When the sun was fully up, casting long, sharp shadows through the pine trees, Wolfen herded his reluctant students—Derek, Leo, Jordan, Eva, and a determined, silent Maya—down to a relatively flat clearing in the forest below. The air was still crisp, and the memory of the raider camp's carnage was a faint, metallic ghost on the breeze.
"Right," Wolfen announced, clapping his hands together with a sound like two rocks cracking. "The whining is over. The running is over. Now, we build."
He didn't mean a shelter. He walked to the center of the clearing, knelt, and placed his palms flat on the earth. The air around his hands began to shimmer with heat. The soil, the ash from the battle, the particulate matter in the air itself, began to coalesce, swarming to his call like iron filings to a magnet. It wasn't the elegant, instantaneous formation of his blade; this was a slower, more deliberate process of creation. A dark, liquid-looking substance flowed from his hands, solidifying not into the pure, glossy obsidian of his weapon, but into a denser, matte-black material that seemed to absorb the light. He called it Umbralite.
First, he forged dumbbells. But these weren't the neat, polished things from a pre-fall gym. They were brutalist blocks of Umbralite, rough-hewn and unnaturally heavy for their size, with grips that seemed almost too thin to hold. He dropped one in front of Derek, who grunted in surprise as he barely caught it, his arms straining.
Next came the gloves. They were fingerless, made of the same dark material, but with a cruel twist: a thick, heavy ring of Umbralite was fused around each wrist, adding punishing weight to every movement.
"To build explosive power," Wolfen explained, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Then came the armor. He didn't make full suits, but rather sections: heavy greaves for their shins, vests that sat on their shoulders like the yoke of an ox, and gauntlets that covered their forearms. Each piece was grotesquely heavy, the Umbralite seeming to amplify gravity itself.
Finally, he created his masterpiece of misery: a long, thick, rectangular slab of Umbralite, standing upright like a tombstone, its surface pitted and unforgiving.
"That," he said, pointing, "is your new best friend. You will punch it, kick it, and headbutt it until it loves you. While wearing the gloves and armor, of course."
Leo stared at the slab, then at his own fists. "You want us to punch solid… whatever-the-hell that is?"
"Your bones will adapt," Wolfen said cheerfully. "Or they'll break. Either way, it's a learning experience."
Before the mutiny could fully form, he decided to share some theory. "You should also understand what you're up against. The Architects don't use a simple A-B-C ranking. It's… more primal. More them." He leaned against a tree, looking every bit the sadistic gym teacher from hell.
"There are fourteen Tiers of threat and capability," he began. "Tier 14 is a baseline, unarmed, uninfected human. Useless. Tier 13 is someone with a pointy stick. Marginally less useless." He pointed at Derek, Leo, and Jordan. "You three, with your current skills and those pathetic weapons, are hovering around Tier 12. Congratulations, you've graduated from 'cannon fodder' to 'moderately irritating cannon fodder.'"
They glared at him.
"Eva," he continued, "with her enhancements and my… contributions… you're a solid Tier 8. A legitimate threat to a small military unit."
His eyes then fell on Maya. "You, in your current state of emotional turmoil, are a volatile Tier 4. If you ever master that temper, you could potentially hit Tier 3." The respect in his tone was unmistakable.
"And you?" Derek asked, almost dreading the answer.
Wolfen smiled. "I am a stable, certified Tier 5. The things in Tiers 1 through 4 are… theoretical. Cataclysms. Walking extinction events the Architects keep locked away. Now," he clapped his hands again, "enough talk. Let's see if we can't nudge those pathetic numbers up a bit."
The workout he devised was not just hard; it was inhumane. Everything was in sets of one hundred.
"One hundred push-ups! One hundred squats! One hundred lunges! Then, one hundred punches on the Slab of Eternal Suffering!" he barked.
It was too much. Even for Eva, with her augmented body, the Umbralite weights and armor were a brutal challenge. Her muscles screamed, her new limbs aching with a deep, cellular fire. Derek was drenched in sweat after the first set of squats. Leo, for all his bravado, was seeing stars by the fiftieth lunge. Jordan, despite his mysterious resilience, was just as exhausted as the others, his body pushed to its absolute limit.
Only Maya was different. She attacked the regimen with a silent, terrifying fury. Each punch she threw at the Umbralite slab landed with a wet, meaty thwack that made the others wince. Her eyes were fixed on some internal horizon, every rep a penance, every drop of sweat an offering to the god of self-control. When she finished her hundred punches, her knuckles were raw and bleeding, the Umbralite rings on her gloves stained crimson.
She turned to Wolfen, her chest heaving. "More."
Wolfen, who had been lounging against a tree, idly sketching in his reclaimed book, looked up. He seemed genuinely tired from creating the Umbralite equipment, a faint sheen of sweat on his own brow. He raised an eyebrow at her, then a slow, approving smile spread across his face.
"Demanding. I like it." With a sigh, he pushed himself up and created another set of even heavier Umbralite anklets for her, which she strapped on without a word and immediately began another set of lunges.
Inspired—or shamed—by her determination, the others gritted their teeth and pushed on, their groans and curses filling the forest air.
Throughout it all, Wolfen was a bizarrely contradictory coach. He would sit for twenty minutes, completely absorbed in his sketchbook, his hand moving with a surprising, delicate grace. If you could have seen the page, you'd have found not battle plans, but incredibly detailed, technical drawings of muscle groups, skeletal structures under stress, and diagrams of kinetic energy transfer. He was literally designing their training in real-time.
Then, without looking up, he'd call out, "Leo, you're putting your hip into the punch wrong. It's a push, not a swing. You're wasting 40% of your potential force." Or, "Jordan, your stance is too narrow. A strong wind would knock you over. Widen it. Yes, even though it hurts more."
He was infuriatingly, impossibly correct every time.
As the sun climbed higher, baking the clearing, the group—a collection of groaning, sweating, Umbralite-laden disasters—slowly began to understand. This wasn't just training. This was a forge. And Wolfen Welfric, the bored, sketching, brutally honest blacksmith, was hammering them into something new. Something that might, just might, survive what was coming.