King Cullen had been easy this time. She teleported straight to him, took a faceful of heat that peeled half her skin sideways—and snapped her fingers. Then there was no more Cullen.
The files said GeneCorp used tardigrade freezing proteins to keep people stable in cryo-sleep for long trips. That was all they gave her—how to sleep. The greedy lying scumbags. How dare they try to scam her while she was scamming them? Kelly knew they were hiding more. She guessed the same proteins could shield humans from radiation, harsh conditions, or internal bioweapons.
She’d tried splicing troll DNA with tardigrades. Total failure. The troll helix spat the mana sequences out like bad sushi. Turns out tardigrades were even worse with mana than humans—aggressively so. Turns out, just like the Status claimed, the mana lockout wasn't a human-exclusive curse.
Augmenting, for Kelly, belonged in the same category as breakfast choices—whatever worked. Cybernetics, genetics, nanotech, mana—she'd stack all of it. If the loop didn’t keep resetting her down to factory settings, she'd already be a walking siege vehicle. A problem for later.
The first retrieval team and their pet Goretank was still a work in progress. They were holding steady at "unsolved problem."
Kelly had died dozens of ways under its claws, each one different—fast, slow, surgical, messy—as if the thing was testing how many ways a body could fail.
It took its time, precise as a surgeon on a bad day. Bite, tear, pause, reconsider. When she failed to rise again, it observed her as if waiting for a better performance, slowing down when it knew she couldn't fight back—learning. It preferred the scenic route through pain.
Someone had coded a sense of pride into it—the sick bastard. Whoever made it had created a killer with feelings, which turned out to be a bold mistake. Because no matter what it would take, she planned to teach it empathy—with a brick, repeatedly, until it cried “truce?”
She’d died more times than she could count—shot, diced, vaporized, once turned into something that might have been soup. Usually, it felt like a trade: Death served as tuition. A reasonable fee.
But this time was different.
This whole thing had zero style. The thing taking her apart moved slow, real method actor energy, studying her death, counting how much she could lose before it stopped mattering. She could live with dying repeatedly, but dying impolitely? Unacceptable. That made it personal. It was a new sensation, like finding your neighbor using your Netflix profile and rating every movie one star. A baseball bat to the knees was perhaps a bit much, but then again, so was rating 'The Silent Passenger' one star.
She chuckled after the fourth vivisection, and each time she died, she came back laughing, sharper than before.
It shaped her. Every break and tear redrafted the design. Every kill hammered her psyche.
She mocked danger, escalated through failure, and treated torment as a resource. Her psychology rejected defeat entirely. Her spirit stayed joyful, brutal, and opportunistic. She'd been evolving through loops. Now she was forging through them.
Its brutality gave her ideas on how to be unbeatable.
She kept dying. Kept laughing and learning through ruptured nerve clusters as the Status marked progress through pain. Grit, brain damage, or a mix—hard to tell. Once she claimed her blood ran closer to circuitry than instinct. After loop sixty-eight, it stopped being a joke. She always got back up, faster and meaner, always escalating. She kept wondering whether this was a bug, a birth defect, or exactly what she was meant for.
Either way, results kept coming.
Warchild spiked. Fortress of Flame surged again mid-swing while she was still on fire, gaining new Titles while muttering about how many grade points decapitation was worth this week as she fought through collapse and dislocation, testing which impacts gave the most return.
But calling it fighting implied she was doing something other than surviving the world's worst autopsy, and meant ignoring that she spent most of it airborne and on fire. Kelly was lasting longer, taking more hits, a new breath each loop, a better record. But the only reason she hadn't been folded into modern art yet was because whatever freak built this thing wired its brain to enjoy noise.
In Loop 52, she swung wide and her radius bone scratched its eye, and the panel responded differently, firing off every new message at once.
[Epic Title: 'Fortress of Endurance' gained!]
[Title - Fortress of Endurance (Epic, I-Grade): Title acquired through repeated survivals under extreme-duration trauma, sustained beyond post-lethal thresholds, inflicted by a higher Rank being—while active, reduces risk of joint failure and major bone fractures by 10% during repeated impact under high-force conditions by beings of higher Threat Levels.]
…
[Fortress of Endurance I → II]
[Title acquired through... Reduces risk of... major bone fractures by 20% ... by beings of higher Rank.]
…
[Fortress of Endurance II → III]
[Title acquired through... Reduces risk of... joint dislocation... and long bone fracturing by 30%... during continuous blunt trauma.]
…
[Fortress of Endurance III → IV]
[A being that favors the unbroken—while equipped, the propensity that you will break is reduced by 10%.]
Grade IV was the hardest to reach—a bottleneck. Kelly noticed that by Grade IV, the title’s effect stopped behaving like a simple modifier and started leaning on causality itself, as if reality had grown tired of pretending it followed rules.
The kills stretched longer now. Her Titles kept ranking up, stacking blessings and quirky conditions she hadn’t memorized. Unequipping them would’ve cut her growth short, lessened the pain and gains, but she valued stubbornness over strategy. The Goretank—the overengineered war project with anger issues—used the extra time efficiently. It forgot her between loops but never changed its approach to killing her: chiropractor from hell. Every new Title bought her a few more seconds, and it treated them like overtime pay.
[Unique Title: 'Death’s Foe’ (I) gained!]
[Title - Death’s Foe (Unique, I-Grade): Gained by remaining conscious through fatal damage inflicted in battle, without healing, across countless consecutive instances. While active, when close to death and when facing enemies of a higher base Rank, increases perception, bodily control, and motor function regardless of organ failure or structural integrity by 35% until death.]
That was loop one-twenty-two. The Title worked in two parts. First it boosted her perception, her vision sharpened until every drop of blood looked professionally lit. She saw through pain the way auditors see through receipts, not missing a single detail—the clarity mostly existed to prove how bad things looked in high resolution. The second effect let her keep moving, regardless of injury, right up until her last breath. Death had become a subscription service she forgot to cancel.
Kelly called it Death Vision? Her body took even longer to die, logging the extra seconds. Pain punched in for overtime.
She could’ve scavenged every prototype armor and cannon in the city’s carcass. She could’ve stolen power armor and gone postal. Planted bombs. Hunted down a light railgun of her own. She didn’t. Those toys would’ve shrunk her data set. She needed pelvic shards and random hemorrhages writing cleaner reports than any precision missile ever could.
She died. Again. And again. Every loop kicked off with gunfire and ended with her face in the rubble, organs leaking on operate floors. Fighting, death, and pain ran the show. Then—so slow she almost missed it—she started to pull ahead. One shot hit home. Then another. Suddenly, something finally started giving way-loudly, and under protest.
Stolen novel; please report.
Death’s Foe ticked over to Grade III.
Grade I and II gave her better motor function and perception—basic perception and movement upgrades.
At this point, whenever she was 'close to dying,' she was seeing faster, moving faster, reacting faster—tracking serrated blades mid-swing, correcting her aim mid-shot, snapping between targets with no wasted effort. Every movement landed tighter, dodges cut closer, and every kill cleaned up faster.
Grade Ill shot to fifty percent, and added structural integrity to the mix, which hadn't been part of the package before. That meant her body could take fifty percent more force without crumpling like a folding chair at a family reunion—bones stayed whole, tissue held together, and muscle didn't tear every time she hit back harder.
And since that bonus only triggered near death, it meant she was effectively fifty percent more everything right when things got ugly—her EQ almost half-doubled on the brink.
In loop one-sixty-four, Kelly finally figured out exactly what her 'Death’s Foe' Title recognized as "near death," or as the medics called it, "critical condition." The title tracked blood oxygen levels falling hard enough to make her neurons file for early retirement, her pulse, and organs throwing in the towel. There were official numbers for these things: respiration slowing past life, flatline, and brains too quiet to register as awake.
Kelly had created and set in a protocol to put her internal organs in a state of slow decline, shifting her implants life saving functions from biological to mechanical.
Her heartbeat slowed gradually until it stopped beating altogether.
Her breath drew slower until it stopped
Her brain fired slower and slower until her consciousness shifted completely to a supported state, managed by her backup Al's like scaffolding, to keep her functioning.
Essentially, she went from being a person with machine parts, to the complete opposite, a machine with person parts.
All in all, it was pretty dangerous, but her paranoia had already kept her away from using Al too complex, too numerous, and too free—Her AIs operated under strict obedience—too dumb to improvise, too shackled to dream of mutiny. They relied entirely on her control. And if they somehow did take over, which she had ensured to be impossible… Well, the reset was a one-passenger ticket that would solve that problem anyway.
That shift cracked loop one-hundred-fifty wide open—it wasn’t exactly a finish line, but a turning point that only showed up when death turned into forward motion and progress. She earned a major Title, capital T.
[Unique Title: 'Outrunning Death' (I)' gained!]
[Title - Outrunning Death (Extremely Rare, I-Grade): Title acquired after 100 consecutive instances of resisting death and total failure through will and continuous high-speed movement. A title for those who die the moment they stop—While equipped, speed increases by 20% per second while in motion. Injury does not cause death as long as momentum is maintained. If movement halts, or the title is unequipped for any reason, the title holder dies instantly. Every second this title remains active, internal structure destabilizes. Microfractures accumulate. Healing is delayed. Long-term use guarantees catastrophic failure.]
She got that title after sprinting through a gas pocket and lighting it mid-stride. it triggered a gas explosion mid-sprint and knocked her faster across a floor she had no business clearing. The blast shaved off most of her coat and a fair bit of skin. Then something important to living was blasted out of her body, and Kelly didn't stop. She kept running while her body and everyone watching reprocessed why the hell she was still alive.
It popped halfway through the fireball. She'd coughed up flames, switched Titles, and kept going.
Unlike the other titles, it started without needing her dying—it just guaranteed she would be. For desperate men, it would’ve been a last shot. To her, it was the perfect deal. For Kelly, death added value.
She ran with it.
Outrunning Death came with terms that sounded more like a dare. If she unequipped it, she'd die. Slow down for a breather and the same result. While active, her body degraded like a rental car, and her healing rate decided it had other plans, dropping to somewhere between “coma patient” and “decorative corpse.” In return, as long as she stayed in motion, she could pretend injury didn’t exist. Her speed multiplied by twenty percent per second, stacking endlessly, a beautiful formula for disaster. By second fourteen, she’d hit 13.8 times baseline, fast enough to experience existential regret in bullet time. The text never mentioned a cap. No ceiling. Limitless. It traded anatomy for momentum, sanity for kinetic madness. And if she ever found a way to upgrade her brain to keep pace, reality itself would need a therapist.
That loop held the first true success. She crossed its guard at speed, then tore a shallow line through its thigh with her molecular blade. She saw blood. A trickle. It was black, reflective, and probably proprietary. That meant the Goretank could be tracked, and if she could tracked it? She could time it, too.
In the loops that followed, she barely made contact with the floor. A few finger snaps, some gravity spikes—guards met walls at regrettable speeds, drones folded in on themselves, and the staircase downgraded to a pile of crushed ambition. She used Warchild as if it were a cleaning product, wiping away anything the building tried to vomit in her direction. Then she triggered Outrunning Death, mostly to keep half the neighborhood’s fauna from joining in, and to tidy up what survived the first pass.
Turned out the Title was supposed to be a final sacrifice, a suicide attack—whoever made the thing hadn’t planned for a repeat customer. It packed so much power it felt almost rude to use.
The fastest unmodified human topped out at 27.8. Once. Impressive, for someone still using tendons. With her werewolf adrenal shift, she hit 72 in short bursts and held half of that when bored.
With Outrunning Death, that speed exploded.
At one second she hit 86 miles per hour. By the third, 124. She crossed rooms between breaths, bounced once, hit the stairwell before the railings could complain. Everything held—balance, speed, bones. Still a sprint. Just faster. And slightly more fatal for anyone in the way.
At five seconds she passed 179mph. A man drew a gun and met a filing cabinet before the trigger finished moving. She took out a partition with her shoulder, paperwork flying in sprays of bureaucratic confetti. The hallway tried to stay upright, doorframes folding in protest as she passed. She could still turn around, technically, though the building now seemed personally offended by the idea.
At eight seconds and 309mph, Kelly’s route rebranded itself as an interactive demolition exhibit. Everything ahead enthusiastically auditioned for the role of “debris.” Her limbs, traitorous in their timing, lagged behind the crisis, responding too late. Turning became math she didn't have time to finish.
She figured by eleven seconds she’d be pushing 534 miles an hour. At that point, the lobby would probably stop existing in any meaningful way, she would enter a lobby and likely wouldn't see it again. The reinforced bulkheads would give before her shoulder finished introducing itself. Reaction time would become a historical concept. One misstep would mean a rib gone missing, or several, or an awkward posthumous discussion about workplace safety and the importance of ribs in general.
Kelly maxed out at nine seconds before her brain declared mutiny. The world stopped being scenery and became one long smear of abstract art. Nerve signals lagged like overworked interns as limbs striked on delay, and by the ninth second, the environment composed a protest symphony of obstacles and walls and a single step was all it took to send her tumbling to a dead stop.
She never saw what came after that. The mind and body had opinions about reaction time limits and hers had reached a unanimous decision.
She had no idea how far the Title could really go either, she never lasted past nine seconds. Her mind couldn’t withstand the sheer speed. Even if she ever found a way to cheat the Titles’ death clause, it would buy her about as much time as a loan shark’s grace period.
In the next loop, she stuck with gravity, anchoring herself because flight muddied trajectories, she created as many blood bags in her lab as her steady hand could manage and turned her immediate radius into her war aura. Each snap increased gravity by one times its base and intensified the aura that compelled every creature nearby to target her. She snapped her fingers like showtunes. Outside, the building's exterior ignited, beasts battered the walls, explosions shook the ground, building defenses split under relentless pressure and gunfire sprayed in choked bursts trying to hold them back.
Kelly snapped thirty times.
The guards died mid-sentence. The bots tripped on corpses that hadn't finished cooling, crushed by the weight of her presence. And before her gravity could reach him, Reggie ran. That one disappointed her. She reached the entrance lobby with nothing left to kill, and found the retrieval team injured, held together by blood and duct tape, after they had to fight through a wall of monsters Warchild had invited to the retrieval team cookout.
Kelly gave them a nod that meant 'congrats on surviving, now get out of my way,' and didn't stop moving.
The lobby shattered into dust as three heaving operators and their Meat Demon, Heavy, Goretank loped in, railsmoke curling off their augments as they slowly stepped in, slowly, gear scraped raw, boots dragging dust through what used to be a lobby. The first cracked his axe against a marble slab and snarled, "Vaughn scientist. That's her." The second scanned the burn patterns, the bodies, the broken lift and third didn't look at her—just the damage. "She trashed the place."
The bug-eyed second raised his railgun, lenses twitching, voice taut, "You kill him?" he asked, not waiting for the answer. Kelly flicked a blood bag from her belt, teleporter primed, and said, "your boss's funeral playlist must be jammed with gunshots, huh?"
4.59EQ each. Heh. Their Light railguns still made them pretty dangerous, but a hundred loops ago, their EQ alone would have been a problem. But at 30 times gravity, you needed to be higher to even walk around her.
Kelly raised her hand high, snapping her fingers with her whole arm, crisp and theatrical, elbow cocked like the room owed her attention. "That's thirty-one."
She teleported into the fight.
At loop two-hundred-thirty, every skull crack, every nerve scorched, every Trait wrung from her flesh paid off. Outrunning Death's last stand, Death's Foe, Fortress of Endurance's tank shell, Warchild's grind, Fortress of Flame’s hot shrug and the Immovable Title’s iron inertia all snapped together into a living fortress—and then the system spat out something absurd:
[New Title (legendary) → Herald of Unending Vitality].
Unending Vitality? Nice. Took two hundred deaths and a few bonus holes, but someone finally gave her a gold star and a medal.
She used to hit the lobby full of holes, dragging half a plan and a quarter of a lung. Now she got there upright, stocked with grenades, and smug about it. It still hurt, but she no longer started the fight as a walking corpse. The retrieval squad showed up bleeding, the abomination looked annoyed, and Kelly hadn't even swapped to Outrunning Death. She'd started trading hits with the tank-thing ten seconds at a time—nothing fancy, just enough to leave a mark and keep her limbs. And instead of being the goal, like it had been until then, survival became the background noise.
“Guess we’re both terrible at self-improvement,” she said, wiping the blade on her sleeve.
