Chapter 66: First Tests Part 2

I ran.

The difference was immediate.

Air rushed past me as I crossed the cavern faster than I’d thought possible.

Everything around me seemed to move differently, but it wasn’t a blur.

I could still see the uneven parts of the ground.

I could tell where each pillar was, and I knew exactly where my feet were going to land before they touched the stone.

More than anything, it felt incredible.

I kept going until I decided I’d gone far enough, then gradually reduced my speed instead of trying to stop all at once.

It worked much better.

By the time I turned around, I was grinning.

Chris suddenly appeared beside me, and I jerked away so quickly that I nearly threw myself several feet sideways.

“Chris!” He looked entirely too pleased with himself as he said, “Good reflexes.” I told him he could’ve warned me, but he pointed out that warning me would defeat the purpose.

I immediately started looking for him, but he appeared behind me before I found him.

I spun around just as he vanished again.

The next time he came from my right, and I caught him almost immediately.

Then he appeared to my left, and I turned the wrong way first.

Chris told me I was too slow, which only made me narrow my eyes and tell him, “Keep doing it.” Something changed in his expression for a moment before he disappeared again.

The next few minutes became a strange game.

Chris would vanish and reappear somewhere around me while I tried to react quickly enough to face him.

Sometimes he appeared close, sometimes farther away, and once he appeared directly above me just to see whether I’d notice.

I didn’t until his shoes entered my vision.

I stared up at him.

“Really?” Chris lowered himself back to the ground and pointed out that I’d missed him.

“You were floating above my head,” I said.

His only response was, “Exactly,” and I decided there was no point arguing with that logic.

Eventually, Chris stopped teleporting and bent down to pick up a few small pieces of loose stone.

He tossed one lightly in his hand, and I looked from it to him.

“Should I be worried?” Chris considered that for a second before saying, “Probably not.” I muttered that he was very reassuring just before he threw it.

I caught the first one easily.

The next came faster, and I moved my head aside.

Another came toward my shoulder, and I caught that one too.

Chris began varying the direction and speed, sometimes giving me enough time to catch them and sometimes forcing me to dodge instead.

It became harder surprisingly quickly, until I found myself focusing entirely on his hands and watching for the slightest movement.

His right hand shifted, but before I could react to it, something felt wrong.

My body moved before I understood why, and a piece of stone passed beside my head.

I froze as it struck the ground behind me with a quiet click.

Chris didn’t throw another one, and when I looked back at him, his right hand was still holding the piece I’d been watching.

I stared at it before realizing what had happened.

“You used your other hand.” Chris confirmed that he had, and when I pointed out that I hadn’t been looking at it, he simply said, “I know.”

There was something about the way he said that which made me stop thinking about the fact that he’d just thrown a rock at my head.

Chris was watching me carefully now, all the amusement from a moment ago gone.

He asked how I’d known to move, but I couldn’t give him an answer

.

I hadn’t seen the stone leave his fingers, and I didn’t remember hearing it either.

There had just been a strange feeling for less than a second.

“I felt something,” I finally said.

When Chris asked what, I rubbed the back of my neck and tried to explain it.

“I don’t know. It was like… something was wrong.”

Chris picked up another piece of stone and told me to turn around.

I hesitated before facing away from him, already knowing what he intended to test.

At least this time I knew something was coming.

I waited, expecting him to throw it at any moment, but several seconds passed without anything.

My attention started drifting toward Mom and White in the distance, and I wondered if they could even tell what we were doing from there.

A strange sensation suddenly crawled across the back of my neck, and I moved without thinking.

Something passed close to my head and bounced across the stone in front of me.

I turned around immediately and found Chris staring at me.

This time I didn’t need him to ask.

“I felt it again.”

Mom called from farther away, asking what had happened, but neither of us answered immediately.

Chris picked up another stone and asked me to repeat it, so I turned my back to him again.

The warning came several seconds later, and I shifted to the side before another stone passed me.

My heartbeat started getting faster, not because I was afraid, but because I was beginning to understand that whatever I was feeling had nothing to do with hearing or seeing the attack.

Chris apparently reached the same conclusion because he dropped the remaining stones instead of continuing.

He vanished immediately afterward, and the warning hit me almost at the same time.

I spun around just before Chris appeared behind me.

For a moment, neither of us moved, and my eyes widened as I looked at him.

“I knew you were coming.” Chris disappeared again before I could say anything more.

This time the feeling came from my left, and I turned toward it before he appeared.

That finally got a different reaction from him.

Chris had barely reacted when I jumped several times higher than I should have been able to.

He hadn’t seemed particularly surprised by my speed either.

Even when I started reacting to his teleportation faster, he’d simply kept testing me.

Now he looked genuinely interested.

Chris vanished again, but this time several seconds passed without anything happening.

I kept waiting for the strange warning to return, but there was nothing.

Then he appeared a short distance in front of me, and I frowned.

“It didn’t happen.” Chris said he knew, which only confused me more.

Instead of explaining, he picked up another stone and disappeared with it.

This time the warning returned from behind me, and I moved aside just before the stone flew past.

Chris appeared a moment later, and I stared at him as the difference finally became obvious.

“It only warned me when you were going to do something?” Chris glanced toward the stone before answering, “Looks like it.”

That sent a strange chill through me.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t simply telling me where Chris was.

When he teleported without doing anything to me, I hadn’t felt him at all.

The moment something was actually coming toward me, the warning returned.

Whatever the spider had given me was somehow warning me when I was in danger.

Mom and White finally reached us.

Mom looked between the stones scattered across the ground and the two of us before asking, “What did you find?” I opened my mouth but didn’t know what to call it, so Chris answered for me.

“Some kind of danger sense.”

Hearing him actually say it made the whole thing feel even stranger.

I looked at him and asked, “That’s possible?” Chris glanced at me before replying, “Apparently,” which wasn’t exactly helpful.

Mom asked how reliable it was, and Chris admitted we didn’t know yet.

He wanted to test whether distance mattered, whether the warning changed depending on the danger, and whether it worked against things I couldn’t normally perceive.

The list was getting longer quickly enough that I stopped him and asked if he intended to do all of that today.

Chris said not all of it, and I immediately told him, “Good.” He reminded me that I was the one who wanted to test my powers, and I pointed out, “I did. I didn’t know there’d be homework.” That finally made him smile again.

I looked around the cavern, thinking about everything we’d already discovered.

Yesterday, strength had been the only thing I was certain about.

Now I knew I could jump far higher than normal, run faster than I should be able to, react quickly enough to keep up with that speed, and somehow sense danger before it reached me.

We still hadn’t even tested everything.

I looked down at my hands.

The spider hadn’t just made me stronger.

Whatever it had done to me went much further than that.