Chương 15: Chasing Rampage

Jackhammer definitely reported her. Kelly would bet her life on it. Hell, considering today's job, someone was likely already watching his feed, making sure he wasn't dead and that Vaughn Security hadn't just been infiltrated by a swarm of corporate mercs. Kelly knew that even if he didn't send the report, his augments probably did it for him. The 7EQ that had chased her? Payne?

Despite being in the same room as her, he'd been busy fighting a literal army of hastily disabled mechs, drones, walls, and droids armed with heavy artillery. All while attempting to steal anything he could. It was likely he hadn't seen much between the bullets and her whipping chain-blade, especially given the fact that it sounded like the bozos who hired him had told him to leave her and take the troll vial.

But he'd walked out of the lab breathing, which meant that eventually, if he ever admitted to the fact that he'd struggled to land a hit on her, a mere research intern, someone else with a lot of money would be very interested in what had just happened.

"Yay, more fans." Kelly floored it, her truck tearing through the ruined streets, bouncing over debris like a boat on water. Her plan had been straightforward. Grab a troll sample, map out its regenerating genetic mana pathway, and splice it into her own DNA. Her home lab could tweak and modify, but rewriting genetic code was out of its league. Now that going back to Vaughn Industries was off the table, she needed a place with full-spectrum genetic splicing capabilities.

She needed a place with a genetic facility, and fabricators. Fortunately, in New York, there were four of them. Four major corps controlled the augmentation market, each carving out their own monopoly—one for each kind of augment. Four flavors of post-human potential, neatly packaged, rigorously patented, and priced just high enough to keep the best upgrades out of reach for anyone who actually needed them. The most common were Cybernetic Augments.

Cybernetics were the entry-level upgrade—neural links, robotic limbs, direct brain-to-machine connections—basic, accessible, and slapped onto anyone with a decent insurance plan. They were common and affordable, but still impressive improvements. They replaced flesh with hardware, nerves with circuits, and achieved similar results as the other methods but were far more fragile, requiring frequent maintenance and repair. Biomechanical & Bioelectronic Augments were the second type.

More than simple robotic limbs, these augments fused biological tissue with electronic systems. Not machine. Not flesh, but a true blend. Hybrid mechanical-biological systems that seamlessly integrated mechanical components with organic tissue. Retinal implants, bones that shrugged off car crashes, synthetic tendons reinforced with polymers, musculature enhanced with kinetic amplifiers. They granted enhanced vision, boosted reflexes, and synaptic speed no baseline human could match.

A seamless hybrid reserved for those whose bank accounts never saw a single digit. They remained out of reach for most, reserved for either direct employees or the more successful citizens of New York—those with a little cash to burn. Then there were Nanotech Augments. Permanent Nanotechnological Augments were the second most expensive on the market and exceedingly rare. They sat at the luxury tier—self-repairing tissue, molecular reconstruction, microscopic robots tweaking biology in real time.

Tiny, invisible engineers working beneath the skin, patching damage before it became fatal, rewriting biology on the fly. Finally, at the top of all augments lay genetic augmentation—the pinnacle, the holy grail, the price tag no one outside the elite could even dream of affording. Genetic rewrites weren't always better than the others—that wasn't why they were deemed to be more than just upgrades. They were legacies, carving superiority into DNA itself to affect entire bloodlines.

Longer life, stronger bones, sharper minds—an entire genome restructured for performance beyond peak. The elites no longer just had money; they had better bodies, better cognition, even better bones. Every genetic tweak widened the gap, stacking advantages with each generation like compound interest until catching up became impossible. And Kelly's existence threw a wrench straight into that whole structure.

As her truck moved, she flipped on the radio, changed gears, and cracked the window open, the cool air eliciting a smile. Only Vaughn and the lone merc, Payne, knew of her existence for sure, and it would only last for this one specific loop, but there was nothing corporations hated more than something they couldn't patent. Now that traits were on the table, the corps would notice. No way around it.

Vaughn, the other megacorp jerkoffs, maybe even some bored international state or off-world nation, would pick up on something. The wars had set them back a little, but a world this deep in surveillance? If they wanted to, they could have eyes on every other street, and already had satellites monitoring the grenade-filled dumpster fire that was Earth from the safety of orbit. There was no permanent way of slipping through the cracks.

Sure, she could keep scrubbing data post-discovery, erasing traces, but if someone saw her tank a missile to the head and walk it off without the scar to match? Yeah. They'd start watching. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. They'd sent hit squads before in past loops. Standard cleanup, standard corporate murder—but only when she'd stepped on their toes. Moving forward they wouldn't only send killers. They'd send retrieval teams.

Men in clean suits that didn't wear armor because they didn't have to. Guys with reinforced cages, tranquilizers, and orders to drag her into a lab before she could get strong enough to convince them otherwise. That was going to get annoying. She hadn't drawn real attention before because, up until now, she'd stayed within the limits of what was physically possible.

Sure, she'd done some crazy stuff—improvised weaponry, punching Ogres in the face, the occasional citywide blackout and surviving explosions she had no business navigating her way through—but it was always within EQ expectations. Even when she flipped the power balance, it was explainable. But now? Now she was breaking rules nobody knew could be broken.

If she did something like 'accidentally punch open a portal to Hell and invite whatever was inside for drinks,' then yeah, they'd start treating her like a priority. For now, titanium-dense bones weren't a headline. Plenty of people walked around with reinforced skeletons, either from augments or genetic mods. Nothing worth rolling out the red carpet for. But once she really got into the weird shit—like whatever that thing in China was—the A-listers would start dropping down to earth like hailstones.

They'd want to know what she was, how she did it. Strap her to a table, pick her apart piece by piece, and slap a patent on whatever they found. Maybe sell it to the highest bidder. Pfft, good luck with that. As if any of them could reverse-engineer this. They'd be dissecting me for centuries and still end up scribbling question marks. She really needed to upgrade the hardware in her home lab. She'd had plenty of 3D printers before the loops. Obviously.

How else was she supposed to make all the illegal, experimental junk no one wanted her to have? Fabricators were locked behind corporate walls, experimental tech not meant for public hands. If she got the schematics, she could print her own every loop. No restrictions. No oversight. But data, machines, and whatever gene-splicing concoctions she decided to fabricate.

Vaughn handed out employee augments at a discount like a treat, or bait, but everyone had already seen what the corps were capable of during the last pandemic. A lot of people would go custom if they could, but nobody had ever had the choice and the rest didn't even know it was an option. Kelly, though? People like her, the scientists and engineers, they had the tools, knowledge, and sheer corporate access to legally dig into things meant to stay locked up from the rest of the public.

It was the reason why her augments were hers, not quite off the books, but uncompromised and offline. If only she had a fabricator of her own, she would've had genetic mods in her first week of employment. She logged "borrow fabricator schematics" onto her ever-growing to-do list, right between don't die and buy a CoffeeBot. But there were only four in New York, and the nearest one sat in Genecorp's shiny, hyper-secured headquarters on Park Avenue.

She'd find the troll, then she'd break into Genecorp or maybe sneak in. That'd get her inside with the least amount of bullets in her face. She had to remind herself that this loop counted. A hundred plus loops of immortality tended to dilute a person's idea of consequences. Right. Sneaking in. She reminded herself, it should be fun. Genecorp had been the proud employer of the 7EQ superkiller who trashed her lab... so really, they had it coming.

Since they specialized in genetic augments, she'd have to go full incognito—signal jammers, no face, no breathing, no fingerprints, no DNA left behind for them to snatch up and identify her by. Kelly veered left, dodging a round of gunfire and some poor bastards trying to stab a tank-sized snake-monster with what looked like rebar, handguns, scavenged weaponry, and bad decisions. She squinted. That thing definitely did something cool—maybe acid spit, or maybe bone armor?

—but her whole 'potentially exploding' situation took priority. She sighed, adjusting her grip on the wheel.

"Unfortunate," she muttered, absolutely not slowing down as she left them to figure it out. Kelly leaned back against the seat, one hand tapping the wheel, the other adjusting the radio until trash turned into something more upbeat. She pressed the gas a little harder, humming along to the music. Either there was a big grey corpse waiting for her, or she'd find a lovely breadcrumb trail of dead people leading straight to the lovely dumb extra-dimensional giant himself.

Either way, she needed that walking genetic upgrade. When she arrived, the street was a mess, way worse than she had ever seen it, which tracked, considering she had never made it this far before. Kelly swerved to avoid the remains of a security drone, its chassis twisted and showing signs it had been stepped on by something with a serious weight problem. The closer she got, the more obvious it was just how bad things had gotten here.

"Damn, they really take playing tag passionately," she muttered, observing the destruction as she slowly drove through the street. The roads were barely intact, whole slabs of pavement tilted, cracked, or just gone from multiple impacts, their edges sheared clean through as though someone had taken a massive industrial saw to the street. The barricade, or what was left of it, was scattered in crumpled heaps, its plating torn apart like aluminum foil, smashed vehicles half-buried beneath the wreckage.

Kelly swerved, nearly taking out a guy mid-sprint as she tore through the remains of the barricade. Someone had lost badly here—there were burned-out wrecks, crushed storefronts, and at least one dude who had been introduced to a wall at terminal velocity. Rough. She rolled past a few corpses, Simon's men mostly, judging by the patchwork armor and "we die like idiots" level of planning. One merc stood out—not because he was more intact, but because his skull was about ten feet from his body.

Definitely not how heads were supposed to work. Kelly stepped out of the truck, scanning the bullet-riddled pavement. There—half-buried under some poor bastard who had lost a fight with gravity, was a police rifle just waiting to be stolen. How generous. She yanked it free, brushing off the blood. Unlocked. Which meant one of Simon's people had cracked the biometric security. That was... actually impressive. Corporate weapons didn't just let anyone pull the trigger.

Sliding back into the truck, she checked the charge. Full mag. Her gaze shot to the ground—big, heavy impacts, something that had just walked, and then steamrolled through concrete like each segment personally owed it money. And off to the side, a fresh trail of destruction leading off down an adjacent road. Kelly grinned, adjusting her grip on the wheel.

"There you are."