Kelly needed to think.

  And if Kelly needed to sit anywhere to think, she would always choose the ground; the ground was superior and she did her best thinking while sitting on it. She'd passed half a dozen perfectly functional chairs on the way to her workplace. Some had been intact, many were inside stores, a few were thrown out of windows with only mild bloodstains, but she never spared them a glance—just floors with delusions of grandeur.

  Chairs were created under the assumption that people needed guidance on how to sit, where to sit, leg placement, where to rest your arms—condescending little slabs of engineered plastic and pretentious little dictators, with arbitrary rules on lumbar support, bossing your limbs around—they limited free thinking and were designed for obedience and ergonomical optimization. She didn't need some corporate-backed, mass-produced hunk of plastic telling her how to exist.

  The ground, though—now that was a surface that didn't care. No rules, no intended position, no attempt to box her into a shape she didn't choose. She could fold her legs, stretch out, shift her weight however she wanted. The ground didn't make demands. It didn't pretend to know better.

  If she wanted to sit and think, it was the superior option by default.

  Plus, you couldn't cozily spread-eagle on a chair.

  Which was why Kelly lay spread-eagle in the middle of what used to be Times Square, surrounded by discarded bullet casings, the occasional severed limb, and at least three different species that shouldn't exist, the cracked pavement still warm from whatever creature corporate security had vaporized there last.

  It was a place to think. A place to reassess. And the loops had taught her that when she laid down, most snipers and creatures had trouble distinguishing between the dead corpses and the professionally unbothered.

  A large impact caused the ground to tremble, right on cue. The last run on her lab had been close, close enough that she could taste it, so close that maybe next time, she'd even have the machines in the lab running before the reset kicked in and she died horribly.

  Kelly stretched her legs out on the pavement in Times Square, leaning atop a fallen signpost as if she had all the time in the world, programming her weapon to prepare for the next run, and idly watching the people trying to break in to her building.

  She'd reached Vaughn Industries. Finally.

  Simon's men were making a lot of noise at Vaughn Industries' main entrance, pounding and prying at an entrance designed to withstand the sort of weaponry that turned entire streets into footnotes. They were barely a concern. Let them keep at it. They had no idea how far out of their league they were. Those doors could withstand a lot more than a few stolen police explosives and whatever else they had at hand. They could detonate that entire stack, and the building would still be standing—fully intact and self-repairing before the dust even settled.

  She sighed, shaking her head. Some people just didn't respect engineering.

  Not like she did. She tapped her monomolecular blade, testing her adjustments, the shape-memory alloy vibrating beneath her touch. She had spent the last five minutes programming its newest form and was pretty satisfied. Technically, on the surface, it was a legal weapon—a folding combat knife no different from the batons the police carried. But she'd modified it herself, pushing its design into grey-market territory, then all the way to black.

  The weapon sported a Shape-Memory Alloy Blade she'd made in her home-lab using graphene and diamond nanothreads-creating an edge sharp enough to cut at the atomic level.

  Technically, the blade wasn't dangerous unless you happened to be made of matter. Which, conveniently, included everything.

  Some extremely rare portal creatures could survive its swing, a fact Kelly found infinitely intriguing—that should have been impossible.

  Its core was made from various materials mixed with nickel-titanium, a special metal that could "remember" its original shape and return to it when heated due to changes in its internal structure. Because of this, she had programmed different shapes into the metal's memory, and the super-elastic blade remembered every programmed form, switching between them at will, obedient to its user's every command.

  So It wasn't actually a blade, but more of a variable weapon assembly, or VWA for short—a high end military tool that could store the shapes of many weapons. The design had been modelled after the far superior weapons used by a distant and centuries old threat from before the augment wars, engineered to only pair with a single user’s neurological signal. They were programmable, transforming weapons, the complexity and lethality depending on the design and materials used as well as the skill of the creator. Most people in the military called them ‘switches’. They were somewhat rare, due to the fact that they usually paled in comparison to the originals, and most found it much easier to just buy several high powered guns and explosives than gamble their lives on a counterfeit switch. But nobody else had designed a switch with an edge capable of slicing between atoms, a feat only ever replicated through large, complex, resource intensive industrial machinery—which made her weapon revolutionary. Kelly wondered how her weapon would compare to the original switches from the first wars waged against humanity so long ago.

  "Mine’s better, definitely," she muttered.

  Her blade was like a toolkit for atoms—a sword, a scythe, an axe, a spoon, a wine bottle opener-all in one.

  With a flick of her wrist, the blade unfolded, extending into a vibrating edge so thin it could slice between molecules with very little force.

  "They can't measure this," Kelly murmured, eyeing the weapon. "But if they could...if it was a part of me..'

  Her EQ augment level would spike. Drastically.

  She idly flicked her blade, watching it shift through its pre-programmed forms; a lengthy military blade, a machete, a scalpel—each one a product of her own design. Industrial tools had been the foundation. But Materials Science, Nanotechnology, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Mechanical Engineering had turned theory into something real and deadly. Kelly had studied many fields in the loops, then she decided to cheat. The stolen memory knowledge chips she'd raided in past loops had given her the raw data in exchange for many deaths. Data chips were treated like a higher commodity than credits, even higher than gold, and horded religiously by the very few that possessed them. She wasted twenty loops just trying to break into one very small stash. The knowledge had been invaluable, but knowing wasn't the same as creating.

  Anyone could know things.

  Real ingenuity was in the application-using knowledge in ways nobody had thought of before.

  She hadn't had much at hand, but some of the critical materials were insanely expensive in larger quantities, and the little she had been a gift—a sentimental one that she would never have parted with before the loops. It became a key ingredient in a rare mix of her own design, so limited and scarce that the best she could do with it was make a small weapon—so she had adapted. If there wasn't enough of it to make bullets, she'd settle for a Swiss army knife with an edge that could split the bonds between atoms. If the world hadn't collapsed into this mess and if she hadn't been stuck in a loop of endless trial and error, she could've sold the tech for a payday that would've rewritten corporate warfare... assuming she lived long enough to complete the sale.

  The high-security memory chips she raided in early loops crammed entire lifetimes of expertise into her head, and in theory, the knowledge shouldn't have stayed with her. The information stored in her neural implants should have slipped away over time with the resets. The loops didn't affect her organic memory, but it reset everything else, including her augments. But her neural implants? Those played by different rules. Whatever process initiated the loop had not accounted for the ingenious of humanity.

  Memories people didn't use faded over time as the brain cleared out anything it didn't reinforce.

  Unused data began to weaken within days, especially if it wasn't recalled, connected to something else, or branded in by panic. Most short-term details disappeared within a week-unless they were useful, repeated, or deeply inconvenient.

  Each morning, Kelly's brain still held everything from previous loops-because the reset deleted her body, not her organic memory. Her neural implant reset with the rest of her, wiped clean, but it always launched with the same protocol: scan the neurons, copy what survived, and write it all back in before she'd even finished waking up. The implant had faster access, better pattern recognition, and stronger recall than her brain alone, so once it had the data, it instantly reinforced key information-refining everything. If she remembered it, the implant rebuilt it better: knowledge from datachips, genetic theory, material architecture the discoveries, the breakthroughs, and the hard-won—or more accurately, hard-liberated under highly questionable circumstances-knowledge the endless days resetting would've otherwise erased.

  It was a loophole. A crack in the system.

  And that was the real question, wasn't it? The loops erased everything. Reset everything. But not her, not completely. Her mind, her memories—all carried over, untouched. That wasn't normal, and it definitely wasn't possible.

  There was a clue buried in that fact.

  Humans couldn't use dark energy—what the status called magic. They had no circuits for mana, no natural or spiritual pathways to store and wield reality-bending power.

  But the world—hell, Kelly was proof that it wasn't completely impossible. Humans might not be able to use mana-but they could be affected by it.

  And that proof was all she needed.

  Escaping the city? The idea was laughable. Why would she leave when her life's work was right here?

  Upgrading her body wasn't impossible either, but it was a waste of time. Any augmentations had to be done in the morning, and even then, the trade-offs were brutal, as Simon had discovered earlier that day. Surgery required recovery, and she had already burned through her last expensive vial of single-use nanorobotic healing injections before the loops started-not the high end permanent stuff, the disposable kind mercs carried for emergency patch-ups. The kind designed to keep fighting. Or twitching. Paramedics had cheaper alternatives. Instant coagulants, synthetic white blood cells, skin sealant that stuck better to packaging than patients.

  It could stop you from dying, if used correctly and if nobody kicked you during application, but it wouldn't help with augment recovery in the same way.

  But full-scale medical nanotech? The kind that healed on the fly and hardly ever stopped? That was a luxury, not a necessity. To get it, she had to break into private hospitals, bypass active defenses built for riots, pass high EQ guards, and win a fistfight with every idiot looter with the same idea. Which wasn't a problem-just a waste of a loop. No healing meant charging through New York with surgical glue doing most of the heavy lifting, like toothpick scaffolding holding up the statue of liberty-enhanced but still weakened from self-performed surgery. If she did heal, she'd lose entire loops battling over medical stockpiles, gaining nothing toward her real goal, and wasting a lot of time for something she'd lose at the end of the day.

  Power suits were similarly fruitless. Kelly's EQ was too low to pilot one effectively-they required high strength and tailored neural augments. They also took too long to build and were extremely expensive. And while they boosted the wearers performance and could even boost her active EQ level, if your enhancement level was too low, once they were damaged their efficiency could drop into the negatives. And worse, a well placed or unfortunate attack could render your suit partially, or completely useless, leaving you either trapped in a tin can while not being strong enough to break out, or being emergency ejected into the very thing that destroyed the only thing protecting you. They were expensive toys mainly designed for highly augmented resilience specialists who could survive the kind of impacts the suit couldn't, while having their weaknesses boosted.

  The monomolecular blade fixed a lot of those problems by making people shorter. In contrast, upgrading her augments or building power armour caused more problems, mostly in the form of new joints that weren't on speaking terms with the old ones.

  So instead, she spent her mornings experimenting.

  Some loops, she built and printed weapons or tools to deal with obstacles. Other loops, she hunted down the weaker creatures, testing their biology, failing to find out how they worked-but figuring out what killed them.

  She’d jailbroken her 3D printer months before the world went to shit. So her morning routine consisted of printing weapons, just a gun and one very special weapon for close to mid-quarter combat. Naturally, she didn't have endless materials, and had learned to be economical, just a low level gun, a small amount of ammo, and transforming weapon, enough to handle anything below 6.0EQ. She'd had to use all of her materials usually kept for emergency repairs, upgrades, and replacements each morning, but it didn't matter, with the city in chaos, she usually found better weapons along the way, and thanks to the second amendment, the city was like a walmart for murderhobos.

  Her invention, the transforming monomolecular blade, remained her favorite. Most of these creatures could shrug off lower level bullets, explosives, and even directed energy weapons, but molecular separation? That had a way of working when nothing else did.

  Sometimes.

  Her days were split between research and field testing, scavenging through dead zones for anything useful, and inevitably, making a mad dash for her lab in the hopes of reaching it before everything reset. She'd died so many times trying to reach it that she'd lost count. That didn't mean she'd stop.

  She still needed more. The fabricator was there, in the building, waiting. Once the fabricator was running, things would change.

  An explosion rocked the entrance of Vaughn Industries and lit up the street, sending a wave of heat through the wreckage. Kelly stayed where she was, sprawled out on the pavement, watching dust settle. The group Simon had sent to breach the building were still at it. Listened as whatever damage they'd dealt began the process of self repair and Simon's men prepared another salvo. Kelly wondered why nobody inside the building has tried to stop them. They had their reasons, she guessed. So did she—it was like witnessing cavemen trying to club a skyscraper into submission, she almost giggled.

  Times Square still reeked of power, even with corpses decorating the sidewalks. The elite had bolted, sure, but they left their toys behind-automated concierge services still chirped cheerful greetings to nonexistent tenants, luxury towers hummed with self-sustaining power grids, and high-end security drones patrolled empty penthouses like their owners might stroll back in any second. Vaughn Industries stood untouched at the center of it all, a monument to everything too advanced, too classified, or just too damn expensive to fall into the hands of the desperate. If anyone had the guts to take it, they'd be claiming the keys to the world.

  For a time, at least.

  Kelly was sure that out in orbit, deals were still made, fortunes still shifted, and real control that could influence nations still mattered. But anyone with half a brain would know that on Earth, this was a rare, maybe even the only chance to rise in power and join them.

  A few feet away, the head of Vaughn Security peered around a steel column at a familiar intern, probably debating if talking to her was worth the headache.

  When upgrading, people tended to specialize. Most specialized for their careers or even part-time jobs. Builders received enhancements that improved strength and endurance. Store clerks received upgrades for focus and accuracy. Police officers and soldiers often specialized in capture or firearms, favoring perception and resilience, or speed depending on the role. Of course, non-specialists existed—people whose enhancement scores were balanced evenly across all categories at their level—but that approach was generally seen as inefficient and costly. Some roles required specific score thresholds. Why aim for a balanced 4.0 when focusing on one category could raise it by a full point, boosting not only prospects and earning potential, but also your place in society?

  Kelly was a scientist, and a junior one at that, gaining hands on experience in a new field. Her Augments, like every other intern and entry level scientist, was specialized in cognitive function—which Jack, the head of Vaughn Industries Security Division, knew was the basic medical-seven suite package, granting entry level enhancements for the role; things like sharper memory recall, enhanced concentration, with some added bonuses for strengthened steady limbs and hands for handling delicate materials. In essence, she should have been mentally sharper than baseline, and only slightly physically stronger, too-but only barely, and not by much, just enough to do her job. That was all.

  But he'd seen her arrive, watched her tear through a small group of goblins to get here. She didn't stop. didn't hesitate. didn't even break rhythm, even when a goblin sank its teeth into her arm, its lockjaw kicking in. She just crushed its skull against a wall and used the body to take out the next one. Her fighting was a mess on paper-wild, unrefined, and reckless-but somehow, every move landed with a brutal efficiency that made technique look optional.

  Had she always been like this? Had he just failed to notice? Jack had seen fighters push through exhaustion, pain, even blood loss-but Kelly moved like something more fundamental was driving her, like stopping had never once occurred to her as an option.

  She wasn't normal.

  But she seemed.... useful.

  "You're just gonna lie there?" he finally called out.

  Kelly lifted her chin. "What, you want me to stand?"

  He glanced at the nearest goblin corpse, diced to pieces ,then back at her, then at the mess she'd left behind. His mouth pressed into a line. " just thought you'd be doing something... else."

  Kelly plucked a loose thread from her sleeve. "Yeah, well, thinking isn't really your strong suit, is it Jack?"

  The man exhaled through his nose, muttering something about how she used to be normal.

  Kelly grinned.

  Jack 'Jackhammer' Vance had been famous before he ever set foot in Vaughn Security.

  Ex private military, and ex-World-class EQ fighting champion and post-human gladiator, a legend whose highlight reels never stopped playing in bars and betting circuits. The man had dodged plasma bolts, walked off blows that should've turned him into paste, and turned high-speed killing machines into scrap with nothing but his bare hands.

  Jackhammer his prime had been a spectacle of destruction, built for war in a ring designed to push augmented combatants to their absolute limits. Then he retired, suited up, and started playing defense for people who needed a human tank with a security clearance, trading the death matches for high-rise boardrooms while putting his legendary discipline and strategic mind toward keeping people from blowing up the company vaults. He was Vaughn's insurance policy—the guy you called when the stakes were terminal. And before the world started throwing magic and monsters into the mix, his biggest problem had been Kelly.

  Her endless obsessive late—night lab sessions always gave him extra work, she had treated the place like a second home. And her constant requests for security clearances stretched his peace to its absolute limit.

  And yet, he never raised his voice, never lost his temper-just leaned in doorways with his arms crossed, watching her try to lie her way out of a containment breach. She was a newer intern and something of a promising prospect, but it was no surprise she'd been left behind by the ones in charge. That kind of work ethic usually led to promotion on merit, and nobody ever allowed merit—based promotion. Corporate politics was a zero-sum game. Her obsessive addiction to her work and bending Vaughn's handbook would have tested most people's patience and eventually lost someone else their job, but somehow, he still spoke to her like she had common sense.

  ***

  A green, pointy-eared creature stood at the end of the road, glowing staff raised, aimed straight at Kelly. She didn't move. She already knew how this would end. Jack blurred forward, covering the distance in an instant, going from zero to a hundred miles per hour in a second. His fist met the creature, and it burst like a water balloon. Her ocular lenses pinged an EQ estimation, and instead of a score, she received a message she rarely ever saw outside of the city's center:

  ‘Error—Subject score too high for user assessment.’

  That meant his score was above 60.0 EQ—people at that level could set their score to private And anyone not at or above 60 would simply receive that message. Of course. That meant Jack was a Elite. Anyone at that level was elite at anything they tried to do, so that's what everyone called them. The Elites. Vaughn hadn't downgraded him.

  He was at least six thousand percent beyond baseline human capability—way past legal limits—and with the difference in their scores, Kelly couldn't even tell what his specialization was. But considering his job and who they worked for, his accord-breaking enhancements were sanctioned, and she wasn't surprised.

  Jack "Jackhammer" Vance stood over her, arms crossed, his expression displaying the face of a man who had seen too much in too little time. Not that she blamed him—his yesterday day had been normal.

  He could still outrun moving vehicles in a dead sprint, and probably leap between rooftops like it was nothing. He had been walking highlight reel and apparently still was, and the world had loved him for it.

  "Should I even ask?" he said, voice dry as he observed her spread-eagle on the floor.

  Kelly yawned. "Chairs are oppressive. The ground is superior.”

  A slow exhale escaped Jack. It was the type of exhale that usually preceded exasperation. “You're lying in the middle of Times Square, and whats with the sword?"

  "Yeah. Best seat in the house... And it's just a police knife, see?"

  She flicked her wrist and her blade instantly reassembled itself to resemble something more mundane.

  "And why are you still here, anyway? Shouldn't you be off-planet, working remotely or something?"

  Most people were busy trying to escape the city or survive until rescue came. Some ignored her completely, treating her like some lunatic who had cracked in the face of the absurd. Others gave her a wide berth, recognizing something off about the way she carried herself—too confident, way too reckless, and entirely too comfortable in a world where comfort no longer existed.

  And then there were the ones that inspired people like the would-be warlord Simon Lang—the people who took to the new world like birds to the sky, ruling amid the flames. Those guys were annoying.

  She wasn't quite sure where Jackhammer fit in just yet. It was only her ninth time meeting him ‘today'.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  "Extra pay," he said simply. He eyed her blade sceptically as he leaned against a half-collapsed barricade, arms crossed, scanning the wreckage like he was still just doing his job. Like this was just another corporate security detail and not the apocalypse.

  Kelly stared at the ruined skyline, flat on her back in the middle of Times Square. "Hey, what's your Rank?"

  Jackhammer snorted. "That magic panel thing? Crazy, right? Everyone's losing their minds over it."

  "Yeah, well, mine says F-Minus. What about yours?"

  Jackhammer paused, glancing down at her. "I don't think—No, actually, it's B-Minus." Then, after a beat, frowned, really looking it her. "Wait. Yours is...?"

  Kelly grinned. "Unless I forgot how to read." She tapped her fingers against the asphalt.

  "Wonder how high it goes."

  Jackhammer grunted. "You planning on finding out?"

  Kelly laughed. "Obviously."

  Jackhammer exhaled. "Kelly—that curiosity's gonna get you killed..."

  "Buddy, I reset." Kelly grinned. "Anyway, what's Vaughn's Rank?"

  Jackhammer quirked a brow in confusion, before rolling his shoulders dismissively. “Why's it matter?"

  Kelly stretched, still lying down. "If we have E and B-Minus, and the most powerful guy in the world isn't even higher than a 'B', then this whole system's a joke."

  Jackhammer hesitated. That was enough of an answer. Kelly grinned wider. "You're actually thinking about it. You don't know, do you?"

  Jackhammer sighed. "Doesn't matter."

  Kelly grinned wider. "Because if he moved personally, the apocalypse would already be over?"

  Jackhammer stared at her. "Because if he moved, there wouldn't be anything left to fight."

  The world's ending, and he's watching it from a penthouse. Not that I'd expect anything from his kind,she thought.

  "What a waste," Kelly let her head fall back against the pavement. "If I had no limits, could shoot lasers out of my eyes, and fall out of orbit without a scratch like Gideon Vaughn, I'd probably come down here to see if l could kick a pigeon into space or something."

  Jackhammer's eyes turned back to Kelly, sprawled out on the pavement fiddling with her programmable weapon. "What're you..." He paused, observing her tinkering. "Figures. End of the world, and you're here trying to clock in overtime. I'm being paid ten times the usual. But you're doing this practically for free. You really can't help yourself, can you?"

  Kelly stretched, tilting her head back to meet his gaze. "Technically, I was supposed to stay behind for an extra month of field research before the higher ups send a team to get me. So really, I'm just following orders."

  Jackhammer snorted. "Uh-huh, right. They still gave you the short end of the stick after all that hard work... Who'd you piss off?"

  He had a point, someone had specifically assigned her this role, probably in the hopes she would face early retirement via magical monstrosity, but Kelly hardly cared. There was nowhere else in the world or known systems she'd rather be; the action was right here on Earth. "Look, I just need my lab," she said, waving a hand toward the towering monument of Vaughn Industries HQ. "I get in there, get the fabricator up and running, and then I can start feeding it genetic samples. If I can break down and regrow their organs, I can study what makes them tick. How they use that energy. Maybe even figure out what makes them work."

  He studied her, gaze sharp. "It's not about the monsters, is it. It's something else. That floating freak... or..." His eyes widened. "The portal?"

  Kelly beamed.

  "The portal. The status panel. The floating bastard in the sky." She flexed her fingers, pointing at the 'Dragons' and ‘Wyverns’ overhead "Those things. We're all going to die later today if I don't do anything. And I've got a lot of questions, Jack. I don't like not knowing things." She sat up, shaking off the dust. “Vaughn has what I need to crack this wide open. I get inside, I get the fabricator running, and then..." She gestured vaguely.

  "Science happens."

  Jackhammer exhaled—a man bracing for impact. "Are you really Kelly? I've confirmed it already, but..." His eye twitched. "You used to be normal."

  Kelly hummed, tilting her head. "Eh. You said that already." She gave a so-so motion with her hand. "And define 'normal." Before the loops, she'd never swung a sword—a small knife, maybe, when she was twelve. Her childhood may have had a checkered spot, a few years she tried not to remember, but before the loops the only weapon she'd fired was an airgun.

  Now? Now she wasn't sure if she'd always had a hidden talent for high-stakes brutality. Either she was a natural-born killer, or dying a hundred times had just hammered it into her skull. She was smart. But being smart wasn't an achievement—it was just a thing that happened, like bad weather or corporate fraud. Sure she was smart, but was she a natural born fighter or just someone who would never quit? Kelly didn't know which.

  "Probably both," she muttered to herself as she pressed in an alteration to her blade.

  Jackhammer watched her work. "Still a workaholic," he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Kelly shot him a look. "And you're still playing hall monitor... What's the deal, anyway? Simon's guys at the door should be a walk in the park for you and the staff inside. Why are they still breathing?"

  Jackhammer didn't answer immediately. Instead, he met her eyes and handed her a set specialised military glasses, then he lifted his chin slightly, his own eyes flicking upward. Kelly followed his gaze, though she already knew what she'd see.

  Another Suicide Squad.

  Kelly tapped her temple, triggering her ocular lenses to connect to the goggles and sharpen, pulling the distant invisible figures into perfect focus.

  In her first run on the building she hadn't even seen through their camouflage until it was too late. Augmented mercs, hanging in the pristine upper levels of the skyscrapers like patient vultures, invisible to the creatures that flew around them. The same highly augmented mercenaries who had already killed her nine times.

  These mercs had less equipment than the ones that fought the troll—They were leaner, lighter—with less mechanical reinforcement, fewer cybernetic seams, less visible alterations, none of the high-end augmentation signatures that screamed "walking war machine" she'd grown to associate with the corporate mercenaries that prowled the city. That meant they had more organic, genetic modifications. Which meant money.

  A lot of money.

  They'd cut her down every time she tried to breach the building—too fast, tough, and too well-trained. She'd been gunned down mid-step, even had her ribs caved in by a single punch, again and again, until the loops had burned their movements into her memory. But after enough loops, she caught the sleek insignia stamped onto their gear-DNA strands coiled into the shape of an ouroboros.

  GeneCorp. A direct competitor to Vaughn Industries and a leader and developer of genetic augmentation and high-end biological enhancement. Genetics was their market niche. If they were here, they were here to steal and sabotage, or both. And judging by the way one of them was currently digging his fingers into reinforced metal like it was wet plywood, they had plenty of reasons to believe they could pull it off.

  The first few loops in the Lab run had been trial and error, but then she started paying attention. In the loops, she learned their movements, their formations, the way they coordinated without a word. It wasn't that they dodged her bullets—the ones that went after hadn't been that fast. But it was worse. They reacted. Instantly. Like, they'd fought her before. Like they'd memorized every twitch, every shift, every microscopic tell before she even pulled the trigger. It was probably how it felt for everyone else fighting her.

  So she was adapting. Ditching the gun as a main weapon and keeping it secondary, while programming a new unpredictable shape into her molecular weapon.

  Kelly ran her tongue over her teeth, already thinking through the next attempt. They were in her way. The final wall between her and the secrets buried in her lab—the status panel, the portals, the nature of magic itself. They were better, sure. Stronger, faster, smarter. But so was she. The loops were not a curse. They were the best goddamn learning tool in history. If they thought they could keep her out forever, they were underestimating the hell out of her. They could kill her a hundred times, a thousand, it didn't matter. She'd keep coming, keep trying, keep clawing forward until she cracked reality open with her own two hands.

  Jackhammer gestured at the mercenaries.

  "You want to help me clear them out? Normally I wouldn’t put you at risk, but after seeing what you can do, it would make things easier. Split their numbers. Everyone inside’s already followed protocol and headed to the safe rooms. It’s just us.”

  "First of all, I work alone." Kelly, still sprawled on the ground, squinted at him. "Second of all, I have a 2.84 EQ, Jack. That's barely above 'breaks doors on accident' levels. Those guys are walking Tank divisions, and the other four are Thresholders, I think one of them is an Elite. That's barely even a fight, it’ll be a physics demonstration." She could kick a door off its hinges, vault walls with ease, and outsprint or react better than trained baseline athletes. But that was where the perks ended. Above baseline. No superhuman durability, no tearing through walls, no crushing metal with her bare hands. Being stronger, having 284% strength, above baseline, sounded good on paper—but in practice? It just meant she had to fight smarter.

  Jackhammer folded his arms. "Bullshit. I saw you carve through those goblins like you were filleting fish."

  "Yeah, because goblins have an EQ score of 'dies when look at them funny, and theirs hardly ever fluctuates." Her ocular lenses had analysed the goblins movements and biological feats, returning an average score of 2.0-4.0 EQ, they were only between twice-to-four times as strong as the average human—usually—which was probably why they always roamed in packs. Where Kelly could easily lift a loaded motorbike, they could lift a car. Where she could only dent a thick composite steel baseball bat with a powerful squeeze, fingers barely digging into the metal to deform it like hardened clay.. they could completely crush reinforced human skulls and with some effort, bend high-carbon composite steel, which was more durable than regular steel. But with their strength it would only bend, not break.

  Overall, it wasn't that big of a difference; like a guy who lifted weights twice a week going up against a full-on bodybuilder; If the weaker guy was an immortal, battle-trained fighter who knew every move in advance, the bodybuilder might as well be a really meaty punching bag.

  Kelly tapped her temple, pointing to the mercs in the sky. "Those guys? At least one of them is sitting at a solid above-60 Enhancement Quotient. Maybe two of them. Six-thousand times stronger than baseline and everything in between. Trust me, I checked."

  Enhancement levels were divided into clear groups. Baselines ranged from 0 to 1, the ordinary population. Enhanced ranged from 1 to 6, people with mild augmentations. The Superhuman Threshold started at 6 and went up to 20, and anyone in that range was called a Thresholder. Experts sat between 20 and 30, specialists whose EQ—Enhancement Quotient—made them masters of their fields. Tanks filled the 30 to 60 range, heavy and built for endurance or force. Above 60 were the Elites, few in number and nearly untouchable. Beyond them existed another class altogether, so far beyond reason that people called them the upper echelon, or demigods only half as a joke.

  Baseline humans were walking obituaries—too slow and weak. Too easy to turn into a red mist. Most people were born at the peak of baseline if they had health insurance.

  But even at the peak of what a normal human could do. Even an EQ at 4.0 meant punching through concrete and catching knives mid-air just to flex. At 4.0, dodging mid-sprint was a reflex, and running fast enough to crack pavements was just a commute. By 12.0—or even 6.0 if your score was lesser, or they were perception specialists—you would need predictive targeting to even stand a chance, high-speed drones got torn apart mid-flight like cheap toys, and small vehicles weren't so much "durable" as they were "waiting to be rearranged into modern art." At 30.0, footsteps shattered the ground, movement blurred past most sensors, and a solid hit could fold reinforced plating like tinfoil. Anything past 60? Even the best tracking systems available to civilians were second-guessing reality, and the strongest non-military armour was just expensive debris waiting to happen.

  Against a lesser opponent, a six at the superhuman threshold could dodge most turret fire by relying on speed, reaction time, movement unpredictability, and simply watching your wrists and trigger finger to predict your firing trajectory, which made them a nightmare for anything that wasn't smart enough to improvise. Railguns, Al-predictive turrets, and high-density kill zones, though? Those were a different story. Even a six, or a twelve, needed ground to stand on and there were only so many places to run when surrounded. Her lab was on the tenth floor, suspiciously free of hypersonic railgun capabilities, unlike the lower more well protected levels, which seemed like a questionable design choice. Maybe the architect assumed no one could make it this far wearing bulletproof armour resistant to near-sonic impacts, or maybe he figured the company's most valuable on-planet building would never be left abandoned deprived of high-EQ executives of their own. Aside from Jack, almost every civilian above 30EQ had bailed to off planet shuttles. Still, it was a foolishly overconfident and Arrogant design choice. But, honestly? If you got paid to turn a skyscraper into a corporate murder temple filled with superhumans, you'd probably think you were untouchable and cut corners on the budget too.

  6.0 EQ was globally considered as a turning point. It was the gateway to something superhuman. A threshold-the first true step into post-humanity, where people stopped being people and began to resemble forces of nature given humanoid shape.

  They could outrun an explosion, sprinting ahead of the shockwave as flames and debris struggled to catch them. Their footfalls hit the ground in a blur, crossing impossible distances before the brain could even register motion. Then there was their reaction time. That was what made them terrifying. Reflexes sharpened to the point of precognition. You could fired at them, watched the muzzle flash, only for them to raise a blade and deflect the rounds like it was an afterthought. It wasn't luck, it wasn't training—it was something beyond even the best human instincts.

  That was what came after the human threshold-strength, speed, and reflexes where the laws of common sense had to scramble to keep up. Where Kelly could rearrange furniture with ease, they could go toe-to-toe with a pair of trolls.

  "6.0-to-12.0 EQ? Four of them? And the rest are over 30? And an Elite, like me?" Jackhammer exhaled, rubbing his face then giving her a long, tired look. His expression didn't shift, but his voice carried that familiar edge of Kelly's-talking-nonsense-again. "You can't possibly know that. Your scanner doesn’t work at that range."

  Kelly waved a lazy hand, too comfortable to respond, as she put the final touches into her blade's newest form.

  Nine loops had ended the same way—she'd make it inside the building through a heavily fortified security entrance, using Jackhammer's security clearance, but they always followed them inside. Everytime, they probably ‘let’ them both enter just to get inside the building. Once inside, she would race to her the lift leading to lab supported by the buildings advanced defences, and Jack would head to the control centre where he would be untouchable. Once she reached her lab, she would begin to experiment while the buildings army of Droids and interior weaponry kept the intruders at bay. She'd even started carving pieces of the troll before she'd arrived, dissecting and breaking down its make-up. But it never lasted long, she wasn’t in a safe room, and while the rest targeted Jack, the one person they sent her way always made it to her lab without fail—she died before the fabricator was even up and running—cut down, crushed, or outpaced before she even got close. The first time, she hadn't even seen it coming. A flicker of movement, then nothing. The second? She caught the blur, the shift of weight, the moment they decided to strike. By the third, she managed to raise her blade before they reached her. It didn't matter. Not yet. But that was the thing—yet.

  Failure wasn't the end. It was a data point. A chance to improve.

  She learned. Every time, she learned. Each attempt, she adjusted-small things, minuscule corrections, shaving off milliseconds, pushing her reactions further, squeezing every inch of advantage from the loops. The first time she fired, she died before she could pull the trigger.

  The next, she got a shot off. A waste. A miss. The third? The merc's blade was already there, deflecting her bullet before it even had a chance. But now she knew—that was the speed she had to beat. And a portion of the buildings weaponry supporting her, she lived a little longer than she should have.

  She couldn't match them. Would never match them. But she was making progress. Once she made it to her lab, assuming she survived, she'd have less than 24 hours to research any anomalous materials she had on hand. Even a fraction of a second gained was another step forward, another inch closer to her discovering the secrets behind her status, to the fabricator, and to answers. Death was proof of concept. She had never made it past them before, but she had never made it this far either.

  That meant one thing.

  She was getting closer.

  Her weapon clicked into new form, its edges finally setting into place. At first glance, the Chainblade configuration looked like an ordinary sword. But the moment Kelly triggered it, the blade split into segmented, razor-sharp links, each driven by high-pressure hydraulics that moved so fast they blurred together in a smoking, distorted arc.

  She could flick her wrist, and it would twist and crack with multiplied speed on its own.

  Its purpose was to give her an edge against stronger, faster foes by keeping them off-balance, off-script, dragging every fight into a mess of unpredictable swings, bad decisions, and pure survival instincts-the kind of brawl filled with nothing but chaotic exchanges where the rules didn't matter.

  Kelly activated it with a thought and the chainblade flexed, shifted, and reconfigured mid-motion, as if it were arguing with itself about the best way to hurt something.

  "Status," she murmured.

  [Name: Dr. Kelly Voss.

  Race: Human

  Title:

  Rank: F-

  Traits: Absolute Mana Incompatibility (EX),

  Skills: ]

  "Tenth time's the charm," She muttered to herself, rising to her feet, eyeing the building some distance ahead, the superhuman mercenaries clinging to the skyline like camouflaged geckos, and the floating figure conducting the destruction of her world.

  They couldn't break her, and she would never yield-the thought was laughable. If it came to it, she'd burn, learn, and come back sharper, because pain was just free research.

  They would be the furnace that would forge her into something that could stop the end of the world, close the portals, and end the loops.

  ***

  For the next ten loops, Kelly fought her way in; adapting, correcting, shaving seconds off her failures with every reset. She and Jackhammer always made it through the doors, she always made it to her lab, and always started her experiment. Access wasn't the problem, but what came after was.

  Every time, Jackhammer broke off toward the control room, she sprinted for the 10th floor's near-instant elevator, supported by gun toting droids and ceiling mounted weaponry. She’d shut down the lift once she arrived, and every damn time, one of them followed. A 60+ Elite and a pack of 6’s, 12’s, and over 30’s tore after Jackhammer, while a lone 7 locked onto her route with what could easily be mistaken for a personal grudge. He never hesitated, never lost the trail, never gave her an enough time breathe. He cut her down, loop after loop, right before she could get any real work done.

  Vaughn's automated defenses bought time, but not enough. The resources were split between her and jackhammer, with Jack getting most of the good stuff. Droids collapsed. Lasers were deflected and even drones were shredded. Turrets reduced to scrap. Security mechs blown apart before they could finish their boot sequences.

  The mercs adapted fast. One of them caught a shooting drone mid-dive. Not dodged. Caught.

  They learned. They adjusted. But they weren't the ones looping.

  Kelly placed troll marrow and muscle into the fabricator and started the breakdown process.

  Soon she'd have a full map of its genetic makeup and maybe the start of some answers.

  There were smoother ways to handle this. Less messy, less explosive, with less deaths. But none of those ended with Jackhammer being overwhelmed enough to dump full security clearance into her lap.

  With that clearance, she could do more than just flipping the switches on her labs defences—she could crack open the vaults. The fun vaults. Restricted materials, blacklisted projects, classified tech too dangerous for general use. All the good stuff

  By the thirtieth loop, Kelly had it down to a science—had it memorized down to the frame.

  First, he'd rush in, cut right in a streak of movement, and go for the kill. Then he'd flip the table, use it as cover, and kick off to launch himself at her throat. Drones would pepper the room with suppression fire, droids would flank his position, security mechs would engage, and she'd counter with her chain-blade whipping it through the air in a blur of atom-severing sharpness, forcing him to pivot. He'd adjust instantly, sliding under the arc, aiming for her ribs. She adapted faster by moving ahead of time.

  The building's defenses played their short, brutal role-turrets, swarms of drones, an army of droids, Vaughn's security mechs rushed to intercept, but he always engaged what looked like an EMP, causing it all to stutter for a second and buy him enough time to remove the most dangerous elements. That was the most annoying part, he always chose not to kill her then, and viewed the building as the greater threat. If the building had full staff like it always did, they wouldn’t stand a chance. If Jack risked his job by never entering the building, they wouldn’t be getting inside. But once inside Kelly alone wasn’t enough to kill the mercs, but she didn't have to be. Jackhammer's security clearance let her reroute high-grade defences, drones, and gun-toting security units to defend the lab, turning every engagement into a numbers game, one she controlled.

  Bullets tore through the room, walls shredded, metal punched through like paper. Kelly barely registered it.

  She barked commands to the building's Al, her clearance letting her override security protocols on the fly, locking down doors, rerouting defenses, shifting power where she needed it. The fight wouldn’t be about victory- it was all about stalling.

  Or—that's what she had expected it to be about.

  She had assumed 'the fight wasn't about winning'. She thought that made it less humiliating. It didn't. A 2.84 EQ could survive against a fully outfitted 7.0 in the same way a parked car could survive an airstrike. Drones flared out before they finished booting. Al tracking lasted three frames against his deployed shield. By loop six, she'd downgraded the plan from "engagement" to "stall tactics" and loop ten was entirely devoted to looking for heavy doors. If she funneled him into enough bottlenecks, she could sometimes earn a full twenty seconds of uninterrupted progress. One loop, she had time to reload. Another, she ate a granola bar. Eventually she stopped measuring success by distance and started counting how many bites she could take before dying. Then she rerouted the surveillance system to record video of his patterns and burned it into neural storage as she fought. If she couldn't win, she could at least snack and study.

  Finally, the fabricator dinged, two vial of liquid appearing within as its systems updated with results.

  A vial of DNA rewriting serum, coded with to splice both the best of her and the trolls DNA to create a new and improved combination. And a vial of single use healing medical nanotech.

  Kelly turned her back on the gunfire, the screaming metal, and the superhuman combatants tearing through security machinery like wet tissue. The troll bones, marrow, and muscle slid from the tray, the full map of its DNA glowing across the screen.

  She ignored the carnage behind her and focused. Everything she needed was in front of her. She plugged herself into the lab, and with a single thought, the troll's genetic blueprint burned itself into her neural implants, slotting into place like a puzzle piece she hadn't known she was missing. Then she dove in, neural enhancements firing at full capacity as the lab's Als ripped through data at speeds that would turn lesser brains into soup.

  The troll's DNA unraveled into a mess of fragmented sequences-jagged, scattered, stitched together as though a part of some mad scientist's secret code, and Kelly found something resembling complex encryption buried in the very foundation of the creatures biology.

  Kelly peeled back the lab's deepest security layers, siphoning data from high-clearance files, blacklisted experiments, and half-buried projects, piecing together scraps of knowledge no one at her pay grade was ever meant to see.

  She cracked it, and the scattered fragments realigned, forming a clear genetic pathway buried beneath the chaos. This is what the status meant, she realised, eyes widening. A pathway that humans didn’t have. She went to work, splicing genes like a cybernetic butcher, threading and replicating the same buried encryption pathway into a projected copy of her genetic helix.

  Beneath the creatures first encryption lay something deeper—layers of hidden pathways tangled into a vast network, it looked like a solar system, complete with stars, all made of genetic code, each more intricate than the last. She locked onto a single sequence buried in the troll's bone structure, isolating it from the genetic noise with the precision of a surgeon and the excitement of a kid with a new toy.

  She fed the refined data into the fabricator, the process accelerating now that the genetic code was already unraveled. The new serum formed in a fraction of the time, rendering the first batch useless-discarded without hesitation.

  An explosion sounded behind her, rocking the walls of the laboratory. She barely even heard it.

  Kelly slammed the syringe into her arm without hesitation, flooding her veins with a reckless cocktail of troll-human gene splicing and fabricator-born single-use healing nanotech. If this worked, she'd gain access to the same hidden mana-encoded pathways buried in the troll's DNA. If it didn't, she'd either melt into a puddle of genetic failure or burst apart like an overcooked experiment.

  No in-between.

  There were smarter ways to do this. There were always smarter, cleaner, more efficient ways to solve a problem, she had tried some. But efficiency meant less chaos, fewer variables, and a narrower scope for the unexpected. Half the world's greatest advancements had come from mistakes—penicillin, microwaves, that one idiot who accidentally created gravity drives while trying to stabilise dark energy. Controlled tests? Careful calculations? That wasn't how breakthroughs happened. Real progress came from hitting reality with everything you had and seeing what cracked open.

  And those cleaner ways, the ones that didn't come with the delightful risk of turning into a fine genetic mist, would be much safer, and significantly less excruciating. But Kelly didn't have time for safety. The mercenary was closing in, and the loop was about to reset—one way or another.

  Her neural HUD flashed as she checked her DNA structure. Success. The hidden pathways were there. She had them. Her genome had accepted the encryption. She was now, officially, part troll.

  The troll's unique bone composition, lattice structure, and marrow density had been the blueprint, and the medical nanotech was the only thing making sure she didn't disintegrate from having her DNA rewritten in real time. In theory.

  Pain burned through her bones, marrow twisting, reforming, reinforcing. Five minutes of pure, unfiltered agony. Then she rose, shaking, grinning, alive.

  Her bones were dense, reinforced, stronger than human—but nowhere near what they should have been. The troll she had dissected had bones like titanium, flesh that swallowed blades without a scratch. This was weaker, barely as strong as hardened metal. The lab's instant Al scans confirmed it: her structure had taken in the single hidden chain of encryption pathways in the trolls galaxy-like DNA, embedding them deep within her genetic core. But something was missing.

  Kelly guessed the troll's bones were so tough because of what the status called ‘mana’. Without it, just dead weight.

  [Absolute Mana Incompatibility (Racial, Foundational, unique): This being cannot manipulate mana, cast spells, or gain mana-based skills. This trait is intrinsic to their race, shaping their spiritual being. While mana can enter their body, it remains inert, unusable, and incapable of being stored. Their metaphysiology lacks mana generating functionality and mana-conductive pathways, replacing them with a stabilized quantum neural lattice that repels the formation of such metaphysiology at the subatomic level. Immune to mana corruption. It is impossible for this race to gain spiritual pathways as they are the core of a souls structure]

  Kelly checked her status with a single word, eyes scanning the readout. The mana trait was still there, but something had changed. The trait stayed. The description now flagged her 'Spirit' instead of her body.

  Spiritual. A term that got you kicked out of a research lab and hired by a podcast. The word alone set her scientific curiosity ablaze.

  The concept had never held any measurable weight—never been something humanity could dissect, catalog, or enhance. But now it was sitting in her status screen, taunting her like a locked door with light behind it, or a karaoke machine at church.

  Mana was no longer listed as inert, but it was still unusable, incapable of being stored. That meant it could move through her body but had nowhere to go, nothing to fuel. It moved through her, did nothing, and still managed to get noticed. That alone made it the most attention-seeking particle in her body.

  A useless flow of power she couldn't access-except for the fact that something had noticed.

  The absence in mana detection was gone. Whatever was watching for it, whatever systems or entities relied on it to sense life—it could see her now. But she still couldn't generate it, store it, or wield it. Which meant... what? That mana could pass through her but never stay? Another clue.

  Every mention of her body was gone. But something called her metaphysiology remained. Her spirit was still listed. Humanity had conquered the stars, mapped the limits of genetic potential, cracked the secrets of augmentation and cybernetic perfection. Yet nothing in all its advancements had ever proven the existence of a 'spirit.'

  It was a missing branch of knowledge. Something that had always been there, completely unnoticed. Like cavemen staring into flames, incapable of realizing what they had discovered.

  She still couldn't use mana.

  The status screen outright denied the possibility. Spiritual pathways were impossible to gain-they were the foundation of a soul's structure.

  So what was she supposed to do with that?

  She didn't know. Yet.

  That was enough.

  Discovery was about tearing through walls until the answers had nowhere left to hide.

  She would push, break, die, repeat.

  And she would figure it out.

  She checked her EQ. The enhanced bone density pushed her score up 0.1 point from 2.84 to 2.94—a predictable jump, her half-troll, half-human bones settling somewhere between reinforced and barely holding together.

  Then the mercenary reached her, and the loop reset.