Chương 121: 120. Violent Discovery

As the gruelling, draining battle went on, Kelly genuinely felt as though she would black out from sheer exertion. Her vision tunneled. The sterile lights of the combat hall swam. Each breath was a raw scrape in her throat. She activated her partial Werewolf Trait form—a ten percent boost in size, strength, toughness, and aggression that felt like lighting a match in a gas tank.

It kept her upright for another thirty seconds of brutal, close-quarters trading before Ren disarmed her with a brutal knuckle-strike to her wrist. Her weapon clattered to the floor, reverting to a simple bracelet. Kelly pulled back and raised a palm.

"Hey Ren. Is it me, or is the room getting… spiritually parched?" He paused and followed her gaze, his expression unreadable.

"I wouldn't know. I imagine you're draining the local field. From what you have told me, your body's a sinkhole." Kelly wiped her face. She thought she was imagining it, but she could have sworn the mana in the environment grew slightly thinner and weaker from her constant excessive drain. Without the Mana Vacuum Title on, there was no violent vortex. Her body's natural pull was a smaller, nicer radius. That smaller radius was now tapped out.

The combat hall's usual visual riot of energy looked faded in her scanners, like a bad copy. She had drained the local magic until it was rationing itself, threadbare. The power her body and soul could provide was running on fumes. Her mana reserves presented her with a permanent zero balance. Her mental and physical stamina had unionized and were on strike. Every single shred of energy was nearly gone.

Even her augments were struggling to keep her alive, and utilizing her induced near-death state was now dangerously lethal. And now, thanks to the constant beating, she didn't even have enough stamina in her body to heal via natural regeneration and Fortress of Vitality anymore. Her healing had resigned. She let her Werewolf Trait drop. The shrinkage was a personal betrayal. A cut on her cheek she'd forgotten about reopened with a renewed sense of drama.

The mimic skin patch on her hand failed, revealing a burn that immediately began complaining loudly to her nervous system, the raw flesh stinging in the open air. Ren's voice came through, smugness dripping from every syllable.

"Feel like taking a break? I fear I might've pushed you too hard there." She had been fighting for so long that 'stopping' was no longer a functional concept. Her desire to quit had been surgically removed by repetition. The only functional protocol remaining was strain, which she wore like an old coat that had learned to fit her injuries. Kelly stood, swaying with a gentle, unpredictable rhythm. She looked at her traitorous hands, then at Ren. Her voice was the audio equivalent of dust.

"I can keep going." She didn't move.

"Seriously, Voss—you can't. You're running on nothing. Your augments are redlining. Your healing mutation stopped triggering eighty minutes ago." He walked to a bench, grabbing a water pouch.

"You've hit the wall." He gestured toward the exit of the combat hall.

"Come, let's get to reviewing the battle footage. The progress was good enough for this session."

"Review footage of what? Me learning how your floor tastes?" Kelly flicked her wrist, and her transforming weapon slid from its bracelet form into a solid tactical blade. She didn't assume a stance. She just held it. Kelly, with no energy, no magic, and no strength, looked inward. Questioned herself. She rejected the concept of quitting the way a sailor rejects turning back in the middle of a voyage—not out of stubbornness, but because it violated the basic laws of how she operated.

Stopping now would be data left on the table—miles left uncrossed, and miles left uncrossed was just another word for failure wearing a sensible shoe. Her combat expertise and scientific mind were not separate tools; they were the same machine, and it thrived in the loops. Death was data with exceptional clarity. Each reset was a pristine lab condition. She pointed her blade at Ren.

"You don't review the explosion while the building is still on fire. You figure out why you're holding a lit match." Her breath was steadying now, the pain in her side receding into a focused burn. Pain, she'd discovered, was just the world's way of saying here's where you're wrong. She had mapped that pain. She knew the exact force and angle that caused it. A valuable learning tool. Kelly was not a survivor. Survivors were people who wanted to keep existing.

She was something else—an explorer who marched into wreckage and took notes, a fighter who treated an incoming warhead as a question and her fist as the answer, a pioneer whose chosen frontier happened to be the violent, stupid end of everything. Because honestly, the end of the world was so poorly organized—like watching someone try to dismantle a machine they'd never actually read the manual for. There were creatures that didn't know what they were. There were physics that contradicted themselves.

There were gods who behaved like middle management, which explained everything about middle management. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. She mocked the world as it crumbled and she worked through its collapse, navigated the chaos with a mix of curiosity and exasperation. It was a circus with grand horrors and petty gods. She had a front-row seat and a clipboard and asked questions: How would that creature behave if set on fire?

Fascinating question. How many laws of reality could you break before reality stopped bothering to enforce them? Worth testing. Long before magic, titles, or time tricks, Kelly had persistence that ignored reason. She did not stop. Ever. Her approach to survival was relentless. Stupid. Hardheaded. She had always plowed through obstacles with a force and precision that looked insane until it worked. Before she'd parsed a single rune, hadn't she just crashed through barricades?

Because analyzing the structural weak point and hitting it was faster than climbing. Hadn't she rammed security drones and that autonomous patrol tank? Because outmaneuvering their patterns would take longer than headbutting them with a truck. The goal was to win. The fastest route was usually a straight line, even if the line went through a reinforced wall. Hadn't she laughed in the face of destruction?

In chaos – hadn't she always made jokes while crushing, killing, and dying—just because she enjoyed the spectacle? Hadn't she always found genuine enjoyment in destruction, chaos, and absurd levels of violence? Scientific progress, to her, had a non-negotiable price. Scientific recklessness was her doctrine. She treated risk and death as the cost of knowledge, line items on a receipt she was always willing to sign. Her philosophy lined up with humanity's most reckless pioneers.

The first person to grab a burning branch won the night. They lost a hand, but they won the night. FTL astronauts strapped themselves to cosmic explosives. The first Full-Mind Upload risked the scan bleeding over, waking up as a buggy, emotionless software copy. But every one of them had succeeded. The sacrifice was only worth the victory it bought. She believed that the pursuit of knowledge required sacrifice, and she was willing to pay in blood. Blood was just a resource she kept in stock. And death?

Death was an experiment. One Kelly refused to ever stop conducting. Her whole thing was Persistence Beyond Reason—no matter how far she had to go or what it took to survive. Kelly had been hardheaded even as a kid, although back then she'd had no muscle to back it up, just stubborn conviction and the kind of refusal that made teachers wonder if she'd been dropped on her head as an infant. And Ren, shaped like an obstacle and smug about it, was a wall in front of her. How did Kelly treat walls?

She smashed through them until she figured out what worked. The wall didn't get a vote. So what if all of her energy reserves were running dangerously low. So what if she couldn't heal. She could legitimately kill herself with overexertion at this point—a log she'd already filed under acceptable risk. But since when did Kelly fear death? Kelly thought about what Ren said. The old man had asked her to stop. He claimed she'd hit a wall. She turned the idea over in her head.

The wall was so far behind her it might as well have been in Hawaii. Her body was a single, solid ache. Breathing was a conscious effort. Her vision swam. She was exhausted beyond measure.

"No," She verbally refused a second time. Her voice was a dry, struggling rasp.

"I'm just getting started." For everyone else, the apocalypse was a catastrophe. For Kelly, it was a giant, violent, global laboratory where the laws of reality were being mugged in an alley by magic. Every limit was a suggestion waiting to be disproven. Every death was an experiment with exceptional clarity. Every reset was a pristine lab condition. Knowledge and power interested her far more than survival. Every obstacle was something to be broken, tested, or figured out. Ren turned.

He raised his staff, his expression still smug, still looking like he knew exactly how this would end. It was incredibly irritating.

"Oh?" he said.

"Then show me." She didn't bother with a comeback. Her response was motion. She equipped Mythril Fist and felt the familiar, hungry potential in her hands. Her mimic skin activated, pulling the stored napalm paste from Vector's leftover gear—may he rest in mild discomfort, or better yet, choke on a cloud somewhere. Her heat shunts dumped the flames energy into her fists, coating them in burning, charged metal. She didn't bother with the first nine blows. She time-skipped straight to the tenth. The world hiccupped.

For a split-second, there were multiple versions of her arm moving. The Mythril Fist multiplier triggered. It wasn't a clean hit; it was a desperate, ugly smash that drained the last bit of juice she had and translated it into a concussive thwump that made the air in the hall shudder. They fought, Kelly with nothing, Ren with everything. She was running on fumes. Everything hurt. But underneath the hurt was a new sensation, a raw feedback buzz between her muscles and the air. It should've been impossible.

She was too wiped for new feelings. But there it was. She was close to understanding something. Her mana-scanning lenses painted the world in energy currents. Her mana attunement let her feel those currents flowing around her. Her time sense felt the weight of seconds clinging to everything. She'd been watching, studying, even while getting her ass kicked. She realized the amount of mana she could stuff into her body at one time didn't just sit there. It boosted her traits. It made them louder.

That was why her Traits had never graded up—they didn't have enough mana. How had she missed that? It was stupidly obvious. The mana vacuum trait's description might as well have shouted it. She'd just skimmed past it. The volume and the density of mana in her body pumped up its magical effects. She'd been staring at a tree and called it a forest. She'd been staring at the forest and missed the weaponized tree right in front of her. It was so simple it was embarrassing.

Kelly almost laughed, but it would have hurt too much. She realised, finally, how to level up her Traits. Each and every single one of them.