Chương 136: 135. Overpowered

[Rune-Script: Unstoppable Physical Resilience This combination reinforces the body's molecular structure, making tissues, bones, and skin extraordinarily durable. Coupled with stabilized kinetic particles, it significantly reduces the impact of any physical blow, making the body resistant to trauma, cuts, bruises, and even blunt force damage. The user's body structure becomes reinforced at the molecular level, increasing density and durability across all tissues. This prevents physical trauma from causing injury or degradation, allowing the body to absorb impacts that would normally cause harm.] [Rune-Script: Permanent WeaponxArmor Fortification When bound to a weapon or armor, this script locks them into a state of permanence and near-indestructibility. The user's equipment becomes resistant to most forms of degradation and damage below conventional thresholds. When bound to a weapon or suit of armor, this enchantment prevents molecular degradation and structural failure. A user's equipment maintains its integrity indefinitely, resisting wear, corrosion, and damage from use or combat.] [Rune-Script: Enhanced Reflexes and Agility This combination allows the body to reduce the effects of gravity and friction, while also optimizing air currents around the body. The result is a drastic increase in agility, allowing the individual to move with the speed and precision of a highly trained athlete, with reflexes that can dodge even the fastest projectiles. The user experiences reduced gravitational pull on their body and decreased friction during movement, while air resistance around them becomes optimized. This allows faster acceleration, sharper directional changes, and accelerated reaction times that permit evasion of high-speed threats.] [Rune-Script: Eternal Youth Full Cellular Rejuvenation. By stabilizing quantum fluctuations, repelling harmful molecular interactions (such as toxins), and stabilizing the flow of time around the body, this combination prevents aging, cellular degeneration, and disease. The individual essentially experiences perpetual youth, with their cells constantly regenerating and rejuvenating. The user's cells continuously regenerate and repair themselves while remaining protected from toxins and pathogens. The aging process halts, allowing the body to maintain its current state indefinitely without degradation or disease progression.] [Rune-Script: Infinite Stamina Infinite Energy Supply with Zero Fatigue. The body constantly captures and converts ambient energy, mana, light, heat, into usable power, while the energy feedback loop recycles it efficiently. Energy flow regulation optimizes metabolism and energy distribution, ensuring the person experiences zero fatigue and can maintain peak physical and mental performance indefinitely. The user's body absorbs ambient energy from their environment and converts it into biological fuel. This constant energy supply eliminates fatigue accumulation, allowing sustained physical and mental performance without rest or recovery periods.] [Trait: Mana Focused Student III → IV] [Trait: Magic Tinkerer III → IV] [Additional Effect…] [Additional Effect…] Kelly's background AIs stored each each permanently. It was a cookbook for calamity. Kelly whistled—a sound of genuine satisfaction. This world, and maybe a few others besides, was about to get significantly more violent. In the end, after all that grinding, they'd only pulled seven hundred runes out of the ether. Seven hundred. A solid, respectable number. Out of what had to be thousands.

The rest weren't lost, exactly. They were there—visible, catalogued, infuriatingly present—but locked behind something neither Kelly nor Dr. Haider could even name. A key that didn't exist, or existed in a form so abstract that looking for it was like trying to find the color of Tuesday. A locked door with no keyhole. A question with no answer, only the certainty that an answer existed. All of them were all still crammed in her head, which was massively inconvenient.

It was a complete set, a full treasure trove of world-bending logic, and it was all right there. It just happened to be behind a layer of what felt like divine encryption. To Kelly, it felt like trying to view a dossier where someone had erased every other file and then burned the table of contents. Just a blank, smug wall of almost. Knowing the exact location of a vault sealed inside you. A problem that made you want to scream into a pillow.

Not because it was difficult, but because you knew the solution was standing right next to you, wearing an invisible hat. Kelly could feel the shape of the knowledge, a constant, humming pressure against the back of her eyes. She found it infuriating in a way that made her teeth ache with a background hum, a static she'd learned to ignore most of the time. Sometimes, when the lab was quiet, it made her want to hit something just to hear a different noise. The kicker?

What they'd already built from those seven hundred scribbles was enough to make reality blink. Environmental bubbles, personal atmospheres, mana conduits that could turn a goblin into a walking firestorm. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. They'd made scripts that defied logic and rewrote biological rules on the fly. Built a monster from the introductory pamphlet. A fraction. Kelly leaned back in her chair, scrolling through the list.

Seven hundred symbols had given them the leverage to pry open the world's seams. She wondered, idly, what kind of beautiful, catastrophic mess you could make with the full set. They had briefly faced a new hiccup: shoving enchantments into living meat came with a price. A violent one. Mana poisoning that boiled your cells from the inside out. Like trying to fit an ocean into a teacup, Crystal overload turned your nervous system into glass. The kind of biological rejection that left stains on the ceiling.

Complications that should've been a hard stop. Should've been. Kelly had already solved this loops ago. The fix was already woven into her, a network of mana-channeling crystal growing under her palms and along her forearms—part of her, perfectly calibrated and humming along. The mana poisoning? Handled. Crystal overload? Non-issue. Aggressive regeneration plus toxic environment immunity runes that made your lungs obsolete equaled problem solved.

Just another checkbox on a very long list of "things that should've killed us but didn't," or as Kelly like to call them, 'problems solved.' Where other people saw a brick wall, Kelly saw a speedbump she'd already paved over. Once they had finished, Kelly glanced at Manuel. The hired professional had lost his cool. His face had settled into a distraught mask, his eyes fixed on the eastern wall as if he could burn through it to the East Grid. He looked like a man measuring the length of a fuse.

Kelly knew that expression. It was the one people wore right before they volunteered to be the tragic, inspiring flash in a news report.

"Doctor Haider." Kelly swiveled her chair.

"Can I call you Joe?" He shook his head slightly.

"No. Fine." She coughed, not from anything real, just to fill the space.

"Look, Joey. Tell me straight. What else is there? These runes you've been working on—what can they actually do? The actual possibilities? Not the marketing summary. The real, on-the-ground, what-can-you-do-with-them possibilities." Dr Haider had been working on his own private script. Joe was a downright mana genius with what he called 'a billion credit military script.' Nobody knew what it was. And Kelly? She wanted to build the most powerful script imaginable.

"We've got the blueprints for a better mousetrap." She reiterated.

"What's the holdup?" Kelly watched Dr. Haider work, his attention locked on the glowing runes. The silence was broken only by the hum of the lab. Joe considered her question with the careful precision of a man with valuable treasure, who'd learned to measure his words. He spoke without looking up, his voice measured.

"Right now? Nothing. We have the scripts but no power source." His expression was neutral, but his eyes were sharp.

"But if your claim about the east grid's crystal reserves is correct—" He paused, letting that if hang in the air like a sword.

"—that changes. Quickly." He shifted his stance, leaning back against the console.

"Our best move is to be first." he said, holding her gaze.

"Package this, sell it to our partners for a percentage." He let the words settle between them.

"Because whoever gets the cube first gets far more, exponentially more than what we're sitting on now." Kelly doubted it. Not because he was wrong—he wasn't. He was precisely, mathematically right. But without the divine key, they'd basically be rich idiots with a locked box. They'd still be staring at a locked box, just with a bigger bank account to cry into about it. And no amount of brute force was going to crack a code the universe had written in disappearing ink.

The runes were still sealed, and sealed runes were just expensive mysteries. The seal suggested something dangerous enough to warrant cosmic-level precautions. The real prize was hidden behind that lock. The key opened thousands upon thousands of runes, just waiting on the other side—that was where the actual godhood lived. Literal godlike power. Which probably explained why someone locked it away. Can't have had that kind of thing just sitting around. Maybe some doors stay locked for a reason.

Kelly pointed at a glowing diagram on the lab table. Her finger aimed at a tangled knot of lines.

"What happens if you shove extra power right into that mess? While it's still being etched?" Dr. Haider adjusted his collar.

"Those are passive reinforcement arrays, so the mana discharge would—" Everyone looked at the diagram—Dr. Haider, his daughter Stacy holding her sleepy wolf cub, the professional, Manuel, and her personal bodyguard and mercenary Reggie. The moment their eyes moved, Kelly's soul fired, and her ability with it. The world slowed to a crawl. Less than a crawl. Sound stretched into a long, flat tone. Dust hung in the air. Dr. Haider's mouth was frozen, halfway through a word. Kelly moved in the drifting world.

Her hand went into the pocket of Haider's lab coat draped on his chair. Her fingers found a small, cold data chip. She cracked the seal, jammed the point against her wrist, and felt the sharp burn of information flooding her systems. The raw, private results of Haider's rune tests filled her head. She slid the empty chip case back into his pocket and put her hand back at her side. Time snapped back into motion.

"—create a localized steam explosion that would ruin the etchings," Dr. Haider finished, blinking once. He hadn't paused. He hadn't seen a thing. Kelly nodded, her face perfectly blank. She'd stretched her dilation as far as it could go, until the point her soul ached and her energy dipped. Far, far more than usual. She couldn't keep that level of dilation running for long. But she'd only needed a few seconds. They'd need to be over 40. 0EQ to even see a twitch, she thought.

And every person in this corporate hall of blasphemy was sitting comfortably at, around, or just below level 30 enhancement quotient. Stacy whispered to her cub. Manuel checked his palm. Reggie stared at the door. None of them lived in a world where a theft could happen between one breath and the next. The heavy lab doors opened without a sound. Venus Vaughn walked in. The child of the most powerful man in humanity—also a powerhouse—didn't make noise.

She checked the door lock twice, her movements efficient and final, before turning. Her eyes scanned the room, noting people, exits, and things that could be weapons.

"Joe," Venus said. A flat, polite acknowledgement. She looked at Kelly.

"The rune stuff. It's weird." Venus took a single step forward. The room didn't change, but the pressure did. It was a quiet, heavy weight.

"Your design ignores the usual corporate rules. The big companies love finding loopholes like that. They'd pay you for it." She tilted her head just enough.

"So why are you here? Why not go to one of the Big Four and get paid today?" Venus's face was calm, zeroing in on Kelly. Open. A demigod making small talk.

"A thing like this, made off the books… it means you planned ahead. Or someone helped you. I'm just wondering if what you want lines up with what we want." The pressure was a physical thing. Ren's pressure was a held-back storm. This was the bottom of the ocean. Standing in front of Venus Vaughn meant knowing the person across from you could unmake you with a flick of her hand. Kelly felt her augments cycling faster, her body preparing for a fight it would lose.

Her next move, her next thought, her next words would be... critical.