Chương 127: 126. Ghost vs. God

Ren vanished, moving faster than Kelly could see. Faster than her mana, augments, and time sense could grasp. In the next instance, a shield of flaming white-gold fire erupted into existence right beside the angel, intercepting a beam of pure annihilation, a line of pure no carving through the air. Kelly knew that beam. It was the same cannon. The exact same gut-punch shade of impossible nothing that had wiped out a city blocks. The dome-killer beam. The her-almost-killer beam. It didn't get far.

The annihilation beam hit the shield of white-gold fire and did what annihilation beams shouldn't do: it splashed. It fizzled. It lit up the hall like a disco ball made of murder and then went away. The shield didn't block the beam so much as it told the beam to get lost. The sound caught up a second later. It sounded like the atmosphere getting a root canal. A battle erupted. Ghost vs God—or a fraction of one. The Order God's avatar, the thing wearing Verrimisir's cracking skin, knew exactly where Ren was.

Kelly couldn't see a thing, not even a shimmer. But the avatar's burning white eyes tracked movements in empty air. Its sword of solid light parried hits from nowhere. Its free hand kept grabbing at empty spots right before a nano-blade would have appeared there. Kelly still couldn't see him. All Kelly had was that faint, rare feeling of Ren's personal time, a tinny beat leaving glimpses of ' somewhere over that way, moving stupid fast.' Ren had zero magic. He didn't need it. Not one bit.

He had implants, biomechanical, genetic augments, and a nano-tech suite that was basically a walking weapons factory bolted to his bones. His stealth suit was part of him. He could rebuild and reconfigure on the fly. All that tech made him as strong as the old mythic heroes. Thor, Gilgamesh, Sekhmet, you name it. Strong enough to crack a planet's surface, and way more adaptable. A veteran of more wars than anyone should have to live through. And he was losing. Summarily. The whole exchange was brutally efficient.

And completely one-sided. What followed was a battle that Kelly could only partially perceive. The visual equivalent of trying to understand a conversation by listening to every other word. Every fleeting impact. Ren's attacks—when they flickered into view for a nanosecond—were city-leveling stuff. A whip of what looked like inverted plasma gouged a molten ditch in the floor and could have burrowed for thousands of miles unimpeded.

A spray of hyperlight rounds warped the air and turned the hall into a raging furnace just from fallout. And several weapons that should have crushed anything on Earth, Saturn, and even Jupiter, into fine paste. Ren's invisible, city-killing attacks were met, parried, and brushed aside by the avatar. Ren was a blur of technological precision—moving faster than sublight had any business moving, striking from angles that shouldn't exist.

The avatar of the Order God met him blow for blow, each exchange a small apocalypse contained in a space the size of a room. It processed the hyper-sonic, near-light, invisible assault with the focus of someone swatting a single, persistent fly. The thing almost looked... bored. After the first second, once Ren got serious and the thing adjusted to his speed, it stopped looking at him entirely. Its burning white eyes no longer track the movement. They stayed locked. Unblinking. On Kelly.

Its eyes—two white-hot drill bits bored into reality—never left her face while it casually dismantled Ren's offense. The focus was a physical pressure on her skin. It was multitasking: annihilating a superhuman veteran with one hand and staring a hole through her—the place where her soul should be, but wasn't, with the other. Not once.

While it fought Ren with a casual mastery that suggested it could do this in its sleep—probably had done this in its sleep—it watched her with the focused attention of something that had identified its actual problem. Kelly had been through this particular song and screaming dance before. Her last tango with this Order God and its crumbling avatar involved getting the fleshy parts of her mind neatly unwrapped and shelved for later. And the introduction of a permanent failure state. It wasn't a fun memory.

Ren's advice was good advice. One she'd wisely had her thumb on the whole time, she'd only waited for data on how the Ghost would fare against the God's echo. The data was... shocking. The god of order, Illvyr, had a very specific approach to problems: erase them. And Ren was apparently a problem it could eventually erase. She thumbed her internal killswitches. All of them. The tech package wired into her brainstem. Technological. Explosive. Magical.

All of them, stacked like a deck of cards designed to burn the entire table down. The detonation triggered. The technological trigger sent a cascade of system failure through her augments. The explosive trigger armed the shaped charges laced along her reinforced skeleton and vitals. Magical payloads that she'd reverse-engineered from things that had no business being reverse-engineered erupted.

Her Outrunning Death Title, the one carved into her soul, omitted her in a controlled, instant, utterly fatal detonation, This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. and Kelly Voss stopped existing in any way that mattered to the universe. The Order God's avatar, still watching the space where she'd been, finally looked something other than bored. It looked confused. Kelly slipped backward through time.

Kelly arose in her bed, in New York's outskirts, to heated floors and the low hum of climate control battling the chill that seeped from the city's corpse. The window beside her soundproofed itself with a muffled thump, cutting off the morning's evacuation messages blaring from the smoldering streets below. The voice of some civic AI, strained and repeating, was cut mid-sentence, its blaring warnings to ' head to the nearest shelter' erased.

She'd followed them once, to the shelters—before being eaten by the leviathan. The whole thing had been a profound lesson in the futility of compliance. Peaceful stillness, the expensive type you bought with corporate credits, filled the room. She lay there for a moment, feeling the floor push warmth up through the mattress. It was a stupid comfort. She appreciated it anyway, it muffled the reminder outside her window that everything was still most certainly fucked. Within her, Kelly felt a storm.

Mana churned, a whirlpool anchored behind her ribs, beneath her eyes, and in her skin—and more of the raw, invasive energy drew in from the air each second. The density of it made her bones feel heavy and her skin feel too tight, like she'd been stuffed into a suit two sizes too small but made of pure lightning. It was no longer a trickle. It was an inhalation, persistent and deep. The changes she'd made—the tinkering with her own ability, the deep fingerprints she'd left on her soul—they'd stuck.

They'd survived the reset. The loop wiped the world clean but left her storm untouched; a cosmic clerical error that refused to be corrected. As every cell thrummed with a persistent, higher-grade voltage, she flexed a hand, watching the air around her fingers warp slightly, a heat-haze of condensed possibility.

"Persistent little guys, aren't you?" she muttered to the empty room. The energy had nowhere to go yet. It just sat there, buzzing, waiting for her to break something with it. The memory of the avatar, Verrimisir and his God Of Order—Capital G intended—played behind her eyes. She'd watched it battle Freya Cain and Venus in a spectacle of light and shattered architecture. Calling it 'just an Avatar' had been accurate, but grossly underselling the problem.

Back then, watching from a safe distance, she'd run the numbers. A joint effort—her cheats, her beams, the runes carved into her blade, the new weapons from Ren's lab, plus the acendant veteran himself, with his century of practiced violence in the fight—maybe, just maybe, that could have been enough. Beat the angel. Or at least, forced coordinated push to make it retreat. A dream she'd kept neatly organized in a mental folder labeled 'Potential Solutions.' A solid plan. A tactical wish.

Now, she scraped that entire assessment into a mental trash compactor and hit the switch. She got it now. Without its god riding shotgun, the angel she'd seen had been operating on a courtesy setting. It had been playing patty-cake with a particle cannon. Not actually trying. The real thing, the possessed version, hadn't even been at full power. The god, Illvyr, had done the equivalent of sending its secretary. And the secretary had almost killed them all.

Her previous idea was a pipe dream constructed from happy thoughts and spare parts. She turned her head to look at the muted window. The city outside was burning in a new and exciting way. A little different from other resets. Strange. Kelly swung her legs out of bed, the storm inside her making her movements feel charged, twitchy.

"What even is a mythical blessing?" she asked aloud to the soundproofed window. Probably something she accidentally invented herself. Whatever it was, that cracked porcelain man-shaped pigeon said she had one—a blessing so rare it was mythical. She paced, the soft floor doing nothing to absorb her restless energy. She wondered what the hell kind of mythical blessing she had that caused the Avatar of another dimension's order god to descend upon her personally, like she alone was worth the trip.

Was it her good looks? Her charming personality? Maybe. All she had were Traits, Titles, and… a Mandate? Was it that? Kelly doubted it. No choir sang. No lights flashed. The heavens didn't even open. She hadn't felt any different after receiving one, whatever the hell it was. It hadn't changed her time abilities either. Her Time trait had done that all on its own. Blessings? Skills? Kelly didn't have any of those. All of her abilities were passive. Every single one.

They were just things she was, not things she did, baked into her system through repetition, theft, and stubborn experimentation. Each one was just a fact about her, like her height, her stubbornness, or a constant heartbeat. Only her time abilities held any real flexibility, and even that wasn't entirely based on mana; no matter how many rules it broke. She'd been looping even before her first title, before her very first, accidental touch with mana.

She'd been doing this on her own, in the dark, with no instructions. The idea that some external god had signed off on it, had stamped a "mythical" seal of approval, was almost... laughable. It was like a mountain giving credit to a geologist for existing. She stopped pacing and stared at her reflection in the blackened window. A woman in pyjamas, hair a mess, eyes holding an invisible vortex of pure electric power.

"So," she said to her ghostly twin.

"Order God shows up, calls me a myth, and I don't even get a cool activation phrase. Rude." Her time abilities had shown up to the party long before magic even knew there was going to be one. Back when the Status had been committed to ghosting her, they were already working perfectly. Before mana arrived with its clipboards and insistence on being quantified, before anyone even thought to name it. They weren't magic—not really. They were something else, something older, maybe.

Or maybe they were both, and the difference just depended on who was doing the labeling. But… Kelly noticed a problem. The beginning of a very big problem, which was unfortunate, because beginnings had a tendency to become middles, and middles had a tendency to become"oh god, how did it get this bad." The problem was her aberrant mana, endlessly compressing. She sat down. Lying on the heated floor, the mana inside her was a churning, dense storm. She held her hand up, fingers spread.

She felt the air around her hand warp, her Mana Attunement blurring the view of the ceiling. A visible distortion. A heat-haze of raw power with nowhere to go. The air around her fingers crackled, a visceral fracture in reality about five inches around her palm only she could feel.

"Well, shit," she said, her voice dry as the dust outside.

"That's new." It was a beacon.