The morning wind rose like a howling, awakening gale that lashed the empire’s towering mountain peaks. High above the sheer, precipitous ridges, the first rays of sunlight broke through the heavy, sullen mass of clouds. An icy, golden glow tried slowly to thaw the frozen domain of the Ward, but the biting cold remained omnipresent. Thick plumes of white vapor billowed from the ancient stone walls.
Yet the freezing silence of this early morning was abruptly torn to shreds.
Pained cries surged up from the depths. They came from everywhere and nowhere at once, raging and rippling through the stone corridors. The screaming flowed in a swift, uninterrupted current, pierced the wooden structures of Oakhaven, tore through the glowing, crackling expanse of Cinderpulse City, and charged without mercy straight toward the University of War. There, the echoes slammed together into a single, sharp wave and flew directly into Nyx’s mouth.
“DON’T LOOK, SIL!”
Inside the dormitory shared by Silarias and Nyx, Silarias jerked awake with a violent shock and a deep groan. He grabbed his chest, where his heart was still hammering like a blacksmith’s bellows. His muscles felt tight, heavy, and overcharged with raw energy.
“Oahhh… ehh, my body…” Silarias forced himself upright with a struggle, his voice rough from sleep. “I feel worse, but at the same time better…”
He was abruptly cut off by Nyx’s panicked, hysterical shriek.
“DON’T LOOK! I… ehh…”
Silarias rubbed the last remnants of sleep from his eyes, planted his bare feet on the freezing floor, and walked toward her with unsteady steps. “Nyx, stop acting crazy. Haven’t I seen you before?”
Nyx desperately clutched a thick, coarse cloth tight around herself and retreated until her back hit the wooden wall. “No, no, I’m myself… but this is different!”
Just as the words left her mouth, the fabric slipped from her trembling fingers. The cloth slid slowly and silently from her shoulders down to the floor. Her physical contours emerged, strikingly defined.
“I, ehh… HELLO!”
Nyx stared straight down, her gaze completely fixed on her visibly altered body. Her breath hitched in her throat. She stared at her own contours, which had become significantly fuller, stronger, and more prominent than the day before.
Silarias stood frozen in place. His eyes widened, and he stared at her in sheer bewilderment. He didn’t know in the slightest where he was supposed to look.
“Nyx… how… you… you were already full, but you look… stronger…”
Heat rushed up into Silarias’s cheeks, and he began to blush visibly. Nyx looked up from herself, met his gaze with wide, shocked eyes, and they remained locked in a heavy, charged silence for several long seconds.
BAM! BAM!
A loud, hurried pounding on the wooden door shattered the tension between them like glass.
Both startled and reflexively looked sideways into the large crystal mirror on the wall. Their breath hitched all over again. It wasn’t just that their bodies had grown physically broader, more muscular, and more solidly built. It was primarily their eyes. A deep, blazing green glow burned brightly within the pupils of both Silarias and Nyx. Beneath their skin, their veins pulsed faintly with the exact same magical, primordial radiance.
Nyx hurriedly snatched up a cloak and jerked the door open.
“OH, Aur… AURELIUS! You too?! And… that eye? What is this…”
As the words tumbled out of her mouth, her mind raced at full speed. Wait a minute… didn’t that healer say something yesterday about this being able to let an entire realm die and heal? Did she mention how? Wasn’t she talking about precisely this right now?!
Aurelius stood in the dark hallway like a streamlined, dangerous swordsman. His shoulders had grown noticeably broader, yet he retained that signature lithe, razor-sharp stance. From beneath the bandages covering his right eye, small, glittering particles of energy escaped and drifted through the air. The eye itself was securely patched with a tight cloth wrapped around his head.
“Nyx… uh, I slept so weirdly,” Aurelius began, gazing down at his muscular arms. “How do I put this… I feel good and—”
“Bad at the same time,” Silarias finished the sentence for him, stepping up beside Nyx in the doorway.
Aurelius looked past Nyx and fixed his gaze on Silarias. His eyes widened as he took in the imposing figure of his leader.
“Woah, Sil… seriously weird. You’ve changed so much, but somehow also so little. In small ways… Have you seen the rest yet?”
Silarias looked at him with a hard, serious stare. “What do you mean, the rest, Aurelius?”
Without a second’s hesitation, Silarias grabbed his cloak and strode directly out into the hallway. Nyx followed close behind him, but the sudden movement made her dizzy. Her head spun and her legs buckled beneath her. She lost her balance and nearly crashed onto the stone floor.
SWOOSH!
At the very last second, she was smoothly caught by Jane’s thick, muscular tail.
Jane stood right beside them in the corridor. She was an impressively graceful feline lynx hybrid, bearing noticeably more feminine and powerful contours. The most striking thing about her was the electrical gemstone now anchored precisely between her eyes on her forehead. With a quick, fierce flash of the gemstone, the feral shadow of a panther flickered across her face for a fraction of a second.
Wobbling and searching for their balance, they all walked together into the large common living area.
The hall had turned into an absolute madhouse. Everyone in the room possessed some bizarre, visible enhancement of their own.
In the far corner, Beat flashed like a phantom across every inch of the room, leaving behind only blurred afterimages. “Look! I feel faster… even faster!”
Kaelid sat upon a massive stone bench. His chest and shoulders had grown overwhelmingly broad. Sitting right beside him was Lila, who had not only developed more feminine curves, but whose skin and hair were now physically intertwined with living plant elements and slender vines.
A short distance away, Apollo picked up a wooden cup of drink from the table. The moment his fingers brushed the wood, the liquid inside the cup began to violently boil and bubble from the immense heat radiating from his body.
Ponich stared around with wide, dazed eyes. “This can’t possibly just… OH! Master Silarias! I think the Ward has undergone a slight change… OH, MASTER! Have you been training for a hundred years, or—”
At that exact moment, the entire room noticed the trio’s arrival. Everyone instantly stopped whatever they were doing. A heavy, breathless silence fell over the living space.
“BOH… SILARIAS… AND… NYX…”
Silarias scanned the room, slow and observant, letting his gaze sweep over every single face. “Do you guys see that green glow too… hehe.”
Nyx, Aurelius, and Jane called out in absolute unison: “Yeah, everyone’s got it in their eyes!”
From the deep, dark back corridor, a piercing, wild screech suddenly rang out.
“I TOLD YOU NOT TO LOOK!!!”
BOOM!
A dull, scorching explosion shook the building’s foundations. Ren came storming through the halls like a human torch. His entire body was ablaze with bright flames, while his right eye glowed an intense, blazing blue. In absolute panic, he burst into the common room.
“WATER!”
Nyx reacted purely on instinct. She raised her arm and fired a direct blast of ice energy straight at him. The fire was smothered in a single second. Ren stood soaked and steaming on the floor, immediately beginning to shiver violently from the cold.
He looked around, saw the rest standing there, and let his arms drop. “Ohh… you guys changed too. Look!” He flexed his arms with a wide grin and showed off a pair of solid biceps. “I don’t even know what I did wrong. We went to sleep and suddenly her clothes didn’t fit anymore. Then I accidentally looked and then I burst into flames!”
Nyx raised an inquiring eyebrow. “What precisely didn’t fit anymore?”
Ren pointed a trembling finger down the corridor. “See for yourself!”
He realized what he had just said, turned deep burgundy, and began to blush furiously.
Before he could stammer out another word, hurried footsteps echoed through the hall. Miki came running out in total panic, having quickly improvised by throwing a large, rough jute sack around her shoulders that hung loosely about her.
“No, I have to put it out! I just got startled!”
A small, pitch-black flash shot from the shadows of the hallway across the living area. In a fraction of a second, all the lingering smoke and leftover fire seemed to vanish without a trace.
Bonk stepped into the living space. He had grown gigantic, far more bestial and rugged than before. Effortlessly, he carried the panicking Miki perched upon his massive shoulder.
Right behind Bonk, Zax stepped forward from the darkness. The right half of his face was still covered in crackling, black flames. With every step he took, the flames receded just a little further, revealing more and more of his actual skin and face. Zax looked at the group with a dark smirk.
“Mm… sleep a bit too wildly?”
Renuardo was still being dragged through the room while fast asleep. A young Dire Wolf had carefully clamped the back of his clothing between its teeth, while a feathered turtle pushed him unperturbedly from behind. Perched on his chest was the Bulletshrimp, which clicked its claws warningly with every bump along the way. Meanwhile, a low, rhythmic whistling issued from Renuardo’s nose, as if he remained completely oblivious to the chaos around him.
Suddenly, the last wisps of smoke were sucked away by a powerful vacuum. A rotund, floating frog, which appeared to be completely filled with smoke, drifted into the room. Walking behind the frog was Balamore. His entire upper body was covered in intricate iron tattoos. At the moment, only the tattoos on his neck emitted a fierce, pulsing glow. With a simple wave of his hand, he made the frog vanish into thin air, whereupon the light on his neck died out.
Balamore coughed deeply and rubbed his stomach. “Woah, I could eat a whole cow right—”
Izamaro trotted up behind him with a slight bounce. “Brother, make it two!” He stopped dead in his tracks the moment his eyes landed on Silarias. “Silarias… did you change too?”
Silarias looked around at his transformed elite. A thought began to form in his mind. This could work…
Yet his train of thought was brutally interrupted when Kaelid sneezed heavily.
SNAP! BOOM!
From the shockwave of his sneeze, immensely thick stone pillars erupted straight up out of the floor with a deafening roar. Lila startled at the violence and spun around quickly, accidentally flailing her arms through the air. A volley of magical seeds shot away like sharp bullets, boring straight through the thick stone outer wall.
Miki completely panicked at the noise. She wanted to lean against one of the brand-new pillars to catch her breath. “OH WHAT, NO!”
The moment her bare hands touched the stone, the pillar instantly melted into liquid, orange lava. A large portion of it sheared off and crashed down. Miki ran in sheer panic to another spot, but everywhere she leaned and sought support, deep, smoking melt-marks formed.
“Ugh… Nyx!”
Nyx tried to put them out with her ice, but she had absolutely zero control over her newly upgraded powers. A massive, freezing beam shot from her hands, missed Miki entirely, and froze Ponich solid on the spot inside a colossal, transparent block of ice.
It was total, uncontrollable chaos.
Suddenly, a powerful, invisible wave of ether tore straight through the building’s walls.
The broken, melted pillar vanished in a single beat and was replaced by a perfectly constructed, invisible pillar. With a second wave of ether, all fire on the floor was extinguished, and the deep melt-marks healed as though they had never existed.
Loud, hearty laughter and heavy footsteps echoed from the hallway. Talking, laughing hammers dashed through the room, autonomously beginning to repair the remaining damage and chop away the redundant pillars.
Nicola walked out of the hall. His hair stood wildly on end as if he’d taken a direct lightning strike, and certain parts of his body continuously flickered in and out of invisibility. Walking beside him was Lyn, more broadly built yet retaining her feminine shape, with that same blazing green glow burning in her eyes.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Brutal, gigantic force slammed against the Goated Outcasts’ heavy doors.
The door swung wide open with a massive crash. There stood an immensely muscular Solomon, standing tall and full of confidence, flexing in the doorway.
“Where is he?!”
Solomon waltzed into the room without a single word of apology and locked eyes directly onto Silarias. With a simple, swift motion of his hand, he completely froze the time surrounding Silarias, Nyx, and himself. The rest of the talking, screaming, and running room froze mid-motion into lifeless statues.
Solomon strode up to Silarias, grabbed the young man, tossed him effortlessly several meters into the air, and caught him as if he were a small child.
“BOY! Do you have any idea what kind of miracle you’ve just pulled off?! Realize that overdose has improved the entire Ward in a single night! I haven’t even told you half of what there is to know about that Haomamane… and that’ll come later, but brace yourself… You’re going to have to get used to this