Time passed and I got to know the people of the dojo better. After about a month and a half I had managed to put on some muscle on my body as well, although not really muscular, it had become more like Dan's body and was more defined than it was before. My martial art became a lot better as well, I could in no way fight people like Dan and Alvin who had trained in martial arts since a young age. Especially Dan, his father was the owner of the dojo and had personally trained him since he was just a small child.
During that time what had changed most was not my body though, it was my mind. I had never felt so good my whole life before that... I felt so free. It was also accompanied by a feeling I could not properly describe as I didn't quite understand it myself, I felt like it was different from just happiness but it was also very similar. I could only leave thinking about it for later.
Aside from when it involved matters martial arts I was mostly the same, though most of my life had started to revolve around martial arts, the main difference outside of martial arts was that I got along a lot better with my parents. I was finally doing at least something with my life, though not what my parents had wanted for me they were forced to accept it.
All I did was to practice martial arts, eat, and sleep. Dan and Alvin had often been forced to interrupt my training due to me being too excited and overworking. I had started getting along very well with both of them, I considered them my first friends. They had started to become people I liked even outside of martial arts. Though I couldn't help but feel that they often stared weirdly at me, it annoyed me a bit but I didn't feel the need to bring it up as I was usually in a good mood when this happened. Sometimes they went away to bicker but when they saw that I was staring at them they would just return as if nothing had ever happened. These were the only things I really had a hard time understanding about them.
But nothing good can last forever. A few weeks before I was about to turn 18 something weird had started happening, a lot of people around the world had started to feel as if some kind of energy had begun piercing their skin and a lot of wild creatures had undergone strange mutations making them stronger, faster, somewhat more intelligent, but most of all more aggressive. These mutated creatures would go on rampages everywhere they went. The creatures' power seemed to steadily grow as time went on, this made the humans feel threatened.
As time went on more humans started getting the weird feeling though and some realized that this energy was actually beneficial for them and started to actively find ways to use that energy to strengthen themselves. Dan, Alvin and I were among those people.
The problem with the beasts soon started getting out of hand, after about half a year the beasts started suppressing even the military of smaller nations and some areas had to be abandoned and were restricted areas that people started calling danger-zones.
The danger-zones then started appearing in every country and almost 30% of the lands that were prior to the danger-zones habitable land where people lived became inhabitable. Many cities unable to evacuate and lots of people died due to the siege of many strong beasts.
The only reason that people didn't lose more land than that was because of people who had begun to cultivate the weird energy that now inhabited the planet and were able to become on par with the beasts. But humans were still slowly losing more lands to the danger-zones.
This wasn't only a bad thing however, this gave the humans the chance to unify all the remaining forces on one continent. This made them lose a lot of land in one fell swoop, but it also gave them a unified force that was strong enough to slowly push back the danger-zones. This all took 3 years to complete and the humans had a steady rise in power for the next 9 years.
Then something that would be known everywhere as the "great disaster" struck...