothing but calculation and will.

  That was enough.