Chương 100: Breakthrough

The old war veteran, Ren Sato the Ghost, raised his hand. His fingers and wrist reconfigured, small segments sliding and locking with a series of unheard clicks. His hand transformed into a long, single-edged dagger made of the same matte grey alloy as his armor. He took a stance. His feet finally shifted, settling into something grounded and inevitable. Kelly looked from the dagger to his expression. She knew she was in for a world of pain. A grim emotion settled on her face. It wasn't joy; it was recognition.

Finally, something practical. To Kelly, learning had once involved lectures, tuition fees, peer-reviewed papers, and specialized equipment in a clean, singular field of expertise. The old veteran Sato the Ghost's form of education was nothing like that. His grading scale was various promises to break her bones if her answers were slow. His academy was a dagger-hand aimed at her throat and a command to alter time before it landed. Needless to say, it was not a formal lesson. The man was a monster.

A complete, unrepentant, educational monster. Kelly took a breath. It felt like inhaling a bag of angry glass. Okay, two ribs—maybe three. Her shoulder had recently vacated its socket for a brief, dramatic excursion before she'd convinced it to return. A souvenir gash over her eyebrow donated a steady crimson drip into her eye. Her ankle had developed a profound philosophical disagreement with the concept of 'standing.'

Her Fortress of Vitality title was humming like an overworked fridge, a persistent, warm tingle deep in her bones as it desperately tried to paste her back together. It was less like healing and more like internal frantic paperwork. He pushed her to her limits. Which was fine. Expected, even. It forced her to think of new ways to push her capabilities, which was the whole irritating, excellent point. But she noted the calibrated precision.

The strike that could have removed her head instead gave her a thrilling new hairstyle via the wall. The throw that could have shattered her spine left her in a crumpled but catalogable heap. He never went beyond a level she couldn't handle. She knew he could. That wasn't his goal. She quickly ascertained the old ghost was just applying pressure. The kind of pressure that might, if she was clever and desperate enough, make her Titles, Traits, and abilities cough up something new.

And when he discovered Kelly could sense time and had implants that allowed her to see him while blinded, he adjusted his methods. Through her passive mana sensing trait—through which all humans just looked like easily identifiable voids of mana-rejecting nothingness in a vibrant mana-filled world, though he didn't know that—he forced her to fight him with her senses removed. No touch. No sight. No hearing. Or even taste.

Her world shrank to raw mana and time—a vague, directional pressure of causality, and the stark, human-shaped emptiness moving through the energy field. She swung at voids. She stumbled. She dodged disturbances in the atmospheric energy. It was hell. But it provided Kelly with interesting new variables. And knowledge—knowledge on her new abilities started to compile in the dark. The first was her time sense. She learned how a person's presence affected the temporal stream of everything they interacted with.

Every particle of air, surface they touched, and action they took created specific, branching alterations in what happened next. She learned to sense those alterations. Then she studied them as she fought. Studying the immediate, local cascade of adjustments a person caused, how every displaced particle of air changed what happened next in its immediate vicinity taught her more about the chain of local consequences—about time—than any man-made machine ever could. The second was her mana sense.

She already knew humans appeared as voids, rejecting the mana around them. Fighting without other senses forced her to focus on how that rejection worked. She observed how the mana field bent and flowed around the human-shaped emptiness, how it compressed just before a movement. She learned more about how mana functioned by watching how it interacted with a person. With that information, Kelly reached into her shadow and retrieved her customized ARGi drone to record the next round of torture.

She was determined to smack him at least once, and data was king. A solid plan. Hit the old monster, and have a perfect recording of how she finally managed it. Or, more likely, of all the creative ways she failed. So time went. Three hours spent fighting in impossible conditions that left her in a constant state of near death, which was a fun new frontier beyond the fake organ failure she induced for her titles and traits. She almost died several times. It became a tedious checklist.

She spent five minutes recovering to full health with the help of her Fortress of Vitality title—which felt like chugging liquid sunlight—and a vial of temporary medical nanotech that itched like hell. During that break she noted and compared combat data, studying videos of their fight from the drone and brainstorming methods to use her abilities to catch up to the impossible monster in some way. There has to be a way. She fought, then she studied the fight, then fought again.

Then she planned and brainstormed, then studied the footage further. It was a productive, if brutally repetitive, cycle. Ren joined her in reviewing the video silently. He answered any questions she had about his actions, her actions, and why she succeeded or failed at any given attempt. He in turn asked her questions about her abilities and their conditions, and was insistent and demanding on pushing what she could do. Together, they dissected her magic like a strange, sparking engine.

Through this she discovered impactful things. Useful things. She had her own personal atomic clock—a clock that measured time perfectly by the changes and frequencies in atoms. Imagine one giant, invisible clock hanging in the center of the universe. On the surface, it appeared that this clock ticked at the exact same rate for everyone, everything, everywhere. A comforting lie. If she focused, she could read it. And she could read the personal time of others, knowing how old they were right down to the second.

Ren, for instance, was old. Really, really old. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. And thanks to the synthetic mesh wrapped around her brain's memory and focus centers, that meant if Kelly experienced something just once, she could perfectly predict, anticipate, and react to it. Whether it was a gunshot, a tactical knife to the gut, or a building falling on her head, she could react before she was even consciously aware of it.

This would make physical skills and combat with anything below her level range almost trivial. A nice perk, she thought, currently covered in blood and dust on the floor of a crater. The power had limits. Situations and people existed where her best reflexes meant nothing. Someone moving faster than thought was a problem. An attack with no warning was a problem. A blow moving at the speed of light was a very big problem. But for everything else, her body shifted. Projectiles missed.

They smashed into her mimic skin and did nothing useful, selling the beautiful lie that she was bulletproof against elite-killer rounds. She no longer had to read a wrist or a trigger finger, which was handy when they were hidden by spin-barrels or trick triggers. Mixed with her time dilation, it made the immortal scientist look downright impossible to hit from the outside. A neat trick. The universe liked its three neat dimensions of space. Time was the messy fourth one. Usually, time only marched forward.

You couldn't rewind it. Except when things started moving stupid fast, right up against light-speed. Then the cosmic rules got drunk and started bending. Space and time were linked. Usually, you needed something properly heavy—a planet, a star—to make them curve. That heaviness bent the sheet, and time slowed down near the dent. Usually, moving very fast also made time slow down. That was time dilation by speed. The speed of light was a constant, the universe's one fixed rule.

Light was the fastest thing that never changed speed, so time became the flexible one, stretching and squishing, moving slower or faster just to keep light's speed constant. But some things cheated. Some things went faster than light. That was when cause and effect got scrambled. Like the deadtech from Reggie's future-sight gunman. It used Tachyons. Nasty little things that moved backward in time. Like wormholes.

A wormhole wouldn't work unless you had something called negative energy, but really, it was just taking that space-time sheet, folding it, and punching a hole through the middle. All of this up close, first hand knowledge—the real, concrete intimate how of it—unclogged several of her titles. They had been bottlenecked, stuck at the second, third, and fourth grades for loops on end. The understanding was the key. The walls shattered. They improved. In a single loop!

"Truly, you are insane, Dr. Voss," the grey-bearded veteran remarked, a dry snark in his voice.

"From the stories of your loops, I had a feeling this sort of kumite-style gauntlet would be most effective for you. But compared to being torn apart by a mass of muscle and metal, or eaten by a winged lizard larger than this room, is this not easier?" That appeared true on the surface. In reality, it was anything but. At least the dragon-like creatures—the things people on the internet called actual dragons in New York's sky—were just dumb beasts.

They hadn't taunted her with a knowing grin as one of them ate her that one time in the early days, when she'd foolishly decided to fire at it. And at least Kelly got to have breakfast and print tools whenever the heavy goretank, the Threshold-level destroyer, that walking, thinking machine of flesh and weaponry, had killed her. This constant testing—battle and torture in a single loop, coupled with the constant assessment, breakdown, and combat review—was genuinely exhausting.

Usually, she would have either won, died, or cheated by now. But it was paying off.

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Kelly said, wiping blood from her lip. She agreed that this blend of hardcore, grueling, torturous battle, experimentation, and testing—treating the results like she treated her experiments, by studying them and improving—suited her. It was how she achieved magic, after all. By destroying the universe over and over until something stuck.

"I'm glad you agree," Ren Sato the Ghost said, his expression unreadable.

"If that's the case, I can take off the training wheels and really test what you can do." Kelly blinked.

"Wait, those were the training wheels?" The time to review her battle, to test and experiment with her abilities, increased. In exchange, Ren refused to allow her even a second to regenerate with her titles. His assault was never-ending, and her body accumulated debilitating damage. She couldn't move her arm properly and her leg was a mess of screaming feedback, forcing Kelly to reconsider her approach mid-stride. Kelly interacted with the world in ways nothing else did, except maybe stars.

Everything about the energy inside her was… altered, unnatural, and inverted. Her soul generated tachyons that moved faster than light and broke through time, and created mana and negative energy that for the last several millennia, was usually impossible to produce. Most of all, her body treated spacetime like a suggestion. She figured out how to use the negative energy to turn her body into something that could punch through time faster than light, and she slowly moved forward in time.

She felt it—changing the nature of her trait and its effect on her body altered her fundamentally. This yielded a spectacular result. [Time Attunement Grade-I → Grade-II]"Huh?" Kelly muttered.

"What?" Everything slowed. Sweat and blood fell in the air like molasses. Ren's movements, previously a blur, now moved like a falling feather. Slowly. And Kelly? She moved normally in this slowed world, though she felt the usual strain on her body, mind, and soul intensify. With the world moving in slow motion, she hopped into his blind spot and swung. She was surprised to notice that although everything was slow except her, the old monster's eyes had still tracked her every movement.

His nanotech expanded at impossible speed to form a thin shield, and her fists smashed harmlessly against it. A shockwave that shattered the flooring rippled outward in a wave, faster than even enhanced eyes could see. The impact separated them. Ren approved.

"How does your mutation let you move like a speed specialist at the tank level?" he asked, his tone analytical.

"It's not superspeed," Kelly said, bastardizing the physics with a shrug she felt in her bones.

"It's more like… I paid the universe to look the other way for a second."

"At the highest Enhancement levels, speed specialists are untouchable," Ren noted.

"I expected something like this. It's why I was intentionally attacking just faster than you could notice." The old veteran spoke, and Kelly reacted.

"So you were sandbagging to see if I'd cheat," she said, the realization dawning alongside a fresh wave of fatigue.

"Awesome. Love being a lab rat for warfare."

"You are the lab rat who built the maze, Kelly," Ren replied, his nanotech retreating.

"Now run it again."

The immediate reward for her breakthrough was a more intricate variety of punishment. Eventually, the building rumbled. A deep groan that vibrated through the floor. A sound like a contained explosion followed, and distant screams filtered through the walls. The rumbling intensified. Ren lowered his guard, his head tilting.

"This place is built to take a hit. It shouldn't shake." He moved toward the exit to investigate.

"That's big players scrambling," Kelly said, pushing herself up. Her body ached in several new and educational ways.

"They're raising the dome over the east-grid. All the overpowered idiots, heavy hitters and their corporate armies are inside it by now, fighting for the cube." She dusted off her pants.

"It's going to blow up soon. Someone always pokes it wrong trying to turn it off and call it theirs. Makes a real mess." Ren stopped at the door. He stood still for a moment.

"Oh," he said, the single word dense with recognition.

"That's what that is." He turned and walked back toward her, his pace purposeful.

"We're going."

"Where?" Kelly asked.

"Outside."