Chương 16: 100EQ Until the Snake

Her foot slammed the accelerator, and the car tore down streets that had already made their peace with falling apart. She was following something—the destruction pointed in one direction, a breadcrumb trail of obliterated concrete. The pavement flew under her tires, and somewhere behind all that speed, a tremor rolled through the city, then the ground, then the very air around her, like the space itself was exhaling. She felt it in her teeth, a tension, a pull—then the sky tore apart.

Above Times Square, the sky changed. The largest portal just... tore. Ripped apart, stretching as though something had grabbed the edges of existence and pulled. Kelly turned her head skyward, the road almost forgotten. She looked up long enough to see what was coming through, then the road needed her attention again. The city's ruins trembled as something vast shoved its way through, ignoring the laws of space like an overcrowded train forcing in one more passenger.

The sheer mass of it broke the sky, and it carried a name someone once gave to something that shouldn't exist. Leviathan. The word didn't do it justice. The word was like calling something like this by that name and then the ocean looked at you, confused, because this was far worse. Its form coiled, shifting between impossible enormity and compressing space into something worse—something that shouldn't fit inside the planet, let alone the city.

The head came first, a yawning abyss of black scales and gleaming ridges, larger than whole districts, its very presence bending the air like a singularity. Eyes, cracked and massive like shattered moons, turned downward and gazed upon the wreckage of a world already dying. They swept over the ruins in a way that suggested it was deciding whether the world was already dead or if finishing the job would be fun.

Its body spilled through the portal like an ocean spilling free, the cloud layer parting, the sky cracking, twisting space, all while its head hung behind the floating man, motionless, waiting. As if the moment he allowed it, it would consume everything. Her EQ scanner went haywire. Kelly leaned back in the driver's seat, one hand loose on the wheel, the other pressing a vial of temporary medical nanotech into her arm. The growing ache spreading through her began to fade.

She glanced up mid-injection, eyes tracking the impossible mass coiled above the city, waiting for the command to swallow New York.

"Oh yeah. Forgot about that." The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. It had been a pretty hectic afternoon, but now that the sun had dipped a little and the sky had split open further, it started. And many hours later... all her progress? Absolutely pointless. Any normal person would have moved with the urgency of a cocaine-fueled Chihuahua. Not Kelly. Kelly was not normal—she never had been, and the loops had only made it worse. Kelly was a scientist first.

Kelly only cared about two things: cracking every mystery of magic until the whole thing was wrapped around her little finger, and finding Jennie. Saving the city came somewhere after that, maybe after lunch, or tomorrow. Sure, she'd save everyone eventually, but seeing tomorrow mattered more than moral grandstanding. Kelly wasn't a bleeding-heart hero—the world had enough people pretending to be heroes, anyway. In reality, it was mostly cosplay. The world had been beyond saving long before the portals.

She'd rescue the people in it once she had what she needed. Plus, she'd settled on a timeline: the floating idiot and his monument to insecurity could hold a pin until she hit 100EQ. She'd need at least that much to teach them about unlawful trespassing. Then—and only then—would she introduce his face to her boot... and make some excellent boots from whatever was left of the snake.

Right on cue, the snake's mouth opened, the portal continuing to bleed something way too big for reality. She could feel it. The city felt it. Streets cracked, buildings groaned—the thing could twist space, somehow. Kelly had thrown everything at this thing. Every plan, every weapon, every last-second gamble. Didn't matter. The result was always the same; its jaws descended and the city dies, she dies, and the loop resets. She stared through the windshield as the truck chewed through another empty intersection.

The thing in the sky hadn't moved yet, but the clock was ticking. She'd lived this day enough times to know exactly when the clock ran out.

"I called in the big guns," she said to the empty cab.

"Humanity's got experience with war and catastrophe. There's protocol. Planetary crisis laws. They showed up with extreme violence, and then they just sat there." She swerved around a fallen traffic drone.

"Claimed they were worried about civilians who hadn't made it to the emergency bunkers yet. Very concerned. Very noble." Her voice flattened.

"They're drooling." Kelly knew they were simply salivating at all the delicious magical tech on display—studying it just like her. She'd tried calling in the not-so-big guns. Less than a fifth of them ever came.

"Useless." She thumped the steering wheel.

"They weren't underprepared. They weren't outgunned. They were stockpiling weapons and stripping red tape, waiting to see how this would play out. Billions of people out there in the stars, watching the feeds, and every single one of them thinking the same thing: not my planet, not my problem." They would send ordnance to destroy this thing once it started moving, but by then it was too late.

The floating man in the sky would redirect half of it, and only a third of the city's self-repairing infrastructure would survive the fallout. And the worst part wasn't that the floating bastard in the sky always protected it, or the magical overpowered explosion that would glass half of the city later; it was that it wasn't even all the way through yet. The city-destroying horror stayed consistent, regardless of butterflies. This was not a legendary hero moment. Just her, looking up and thinking, Well. Shit.