Chương 5: Iterative Homocide: A Practical Guide

A scream carved through the chaos—"Troll!" —and Kelly's head snapped up just in time to watch the thing's arm whip sideways with the lazy, unstoppable momentum of a freight train that had stopped caring about things like "physics" or "not killing people." The nearest mercenary took the hit square in the chest and stopped being a person. He became a blur. A blur that ended with the wet, structural crunch of a body going through a building wall across the street and not coming out the other side.

The remaining four didn't flinch. They didn't even look at the hole their coworker had just vacated. Their formation widened before the dust settled, rifles snapping up with that faint augmented whine of targeting systems locking, bodies moving with expensive, surgically precise detachment that cost more than most people made in a lifetime. Rounds tore into the troll's hide, stitching lines across its torso, puffing dust from puckered craters that sealed almost as fast as they opened. The thing barely slowed.

It barely even noticed. Simon's crew scattered like roaches in sudden light. Most fired. Some ran. A few decided it was a great day for rocket launchers. Kelly? Kelly ran. Forward. The troll roared and every gun in the street answered it. Kelly's boots found the gaps between rubble before her brain finished logging them, her legs pushing her faster and farther than they should have, muscles humming. The chaos was perfect. No one watched her.

She ducked a falling sign, sidestepped a crater, hurdled a body, and kept her eyes on the gap in the barricade—forty meters of wreckage between her and the other side, and she crossed half of it before the first 'Stop' was yelled. A shout rose from across the street. One of Simon's men had spotted her. His pistol came up. Kelly didn't dodge. Instead, she scooped a fallen rifle off the ground without breaking stride, her fingers finding the barrel, her momentum carrying the rotation, and she hurled it.

It rocketed at his face with startling force, knocking the shooter backward. Civilians always panicked when she did that. Most people expected you to shoot.

"Appreciate it," she muttered, vaulting the last stretch. The crack of a rifle split the air. Her chest opened. She felt the impact before she heard the shot—a hot, wet rupture that turned her legs to dead weight mid-stride. Her body pitched forward. Blood poured out of her with an urgency that meant it had somewhere else to be. Then she stumbled, blood pouring from her chest. Kelly didn't see the shot that stopped her.

One moment, she was diving through the gap for the other side of the barricade; the next, her body was already shutting down, nerves screaming, vision tunneling. She hit the ground arms-first, elbows snapping together, rubble biting into her palms. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel, then to a single point of light. She dragged her eyes upward, locking onto the man who landed the shot. The shooter stood over her. Rifle leveled. Posture oozing self-satisfaction and poor trigger discipline.

He'd shot a fleeing woman in the back and clearly wanted credit for it.

"Really?" Her voice came out wet, thick with something she didn't have time to analyze.

"Man, I hope you enjoy this moment, 'cause you are not gonna like the next one." The muzzle flash answered for him.

She sat up gasping awake in her bed, the taste of blood still in her mouth, the sound of emergency evacuation warnings muted by her windows.

"Oh, come on! I was right there!" Before the loops, Kelly had worn lab coats, not combat rigs. She'd studied quantum entanglement and dark matter theory in a corporate lab as a part of a larger team—as nothing but an intern—her biggest thrill a successful particle collision or new discovery with the project she'd struggled so hard to join. The portals had hung in the sky for weeks then, dormant, and unexplained. A mysterious phenomenon everyone sought to investigate.

Then all of the portals tore open, and the world ended. She had familiarised herself with more than a few different fields since then. Hell, there were entire loops she'd dedicated to singular areas of expertise. The first loop had been an accident—despite investigation, she wasn't even sure how it had started.

She suspected it had something to do with the bombardment of zero fallout miniature Higgs cannons that had struck the floating man in Times Square on the very first day, before never appearing again in any other loop; the same time a multichromatic magical explosion of twisted energy had blasted through half of New York. It was also at that exact same moment, that she and the rest of the team of scientists she'd interned for had begun an experiment dubbed 'project portal' in Vaughn's military lab.

Kelly had been standing closest to the experiment when the orbital bombardment hit. The elites had opted for a safer measure of firing small accelerated particle streams at near-light speed, delivering energy outputs exceeding nuclear weapons without radiation fallout and a limited range of impact at the largest portal and its apparent orchestrator. The floating man had held other ideas. A collapsing building, a scream, a twisted flash, and Kelly had died for the first time.

In the second loop she had been terrified, and the creatures thrived on her fear. And when the portals opened for a third time, Kelly had tried diplomacy. A scientist standing before the end of all things, begging for understanding. She'd been devoured before she finished speaking. She died. Whenever she died, she woke up at the start of the day, without fail. The world had changed; a butterfly effect filling her path with obstacles and countless creatures; she could no longer reach her lab.

And if she waited until the end of the day? Two separate events would simultaneously wipe New York from the map. The first would be an explosion; half of the city would be glassed by a magical equivalent to Hiroshima. And after that? Anything on the other half would be trapped in the city by a spatial cage of magic, then, hours later, eaten by a giant creature in the sky the size of starships. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Her world would end and she would die with it, both devoured by the beings that invaded the planet and the calamity they caused that destroyed it—then she'd be sent back through time to the very start of it all, waking up at dawn. Pain stopped being interesting around loop fifty. She'd hacked her receptors to dampen it at will—it still hurt like hell, but it no longer made her wish she was dead. The trauma didn't last either. Screams, burning, bones, blood—none of it faded, none of it got easier.

But she didn't break. Apparently, that wasn't how she was built. She wasn't fine, but she was built for this—literally. And in her world, that was the better version. At first, she had been terrified of it all; of the creatures, dying, and the pain. Now, death was practically her business partner. Thanks to her neural augments, her memory was drastically improved; added features like memory banks and background A. I.

assisted recall meant that if she tried, she could almost perfectly remember the actions of the previous loop. She had neural recall and too many resets to be this far behind. The problem wasn't effort. It was equipment and access. With the right materials, her home lab could 3D print, build, and repurpose almost anything—except tools sharp enough to measure and cut into the fabric of reality, or the perfect biological samples currently decorating New York's skyline and streets as though they owned the place.

She rose from bed, prepared, then left her apartment complex the same way she did the day prior, attempting to repeat the actions of the previous 'day' as close to identically as she could. Except this time, she'd make sure she didn't lose her favourite weapon on the way to the barricade. She held on to the weapon right up until the troll burst through the barricade and began to treat Simon's men and the suicide squad of mercenaries like whack-a-mole.

While everyone was busy having a moment of existential horror, Kelly sprinted toward the barricade, boots crunching over debris, slipping through gaps. Prepared. One of Simon's men slipped from cover, rifle raised—but this time, Kelly was ready. She barely looked before squeezing the trigger, a sharp burst of gunfire cutting him down mid-step. No last-second ambush, no repeat of her last failure.

The man screamed loud enough to rattle Kelly's teeth, writhing on the ground with his agony cutting through the gunfire like a siren strapped to a jet engine. Kelly felt the ground rumble and a shadow behind her, and then her gut erupted in pain. The creature's claws punched through her chest, and she laughed—a wet, gurgling sound that bubbled with surprise. Kelly's blade flashed, carving clean through the creature's reinforced femur-whatever it was made of, it had the density of titanium.

The wound sealed itself almost instantly, muscle and sinew rewinding reality like it never happened, using the energy flooding the environment as fuel. It wasn't science, wasn't tech, and it was barely genetics—instead, it was pure, raw, unchecked.... Something. A process she hadn't cracked. Yet.

"Oh, we're playing the ignore physics' game? That's fine. I like a challenge." She muttered through blood-gritted teeth.

"Regenerative properties, my ass." A large part of her craved the discovery of how it worked—how a seemingly unintelligent creature could manipulate an element that made up 95% of reality to achieve the impossible.

"Hope that trick works in pieces," she whispered as the world blurred, her body gave out, and darkness swallowed her whole.

She woke up in her bed on the same day, again, ignoring the sound of emergency evacuation warnings. Her face pursed with determination. If the world wanted to throw infinite obstacles in her path, fine. She'd throw herself at them until something cracked. Kelly knew there was no guarantee the loops would last forever—one day, she might wake up, bleeding out for real, no reset waiting. But if scientists never took risks, humanity would still be shivering in caves, rubbing sticks together and screaming at lightning.

The first humans who harnessed fire probably lost a few limbs figuring it out. The first astronauts? Strapped themselves into controlled explosions just to reach orbit. Progress wasn't safe. The first AI-designed nanofactories collapsed under their own molecular instability. The first quantum entanglement engines tore holes in space before stabilizing. Hell, the first-gen neural augments fried more brains than they enhanced.

But it hadn't stopped humanity—now they were printing organs, bending gravity, and running simulations of entire civilizations in synthetic reality drives the size of a grain of rice. Risk was the cost of knowledge. And Kelly had infinite chances to pay it. As long as the resets kept coming, she'd keep paying in blood. As long as she could stand up, she'd keep moving forward. No force in existence had ever been able to discourage her—why would she start letting one now?

When she stood before the barricade for the third time, Kelly did things a little differently. This time, she let the troll, Simon, and the suicide squad clash first. Then, Kelly tore through the shattered battlefield, twisting midair through the barricade as her wrist flicked—her blade snapped out like a whip, slicing so fast it cracked like a gunshot.

The man who'd caused her deaths in the last two loops barely had time to register the noise before his head hit the ground, unable to attract the troll through his screams. She landed in a roll, feet already moving, and bolted, sprinting toward her target as the chaos behind her blurred into background noise. Behind her, the troll roared, the squad opened fire, Simon shouted something probably important. She smiled, flexing her fingers. No bullet holes. No fractures this time. Progress. Kelly didn't look back.

Didn't swerve. The road ahead was open. And that was all she needed. The lab stood ahead, beneath the largest Central Park portal. Its entrance was a steel maw sealed with biometric and cybernetic locks, a relic from her corporate days. At the edge of everything, so close she could taste it, Kelly's thoughts turned with questions. Why did the day keep looping? And why her? Did the universe just like watching her suffer, or was there an actual reason? Who or what made the portals? Where did they lead?

Why could the creatures manipulate dark matter and energy to bend reality like it was suggestible? And the floating guy above, who was he? What was he? What gave him the right to hover ominously like that? And, more importantly—was he alone? Her fingers twitched. She needed to find out. She needed to crack this open and rip the answers out of whatever force had decided she didn't get to know. Experimentation. That was the first step. Kelly looked up as she ran.

The largest portal above swirled, and the floating bastard came into distant view: its humanoid figure radiating anomalous energy, its abnormally long-eared face a shifting scowl of inhumanity and indifference as he hung in the sky directly above the place she needed to reach most. Her lab had some of the most advanced equipment on the planet, a treasure trove of tools and information. She'd hardly even seen the rest of the city in her attempts to get there. Every loop, she'd tried to reach it.

Every loop, something killed her before she got close, and sometimes, rarely, the being in the sky's magic would erase her upon it spotting her approach, though strangely, it never attacked those already within its range as though their actions, however wild, were beneath its notice, and her mad dashes in those rare few loops were somehow not. Her actions, the new butterfly effects, and the dragon's shadow had hidden her this loop, but they didn't guarantee a smooth route to the finish line.

She still had the flying giant in the sky to deal with. She was 2. 84 EQ. She'd need to be at least 100EQ to deal with the bastard. If whatever she did matched whatever strange criteria drew its attention. The thought of facing it made her smile widen. If the portal and its flying fairy wanted a war, she'd give it a spectacle, and maybe even sell tickets. Once she made it to her lab, she'd upgrade, then they would both be begging for retirement.

Her goal was to hit the 100EQ level and make everyone regret their existence. She would make it a citywide hobby. Kelly raced for the entrance. Immortality was just a bonus, her real experiment would be taming the end of the world.