East Blue, an unnamed deserted island, beneath curtains of rain.
The gray sky seemed to have sprung a leak, pouring down cold rain that blurred the world into an ink wash.
Boer walked through the storm without raising any force field to keep the rain away, instead letting its dense lashes strike his body. The cold seeped through his crude black metallic fabric, mingling with the faint tingling from the magnetized left side of his body absorbing the rain's electrical charge, and the involuntary shivering the chill provoked in the flesh-and-blood right side.
He walked slowly. His metal boots squelched against the soft, muddy beach, splashing muddy water into the rain and leaving a trail of footprints of varying depths, their uneven weight unmistakable-the left light and shallow, the right heavy and deeply sunken.
Deep in his mind, the electromagnetic extrasensory perception that had surged with his awakening buzzed like a hive out of control. A vast stream of information within a thirty-kilometer radius-the groaning of underground mineral veins, the dance of charges in the clouds, the faint bioelectric signals of distant marine life, even interference from stray cosmic rays in the atmosphere-forced its way into his consciousness with unprecedented clarity and volume.
"Too loud..." Boer's brow furrowed tightly, tiny arcs flickering erratically in his azure left pupil with his irritation. He closed both eyes and drew all his attention inward.
He was like an unskilled musician whose power had suddenly surged, trying to tame a massive pipe organ that had abruptly become ten times louder. He stopped passively accepting every "sound." Instead, using his powerful will as a dam, he began selectively "shutting off" certain sensory channels, compressing and concentrating the super-sense magnetic field that had spread thirty kilometers outward, drawing it inward ring by ring like hauling in