1 Becoming The Strongest

"Nine hundred ninety-eight... nine hundred ninety-nine... ONE THOUSAND PUSHUPS!!!"

Inside of a freezing cave, at the top of a mountain stood a sixteen-year-old boy screaming at the top of his lungs. Although his face clearly resembled his age, his body and mind most definitely didn't. This boys name was Daniel Aiken.

Daniel was always an energetic boy. He loved competition and thanks to his competitive spirit usually won in everything he did. However, there was one person he could never beat. It was none other than his father. Every day Daniel would challenge his dad to a competition. Whether it was a competition of body, mind or anything in between he could never beat his father until one day, he did.

After Daniel's first taste of victory against his father, he realized that it was nothing like anything he had ever felt before. The mixture of achievement and pleasure you get from beating someone else. Growing stronger than others became the only thing that brought joy to Daniel. He kept working hard, improving himself and finding new rivals but eventually he hit a wall. The wall of genetics. Him being human, made him unable to further improve his physical body and limited the speed at which he could retain information and learn new things.

Daniel, unable to accept the situation, secluded himself in the cold mountains where the only way he wouldn't freeze to death was by producing enough heat with his body through exercise. He prepared enough rations to last him a year and during the entire time he was up there there was one question running through his mind. 'How can I improve more?'

One year worth of rations has been eaten since then. Today was the first time in a year that Daniel gets to see the sun. As he stepped outside of the cave he noticed some things were odd.

'Did the snow always fall this slowly?'

Daniel lost himself in his thought and within that single second of lack of focus, he tripped over a rock hidden in the snow and fell off the edge of one of the mountains many cliffs. He panicked for a second, but then realized that he was falling at about one-tenth of the speed things normally do and started to panic for a whole other reason.

'Wait, wait, WAIT! Why am I falling so slowly!? It's not just me, the snow seems to be doing it too.'

He spent the next minute of his slow-motion falling in deep contemplation over the matter. As he landed, although he just fell 100m it felt to him more like he fell 1m. The only logical explanation to this was that Daniel's training was a success, although even he didn't understand why it sped up not only his body but also his mind.