The air was cooler here than on Earth 3. Fall was well under way and the air felt damp, especially under the pines where the sun never reached. A low, morning fog rose off the small river, soft and colorless and crept across the forest floor.

  As predicted, Alex had woken up at the hint of dawn and with very few exceptions, the rest of the campus still slept.

  Behind the residence buildings and across the thin line of the McIntyre river, stood a small forest of pine and birch. Alex stood some ways off the walking path in a small clearing of thin grasses, thick moss and half brown ferns. He stood with a broom handle balanced across his palms.

  It wasn’t exactly a battle weapon, and a little lighter than his Mages staff back on Earth-3, but it had the right length and the right weight distribution. Good enough to get in his practice. The wood was smooth from use, he’d nabbed it from the janitor's closet, and heavy enough to sting when hit his shin. Or head, which he’d done twice now while trying to learn how to spin the staff around quickly.

  A faint blue overlay shimmered in his vision – transparent silhouettes demonstrating the motions that had been drilled into them over the weekend: stance, rotation, guard, thrust.

  He was getting pretty good at it by this point. Practice plus ANIP did seem to make perfect.

  It was Wednesday morning. He’d successfully avoided all of his friends the day before, feigning exhaustion from a busy first weekend on the Dungeon Inc. set. He was going to have to face them today, but he still hadn’t figured out what he was going to say. What he could say. There was no way any of them were going to let him hide behind a theoretical NDA.

  He let out a deep breath and focused on the demonstration outline in front of him. Relaxed his knees and followed along, slow and deliberate, letting muscle memory fill in the gaps.

  The first time he’d done this routine, on Sunday morning, his movements had been stiff and uncertain. Slow. Now, just two days later, and about 6 hours of practice, his body flowed through the sequences with a kind of intuitive logic – not perfect, but remembered.

  He spun the staff through a tight arc, felt the balance shift, caught it on the rebound. The broomstick hissed through the air, scattering droplets of mist.

  Still too loose on the wrist, the HUD noted in a faint ghost-text in the top corner of his vision.

  He adjusted, gripping the staff more firmly and tried to stiffen his wrist as he turned the broomstick in a blur around himself.

  Branches creaked overhead. A raven took off from the branches, wingbeats thumping through the trees.

  He finished the routine and sank into a neutral stance – feet shoulder width, knees soft, breathing steady.

  The Still Water breathing rhythm came easier now. Natural and automatic. Inhale. Hold. Inhale more. Exhale. Even here, on the mostly manaless side of the portal, the technique smoothed his thoughts and helped focus him.

  He set the broomstick against a tree and wiped his hands on his hoodie. He opened the menu and started flipping through for a new martial art he had activated.

  “Alright,” he muttered. “Let’s see how bad I am at this technique today.” The ANIP’s passive light pulsed in response – an almost encouraging flicker. On Monday night he had found a whole tree of other ‘skills’ the ANIP had been programmed to teach. They were all greyed out unfortunately.

  He assumed that each class got a default set of skills to train and those ones weren’t available to him.

  Unfortunately, as a Mage, his custom menu had only been loaded with the Krav Maga that Reach was teaching them, and the sword and staff manuals. Everything else was available in the menus if you dug around long enough, but access to them was locked.

  But he had found a loophole that let him activate the ones he wanted.

  It happened yesterday, after his practice session in the forest. When he was finishing up, he noticed how all the pine trees looked a lot like those wooden training dummies you saw in old kung fu movies.

  Most of the trees here were white pine. They grew tall and straight and most of the bottom branches died off as the tree climbed. So the bottom 15 or 20 feet of each tree was just dead, dried, skeletal branches spaced out around the trunk.

  Obviously all his recent training was changing how he looked at the world, because he had walked through this forest dozens of times before and never thought about it quite like that.

  Regardless, the idea made him wonder about techniques that used those dummies, since he had a whole forest of them available to him. So he pulled out his phone and looked it up. Apparently the wooden dummies were used in a variety of martial arts, but the one that he was thinking of was Wing Chun.

  He didn’t know how useful it would be for him, but it looked like fun and he figured that any training had to be good training. He watched a few videos and, after snapping off the excess branches on a thick pine tree, started through the motions he had just watched. He moved slowly, not hitting the tree very hard. It was all about learning the motions and working through the flow of movements.

  After about 20 minutes, the Wing Chun training manual popped up in his class training bar.

  Apparently ‘knowing’ a skill already was enough for the ANIP to reward you with further training. Which meant, he had a way to get around the unavailable training manuals by just doing a little self learning first. It was a soft hack of the system.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  He took a deep breath and lined himself up with one of the trees he had prepared. Activating the training module, he spent another hour working through the beginner motions of the Wing Chun Wooden Dummy practice according to the ANIPs training manual and its provided ghostly outline. He had to admit, seeing exactly where his hands were supposed to go at each moment made the whole process easier.

  If he stood back and looked at the tree, the translucent figure appeared in front of him – a digital outline of a martial artist moving through slow, precise sequences labelled: tan sau, fook sau, bong sau. Hands weaving in tight arcs close to the centerline.

  When he stepped up close to the tree, he could step ‘inside’ the outline, and was able to match up his movements with the digital ghost.

  Alex moved slowly, mirroring the movements as they flowed around the trunk of the tree.

  It still felt awkward at first. His elbows wanted to drift, his shoulders were too tense. But the ANIP compensated, whispering micro-adjustments through haptic cues along his spine and arms, guiding him into the right geometry. It was providing more direct help now than it had a few days ago. Did Dungeon Inc. push updates? Or did this just mean the nanobots were still wiring into his system? He wondered how far the system would eventually go.

  He sped up his movements, but focused on keeping them steady. True speed would come with time. His goal was to train the muscle memory first. He practiced until sweat dampened his hoodie and his forearms trembled. Then he kept going.

  The ANIP tracked it all and displayed the information across his HUD: heart rate, micro-corrections, energy expenditure.

  He ran through the sequence again, faster each time, the movements snapping into rhythm – soft parries, redirecting energy, keeping the centerline tight.

  A breeze moved through the trees, blowing away the last of the mist. The sun was rising over the residence buildings, pale and weak behind the clouds.

  For a moment, it almost looked like the light on the other side of the portal – refracted, shimmering, alive.

  Eventually an orange message blinked across his screen telling him that he needed to stop and go find some food. He wasn’t really hungry yet, but the system knew what his body needed better than he did and it was telling him to refuel.

  A fallen log made a decent seat and he sat, folded his legs in front of him, and let the damp chill cool him off.

  The forest was quiet still – no joggers, no morning classes, just the slow burble of water in the nearby river and the occasional bird welcoming the morning sun.

  He started his breathing pattern again. Still Water. In through the nose, hold, in again, out through the mouth.

  Each cycle stretched longer than the last. His pulse slowed. The ANIP’s overlay dimmed until it was just the faintest heartbeat at the edge of perception.

  Eventually it was time. Time for breakfast. Time for coffee. Time for classes. Time to talk to his friends and try to parry the thousand questions they were going to have.

  He stood, brushing off his jeans, and retrieved the broomstick.

  His arms were sore, his hoodie damp, but he felt good. Centered.

  He slung the stick across his shoulders and started back toward campus as the first trickle of students emerged from the dorms and headed to the cafeteria, or to early morning classes.

  A few gave him odd looks – a guy in soaked clothes carrying a broom like a quarterstaff was hard to miss – but he didn’t pay them any mind.

  After lunch he was going to meet Jay and Danny at the Fieldhouse for his first ever gym workout. That thought would have scared him a week ago, made him anxious anyway. Now? Now he was ready to go.

  He had a lot of things to figure out over the next few weeks, but he already knew that he was all in with Dungeon Inc. and Earth3.

  Before this weekend he had liked his life. Like most people his age, he was still figuring out ‘who he was,’ but he knew where he was going. He was graduating in a couple of years. Computer engineering with a specialty in AI. He wanted to make video games. He had a successful Social Media brand with Side Quest Heroes. That was his future.

  Or had been.

  With Dungeon Inc. he could become a star. He could get rich. Even more important though, on Earth-3 he could learn to be a Mage. An actual fireball tossing, magic missile blasting, Mage. How could anything else compare with that opportunity?

  It was the coolest thing that could possibly happen to him. Period. He couldn’t think of anything that would rank better than ‘Mage’. Just the thought was enough to make him smile.

  He stepped into Bartley Residence and walked down the long center hallway, trying to imagine what life might be like on Earth-3 once he had figured out his powers.

  “And there he is! You look happy this morning, feeling better?”

  Alex stopped in his tracks and looked up. Ryan was walking towards him with a big smile on his face. Alex had been dreading this. He wanted to tell his friend everything, but couldn’t.

  “So, how was it? You didn’t answer my texts yesterday.”

  Alex smiled. This he could answer. “It was amazing.”

  “I knew you would like it! Tell me everything.”

  “I’ve got to go grab a shower but I’ll meet you at the cafeteria and tell you what I can.” He started walking back to his room. “Grab me a coffee! I’ll be 15 minutes.”

  Ryan shook his head and started walking towards the cafeteria.

  “Oh, and Ryan?” His friend turned back to him. “You are going to absolutely fucking love it there.”

  ***

  The ANIP system is used from day one in training to teach us all the standard combat packages that Dungeon Inc. has put together for us. It’s like the ultimate tutorial program, with text, audio and visual help options. It can even make you see the things you need to do by projecting onto your HUD.

  Beyond that though, I wonder how it decides who gets to learn what. That’s the part that bothers me.

  Everyone ends up with different options. Different “class skills” apparently. Same hardware. Same baseline tech. Different menus. Which means the system is deciding something about us long before we know it ourselves. Or is it just some tech somewhere in the Underground deciding for us?

  As far as I can tell, almost anything you want to learn is in there. Combat styles, footwork variants, obscure weapon forms. It feels less like a training program and more like it’s plugged into the ultimate database. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s just the internet distilled, indexed, and stripped of noise.

  I tested a new theory last week.

  I spent some time in the computer lab and started learning traditional basket weaving. Old-world stuff. Videos, forums, bad PDFs. Sixty hours of practice so far. I have calluses in weird places and have stripped most of the reeds from the lake by now.

  Then, quietly, the ANIP flagged it. I got a new lesson plan in my available menu.

  There was no announcement. It was just… available one day.

  So maybe you don’t get assigned a path. Maybe you earn the right to see it.

  Either way, I’ve got eighty hours in now and a room full of baskets.

  Everyone needs a hobby.

  Personal Journal

  Steel Wings

  Sam Turnth, Fighter