Every time Kelly's blade bit into its flesh, its eyes ignited with wounded pride and raw hate. She leaned in, savoring each stutter in its roar, because scars were proof of progress—growth—each contact fueled her next reckless experiment. Its fury wound tighter with every nick, making her strikes feel like sparks in its wildfire. It still outstripped her by far; each shallow cut made clear she lacked the speed to keep pace.

  Loop three-hundred hit like a proclamation in her veins—she slapped her glove to her chest and admitted she got addicted to chasing progress and variables. Death receded into white noise as Title bars climbed. Her own blood became the currency of advancement and she laughed, because obsession had turned her body into the ultimate data set.

  Five hundred loops deep and her Endurance Title finally hit Grade five, meaning damage reduction was topped off and—bonus round!—once every thirty days, she got to laugh at death by shrugging off a single fatal hit. Death’s Foe landed grade 3, stacking neatly with her werewolf reflexes, boosting perception by 200%, and allowing her to appreciate all the gore and violence in high-definition clarity.

  Warchild ticked up to grade 2, so now gravity suppression slowed enemy movements as though they'd all forgotten leg-day and the title drew aggression to her in the worst way, which she appreciated—attention was nice, after all. Fortress of Flame capped grade 4, cutting back damage from flames and making kinetic hits that usually tossed bodies just mildly inconvenient instead, it still hurt, and it could still kill her, but at least she didn't need to budge. Her relentless suffering had benefits. Title swapping was becoming second nature, she tweaked her mind with sub-routines to rotate through them faster than streaming subscriptions—she barely had to think of a title before it snapped into place. Combined, they finally punched a hairline crack into the wall she'd been bashing her head against.

  Title swapping gave Kelly enough power to position herself squarely in the creature's path, so any Light railgun slug aimed at her risked shredding their own abomination. They looked sure the monster would finish her, but sometimes she caught concern flashing in their eyes.

  She had officially graduated from the punching bag school of defense, finally promoting herself to something capable of deflecting the monster's limbs instead of catching them or its blasts with her face. She wasn't exactly winning awards for elegance, but twisting giant, murder-happy fists out of alignment counted as a victory lap in her book.

  Now she could return fire and slash back properly without immediately losing internal organs, turning combat into something less like a one-sided massacre and more like violently aggressive performance art. It wasn't flawless, but she was discovering a new joy in forcing this beast into awkward poses, and if humiliation was a valid tactic, she'd happily weaponize embarrassment.

  The creature was absurdly stronger than Kelly's base in every possible dimension, and annoyingly bigger, too—her entire body fit comfortably within the span of its forearm, fingers included. This made every deflection and split second Title-switch an entertaining near-death gamble, since physics stubbornly sided with the monster.

  Kelly wasn't outmatching it or even genuinely hurting it—she was just managing to redirect limbs that should've liquefied her instantly. It was progress by pure stubbornness, victory defined strictly by how much longer she could irritate something that outclassed her entirely.

  If Kelly committed fully, every reckless brain cell, every genetically juiced muscle fiber—she could temporarily shove one or two of its massive arms into angles evolution never intended, buying precious seconds to avoid being turned into a messy red smear by its shoulder-mounted cannons. Of course, this wasn't exactly dominance; more like advanced suicide management.

  But hey, tactical stupidity was still tactical, and she'd happily gamble all-in if it meant progress—or at least, slightly delayed obliteration.

  [New Title → (Grade-I) Disciple of Deflection]

  The Abomination howled in fury, it's roar a volcanic tantrum, cannons firing through air and muscle, thrashing at her with everything it had left, like a wrecking ball on a bad day. Its arms—each one as thick as her—kept coming, claws scraping, guns blasting, everything working overtime to turn her into scrap.

  But Kelly? She wasn't just dodging anymore. No, now she was carving at its limbs, slicing through its weapons with the precision of a surgeon who'd just had too much coffee and loved their work. And then, for the first time in a while, it actually paid off. Her boosted durability finally kicked in, and she went toe-to-toe with it, seizing a gap she knew was coming, redirecting a swing and gouging a crater in its chest plating.

  She shoved a cluster of incendiary grenades right into the hole she'd chipped away at its chest, watching it burn and rattle. The explosion flared in its pride, smoldering flesh and metal in a perfect scar—Kelly had won the first real damage trade, and soot-streaked triumph tasted electric.

  Not exactly a win, but hell, at least it wasn't the usual getting demolished.

  The dual-arm-cannon-swinging, shoulder-mounted-missile-bearing, chest-embedded-compression-weapon-toting, back-racked-arsenal-hauling, heated-blade-wielding biological disaster thrashed around, chest cavity kindly smoldering—fire finding even its hardened body inconveniently flame-retardant.

  One massive arm thumped to the ground alongside a neatly detached missile rig she cut out of its shoulder, courtesy of Kelly's monomolecular blade slicing precision. She hit the floor on all fours—barely holding form through blood that was both hers and not, thick red soaked into black grease-thick ichor—gun swinging behind her on its strap. Everything hurt, which meant everything was working.

  Kelly was covered in blood. Most of it hers. Her limbs and ribs traced a constellation of fractures, abrasion scars jagged on her arms, every breath tasted burnt iron. The creature staggered, off-balance, before one of its many brains recalibrated, its balance instantly regained and the wounds sealed on their own like they was never there, the flames in its chest doused to nothing by inbuilt systems. But it's arm was gone. It's shoulder cannon too. Genuine progress bled out onto the floor.

  The three retrieval team operatives—still tending to their wounds—paused mid-tourniquet, and stared at her with sharp, seething anger, each turning toward her with the sort of fury usually reserved for things they killed out of hatred instead of duty.

  One looked like he wanted to speak. The other two looked like they wanted to disassemble her.

  Nobody clapped. Which felt rude; considering the performance.

  "The hell's wrong with her?" one muttered, eyes wide. "Her EQ's spiking all over—nothing should do that."

  "Is she one of those things from outside?" the second asked, already unlocking his sidearm.

  "She's bleeding like us, but they can fake that," the third said, mag check half-done, muzzle angling in, the other hand reaching for his railgun. "Her readings don't line up. That's not human switching range."

  "What the fuck is she?"

  And then Kelly woke up in her apartment again—less sore and short one abomination kill.

  Dozens more loops burned through. Kelly geared up, charged in, carved out damage, lost limbs, made notes, died, bled, killed, got killed, and lined up to do it again.

  By attempt seven-hundred and forty-eight, her deflecting had evolved into real control—she could force openings, shut down return fire, shut down its arms, and attack freely without punishment.

  It had stopped being a question of victory and turned into scheduling. She had control, she had rhythm, and now she had time. Every strike she landed cost it more than every strike she took, and she could keep going longer than it could keep standing.

  The retrieval team decided they were bored of watching and moved as a single calibrated threat—guns raised, steps aligned, visors flashing with synced telemetry. Boots hissed against scorched floor as they closed in, formation tight as a contract clause.

  Kelly caught the familiar sharp-click rhythm of their safeties disengaging, punctuation marks to whatever memo they'd just agreed on. The abomination shifted to accommodate them, its chassis groaning approval, shoulder cannons syncing with human rifles in a shared language of suppression. No more duel. This was hostile acquisition. She was the asset. They moved to lock her down.

  Permanently.

  She was swarmed, gutted, and erased—again. But now the math lined up. The Heavy—the Goretank, wasn't invincible anymore. She could bleed it. She could break it. It took effort, timing, control—but it could be done. That changed everything.

  Attempt one-thousand one-hundred and thirty-three was the loop she cracked it. The Heavy's cannons kept locking late, its weight buckled under redirect after redirect, and she'd built enough muscle memory to route its strikes by reflex. One of the retrieval team bled out before his rifle hit the ground.

  Which was exactly when Retrieval decided fair play was overrated, cracked open their toybox, and unleashed enough drones, bots, and reactivated building defenses to start their own tiny corporate warzone. They plugged a suspiciously glowing yellow case into the Heavy, kickstarting a grotesque round of regenerative steroids that bulked it up even as chunks visibly cracked and dropped off, because when Genecorp said disposable assets, they meant it literally.

  She lost. Again. The abomination bulked up, slammed her through debris, and let its tether buzz louder while its casing split under the pressure. That was fine. Now she understood what rebuilt it—and next time, she'd snap that link with her skull if that's what it took.

  Loop one thousand four hundred was when the outcome finally locked in.

  She'd always had problems with Genecorp, ideologically. Even before the loops. Not because they couldn't crack immortality—they had. Not because they couldn't heal anything, regrow anything, build biology into anything. They could. They just didn't. They locked it all behind retinal scanners and contract clauses, sold it to the rich, hoarded it for their boardrooms, let the world rot while they preserved the same twelve perfect men and women for centuries.

  Kelly didn't disagree with the science. She disagreed with the aim. And now that aim was standing in front of her with light railguns and a leash on a gore tank demon.

  To Kelly, corporate technological hoarding and restraint was the kind of deep offense that blocked everything she lived for—scientific progress.

  The place was a full-body insult to science; barefaced restraint packaged in smug white tiles.

  She'd catalogued every inch of this lobby on instinct alone: the sterile floors, the quietly humming locks, the walls built to outlast low class uprisings. It was a habitat engineered for stagnation, a place where curiosity came to be buried under brand slogans and security clearance. Rather than disliking it, she wanted it chemically unmade.

  She'd cracked every slab of reinforced tile under her spine or someone else's boot. Support beams had lost arguments with her corpse more times than she cared to count. The abomination had thrown her through ten floors of glass, drywall, and pride—and she'd returned each time with worse ideas. Outside, Park Avenue groaned under the weight of her Titles.

  Monsters packed the avenue like they were queuing for autographs. Genecorp HQ stood surrounded by a living barricade of claws, sludge, gunfire, explosions, and debt collectors in beast form. If this lobby had once been a corporate temple, it was now a crash test site for Kelly Voss-shaped problems.

  One day, when she cracked the loop wide enough to keep her body in one piece past the end, she'd take a break from progress and erase Genecorp from the skyline. Not out of spite—she wasn't being sentimental. It would be a controlled demolition of everything that stalled science in favor of profit. Strip it down, study the wreckage, atomize the blueprints. Then put the crater on a map and label it "Lesson One."

  The real project would come later—once she nailed the architecture of causality to the floor and she came back and turned the whole building into a teachable moment. For now, stripping Genecorp of most of its lobby, all of its guards, its first retrieval team and half its structural dignity would count as a warm-up.

  A surge, and her mimic claw punched through the teleporter's chest, hissing steam as the rig detached, while her other hand brought a pistol up and the muzzle barked through the future-sight gunman's armor gap—killing both in the same heartbeat she'd slaughtered them in hundreds of times before.

  She dropped through floor after floor without slowing, tearing through every turret, drone, wall-mounted cannon, guard, budget-grade mercenary, gene-things with tubes and ego-things in armor, and each containment freak the building could scrape together. They didn't even get their safeties off. She'd memorized every corridor, every reload rhythm, every meatbag scream cue. It was hardly a breach—it was housekeeping. Genecorp had picked the wrong apocalypse to monetize, and her body had long since stopped accepting their authority as real.

  A second ticked by, and Reggie and the Phaser rushed her, all electric reflex and loyalty. Kelly dialed Warchild up to grade 2 with a snap, and the pressure folded them before they could aim. She shot them both through the skull as they dropped, calm and clinical.

  She'd killed them hundreds of times already—sometimes Reggie got back up when he thought she wasn’t looking, sometimes he didn't and played dead. The teen's parents put a lot of safeguards into his annoying little body against death. She could sense the heat of his heart beating through injury while the Phasers went cold.

  Kelly watched him for a moment, then decided this was a run where he was too afraid to stop playing dead and attack her. She shot him one more time for being annoying, then moved on, unbothered. By now, their movements were solved problems and their defeat a recurring task.

  She blitzed straight through the seventy-floor staircase, casually raiding a few extra floors because momentum was hard to brake at this speed. Every guard rotation, turret cycle, drone patrol, and bio-containment trap had long since stopped being obstacles and started being conveniently placed and well memorised entertainment. Switching titles and feats pushed her EQ into territory that could politely be called unfair—especially once she figured out how easy it was to flirt with death on purpose.

  King Cullen—the black-ops burn pile Genecorp kept on retainer for wet work and war crimes—took one step into the stairwell before gravity, a dead man's rig, and her mimic claw made three executive decisions on his behalf. He landed hard and headfirst, and Kelly stood over the mess grinning as she'd finally solved the equation with blood. Then she cackled.

  Kelly let loose a cackle that started in her bones and roared out into the wreckage, loaded with the distilled essence of every loop she'd ever broken. It was madness sharpened into skill, rage compressed into a tactical asset, and bloodlust polished into her personal calling card—a notice to anyone who heard it that she'd stopped playing defense about a hundred deaths ago and the world better catch up fast.

  The meat demon had trained her better than the labs ever did. It didn't speak, didn't negotiate, didn't hesitate, all it did was tear. Kelly watched it across loops, learned the rhythm, matched the tempo, then made it hers. Now the Title sat under her name, and every time someone flinched before they fired, she knew it was working.

  [New Title (Extremely Rare) → Slaughterer of Men (I)]

  "Memo to Genecorp: your containment plan is now part of the floor. Recommend backup. Stronger backup."

  A dead guard's tag had already tripped the building's speaker relay, so Kelly didn't waste the opportunity. Her voice slammed through the lobby, the entrance, the cracked street beyond.

  "This is your building speaking. We regret to inform you that all vital assets have been converted into fertilizer. Management is on fire. Cullen is dead. And I'm still bored. If you can hear me over the sound of the monsters trying to eat you; Send the retrieval team with the Heavy—the fun ones."

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  Her voice blasted through the street’s gunfire and screeches.

  Almost immediatley, nearly seventy squads tried to storm the building—four made it inside.

  They found Kelly standing in a red puddle shaped by corpses and effort, still upright, still grinning, the way a problem grins back when you thought it was solved. Blood pooled at her feet and fell from her ears and mouth, the price of artificially triggered Titles grinding through her biology. She looked dead on her feet.

  Temporarily. They didn't need to know that.

  They rushed in proud, and left in piles. Blood soaked the lobby tiles, viscera hung off fractured rails, and the ones who didn't die immediately froze when they tried to run. Their own legs gave them up—Slaughterer of Men didn't ask. It hijacked nerves, kicked hormones out of rhythm, and pulled the brakes right when panic reached top speed. A second of hesitation was all it needed.

  They weren't mind-controlled. That'd be cute. They were chemically betrayed by their own training. If they'd come in expecting magecraft duct-taped to war crimes, perhaps it would've gone different. Maybe their neural augments would've triggered preemptive chemical blockers instead of hastily recovering a second too late.

  But unfortunately for them, a second was all Kelly needed.

  The first time she fought it, she called it a mistake in muscle. The last time, she called it a lesson plan. Somewhere between the fifth and thirtieth death, Kelly decided the abomination had a point. In the middle of tearing it apart, Kelly had to admit the thing knew a few things worth stealing. That rage—deep, engineered, spread across three organoid brains and calibrated for siege-tier carnage—wasn't far from a flaw. It was a toolkit. She didn't plan to foam at the mouth and eat drywall, but there was value in unfiltered violence when directed with intent. Rage made pressure. Pressure made cracks. Cracks made outcomes. And outcomes could create as many variables—No, as many butterflies, as possible.

  Maybe it could help her get closer to the man in the sky, find Jellybean, and maybe even reach the smug observers hiding in the stars.

  And hundreds of bouts later, the monster wasn't a foe, but a living syllabus. No worship involved but lab notes and blood metrics. By loop seven hundred and eleven she'd re-filed it under "useful reference material." The lesson that began when she was a timid, scared, confused scientist trapped in an apocalypse that never ended now sat ironclad in her notes: if violence is coming anyway, make sure yours lands first—and harder. And when the room tilted toward bloodshed, own the tilt and add more blood.

  She grabbed the magnetic rifle from the floor, reshaped her blade into something long and rude, and switched the teleporter rig off with one flick. She had weapons that punched harder. She had exit tech that skipped time and effort. She had three options that involved no pain and no spectacle and didn't touch any of them.

  She had built artificial blood sacks that ruptured on cue and lied to her Status panel. Tricked it.

  She'd skated death with chemical poetry and hacked her way into Traits that never should've let her in. The rig could have taken her past the retrieval team. The kill-code rifle could've solved the lobby. But Kelly stayed exactly where she was. The enemy was here. The fight was hers.

  And if the lobby wanted to be a wall, it was getting broken by the same timid, scared, confused scientist trapped in an apocalypse that never ended—only now armed with spite, science, and eight stacked Titles.

  She wouldn't be Kelly Voss if she didn't solve every blockade by dragging her broken body through it on principle and a deep commitment to personal overkill and dissecting reality, seeing what happened when it ran out of excuses.

  "That her? That's the freak Cullen warned about?" the axe-hauler bellowed, voice soaked in leftover pride and twitching nerves, surrounded by nine more retrievals already bristling with light railguns and monster crates. Kelly interrupted before they could finish unpacking their egos.

  "Listen, guys—i'd love to track your trigger fingers and dodge your clumsy railgun fire, but thats boring. Nothing in those pretty cases can scratch me. Roll the Heavy in, unload every crate you're babysitting, or you won't live through this conversation," she said, voice level while raw power chewed at her nerves and she checked her fingernails for chipped edges.

  Naturally they opened with light rail-fire and grenades; naturally she switched through her Titles at high speed, tracked every twitching trigger finger, and stepped clear before the magnets even spat. Kelly sidestepped the streaking rounds, strolled through the blooming blasts, and checked a rough edge on her thumbnail while the shockwaves fussed at her coat.

  Initial bravado evaporated when they saw her strolling through the flames, checking her cuticles. And after one optimistic fool tried sneaking up on her, only to hit the lobby's sudden gravity swell and fold flat at a snap of her fingers, the rest promptly chose the sane option; wheel out the Heavy and crack every crate, or die before the flames faded.

  This loop, their faces carried the weight of soldiers ordered to hold ground already lost. They stood silent, trained, shoulders tight, with their weapons held more for war than for extermination, and bracing for a battle they now understood they'd entered too late.

  Steel doors split and the meat demon lumbered through, smoke wreathing its cannons; on the first tremor of its roar, Kelly was already moving—war-aura hardening the air, gun up, blade shaping the opening beat of their duel.

  She lunged into the collision, floor tiles exploding under the monster's momentum; burst-sharp footwork held her in its slipstream, her weapons skimming the cannons to bleed force from each blow while its brute weight thundered past her guard.

  She intercepted the charge head-on; its strength and brute force still exceeded hers...

  Yet in short flashes she matched its speed in sharp bursts and deflection.

  Kelly read each finger twitch before the railguns barked, sidestepped the turret storms she once had to take cover behind, and when the turrets clipped her, they found no soft tissue worth celebrating. Kelly let the Endurance Title surge through her muscles;

  When the Heavy reached in to crack her spine, she slammed Death’s Foe into her limbs and let her bones do the talking, leaning into bones, muscles, eyes, senses, that could stand fifty percent more abuse, and exert fifty percent more everything. The power gap hadn’t closed, but it no longer mattered. She was close enough that the numbers felt petty.

  Kelly attacked with every messy, savage instinct she had—guns, grenades, and a blade that cared nothing for form, only impact, and a style that could've only been labeled "chaos." She flooded it with bullets and wild sword swings that still made more impact than anything the Heavy tried.

  Still, she dominated.

  That forced the retrieval teams to break their usual order.

  They cracked open their support crates, and deployed their backup units—biological support creatures bred from less costly projects and gene-splicing. Some looked like combat drones wrapped in muscle. Others moved on four legs, built from canine frames and hostile tissue—things shaped like metal mixed with fleshy dogs the devil forgot to take back to hell—and slapped glowing yellow boxes into their backs.

  Each one got a yellow injection case slammed onto its spine. The tubes lit up as they activated, pumping synthetic combat drugs straight into unstable organs. Strength surged. Coordination followed. Every unit went rabid in under a second.

  The creatures surged, their rage amplified into something they hadn't needed to do before in any of her previous loops.

  In all of her encounters, they had never been enhanced. The teams were spending resources early, which meant the viewed her differently now.

  The Heavy came in fast. And not alone. It moved backed by every boosted support unit the squads had left; canine-legged hybrids and reinforced bio-drones that burned hot from the yellow injectors still lodged in their spines.

  Thirteen targets in total—all thirteen hounds charging at her in a tight spread. They hit her from every side at once. Kelly stayed mobile, moving through hardwired reflex and timing. Her mimic skin locked down where her eyes couldn't reach, catching angles she didn't need to see. She parried what she could, slipped what she couldn't, and let Death’s Foe carry what was left. Every deflection came clean. Every dodge cut narrow.

  It was full surround, thirteen-on-one, cannonfire and turrets, and she still held. Not evenly—she was taking hits. She wasn't winning, she just didn't fall.

  One second

  Then two.

  Three seconds of constant redirection, stalling, and burst counterattacks, burst fire and slicing at anything down, or shredded under its own overextension.

  Four seconds passed like that before the hounds hit the floor. All of them.

  The W2 warhounds had killed her hundreds of times. They were a corporate countermeasure, rated cleanly for anything under EQ 6.0, with kinetic spikes that used to tear through her every time she blinked wrong. That was then. Now they dropped into the melee with the Heavy and got chewed apart by crossfire and claw within four seconds. Kelly didn't even look. They weren't opponents anymore. They were obstacles. Environmental. Background detail that used to matter.

  And before the boosted abomination could get torn down like the rest, two of the other teams tossed fresh yellow cases into its frame and braced behind the blast pattern of its empowerment. The moment its vitals surged again, they spread out tactically and opened fire together—weapons came up a heartbeat later, zero hesitation, all barrels aimed to box her in from four vectors at once.

  But kelly met the heavy at the center in a burst of velocity.

  It started with full collision. The type that broke things. Kelly activated her empowerment Title Death’s Foe, and her body answered with 50% more everything—nerve conduction, motor sync, structural hold—stacked clean over the werewolf strength and keyed to her near-death state. That spiked her EQ to 6.8 in short bursts, only while it stayed equipped. She parried with strength, then switched on contact to Disciple of Deflection, not to hurt, just to redirect. That Title reflected attacks away with equal force on successful deflection, all she had to do was make contact, push, and switch.

  Which she did. Masterfully.

  Raw force came in, and her bones played courier. The shock threw the large creature's limbs wide, broke canonfire angles, collapsed footing. She never move through the chaos. She let it orbit her.

  The thing surged past its built-in limits and started cooking from the inside, cracks split across its torso, heat poured out from both eyes and half-healed wounds, and the air around it went damp with steam and powerfully manufactured muscle fibres pushed to the edge. Skin split down its chest and arms where pressure outran regeneration, steam forced out through bone gaps, and heat shimmered off the torn meat around its cannons. It's cannonfire grew more explosive. Its punches gained mass, its stride accelerated.

  This was biological suicide, weaponised. A perfect mirror of Kelly's strategy—burn through the body, trade time for dominance.

  And it was faster ever than before, too fast for its size. It wasn't slowing down, burning through its own structure to spike performance to widen the gap. Its acceleration pushed past her readouts, and for the first time across thirty deaths, Kelly found herself falling behind.

  Kelly didn't need the odds even, she never had. She had built herself in worse. Slower reflexes. Broken ribs. Fewer weapons. Less certainty. That was normal. The loop standard. The moment things got fair, she got suspicious.

  She didn't mind that the Meat Demon still outclassed her. Or that the light railguns hadn't stopped firing. Or the EQ gap was still wide. She just noted the variables, logged the timings, and kept moving. Every loop started tilted, stacked, and bleeding—and she built her rhythm in the crush of it. Being outclassed was never a problem. It was the layout.

  Every Titled she'd earned kicked in, in sequence, chained end to end, no cooldown or breathing room, each one dragged forward by blood loss, hacked reflexes, and whatever passed for luck after countless deaths. Warchild squeezed gravity, Endurance Fortress and Fortress of Flame drank the incoming force, Disciple of Deflection volleyed it back, and Death’s Foe stacked a fifty-percent uplift atop her werewolf surge and Mimic plates. The fight got hungrier, messier, sharper with every drop of blood she lost. She kept taking hits, and the fight got harder every time her body gave out a little more.

  The abomination pushed harder and stronger than her. It forced her back two steps at a time, arms slamming down with a weight that broke concrete and spines, but every swing cost it something in the exchange; one arm hung loose from tendon burn, one leg limped from a torque fracture, and its chest armor was gone entirely, peeled off during a grab that turned into a full-body gouge.

  And finally, Kelly took enough consecutive hits at melee range for Disciple of Deflection to spike in grade, and from that moment, every strike that successfully turned got thrown back at full strength, and the fight broke open.

  The increase in Disciple of Deflection's grade let her bounce full-force attacks on clean parries, and she used it the way she used everything—with enthusiasm and zero concern for durability thresholds, slamming the enhanced creature by shoving the advantage back into the creature's chest, folding limbs with returned force, turning cannonfire into self-harm, spinning bullets off-course, and tearing into it with follow-up strikes that stacked speed, weight, and precision without giving the body time to stabilize.

  The creature was never truly alive. It was built for violence and containment, its nature execution. Designed for high-efficiency extermination with multiple brains trained to optimize killing, it still carried, deep in its threat filter, a capacity to recognize something worse. That process staggered when Kelly kept breaking physical laws with her anomaly-fueled assault, and it processed her as the anomaly mid-mauling, with no protocol left to explain the manic precision tearing it apart.

  And its three organoid brains, wired for efficient slaughter, still carried enough residual survival mapping to recognize that the thing in front of it was more violent than its own kill routines, and that it was somehow enjoying the anomaly-fueled violence enough to trigger a hesitation cycle usually reserved for strategic retreat.

  She carved her way through the creature's entire arsenal, piece by overpriced piece; cannons dropped, cameras gone, sensors gouged, every emergency weapon ripped off or hacked down, until what remained was a twitching wreck pinned to the floor under her boot, its head crushed beneath her stance, every inch of offense stripped and catalogued by disassembly.

  It would've looked absurd to anyone who hadn't just watched her dismantle it—Kelly, human-sized, standing on the skull of a Threshold-killer class meat construct engineered for siege clearance. Her balance didn't shift once.

  Kelly stood with her foot pressed into the monster's head. It had been built to rip siege vehicles in half.

  She hadn't. She still won. She cackled-loud, manic, delighted, and pleased with herself.

  It was designed to shred armored columns. She wasn't. She still won. Her laugh cracked out raw and unfiltered, and she leaned into it—head tilted back, throat open, entertained.

  To the side, the mercenaries, specifically the three who had survived her chaos of deflected bullets, redirected turrets, and ricochet cannonfire that hadn’t picked a side, watched in stunned silence while she smiled at them.

  She caught their eyes and tilted her chin. "So. You want it back intact, or should I bill per piece?" Her shape-memory blade responded on cue, stretching long into a heavy machete. She rested it against the creature's thick neck and swung.

  The moment her blade bit through, the thing vented from everywhere at once—fluids, pressure, whatever counted as blood, and a handful of chemicals that were probably banned in peacetime. Gas poured out in grey ribbons, veined with color that didn’t match the human spectrum. Then the head dropped, too heavy, too late, and slammed into the floor hard enough to fracture composite. The spine followed one vertebra at a time, slumping out while the neck tried to realign and gave up halfway through. The whole thing collapsed into a leaking heap of gas and meat-code.

  The spine-pull special. It had done it to her plenty. She was returning the favor.

  At last, the nightmare was ended.

  The wall that could never be breached had been shattered.

  She looked up, coat punched through with bullets and soaked in blood, then stared straight at the three geniuses who thought unleashing that thing on her would do the job.

  Their gaunt faces were filled with shock, and true expressions of fear.

  "You saw that, right?" The woman's voice cracked. Her light railgun was still up, but her arms had locked. "That was a Class-X heavy, boosted past 6.5EQ. That's over protocol. She's pulling sub-fours. She shouldn't be breathing."

  “That shouldn’t be possible.” The light railgun carrier steadied his aim, voice raw. “She’s not even at five.” His hands stayed locked on the weapon’s frame. “We need to call for backup!” he shouted. The second raced to the shattered doorway, scanned the outside, and froze. The lobby exit opened into a living tide. A sea of creatures waited, twisting, breathing, shifting, while the sounds of their squadmates battling titanic creatures, winged or tentacled beasts, carried through—men fighting to stay alive or getting torn down before they even reached the steps.

  "Oh no," Kelly mock-gasped, swiping blood off her cheek with the back of her hand. "Not over protocol. Did I void the warranty?"

  She tilted her head at the frozen light railgun, then at the one broadcasting panic. "By all means. Call backup. Bring two."

  Then, to the woman still locked up. "And why do you even have a Heavy?" she asked, gesturing at the leaking wreckage. "Those things are for riots and bank sieges, not one woman in a coat.”

  “Didn't use it on the first monster tide. Didn't use it when your buddies were dying on Floor 12. But me? Oh, sure. Pop the cork."

  She paced in front of them, grinning wide. "This is why nobody likes you guys anymore."

  “Also—thanks for trying to kill me. Real sweet.” She tapped her blade. “Uno reverse, by the way.”

  They moved to run. One blink—Death’s Foe surged, faked a near-death activation, and force-spiked her EQ up 150%. Another breath and Slaughterer of Men flipped on: fear, confusion, and chemical override spilled into the room. The third Title came with a crunch—Warchild. She snapped her fingers, the floor bowed, and a bone halo spun into orbit above her head. Gravity locked the retrieval team mid-step.

  Kelly exhaled. "That's the trick with escape artists. You trap the air first."

  They pressed flat under her gravity, armor grinding into cracked tile, heads forced low under the weight of Warchild's field. One of them whimpered something broken and useless, unused to the taste of real consequence. The other was louder. He promised to kill her, gut her kids, torch her family tree. His wrist bent sideways from the pressure but still dragged the railgun into place. The round cracked off with a scream.

  She watched his trigger finger twitch under the crush of Warchild's gravity, slow enough she could’ve microwaved something first. She didn't bother to swap Titles—she sidestepped before the shot fired and ended all three, cleaner than any death they ever gave her.

  [Title: Giantbane III → Giantbane IV]

  They were only stronger because their strength was sanctioned. Just slightly above the everyone else, like the others—only bulked up with enough Genecorp gear to fake it past 4.0.

  Their armor screamed budget exception, their reflexes lagged, and the second their toys broke, so did they. Kelly had logged harder kills in the stairwell. Their pet was the threat. They were just the packaging.

  She disabled Warchild, dropping the aura that had pulled every apex predator in walking range. Then she pinged her neural assistant to shut off the induced near-death state she'd been using to fake activation thresholds.

  Her ribs stayed broken. One arm twitched wrong. Her legs bled through melted armor. Something in her shoulder had stopped tracking vertical movement entirely. But she'd stacked enough Titles to crawl out of worse. She toggled to her vitality Title, feeling her regeneration improve once per second, and gave herself permission to stop dying for the next ten minutes. She still had a teleport rig to carve, a Meat Demon to skin, and Jellybean to find before the world exploded.

  Her hand locked on a gray reinforced vial, torn from her belt, miraculously unbroken, and drove it into her arm. The fluid pushed back—It always did. Probably aware it came from something that treated physics as a personal assistant.

  She'd had three priorities: the teleport rig, the anomaly sample, and crushing the final wall. And every time she tried to inject it in a loop, something killed her before it hit tissue. Bots, drones, or automated guns, all keyed to react the moment she moved for it. Security didn't just know what it was. They'd known it was her target, and what she could become if it took.

  Now, the floor was clear, the turrets were reconstructing slag, everything had been crushed, and the only people fast enough to stop her were still locked outside, arguing with the monsters Warchild had attracted. She had maybe 15 seconds before the self-repairing walls decided they were turrets again and she’d have to destroy them.

  The dose would break her balance and shred her nerves, maybe send her skidding across the tile, or maybe send her somewhere else entirely. If nothing landed a shot before it finished rewriting her blood.

  But if she survived the injection window, she'd carry the anomaly's dna into every single run.

  For the first time in any loop,

  Kelly pressed inject,

  recovered,

  and headed for the exit with a Trait no-one had accounted for.