Chương 114: 113. Beneath the City

Kelly went underground. Outside the dome, the city was doing its best impression of a garbage disposal unit after a symphony of grenades. Kelly dropped underground, into the tunnels that veined the city's corpse. The air down there smelled like wet rust and something that had given up on being biological. Kelly moved through the tunnels with speed that came from already knowing where every broken pipe and collapsed support beam waited. She had bled down here before. She had been stabbed down here a lot.

The tunnels under the east grid had a personality, and that personality was "kill you slowly while something else watches." A creature dropped from the ceiling and landed on the track ahead. The thing stood on two thick hind legs, wings of fused bone folded against its back. Each wing finger ended in a hooked claw that held a faint glow in her mana sense. Its rib cage was exposed, the bones themselves pulsing with a low, sullen light that matched no biological process she understood.

The head swiveled on too many vertebrae, each joint clicking as it turned, and the jaw unhinged slightly before snapping back into place with a sharp sound, clicking out of alignment as it forced words through a mouth never designed for speech.

"Give. What. You. Carry." Kelly stopped walking. She just watched the thing. Her eyes moved over the creature, cataloguing structure, mass, probable threat level. The assessment took less than a second and confirmed what she already knew: this was an ambush predator with enough intelligence to make demands.

"The artifact? You came all the way down here for that?" Kelly asked.

"I don't have it.

'Matter fact, what artifact? Never heard of it." As she spoke the bracelet on her wrist unfolded into a long blade with a sound like a train speeding. The creature's bone spikes lifted along its spine, each one rising with a sound of old hinges. It shrieked, and the sound bounced off the walls and came back as a second, meaner noise. Every spike detached from the creature's body and floated in the air around it. No thread connected them. No shimmering field held them. They simply hung there, pointing at her.

Kelly flexed her fingers. Her own bone control always needed a physical link, a thin chain running from her hand into whatever she wanted to shape. This thing just willed its spikes into the air and they obeyed.

"That's cheating," Kelly said.

"Mine need a tether. Unfair." The creature's control might be a skill, which would mean she could not pull it from the corpse. Skills died with the owner, or were likely glued to their souls. If it was a trait, though, she could add it to her growing collection of impossible things. A trait that upgraded her bone-knight ability would be perfect. She could already shape bone into tools, weapons, and terrible ideas. With that, she could shape it into an army.

A dense reinforced composite shield snapped into place in front of her. Three spikes shattered against it. The rest veered into the tunnel walls and lodged deep in the stone.

"Hold on a minute," Kelly said, lowering the shield enough to see the creature over its edge.

"I'm doing some important thinking. There's a cube in my shadow, and I need to figure out how it works so I can use it to slap an angelic pigeon. You're interrupting my process." The creature circled, body shifting as it prepared another attack. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Kelly flicked a metal marble out of her shadow and sent it through the creature's wing membrane at speed.

The marble punched a clean hole, clipped the bone beneath, and vanished into the dark behind it. Broken pieces of bone pulled back toward the creature and reattached without effort.

"Recycling," Kelly said.

"I don't have time for this." She extended a thin chain of bone from her index finger and pressed the tip against a fallen spike. The connection took hold immediately. The spike reshaped into a long, flat blade at the end of the chain, and Kelly gave it an experimental twitch. The creature lunged. Kelly whipped the blade into its shoulder and tore a chunk of bone free. She added that piece to the chain and reshaped the whole mass into a large claw.

Her increased trait grades let her move faster than she had managed before, and the claw slammed into the creature's face hard enough to stagger it. The claw partially shattered on impact, leaving splinters of bone scattered across the floor. She needed stronger material. Ren had told her that, and she was profoundly annoyed that he was, once again, right. She needed synthesized high-EQ bone for this trait, or she needed to kill something holy and take whatever it used for a skeleton.

"I have a schedule," Kelly said.

"I have a cube to reverse engineer, a Mandate to figure out, and a long list of people who need punching. You are delaying all of that." She built a massive bone hand from a larger broken piece, drawing on every bit of engineering knowledge she had soaked up across a thousand loops. The hand swung into the creature's ribs at mach speed. Something cracked, and the hand shattered into white splinters. The creature tried to fly, hit the low tunnel ceiling, and crashed back down.

Kelly formed a second chain, pressed it into another broken piece, and shaped a second hand. This one drove into the creature's wing and pinned it against the floor. The creature struggled, and the hand held. She killed it with Giantbane and Mythril Fist. The first title pushed her speed against a stronger target, and the second multiplied one of her strikes by ten percent exactly when her augments told her it would trigger. The creature hit the ground in pieces. The blow sent dust billowing through the tunnel.

Kelly extended several thin chains of bone from her palm, connected them to the corpse, and stored the whole thing in her shadow. It joined a growing collection of things she intended to study when the loop allowed. While she walked on, Kelly spoke to the cube she had stolen and now stored in her shadow. She had not decided if it came from a god's pocket or a god's head, and she no longer cared.

"You're heavy," she said.

"You have a glowing diary inside. You can turn nothing into the most powerful mana I've ever seen, and you're taking up space. I know you do something impossible. I just don't know what, and I don't know how." She ran through what she had already tried. Mana had not woken it. Titles had not affected it. Shoving it deeper into the shadow only made it settle further, as if it had found a chair and refused to move.

"Fine," Kelly said.

"Stay like that. I'll take you apart later. With a very small hammer." Kelly turned her attention to an entry in her status called Mandate. It occupied its own section, separate from Titles and Traits, and it bothered her more than the cube did.

"You," she said.

"Mandate. You have your own category. That means you matter. Just as much as everything else with its own category. You should be as unfair as my best title. So why don't you work?" She listed what she had tried. Saying its name. Saying equip. Feeding it cube mana. Even shouting at it once, which had accomplished nothing except making her feel slightly better. The entry stayed inert, waiting for a condition she had not met.

"I'm going to find out what that condition is," Kelly said.

"And when I do, I'm throwing it at the first god I see." Kelly kept walking and worked through what she knew about the cube and the Mandate.

"The cube is magic terraforming. Portal tech. The Mandate is a status category. Both came from outside my dimension. That's the only connection I'm sure of." She stepped over a collapsed beam and continued.

"I'm missing something." Kelly shifted from speculation to practical next steps, because speculation was only useful when it led somewhere.

"First, I study the cube. Then I find whatever makes the Mandate work. Then I punch Ren. Then I kill that pigeon. In that order." She tapped the place where her shadow sat against her side, not quite a pat, more a reminder that it was still there.

"You're not getting out of this. I'm very persistent." She kept moving. A thrum moved through her shadow storage. Faint at first, then stronger. It ran up through the bones in the hand that had touched the cube and settled behind her eyes. Kelly stopped walking and turned her attention toward it. The shadow dimension felt brimming with power, as if the cube had finally noticed she was there and decided to say hello.

"Okay," Kelly said.

"That's new." Kelly stepped into her shadow.