Chương 137: 136. Spellforged Human

Venus stared, awaiting an answer. Kelly shrugged, a loose, casual motion that felt absurd.

"Joe and I go way back. He doesn't treat this like a spreadsheet." She met Venus's gaze.

"The Big Four? They don't care. They'd own my work, lock it in a vault, and send thoughts and prayers if your building fell down. I'm not here for corporate ignorance. I'm here because you're actually trying to fight, not just lose slowly like everyone else is." Venus was hinting Kelly was using them. Disloyal. That Kelly had a different plan that could hurt them. It was true. All of it was for Kelly. She'd already stolen Haider's private research from his pocket while he talked.

Kelly knew Venus was suspicious, but Venus didn't know that Kelly knew. A slight, genuine confusion touched Venus's expression.

"What are you implying?" she asked. Kelly's answer hadn't followed the script.

"I'm saying," Kelly said, leaning in, "that these people will happily watch the world burn if the stock price looks good. And when we inevitably riot? When we demand a new law or some cash to shut up? They'll rubber-stamp it faster than you can say 'PR nightmare.' So yeah, maybe we protect ourselves before they decide to intentionally turn half the city into a new beach in—" She checked the time—"four hours—with all of us still in it." Venus stared. She didn't speak. She knows I've figured her out! She's on to me!

Damn it! Kelly kept her face set in enthusiastic, chaotic focus.

"Can you all be focused for just one minute?" Stacy cut in, holding her cub tighter as it licked her chin. She'd missed the lethal tension completely.

"Do you two get what this is? This is new. A brand new category of augmentation. The sixth revolution." Stacy's eyes grewmore excited by the second.

"Dont you get it? It costs nothing. It works on gear, on clothes. On implants. My dad's notes say it makes things twelve times tougher for no extra cost. We made a new thing. This changes everything for people actually living in this mess. For everyone." Manuel leaned on a console, completely ignoring the moments gravitas. He looked bored.

"She's right about the Big Four. They're slow. We're fast. Kelly shows up with a fast thing. Why doesn't matter." He shrugged at Venus.

"Maybe she's a saint. Maybe she's not. The stuff works. That's what I care about." He paused.

"But if Kelly's right about the East Grid, then the first group to use these runes makes the new rules." Venus crossed her arms. Her eyes locked on Kelly, and for a second, the evaluation vanished. What was left was simple: a predator looking at a strange, active creature in its space. She was weighing whether to kill her right there. Then she looked away, thoughtful.

"It's true that the East Grid is a mess. It eats people and gear," she conceded, her voice flat again.

"But what you're saying—that the allied forces will erase billions worth of public and private infrastructure, and intentionally kill millions of innocents—that's a big accusation to throw at the people who run this planet."

"It's only an accusation if we're wrong," Kelly said. Her mind was already racing ahead, mixing the stolen Haider data with her own plans. She was thinking about skin depth, activation conditions, and how to hide the Unstoppable Physical Resilience rune under her own skin. Venus stopped. Her eyes fixed on Kelly. The air in the lab thickened. Venus just looked at her, a long, flat stare that peeled back layers and counted ribs.

Kelly felt it then—a subtle warp in the space between them, a ripple through the flow of moments. Time itself flexed, a single soft shudder passing from Venus's stillness into the room.

"You're strange," Venus said. Her voice gave the words without weight and devoid of judgement. It was a statement of fact, the same way someone would note the color of the wall. She turned to Dr. Haider.

"I'll need a physical file with the finalized results before the job. The usual encryption." Then she walked to the lab doors, opened them, and was gone. The hall held its shape for a second after she left. Then Dr. Haider let out a slow, relieved breath. Suzan sagged against the table, her wolf cub whining softly. Reggie the bodyguard unclenched his jaw with an audible pop. Kelly realized she'd been holding the air in her own lungs and released it, feeling her augments dial back from their ready-state hum.

Manuel kept reading something on his wrist. Today, he hadn't even noticed. After that, Kelly got out of there. She thumbed her truck to life, and sped home. A hole in reality on 8th Avenue was dripping what looked like giant, angry snails made of melted wax. Kelly swerved onto the sidewalk to avoid the main puddle, her tires crushing an abandoned hot-dog cart.

"Watch the paint," she told the snails in her rearview as one of them hissed at her bumper. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. The drive home was a demolition derby with extra teeth.

She swerved around a pulsating portal scar that vomited crystalline slugs across the asphalt, plowed through a pack of skittering, six-legged horrors that sounded like breaking glass when they died under her tires, and detoured down three blocks because a corporate cleanup team ahead was sweeping the street with throbbing mana scanners. Their gear was too good, their payroll too fat. Getting spotted meant paperwork, and Kelly would rather wrestle the crystalline slugs. Her corner of the outskirts was a hike.

She moved through streets that were obstacle courses of debris, abandoned vehicles, and the occasional, very still corpse. Distant booms echoed from the East Grid where the daily civil war was kicking into its evening session. The city, as usual was a mess, but so late in the day? It was a special, specific kind. Towers stood, but many were cut open, spilling light and strange flora from portal wounds in their sides.

The sky was a tactical display of wrong colors—magenta, sulfur-yellow, a deep void-green where the dimensional rifts bled through. The atmosphere tasted of ozone, spilled fuel, and something sweetly rotten. It was the tail end of the first day of the magical portal apocalypse, and the planet had the vibe of a bar after a really bad fight. Her building was, miraculously, still a building.

It had a new, impressive crack running up the side like a lightning bolt, and most of the windows were blown out, but the door was on its hinges. That was the current standard for 'luxury living' in downtown apocalypse. She parked in the rubble-strewn lot. The important thing was that it was still standing. For now. She keyed through three separate physical locks on the poorly reinforced door to her unit.

The space inside was an apartment if the word 'apartment' defined a salvage yard that had agreed to store a bed, a minimalist lounge, and an insanity-filled workshop. She needed the privacy for what came next. The walls here were thick, the neighbors were dead or gone, and, most importantly, there were no demigods, suspicious Echelon hitwomen, or kindly doctors with stealable research. There was just Kelly, her gear, and the new runes itching to get under her skin.

Inside her stripped-down workshop, Kelly got to work. she implanted every single script, every dense cluster of runes they'd made into her body. The crystals growing in her had been updated just for this moment. Environmental Immunity went across her shoulders and down her spine. Unstoppable Physical Resilience was woven around her major bones and organs. Permanent WeaponxArmor Fortification etched itself into the bones of her forearms and shins.

Enhanced Reflexes and Agility became a complex fractal along her nervous pathways. Eternal Youth settled deep, a dense cluster around her heart and brainstem. The Mana Conduit Body became a network, circulating mana where stillness used to be. And those she'd personally lifted from Haider's private research. She implanted them in her body, in her weapon, and in her very clothes. [Rune-script: Kinetic Mastery This system transforms the user's body into a living capacitor for kinetic energy. It absorbs force; it captures, refines, and violently re-emits it. Every impact charges the matrix, allowing the user to store energy and release it through focused strikes, creating concussive blasts or reinforcing their own movements to destructive levels. Power exerted is based on stored kinetic energy through received impacts or movement. The need to gradually accelerate, because inertia resists acceleration, is erased. The user can instantly change their velocity because they are directly controlling the kinetic energy state, not working against inertia through conventional force application. Kinetic energy and inertia are fundamentally linked. Kinetic mastery allows for Inertial Mastery. A mobility-focused system that allows the user to manipulate localized inertia. It enables instantaneous acceleration, dead-stop halts, and rapid directional changes without incurring g-forces or momentum-based trauma. The user fall safely by negating their mass relative to the ground. Program Components: Kinetic Particle Stabilization (78) + Energy Feedback Loop (64) + Energy Flow Regulation (52) + Particle Density Reduction (41) + Mana Particle Smoothing (33) + Atomic Reinforcement (29) + Gravitational Field Equalization (140) + Mana Particle Capture (80)] Kinetic Mastery? Directional mastery? Inertia control, zero to a hundred in any direction? Plus her own kinetic attack? Damn, Dr.

Haider had really been gatekeeping his best work. Hoarding it from her. Kelly smiled in genuine appreciation. The process felt like being sewn together with live wires. Her skin steamed. The room smelled of ozone and scorched meat. When it was done, she stood in the center of the room, feeling the new circuits hum beneath her skin, syncing with her existing augments. Compared to two hours ago? Kelly was now legitimately overpowered. The present her could kick the past her's ass.

Two hours ago, Kelly had been a person with ambitions. Now she was a person with the infrastructure to actually achieve them. A notification bloomed in her vision—one that only appeared when your body decided to become something new: [Increased mana reserves, potency, and purity has permanently boosted all Traits by one grade. Additional effects gained.] [All Traits: Grade I → II] [Trait: Mana Vacuum Grade II → III] Her skin felt different.

Her bones felt like they'd been reforged by something that understood engineering better than she did. Her reflexes had developed reflexes. The world had gotten slower, or she'd gotten faster, and the distinction didn't matter anymore because the result was the same: she was no longer playing in the same league as everyone else. Kelly stood in front of the mirror and watched herself become something that the numbers couldn't quite contain anymore. Now that she had all this power? She needed to test them, and would.

Immediately. [Epic Trait: 'Ascended Human (II)' gained!] [Epic Title: 'Spellforged human (I)' gained!]"Wait—there's more?" Kelly's eyes widened in surprise.