Chapter  368

SHAWN I kept going. Forty--seven. Forty--eight. Fifty. Still no fatigue. No sense that I was depleting reserves or using up some finite resource. Was this sustainable? Could I do this indefinitely? Or was there a wall I'd hit eventually, some point where my body would give out or the magic would fail? I needed to know. Needed to understand this power that had manifested so suddenly, that had changed everything about what I thought I was capable of. Fifty--five. Sixty. Sixty--five. The forest around me was starting to look like a war zone. Trees reduced to stumps, craters dotting the landscape, the smell of ozone and burned wood thick in the air. Seventy. Seventy--five. A small part of my brain registered that this was probably not great for the local ecosystem. But the larger part was too focused on testing limits, on pushing myself to see where the breaking point was. Eighty. That's when I noticed the smoke. Not from the individual trees I'd been targeting, but from a spreading fire.