Chương 10: Discovery

The doors to Vaughn Industries buckled inward with a shriek of twisted alloy, and Kelly was already in motion, gun up, boots finding purchase on shattered tile. Jackhammer tore left without breaking stride, dashing past a security droid that unfolded from the wall to cover his flank. He shouted something about the control room that got swallowed by the screech of ceiling-mounted turrets spinning to life. Kelly didn't answer.

She was already gone, sprinting down the east corridor where a single lit panel above a reinforced lift door guaranteed a shortcut to the tenth floor. The turrets tracked her for half a heartbeat, then swiveled past her and locked onto the shape that had just cleared the entrance behind her. She heard the first volley, then the sound of metal being turned inside out, then nothing. Her fist hit the elevator call button. The doors slid open.

She stepped inside, slammed the lockdown toggle, and watched the doors begin to slide shut. The lift lurched once. Then the ceiling above her screamed as fingers punched through the reinforced panel, peeling the hatch back like the lid of a can. A man dropped through the gap and landed in the cramped space, close enough that she could see the seams of his tactical rig and the complete lack of urgency in his expression. Kelly fired. The shot took him in the chest and barely rocked his stance.

He closed the distance in a single, unhurried step, and the last thing she processed before the world went dark was the faint, irritated thought that the elevator music hadn't even finished its first song.

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 enough time to 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 fewer 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 flip the switches on her lab's defenses—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 defenses, 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 AI, 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. AI 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. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Finally, the fabricator dinged, two vials of liquid appearing within as its systems updated with results. A vial of DNA rewriting serum, coded to splice both the best of her and the troll's 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 AIs 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 part of some mad scientist's secret code, and Kelly found something resembling complex encryption buried in the very foundation of the creature's 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 creature's 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 AI scans confirmed it: her structure had taken in the single hidden chain of encryption pathways in the troll's 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 soul's 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.