Chương 34: The Warchild

The staircase groaned under Kelly's weight and war crimes as she limped down the last ten floors, a walking pile of ash and blood, dragging structural violations behind her. [New Title: Warchild (I)] [Title - Warchild (Extremely Rare, I-Grade): Slain 100 enemies alone and without support in a single battle. A being favored by War. When outnumbered, a halo of bone forms above the wielder's head. As life-fluid spills onto the ground, it is absorbed into the halo. Each liter of life-fluid absorbed increases local gravity around the wielder proportionally; the halo shields the wielder from this gravity. While active, all hostile entities in the area are compelled to target the wielder. Unequipping the Title removes the halo and restores gravity to normal.] Warchild. The panel could've stapled a lawsuit to it too and Kelly still would've hit equip.

Even the way it dropped onto the Status panel felt aggressive, as if the thing wanted to punch a hole through the screen and fight her directly. Kelly liked it. Whoever built this thing wasn't playing around—gravity without a drive, gravity siphoning life-fluid into a bone halo, battlefield-wide neural compulsion baked in. She respected the craftsmanship. But the wording stank of loopholes. Things she could exploit once she made it to a place with equipment that didn't come with a side of gunfire.

Kelly equipped the Title, and the change hit like a nail driven through the world. Bone arched out of nothing above her head, twisting into a jagged halo that turned in slow, grinding circles. The broken rubble at her feet began to tremble, armor plates and shattered limbs dragging against the ground as gravity thickened. Guards stumbling between cover fought for balance, caught off-guard by the sudden weight dragging at their legs.

Kelly felt nothing at first, shielded under the halo's pull—until the stairwell itself gave a long, low groan, shifting to adjust as the sound of distant explosions cracked through the floors above the noise of her own battle. Nine floors left. Victory smelled almost plausible, her new Titles thrummed through her bones, the patch of mimic flesh layered over her skin had already adapted into something the guns couldn't chew through—and for one glorious, broken moment, a war of attrition seemed viable.

Bleed them dry. Grind them out. Walk through the front doors like she owned the place and maybe steal a coffee on the way. Then the real countdown spat in her face: her seven-minute window had passed. Power cracked open doors, but time slammed them shut. The first retrieval team had hit the building. They tore up the stairs as a shotgun blast would through glass lungs. Cullen was dead, and their pride was bleeding; they were roaring for payback so loud it rattled the broken floors. 5.

9 EQ each, packed in so much gear it made the numbers feel like an afterthought. Kelly caught genetic augments, armor-piercing guns, and—was that a... a Light railgun? No. It was three.

"That her? That's the freak Cullen warned about?" The first member came up the stairs the way a battering ram took doors, shoulders dragging wide against the broken rails, each step thudding through the concrete. A giant of a man, with a massive axe slung across his back, humming faintly where kinetic charges coiled under the haft. He was broad, stitched together for demolition and bloodwork; he ground his jaw as he spoke, chewing the words as if he expected them to fight back.

"She's dead. Doesn't matter what she's hauling—she dies loud and long for Cullen." The second member was built like a sprinter, all coiled muscle and lean power packed under impact plating, but his arms stretched unnaturally long, engineered for the wild arc of heavy weapons. His eyes were stranger still—split by a visible horizontal band, their surface glinting with metallic blues and greens, packed with twitching micro-lenses that never stopped shifting.

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"Stack her bones high enough, they'll see it from the lobby." The third member was a small woman with bright blue hair and twin kinetic pistols strapped close. Her legs bent backward like a beast's, thick at the thighs and brutal with muscle, built to launch her faster than a human body should move. She wore stripped-down armor shaped for speed, every surface shaved to cut drag. She spoke in clipped, cold bursts, bred for killing fast and vanishing before anyone could strike back.

Guards shooting at Kelly paused and bolted at the first sign, abandoning cover and sprinting away like rats fleeing an incoming flood, their feet tripping over the wreckage of drones they'd been too frantic to avoid. Kelly blinked at the chaos—didn't expect them to scatter that fast. She gave a casual glance back to the stairs, wondering if she'd just become the latest target in an office game of 'run for your life.' Then the first blast hit.

The first blast came with the force of an impatient god reaching down with a punch. Light Railgun slugs tore through concrete, exploding with shrapnel on impact, scattering half a dozen drones into scrap before a slug tore through her cover, and its edge glanced by as its shockwave hit her, rattling her bones to tear skin and dent titanium.

Her Immovable title snapped into place and her mimic skin shifted, diamond-hard, but the slug's glancing blow barely left her with time to swear, sending her spinning with the impact, her dense bones fracturing, doing little to dull the pain. Then she moved, her teleport rig flared, and she skipped sideways—no more than a blur in their sights as she took cover behind something more durable.

They shot again at her last position with a deafening roar, ripping through the staircase and sending debris cascading down in an avalanche—nothing short of a small-scale demolition, turning her once-solid escape route into a smoldering crater. Her teleporter flared, recharged, strapped to her wrist, and Kelly leaned out from behind a cracked column, watching the wreckage with the casual interest of someone driving past a car crash.

"Well, that's one way to blow your load—straight through a staircase." Concrete rained from the ceiling where their blast had ripped a yawning hole straight through the staircase and into the office beyond. Smart-foam surged from the walls in dense, snaking coils, choking fires and starting crude patchwork over the torn metal. Holographic signs blinked into place over the wreckage, bright red "KEEP OUT" banners and grimy "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" tags stuttering across the half-melted wall.

Kelly gave a loose nod at the massive axe-hauler still humming with kinetic charge.

"Was that really necessary, Meat Mountain? Company property's expensive, you know." The stairwell froze for a breath, the retrieval team locking onto her shape through the smoke. The big one let out a sharp grunt, half-lifting his axe, staring at a large hole in the clothing surrounding her stomach, and an even larger, wicked, swollen bruise.

"She—she ate a rail slug—" His voice cracked short. The long-armed man took a quick step forward, words snapping out.

"That should've blown her in half—" The woman with sprint legs shifted her stance, pistols twitching in her hands, unable to believe she still needed them. The long-armed member shifted, his compound bug-eyes twitching across Kelly's position, his perceptive eyes tracking details normal optics would miss.

"There's something off about her," he said, voice cutting through the smoke, too steady for the wreck around them. He jerked his chin toward the upper stairwell.

"Switch to portal protocol. Lock movement." When they saw she could survive a round meant to grind flesh and tear bone, they switched to tactics reserved for monsters. A case. The big guy pulled out a case, opened it, and a mound of flesh opened up into a robot made of flesh, meat, and carbon—a storm of sinew and bone sculpted its own fury as wet snaps rattled across metal.

Small at first, it rapidly expanded, unraveled and grew into something towering that Kelly had only ever heard of and never seen, no matter how much she had wanted to see one, even in all her loops trying to make it to the center of New York. A military Vanguard Strain. A robot made of flesh and bone. It bled and it fought. A grown biological engine of war, disposable, semi-smart, brutal—almost impossible to stop with small arms.

It served short-term annihilation with frightening efficiency, lacking self-awareness and free will. It was big—bigger than Payne, the high-EQ merc who had snapped her spine at Vaughn Labs, heavier than the overclocked brute that had crushed her against the magnetic rail line. Engineered bone jutted from its shoulders and head in spikes, rail spines bristled under stretched flesh, and every step hit the ground with the slow, wet certainty of something built to kill Thresholders. Needless to say, it made the 4.

72 EQ overclocked brute from the hyperloop look like a thrown shoe, shattering every ceiling Kelly thought she had seen. Someone had bolted a metal skull onto its humanoid face—an assortment of glass eyes—and a few multi-purpose holes were left where it could shout or shoot from. The entire effect suggested a very disturbed artistic vision. It looked like a 'roided gorilla that someone had tried their best to make into a demon, gave up halfway, and stuffed rocket launchers into its arms and knives into its body.

And Kelly didn't even see it move.