Chương 128: 127. The Next Step

Kelly's mana was a beacon. She sat up. The movement was charged, twitchy.

"No, not a beacon. A flashlight," she said. Her voice was flat, factual. She corrected herself immediately.

"No. A broadcast. A short-range, stupid broadcast." A neon sign blinking 'KILL HERE' in every magical spectrum. Right now, it was just a sign in a pitch-black cave. You couldn't see it from a block away, or even the street over. But up close? Real close? If you had the right messed-up senses? The right tools? Or a really obsessive scanner and the right paranoia? It was beyond visible. The angel, Verrimisir, had tracked that broadcast straight to Ren's hall.

The corporate kill-team under Vector, that psychopathic monument to human suffering, had locked onto it too, through her stealth suit as if it wasn't there. Up close, with the right sensors or senses, she was blatant. Obvious. They'd even tracked the mana flowing through her body itself, mistaking her for something that didn't belong in this dimension, which was funny in a profoundly unfunny way, because they weren't exactly wrong. She looked at her vibrating hand. The logic was a straightforward thing.

Every loop, she absorbed more mana. Every loop, she channeled more, compressed more through her traits and augments. The power grew. The signal strengthened.

"Stronger is brighter," she muttered. She pushed herself to her feet, the storm in her ribs making her stance feel unstable, overloaded.

"Get strong enough, and I won't need to find trouble. My morning alarm will ring in every dimension." She wouldn't be surprised if her breakfast at the next loop's start began video calls to divine watchlists. She could see the trajectory: a future where her first conscious breath of a new loop would ping sensors from corporate black sites, remnant military AIs, and whatever other scavengers with a scanner were still breathing.

Her personal growth was functionally identical to painting a giant, pulsating target on her back. Terrible, right? But here was the thing: her present state wasn't the worst outcome. In fact, it was pretty damn... acceptable.

"Not bad at all," Kelly muttered, staring at the rumbling ceiling in thought. She walked to the soundproofed window. She traced a shape around a distant, giant, two, legged thing covered in ice. It looked dangerous. The space around her silhouette was wrong—a permanent, warping haze, like looking through bad glass. The her mana attunement Trait wasn't staying inside anymore. Her absorption was notable. It was etching 'I AM HERE' into the very air around her.

"Complications," she told the reflection.

"You get the world-breaking power, and the world gets your GPS coordinates. Fair trade." Sure, getting a personal visit from an order god's cracking avatar was a problem. One she'd have to get ahead of. Having her magical footprint become a universal homing beacon was a tactical pain in her ass. But. She looked at her hands. They looked normal. They felt like they could crumple a car door. The mana density inside her was a tangible, heavy thing. A live wire waiting for a purpose.

The angel had called it a Mythical blessing. It was a thing that made a capital-G God stop, point, and demand an explanation. And she hadn't even hacked it yet. Rens training had been worth it. Extremely so. Ren's training had been a masterclass in the art of "suck." The ghost of many wars didn't pull punches—the old monster threw them with the efficiency of something that had already thrown them at everyone else and had learned what worked.

But effectiveness, it turned out, was the consolation prize for surviving something that wanted you to fail. Kelly had gained new titles. Two of them. Which was remarkable, considering that most corpos were currently spending trillions chasing a single one and failing, and most of those them were trying. Kelly had touched time. On purpose. Clearly, she was on a roll. And now, Kelly had a plan.

Which, in the grand tradition of people who've spent enough time looping through apocalypses, meant she had several plans, a few grudges masquerading as objectives, and a personal vendetta list that was a messy, aggressive, multi-pointed thing scribbled in the mental space usually reserved for survival and petty grudges. A checklist for systematic arson. Kelly had two primary goals that had calcified into facts of her existence, more solid than the crumbling city outside.

The first was ' reverse engineer the apocalypse'. Tearing the whole screaming magical ecosystem down to its first principles just to see how it ticked, and then maybe giving it a few new ticks of her own invention. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. The second was'find Jennie'. That one was simpler. It was a destination with a person's face on it, and every other objective was just terrain between here and there.

But the loops had a way of accreting smaller, meaner ambitions like barnacles on a ship. All the dying, the resetting, the watching the same disasters play out with irritating variations—had caused her goals to grow tumors. She now had a whole spectrum of lesser, peripheral goals. They were integral, which made them absolutely essential.

You couldn't reverse-engineer a reality-warping invasion without some raw materials, and you couldn't get across the universe to find someone if a god's secretary decided to paste you across a training hall wall first. These secondary goals were also personal. Deeply, irrationally personal. She had to absolutely complete them. No matter what. Like taking out the Conductor at 100EQ, for instance. Same with the Leviathan.

Both needed dismantling, partly because they were obstacles, partly because Kelly had discovered she was the type of person who held grudges with the dedication others reserved for hobbies. The fact that eliminating them would also save a handful of people she'd grown absurdly attached to was almost beside the point. Almost. Was it purely altruistic? No. Dissecting the Leviathan's powers sounded way more interesting than watching it on feeds. Grabbing the Conductor's reality-bending seemed only pracical.

With those in her arsenal, maybe she'd finally be able to hi-five Verrimisir in the face. That was a big one. Taking out the angel, Verrimisir at 100EQ and his boss, the God of Order, Illvyr. Simply for messing with her. For that condescending tone, for the white-fire eyes, for the sheer bureaucratic gall of showing up and demanding her divine references. She wanted to pay them back. With compound interest.

Reverse-engineering their metaphysical tricks and brittle logic would be a bonus, a professional courtesy after the personal statement. She also needed to get off-planet, off this magical rock. Her destination was the Echelon, the last confirmed pack of murderhobos to have interacted with and abducted Jennie. Kelly planned the trip in her head. A scheduled extraction. Gunfire and extreme prejudice would be her travel agents. She'd probably have to book the flight by hijacking it.

First class would involve a hold full of explosives. And finally, maybe, if she ever found a guaranteed way back that didn't involve being unmade by higher powers, she might check out what was on the other side of those portals. A holiday of sorts. A working vacation. She'd bring a shovel. And several crates of high-yield munitions. You don't visit a new dimension without a housewarming gift that says "I can level your capital." Unfortunately… Kelly was still too weak. She was far, far too weak.

Every single one of her goals needed more strength. More weapons, more hacks, more abilities, more titles, more traits, more reverse-engineered cheats. A hell of a lot more leverage against a universe that kept trying to turn her into spare parts. The gap between what she was and what she needed to be was a canyon you could lose a city in, and she was on the wrong side with a piece of rope.

"If I took a casual trip to the Echelon planets right now," she said to the ceiling, "The cozy little resort worlds where everyone strong enough to matter decided to sit this apocalypse out?" She stopped pacing.

"Like Jupiter? Getting turned into a smear on the deck would be the good outcome." She picked at a thread on her sleeve, imagining the brochure. She could see it. A sterile room, bright lights."

"They'll send a procurement team. I'd get a barcode, a biometric scan, and my consciousness would end up as a compressed file on some executive's server. A real career-limiting move." The realistic outcome involved a bag, a tag, and a very thorough memory download before they scrubbed her brain back to factory settings. And that was if they were feeling kind. Fighting the God of Order, Illvyr? She exhaled, a sound halfway between a sigh and a scoff.

"Until 100 and without mental protection, that's volunteering for a promotion to 'eternal living art installation.' He'd rearrange my mind into a decorative vase. An eternity of mind puppetry. My own personal horror show, front row seat, starring someone else" And the Conductor with its Leviathan? A dry, cracked laugh escaped her. A real one. Statistical illiteracy. She already knew how that particular game ended. The idea of a fight with them, as she was now, was a laughable waste of time.

And Kelly had decided many loops ago that she was no longer wasting time. Every single one of her goals needed power. Raw, malleable, excessive power. Ren would be the key to most of Kelly becoming powerful enough to do it all—he was a bottomless well of " how to kill things from every dimension" dressed up in gruff practicality.

His training method was essentially accelerated Darwinism: create conditions where the only way out was discovering a new way to fight, usually while something was actively trying to turn her into paste. It was efficient. It was painful. It worked. He was the catalyst—the immovable, wearily practical one who observed her chaotic methodology with the expression of someone watching another person reorganize their entire life based on a dream they had once.

Simply acknowledging that this was happening and would continue to happen until either she learned better or exhaustion filed a formal complaint. With a thought, her blade's crystals started printing. She was eager. Genuinely, bone-deep eager. Another chance to grind her raw edges against something that would sharpen them. To find the limits of what she could do, so she could punch through them. There was still so much to extract from herself. More tactics. More dirty tricks.

More ways to weaponize the gap between what she was supposed to do and what would actually work. More ways to turn a wave and a finger love sign into a disemboweling maneuver, or to find the seam in reality where violence became art. She was going to learn it all. Every last ugly secret Ren had scraped from a hundred battlefields, every brutal calculus he'd memorized through sheer survival. She'd improve them. She'd take his brutal, efficient, veteran's calculus and run it through her own chaotic engine.

She'd find the seams in his perfect tactics and wedge a new trick in there, something he wouldn't see coming. The old warhound knew how to survive any hell. She was going to learn how to redecorate it. Because that's what you did when someone handed you a blade— You made it sharper. Her goals all needed her to have insane power. So what would Kelly do? She looked at her distorted reflection in the window, at the warped air hugging her silhouette. She answered herself, the statement flat and final.

"Get more power," She would Master her new time abilities. She would master her new time abilities until she could twist a second into an hour. She would dissect the magical cube from the East Grid until she understood its birthday and its nightmares. Build weapons—plural, because singular felt optimistic. An arsenal with its own postcode. She was going to power up in every sense of the word. Then, she would systematically tackle every problem on her list, from the petty to the cosmic.

Kelly raced outside to see a world that had completely shifted.

"Well I'll be..." She muttered, staring. Something had changed. Something major.