Chương 69: Hardlight

Kelly slammed the brakes as a thrashing shape filled the mist ahead. The truck screeched to a stop inches from a creature's flailing limbs, and she reversed hard, but the thing dragged itself after them. She threw the door open and got out, because stopping it before it reached the back seat mattered more than staying behind the wheel. Her truck was important, less important than its passenger, but still. It was her first car, acquired a month before the world's end through her internship credits.

She had mastered driving it through the loops, and always tried to make it through each day without wrecking it. Now, thanks to her passenger, that record mattered more than ever. Buster was already on his paws in the back seat, ears flat, tail down, but his eyes tracked her through the mask. The truck came back every loop, same as her apartment, her clothes, her gear. Buster came back too, but he forgot. Every morning he met her new, and every morning he decided within minutes that she was safe.

Friendly, well-socialized dogs worked that way. It took minutes, not months. Short, positive, consistent interactions. He knew her, trusted her, before the first hour of the loop was done. That meant more than it should. Humans took weeks, months, years. They could like her, respect her, fight beside her, risk their lives, and still not know who she was now. The people she'd known for years had no idea what she'd become. She'd been looping for over a thousand days, and every day they reset.

Every day she had to meet a new version of them. But Buster was the same dog, with the same immediate trust, every single reset. Aside from her monomolecular blade, which synced to her mind each morning, and Jennie, who had known her before she could count to fifty, Buster was the closest thing she had to a real loop companion. He was almost as important to Kelly as her atom blade. Kelly reached into the shadow inside her jacket and pulled out the hardlight sphere.

She concentrated, and the metal sphere came online, a thin seam of light waking along its surface. Hardlight poured out and formed a dense shell around the truck, bars and panels of light as hard as steel. The shell illuminated Kelly and the whole street in pale white, locking Buster and the truck inside a cage of light.

"Do you have any idea who's inside my truck!" she screamed, throwing her hands in the air. Her sudden, shrill outrage made the creature jerk its head back.

"You almost wrecked it! You're still trying! Do you know who you could have hurt? You know how much this thing costs on an intern's salary? The payments I have to make every month?!" Kelly rushed toward the creature. She equipped Death's Foe and swung a bat that sprang to life from her wrist. It was a desperate attempt, aimed at stopping the thing from reaching the hardlight shell and at creating distance. She checked the space. There still wasn't enough. It was still too close.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. She was overwhelmed with indignation at the risk. She quickly considered going on a personal Templar, Genghis Khan, Gideon Vaughn style revenge-crusade. If they hurt a hair on Buster's head, she would chase them out of this dimension, she would target every abomination and enact holy retribution on every portal being she could find. Then cross over into theirs and show them what a demon straight out of south New York looked like.

"Hey! My boy's in there! The one who trusts me in under five minutes!" She couldn't bear the thought of Buster getting hurt, and she didn't care about the reset—not in the least. It was the way his eyes followed her whenever they met, the way his ears perked at the sound of her voice. Sometimes, it felt as though he had never forgotten her. Somehow, by some miracle, through every loop, Buster had never once looked at her like a stranger.

"Back off!" Kelly shouted.

"Try it and I will personally rearrange your life!" Kelly let out a long breath and shifted the bat in her grip, then the intern scientist concentrated. She triggered the weapon's light-chainsaw mode. Molecular edges engaged, and the superheated edge woke along the blade with a rising shriek. She lifted the buzzing weapon and pointed it at the creature.

"Hey. Ugly." The creature's head swiveled toward her.

"Yeah, you. I'm talking." It took a heavy step forward, and its voice was a grating pile of broken sounds"Prey… comes close… pain is…"

"Save it." Kelly hefted the chainsaw and glanced back toward the glowing shell around her truck, where Buster stood at the window, ears pinned flat inside his mask.

"You see that big, beautiful machine you almost sat on? Don't do that." The creature groaned and oozed forward.

"Hey, look at me." Kelly's arm went back.

"You getting the picture? No?" She cocked her arm back further.

"Figure it out." [Title: Giantbane (V) equipped] Kelly hurled the spinning chainsaw straight at the creature's chest. It—quite idiotically—tried to bat the weapon away with a hand warped by its rapidly progressing mutation. Kelly's lenses caught a glow of mana surrounding the thing's swing, and to her surprise, the atom-splitting weapon veered off course, partially cutting through a section of the creature's glowing protection before firmly lodging itself in its throat.

The weapon's spinning edge kept working, causing it to slide through the thing's shield, neck, then torso. The sickly beast looked at the weapon, then back at Kelly, confused and horrified as the spinning edge split the layers of its magical defenses and body apart. It made a wet, gurgling sound. Its eyes found Kelly's.

"What's the matter?" Kelly asked, watching the chainsaw do its work.

"You hurt my things, I break you. That's the deal. Should've sprung for the premium shield package." The creature split open from the inside. It erupted. Toxic flesh, searing light, and swirling mist.

"Guess you're not as strong as that pigeon, or even those bones underground," Kelly said.

"Skill issue." Kelly nodded, relieved. The Status appeared to agree with her problem solving. [Rare Title gained: (Grade-I) Unerring Marksman]