Chương 125: 124. Taming the Impossible

"Stop it. Now. Or I will kill you myself." Ren didn't yell. The command was a guillotine blade. He jabbed a finger at the shimmering, heavy air.

"The pressure keeps rising. It feels like someone crammed a second terraforming cube in here." His eyes locked onto hers, noting the unnatural, faint glow starting behind them.

"You're bleeding out on my floor through your face. He stared, his veteran's composure cracking for a split second at the surreal sight.

"Why are your eyes glowing?" The atmospheric pressure was a heavy fist now, squeezing the hall. He stepped closer to the dense mana, barely even feeling the way it pressed at his skin.

"If you don't stop, you will kill yourself. You will shatter your soul. You are not strong enough for this." He shook his head, a sharp, furious motion.

"'Freeze all of existence.' It's a miracle you didn't vaporize your own consciousness." He took another step and pointed at her, his finger as steady and voice final as a gun barrel.

"Shut it down. This instant." Kelly had discovered, somewhat to her dismay, that momentum was a concept her new time ability had decided to ignore entirely. The momentum wasn't just high; it had a mortgage and was planning to raise a family here. And shutting it down? Kelly felt the entire concept of "stopping" laugh at her from a great height.

She was going to have a hard time stopping this new time ability, which was a nicer way of saying she'd probably have to dismantle it brick by brick while it actively tried to turn her skeleton into confetti. So she did what anyone with a modicum of self-preservation would do: she negotiated with it. In the careful, exhausting language of restraint. Restraint and Ugly, pragmatic, duct-tape maintenance. She let time within the bubble get lazy, slow to a crawl, a temporal traffic jam. It was less strainful.

More manageable. It felt like convincing a tsunami to please, just be a wave pool. The process was slower than she wanted; glacial. Genuinely, a glacier would have found it tedious. Her body's complaint department was overflowing, sending memos written in blood and snapped tendons. But even the slow, grinding containment dramatically eased the pressure on her body. The constant, meaty rips of muscle fiber tearing slowed to a mean murmer.

She began the deliberate, mental surgery of funneling the chaos inward, and the ability hungrily began absorbing mana from the surroundings once more. The hall's atmosphere went from "crushing depth of the ocean" to "stuck in a humid elevator." The crushing weight on her very soul lightened from an anvil on her chest to merely a very enthusiastic dog. And Mana Vacuum was hungry, a creature that had been promised an all-you-can-absorb buffet. It gorged and devoured.

Drank from the world around her with the single-minded determination of something that had never encountered the concept of "enough." The Title seized the influx and crushed it down inside her, compressing potential energy into a dense, vibrating knot. She shook with it, teeth rattling, a skeleton playing the xylophone on its own bones. A clean, visceral click echoed in her mind. [Title: Mana Vacuum Grade V → VI] Mana Vacuum ticked up a grade. The title leveled up, getting better at its one job. which tracked.

She'd just swallowed a small weather system. Her body did what it always did. It ate. The pressure in the air was just another meal. Finally, the rampant energy running through her waned. Kelly's new Time ability stabilized. Not being actively turned into organic confetti allowed her to focus. She could now dedicate serious effort to dialing back the insanely increased soul strain.

The solution was perfect: use the insane quantity of the mana she was absorbing to fuel the very frozen field causing the strain, which felt like carefully loosening a valve on a pipe full of screaming. She fed the frozen time field a constant, insane stream of mana, not to expand it, but to buy its compliance. It was paying a fire with more fire. The field simmered down from a screaming primal force to a low, obedient growl. The air stopped feeling like a solid object. She looked at her hand.

A last bead of blood welled up from a split knuckle, hesitated, and got sucked back in by her regeneration. A wet, red chuckle escaped her.

"That's one hell of a bar tab," she muttered to the quieting air. And then Kelly made the mistake of actually thinking about what had just happened. A single use. One activation of this ability had saturated the space around her with mana density almost comparable to a terraformer—those absurdly rare, world-altering devices that existed primarily to prove that sufficiently murdery invaders had the power to reshape geography.

Those cubes, those insane terraformers, had held enough mana to shatter protective domes and incinerate anything foolish enough to stand nearby. She'd compressed that into herself. Into her body. Crammed it into bones and flesh that were, by any reasonable assessment, primarily water, wires, and meat. And it was roughly one-quarter of what an extradimensional planet-altering machine released when it went catastrophically wrong and shattered a dome built to withstand the personal attention of actual gods.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. The power to shatter domes was currently, still, inside her. It wasnt leaving. Kelly sat with this fact the way one sits with a cup of coffee that's been placed directly onto a nerve. Carefully. With mounting awareness that something had gone very wrong in her design specifications. Or right. That was... well. That was genuinely, mathematically, objectively inconceivable.

Which meant she'd just conceived of it, and her brain—and body and soul— was truly running on a different operating system than everyone else's. Even the her from yesterday. She was going to need to sit down.

"I'm already sitting down," she realized, absentminded. She was going to need to sit down harder. The veteran's arm reconfigured with a series of solid, industrial clunks, the barrel of the mounted cannon retracting and sealing itself away into the housing along his forearm. Ren stood in the aftermath, the air around him still vibrating from the mana she'd just vacuumed out of reality. He stared at her. His voice was flat, his tone the same once used to report breaches in containment.

"Voss!" The word was a shout and more—a controlled detonation, the vocal equivalent of a warning shot. His eyes scanned the room, trying to reconcile the visual of a normal training hall with the sensation of drowning in an invisible, electrified gel.

"What the hell was that?" He took a single, precise step forward, his armored boot grinding a faint scuff into the polished floor. His arm swept out in a short, frustrated arc, encompassing the entire, oppressive atmosphere.

"How were you doing that to the space? And how did you make the room into…" He trailed off, his vocabulary for supernatural atmospheric phenomena apparently exhausted. He settled for a blunt, baffled gesture at the static-charged air." This." Even to him—a man who had spent decades learning to kill things efficiently—the room felt like reality's way of saying it had made a clerical error. Kelly stared at her own hand, turning it over. The split knuckle was gone. The shaking had stopped.

Inside, she felt like a building after the demolition charges had gone off but before the structure realized it was supposed to fall down. Solid, but in a temporary, deeply suspicious way. Ren's questions buzzed in the dense air. How? What?

She knew the sequence. The step-by-step, cause-and-effect mess of it. Grab time, wrestle it into a frozen bubble, then let her personal, built-in cosmic vacuum cleaner suck up the resulting metaphysical fallout until it leveled up. That was the how. The what was the leftover product: a quarter of a planet-cracking machine's worth of raw power, now sitting in her stomach like a bad burrito.

The what was the undeniable fact she'd just upgraded her personal shotgun from a standard model to a deluxe suite with a view of the abyss. She still hesitated. The how and the what wasn't unknown anymore. But the power? The sheer potential? It was an unconfirmed resident, hiding in the walls and it had already rearranged the furniture. Acknowledging it meant admitting the door she'd casually strolled through was now a deep, poorly-lit abyss, and there was no rope, and no coin to test its depths.

How far could her ability actually go?

"I don't know," Kelly said. The words were technically true and completely useless, like describing a tornado as 'windy'. She got to her feet, movements deliberate, testing the new, heavier gravity of her own existence. She met Ren's hard stare with one that was equal parts shell-shock and the beginning of a truly deranged grin. The combat master waited. Surely there was more. There had to be more.

"I just… grabbed it." She held up her hand, flexing her fingers as if looking for cosmic lint." Time. The whole thing. For everyone. Everything. Every last ticking thing in every place. All of it." Her fingers slowly curled into a fist. They shook slightly.

"I held it. In my actual hands. It felt like trying to give a black hole a tug. My bones were writing their last will and testament." She opened her fist, examining her palm like it might have instructions.

"But I held it. It was pulling me apart, but I held it anyway because..." She trailed off, searching for the right word.

"Because I could. I felt like I could freeze time for the entire universe. Every universe. So I did. I ripped a chunk of 'now' right out of the stream and made it... sit in the corner." She looked back at Ren, the unsteady smile settling into something more familiar—a chaotic, pragmatic acceptance. She paused, the pause of someone who had just realized they'd been describing their afternoon activities, and those activities happened to include casually holding the fabric of reality.

Kelly exhaled, allowing herself to recenter, then, her smile finally met her eyes, teeth bared with growing satisfaction.

"Yeah," she said,.

"Turns out you can punch time." She paused.

"Five bucks says Gideon can't do this." Sound was dead. Not literally. Ren's private combat hall had achieved a very unique brand of silence that replaced sound. One that rivalled a gunshot in a church, mid-reverence. It was a silence that Earth had never experienced before, and would likely become well acquainted with, as it only arrived when someone casually mentioned they'd stolen a piece of reality and kept it in their pocket.

Kelly had just explained, in terms even she found a little unbelievable, that she'd broken off a piece of the universe's time and told it to ' sit.' The small field around her was now a pocket of completely frozen time. The air in the hall had been upgraded. Charged. Surging. The air was a viscous soup of mana so dense it made the atmosphere after the cube's explosion feel like twins. Her muscles jumped and twitched under her skin, a live wire display of excess energy with nowhere useful to go.

Her hair drifted around her head, floating in a current only her body could feel, submerged in an invisible ocean she'd just created. Ren Sato watched her. The ghost of several wars stood there, and his face did something unusual. It emptied. All the hard lines and veteran's skepticism smoothed as he arranged his face into something unusually thoughtful. Which, for a man who'd watched empires collapse, was roughly equivalent to someone else screaming.

"You should probably kill yourself." Ren's voice was a dry scrape of gravel.

"Now. If you really are in a time loop, that's your play."

"Look at what you've done." He swept a hand through the space between them. The mana-thick air left a soft, staticky resistance against his skin. His own flesh subtly rebelled against the foreign energy, a faint pushback that felt like trying to force two identical magnetic poles together, and the mana, weighing less, swirled against his movements. He stared at his hand as if it had been plunged into warm ice. The old man's next words were solemn, weighed down with memory."

Do you remember what happened the last time you made the atmosphere like this?"