Chương 116: 115. The Mountain Ahead

Kelly fired and moved, until she was right at the threshold. Then she was through. One moment, the distorted skyline of ruined New York was ahead of her. The next, she stood on cracked earth outside the dome, the city encased in a giant, shimmering egg behind her. The hum of the spatial barrier was gone, replaced by the howl of open, dead wind. Kelly let the cannon in her hands collapse back into a simple blade. The shadow-gun dissolved into nothing.

And just like that, Kelly Voss, for the first time, stood outside the spatial barrier that had been trapping her in New York for years. A mess of frozen and vaporized magic smoked at her back. She was through.

"Huh," she said, looking back at the wall of force.

"Now for the really fun part." New York was gone. It was different from the usual irradiated glassy-floored skeletal landscapes of the past's destroyed cities. No, instead, this was a wholesale deletion. Not a building left, not even a single stubborn piece of rebar sticking up as a middle finger to entropy. It was just… a hole. A deep, miles-wide crater punched straight down into the planet's crust where a city had been a few hours ago.

The snake ate the city she once called home, and the snake-charmer was waiting for an encore. The leviathan had slithered off to digest, but the thing that summoned it, the naked guy floating high up in the smoke-stained sky, the powerful floating invader they called the conductor, was still there. Just hanging in its wake. But Kelly finally had the cube's secrets, the key to a new kind of magic theory. Runes. Thousands of them. Maybe hundreds of thousands, who knew?

The things carved into the cube had been tiny, writhing, and impossible for a human eye to accurately scan. Either way, the entire treasure trove was hers. She'd delved into the Eastgrid, a city-sized wrestling pit for every major power faction and megalomaniacal being on every planet and from every leaking portal. She'd taken the cube from under their collective noses.

In the process, she'd peeled back layers of her own time abilities, prying open a door to possibilities nobody, not even the invaders, had anticipated. And now, she was moving to prepare. To her, the cube was the answer to a question she had asked since it all began. One she'd asked the moment the world started tearing itself apart on live feeds. What was magic? It, and her time abilities, would be the key to taking the next step.

Beating the conductor, conquering magic, conquering time, learning combat techniques from a military academy, heading off-planet, putting a gun to an order god's head, finding Jennie. Beating the apocalypse. Her goals had shifted. They'd grown, even. What started as a desperate scramble for the next hour had calcified into a blueprint. Now, Kelly had a structure to her madness. She knew exactly what she wanted, including exactly how she was going to get there.

The method involved a lot of broken things and a running tally of favors owed. But ultimately? It all boiled down to power. Kelly was arming herself for a party nobody else knew was happening yet. A messy, explosive party. She grinned inside her helmet. Preparation looked a lot like assembling a bigger bomb. Breathing the second day's air felt wrong. Structurally, cosmically wrong. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. Kelly felt profound guilt.

This was wrong. She wasn't supposed to be here. Not like this. She should have destroyed the conductor, the leviathan, Verrimisir, and its god Illvyr, risked having her mind wiped for eternity, smashed her head against them thousands—no, a million times if that's what it took. She should have beat them all with brute force. She knew that the alternative was dangerous and stupid, and that what she was doing right now was the smarter option, the pragmatic, intelligent option. The tactically superior move.

The mountain of impossible things she had to deal with hadn't shrunk, but she'd managed to step off the treadmill to fetch a shotgun. But... why did it feel so wrong? She knew what she was doing was the less flawed path. This route aggregated power faster, shortcut the grind. It was the efficient play, a cold consolidation of resources. She'd gain power more quickly, achieve what she wanted in fewer loops. Kelly was being emotional; she knew this.

A primal part of her itched for a reset, to do things the hard way—her way—the path of maximum collision, excessive variables, experimentation, Titles, Traits, and spectacular, violent fire. But she knew she needed to master time, and in doing so, she could master everything. But... why did each step hurt? Cause her heart to shudder more slightly than the last? A faint, persistent tremor in her chest, the psychosomatic tax for choosing the chess move over the sledgehammer. Why did the shorter path, hurt?

The two fighters at the end of the world, entered a building. A secondary site, a good distance from the new scenic crater. Ren led Kelly to it. The building was bland, corporate, and forgettable. They went underground. The door opened into a cavernous hall, a battle training chamber clearly designed to withstand Ren's blasts. A space that made Kelly, the immortal intern, stop dead. Ren's people were wheeling in machines. Not scrap or jury-rigged salvage.

This was top-shelf, bleeding-edge, stupidly-expensive hardware. Diagnostic arrays, high-speed motion-capture rigs, industrial fabricators. Her eyes got wide. Her jaw actually dropped.

"You have a volumetric particle scanner just… sitting in a crate?" she muttered, more to herself than to anyone, her eyes wide as saucers and her jaw gape. Kelly stood there and watched, arms crossed, as an entire lab and combat arena erected itself around her under the staff's guidance. It was efficient. Impressive. It was also completely missing the point. Industrial machinery and cutting-edge combat research tech to dissect a reality altering cube. Ren had brought combat tech.

The machines were mostly for cube dissection, weapon prototyping, and surface-level scans of invader tissue. It was a place for crafting weapons, breaking them down, and building stronger versions. It wasn't a place for true study—for taking reality itself apart at the seams, peeling back the layers of matter and dark energy and asking rude questions. Not like Vaughn, the botanical lab, or even Genecorp. This was a garage for building a fighter jet, not a facility for questioning why the sky existed.

Ren, the old soldier who'd clearly been paid a fortune by someone at some point, gestured at the reinforced walls.

"The whole place is rated to contain any blast. Should hold if things go wrong and the cube overloads." Kelly scoffed and tilted her head. She doubted it.

"My abilities mean I'll probably survive if I absorb the energy directly. This building, though? It's getting a new skylight. Several of them." She knocked a knuckle against a carbon-weave support column.

"I've seen what this cube does. Your 'ratings' are a suggestion it's going to ignore." Kelly then turned to her aged mentor, "Can you get them to leave? The staff? Kinda need privacy for this next part." Ren gave a single, slow nod to his team.

"Alright, out, all of you," he announced, his voice echoing in the hall.

"Everyone who isn't me or the young lady, leave." Rens hired assembly staff didn't need to be told twice. They took one look at his expression, then they shifted to Kelly and saw in her mad gaze a blend of scientific hunger and avarice-filed anticipation—and filed out of the reinforced hall with a haste that suggested they'd been waiting for the excuse, gone in under a minute.

With all the annoying potential witnesses gone, Kelly extracted the magic mana terraforming cube from her shadow dimension, which was laborious and involved rallying herself and her background AIs to raid her shadow in three-dimensional space to pull the massive magical machine out of it. Her shadow on the floor darkened, pooled, and then strained upward against the concrete, a bulge of impossible depth fighting her pull. A low groan of stressed reality hummed in the air.

With a soundless heave of will, she forced the object through. The magical mana-terraforming cube dropped several feet out of the air with a concussive THUMP that vibrated in their teeth. It was a monument of alien geometry, humming with latent power. Immediately, the air grew thick, soup-like. Dense, raw mana began pumping from it, a visible, shimmering distortion that made the lights flicker. Kelly shook out her hands, feeling the energy wash over her augments like a tidal wave.

Ren was staring at the cube with the grim focus of a man looking at a live warhead.