Chương 91: The First Combat Technique

Close-quarters combat happened when everyone in a room ran out of hallway. It was a tactical solution for when talking stalled and the walls moved in, a discipline built around the idea that reloading was a lifestyle choice. Official definitions called for rapid engagement. But to Kelly, on the receiving end, it was the moment you learned whether an opponent's augments were decorative or structural; the fastest way to discover who skipped leg day. Guns were useful until they became things to throw.

The space was always too small. The winner was usually whoever remembered their techniques best, and whoever knew how to use them as tools. She spent the rest of that loop training with Ren. He drilled footwork mechanics into her through repetition and impact. The old veteran, Ren, used footwork by standing still until it mattered, then moving in sudden bursts like: Still. Then instant displacement. Then still again. Minimum movement, maximum damage.

Each step stayed small and angled, stepping "through the opponent's structure," so tiny movements caused large, uncomfortable problems. The guiding rule was "the minimum movement that forces the opponent to make the maximum movement," which usually left the opponent working very hard to understand what had just gone wrong. And Kelly hated every second of it. Footwork—it was a rigid insult, almost as bad as the concept of chairs.

But Ren had spent a large portion of the day making a convincing argument for the utility of technique—by obliterating her at every turn. And Kelly was a big believer in payback, so she equipped Mana Focused Student and tried her best to master her teacher's footwork, all for the single goal of someday using it to rearrange her teacher's face. When the light faded, the old veteran, Ren, suddenly stopped. He gave a short nod.

"Good luck." Then he left the building. To where, Kelly didn't know. Shortly after, the leviathan appeared in the sky. Shortly after that, half of New York exploded. Kelly decided to try one final experiment. She raced to the edge of the city to use her shadow dimension as an escape. Her transforming weapon would act as a tether between dimensions, an anchored line. She went deep underground through the bones of collapsing basements and entered her shadow in an attempt to survive the leviathan consuming the city.

It didn't work. The creature's bite reached deep underground. It consumed everything. Including her tether.

Kelly woke up in her apartment to the sound of public warnings and evacuation alarms, the broadcast system gargling static and panic was her new morning playlist, layered over sirens that whooped from the streets below. The day reset and the apocalypse woke with her. Her sheets were a decent cocoon. Comfortable. An hour before dawn, the portals had finished their grand opening—tearing through reality like festering wounds. Unstable. Asymmetrical. Uncaring of human understanding.

A massive thud echoed through the building's bones. Dust drifted from the ceiling vent. Something big and unpleasant was taking a stroll downtown. Rifts yawned across the planet, vomiting out creatures that biology textbooks would weep over, each one more grotesque than the last. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. And Kelly yawned too, stretching, her spine cracking a morning symphony. Turns out, you could get used to anything.

As madness engulfed the sky, and emergency messages pinged on every screen she owned, Kelly got up and resumed her morning routine. But this time, though, she moved with a real drive. A real purpose. A shower and change of clothes later, she was in her home lab, printing her favorite weapons. Kelly immediately rushed out of her apartment to the streets full of chaos and the last dregs of emergency evacuees. She looked for something to violently experiment on. She was dying to—well, not dying.

Dying was officially off the schedule now. Kelly had no desire for death. But she really, really wanted to explore her new mythical rarity Trait. To run tests. To log all sorts of details. The Trait was new, but also wasn't. The wording implied that, like most Traits, it was simply the status informing her of what already existed, and what had changed. Like her absolute mana incompatibility. Whatever the explosion on the first day did to her, it was profound. Kelly wasn't a mutant.

She had taken every test under the sun, just like everyone else in the city, to confirm that blessed fact. She had two arms and two legs, and didn't sneeze electric fire without the right runes. But her new Trait led to many more questions than answers. Mutations were a result of a cocktail. Environmental poisoning. Radioactive elements. Chemical agents. A dash of human experimentation. Unpredictable quantum dimensional alterations. Kelly's loops came from a single unfortunate moment. Higgs cannons from orbit.

The Cube's explosion. The Conductor messing with time. All while she stood dangerously close to Project Portal. That cocktail of warfare and bad positioning had changed her. It jarred her soul into some impossible place nobody could reach—perhaps that place was one nobody was ever meant to visit; a place that barred all entry of any kind. The many-worlds theory, by Dr. Hugh Everett, claimed that different dimensions had different rules. Her shadow-dimension stasis proved that.

Perhaps her soul was the only soul in that impossible dimension even gods couldn't reach. Did that grant her a time affinity? If she wasn't a mutant, did that mean she really was a baby time-god? She hoped so.

"Awesome," Kelly said, to no one and everything at once.

"I knew I was great." The Trait felt full of possibilities. It hummed with raw potential. It was incredibly powerful, but right now, it was just another offensive skill. A devastating one. It would let her threaten higher-level enemies. Surprise them. Even wreck them, temporarily. But without Mana Vacuum, she doubted she could even trigger it.

Its real power was tied to what other uses she could uncover—and to Mana Vacuum's specific function: boosting her passive Traits and any single equipped Title by absorbing and condensing excessive quantities of mana. She had expended every drop of ambient mana in a storm just for a single teleport. Well, it wasn't teleporting. Not really. Given the nature of her Trait, it felt more like skipping forward in time to a new position. Kelly decided to call it her Time-skipping™.

Now, the battle-crazed scientist was essentially dry. Her body was pulling in the beginnings of mana, starting from scratch. The last reset had left her empty. She'd have to recharge and replicate the same effect again. Time Attunement was still incredibly powerful. Its implications were frankly profound. But one element of the status description hooked her attention and didn't let go. It didn't just say teleport. It didn't say time-skip. The word it used was open-ended. Extremely so. [... in heightened states near death, allows for slight manipulation of its effects on you…] Manipulation. If she was near death—and Kelly had figured out how to trick the status, how to fake ' near death,' ages ago—she could, in theory, influence time itself. Kelly watched an armored vehicle skid to a halt across the street. People scrambled on its back, hefting launchers toward a shambling, six-limbed horror that rounded the corner. It was leaking something vibrant and toxic. Brickwork crumbled in its wake.

She turned her head away. The spectacle was background noise.

"Manipulation, huh." She needed a guinea pig.