Chương 120: 119. No Rest for Small Gods II

By the second day, something had shifted. Not in her reserves—those were still technically infinite, which was the problem. The shift was in her, in some part of her that apparently wasn't infinite. Her soul had thinned from constant time manipulation. Countless time skips and dilation maintained a state of continuous emptiness. The combat video reviews had stopped. Ren said in a real war you rarely got to sit on your ass and strategize. You had to think while you were busy not dying. Even with cover.

No cover was guaranteed, and no cover lasted longer than an armor-piercing round or something specifically designed to go through it. Modern battle was constant movement—all momentum and intensity. And sure, Kelly was a genius of innovation—she had a title for it and everything. So as she fought Ren without a break, she started improvising on the fly. Her time dilation and skips were draining her reserves dry.

Her natural regeneration was a constant background hum just keeping her organs in place, and her Vitality title was turning that hum into a screaming drain on her system. At this point, drained as she was, her body's consumption outraced her ambient mana absorption the way a sinking ship outraced a bucket brigade. Healing a grievous wound with the Title felt like the fatigue of launching a full-body time skip—it nearly emptied her of the crumbs she had left.

"Trying to… jury-rig my… metabolism," she grunted between exchanges, the flat of her transforming blade locking against Ren's practice staff.

"Stop talking," Ren said, and swept her legs out from under her. She hit the mat, an impact that could have shattered stone shuddering through her augments. The world went briefly sideways.

"Not a… suggestion I'm likely to take." Ren gave her no breaks, no quarter, and no mercy. He pressed the attack the moment she found her feet. A feint high, a strike low. She blocked with an instant-shield that dissolved on impact, the kinetic energy shoving her back three steps.

"You're hesitating."

"I'm calculating," Kelly shot back, firing a sonic-speed marble from her shadow. He deflected it with a casual twist of his staff.

"Calculate faster." She pushed her speed augments, feeling the strain in her synthetic muscles. The guided counter-movement system twitched in her spine, correcting a stumble before it happened. She used the momentum to lunge, her weapon morphing from a tactical blade into a longer, segmented chain. Ren sidestepped, and the chain whipped past where his heart had been with a vacuum of air that sounded like reality disagreeing with itself..

"Creative," he noted, utterly flat.

"I'm a creative person." Ren moved, and the air cracked. He went beyond a blur, deleting the space between them. He feinted high—a tectonic plate shifting—and the real strike low was the continent dropping out from under her. She blocked with instant-shields. Ten of them. They dissolved on impact, not from failure, but from the suggestion that a mountain had tapped them.

The kinetic energy punted her across twenty feet of mat like a discarded bottle, and as she flew, her chainblade whipped toward the old man's eye with a sonic CRACK that would have skewered anyone else. Would have turned Payne or King Cullen into cautionary tales. Would've given Reggie, Vector, or even Ithili an eye-patch. Would have given most people a very bad day. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

The old man just tilted his head by a centimeter, letting it fly past. He was an excellent grinding stone for Kelly's magic. That made fighting him infinitely annoying. She skidded to a halt, the mana from her inertia resistance sputtering, her augmented limbs screaming a hydraulic protest her inner ears could actually hear. Kelly stood there, panting, hands on her knees, a woman who'd just been launched across a room by an old man with a stick.

Her legs trembled and she felt a sensation she hadn't felt since baseline; like she'd just conquered the world's worst stairmaster, which she immediately dismissed as an unfair comparison, because at least the stairmaster never actively try to murder her. Compared to them, Ren made the untold horrors of stairmasters seem like newly born puppies.

"Okay. Time out."

"No."

"I'm declaring a diplomatic pause."

"Denied." She straightened, rolling her shoulders.

"You're a terrible host." Her weapon unfolded and she stepped forward. Kelly began to feel exhausted. Not the pleasant ache of a good workout. This was a deeper scrape against her reserves. Her body hummed with the unnatural energy of absorbed mana, but beneath that, a fatigue was building, brick by brick. The hollow, vibrating sensation inside her was new. Alien. Like discovering a third state between "full to bursting" and "dead," and it turned out that third state was called "awake and suffering."

Her Mana Vacuum title churned, unable to keep pace with the demand. Her physical stamina was spent, her body demanding flickers of her Vitality titles in the brief windows it held enough mana to spark them. On the morning of the second day of continuous battle, she hit the bottom. Every reserve was empty. She'd never actually reached it before. In past loops, something would have broken her first—a wound, organ failure, a final blow.

This time, she'd survived long enough to feel what real that new state actually felt like, which was apparently worse than any of those options. The ensuing almost two full days of continuous combat with a mentor who far outstripped her, without any rest whatsoever, had finally allowed her to experience what actual, real, genuine exhaustion felt like. She stood swaying in the center of the hall, her breath raw.

Ren stood across from her, not even winded, looking like a man who'd just finished a light run and was mildly disappointed that she was still conscious. He gave a slow, assessing nod.

"Good," he grunted.

"Now you know the feeling. Remember it. In a real fight, your enemy will try to put you there and keep you there." And then he attacked her, not caring that she barely had the strength left to stand. Kelly managed a weak, bloody smile that held no joy, her body screaming a protest she ignored. She shifted her weight, a barely-there evasion.

"No fair," she rasped.

"Being tired? It's terrible."

"Yes," Ren said, pressing forward without sympathy. A spark of her usual chaos flickered behind her eyes, calculating the drain, the angle of his next strike, the cost of one more dilation. Then she considered the gains, the new abilities and grades. She rasped, the words scraping out of someone who'd just discovered a new, previously unknown way to suffer.

"I… don't hate it." Kelly was learning that modern warfare was a party where everyone tried to kill you and the music never stopped. She wiped sweat from her brow, her breath fogging the inside of her helmet she'd reworn—for an edge—before she yanked it off. Ren didn't smile, but continued his mid-violence lecture.

"Modern battle is all about momentum and intensity. Keep moving. It's how you survived the dome." Kelly agreed.

"Yeah, by blowing up half of it." That soldier-infested, overpowered monster-filled, civilian safety dome should have been unsurvivable, but not only had she blown it up with a little help from the old fossil; she'd never stayed still. Kelly tossed the helmet aside.

"Let's go again."