Kinetic World: Chapter 5

The rest of the day, I got weird looks from every person who even heard about the fight. So much for keeping a low profile. Come lunch, they praised me so much. I had a neutral face the entire time, but inside I was screaming from social anxiety. Sure, I get that it’s supposed to make you feel good and proud, and I get that I basically took down Goliath with mere words, but it didn’t lessen the anxiety of being approached by hundreds of people.
At the end of the day, I walked home, tense and stressed. Instead of going straight home, I texted my dad and sister and said that I was going to stay after school for a while to study for Spanish. They said okay like it was nothing.
If only they knew I never studied.
I walked down our street, and I took a right down the turn-off right before the one I would need to take to my house. I walked for a solid half hour, and finally came upon a walking path. I looked around, and wlaked along it for about a quarter mile. After seeing no people, I ran as fast as fast as I could to a small, barely visible split in the foliage surrounding me. I slinked through, and on the other side was a large grotto with tons of trees. In the center of the grotto was a near-perfect circle void of trees that was around fifty yards in diameter. As far as I knew, nobody else even knew about this place. So this is where I went to train my powers, trying to control them.
The trees nearby sported scorch marks, very recent considering I discovered how to make spheres of explosive energy. It took a lot out of me, thouhg, so I had to make them a lot to build up stamina for my abilities. Today, I tried to summon one the size of a tennis ball; a strict upgrade over the ping-pong ball-sized spheres I normally made. It made me strain my mind and abilities, but I managed to make one. I inspected it closely, not looking up for an extended period of time. I looked to the trees, and noted the massive scorch marks they bore from spheres with a mere 1-inch diameter, and wondered what a sphere four times as big (at least) would do.
I launched it at a nearby tree.
It exploded like normal, but I heard cracking. I looked at the tree.
That minescule sphere had broken 9/10 of the way through a tree trunk around 20 feet thick.
The cracking was from the tree preparing to fall down. I looked up, and it seemed to try to fall directly on me. I flinched away, curling into a ball on the forest floor, but nothing happened. I found myself screaming, and I shut myself up as soon as I could. I blinked.
I didn’t feel anything. I can’t be dead… I thought. I looked up.
The tree seemed to be held in suspended animation not an inch from my face.
I quickly scurried out from under the tree. It still didn’t move, so I poked it. It smashed into the ground, kicking up all kinds of dirt and loose foliage, and I blinked. I began to laugh insanely and nervously.
I had forgotten about kinetic and potential energy.
I laughed harder, and quite loud, at that. I sat there chuckling my head off for a solid ten minutes before I could pull myself together. The feeling of anxiety I had felt with a shocking crmap had dissipated by now. I shook my head, still in disbelief at how lucky I was. Way too lucky.
I decided to go back to training, just aim at the ground this time. I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be so lucky the next time something like this would happen. I cracked my fingers, and summoned four ping-pong ball-sized spheres at a time now, each time taking as much energy as it took to summon one tennis ball-sized sphere. I launched them at the ground in various patterns, trying to control their movement as they flew, their flight speed, and their explosion radius. I was unable to get anything except for their flight speed to change, and that took as much energy as it did to summon one. I wiped the sweat off my brow.
Remembering how I had saved my sorry a*s, I decided to stop with the spheres for the moment and focus on manipulating kinetic and potential energy. I threw a stone in the air, and focused on it. It hit me on the forehead, and I clutched my face in pain, groaning. I shook it off, and tried again, this time stepping out of the way when I got no results. After several more tries, I had grown frustrated. I threw another stone in the air, and launched a small sphere at the dmaned stone, and it shattered and evaporated. I threw another up yet again, anger building. The stone flew higher than I thought it would, and as it came down, I willed it to come down hard.
It rocketed down, and I could hear the wind whipping around it. When it hit the ground, it sank into the hard earth at least ten feet. I blinked, and grew excited. My eyes widened in excitement, and I repeated it several times. Doing the opposite of what worked, I got it to slow down so much that it didn’t even make a sound when it touched the ground.
Tired and content, I summoned forth a tennis ball-sized sphere and held it above my head, deciding spheres would be a good way to wrap up training for the day.
I had an odd feeling, so I turned around.
That’s when I saw a girl, at seemingly my age, with a sphere the same size as mine made of blood floating above her head. We looked at each other with blank looks for a half second, then looked at the spheres floating above our heads.
My mouth opened, but no words came out. She was rather attractive, but she was only around five and a half feet tall, maybe a bit taller. She looked up at me with blue-grey eyes, and I was struck at her mess of long, raven-colored hair. Her face was spotted with freckles, and just like me, she was thin and lanky. She wore a red t-shirt and black sweatpants. I blinked, unsure of how I felt about an attractive girl stanging in front of me with an orb of blood hovering over her head, and I can only imagine what she thought about the sphere above my own head.
We screamed in unison.