Kelly was lying on the floor in one of the most dangerous buildings in Park Avenue. Because she was on vacation, and she needed to think.

  As usual, the ground was consistent and structurally sound—reliable, unlike everything else that tried to brand her with a serial number or kill her.

  It still felt warm from all of the explosions. And... nice—it reminded her of the time she’d spent with her best friend, the Deadqueen, years ago.

  So Kelly used it as a platform to think about the current problem she faced.

  According to Dr. Haider, there was still one place in the area that hadn’t been covered in layers of security or gutted by creatures—a sealed botanical research facility buried behind a collapsed overpass on the east grid.

  She’d seen that on the way here, pristine, and considered breaking into it at some point to scan the teleporter rig, and a few other things. It had oxygen and nobody important left to complain. Perfect.

  The monsters had beaten her to it, though, and covered the building in crushed infrastructure in their rush to reach her. “Looks like the magical hell-portal stampede called dibs,” she muttered.

  Outside, the street was practically submerged with creatures. Which meant nobody else was coming inside and she would face something of a challenge trying to get outside too. The teleport rig had been secured and the sample had finally taken—granting her a new Trait she badly wanted to hack. And the Heavy had been diced up and stashed away—most of it. Genecorp’s lobby was still repairing itself, one shifting floor tile at a time. The smart walls were confused, trying to regrow parts of the room that had been vaporised or digested.

  Of course, Kelly had taken the time to pack as many weapons, two datachips, and tools as she could get her hands on, including three railguns and Cullen’s bisected weapon augment. Which was great. Then she erased every trace of herself from the building’s security system, mostly out of habit and muscle memory.

  Not that it helped. These places always ran backups of their backups of their secret backups, usually across three satellites. She scrubbed what she could and ripped out what she couldn't with homemade corruptive code. Then she copied what she liked, and didn’t expect to get away with it. If she’d actually cared about hiding her identity, she’d have used an alias alongside a few proxies, and never shown up in person.

  Resting on her back, Kelly reached behind her and grabbed a diced cube of meat demon, pressed it to her shadow, and shoved her entire arm through the surface. Storage confirmed. She’d spent the last fifteen minutes testing the new trait, and so far, it hadn’t exploded. With her other hand, she stripped the biological lock from the light railgun beside her. She wasn’t paying attention. Most of her was already figuring out how to exploit the hell out of her newest Trait; Lesser Null-Voidling.

  [Lesser Null-Voidling (Unique, I-Grade)]: This being contains traces of Voidling physiology, merged with its Null qualities to create a strain of Voidling that should not exist. As a result, this being passively constructs a layered substrate beneath existence. A second foundation—not underneath space, but folded beside it. Unobservable. Unreachable. It holds nothing yet, but as a new manifold substrate, it holds potential.]

  Her shadow had changed. It was weird now. It felt pliable when she pressed down—soft, but with resistance, like rubber she could push through. She tested it by shoving objects in at different speeds and angles. If she focused and applied a little pressure, things just slipped through. When she reached in and thought about what she wanted, she felt the right shape press against her palm. So naturally, she stuck her head in her shadow to see what was on the other side.

  She saw darkness, which she’d expected.

  She’d been upgrading her lens-suite with night vision every loop since attempt ten, so it wasn’t a visual failure. What came through was absence. No floor. No items. No ceiling. No roof. What she saw was uninterrupted blank—depthless and structureless.

  That raised more than a few questions.

  The trait description called it a 'layered substrate' and 'folded beside' existence, which implied this wasn’t spatial storage in the traditional sense. That meant it didn’t sit under space or compress it like a basement or sub-dimension. It unfolded alongside existence—a parallel layer that interacted with reality only through an anchor. It wasn’t even local.

  Kelly thought about a toaster that printed her face on the bread, even pictured the shape and the settings menu, then reached into the space and willed it to appear in her hand. Nothing—no metal touched her palm. The space stayed inert. That confirmed it wasn’t a pool of structureless potential or raw mana waiting for input—at this stage, it only stored what had already been placed.

  If it held her arm, it was real, but not spatially continuous with anything else. There was no container, no coordinates, no observable structure—only a foundation that existed in relation to her. That meant she was the anchor and the access point but not the location. She wasn’t simply storing items in existing space like the oversized Fold-up rooms or bulky Shrink-boxes. She was placing them into a new and hidden layer of reality that didn’t follow normal space rules and hadn’t even decided its rules yet.

  For that to happen, one of two things had to be true. Either the trait was partially symbiotic, forming around her like a living extension, or it ran passive logic through her biology—referencing her thought patterns or nervous system as input parameters and retrieval vectors, and reacted to her input: if she reached in, thought of what placed item she wanted, it would respond.

  In both cases, the space wasn’t separate—it was bound. It didn’t exist without her. She was the key and the doorway. It was an incomplete, placeholder dimension only she had access to.

  A placeholder. And she’d just leaned her entire head into it.

  Until she was ready to experiment, she kept her weight distributed. Falling in completely would break the interface—her body was the access point, and pulling it out of reality would lock the space shut. There’d be zero anchor or return path. She’d either reset or drift alone in a place without rules or a customer service line.

  She had paused her dissection of the meat demon to map a route toward the botanical research facility, where she could dismantle the teleporter in peace with better tools and extract any traces to its origin. That might speed up her search for the Deadqueen. Dr. Haider had mentioned that if Jellybean was alive or dead, there would be traces here—on Earth, not off-planet. It wasn’t the worst lead she’d followed.

  From what Dr. Haider told her, she needed to hit Rosebridge Station for data, and Greenpoint Industrial for cover. According to the locals, that entire northwest grid was called the Graveyard District. It was full of fallout from the wars—the worst kind. Then the corporations made it worse, packing it with plants, runoff, and containment waste, then built checkpoints around it to stop anyone from leaking into the rich zones. Clean air cost Credits. Dollars. Crypto. USD-C. Clean streets required approval.

  And the intern she’d pulled out of hiding in a janitorial closet on floor four had told her the Graveyard District’s landmark was a ruined parking-lot fortress converted into an open-air chop shop. Full of runoff, reactors, pollution and incinerators, the checkpoints kept the executives clean. Traders used it. Illegal EQs used it. People with face problems and bounty issues used it. The Deadqueen might have too. She’d left him alive, stranded, on the fourth floor with no way down and a bottle of water.

  With her arm and head sunk elbow-deep in her own shadow, Kelly felt a finger tap her shoulder.

  Kelly withdrew her head from the extradimensional hole she’d made in reality and looked up at the tapper, a young man—the intern—standing in the broken lobby, arm raised as though he’d interrupted a meeting. “Hi,” he said. “Can we talk for a minute?”

  The lifts were dead. Manual overrides were fused, rails had collapsed, and one still groaned under a crushed torso. The stairs had collapsed across multiple floors. She’d jammed a drone nest into the landing, and the rest was now an unstable chute of wreckage. The real danger was the broken droids. The enemy recognition units inside the husks sometimes spiked under pressure and opened fire at random, or from fractured heat or motion sensors, which was worse—step into the wrong corridor and get Swiss cheesed. Nothing under 3.0EQ could descend through that without divine intervention or an accidentally triggered bullet.

  He'd been so pitiful that shooting him would've hurt her feelings.

  So she’d left him on the 4th floor with 1.1EQ.

  Now, he was somehow in the ground floor lobby. Very resourceful.

  “Hey! I was experimenting,” Kelly said, shooing him away with one hand still half-inside her shadow, “and you’re compromising my vacation from immortal battle, my escape plan, and my capacity to punch holes through space!”

  “Um, well—I mean, security described a fuzzy entity laying on the floor for five minutes, relaxing and not attempting to escape, so I don't think that's true,” the young man stammered, watching her arm vanish into the surface. “A-and the cut on your cheek stopped healing while your head was inside.” He crouched, lit a piece of paper and pushed it through her shadow, struggling past resistance. "So, uh… well, this doesn’t look like a hole in space".

  Kelly raised a brow, mentally noting third-party entry.

  A moment later he pulled the paper back out—its burn perfectly matched the shape going in. She checked. “It’s acting more like stasis. Or a piece of space cut off from spacetime flow.” Then he laughed, shaking his head. “But that’s impossible.”

  A grin spread across Kelly’s face as the implication clarified. She was the Null, and her merge with the Voidling’s physiology had built an extra layer of reality beside normal space—it was totally its own thing. Separate. Unreachable. No wonder the universe hated her.

  “That was five minutes?” Kelly asked, eyebrows up and tone flat. “Excellent. I love this for me.” She tapped her shadow, still half-embedded in it. “Does this make me a god of time? Do you think it reacts faster if I’m smiling? Damn, I’m incredible.”

  “Uh—well, no. Hypothetically, it makes you someone carrying a mobile temporal stasis anchor with—uh—some grandiosity issues and, um, access to tech that shouldn’t exist,” he said, voice cracking on the last word.

  Kelly beamed. Fantastic. She’d made a stasis godhole and it only took a fourteen hundred deaths and mildly illegal gene therapy!

  The intern glanced down, tracking the scattered repair units, the scorched floor, the ruined security team, and the last twitching cube of the Heavy. His eyes stopped at the wall of monsters pressing in from the street. They were everywhere. "Do you, uh, maybe wanna stand up or leave before they start breaking through the windows?”

  Kelly chuckled. “No.”

  Unless someone higher than 10EQ dropped from orbit, Genecorps cronies wouldn't make it past her monstrous emotional support group—the first retrieval team had just been lucky and quick. The floor remained supportive, and as usual, much better than chairs. And she was still thinking about how to weaponize her shadow pocket-world, preferably in a way that would ruin everyone else's job security.

  The Urgency Intern frowned, gestured at the windows flexing under monster weight, opened his mouth, stalled, then half-pointed again with a helpless, “Could you maybe, um—before they, you know—get in?”

  Kelly stood, pulled a light railgun from her shadow, slung it over one shoulder, and flexed her wrist to confirm the shape-memory blade still rested in bracelet form. Then she aimed an armor-piercing handgun at the newcomer.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  This teen was too friendly and too willing for someone whose employer had spent the morning trying to kill her, which meant either something was up, or he wasn’t on-message.

  Now that she had a clear view, she saw the change. When she’d scanned him hiding in the fourth-floor closet, he’d measured 1.1—barely enhanced, still legal. He’d boosted himself during the chaos. Smart. Whether that counted as emergency initiative or felony-level overreach depended on how the courts decided to interpret panic.

  Earlier, he’d been moving at peak human output. Now he was pushing 300 percent. Enough to throw heavy machinery or sidestep slow rubber bullets. His balance had improved, posture squared up, but he still panicked whenever she moved.

  “I’m Caleb,” the opportunist said. He wore standard corporate office attire—pressed trousers, collared shirt, and a GeneCorp jacket marked with the helix insignia and department tag. Seventeen, maybe eighteen, and visibly uneasy being this close to someone who had recently shredded and diced a biological weapon. “I was looking for the safest way out.”

  “Oh, cool.”

  Then Kelly turned around and started walking away.

  “Hey, wait!” Caleb darted ahead with both arms out in a panic, trying to box her in with nervous limbs and too much momentum—as a fellow intern, Kelly let it slide, because interns ran on stress and delusion. “Where are you going, Miss Voss? Can I call you Kelly?”

  “Sure,” Kelly said, shrugging without commitment. “I’m a scientist. I do science. So I’m going home to do science.” She wasn’t. She was heading to a botanical lab to track her best friend and hack the absolute hell out of her latest Trait. She glanced at Caleb. “I can’t die, so I’m probably a terrible role model.”

  “So Vaughn didn’t hire you as muscle? Military?” the intern asked, confused by her last line. “Most of our heavy hitters are off-world, but this place you wrecked is Earth’s front-line base—I figured they dropped you in to grab territory while the competition was orbiting.” He pointed upward. Kelly understood he meant space, not the ceiling.

  “Nope,” she said. “They tried to put me in a petri dish and cut pieces off, so I cut back. And they were in the way of me getting superpowers.”

  Caleb made a strange face, unable to keep up with her explanation. The Augment Wars had already broken the illusion of societal equality, so the idea of someone like her not being military kept throwing people off.

  “Anyway. Heard any news about the Deadqueen? You know, gold eyes, tall, way too many augments in one body?” The air sharpened—her voice, too casual. The name sat like a pin in her throat.

  “The Deadqueen?” Caleb's confusion deepened into a frowned. “You mean the terrorist? She’s still around?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Probably. Definitely. I know that’s the kind of answer that makes billionaires recheck their exit plans—but there’s no way she could've died.”

  “No clue,” he said. “I think she’s dead." He checked a device embedded in his palm. "Actually, that's not a guess, but I can check the internal records if you want." Kelly had already checked. "Is that why you trashed the place?”

  He didn’t wait for a reply, checking his palm-device again as if confirming something private—“I’ll help if I can,” he said, then added, “actually, I think I’m in a better position than most to make that happen.”

  Kelly blinked once. “Hmm.”

  “You’re a kid in a closet. How does that turn into a Deadqueen location? Or access? Or anything useful?”

  “It’s not something I talk about,” he said, in a voice that suggested it had been practiced on mirrors, vending machines, and at least one paramedic. “My dad’s a survivor of the Shanghai fallout. He, uh, kept a few souvenirs.” He gestured vaguely, either toward nothing or everything. “But it’s not how I got the job or anything,” he added, fast and a little too earnestly. Aww, he really believed that. Kelly smirked.

  “I was looking for a way out. I’m thinking underground. I mean—no confirmation those things haven’t made it there, right? If they have, we die. So I wouldn’t mind a temporary arrangement. I can show you the tunnel. Make sure the building ignores you. Otherwise, we get torn apart trying to leave separate or crushed trying to hold the door.”

  It made sense. Kelly doubted the ones assigned to guard tunnels and underground labs, stationed in basement car parks, had stayed once the sky split open and began ejecting creatures that broke natural laws. The tunnel would still be dangerous, but the odds of survival were better than the monster kaleidoscope writhing and hammering in the street outside. If the tunnel led toward the botanical research facility, she could reach it faster and avoid getting shredded on the way.

  “Does the underground connect to the east grid?”

  “Yeah—of course it does,” Caleb said. “And, uh, a bunch of other places too. Why do you think the building’s half-empty? Everyone without a weapon bailed the second the floor started shaking.”

  Kelly nudged a chunk of the biological weapon with her boot. “I was busy turning the Heavy into smaller parts, so no—I didn’t catch where the tunnel was. What’s down there? And why does an office need direct access to street-level escape routes?”

  “You—uh, you seriously don’t know?” Caleb asked. “I mean—what even happened out here? I thought you were Vaughn. They’re supposed to have those.” He hesitated. “Who are you really?”

  Kelly waved dismissively. "I've explained this clearly already. Everyone upstairs who aimed something vaguely lethal in my direction experienced sudden, permanent organ failure. Cullen insisted on repeatedly firing lasers into my personal space, which felt excessive, so he also became abruptly deceased. His retrieval team and their genetically engineered murder pets joined him shortly after." She sighed, satisfied, as though recalling old memories. "It was all in self defence, of course. I’m not a monster.”

  Then she smiled for the eighth time in twenty four hours, mildly pleased by the day's sensible problem-solving. "So where are we going?” A pause. “Also, by the way, I really can’t die, so don’t copy anything I do. It won’t go well for you.”

  Caleb audibly swallowed and immediately re-evaluated several life choices. He'd known Kelly was the primary intruder, but he assumed there were unknown variables: likely accompanied by a covert strike force or perhaps stray bio-weapons. Realizing Kelly herself was essentially the stray bio-weapon caused him genuine concern.

  Nobody sane would walk casually into a place like this and announce they'd wiped out an entire facility packed with armed operatives at 3-to-5EQ, equipped well above their rank, and a Meat Demon Goretank that was a minimum 6EQ threat response. Caleb decided not to question her about weapons, equipment, and specifically avoided inquiring how exactly she made her shadow casually break physics in ways current technology had notably failed to replicate. He quickly accepted that she was clearly some kind of special operative here to casually steal technology humanity probably wasn’t ready to play with yet—possibly government-linked or rogue Vaughn elite. Definitely someone else's problem.

  Caleb cleared his throat nervously, immediately adopting that careful teenage tone reserved for explaining complex things to adults who might bite his head off. “I, um, apologize, miss—it's just, uh, basically Vaughn and Genecorp both get attacked sometimes by leftover Deadqueen monsters or machines. It’s happened on and off for years—it’s in the company briefing, you know? Emails mention it sometimes." He guided her to a massive set of metal doors, and a shifting floor that would take them to their destination.

  "They're pretty dormant until they get inside the building, then suddenly they're grabbing our stuff to upgrade themselves. Apparently, they're only after our tech or resources or whatever. Or maybe they're just greedy like us—I mean, fair enough, I guess. It got bad enough last year that Genecorp and Vaughn started pretending to play nice to keep everyone safe while fighting over relics. And today…” Caleb gestured at the madness outside—the sky creature, floating freak, monster chaos everywhere. “With everything totally losing it outside, I think that little game they’ve been playing just fell apart completely. Both Vaughn and Genecorp bosses took off for safer planets ages ago. Most of the operatives left behind are either on triple-decuple hazard pay or raiding other places. Pretty much everyone’s just waiting until somebody finds something good, then it’s going to be open season. Kinda hoping Vaughn doesn’t find it first, though…”

  Kelly finally had a handle on what was happening. She’d never been a big fan of politics or global squabbling—it slowed down important work like breakthroughs and blowing things up for research. Normally she preferred ignoring it altogether until she was forced to acknowledge it to find a work-around. But government delays, corporate red tape, votes masquerading as progress—it all made her physically itchy.

  Genecorp and Vaughn were supposedly past their war machine era, switched to boring market battles ages ago, but clearly they'd never quite given up on murdering each other over shiny relics and backdoor control. It made sense, really: whoever was losing would send everything they had left armed to the teeth, hoping for one last grab at the wheel. She almost felt bad for Jackhammer, briefly wondering if he had at least packed a few meat demons to keep him company down in the control room.

  Considering the desperate and clearly inferior force she’d handled at Vaughn HQ, she pegged GeneCorp’s people in the control chamber as solidly second-place contenders in this sad little relay race of violence and betrayal. Either that, or this was just round one of multiple attacks from various overly ambitious teams, all slamming into Vaughn HQ until someone actually won.

  “Quick question,” Kelly said cheerfully. “How’s your relationship with upper management these days?”

  Caleb blinked. “Upper management? They’re in space, probably enjoying the show or taking selfies with celebrities. We don’t really hear much from them.”

  Kelly couldn’t exactly confirm it, but she suspected all the big-shot, superhuman celebrities with their off-world yachts were definitely hovering just out of sight, waiting patiently for the chaos to boil down to a manageable size before descending heroically to claim whatever shiny thing turned up. Then they'd pretend to care, maybe pose dramatically with refugees for the news while pocketing valuables from the wreckage—pretty much their standard catastrophe game plan.

  This basically meant that once Kelly started seriously showing off or acquiring Traits that would draw attention, the real monsters—the ones with astronomical EQ ratings, endless advertising contracts, celebrity guest spots, and probably personal fan clubs—would start dropping from orbit, kindly asking her to step aside and follow them at gunpoint.

  Maybe it hadn't happened yet because GeneCorp expected Vaughn to openly fight back if they took her, and certainly hadn’t factored in or realized Kelly had already quietly resigned from Team-Vaughn in spirit.

  Back in her first life—before loops, before flaming tentacle creatures, before New York turned into a portal zoo—she remembered how the big names stayed quiet in the face of the portals. Hiding behind their public defense contracts, spewing meaningless assurances. Defensive. Promised safety. Focused on evacuation. Or bunkers. Buying time while the rest burned.

  They’d been waiting, back then, for the gold rush to start.

  Kelly sighed, rubbing her temples theatrically. “Alright, that’s enough. My brain hurts now, and it's definitely not from complexity, but stupidity." Politics was basically monkeys juggling explosives—fun from a distance, bad up close. "Just point me toward the main basement entrance and tell me which path heads east.”

  Caleb didn’t need telling twice. After quickly explaining how to reach the main underground entrance, he scampered after her.

  The path was clean enough, and the tunnels well designed leading more or less where they were supposed to. It was a safe journey.

  Until it wasn't.

  As Kelly descended deeper, they encountered corpses. Monstrous corpses—little green pointy-eared man-like creatures and their eviscerated bodies. Soon, the reason behind the scattered corpses became immediately obvious. Giant skeletal snake-things and men-shaped bone-creatures sprawled everywhere, some horse-sized and extremely aggressive. Caleb nervously referred to them as "undead." Kelly snorted, figuring some fungal parasite had probably set up shop inside the fused and mutated bones. Out of habit, she stuffed a few samples into her shadow storage for later investigation, surprised to see they went all the way through. No plans to inject. Probably.

  Fortunately, most of the skeletal creatures barely rated at 3EQ, and their rating didn't fluctuate, likely due to their only capability appearing to be regenerating and fusing any and all bones. They were mindless enough for quick kills without trouble, and easily manageable, posing no real threat beyond swarms forcing her into the occasional Title swap. Caleb nearly passed out from panic whenever Kelly showed genuine scientific curiosity in hunting down whatever larger threat controlled them.

  She'd relent, though, only to avoid his hysterics, destroying them instead out of straightforward annoyance. Caleb insisted they were controlled by something worse, and nearly hyperventilated when she showed interest in locating it. She sighed. Curiosity could wait. East was easier. She smashed everything in the way.

  Thankfully, Kelly had become very good at smashing things.

  Every minute or so, groups of jagged skeletal things stood in their way, endlessly regenerating until the glowing stones inside their heads or ribs were shattered. Kelly started collecting these stones out of habit, while Caleb sensibly started navigating them around any obvious trouble spots.

  But as they continued deeper, the skeletons became stronger, and far more aggressive.

  Kelly wiped out four separate groups of a dozen or more higher-EQ bone creatures, maintaining herself at a steady 150% boost thanks to Death’s Foe. Eventually, they arrived at the largest chamber she'd seen so far. It was massive. Two exits branched off at the far end—one clearly leading toward the surface streets of the east district. Both routes conveniently converged right here.

  At the opposite end blocking their path was a large metal gate, guarded by the meanest, toughest, largest, angriest-looking skeletons yet. They looked bizarre—like ancient knights made entirely of fused and plated gothic bones, hardened by unknown means to deflect high pressure bullets.

  And even stranger yet, for some reason, they were busy attacking a group of heavily armed humans in covert gear.

  There were fifteen of them. Bone knight-things with EQ scores that wouldn't hold still. Sometimes reading 3.0, other times 5.0, and once or twice, a spike took them to 8.0EQ as they attacked the operatives trying to erase them.

  Kelly glanced at Caleb, wondering how he could possibly live through the skirmish. Him and a few other non-combatants hadn't tried to shoot her back at Genecorp HQ, despite the fact that they’d been surrounded by abandoned guns and drone corpses, while mass security tried to do so. They'd seen what happened to people who wanted her dead and decided that keeping her alive was great health insurance.

  Because of that, Kelly had mentally placed their and Caleb’s survival skill ratings slightly higher on the Darwin scale. Despite that, there was no way he would survive this.

  Kelly sighed.

  Casually reaching into her shadow, she pulled out and handed Caleb a pair of jury-rigged, armor-piercing handguns. "Stay here, don't help, and definitely don't die," She said. "And watch your back. I’m having a very good day so far and it would ruin it if I had to restart because someone else couldn't keep their organs on the inside."

  The covert squad consisted of ten elite soldiers, led by one almost-8EQ elite in heavy armor, holding a concussive shotgun and massive military shield. One spotted her and shouted, “Target sighted!” Several spun toward Kelly. Two broke from the melee to subdue her, the rest struggled to keep the twisted towering bone-things at bay.

  Dialogue, apparently, wasn't on any of their agendas.

  Kelly huffed, already swapping Titles, and prepared, without fanfare, for some refreshingly straightforward violence.