It took Death days to calm down. At first, he'd shout as loud he could for hours, swearing and cursing the "miscreants." After a day or two, he simply went silent, not speaking even when spoken directly to. Even after he began to open up again, I could tell that he was still angry.
Greta had managed to stop the fireball from burning her, but it would still take her around a week to recover. The first night of her recovery, she slipped in and out of conciousness a few times, and none of us knew if she was going to make it.
After Greta's condition began to improve, I began to train. I ran a couple hundred miles every morning, over and around the beautiful Rockies. I also went deep into the mountains and began to lift weights. Not just for weight, but also for reps.In the heat of the day, I lifted hundreds of tons thousands of times. As it began to cool off in the afternoon I would do millions of push-ups and crunches. When evening fell, I would run sprints back to Zaak's.
Greta healed, and I continued to train. When she was able, she even ran with me for a small while. As I trained more and more, I began to change. My muscles started to become hard as stone, and my training became too easy. I increased weight, number of reps and distance. But I also began to train my wings. I would fly with resistance, and I lifted boulders with only my wings. After several more days, I noticed a curious thing. When I focused intensely on one thing, my skin became incredibly hard. Despite everything I tried, nothing seemed to be able to pierce my skin when it was in that state. Unfortunately, I could keep it up for a few seconds at a time, and I had to have no distractions in order to do it at all.
And so I began to meditate daily. I cleared my mind, and focused on one object. I had some trouble at first, but soon I could harden my skin for minutes at a time. By the time Zoe and Alisha were back, I could almost "shield," as I liked to call it, for half an hour. But I still hadn't mastered it with distractions. So when the whole group offered to help me practice with distractions, I accepted. I went ahead running, and they said they'd catch up later.
So you can imagine my shock when I entered my favorite clearing to find the four waiting for me.