Chương 32: Mana Monsters’ Descent

Kelly had solved her imminent combustion issue. That achievement alone deserved a parade, or at minimum confetti, or maybe a commemorative plaque. She'd settled for the teleporter rig now on her person and linked to her nervous system. She also had new samples surging through her cells, permanently. Victory. Then she hit the stairwell at a sprint. By the fourth landing, the full, all-encompassing, pain-in-the-ass scope of her situation arrived.

It arrived as subtly as a corporate execution order, which was, in fact, not subtle at all. Issue one: the teleporter rig was currently linked to her spine. If she died now—a statistically likely event—she'd wake up next reset without it. The only place she'd found it was in this specific GeneCorp lab, at that specific moment. Show up earlier? Maybe it's still in a building. Show up later? Some corporate cleanup crew has it already off-grid. Deviating meant gambling a whole reset. The ROI was terrible.

Issue two: greed. Kelly couldn't abandon the staircase path. That lab was a candy store of genetic horror shows, and she'd only grabbed a few treats. Another sample sat there, practically winking at her. The best one. Walking away was financially irresponsible. Issue three: the exit strategy. Assume she lived, grabbed the powerful sample, and got the rig. She was still seventy floors up in a concrete vertical tomb.

The only way down was through a gauntlet of automated sentry guns and security drones armed with plasma cutters that went through reinforced steel doors the same way a blowtorch went through ration-bar plastic. And the guards, Kelly couldn't forget the guards. It was a corporate killbox designed by the most over-funded, flesh-obsessed architects on the planet. It was, quite frankly, impossible. But Kelly was impossible's much cooler, better-dressed cousin.

So Kelly, on the second flight of stairs, realizing all of these issues, just laughed and ran. Give up? Walk away with her life and a few new magical trinkets?

"Ha," Kelly said, the sound bouncing off sterile concrete.

"Yeah, that's not happening." Then she took the stairs three at a time. A security drone the size of a large dog unfolded from a ceiling panel on the fifteenth floor. Its quad rotors hummed. Its mounted plasma cutter spun up with a high-pitched whine that could cut diamond. Plasma was super-heated gas—so hot it stopped acting like air and became electrically charged soup that powered stars, sparked lightning, and cut through metal for a living. Kelly was decidedly less hardy than metal.

"Lethal force authorized. Authorized personnel only," it buzzed.

"Submit to scan." Kelly didn't break stride.

"My authorization is I'm leaving." The plasma beam lanced out, slicing a molten line across the stairwell wall where her head had been. The air smelled of ozone and vaporized concrete. She vaulted the railing, dropping half a flight, and landed in a roll. The drone banked, seeking a firing angle. She came up with her sidearm. Standard rounds pinged off its polymer carapace. Useless. The plasma cutter recharged with an audible thrum. Kelly shot the closing ceiling panel above it. Seven times in a single second.

The panel gave way, impacting the drone's rotors. It sputtered, listed sideways, and slammed into the wall.

"Hi," Kelly said as squads of guards chased her from behind. She drew her knife, stolen from the teleporter.

"I'm just passing through." The fight was brief, ugly, and involved a lot of squealing and stabbing in pitch darkness. When it was over, Kelly wiped her stolen knife on her pants and kept sprinting.

"Three percent probability," she muttered.

"I'm buying a lottery ticket after this." She dropped back into the stairwell on the twenty-sixth floor, past the quarantine door. The descent continued. A kinetic slug shot from a ceiling turret, fired with a hydraulic, armor-denting thwump. It hit her temple. Her skull gave way with a wet, definitive crunch. It didn't hurt, not exactly. Her consciousness became nothing more than a stopped signal.

The last thing she registered was the taste of copper, the sight of her own blood spraying across the stairwell's safety-yellow handrail, and a detached, clinical thought: So that's what that sounds like.

She woke with copper on her tongue, stared at her apartment's ceiling crack. She had the troll-regen. She could have stopped. Could have quit. Should have. Why didn't she give up on this building? First—the Deadqueen's tech. All three of them. Teleporter. Phaser. Future-sight. She didn't know how, but she planned to score them all. The person everyone said was dead and the one she'd been hunting for years without the resources to catch so much as murmurs online, until recently.

Last loop, she had one, but she wanted all three intact and still pinging to chase down a trace that might lead to her. Stolen novel; please report. That building had things she needed. Multiple things, and she was not leaving without a single one of them. Kelly headed back to GeneCorp. Second death came on the twenty-seventh floor when a ceiling turret punched a slug through her skull before she saw it. She woke in her own bed with the same crack above her.

Third attempt, she sidestepped the turret and reached the twenty-eighth floor, where a droid carved through her ribs with a plasma beam. Kelly woke in bed and pressed a palm to her side. Fourth loop, the werewolf trait flared before the stairwell. Her body went denser, meaner. The turret shots looked slower. She clawed the droid out of the air on the twenty-eighth floor, then a grenade from above opened her chest right as she reached the twenty-ninth. She woke with her hand flat over her sternum.

The sixth time down the building, Reggie's crew reached her. The Phaser stepped through the wall, and Greg snapped into place beside her, charging at her, teleport rig humming in his ribs. Kelly put her blade through his side, and tore the rig out from under his ribs while he screamed. She left him breathing on the landing. The Phaser swung at her spine, and she ducked, then kicked Greg down the stairs.

"You're welcome," she said, and the future-sight gunman put a round through her left eye before she could turn. She woke in bed, squeezed both eyes shut, and said to the empty room, "That one was just rude." She made good on her promise to Greg. Exactly once. But that rig was a starring player in Kelly's 'Stay Alive' plan. The eighth attempt ended on the forty-eighth floor when she threw a stolen grenade around a corner, heard it clatter, and watched a drone carry its own cluster back. Her anger spiked.

Mer-blood seized the coolant inside that drone and sent it hurtling. Grenades rained from above and her world became fire. She woke with a full-body flinch. Her ninth fall down the tower carried her to twenty-two. She was adjusting. The stairwell became a sequence of movements, each death a lesson. A plasma cutter took her arm, then opened her throat. Kelly woke and flexed each finger. Kelly tried again, then died, and tried again, and again, and again.

[Trait: Giantbane Grade II → III] In the loops that followed, Kelly inched closer and closer to her goal each attempt: getting the hell out of the building with loot. Each death was one step closer, one floor down. Since the teleportation rig was finally working and fully synchronized over multiple loops of robbing the emotionally stunted man, Kelly familiarized herself with its two-second recharge between jumps. She'd robbed the teleporter, Greg, twelve times over twelve separate loops.

Since there was still no guarantee she'd be out of the building before higher-EQ mercs returned from bagging whatever mutant souvenirs they could scrape off the streets, Kelly decided this current latest run was about one thing: Stacking Titles on her way down all seventy floors.

"Twenty-seven floors. That was the first run, twelve loops ago. Not bad, honestly. Beats the loop where I tripped on a corpse and six different departments shot me at once—" Kelly ducked under a drone's plasma beam and fired a stolen rifle at the nearest droid. The shot sparked off its shell and she kept moving.

"—Getting back inside was harder. Some idiot tried to blackmail me over wanting an illegal EQ score. I gave up nearly every royalty stream I had left, and they still denied me samples. Said they'd push me over the legal limit." She vaulted a railing, landed on the next landing, and heard boots above. A security guard shouted something about containment. Kelly ignored him.

"—So I can't test on myself. Gotta stay under 6. I'd have to use someone else. Except it never works on anyone else. It only works on me. A Kelly-only solution—" She kicked a droid as it rounded the corner, then stomped on its sensor array.

"Which means they eventually figure out I can't deliver a viable product, and they try to take my tech and dissect the rest. Not in that order." She'd been chased through the building more times than she could count. With turrets, guards, drones, Reggie and his personal lightning storm, that poor future-sight gunman who still couldn't see her coming, and Greg. Sweet Greg. Her favorite ex-teleporter.

The only other person in the network of planets who might understand what was actually happening to reality—not that Kelly needed her to solve it—she could crack the apocalypse solo. She had her own reasons for finding her. And she didn't buy the dead story. Hell, she wasn't even sure Jellybean came with a death setting. Second—remained the same, but with more detail; there was a sample in this building that GeneCorp swore came from a reality-warping creature. Something that made space go sideways. Kelly wanted it.

Because of what it could do and because it wasn't supposed to exist. Like a magical middle finger to physics. Which made it perfect. She needed that in her blood immediately. The corridor went still in a way that made the back of her neck prickle. The guards ahead stopped firing and pressed themselves against the walls. The drones that had been hunting her broke off and scattered upward, disappearing through vents and ceiling panels. Kelly heard the footsteps before she saw him.

A man stepped out of a side corridor and filled the space. He was huge, shoulders wide, chest covered in medals and combat patches. Some of those patches were from things she'd seen on walls. Some she didn't. Her lenses showed his EQ score, and then a red warning glyph appeared over his head—a skull with a slash through it. The warning pulsed. She had never seen that glyph before. It didn't mean "proceed with caution." It meant "run." The guards flattened themselves further. One dropped his rifle.

Another backed into a wall and stayed there. The man pointed at Kelly. His arm rose. The sleeve split at the seams, and the skin underneath began to unfold, panels of flesh opening in a spiral. The exposed tissue glowed white, then blue-white. Heat radiated off him in waves. The paint on the wall beside him bubbled and peeled. Then a blast came. A column of heat punched from his palm, dense and blinding. It vaporized a drone that had been too slow to escape. It blew through three walls.

It filled the corridor with fire and light. Kelly dove, but the heat was already there.