Kelly had solved her imminent combustion issue. That achievement alone deserved a parade, or at minimum confetti, or maybe a commemorative plaque. She’d settled for the teleporter rig now on her person and linked to her nervous system. She also had new samples surging through her cells, permanently. Victory.

  Then she hit the stairwell at a sprint.

  By the fourth landing, the full, all-encompassing, pain-in-the-ass scope of her situation arrived. It arrived as subtly as a corporate execution order, which was, in fact, not subtle at all.

  Issue one: the teleporter rig was currently linked to her spine. If she died now—a statistically likely event—she’d wake up next reset without it. The only place she’d found it was in this specific Genecorp lab, at that specific moment. Show up earlier? Maybe it’s still in a building. Show up later? Some corporate cleanup crew has already off-grid. Deviating meant gambling a whole reset. The ROI was terrible.

  Issue two: greed. Kelly couldn't abandon the staircase path. That lab was a candy store of genetic horror shows, and she’d only grabbed a few treats. Another sample sat there, practically winking at her. The best one. Walking away was financially irresponsible.

  Issue three: the exit strategy. Assume she lived, grabbed the powerful sample, and got the rig. She was still seventy floors up in a concrete vertical tomb. The only way down was through a gauntlet of automated sentry guns and security drones armed with plasma cutters that went through reinforced steel doors the same way a blowtorch went through ration-bar plastic. And the guards, Kelly couldn't forget the guards. It was a corporate killbox designed by the most over-funded flesh obsessed architects on the planet.

  It was, quite frankly, impossible. But Kelly was impossible’s much cooler, better dressed cousin.

  So Kelly, on the second flight of stairs, realising all of these issues, just laughed and ran.

  Give up? Walk away with her life and a few new magical trinkets? “Ha,” Kelly said, the sound bouncing off sterile concrete. “Yeah, that’s not happening.”

  Then she took the stairs three at a time.

  A security drone the size of a large dog unfolded from a ceiling panel on the fifteenth floor. Its quad rotors hummed. Its mounted plasma cutter spun up with a high-pitched whine that could cut diamond.

  Plasma was super-heated gas—so hot it stopped acting like air and became electrically charged soup that powered stars, sparked lightning, and cut through metal for a living. Kelly was decidedly less hardy than metal.

  “Lethal force authorized. Authorized personnel only,” it buzzed. “Submit to scan.”

  Kelly didn’t break stride. “My authorization is I’m leaving.”

  The plasma beam lanced out, slicing a molten line across the stairwell wall where her head had been. The air smelled of ozone and vaporized concrete. She vaulted the railing, dropping half a flight, and landed in a roll. The drone banked, seeking a firing angle.

  She came up with her sidearm. Standard rounds pinged off its polymer carapace. Useless. The plasma cutter recharged with an audible thrum.

  Kelly shot the closing ceiling panel above it. Seven times in a single second. The panel gave way, impacting the drone’s rotors. It sputtered, listed sideways, and slammed into the wall.

  “Hi,” Kelly said, as squads of guards chased her from behind. She drew her knife, stolen from the teleporter. “I’m just passing through.

  The fight was brief, ugly, and involved a lot of squealing and stabbing in pitch darkness. When it was over, Kelly wiped her knife-turned-blade on her pants and kept sprinting. She didn't slow, didn't stop, not once. “Three percent probability,” she muttered. “I’m buying a lottery ticket after this.”

  She dropped back into the stairwell on the twenty-sixth floor, past the quarantine door. The descent continued.

  A kinetic slug shot from a ceiling turret, fired with a hydraulic, armor-denting thwump. It hit her temple. Her skull gave way with a wet, definitive crunch. It didn't hurt, not exactly. Her consciousness became nothing more than a stopped signal. The last thing she registered was the taste of copper, the sight of her own blood spraying across the stairwell's safety-yellow handrail, and a detached, clinical thought: So that's what that sounds like.

  Then, after some prolonged and very chaotic fighting, Kelly died for the very first time in Genecorps’ war-like staircase.

  [Trait: Giantbane Grade II → III]

  In the loops that followed, Kelly made good on her promise to Greg. Exactly once. But that rig was a starring player in Kelly's 'Stay Alive' plan.

  Since the teleportation rig was finally working and fully synchronized over multiple loops robbing the emotionally stunted man, Kelly familiarized herself with its two-second recharge between jumps. She'd robbed the teleporter, Greg, twelve times over separate twelve loops. Since there was still no guarantee she’d be out of the building before higher-EQ mercs returned from bagging whatever mutant souvenirs they could scrape off the streets, Kelly decided this current lastest run was about one thing:

  Stacking Titles on her way down all seventy floors.

  She'd only made it twenty-seven floors before dying that first time, twelve loops ago. Not bad, honestly. Better than the run where she tripped on a corpse and got shot by six different departments at once. Getting back into the building had been harder. She'd given up nearly every royalty stream she still had the moment someone tried to blackmail her over her desire for a very illegal EQ score, and even then they'd still had the audacity to deny her access to new samples, claiming they would all take her over the limit.

  Which meant she couldn't demonstrate the process on herself and she'd have to use someone else, which of course meant the results wouldn't work—because they never worked on anyone else. Which meant it was a Kelly-only solution. Which also meant they realized she couldn't deliver a viable product, and would decide to take her tech and dissect the rest—not in that order.

  She'd been chased through the building more times than she could count. With turrets, guards, drones, Reggie and his personal lightning storm, that poor future-sight gunman who still couldn't see her coming, and Greg. Sweet Greg. Her favorite ex-teleporter.

  Why didn't she give up on this building? She had additional reasons. First—the Deadqueen’s tech. All three of them. Teleporter. Phaser. Future-sight. She didn't know how, but she planned to score them all. The person everyone said was dead and the one she'd been hunting for years without the resources to catch so much as murmurs online, until recently. She had one, but she wanted all three intact and still pinging to chase down a trace that might lead to her.

  The only other person in the network of planets who might understand what was actually happening to reality—not that Kelly needed her to solve it—she could crack the apocalypse solo. She had her own reasons for finding her. And she didn't buy the dead story. Hell, she wasn't even sure Jellybean came with a death setting.

  Second—remained the same, but with more detail; there was a sample in this building that GeneCorp swore came from a reality-warping creature. Something that made space go sideways. Kelly wanted it. Because of what it could do and because it wasn't supposed to exist. Like a magical middle finger to physics. Which made it perfect.

  She needed that in her blood immediately.

  So Kelly died. Then died harder. Then died smarter. Then died louder. Right up until she reached attempt Thirty-Four—at that point, she'd looped through more firepower than some small nation-states, and died enough times to memorize things like the janitor rotation or exactly how far a decapitated security officer could slide on Genecorp's marble floors. Her personal best was the twenty-eighth floor, a real milestone in the Tower of Corporate death. Forty-two more to go.

  Her 34th attempt had begun with her kicking the stairwell door open with force, the metal clanging against the wall. A flashbang left her hand a moment later, bouncing once before disappearing into the hallway. She’d moved with it—low, fast-rifle up and steady, eyes fixed ahead as the blast lit the corridor.

  Now? Many loops later?

  The stairwell shook with gunfire. A droid bounced between walls, copying Kelly's low, clawed sprint like it had something to prove, until she slid under it and tore it in half at the waist, claws folding away as she snatched a shotgun from the air without looking. The Phaser came next, stepping through stone as though doors were beneath him, moving fast enough to matter. Above him, the future-sight gunman played his angles, twitch-precise and always a second early. And high on the landing, Reggie raised one arm and lit the floors with lightning, frying cover as drones and mercs poured down the stairwell in layers.

  Until this point, Kelly had held back her advance. Her focus stayed on one problem—surviving an encounter with GeneCorp’s on-site security manager, a man called King Cullen—yes, that was really what he called himself. GeneCorp's retired, undefeated poster-boy, now their temporary head of security while the real head sipped mimosas from the safety of orbit, was the wall.

  He marked the edge of progress. And his weapon augment, a G-72 Genetic Thermal Lance, was proving impossible to get past.

  He fired a genetic thermal lazer tuned to punch through bone, pride, cover, augments, and anything pretending to be post-human. She had died multiple times. Each loop against him had been spent in that burn, training her body to hold through repetition to get past him, testing thresholds—dying in place until the right Title stuck. He blocked every path forward, much more than an obstacle to fight. He stood in place, solid and constant, a wall she had to outlast.

  Halfway through her loos spent dying to his weaponry, Kelly shifted focus—no more training runs, no more testing pain limits. Her goal was clear: break King Cullen and the elite stack backing him—gene-dosed guards, gun-toting droids that mirrored her movement, turrets, and high-end mercs with tailored augments. This was the new wall, and she was done surviving around it.

  Which meant that Kelly, after dozens of runs spent tanking beams, testing limits, and bracing for the hit, finally stopped holding ground—and decided to hit back.

  Kelly teleported straight above the future-sight gunman and shot him through the back before her feet landed. He had to go first—she needed the title slot free. She fired into the crowd as she moved, swapped to Giantbane III, and felt the thirty percent boost hit like a surge. She felt breath behind her. Smelt it. Oil. Powder. A gun at the back of her head. She smiled. Her mimic skin locked the back of her skull down to diamond. The bullet pinged off.

  "What the f-" the man started.

  Her clawed hand turned hard as diamond to punch through his chest before he could finish the question.

  "You brought a sidearm to evolution. That's on you."

  Giantbane III hit like a refund on pain with twice the speed, gained straight from the last run's wreckage. Teleport came online mid-move, clean as muscle memory. Maybe someone out there had more speed on paper. It didn't help. Now, she almost always struck first.

  Kelly pulled the pins at her waist. Flashbang. Concussion. Both cooked hot in her fists as she sprinted for the Phaser. He grinned—cool, practiced—then drove a hand straight at her chest. "Let's see if that heart's still beating."

  She dropped the grenades and vanished. The teleport rig snapped her above him mid-sentence. He phased calmly through the floor—but the blast hit anyway. Light. Noise. Pressure. He staggered half-solid, caught in transition. She landed and kicked him off the ledge.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Intangible. Not sound or light proof.

  Another heavy hitter gone. She didn't blink at the crossfire—cover and mimic plating caught the bullets clean.

  "Still beating? Hard to tell. I think it's just humming at this point. It's mostly aftermarket parts anyway."

  Lightning struck her shoulder, and mimic patches of rubber skin with Fortress of Flame burned bright, leaving blackened marks. Kelly walked straight through it.

  Reggie blinked.

  Then Reggie froze, his hand still halfway to another strike. The last hit had landed, but it hadn't stopped her. His expression slipped with flash of doubt, a blink of fear. Kelly met his eyes, her voice sharp and casual. "Yeah, I know—this wasn't on the mission brief, was it?"

  Without heavy support in the way, Kelly could tear through backliners like practice dummies.

  Reggie's electromagnetic strikes might hit hard, but his low EQ and frail build made him fragile.

  Glass cannons, from compression gun-wielding gunners to magnetic manipulators like Reggie, would crack under her pressure. Without proper heavy hitters holding her back, there would be nothing stopping her from walking through him.

  The teleport rig meant Reggie was screwed sideways, forwards, and diagonally. He could unleash every chained up metal gorilla and gene-hacked bodybuilder in the basement and she'd still blink past them like a cockroach in a microwave. She could've ended this loop with his spleen in a sample jar—hell, she wanted to—but the pocket-sized syringe twitching against her thigh took priority.

  They said its sample could alter reality. Kelly hadn't injected it yet, mostly because every time she tried, someone either put a bullet through her or turned her ribcage into confetti before the stuff kicked in.

  She blinked directly behind Reggie mid-stairwell and thirty guns screamed in her face with the fury of insulted programming. Two seconds to move—no, one—tight angles, too many barrels, and a merc with a twitchy finger who loved his job. "Surprise, dipshit," she said cheerfully from behind as Reggie stammered.

  "Voss—shit, wait, I didn't—"

  Her wristband buckled, folded, and snapped into a blade that could argue with quantum law and win. She swung low, aiming to bifurcate Reggie into two equally annoying halves. Sixteen wasn't a great age to die, but after loop fifty-two, the sympathy budget had dried up. He'd earned this with interest.

  The swing went wide when a beam hotter than industrial hell punched into her blade mid-arc—light, focused, meant for armor columns, and pissed off by her timing. It slapped the molecular edge sideways, wrecked the angle, and turned clean execution into shoulder-to-groin demolition. Reggie didn't die, but he lost an arm, most of the shoulder, and enough blood to paint a stairwell. He screamed like a factory alarm as his squad dragged him out trailing meat, smoke, and whatever passed for courage.

  "That was almost satisfying!" She called, swinging up as bullets stitched the air behind her.

  "Who's next? I've got plenty of sharp and zero patience!"

  She said it like a threat, but underneath, she already knew the answer—and it itched like a truth she hadn't broken yet.

  She still got hit. Even with foreknowledge, even with mimic-hardened skin and Fortress of Flame III simmering under her coat, it still hurt. She took hits—lots of them—because evasion wasted seconds she didn't have, and the damage was survivable now, barely. There were too many angles, too many guns, and not enough body to cover it all. Skin flexing into plated mimic-metal that shrugged off bullets and vented heat down her spine. Fortress of Flame III soaked 35 percent of the inferno chewing at her coat, enough to make lesser heat a skincare problem, not a threat to her life. Three mercs dropped—bone, steam, shrapnel—before a beam carved through the chaos much earlier than it ever had. It clipped her ribs, peeled muscle, staggered her mid-swing, and made her laugh through blood. That timing wasn't random. Something in the loop had blinked first.

  By now, Cullen was supposed to be fifteen seconds late and halfway down the hall, yelling orders the way a bootleg warlord did. Instead, his beam hit early—twelve seconds early. She'd run this exact sequence before, down to the foot placement, and nothing ever changed. Now the loop was twitching. Either Cullen had rewritten his script, or something bigger was tilting the board.

  She used to sandbag—take hits, stall kills, fake fatigue because when she moved like she was losing, the world stayed lazy. Cullen was scheduled chaos, meant to drop in three floors later, still occupied rerouting drones and yelling at his squad via intercom. That delay gave her room—space to control tempo, bleed the fight slow, keep the heavy hitters on a leash. But she went sharp from the start this time—five bodies down, no drama, no pauses. Cullen came early. Power made noise. She moved too fast, and the world responded in kind.

  Kelly took the hit like a woman who'd already died too many times this hour—her mimic skin warped, blistered, and held, heat leaking through in a deep belly-ache that promised more vomiting later, but hey, she was still vertical. She yanked a drone from the air by its stabilizer and pulped it against a guard's face hard enough to paint the stairs with both, then grinned through the smoke as King Cullen stood a floor below, frozen mid-step as though watching a corpse sit up mid-cremation. His eye gave a single betraying twitch that said ‘the beam that should've split a person like tofu met a lunatic who apparently ate lasers,’ and the mission in his skull, the extermination order, went from protocol to priority.

  His lasers came from gene-spliced glands and photonic tissue. His arms built up heat and light, then fired it through a biological structure that controlled and focused energy, multiplying it—like a built-in barrel filled with lenses. It guided the output so it didn't scatter, sending it out in a tight, powerful beam. In King Cullen's case, it was muscle and bone modified to act like a firing tube—organic, but engineered to aim and contain the blast, like a living weapon.

  [Extremely rare Title: 'The Immovable One’ (I) gained!]

  [Title - The Immovable One (Extremely rare, I-Grade): Gained through repeatable feats of pain tolerance that reach or exceed fatal thresholds. Survivors receive a 10% reduction in all kinetic displacement and pain.]

  The blast threw her into a wall hard enough to crater the concrete—she peeled off it laughing, bones intact, because now even momentum had to ask permission.

  "You should be dead."

  Cullen advanced, weapon glands building pressure again, eyes locked like she'd insulted his heritage; "You think this is funny?" he said, voice flat, heat rising.

  Kelly rolled the ache out her shoulder, spit blood, and muttered, as though reading off a grocery list, "Next he closes in—because obviously, the beam wasn't enough."

  Cullen pressed his palm to the side of his face-skin split, metal hissed, and the embedded node pulsed once.

  "All personnel, redirect to Stairwell B3," he said, low and clipped, in a way that suggested he'd done this drill a hundred times and never gotten his boots dirty. "Deadtech user. Threat level F confirmed. Potentially higher. Retrieval squads rated For F and above, converge. Authorize release of biologicals."

  Kelly wiped blood off her chin with the back of her wrist. "Ah. The fuck-this-send-everything' button. Always charming when a man's first move is delegation."

  All those augments, all that classified muscle, and Cullen still cried for backup the moment things got inconvenient—a surgical killer built for war, but only if his targets couldn't hit back. With an MO like that, his middle name was probably War Crimes.

  "Voss." Cullen's voice cut through the gunfire, hard and deliberate. "You with Hauser? Did Vaughn send you?"

  Kelly blinked twice, slow and unimpressed. "Who the hell is that?" Her boot knocked a drone's cooling fan down the stairs. "I came here to hydrate and misbehave," she added, already counting exit points. "And I'm all out of water."

  Cullen fired again—white-hot, slicing through reinforced plating with the precision of an angry surgeon.

  Her cover vaporized in an instant, but she'd already triggered the rig, teleporting mid-sprint to the next landing.

  "Good," he called after her, heat still venting from his arms. "That means I don't have to worry about killing you nicely."

  Yeah. War Crimes. She was totally killing this guy.

  The retrieval squads he called for backup never came fast—too elite to rush and too expensive to lose. They were busy, retrieving invaders. Kelly had a ten-minute gap at most, carved out by protocol and sluggish escalation patterns. Every loop followed the same rhythm: threat first, overkill second. That window was open now, and she had to break something important before it slammed shut.

  Once those retrieval teams reached the building, she'd stop being a problem to solve and start being a specimen to process. Ten minutes. Anything past that, and she'd be parts in a box.

  Her body kept up—barely. The troll regen fought to hold her together, cell by cell, but most of its bandwidth was spent keeping her from liquefying. She could walk off burns and shrapnel, but not forever. Cullen's beams burned her guns to molten scrap and triggered her grenades—only the molecular blade held.

  Her mimic skin helped—thin patch, fast reflexes, repositionable shielding—but it only covered what she told it to, and only if she moved right. She'd gotten fast at it. Not perfect. Every mistake stuck. With reinforcements on the way, this stopped being a fight and started looking like a countdown. If she didn't finish it fast, they'd grind her down by existing.

  She teleported straight at him—rifles were slag, grenades cooked off mid-holster-with just a blade, a teleport rig, and ten minutes to prove Cullen was only scary at range.

  Cullen reacted instantly—arm up, beam screaming point-blank toward her skull. Kelly stabbed her blade into the wall, anchored herself, flipped to Fortress of Flame, turned her temple to graphene, and took the hit full-force. The blast nearly tore her loose. She swapped to her ‘Immovable’ title mid-burn and held.

  Then she swung.

  The blade sank deeper than it should've, clean through reinforced plating, muscle, and whatever classified hardware Cullen used for ribs.

  Kelly blinked.

  "..Wait, this works?"

  She yanked it sideways anyway. Curiosity was great, but commitment was better.

  Kelly paused mid-slash, almost offended at how quickly Cullen faltered at melee range.

  Hyper-Specialized Thresholders had blind spots this obvious? She'd never gotten close enough to check before—usually he vaporized her first. "Seriously?" she muttered, twisting the blade for emphasis. "All that buildup, and your kryptonite is getting stabbed?"

  Cullen's sloppy defense reminded her exactly why "specialized" meant "situational." The Obsidian Futures brute from the Hyperloop had been melee-built to the bone—an near-overclocked nightmare of Al-optimized muscle she had to trick just to scratch. Same deal with Payne, the 7EQ merc who'd redecorated her lab walls with her brain matter more times than she cared to count.

  Cullen, though? The man had combat data, sure—he reacted like clockwork, blasted her the moment she got close. Every time. Still, when she had gotten good enough to reach him there was something missing. No finesse, no creativity. His approach was all shoot first, shoot with impunity, shoot again, ask questions later. And preferably from a distance. The type that was used to having a squad backing him—or a staircase full of armed security.

  Close quarters against a weapon augment was supposed to be suicide. Before today, without an army of backup, it had always been suicide. Yet Cullen had been, sloppy—blast first ask questions later; Kelly hesitated, annoyed to realize specialized Thresholders might actually have blind spots worth exploiting.

  She died shortly after in a hail of bullets, lances, and an exploding panel that completely caught her by surprise.

  In the next loop, Kelly launched a guard into the exploding panel and dipped into cover as turret fire chewed up concrete overhead, adjusting her mimic patch to cool a fresh burn.

  Her loop-forged proficiency tipped the scale, every death had been another brutal lesson marching her into this glorious—and actually pretty gross—milestone.

  Titles flipped through her head—Giantbane stacked with the wolf-stuff to sharpen her movements, Fortress of Flame kept burns to a crisp annoyance, and The Immovable One stacked with the mimic skin, rooting her against the kickback. Cullen wasn't complicated. All combat datachips, group warfare tactics, and zero originality: glass cannon design at its worst. Payne, the 7EQ merc would have eaten him for breakfast. Before breakfast, actually. "All that hardware," she muttered, counting turret cycles, “and the man's built to bully—one good push and he folds."

  Any scientist worth their salt knew data was only as sharp as the lunatic swinging it.

  Before the loops, she'd searched for datachips like they were ammunition—ripping through archives, scooping up anything unstable, poorly guarded, half-baked, or flagged for ethical violations. Most people clutched them like gospel, waiting for someone to tell them how to use the knowledge safely.

  "Idiots," she muttered. That kind of dependence choked progress. They memorized blueprints while she rewired them mid-firefight. The ones who trained for symmetry, for hyper-specialisation, for one perfect strike—they shattered. They were vulnerable.

  She adapted because she always had.

  Cullen's head split clean through her claw before his body remembered it was alive, before he even blinked—and she watched it fall with the satisfaction that could only come from thirty-seven deaths, six melted limbs, and one flawless lunge.

  [New Title: Warchild (I)]

  The new title floated at the edge of her vision, ignored. Ignoring a new Title hurt worse than a gutshot, but priorities were priorities. Cullen hit the floor and Kelly hit the teleporter rig in the same breath, because the only thing dumber than dying here was waiting around for the things worth running from. Squads, real ones, already moving—armed heavy enough to raze the staircase into rubble. She needed the Vail and the rig out before the monsters got inside.

  Her lesser-wolf enhanced form scaled with her Giantbane boost and whatever weapon she swung into battle, which meant her offense fell apart the second she switched out. Her mimic skin could copy materials, but only on a patch the size of her hand—a neat trick, nothing more. She had figured out how to use both better, but neither had changed grade. Neither had evolved. Kelly didn't know why, and it gnawed at her worse than any wound. She needed to tear open Traits and rip apart gear, kick the apocalypse itself until something broke loose. Safety and caution only choked progress. If she wanted real data—real breakthroughs—she had to grade up her Traits, dissect and splice them, loot better gear mid-loop, and smash her abilities into new shapes until they stopped playing dead.

  Cullen's body sizzled in the stairwell, but Kelly didn't waste time on it. Seven minutes—tops—before another batch of over-altered and over-specced meatheads came clanging through, eager to ruin her day.

  Her teleport rig flared to life, and she was already moving, slamming into the next floor's metal wall, resetting, and jumping again. The stairwell was a maze of broken glass and smoking drones, with the stench of burnt augments. Cullen's death cracked open a brief window, dropping her a few floors, but the building adapted—tightening security and cranking up the heat. Things were about to get worse.

  Kelly needed to scavenge new gear and break apart what she already had, twisting it into something better. Safety didn’t matter, she was here to push limits. Her next jump brought her lower, straight into more danger, and she moved without hesitation. There was no space for it—not with the clock ticking down and more death waiting at the next landing.

  There was no time for victory dances. Safety belonged to people who cared about breathing.

  Safety wasn't even an option, every jump had to bleed, every clash had to leave a scar, every fight had to be brutal, or nothing would grow. Traits had to be cracked open, ripped apart, and stitched into something meaner. New strategies had to be dragged out kicking and screaming,

  She had an old, badly missed relative to find, and a reality-warping sample to jam into her body and see what it turned her into.

  Kelly had experiments to run.