Chương 12: Discovery II

Kelly pushed herself up, vision swimming, body aching, and looked at the 7EQ merc standing in her lab. Seven hundred percent human strength, speed, reaction time. That was the sort of power that could tear through lesser metals, outmaneuver lesser gunfire, and with the right tools, dismantle a lesser armed squad with bare hands.

And he was here, working for some rival corp, trying his best to tear through her lab like a kid in a candy store, ripping apart drones, but thankfully, failing to smash through the many priceless consoles' emergency protection, but that didn't stop him from trying to loot whatever wasn't bolted down. Now he stopped and stood dead still, watching her with slight disbelief as she recovered from the perfect shot he'd put between her eyes. He holstered his gun and drew a long, vibrating knife.

[Unique Trait: The Null gained!] [Foundational Trait: 'The Aberration of Mana' gained!] [Rare Trait: Mer-Blood gained!] [Rare Trait: Troll-Marrowed gained!]"Ow," Kelly said, prying the bullet from the bleeding hole in her apparently bulletproof, Mer-blooded, and Troll-Marrowed forehead. Slightly dazed, she raised a hand toward the merc.

"Wait, time-out; I need to check something." The 7EQ merc didn't listen to her request and was already there. He was moving with that unnatural, physics-defying speed that made her normal reaction time look like a joke. Kelly had struggled between calling him 'Major Payne' or 'Crash Course Carl' for his knack for both hindering her progress and teaching her how to fight someone like him. In the end, she chose 'Major Payne.' It fit him perfectly.

Kelly flicked her chain-blade to where he would be, not through precognition or through anticipating a past loop, but through raw, brutal repetition. The way he stepped, the shift in his balance, the microsecond correction before he struck. She had studied him for more than hours and more than days. For months. He relied on nothing but his superior instincts, barely stopping to think as he battled her defenses. Kelly had fought him enough times to know how he would react.

"Hey, dumbass—" she snapped, flicking her blade mid-swing, "—eyes up." The turret AI fired—he blurred through, a shield springing to life to protect him without effort. Kelly wasn't winning. She wasn't even close. Compared to her, he was still an unstoppable force of nature wrapped in a humanoid shape, his weapon vibrating. Still strong enough to carve through walls like they were cheap drywall. But for the first time, he wasn't just plowing through her—he was adjusting, more than once. That was new.

She was way past the point where he usually killed her. She swung her chain-blade; it cracked with hydraulic-boosted speed as she barked another command—turrets roared, drones crashed, emergency walls slammed into place as her molecular blade blurred like a whip, severing everything and forcing him to shift, forcing him to finally react. Not struggling, not losing. But reacting.

"Oh wow, did that slow you down for half a second, Payne? Must be embarrassing." Then everything wet inside the room detonated outward from her body in the same instant. Blood from a collection tray that had tipped over two exchanges ago. Half‑full syringes, their contents still beaded on the injectors. Spilt test tubes, unlabeled vials, reagent puddles that had been mixing into a chemical sludge since the first magazine emptied.

All of it ripped away from her center of mass in a radial spray, simultaneous, a liquid shockwave expanding through the lab like someone had pulled the pin on a Kelly‑shaped grenade. What the hell was that? The merc stopped short beside a console, using its shielding as cover from gunfire and aware that Kelly hadn't been willing to destroy her own equipment.

His fingers closed around a discarded vial—not the good reality-warping stuff, just the older, weaker, failed human-troll splicing serum, some water-goblin reporter genes in there too as scaffolding. None of it would work—his left eye glowed suspiciously red. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. Someone was watching. Someone in his head. He pressed a finger to his temple, listening for half a second, then scowled, sharp and irritated.

"The vial counts? You want it?" A pause, a low growl.

"But... Yeah. Yeah, I get it." His gaze snapped back to her, scanning, reading—and then he froze. His brow twitched, mouth curling into something between a sneer and disbelief.

"Facial recognition confirms… Dr. Kelly Voss." A beat of absolute silence.

"A doctor?" He exhaled through his nose, shoulders tensing, before he completely rose from cover to stare at her, his shield turning translucent so they could see each other, and his fingers curling tight in anger. For a second, Kelly watched curiously as a wall of defensive droids surrounded the space between them—she had never seen this behavior before. What would he do next?

"A doctor. You survived by luck." The merc spat.

"Enjoy breathing while you still can, Voss. Next time, you won't even see me coming." Flat. Unshaken. Absolute. Then he was gone, blurring past the ruined doorway, leaving Kelly standing in the wreckage, grinning as though she'd just won something.

"Oh no, Payne, don't go—I was just starting to get the hang of this," she said, ecstatic. First time that's ever happened. Over a hundred loops, and not once had she lasted long enough to watch him leave. Kelly wiped blood from her mouth, grinning through the ache she was just beginning to notice in her limbs. The immortal intern bolted to a nearby console, smearing blood across the scanner like it owed her money and today was payday. Chunks of tissue hit the receptacle with a wet slap.

"Analyze that," she barked the order to the lab, and its AI complied. Then she was already moving, shoving herself into the full-body sample scanner, the machine locking around her and the lab's AI already processing and peeling her apart with its scans on a scale so microscopic it made quantum foam look clunky, the fundamental interactions mapped in real-time.

"Alright, dissect me, let's see what the hell I've turned into." However, it wasn't a complete success. She ground her teeth as a sudden wave of pain rushed through her. The changes had made her fragile in unexpected ways, constantly shifting and adapting without her control. The scan spat out its results, and it tracked. She'd inverted dark matter and dark energy, shoved them into her DNA, reinforced it with temporary medical nanotech, and now? Well. Reality wasn't sure if she belonged in it anymore.

Her structure kept shifting, half-stable, half-not. That explained the low-grade, full-body ache she felt now that the adrenaline had worn off—her cells were reconsidering their life choices. Dark energy's job was to expand the reality and stretch space itself, but inside her? It had flipped. Instead of pushing, it was pulling, doing something the universe hadn't signed off on. Every breath, every second, it dragged energy inward, funneling power into her instead of letting it disperse.

That was why, according to the scans, her body was saturated with it, why it clung to her structure, integrating at a level even the lab's AI struggled to quantify. And dark matter? Dark matter was the thing that kept everything together, that had inverted too. Instead of binding her, it was pushing her apart, peeling her mass away from itself like her molecules hated each other. That was the cause of the constant ache under her skin; it was as if her body were trying to be in ten places at once.

That also explained the "SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION!!!" part of the report. The only thing keeping her alive and in one piece was the temporary nanotech blended into the two serums. It was still fixing her faster than she could break, but once it burned out? She'd start pulling apart like bad wiring. The scan results glitched for a second, signaling that reality itself couldn't decide if she was still part of it. Kelly sighed, tapped the console like it could give her better news, then cracked her neck.

"Well. That's annoying." If she didn't get permanent medical nanotech soon, she'd be dead—no debate, no loopholes, all she had without it was an ugly, messy expiration. And even if she got an injection now? That was a band-aid on a bullet wound, keeping her stitched together for this loop only. If this made it to her status, then every reset would kick off with her body trying to evict itself from existence and a very short countdown to exploding like a meat grenade.

"Oh, cool. Built-in self-destruct. Love that for me." Kelly asked the room to play her favourite pop song—a classic—then kicked off her chair, sliding across the wreckage as though she had all the time in the world. She spun on the chair once, slowing before the fabricator console, and started queuing up blueprints.

"Status," The strange panel sprang to life in mid-air without the aid of tech. [Name: Dr. Kelly Voss. Race: Human Title: The Null (I) Rank: F- Traits: Mana Incompatibility (X), The Aberration of Mana (I), Mer-Blooded (I), Troll-Marrowed (I), Skills:] She focused on 'Mana Incompatibility' and another translucent panel sprang to life.