Daniel noticed the change on a morning that should have been forgettable.
He was standing in line at a coffee shop just off the avenue, half-asleep, the smell of burnt espresso thick in the air. The man ahead of him fumbled for change, coins slipping from his fingers and clattering across the counter. Daniel bent down to help without thinking.
His hand moved too fast.
Not fast enough to be seen as impossible—but fast enough that the woman behind the counter paused, eyes flicking from the fallen coins to his face, then back again. Just a fraction of a second longer than courtesy required.
Daniel straightened slowly, passed the coins forward, and stepped back into line.
"Thanks," the man said, distracted already.
Daniel nodded, heart steady, but something inside him tightened.
It wasn't fear.
It was calibration.
He took his coffee to go and walked instead of riding the train, letting the city reassert itself around him. Traffic surged. A bus hissed to a stop. Somewhere, someone laughed too loudly. The noise helped. It always did.
He had learned to listen to moments like that—not because they were dangerous, but because they were informative. They told him where the edges were. How close he was to being noticed.
He hadn't meant to move that quickly.
That was the problem.
Back in his apartment, he stood in front of the mirror longer than usual.
Nothing looked wrong.
His face hadn't changed. The same lines, the same unremarkable angles. The kind of face that disappeared in crowds, that belonged to no particular memory. He leaned closer, searching for something he couldn't quite name.
Time had passed.
He knew that.
The calendar said so. The city said so. The man who used to live downstairs had grown heavier, slower. The woman who ran the corner store had begun wearing glasses.
Daniel had not.
He pressed his fingers against the glass, watching how easily they stilled. No tremor. No hesitation. He remembered doing this same thing years ago—standing in a different room, a different city, a different life—and the reflection had looked the same then too.
He stepped back.
Sat on the edge of the bed.
Waited for something to catch up to him.
Nothing did.
He didn't train.
Not the way stories imagined training. No weights stacked higher each week. No tests of endurance for their own sake. Those things were unnecessary—and worse, indulgent.
Growth came whether he acknowledged it or not.
It arrived while he slept. While he worked. While he stood still and watched the city breathe. His body adjusted constantly, invisibly, the way bone thickens over time or skin toughens without being asked.
The frightening part wasn't the strength.
It was how natural it felt.
Once, out of curiosity more than intent, he held his breath in the shower and counted slowly. One minute passed. Then two. Then five. He stopped himself not because he had to, but because he understood where the path led if he didn't.
Later that night, he sat by the window with it cracked open, listening to traffic wash through the street below.
You don't need to know how far this goes, he told himself.
You just need to know when to stop.
That became important.
New things surfaced occasionally—not all at once, never announced.
Balance sharpened until uneven ground stopped mattering. Reaction aligned until accidents missed him by margins too precise to be luck. He began noticing details he hadn't before: the shift in a person's breathing before they spoke, the way a crowd leaned a second before it moved.
None of it demanded attention.
None of it asked permission.
It simply happened.
Daniel learned to treat these changes the way he treated weather—by accounting for them, not controlling them. He didn't suppress what he was becoming. That would have been dishonest. But he didn't lean into it either.
He let it be.
That restraint cost more effort than strength ever had.
One night, walking home from a late shift, he paused beneath a streetlight that flickered like it couldn't decide whether to stay on. He felt the familiar hum beneath his skin settle into a new alignment—subtle, almost shy.
For a moment, he understood something with perfect clarity:
If he wanted to, he could leave.
Not just the street.
Not just the city.
He could rise until the noise softened, until distance erased urgency. He could sleep somewhere the world couldn't reach him.
The idea felt… quiet.
And that terrified him.
Because quiet made things smaller. Made consequences abstract. Made suffering tolerable at a distance.
Daniel stepped out of the light and kept walking.
He chose the sidewalk. The cracked pavement. The weight of his boots on concrete. The smell of rain and old oil and human life layered too closely together.
If he was going to become something that did not stop becoming, then he would decide one thing and decide it again every day:
He would stay where damage was loud.
Where mistakes had faces.
Where time hurt.
He never wrote the rule down.
Didn't give it words that could be argued with or refined away.
But it stayed with him after that, steady and unyielding:
He would grow forever.
That was inevitable.
What mattered was that he would never let growth decide who he stood among.
And as long as he remembered that—
as long as he chose the ground over the sky—
time could do whatever it wanted to him.
It would not take him away from the world he was meant to guard.
Not yet.
Not ever.