Chương 17: Smallness Before the Vast

"Tried leaving the city to get bigger guns." She shook her head. Nothing left New York today. The snake controlled space—didn't matter if she was in the sky, underground, or a few miles offshore—when it started to move? She died. She'd tried ignoring it. Let the idiots throw themselves into the meat grinder, see if it made a difference.

"Nope." She'd tried fighting it herself. That one was funny.

"I fought mercs faster than bullets," she said, ticking fingers off the wheel.

"Shot a rocket at an army of little green men. Strapped impossible science to my body and told physics to deal with it." She fell quiet. The road stretched ahead, cracked and empty. None of it mattered. It was just too big. Far too big, and too much. It broke perspective and broke the shape of the city, like someone had cut open the world and let something bigger bleed through. Kelly looked up as the truck rumbled through a shattered overpass.

"One day. One day I'll be level one hundred, a hundred EQ, and you'll be a rug in my apartment." The image made her smile. The military heroes of the Augment Wars had faced extinction-level threats. They'd rewritten biology, built weapons that defied conventional understanding, actually won. But Kelly? She wasn't here to be a saviour. She was here because she refused to be erased. She wasn't here to protect the weak, restore order, turn a profit, or fight for some grand ideal, either.

She was here because this was the best lab she'd ever had. A world ripping itself apart, a status panel rewriting reality, and anomalies that broke physics? It gave her endless tests, and endless opportunities she could push every limit until she cracked them open. This was supposed to be a burden, right? Some unbearable existential weight crushing her under the expectation of greatness? Too bad. She wasn't built for that.

Whatever led to her receiving the loops could try to force some grand purpose on her, but if such a thing existed, it was wasting its time.

The loops had probably started the second 'Project Portal' initiated. At the same moment zero-fallout Higgs cannons had hammered the floating man in Times Square before he could finish summoning that thing. Every loop after the first? The Higgs cannons never came. In addition to all that, the fact that only she was looping felt... odd. An inconsistency in reality. As though something had tried to change everything, and completely failed to change her. But what was it? She didn't feel chosen. Or special.

She felt suspicious. If it had been a random effect, someone else should have been hit. If it had been targeted, then something—or someone—had made her the exception. Something caused this. That meant something could be studied, reverse-engineered, and, eventually, broken down and exploited. Beating the apocalypse was a secondary goal. She was trying to take it apart and see how it worked. Could she hijack the loops? Set her own checkpoints? Speed up time? Or try something even dumber? Oh, the things she'd test.

All she needed was a breadcrumb. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Statistically, at least one of those lab coats should be right here with me. But nope. Just me." Which means this isn't random. Either something picked me, or the universe took one look at my track record and went 'Yeah, this one doesn't know how to let things go. Let's see what happens.' Kelly didn't doubt herself. Ever. Because she knew she would fail. But even in failure there was progress. Iteration. Each failure was a step closer to success. To growth.

If there was a system behind all this, it had horrible decision-making skills. She wasn't a warrior or an assassin. She wasn't built for the sort of brute force that knocked world-ending threats off their feet. She was just a battle-hungry scientist with an unhealthy disregard for self-preservation and a complete inability to let things go. Did she doubt the possibility of stopping this disaster before it spiralled past the point of no return? Sure. But herself? No. That wasn't the question.

Because as long as she was still standing, the answer didn't matter. She'd crawled her way up from 2. 48 to 3. 8EQ, which was a nice little "Hey, congrats, you suck a little less now." But 380% of baseline human strength still meant jack against a fully equipped, heavily geared 7. She had barely hung on against Payne, the merc—and that was with turrets, drones, and security bots all throwing lead in the same direction. Was she stronger? Sure.

But not in any way that mattered when the real monsters were still walking around unbothered. The fabricator schematics would help with that, a little. But Vaughn wasn't an option for retrieving it, not in this loop, and not for what she had planned. Vaughn Industries had everything she needed, but they didn't have permanent nanotech. Vaughn would not be worth it. She'd been expendable to them before, but now? Now she was a walking, talking, bleeding investment.

And corporations didn't like their investments running loose. They had unlimited resources. Tracking tech, hindered only by the chaos outside. And by now, a boardroom full of executives very interested in knowing how she was still alive. If she went back to Vaughn, she'd be walking into a killbox. The last thing she needed was to waste this loop getting dogpiled by an entire team of high EQ mercs. Thresholders, Experts, Tanks, or—god forbid—Elites, each one built for post-human warfare. Hard pass.

It wouldn't even get her any new samples. Maybe Titles, though.

"Actually, that sounds fun," she said, realizing every fight now came with the chance to make things louder. She floored the gas, tearing through the ruined streets, following a trail of destruction that shouldn't be growing this fast. Too many not-Troll footprints. Larger ones, smaller ones. And too many Troll footprints, and something else that didn't look like a Troll's foot at all. There was too much blood, too. Too many things still alive to leave them.

The big grey creature wasn't the only thing making it this far—it had company, and something else was keeping up. There were bullet holes along the street, gunfire that had lasted way longer than it should have. That meant humans, people who were good enough, fast enough, and augmented enough to survive long enough to keep up with them. Kelly smiled, steering into the chaos. Exactly what she needed. Decoys. Something stronger and worth stealing from.

Her body was still tearing itself apart at the seams, atoms rejecting atoms and molecules rejecting molecules in a microscopic civil war. And the only thing keeping her alive was the temporary cocktail of medical nanotech stalling the inevitable. The solution? Step one, get a troll sample—no need to kill it—just take a big, healthy chunk of its still-beating heart, or if she was feeling generous, an even larger piece of its brain.

Most things could 'alternatively survive' that, though most people would call 'alternatively surviving' as 'being dead'. Step two, break into one of the most secure buildings in the city, a fortress packed with enough drones, gene-crafted weaponry, and gun-toting droids to hold off an army, staffed by augmented assholes who didn't need tech to be superhuman but used it anyway, because why stop at terrifying when you can be excessive? A reasonable plan. Her fingers tightened on the wheel.

She didn't need the status backing her. She had science, persistence, and an infinite number of tries. That was all she needed. She didn't need skills, either. Because Kelly was a crazy immortal scientist who never quit, reverse-engineered the apocalypse, and could endlessly stack magical traits. And the very thing she was looking for was in sight. Her target.