Chương 55: A God's Momentum

Eleven seconds. Kelly had to make it eleven seconds. Her suicide Title was already eating her alive and it had only been the first second. It was also the only thing that would make her fast enough to outrun the two monsters on her ass. Soon the world would be nothing but multicolored blurs; her mind wouldn't be able to process the sheer speed past the fifth second—the world would become one big splash.

By the eleventh second, the speed boost would hit 743%, and the Title would have ripped her apart to buy every single percentage point. If anything stopped her before then, she would die. If she made it all eleven and hit whatever she was aiming at, the impact alone could kill her—which would solve the bleeding problem. She was cut in twenty-three places and still leaking from most of them.

One arm was shredded to toast, and her regeneration was too busy fighting the constant internal damage from her own kamikaze Title to put her back together. Kelly didn't care. Eleven seconds was the whole plan. She only needed to not die for eleven more seconds. So she ran. The molecular blade in Kelly's hand itched to simplify the entire 'corporate-heir-tries-to-kill-her-and-steal-first-magic-tech' situation. A quick decapitation.

A surgical strike on his little collection of bound, brainwashed goblins—that would ruin his proxy magic so beautifully. She could have torn Adrian Ward apart with her molecular blade while he juggled the cube and kept the city from detonating. She didn't. Her target had a different address. She saw his stabilizing influence on the storm of mana being pulled from the sky, and saw a far more entertaining application. Kelly planned to use it against them all. One second.

Kelly stepped and her speed was still too fast. The Immortal scientist raced forward, humming a tune of chaos. Two seconds. She watched Ithili and the sniper scramble after her. Four seconds. Fingers hovering over triggers, mouths roared, and she let the chaos roll around her. Five seconds. She raised corpses. Bone, blood, and bullets. Flung them like stones. Eight seconds. Fire shot from her shadow to slow them, blind them. It would not help.

"This is going to be fun, in an 'oh my god this is excruciating' sort of way," she muttered, watching the blur where she had last seen them scramble. They were far too late. Giantbane had pushed her speed to 23. 7EQ, ten percent shy of Ithili, close enough that neither the difference nor their tech mattered. Outrunning Death took away that speed and replaced it with something catastrophic. Deadly. Suicidal. Impossible. That's what others would have called it.

Kelly calculated the gap and the timing, and it screamed opportunity. Ten seconds passed. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. With an eleventh step, she rushed, all the speed her empowered body could muster, straight to the interdimensional mana Cube. Kelly switched to Fortress of Flame a breath before impact and thought, Someone's going to cry over this, then slapped her only functioning hand on the flat magical surface.

She impacted the cube with a shockwave that would have shattered her body without Fortress of Flame. The damage immunity vanished the instant it came online. Kelly's oval shield stretched into a concave shape, covering her vitals with her shadow, but that didn't stop Ithili from hurling his liquid weapon, Ithili's weapon cleaving off both of her legs at the knees as the sniper fired, but Kelly had already made her Gambit.

[Title equipped: Mana Vacuum] Her fingers forced themselves between two lines of dense inscriptions glowing across the surface. No time to admire the glowing, dense, unreadable scriptures. Precision mattered more than curiosity. Speed mattered more than anything. And she had both in spades. Mana surged. The cube shook, screaming in energy as it poured itself into her. It tugged, twisted, tore it apart with her presence, forcing it to implode, fold, and burn itself in a glorious mess of raw power. It was terrifying.

And perfect. Adrian Ward's eyes hit her at last. Shock spat across his face as though someone had forcibly carved it there. That device he thought would make him untouchable, the one manipulating and scanning mana with smug hubris, screamed back in panic at the chaos she had stitched into the air and the cube. Every delicate flow he counted on broke, and each measure he trusted shredded. And it forced him to stare in bewilderment at the person causing it all.

"Do you have any idea what you've done, you fucking insect?!" Adrian roared, venom dripping from every word.

"Do you even know who I am? Who I am?!" His hands trembled, eyes wide, his voice pitched between fury and disbelief.

"You can't just—how dare you—touch this, touch any of it!"

"This is mine! Mine!" Adrian screamed, voice breaking as he tried to reclaim control of the cyclone of mana, a black hole shredding everything in its orbit and swallowing control whole. Kelly had no idea what she was doing, but Adrian Ward did not need to know that. The corporate heir, that high-society poster child, glared at her, eyes trembling with pure rage. His concentration was so absolute that it rendered them both silent.

Her body seized under the mana pouring in—veins burning, muscles clamped down, screaming, teeth clenched shut. Neither of them could speak. And Kelly really, really wanted to say something. From the instant her title latched onto the cube's mana, the surge slammed into her with a raw intensity she'd felt before, the very same energy that she'd felt back in her lab, when she'd broken the universe. Mana.

Bottomless, endless, surging with ferocity, a storm pumping the machine with an appetite she could feel like fire under her skin. And as Ithili and the sniper reached her, bearing down upon her from behind, death coming for her, Kelly did the only thing she could.

"D-Dr. Kelly V-Voss," she snarled, her jaw wired shut by the coursing power.

"N-not a… thief. I'm a s-scien—a goddamn… s-sc—uh… a certified… furniture inspector!" Ithili and the sniper closed in behind her, fast and precise, death bearing down. Kelly swung her head back, her eyes visibly glowing with energy, like torches, her veins burning, skin filled with cracks. The mana connected, a violent handshake with her very essence. Her Title, spotting an all-you-can-eat buffet of endless mana, yanked on the leash. Adrian saw it coming.

"No! Don't d—" The cube, the entire visible region and everything in it exploded in a surge of destruction. And yet, the loop did not reset.