A year went by...

Kael’s descent used to be a slow, hateful crawl, feet slipping on loose shale, fingers burning from clinging too long, lungs dragging cold air like it was made of needles. A year ago, every meter down the mountain felt like a negotiation with gravity where gravity always won.

Now he moved as if the mountain belonged to him.

He dropped from cliff edge to cliff edge with the casual confidence of something that had fallen a thousand times and finally learned how not to die doing it.

His hands didn’t search for holds anymore, they picked them. Two fingers hooked into cracks that looked like they were carved for insects, not men. His boots barely touched stone before he was already shifting weight, already committing to the next jump, and he did it without looking down like the drop was beneath his dignity.

On his back, a large backpack swelled and strained like a beast trying to escape. Every strap creaked under the load. The thing looked obscene, too heavy, too full, too stubborn to sit right. It should’ve dragged him backward off the cliff. It should’ve made him careful.

Instead, Kael treated it like a mild inconvenience. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

He had no complains in him this time, not a single word of annoyance. Long gone were the days he’d endlessly curse at his master.

"Fucking old man!"

Or maybe they became just a bit rarer...

The words came out more like a reflex than a tantrum, the way you swear at a hammer after it smashes your thumb. The difference was that Kael didn’t stop to breathe after it.

He didn’t slow down to savor the complaint. He kept moving, because his body had learned that stopping on a mountain was how you get stiff, sloppy, and dead.

"What do you mean by you want to eat roast boar tonight! Do I look like some private chef? Damn this to hell!" he cursed as he continued climbing down.

His voice got stolen by the wind, broken into pieces and thrown off into the valley. He didn’t care. If anything, he hoped the mountain carried it all the way up to that cave so the old man could hear it and laugh.

The next sequence happened so fast it barely registered as decision.

Suddenly, he let go of his hand, and the heavy backpack pulled him down like a sac of potatoes. The drop yanked his center of mass outward, the kind of tug that used to make his stomach flip and his mind go blank.

A year ago, panic would’ve hit first, arms flailing, foot missing its purchase, body slamming into rock until something cracked.

Now?

Not Kael, or at least current Kael.

His hips turned before his fear could form. One shoulder dipped. A single twist of his body, a light touch of his foot on the wall, then he was gone, rushing down the steep cliff face on his feet, from one side to another.

His soles kissed stone in quick, precise taps, tap, tap, tap, each contact just long enough to redirect momentum, never long enough to let the cliff decide his fate. The backpack swung with him like a pendulum, but he compensated automatically, tightening his core, letting the weight pull through his movement instead of against it.

Several steps later he landed on the ground.

He didn’t stumble. He didn’t sink. He didn’t even flare his arms for balance.

With that much weight, including the iron rings that became twice as large in size during the past year, he slammed into the ground... without even making the ground shake or dip more than an inch.

The grass beneath his boots bent, then sprang back up like it had been tapped, not crushed.

"Damn, how does he do it without even flattening the grass?" Kael sighed as he walked forward.

It wasn’t a boast. It came out with real irritation, like his own body was showing off, but it wasn’t to the level of getting praised by his cruel master. The old Kael would’ve celebrated that control. The current Kael was already thinking about what it meant.

If he could land like that while loaded down, then his master was about to add more weight. That’s how it always went. The moment you got efficient, the punishment got creative.

He rolled his shoulders once, letting the straps bite into muscle and skin. The iron rings clinked softly when he moved, heavy circles that didn’t just add weight, but insisted on being felt. They were no longer "training tools." They were a constant argument between Kael’s body and gravity, and gravity had finally started losing.

He looked around, eyes scanning the ground the way a starving man scans a table.

Tracks.

Not old. Not blurred by wind. Fresh enough that the edges hadn’t crumbled.

"Lucky!" he said as he realized the hooves belonged to what he was looking for, a Boar.

The word carried relief and annoyance at the same time. Relief because it meant tonight’s problem had a solution. Annoyance because it meant he was about to do work that would somehow still be called "character building."

He moved forward a bit following the trail until he spotted a boar that was digging its tusks into the ground, probably searching for its meal.

The thing was thick-necked and mean-looking, shoulders rolling as it tore at dirt. Its ears flicked at insects. Its breath came in rough snorts that puffed dust. It was so busy being greedy it didn’t notice death arriving behind it.

Without making his presence known, Kael grabbed one item from his backpack.

A rock.

That was all there was in it, a large rock, and then he flung it forward at the boar.

No flourish. No stance. Just a casual throw, like he was skipping a stone.

The rock hit with a sound that wasn’t quite a crack and wasn’t quite a thud, something uglier in between. The poor beast never realized that it was sent to heaven, as its body dropped to the ground, and half of its skull caved in.

It twitched once, a reflex trying to argue with reality, then went still.