The blonde-haired beastkin woman dived and dashed around the lethal blades, her creamy skin glistening with perspiration and her breath coming in quick bursts. Her focus was extreme, and it had to be. Those blades were not fake, and the heavy beams that swung down to catch the unwary were like battering rams.

I couldn’t pull myself away from watching her. Pure perfection was displayed in the timing of her jumps as she avoided the cleavers that cut through the air.

She didn’t slow her momentum as she slid along the ground to narrowly avoid the deadly downswing of a massive blade. She executed a perfect forward roll, then leaped to her feet and snatched a rifle from a weapons rack that ran along one section of the obstacle course.

A target dummy rose up from a hatch in the floor, and Astrid emptied her rifle into it. Bullets punched into the target’s stomach, shredding it apart and spraying wood chips across the walls of the training hall.

Astrid calmly got to her feet, her busty chest pumping up and down as she sucked in air.

I decided it was time for me to make an entrance.

Getting to the training hall worked just like Kyrine had said it would, once I got the hang of it. The only difference was that she had made it sound easy.

I imagined that I was standing in the training hall beside Astrid. To my surprise and disappointment, it didn’t happen in an instant. In fact, it didn’t happen at all. Nothing happened.

“What the…?” I muttered, trying to visualize myself in the hall again.

“Bring your focus to your center, Jeremy, then try again,” Kyrine’s voice said in my head.

“Right, of course,” I said, as if I knew what I was doing.

I concentrated a little harder, willing my body to appear in the training hall. While I was doing so, I turned my attention to my new internal sphere of energy, like I had done when I was summoning the Dragonling. I moved some chi through my cultivation pathways.

After what felt like forever, I started to feel something happening deep within my center. It felt like my body was pulling apart, atom by atom. The only surprise was that it felt disorienting rather than painful.

The process started slowly, then sped up. With a sudden lurch, I felt that I was being pulled by the face through some kind of wormhole.

Reality distorted around me, the light darkened, then with a surge up as if I had been spat out by some kind of giant monster, I found myself suddenly in the training hall.

I was exactly where I’d imagined myself, standing between Astrid and the shredded training dummy.

I had done it, but it hadn’t been anything like as easy as I’d thought it would be.