Chương 130: 129. Building a Magical Research Facility

Some eggheads in Vaughn R&D had definitely made magic weapons by now, just like her; built a little superweapon out of street-level runes, probably with a live goblin on a treadmill. But until the corpo's magical toys were better than a standard-issue plasma rifle? Kinetic energy grenades? Rail weapons? Or even a simple, wrist-mounted burner?

"No dice," she muttered, recalibrating her wrist mounted weapon. Nobody would care. Until their toys didn't need a live alien chained to it, they would never see the light of day. Neither seemed probable in the next few months. Until then? This stuff wasn't going mainstream.

"Bet they're having meetings about it," she muttered under her breath to herself and the busy hall, spinning her bracelet-form weapon on her wrist.

"PowerPoint presentations on 'Synergistic Cross-Dimensional Kinetic Enhancement.' Meanwhile, I just smashed a rock with a bigger metal rock until the shiny bits did what I wanted." She smiled. It was convenient. For now, most modern weaponry way above the Enhanced grade made the basic-as-hell runes goblins carried redundant. The corpos needed to cook up magic tech better than the hyper-advanced experimental gear already in circulation, or make it work without needing a troll strapped to a backpack.

They'd figure it out eventually. They just had to start from absolute zero, needed external power sources, and were operating under the assumption that they had more than a single planetary rotation to accomplish anything. For the rest of the world, it was only day one. Everyone else was still reading the manual. Capitalism was king. Advanced arcane weaponry was a problem for tomorrow's Kelly, if tomorrow ever happened. Could they do it today? Make magic weapons? Sure. They could make a Mana gun.

Or a powersuit that ran on screaming goblins. But if they couldn't sell it, why would they? Dr. Haider delivered a warning to everyone that mattered. That terraforming device landing in the east grid? The mana box? It would blow half the city off the map, dome or no dome. Kelly gave him and them vague schematics—no runes—and had Haider heavily imply without self-incrimination, that they came from very illegal invader brain-mapping, the planetary authorities' favorite criminal boogeyman.

Everyone was doing it in blacksites. No on admitted to it. They probably wanted to keep their favorite cousins alive. That early warning? It was Kelly's bid to stop the explosion without actually being there. She was hoping, against all better judgment, that someone would see the size of the crater-to-be and maybe try to stop it. Hopefully someone would take precautions. Put a sign up. Save human lives. Not just the profitable one. Or at least run.

'A public service announcement,' she'd called it.

'From a concerned anonymous citizen.' Maybe they'd move some chairs before the explosion. Fingers crossed. Since everyone was running around with a person carrying a mana scanner, physically walking into GeneCorp or Vaughn Labs meant a brutal, day-long fight. A fight that could end with capture. And Ren said capture meant getting your memories read, copied, and your mind scrubbed blank.

"Hard pass," Kelly decided, throwing a grenade into her shadow and clipping another to her belt.

"I'm fond of my memories. Even the terrible ones." Kelly had already leveraged Dr. Haider instead. She'd needed more resources. More credits. GeneCorp, being genetics obsessed, didn't care about her molecular tech enough to sweeten the deal, but her biology? That was their language. First thing in the morning, she cultured a living tissue sample of her own flesh and handed it to a courier from Haider's organization. Her separated flesh didn't reset—she'd checked years ago.

Would giving them her still living, synthesised human, genetically scrambled flesh cause problems later? No, probably not. They probably had a decades-long schedule. A full plan to poke and prod her fleshy sample for its million secrets, creating a new revolutionary gizmo with each new discovery, cementing their place at the top for the next hundred years. A century of research in that petri dish, a ticket to corporate godhood by express mail. A hundred years of discovery.

"Too bad they only get one day." Kelly shrugged.

"Their stock price would've been incredible." This loop, she bargained harder. A fortune. More than half the proceeds went to Haider for access to his intelligence network and a fast track into his organization. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. The rest of the proceeds? They bought, shipped, and installed cutting-edge lab equipment for Kelly and his people to crack the thousands of rune patterns stored in her enhanced memory.

Negotiation and prep. That was how Kelly ended up at Haider's shadow organisation, the only place in the city not teeming with squads chaotically fighting creatures, carrying mana scanners, or actively murdering each other over readings. The air tasted different at Haiders'—less frantic. It was a different brand of chaos here—one with coffee machines and clipboards—like standing in a room where everyone was collectively holding their breath and pretending they hadn't noticed the countdown timer.

Kelly hated interviews. Not for the reasons interviews were supposed to be hated—the nervous energy, the performative enthusiasm, the way someone whose entire job was gatekeeping asked " where do you see yourself in five years" as if the future were a location you could book a hotel in. It wasn't even the fact that the human face was poorly designed for them—it leaked information constantly—micro-expressions, pupil dilation, the exact microsecond when someone stopped listening but continued nodding.

Which meant interviews were essentially asking her to sit across from a stranger while both of them pretended they couldn't read each other's lies, a performance so fundamentally dishonest that it required everyone involved to be actively stupid about it. No.

She hated them because the entire enterprise operated on the assumption that people were fundamentally dishonest, and the only way to root out the liars was to make everyone sit in a climate-controlled room and pretend they'd always dreamed of "synergizing cross-functional teams" or whatever corporate Mad Libs had been generated that quarter. Their reason for existing was always some polished nonsense about elevating humanity or optimizing global potential.

The whole dance made her feel like a bug under a lens, pinned and labeled. So, walking into the Haider organization's version—a truth-serum double-dose cocktail followed by a corporate psychologist digging around in your motivations—started as a mild annoyance and quickly became a profound irritation. It was the same invasive procedure, just with better drugs and worse lighting. She solved it by not playing. This time, she arrived at the designated spot, said her name, and slid a data-chip across the table.

"Answers to your seventy-three questions." Kelly stepped to the wall panel, pressed her palm to it, and left before anyone could ask her to perform the ritual of caring.

"Have fun." Hours later, Haider—still under house arrest for crimes the government had stopped numbering—had sent a representative. It was a humanoid droid with his own smirking face plastered on its head, haggling over contracts and profit splits on Kelly's behalf, and for his personal financial gain.

The mansion itself—a building that had somehow accumulated the simultaneous purposes of home, family office, charity headquarters, and quasi-illegal shadow organisation—was beginning to look less like a residence and more like a research facility that had decided to also serve lunch. Kelly watched from a window as crates of gear arrived: dark-matter sniffers, spell-effect stress testers, language decipherers, a device that looked like a toaster oven wired to a car battery.

Machines designed to measure what magic actually did when you pointed instruments at it. Finally. Then she turned to Dr. Haider, and watched his robot from from his hand-held remote control. She watched it gesture with polished hands at a projected contract shimmering in the air between it and a visibly sweating cabal of corporate liaisons.

"Why didn't you just attend via video?" she asked, turning. Dr. Haider simply looked at her as if the question itself was more ridiculous than the fact that he'd spent the last three hours teaching a machine wearing his face how to lie better than he could.

"A video call would have been simpler than the droid," she stated, doubling down, her voice flat with judgemental observation.

"A screen and a microphone. That's all this needed."

"The value of physical presence, Kelly. A personal touch. That's why." Haider's voice filtered back, smooth as oil.

"It conveys sincerity... and gravitas. A tangible commitment." Somewhere outside, miles away, his drone straightened its tie. A block over, something large and chitinous was being methodically disassembled by automated turrets.

"You wanted a front-row seat to the street-level chaos without risking a taxi ride with an eldritch passenger," Kelly said. He smiled.

"Shared, remotely experienced trauma builds rapport," Haider admitted, as the robot's visual feed flickered to a rift in the skyline. A mass of swirling eyes and recursive teeth pulsed briefly before being lanced by a particle beam from a corporate defense tower.

"All of us participating in the same loud existential melee from a safe, comfortable distance." He gesture at his droids operating screen. It looked suspiciously like a gaming console's controller. It even had stickers. Dr. Haider continued, unaware of her observation.

"Avoiding the life-threatening nature of simply being in the same where at the same when as a…" He trailed off as the robot's view-screen panned to the street below, where something with too many legs skittered up the side of a building, pursued by a streak of plasma fire.

"... a horror from the abyss that can casually unmake local causality. The interpersonal touch included is invaluable. It builds rapport." A part of Kelly was dying to train with Ren again. The old soldier's idea of a warm-up usually involved something that would liquefy a normal person's spine, and she missed that. Grinding her personal power into something sharper had a straightforward appeal—hit the thing until the thing breaks, or you break, and then you learn which part was faulty.

But a larger, louder, more persistent part of her brain was a shouting, tangled mess. Utterly mystified. Thousands of runes and formations, ripped from the guts of a terraforming cube, were crammed inside her skull, a complete scan of the terraforming cube's internal architecture. Problem: she had no idea what any of them did. Kelly had decided that today, she would start chipping away at that mountain with every industrial-grade data-cracker and pattern-analyst she could get her hands on.

The mountain didn't know it, but she was about to hit it with a landslide. They sat there, a sprawling database with no key. Cosmic graffiti with no known effect, language, or methodology. No obvious syntax. It could hold rune language. Or, it could be nonsense operating on laws that had never bothered to introduce themselves to Earth. Unraveling it would take loops. Maybe a hundred of them, poking each symbol, squiggle, and curve with a stick to see if it spat fire or started singing show tunes.