Ares walked until the forest thinned and the old military support position rose out of the ruins.
The buildings still stood in uneven rows, concrete stained dark by years of rain.
He moved through them without hurry.
Food had always been the harder thing to find.
Clothes were simpler.
Lockers still held folded uniforms in some of the rooms that had not been forced open.
He took what fit the longer frame of his body: a white undershirt that stretched tight across the new width of his shoulders, a black field jacket that closed over it, dark trousers, and a pair of boots that no longer felt too large.
He dressed slowly, testing the way the fabric moved with him.
Everything sat differently now.
The storage room at the back of the main building still held what he had left behind weeks earlier.
The crossbow hung where he had placed it.
He checked the string by feel, loaded a single bolt, and settled the weapon across his back.
The metal spear never left his right hand.
Outside he found a low concrete ledge that overlooked the open ground beyond the perimeter.
He sat.
The body felt wrong in its new quiet strength.
Energy moved through him without the old drag of hunger or fatigue.
When he listened, the world arrived in layers: wind through distant wire, the soft shift of rubble two streets away, the slow breathing of something large that had not yet decided to move.
When he looked, the details held farther than they should have.
A broken window three blocks out.
The shape of a collapsed roof beyond it.
He remembered the bird.
The moment before the blackout.
His arm rising without decision.
The spear climbing.
The eye.
The fall.
He stood and weighed the spear in his hand.
A test throw into empty air would tell him little.
An animal would give him both the measure of the new strength and food that did not need to be scavenged.
He entered the treeline again and found a place where the ground fell away into a shallow draw.
He sat.
He listened.
Footsteps came first, heavy and uneven.
Then the deeper thump of weight moving through undergrowth.
Ares rose and followed the sound without hurry, keeping the wind in his face.
The animal resolved between the trunks: a wild boar, thick through the shoulders, the weight of it clear even at distance, two hundred and fifty kilos at least.
Long tusks curved from the lower jaw.
It rooted in the soft earth, unaware.
Ares stepped into the open.
The boar’s head came up.
Small eyes fixed on him.
It charged without warning, low and fast, tusks angled for the gut.
Ares felt the tension in his arms, the readiness in the long muscles.
His heart rate stayed flat.
The old spike of fear simply failed to arrive.
He watched the animal close the ground.
He set his feet.
The spear came up.
He threw.
The metal left his hand in a single clean motion.
It passed through the boar’s chest without slowing, drove on through the far side, and buried itself in the trunks of two trees standing close behind.
The animal’s momentum carried it another three strides before the body collapsed, legs folding under the sudden absence of whatever had driven it.
Ares stood still.
Surprise tightened his chest, then passed.
He walked to the carcass, freed the spear from the wood, and wiped the blade on the grass.
The throw had required almost no effort.
It lived in the arm, in the shoulder, in the long muscles that had not been there before.
He crouched, worked his arms under the boar’s shoulders, and lifted.
The carcass rose cleanly.
The new strength in his back and legs took the two hundred and fifty kilos without strain.
He settled the heavy body across his shoulders and started back toward the support position.
The spear stayed in his right hand.
The crossbow rode easy against his spine.
The forest remained quiet around him.
Whatever else moved out there had heard the charge and the fall, and had chosen to stay away.
Halfway across the open ground he saw the dog.
The same lean, scarred animal that had shared the rabbit with him days earlier.
It stood at the edge of the rubble, ears forward, watching.
Ares stopped.
He lowered the boar, cut a clean half with the knife from the jacket pocket, and left the portion on the asphalt.
The dog waited until he stepped back.
Then it moved in, took the meat in its jaws, and, this time, did not eat where it stood.
It dragged the heavy piece all the way to the nearest building of the support position and disappeared inside.
Ares carried the remaining half to the storage room.
He built a small fire in the old metal drum, seared the meat, and ate until the last of the hunger was gone.
The body accepted everything he gave it.
No fullness.
No limit he could feel.
Afterward he lay on the concrete floor with the spear beside him and stared at the ceiling.
The blackouts had stopped, but the gaps remained closed.
Strength, senses, the capacity to consume without limit—the body was simply different now.
He wondered if it was permanent.
He rose and walked the support position without caution.
No need to hide.
He was not looking for food.
He was looking for something to occupy the quiet.
In a room that had once been a classroom he found the books.
Most were ruined by damp.
Two remained intact.
Hand-to-Hand Combat.
Weapons Combat.
He dropped the weapons manual on the floor and took the other back to the storage room.
He read it once, slowly, under the gray light from the high window.
Weak points.
Pressure points.
The places a knife should enter if the goal was silence or speed.
When he closed the cover he shut his eyes and found the pages still there, every diagram, every line of text, held as clearly as if his eyes had taken a photograph and placed it behind them.
He opened his eyes.
He would not return to the old camp of the people who had driven him out.
That place was finished.
But the ones who had followed afterward, the ones who ate human flesh, still moved through the ruins somewhere beyond the support position.
His fingers closed harder around the spear.
Ares closed the book and set it beside the spear.
It was time to hunt.