By the end of the month, he could hold the lightning for three seconds before his arms began to shake.
Three seconds did not sound like much. He stood in the clearing and held his hand out and counted, one, two, three, and the arc stayed continuous from his fingers to the target, the light of it so bright that he had to look away. He let go on three and his arm dropped to his side and his legs felt unsteady beneath him.
He ate half a reindeer that night and slept for twelve hours.
His body had changed.
He noticed it most when he was moving through the forest. The tracksuit had become a thing of constant negotiation, the top straining across his chest and shoulders in ways that pulled at the vine stitching he had added weeks ago. He had let it out twice more during the month, cutting the side seams and relacing them with fresh vine, and it still pulled. His arms did not fit through the sleeves the way they used to. The fabric that had once hung loose was now tight across his biceps, the white stripes on the sides stretching to accommodate what was underneath.
He had been five foot eight when he arrived in the forest.
He knew this the same way he knew his own name, a fact about himself that had been true for his entire adult life. He had measured himself against the trees in the early days, marking his height on a trunk near the cave entrance with a line from his stone dagger. He had checked it at the end of the month and the line that had been level with the top of his head was now level with his eyebrows.
He was taller. Not by much. But enough.
He stood with his back against the trunk and marked a new line with the dagger and looked at the gap between the two marks. Three inches. Maybe four. He had been eating rabbits and reindeer and slimes and the forest's fruits and mushrooms for two months and his body had decided that the specifications he arrived with were suggestions, not requirements.
He looked at his arms. The muscles were not the lean definition of a runner or the bulk of a weightlifter. They were something between, dense and solid, the kind of mass that came from dragging hundreds of kilograms of meat through a forest and climbing trees and throwing spears and learning to hold lightning in your hands. His shoulders were wider. His chest was thicker. His legs, when he looked down at them, had the architecture of something designed to cover ground and absorb impact.
He looked like he belonged here.
Not like the man who had woken up on the forest floor in a tracksuit with a dead phone in his pocket. That man was still in there somewhere, the data entry worker from Kimura Street who had read web novels and never expected to be in one. But he was wearing that man's body like a set of clothes that no longer fit properly, and underneath it, something else had been growing.
He ate the berries and mushrooms and fruits alongside the meat.
This was a rule he had developed during the month, not spoken aloud but followed consistently. The rabbits and reindeer gave him what he needed to build, but the things that grew from the earth gave him something else. He could feel the difference in how his body processed them. The meat sat heavy and solid, fuel for the muscles and the lightning. The plants sat lighter, a different kind of energy, something that kept his digestion working and his head clear and his body from feeling like a machine running on a single fuel.
He foraged every day, even on the days when the hunting was good. The mushrooms he had identified as safe grew in clusters near the roots of certain trees, pale things with gills that caught the light. The berries changed as the season shifted, the dark red ones becoming less common and something smaller and purple appearing in their place. He tested each new thing the way he had tested the first berries, the small bite, the wait, the observation. Nothing had killed him yet. Nothing had made him sick enough to regret it.
He was not going to be the man who survived rabbits and reindeer and slimes only to die because he ate the wrong mushroom.
By the end of the month, his radius from the cave was fifteen kilometers in every direction.
He knew every tree within that radius. Not each individual tree, not the way a botanist would know them, but the shape of them, the spacing, the places where the canopy opened enough for light to reach the ground, the places where the undergrowth was dense enough to slow him down. He knew where the rabbit warrens were, which ones were active and which had gone quiet. He knew where the reindeer moved through, the paths they had worn through the undergrowth over what looked like years of consistent passage. He knew where the water was, the streams that fed into the river, the pools that collected in the depressions between roots.
He moved through it all now with a speed and confidence that would have been impossible in the first weeks.
He ran. He climbed. He moved through the canopy when the ground was too slow, finding routes through the branches that connected sections of the forest in ways that walking could not. He found vines that hung from the higher branches, thick ropes of vegetation that had been growing for longer than he had been alive, and he learned to swing.
The first time he took a vine from a branch at height, his weight dropped into the arc and the world swung around him in a way that should have been terrifying and was instead exactly right. His hands held. His shoulders took the load. His legs found the landing on the far side without him having to think about it.
He did it again. And again. He found a section of the forest where the trees were tall and the vines were thick and the gaps between the trunks were wide enough that the swing became something like flight. He learned to let go at the top of the arc and cover the last distance through the air, his body curling into the landing, the impact absorbed through legs that had learned to take what the forest gave them.
George of the jungle, he thought, and the thought almost made him laugh.
He was swinging through an ancient fantasy forest wearing a ruined tracksuit held together with vine stitching, his hair longer than it had ever been, his beard a thing he had stopped trying to manage after the second week. He had lightning in his hands and the strength of something that was not quite human in his legs and the speed of something that had never needed to be fast in his running.
Stolen story; please report.
He was Tarzan if Tarzan had been a data entry clerk from Tokyo who read too many web novels.
The forest accepted him now in a way it had not accepted him in the beginning. He did not know if this was real or if he was projecting something onto the trees and the ground and the air, but it felt like acceptance. The roots still caught at his feet when he was careless, but he was less careless. The branches still broke when he chose the wrong ones, but he chose better. The forest was not friendly. It had never been friendly. But it had stopped treating him like a foreign object.
He was part of it now. Or he was becoming part of it. Or he was something that lived in it the way the rabbits and the reindeer and the slimes lived in it, a creature of this place, eating and growing and changing.
He was in the canopy on the last day of the month when he found them.
He had pushed his radius to eighteen kilometers that morning, running east through the forest at a speed that covered the ground in a way that still felt like a gift every time he did it. He had stopped at fifteen, eaten a rabbit he had killed on the way, and climbed into the canopy to cover the last three kilometers above the ground where the movement was faster and the view was better.
The trees here were taller than the ones near the cave. The trunks were wider, the bark darker, the branches starting higher up and spreading wider. He moved through them the way he had learned to move, hand over hand, the vines supplementing the branches where the gaps were too wide to jump.
He was on a branch maybe twenty meters up when he heard the sound.
It was not a sound he recognized. A low sound, rhythmic, the kind of sound that had weight to it. He stopped moving and stood on the branch with his hand on the trunk and listened.
Below him, maybe fifty meters ahead, the forest opened into a space that was not quite a clearing. The trees were still there but the undergrowth was flattened, the ground packed hard in a way that suggested regular passage. And in that space, moving with a purpose that made his chest go tight, were wolves.
He counted five of them.
They were not wolves from the world he had come from. Wolves from the world he had come from were large animals, yes, but they were the size of large dogs, their heads at hip height on a standing man. These wolves were something else entirely.
The smallest of them was as tall at the shoulder as his chest. The largest, a grey animal with a white streak down its back, was taller than he was. He was six feet tall now, standing on the branch, and that wolf would meet him eye to eye if they were on the same ground.
Their coats varied. Grey, the dominant color, ranging from silver to a dark iron that looked almost black in the filtered light. One of them was white, not the bright white of snow but the soft white of old bone, the fur around its muzzle darker with age. Another was brown, a deep reddish brown that caught the light when it moved. The fifth was something between grey and black, the color shifting as it turned its head.
They moved with the confidence of things that had never been threatened in this forest. They did not move like predators hunting. They moved like a pack that had already eaten, already done whatever they had come to do, and was now moving through their territory with the casual authority of ownership.
One of them stopped. The grey one with the white streak. It lifted its head and its ears turned and it stood still in the way predators stand still when they are listening for something that might be food or might be nothing.
Eto did not move.
He was on the branch with his hand against the trunk, his breathing as slow as he could make it, his body pressed against the bark in a way that broke up the shape of him. The wolf's head turned. Its eyes were yellow, the color of old paper, and they swept across the canopy where he was standing without stopping.
It went back to walking.
He watched them move through the space below him and disappear into the trees on the far side. The sounds of them faded, the low rhythm of their movement, the occasional sound that might have been a vocalization or might have been nothing. Then the forest was quiet again.
He stayed on the branch for a long time after they were gone.
His heart was beating faster than the run had made it beat. Not fear. He had been afraid in this forest, had been afraid many times, had been afraid when the rabbit's horn went into his shoulder and when the reindeer dragged him through the undergrowth and when the lightning exploded the branch beneath his hand. This was not fear.
This was recognition.
He had been eating rabbits and reindeer. He had been building himself out of the things that lived in this forest. He had lightning in his hands and strength in his legs and speed that no human had ever possessed in the world he came from. And he had just watched five wolves the size of horses walk through the forest like they owned it.
He wanted what they had.
He did not know what it was. Speed, maybe, though the rabbit had already given him speed. Senses, the way the grey wolf had heard something he could not have heard, smelled something he could not have smelled. Strength, the power in those bodies that carried them through the forest like the trees were not obstacles. Magic, the way the slimes had carried lightning in their translucent bodies, some quality that lived in the wolves and would live in him if he ate enough of them.
He did not want to make them a permanent diet. He had learned enough about his body in the past month to understand that the things he ate changed him in permanent ways, that the rabbits and reindeer had built him into something that could not be undone. He would eat a wolf. Maybe two. And whatever they gave him, he would take, and he would move on to the next thing.
But first he had to kill one.
He sat on the branch and thought about it. The wolves moved as a pack. They were large, too large to kill with a single spear throw unless the throw was perfect. They were fast, faster than the reindeer, probably faster than him. They had senses that would make sneaking up on them almost impossible. And they had teeth that could end him faster than the rabbit's horn had almost ended him.
He needed a plan.
He needed to watch them. Learn their patterns. Find the place where they were vulnerable, the moment when one of them was separated from the pack, the weakness in the way they moved through their territory. He had a month of learning to hunt the rabbits and the reindeer. The wolves would take longer. That was fine. He had time.
He climbed down from the branch and moved back toward the cave, his route taking him through the forest at a slower pace than usual, his mind already working on the problem. The tracksuit pulled at his shoulders. The horn dagger was heavy at his hip. The bone spear was in his hand, the tip sharpened and resharpened until it was as good as he could make it.
He would find them again. He would watch them. And when the moment came, he would kill one of them and eat it and add whatever it carried to the thing he was becoming.
He reached the cave as the light was fading, built the fire, ate the remaining reindeer meat from the day before. His appetite was steady now, a constant baseline that the lightning drew from and the meat replenished. He was not hungry the way he had been in the beginning. He was something else now, something that had learned to manage the need.
He sat at the cave entrance and looked out at the darkening forest and thought about the wolves.
The grey one with the white streak would be the one. The largest. The one that had stopped and listened, that had looked in his direction without seeing him. That one would have something worth taking.
He would need to be patient.
He settled back against the cave wall and closed his eyes. The lightning hummed under his skin, a low current that he had learned to live with, that he had learned to call and hold and use. The strength sat in his legs and his shoulders, ready to move when he told them to move. The speed was there, waiting for the moment when he needed to cover ground faster than anything in this forest could cover it.
He would find the wolves tomorrow. He would watch them. He would learn them.
And when he was ready, he would take what they had.
The fire burned down to coals. The forest went dark. He slept.