Instead of allowing his thoughts to spiral endlessly, the boy forced himself into motion. 

Standing still in a place like this was not contemplation—it was surrender. The storm did not care for hesitation, and the sky above made that painfully clear. The clouds churned like a living ocean, folding into one another in massive, slow rotations that carried a sense of inevitability, as if the world itself were inhaling and exhaling. The air trembled with distant thunder, not loud enough to be a threat, but heavy enough to be a warning. Confusion, he realized, could become just as lethal as the wind.  

If this floor held an answer, it would not reveal itself to someone who waited for it.  

So he ran.  

The moment he moved, the wind assaulted him. It did not simply push—it seized, clawed, pulled at his clothes and hair as if testing his balance, his intent, his right to move at all. Each step felt uncertain, the ground threatening to slip from beneath his feet as invisible currents shifted around his legs. His hoodie snapped violently against his back. His breath was stolen and returned in ragged bursts as the pressure changed with every stride.  

He scanned the horizon while running, eyes sharp, mind alert, searching for anything that did not belong—any structure, any distortion, any sign that this endless plain hid a mechanism or a destination.  

There was nothing. 

The land stretched outward in every direction, flat and barren, as though it had been scraped clean by something vast and indifferent. No rocks. No trees. No ruins. No elevation. Just soil and wind and sky, existing in a balance that felt unnatural in its uniformity. The world was not empty by accident. It had been made empty.  

When he finally slowed, planting his feet against the relentless current, the truth settled into his chest with quiet weight. This was not a place meant to be crossed in the conventional sense. There was no path to follow, no objective to reach through simple endurance. 

Only the storm. 

He turned, slowly, letting his gaze trace the horizon. Tornadoes had formed in the distance—thin at first, like threads drawn from the clouds, then thickening, darkening, growing into towering pillars of rotating destruction. He counted them without knowing why. Perhaps part of him still believed that numbers could impose order on chaos. 

Thirty-two. 

And even as he counted, more were born. The air twisted, tightened, screamed as rotation accelerated, as pressure condensed into form. They rose from the earth like colossal spears and pierced the sky, connecting ground and cloud with violent continuity. 

They were not stationary. 

They were spreading. 

Not converging on a single point, but expanding outward, filling the plain with their presence, claiming territory in slow, inevitable arcs. Given enough time, there would be nowhere left to stand that was not claimed by their reach. 

This was not a battlefield. 

It was a system. 

A domain governed by wind. 

If the answer isn’t in the land, he thought, following the spiraling motion of the nearest storm, then it must be in what rules it. 

The wind was not merely an obstacle here. It was the foundation. The sky existed for it. The ground existed to feel its pressure. The tornadoes were not attacks; they were expressions. Manifestations of something vast, something constant, something that did not rage for the sake of rage but moved because movement was its nature. 

Approaching them directly would mean death. He could feel that even from a distance. The air near their edges cut into his skin, thin lines of pain blooming where exposed flesh met compressed current. Not enough to maim—but enough to warn. 

Still, something about them felt deliberate.  

He drew one of his guns, the metal cold and solid in his hand, a familiar weight anchoring him to reality. He aimed carefully, compensating for the shifting pressure, and fired into the nearest tornado. 

The sound of the gunshot vanished instantly, devoured by the roar of the storm. The bullet itself disappeared into the rotating wall of wind as though it had never existed. 

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. 

Then the casing landed next to him, grazing his leg as it came back at him. He approached slowly, eyes never leaving the towering vortex, and picked it up. 

The bullet was not crushed. Not warped. Instead, its surface bore a smooth, curved marking, etched with precision—as if the wind had not attacked it, but guided it along a path only it could perceive. 

The realization came quietly. 

The wind did not destroy everything that entered it. 

It destroyed what resisted. 

“If I charge in like this,” he murmured, closing his fingers around the casing, “I’ll be torn apart.” 

He lifted his gaze to the storm once more. 

“But if I move the way it moves… if I try to ride the wind…” 

The tornadoes continued to grow. The air thickened, pressure building, the sky darkening as if the world itself were bracing for something. 

And instead of retreating, he closed his eyes. 

He did not sit. He did not kneel. He remained standing, feet planted, body exposed to the full force of the storm. The wind howled around him, tearing at his clothes, stinging his skin, trying to push him off balance. Every instinct screamed for him to shield himself, to tense, to resist. 

He did neither. 

He breathed. 

Slowly at first, then with growing steadiness, allowing the rhythm of the storm to dictate the rhythm of his lungs. Inhale with the surge of pressure. Exhale as it receded. He let go of the idea of stillness and replaced it with the idea of flow. 

The world narrowed. 

Sound faded into a distant, continuous roar, like the ocean heard from beneath the surface. Sensation dulled, not because it disappeared, but because it ceased to demand reaction. The pain of the cutting wind became information instead of threat. The pull at his balance became direction instead of danger. 

He stopped trying to stand. 

He began to sway. 

Not in weakness, but in imitation. His body adjusted in subtle ways, shifting weight with the currents rather than opposing them. Muscles relaxed where tension would have meant fracture. His center of gravity lowered, spread, moved, adapting moment by moment to invisible vectors. 

This was not control. 

This was understanding. 

The tornadoes advanced. 

The ground vibrated faintly beneath their approach, a deep, constant tremor that traveled through soil and bone alike. Debris lifted into the air, stones and dust drawn upward into spiraling paths. The pressure intensified until the air itself seemed to solidify, pressing against his chest, his limbs, his face. 

Blood welled in thin lines along his arms where the wind cut too sharply. A warm trickle slid down his cheek, stinging as it met the cold current. 

His focus wavered. 

Fear surged—not of death, but of insignificance. Of being nothing more than something to be erased by a force too vast to notice his existence. 

And then, something shifted. 

Not in the storm. 

In him. 

A faint green light flickered around his body, unstable at first, like a reflection on turbulent water. It did not flare. It did not surge. It trembled, responding to the same rhythm he had begun to follow. 

The wind did not bend away from him. 

It flowed around him. 

Not because it chose to, but because his presence no longer disrupted its path. 

He took a step forward. 

The current adjusted, sliding past him instead of through him. 

Another step. 

The pressure redistributed, spiraling in patterns that left a narrow, invisible corridor of relative calm around his form. 

He was not parting the storm. 

He was aligning with it. 

When he reached the edge of the first tornado, he did not hesitate. He walked into the rotating wall of air, surrendering entirely to the logic of motion that governed it. 

The world became a blur of sound, force and color. His vision spun, not because he was being thrown, but because everything else was. The sky and ground traded places in his perception as rotation wrapped around him. The pressure was immense, crushing, suffocating. 

But it did not tear him apart. 

Because he did not resist. 

His body followed the spiral. His mind let go of orientation, of up and down, of fixed direction. He became movement within movement, a point carried by flow rather than shattered by it. 

And then he was through. 

He emerged from the other side, breath ragged, heart pounding, but intact. The storm behind him continued its rotation as if he had never passed through at all. 

He did it again. 

And again. 

Each tornado demanded deeper surrender and finer adjustment. With every passage, the green resonance around him grew clearer, not brighter, but more stable, more attuned to the invisible architecture of the wind. 

He was no longer simply a body moving through storms. 

He was learning what it meant to be free. 

Not the freedom of stillness, but the freedom of inevitability. The kind that did not choose its path but embraced it. The kind that did not hesitate but did not rush. The kind that could be gentle as a breeze or catastrophic as a cyclone, without contradiction. 

Freedom and violence were not opposites here. 

They were aspects of the same truth. 

At the heart of the tempest, where the air twisted with such density that even sound seemed to warp, a massive steel door stood embedded in nothingness. It did not float, yet it was not anchored. It simply existed, upright and immovable, its surface unmarred by the storm that raged endlessly around it. 

He approached. 

The moment his fingers brushed the cold metal, the resonance shattered. 

Awareness crashed back into him like a wave against rock. The green light vanished. The alignment broke. 

Pain returned in full. 

The wind slammed into him with merciless force, tearing at his body as if offended by his sudden dissonance. The pressure threatened to crush the breath from his lungs. 

Without hesitation, he forced the door open and hurled himself through. 

Light swallowed him whole. 

When his vision cleared, he stood atop a small raft bound from thick wooden logs, gently rocking upon an endless sea. The water stretched infinitely in every direction, its surface calm, reflective, and deceptively serene. The storm was gone. The sky was open. 

His body trembled as the aftershocks of the trial caught up to him. He stared at his hands, still half-expecting to feel the phantom pressure of the wind between his fingers. 

“For a moment…” he whispered, voice hoarse, “it felt like I was the storm.” 

Not its master. 

Not its ruler. 

But something that understood its language. 

His gaze lifted to the distant horizon, where sea and sky met in a line so perfect it seemed unreal. 

The trials were not meant to be broken. 

They were meant to be comprehended. 

And comprehension, he was beginning to realize, was far more dangerous than force.