Chương 129: 128. Power-up

"Called it," Kelly said, eyeing the chaotic streets. This loop decided to be special snowflake. It was different. Something had changed. And that something had absolutely nothing to do with the sudden, aggressive landscaping being done by a twenty-foot crystal scorpion three blocks over. Her loop kicked off with its usual charming fanfare of distant explosions and panic. She went through the motions: waking up in her apartment, ignoring the news feeds screaming about dimensional breaches, and gearing up.

It felt normal. It smelled normal—crisp ozone and cheap synth-coffee. She hit the streets, into the street symphony of New York losing its collective mind, weaving through the human river of people either scrambling for the underground shelters or making a desperate, shoving run for the Hyperloop stations. Kelly cut across both currents, a rock in a river of panic with a plan: Jackhammer route to Vaughn, to her lab. Standard operating procedure for the end of the world.

Then, two blocks in, she started noticing the new decor. More butterflies. A whole freaking swarm of them. The first hint was the sheer volume of armed professionals now treating the Jackhammer route like a highway rest stop. These weren't the usual hidden groups on very specific, obscure, and very need-to-know missions. These were professional, openly armed-to-the-teeth teams of private military contractors, corporate wetwork agents, mercenaries, and outright suicide squads.

They moved through New York's arteries with a purpose she'd never seen this early. They poured out of armored transports and descended from rooftops in squads—two to seven bodies per unit, all wearing that particular expression of people who'd been given an assignment at 6 AM and decided "good enough" was a perfectly acceptable standard. Vaughn Industries had sent their usual flavor of corporate muscle. Han Cyber had apparently decided the morning was young enough for an invasion.

Crystal Nanotech and Genecorp had shown up with their particular brand of existential confidence. And then there was even smaller, fringe groups like the Obsidian Gang, which Kelly could only describe as "aggressively ambitious in the way a golden retriever is aggressively friendly"—all effort and no actual strategy, but somehow still dangerous. What tied them together, what made Kelly's stomach perform a small, involuntary gymnastics routine, was the equipment. Mana Scanners.

Every single early-bird death squad had at least one member carrying the equipment. Mana scanners that had been slapped-together by someone who'd learned engineering from a fever dream. Some wore the bulky goggles. Others hauled boxy backpack units with screens wired into their glasses. It all had the same aesthetic: 3D-printed in a hurry, crude, and held together by bad intentions and duct tape. Gear that screamed "R&D? Never heard of her. We needed this yesterday."

"They got all that rubber-stamped in an hour? The R&D lab was still brainstorming. The only review was 'does it make a noise when you hit the button.'" They were all scanning, heads on a swivel, looking for something specific. Kelly knew that look. It was the "I have a scanner and a budget" look.

"Panic's one thing," Kelly said, shaking her head as the truck rumbled.

"Shipping untested gear to a live extinction event is another." Someone was handing out fireworks and calling it a safety measure. Which meant someone—multiple someones, actually, across multiple corporations and at least two scrappy street-level gangs —had collectively decided that mana scanners were suddenly, desperately, urgently necessary. This was new. This hadn't happened before. Kelly pieced it together while sliding the truck to a halt and ducking into an alley to avoid a squad of Han Cyber grunts.

She connected the dots, and the picture it formed was of her own face with a target on it. The weird feeling in her gut crystallized into solid, pragmatic suspicion. This was related. It was related to her little project last loop: boosting her Mana Vacuum title, tweaking her Mana Attunement, and giving that Mana Anomaly trait a solid kick in the pants. She'd poked a universal concept with a stick, and apparently poked it hard enough that an Order God immediately dialed her number. The timing wasn't a coincidence.

The moment she'd woken up this morning, her passive mana absorption had shifted from "quiet background hum" to "small nuclear reactor pretending to be a person." She was pulling in ambient mana just by existing, a bit more aggressively than before. Turns out, turning yourself into a passive mana beacon has consequences. Who knew?

The butterfly effect ripple was apparently every corporation and their ambitious little brother suddenly realizing that scanning for raw magical energy might be a valuable investment strategy on invasion day. Or maybe the universe had just recalibrated its attempts to kill her. The old thing was probably judging events, stacking the deck, tilting the board, trying to erase its Kelly-shaped problem before she could progress. Again. Worth considering. Her money was on the universe being a sore loser.

Kelly adjusted her path toward Vaughn Industries and tried very hard not to think about what would happen if they actually found what they were looking for. Kelly used to think she'd figured out the whole thing. Gods, seers, time, all of it—completely understood, filed away in her head, done deal. Then reality, in that characteristically annoying way it had, shoved her back to the beginning and told her she'd barely passed lesson one. Which was good.

And also genuinely thrilling in a way that made her want to laugh at her own stupidity. The universe still had tricks. It could still blindside her. She hadn't run out of ways to be wrong yet. Understanding the full scope of those things? Not there yet. But she understood prediction. Feed an A. I. enough information—mountain ranges of data, every variable you can scrape—and it'll cough up a prediction of a person's future with scary accuracy. It was grunt work. Computational heavy lifting. Love what you're reading?

Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. The angel, its god, and whatever passed for seers apparently skipped the grunt work. They did something similar on the fly. A bit of magic juice, a spit and a prayer, and they were peeking around corners in time. What did he call it? The stream of Time and Fate? Time's temporal waters? Kelly snorted. The branding needed work. Titles were passive and vague. Branching. Completely useless at telling you anything real.

Traits were too—deliberately obscure. But Skills—Skills were a total disaster. Each one was so specific, so precise, and you could stack them forever without hitting any limit. Mix them together and they'd amplify each other into something exponentially more devastating. She'd seen them. And Kelly didn't for doubt one second they could be used to track someone. [Title equipped: The Null] Naturally, she equipped the Title that hid her from divination. It was the obvious move.

It had workarounds, but it beat standing in the open with a spotlight on her head. She'd have to find a way to plug that particular vulnerability later. A problem for future-Kelly, who was always marginally better equipped than present-Kelly. During the last reset, she'd done nothing but scan. Every microscopic rune etched on the cube's surface, every one crawling inside its interior, the tide swarming over the power crystal at its heart. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.

She had the designs, the appearance, the precise structural data of all of them uploaded and stored. A catalog of arcane graffiti. She didn't know what a single one did yet. The anticipation was a familiar, almost comforting itch. That archive took the edge off, the frantic, clawing urgency about needing to visit the east grid right-the-hell-now. The immediate crisis of not having it was finally over.

Given her multiple terrible encounters in the east grid—a parade of bad experiences that usually ended in screaming, dismemberment, or metaphysical unraveling—Kelly had made it an active habit to stay the hell away from the place. The botanical lab there, with the giant mana-producing crystal right beside it, was a siren call for her research. But this loop was different. Sharper. More dangerous than any before. Much more dangerous.

The east grid this time around was teeming with crude mana scanners and various overpowered entities whose favorite hobby seemed to be rewriting minds. The risk finally outweighed the manic curiosity. She could avoid it. A solid plan, until you considered the obvious flaw: what was she supposed to do when the east grid spilled all over the city, getting its murder juice all over her brand new boots? For now, the scanner-equipped squads weren't pinpointing her. They weren't gravitating toward her position either.

That made visiting Vaughn and her lab, like she'd originally planned, a solid, emphatic no-go. Kelly theorized, racing a long line in the streets, that some element of her own influence on the ambient mana must have kicked off a butterfly effect. Maybe her constant absorption and manipulation had created strange, abnormal patterns in the atmospheric energy. Some corporate pencil-pusher with a promotion on the line probably noticed the statistical blip.

That notice could have triggered a domino effect: allocate resources, deploy rudimentary scanners, discover that the invading creatures' actions also messed with the ambient energy. A happy accident for them. A nuisance for her. Either way, they weren't directly looking for her, they were just unfairly, and extremely well equipped to find her, so she avoided them completely, then organized a deal with Genecorp.

They'd sanction her abnormally high enhancement level—look the other way, officially—in exchange, she handed over a very outdated, much weaker version of the blueprints for her monomolecular blade. No beam guns or runes. No reinforcement. A museum piece. She decided to make way for the Haider organisation route, Ren Sato, Joe Haider, and the most secure facility in that part of the city. A fair trade for making the official paperwork stop blinking red. Kelly had two traits she hadn't hacked yet: bone and liquid.

Which sounded like a goth grocery list. She could build a bone weapon like Ren suggested. She could hunt a high-level creature in the city for fancier materials. But then she'd have to repeat that hunt every single loop, and in a world packed with opportunities, that was a criminal waste of her schedule. Kelly wanted an upgrade that would pack its bags and come with her across loops.

So she decided: she would harden her bones, weaponize her blood, steal a bone Trait from the strongest creature she'd located, and then turn her skeleton and circulatory system into armaments she could deploy at the speed of thought. Kelly was going to rip the traits right out of the angel. Preferably with angwlic screaming.

Kelly's hobby of frankensteining portal monsters together had awarded her the 'Troll-Homunculus' trait, which sounded badass until you understood what it meant: her body had stopped rejecting foreign biological matter and started treating it as a personal guests. That, plus her 'Primordial Blood'—which basically meant her blood became aggressively collaborative, willing to integrate basically anything into her architecture. Any weird biological crap. It turned out to have a bonus.

The 'homunculus' part made her a universal recipient. The 'Primordial' part did too. Usually, stapling a new piece of monster onto herself meant specifically tweaking parts to match her DNA, so her body wouldn't reject it like bad sushi. In theory, those two traits meant she could surgically attach anything to herself and it would just… work. A foot. A tail. Wings. Literally anything. Her body was like a Swiss army knife for parts. A universal adapter.

She could probably bolt the cellular equivalent of a park bench to her spine and her biology would just sigh and make it work. Kelly hadn't tested it in full because—well, it was gross. Unless it was meticulously designed to make her more awesome, she had no plans for it. She had been ignoring the whole concept. Instead, she'd spent her time at the botanical lab with Rowena productively. While Rowena talked to hallucinogenic mushrooms, Kelly had been busy growing a new bone in her palm.

She made a part-Kelly, part-plant bone in her palm that grew magic amplifier crystals, the type you'd find in enchanted invader weapons. The crystals grew in her palm in a flexible formation just beneath skin and muscle. She'd synthesized them from gems she'd ripped from staffs goblin shamans waved around and ugly jewels some creatures had wedged into their axes. The crystals didn't make mana, but when you pushed mana through them, things got interesting.

Carve a rune onto them, and you could tell the mana what to do. Her palm crystals currently held two runes: [Absorb], which constantly sucked a portion of mana from her body, and [Infuse], which shoved it into whatever she was holding. Like everything she had, the effect was passive. Always on. So anything she picked up—a gun, a knife, a half-eaten sandwich—got a surprise infusion of whatever Kelly was made of.

As she stood in a new building, surrounded by workers she'd personally hired, Kelly flexed her hand, her scanners and attunement watching the faint geometric pattern under her skin shimmer with absorbed blue light.

"Personal touch," she muttered.

"Now everything I grab gets a little piece of me. Mostly metaphysical. Flattering." It worked great with her monomolecular weapon. She'd crushed spare crystals into powder, mixed the glittery dust into the weapon's metal, and glued one right into its interior base. The process took 45 minutes and made the workshop smell like a lightning strike had hit a pineapple fruit stand. Now her blade had the same runes she saw on creature axes— [Harden] and [Absorb] —baked right into every facet of the metal. Harden. Absorb.

The weapon understood these commands better than most people understood their own employment contracts. Making a magic weapon. There was no way she was the only person on Earth to do this.