Chương 135: 134. Weaponizing Reality

[Runescript: Absolute Environmental Immunity.] What did it mean? It built an Internal Homeostasis Field. That word, 'Homeostasis,' was just a fancy way of saying your body had an autopilot keeping everything balanced—temperature, water, chemicals—so you didn't completely fall to pieces. Except like everything Kelly loved, 'Absolute Environmental Immunity' decided balance was boring and went full nuclear. It kept harmful particles out.

It cut air resistance, so moving through the world became smoother because the world's opinion was no longer a relevant factor. It acted as a shield against harmful radiation and environmental toxins. The individual became practically immune to the very concept of 'weather.' Kelly imagined walking through acid rain. Finally, she thought. A good hair day, guaranteed. The user became a closed system. They could stand naked in a blizzard or take a casual walk across a desert salt flat and not feel a thing.

Their body automatically filtered out toxins, pathogens, and allergens from the air they didn't technically need to breathe anymore. Internal temperature and hydration locked into perfect, non-lethal settings. This was the essential platform. The unglamorous, vital foundation every other flashy, destructive program needed to run on. The base for everything else.

"The body was a temple," Kelly said, looking at the runic array.

"We just installed central air, plumbing, and a force field." Dr. Haider crumpled a ball of paper and threw it at her. She dodged.

"It's not a force field if you can get a papercut," he said flatly. Kelly dodged the next one.

"Ow, hey—that's unprofessional." Dr. Haider set down his pen.

"According to records of the mercenary group you clashed with on the way here, you treat destruction as a tool and find genuine enjoyment in it. Your entire dossier is built on strategic recklessness." He paused.

"I'm almost ninety percent certain you'd blow up this lab if it served your purposes. Yet you're genuinely offended that I threw paper at you." Kelly grinned.

"Yeah, but that's different. Blowing up the lab would be for a reason. You're just being annoying." Their invention was beautifully complex. Fifty-three runes just to micromanage the air cycle. Twenty-two obsessing over oxygen saturation like a helicopter parent. Thirty throwing their weight around to keep matter from having an existential crisis. Four sweating the humidity details. Two on permanent temperature duty. One doing the atmospheric filtering with the grim efficiency of a border guard.

The numbers piled up like some obsessive-compulsive accountant's fever dream—each rune another layer of bureaucratic overkill, a blood oath that the body would never have to negotiate with the absolute chaos outside. Kelly scanned the list. How did it work? The body sealed itself shut. It became its own environment. A self-regulating, walking biosphere. Any food, anything coming in, would have to go through the galaxy's most annoying bouncers.

"Hey, background AI, keep a permanent record of all this Runescript, enchantment recipe stuff," Kelly said, tapping her temple. A screen materialized in her vision, all sterile blue text. [Runescript Enchantment: Absolute Environmental Immunity. The body becomes a perfectly sealed, self-regulating system, immune to external toxic environments, gas, extreme heat, and cold. The user's lungs are no longer the primary source of respiration. They create a breathable atmosphere directly around their skin and in their airways, independent of the outside environment. Program Components: Runes of Temperature Stabilization (2) + Humidity Regulation (4) + Atmospheric Filtering (1), Oxygen Saturation Control (22) + Internal Air Cycle (53) + Matter Stabilization (30) + Rune of Atmospheric Filtering + Rune of Particle Density Reduction + Rune of Radiant Energy Reflection. Temperature Stabilization (2) + Humidity Regulation (4) + Molecular Structure Reinforcement (60)] The molecular reinforcement was a beast. It kept your body from getting wrecked by energy spikes and made your cells tough enough to handle whatever the environment threw at you. Total Environmental Independence. You became a walking life-support system. A talking one, too, which was probably the weirdest part. The whole breathing thing? They outsourced it. To themselves.

Your body just cooked up its own air, a personal, portable pocket of atmosphere that clung to you with the tenacity of a bad perfume. Vacuum, poison, the bottom of the ocean—they all received the same RSVP: 'not attending.' Space could turn off the air. A person with this script would just be floating there in the void, perfectly comfortable in a tank top and gym shorts, mildly annoyed they'd forgotten a sweater, and that space needs better lighting.

The second goblin lasted two full minutes in the hotzones smog before the clouds got creative with their mutations. Two minutes was progress, even if progress still ended in a pile of rapidly changing sludge. Kelly stood at the edge in her vacuum mask, looking at what used to be a shaman. She thought about saying something respectful, but the toxic cloying clouds and mist didn't deserve an audience.

"RIP Gnaw," she said to herself.

"You were a true pioneer," she muttered, her voice perfectly clear and dry behind her now-redundant airtight vacuum mask. Kelly and Joe saw first hand the hotzones toxins had a quantum element, something that bent sideways into dimensions the immunity couldn't follow. The runes protected against everything environmental. Everything except that. Still, it was protection equal to what the Echelon members could do. Before today, that had been impossible. Kelly jabbed a thumb at the shimmering pattern in the air.

"Runescript's baked. Ready to burn it in." This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Joe Haider didn't look up from his work.

"Call it an enchantment. That's what we're calling them now."

"Since when?"

"Since the memo. Marketing says 'enchantment' tests better. Less threatening." He finally met her gaze, his expression blank.

"It's the approved term."

"Enchantment." Kelly repeated the word, letting it hang.

"Sounds quaint. Sounds like something that makes a garden pretty, not something that rewires a monster's guts to hold a fusion reactor."

"It sounds sellable," Haider stated, his voice devoid of debate.

"That's the point."

"Sure." Kelly shrugged, turning back to the lethal diagram with a smirk.

"The name's not bad. Just doesn't sound like it'd leave a stain." Kelly preferred 'Runescript.' It felt violent. They got back to work. The topic was a new Runescript—Kelly's idea, naturally. Motivated by her innocent, non-self-interested, purely scientific curiosity about magical theory. Did she mention the innocent part? Worth saying twice. Thrice, even. Her deeply humanitarian desire to advance human knowledge and understanding.

The type of thing that just happens when you're selflessly advancing knowledge for the betterment of others. The fact that it would absolutely skyrocket her personal power and amplify every single trait she possessed? Pure coincidence. Totally unrelated. She'd checked. Multiple times. Very thoroughly. With a completely straight face. They called it the [Mana Conduit Body.]"Hey, background AIs," Kelly said, not looking up from the structure floating in the air between her and Joe.

"File this one too. Save it under…" She paused, tapping a finger against her chin.

"… under 'not for personal gain.' Be specific." A screen painted itself into existence in her vision, crafting a recipe of pure excess. [Rune-Script: Mana Conduit Body This is the core magical system. The runes related to particle and energy interaction create an environment for mana just above the users skin; they transform the body into a super-efficient conduit for the energy. Creates a zone around and inside the user where matter is pre-processed to be incredibly receptive to mana. Mana flows; it's eagerly absorbed and guided. Program Components: Particle Density Reduction (3) + Molecular Density Alignment (7) + Nano-PartiMolecucle Dissociation (27), Energy Feedback Loop (8) + Energy Transfer Rate Regulation (25) + Mana Particle Smoothing (88)] Joe Haider scrolled through the data, his expression grimly focused.

"The alignment runes are finally working right. The feedback loop could still cascade under extreme overload."

"Could," Kelly echoed, waving a hand.

"But will it? We won't know until we turn something into a mana sponge and see if it pops. That'll be fun. Like fireworks."

"This isn't a game, Voss."

"Everything's a game. The rules are just written in blood and math now." She zoomed in on her favorite part, almost reverent. Automatic circulation. Passive Mana Saturation and Hyper-Efficiency. This was the big one. The real deal. The 'oh crap, what have we done' one.

They'd crammed every single lesson learned about mana circulation and mana flow —from burning through a warehouse of goblin test subjects and running a stupid number of simulations, all the painful results on perfect pathways, mana poisoning, and cellular burnout—into one dense, brutalist package for a living body. The mana circulation it enabled went from a trickle to a stream, from a tiny, hesitant current to a thunderous, pressurized deluge, a flash flood contained within flesh and bone.

It carved pathways they'd learned by watching goblins incinerate from the inside out. The user's very presence would become a mana-rich zone, a walking hotspot. Their spells, skills, magic would need a fraction of the energy anyone else required. They'd be more stable. They'd cast faster, because the mana was already pre-aligned and practically begging to be used. They wouldn't "gather" mana. They'd exist in a perpetual state of being absolutely, overwhelmingly, destructively overloaded with the stuff.

From the 'OFF' setting to the 'Oh my god how do we stop this thing.' More than once, a test subject had broken free, overloaded with power, being a problem for the room's defenses for exactly three seconds before it burned from the inside out, its body unable to handle the sheer power coursing through it. The practical application was absurd. It could take a weak, frail goblin and shovel a mountain of energy into its brittle frame, turning it into a twitching, overloaded problem.

It could turn their sputtering, pathetic flames into roaring, continuous furnaces. Joe stared at the final glowing rune, his jaw set.

"This is a weapon. A dangerous one. In a ship or a powersuit... It's a force multiplier with no upper limit."

"No it's not. It's a humanitarian research project," Kelly corrected, her voice flat.

"Think of the applications. A single goblin could power a small district's heating. Efficient and energy saving." Technically, that was true. But. Kelly stared at her own arm, turning it over in the lab's sterile light. A slow, deliberate smile spread across her face.

"This is going to make someone very powerful," she said, studying a cluster of runes that looked like a Jenga tower.

"Not me," she added hastily, "but some hypothetical test subject's district that definitely exists," Kelly said, her eyes still on the glowing mess. The fact that successfully grafting this script would grade up every single one of her traits—enhancing her strength, her speed, her reaction augments, the density of her shields—was a coincidence. Obviously. It was totally, completely unrelated to any desire for personal power or a more efficient mana pool. Nope. Not at all.

The faint, almost imperceptible tremor in her fingers was definitely not anticipation. It was probably a draft. Or low blood sugar. It was absolutely not the urge to take the schematic and immediately begin etching its pathways onto and inside her own skin, to feel that thunderous deluge become her new baseline. No sir. Next, they tried to create military applications. To weaponize things more than they already had. Because, according to Dr.

Haider, apparently, "we probably shouldn't" was more of a suggestion than a rule. First attempt: runes that killed friction, bent space, made projectiles just miss—like the hit never happened at all. It wasn't perfect—you could still catch a hit—but it turned your body into something that made enemies want to throw their weapons down and just leave in pure, magically driven frustration. Kelly observed the trial run from a terminal, chewing on a stylus.

On screen, a figure flopped on test room floor as training rounds painted the walls and floor behind them, beside them, everywhere but on target. She grunted.

"Annoyance as a survival strategy. I can work with that." Looked great on paper. Turned into a bloodbath when they realized stripping away all resistance meant test subjects couldn't breathe, couldn't move, and started dying. One guy still lay there, paralyzed, sliding off the table like he was made of margarine. They watched it happen. Then it happened again. And again, until someone finally said maybe this approach was garbage. So they pivoted to something more sustainably brutal.

Over loops, the immortal intern, Kelly, and her older almost-relative kept grinding away—testing, cracking, theorizing, blowing things up—until they'd constructed runes and enchantments that could make a demigod blink and a god lean in to stare. Not because the god felt threatened, but because two humans had managed to do insanity it had never intended to be possible. They'd cracked open a language that was never meant to be in mortal hands.

In a lab pocked with bullet holes, scorch marks, lines where lasers had carved through overpowered test subjects, and evidence of weaponized gravity, with a cordoned-off section where the atmosphere had just stopped being normal—Kelly and her lab partner stood in the middle of the wreckage.

"Hey, save all these rune recipes too," Kelly said, staring at a flood of screens suspended in her vision, courtesy of her background AIs.

"Every single enchantment, stat. Don't miss a single word." [Calculating...]