The ground cracked under the first impact. Kelly lunged aside as the taller metal construct drove both blade arms down, carving through tile and reinforcing steel. The crack widened with surface damage, while the tremors that followed made a decent case for panic.

  Across the chamber, the broader one barrelled into the skeletal knights, scattering its metal plating as it bore their combined assault. The gunmen took one synchronized glance at the scene and decided they didn’t make hazard pay, disappearing into the tunnel.

  Kelly ducked haphazardly beneath a whip-like blow as Reggie's metal giant's arms rippled and contorted like human skin.

  How was he doing that?

  Oh. That was how. She watched the metal shift on its surface—soft, then sharp again. Some conductive alloys could be kept semi-solid using rapid, low-range magnetic modulation. So it wasn’t melting. He was bending it back and forth so fast it looked alive. And making it act human was probably just magnetic puppetry with a side of electricity. She hoped he wasn’t simulating muscles. That would mean admitting he knew what he was doing. Pulling panels from the walls was one thing. Turning them into sword arms and fake liquid skin? That took ego. She gave him points for effort. The building hadn’t been touched like that in years.

  The construct swung—blade charged—and its voice came through the air, static-warped and electric. Suffused, as if the air itself had decided to speak

  “You're not making it out of here alive.”

  “Reggie,” Kelly said, “if you wanted me that badly, you could’ve skipped the metal striptease and asked.” She tilted her head at the architecture spooning him. He’d killed her in loops so many times, and somehow never used this. Kelly took the moment to file that under bad strategic planning. “Still not interested.”

  Kelly had been experimenting with self restriction, holding back from using her weapon’s chain-blade form to better upgrade her ‘Deflection’ Title. Because if she wanted more, she needed to refrain from using the good stuff and stack achievements.

  That made the first construct’s whip-like limbs a problem. But apart from that, Reggie’s metal constructs were… poorly designed.

  They were impressively hard to break, sure. But they were also slow moving.

  The constructs weren't much faster than a person stuck at the 2.0 EQ limit, which made them slower than everything there. But they could take a beating. The materials were durable, and any part she sliced off was near instantly replaced through his magnetism. Reggie had swapped speed and force for bulk and resilient armor, turning them into electrically charged and heavy plated turtle shells—strategically designed to wait out a war they couldn’t win, and wrapped in enough armor to be considered emotionally unavailable.

  Reggie's metal giant swung both arms, electricity surging. And this time, Kelly didn’t dodge. She swung, her blade's edge flattening by thought, Death’s Foe boosting her past 6.8EQ. On contact, she pushed back, and switched to Disciple of Deflection.

  The recoil sent both metal arms flying, and sent fractures along the surface of one arm. The entire thing lifted briefly off the ground. Kelly immediately switched to Fortress of Flame, the Title absorbing the voltage.

  She guessed his nervous system rerouted through secondary muscle control—probably to compensate for spinal damage or a missing shoulder.

  “You swapped out your whole squad already? Fast turnaround.” Kelly said, shooting a round that sent the metal thing stumbling.

  “You think those were the only ones? For the price on your head, all it takes is a call.” The construct recovered and swung. A static pull dragged loose metal across the floor behind him.

  The remaining eight gunmen lingered at the tunnel’s edge. Alive and limping, clinging to weapons—they clustered in partial cover behind the metal support struts, bruised but functional. None advanced.

  They were waiting. Watching—trying so hard to seem invisible that they looked like living statues. Waiting for a signal, or maybe a distraction. The second construct had taken over the frontlines—absorbing strikes from the bone giants, redirecting the aggression that would’ve broken their formation.

  Kelly understood their strategy immediately—It was obvious. Rather than split forces and fight on two fronts, they were going to utilise the bone creatures. If the skeletons didn’t finish her, they’d weaken her. Then the squad could step in and mop up without earning it. Efficient. Cowardly. Smart. Annoying.

  The floor vibrated. Footsteps boomed. Something heavy was moving behind Reggie’s first construct. Several somethings—fast and loud.

  Reggie laughed into the chamber.

  "Once the knights are done pulping your soft bits," Reggie’s construct voice came through static, "I’ll have the frames collect whatever’s left."

  Reggie's first construct jumped over her. A clean vault. The motion cleared her line of sight, revealing the second construct ahead, charging directly. Just as she’d predicted. Skeletal knights had already begun advancing behind it, pulled in by motion and impact, their path folding into a convergence around her position as the whip-armed metal behemoth blocked her escape.

  Kelly raised both hands in surrender, testing a current and highly debated theory that claimed some humanoid portal creatures had interspecies communication tech capabilities—and as a result, could understand human speech. The theory remained unproven speculation, since even advanced language models struggled to extract meaning from the noises most of these creatures made, and instead parsed communication and behavioral cues from body language.

  Kelly conducted her 1,297th field test. It was a new species, after all.

  “All right guys, you got me, you win. The prize is not stabbing me.”

  The skeletons continued their charge.

  “Really guys, no need to keep fighting. Truce accepted.”

  The skeleton knights acknowledged her surrender by surrounding her and lunging in unison, evidently aiming for their trophy.

  Kelly jammed her blade into the ground at an angle. Its edge transforming, extending far downward, the tip shifting into a blunted industrial hook and locking deep into the buried support underground. Then she dropped fully into her shadow. Only her hand remained above—gripping the handle, skin shifted to hardened mimic alloy.

  Safe in her personal shadow dimension, surrounded by darkness, she felt the hit as a dull tap.

  When she resurfaced, the floor was a mosaic of rubble, dust, and crushed bone. The constructs remained untouched. She realised every strike had targeted her last location. The bone creatures ignored all other forms, which implied shared targeting priorities and coordinated behavior.

  Pheromones, maybe. Or something tactile. She wondered if there had been a physical cue she hadn’t seen—and made a mental note to test if mana could be shaped into a radio frequency.

  Then she cocked her railgun and reset her grip.

  “If they all kill each other, I win,” Caleb, the Genecorp intern, said quietly, mostly to himself. He stood at the tunnel’s edge with both hands clamped around a gun he didn’t want to use. He wasn’t augmented until a few hours ago. His limbs still hurt. He wasn’t combat-certified; he was only here because Kelly told him to stay alive, and because refusing would’ve gone worse.

  Company policy allowed emergency use of restricted weapons if the site faced collapse-level threats. It allowed emergency upgrades too—‘Crisis Upgrades’. If the threat was neutralized, the employee got legal protection—but became financially liable for damages. If the threat escaped, the penalties were lighter: deductions, reassignment, a flagged profile. No criminal filing.

  So if Kelly won, he’d owe the cleanup. If she ran, he’d get cited for failure, but it would pass. If he got involved and it went wrong, he’d eat both. The plan was to stay out of frame, submit the report before Legal opened, and hope someone else claimed responsibility. Best outcome: Kelly finished the job, and he became a footnote. Worst outcome: he tried something useful and got terminated for initiative.

  Kelly fired two light railgun slugs at the nearest skeletal knight. Just before contact, both rounds curved into a distortion field and ricocheted into the far wall, collapsing a support beam and flattening a corner of the chamber.

  She stopped mid-thought.

  Kelly watched it happen, eyes wide. Her attention collapsed into a single point, already parsing outcomes before she understood why the distortion had warped the light rail slug’s path and thrown it wide.

  Most buildings could withstand glancing hits or low-EQ impacts, but unless they were high-priority sites—like these tunnels—and unless someone had gone full budget apocalypse with impact-nullifiers, exotic alloys, or directional dampers… a Mach 5 railgun slug could still punch through their supports, and shred every critical system in the walls.

  A railgun slug shot off at somewhere between Mach 5 and Mach 15—roughly 3,800 to 11,500 miles per hour, depending on how much funding the gunmaker had. The lighter models capped at 3,800, which still meant “goodbye” for vehicles, defense plating, and any infrastructure pretending it had resistance. If a slug bent midair without contact, something had hijacked motion itself, because armor didn’t get a vote at those speeds.

  She’d found something absurd enough to break motion—because the projectile had been on target, and something had forced it off. The world had presented her with something new. That meant it got her full attention.

  Kelly’s breath shifted—quiet, steady, real, her heart hammering against her ribs.

  As the lead skeleton swung in response, wielding a sword the size of a small vehicle, Kelly stopped holding back. She switched her blade to chainsaw mode with a thought and tapped the small cube attached to her wrist to activate the teleporter rig.

  She needed samples. Preferably living.

  She teleported some distance away, a little closer to the tunnel where the eight gunmen were hiding, leaving the bone knight-things—whatever they were—with no targets besides Reggie’s constructs. She counted fourteen bone-knights and noted with surprise that Reggie’s band of hired misfits had actually managed to bag and tag one. Then she glanced at the tunnel where the 7.6EQ team captain stood with his seven men. They hadn’t moved yet, but they would. If she wasn’t prepared, that would end her fruitful day.

  OK. That meant while the bone-giants pummelled Reggie, Kelly had to take out the backup first. Before they could ambush her.

  She switched from railgun to handgun, held her chainblade tight in her free hand, and teleported directly above the remaining eight gunmen in the far tunnel. Kelly hung in mid-air for a breath, then she shot and swung.

  She slashed with her chainblade, cutting into part of the team. Then with her other hand, she fired into the others. The leader reacted immediately—rifle raised, target acquired, trigger ready. The rest of his team followed within the same second, already adjusting, already shooting, every movement matched with machine-tight precision and trajectories synced so tightly it looked rehearsed by a neural patch and a shared calendar. They were already firing. In any other loop, that would have been the end of her.

  But Kelly’s two-second charge had already completed.

  She teleported again, and fired again. Then carved through the rest in one vertical swing.

  Most wore tactical armor rated to deflect lower-velocity rounds, assuming poor placement and minimal follow-through. But none of them were rated for a chain-blade engineered to split molecular bonds, swung at almost seven hundred percent beyond human speed and wrapped in momentum.

  Under the right cocktail of conditions, a human could, in theory, crack a metal whip past the sound barrier. It would need to be short, segmented, and built from something that didn’t fold in shame halfway through the swing. If engineered correctly, the tip could touch Mach 1.5—maybe 1.8—before friction, rigid metals, or common sense ruined everything. The sonic crack would happen, barely possible by baseline hands and barely audible over the sound of the wielder’s joints regretting everything.

  But Kelly’s hand moved several times beyond baseline. And because she didn't want her weapon to completely shatter, she eased her swing just enough to break the sound barrier. Each link accelerated into the next, converting momentum into rupture and momentum into throughput. The blade met no resistance, and an explosion of sound ripped through all in the tunnel.

  That included the captain.

  Stood in the now empty tunnel, a line of clean bisection cut clean through its otherwise reinforced structure, Kelly received a mental alert informing her that the weapon’s integrity had dropped by 20 percent.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Worth it.”

  The weapon had four swings left in whip mode before structural failure. Using a slower mode was mechanically safer but tactically inefficient, especially against a group of seven foot beings of what looked like heaps of fused bone infused with reality altering energy.

  Before reaching her lab, Kelly had barely explored the city. Her single-minded, hardheaded focus had always pulled her forward toward her lab. Almost every loop had reinforced the same route and single priority, the same schedule of critical steps that didn’t include sightseeing.

  As a result, aside from the ‘man’ in the sky, his giant snake, and one other overachieving monstrosity better left unmentioned, these were the first beings Kelly had met that appeared to willfully control reality to deflect her assaults, utilizing biologies that ignored high-energy and high-precision attacks.

  The phaser was another example, although his ability was technological and Deadtech based, not biological like the portal creatures.

  The suggestion pointed to either a deliberate use of the volatile mix between dark matter and energy to forge unstable spatial properties, or some form of intentional manipulation utilized defensively.

  Either possibility required containment and study.

  The risk was acceptable now that she had the gear, the samples, control over entry routes, and a viable way to study through a half-functioning, buried botanical lab.

  While the bone creatures treated Reggie’s metal shell as a group therapy project, hammering the dome he'd created while she wasn't looking into another regrettable learning experience, Kelly studied the one bone entity they’d already captured.

  It lay bound in reinforced wire, shot by illegal netguns—military only restraints—normally used to capture mutants, overclocked augments, or the things that crawled out of the radiation zones of glassed cities. The worst netguns could capture a being at 10EQ and the best of them even incorporated quantum technology, though Kelly doubted that was what they had here. They probably had the regular metal stuff, or she would have been caught a while ago.

  But Reggie’s new squad had captured a portal knight, that meant with their gear, she could too. Kelly searched their remains. Most of the weapons not strapped to their backs or held at chest level were still, thankfully, in one piece and had survived her strikes, and Kelly dumped all of them into her shadow—keeping only a single light railgun, every grenade they had, and every military netgun.

  She exited the tunnel at a sprint, teleported above the nearest bone creature, and landed one foot clean on its bony shoulder. It didn’t twist space or deflect her landing with spatial tricks, which was good, and which implied it either didn’t notice her or didn’t care. Either way, she’d take it.

  The bone creature started to turn its head, only just realising something stood on its shoulder. Its hand began to rise toward her.

  “Skull check,” Kelly said.

  She placed the barrel to its skull and fired at point blank.

  The railgun round struck the bone giant’s head at point blank. Its magical barrier appeared half a second late and split the slug in half, triggering an explosion that fractured the tunnel and flung fragments in every direction.

  With only one foot precariously balanced, the kickback almost sent her flying. Kelly teleported sideways the instant she squeezed the trigger, a mere moment before the blast hit. Landing a slightly safer distance away, she waited two seconds for the teleport rig to recharge, then as the creatures swung their giant swords in haphazard superhuman speeds, she repeated the shot ten more times. Each impact caused the same delayed split and directional explosion. After the eleventh, only three humanoid bone creatures remained.

  With the remaining three, Kelly blew off the legs at point blank range then captured them with netguns.

  She adjusted her grip. The railgun was half-melted, one panel cracked, and the chamber pressure was wrong. She looked at it, then shrugged. She probably should have used the molecular blade instead. Cleaner, quieter, no recoil surge, and no risk of detonation across her face. But then she wouldn’t have learned how late the barriers deployed under kinetic stress. Or how funny it looked when magical defenses panicked mid-split. So overall, acceptable loss.

  But life wasn’t about speed or efficiency. It was about discovery.

  From somewhere down the tunnel, Caleb’s voice cracked out—thin, breath-held, and unsteady.

  “I-Is it over?”

  “Kinda, sorta,” Kelly said, teleporting to a dented and pummeled metal dome at the center of the destruction, next to three massive writhing legless metallic bone creatures bound in thick military-grade corded reinforced wires. She carved into the dome and found Reggie—jumpy.

  He jolted upright the moment the opening broke through. Metal began to churn and buck, a breath away from crushing Kelly where she stood. He moved fast, but not first.

  She fired the railgun and tore him apart, scattering the pieces across the interior wall as the round tore out of the side of the dome, crashing into and partly demolishing a non-reinforced section of the far wall.

  “Now it’s over,” she said.

  Caleb pushed his head through the broken opening. He froze at the sight inside, blood draining from his face as his eyes locked on the mess across the dome. He looked like he tried to speak twice before anything came out.

  "That was a person.”

  Kelly crouched beside a still-twitching chunk of something that used to be part of Reggie and scoffed. The edges were clean—clean-ish—and the smear trailing off the dome floor hadn’t stopped leaking. “Believe it or not,” she said, tone dry enough to sand metal, “that little midget’s not dead.”

  He’d survived worse. Plasma to the spine. Electrocution through both lungs. A teleport misfire that folded his thigh through a carbon wall. One loop, she got curious and ran tests. His cells were annoying. They didn’t stop. Somewhere in that mess of wire and meat, one piece had already started to bleed just enough to prove the bastard was still thinking about coming back.

  He had high-end regenerative nanomachines, but those were only good for shredded organs and shattered limbs, not atomised torsos. The real trick was biological. Gene splicing.

  Reggie had been gene-spliced with modified biology taken from a type of flatworm. Reggie’s ones were known for one thing: they didn’t die properly. Even when crushed, cut, or sliced into hundreds of pieces, each piece could grow into a full new body. The reason was fairly simple: their entire bodies were packed with raw stem cells. That meant Reggie’s, annoyingly, was too.

  Stem cells were basic cells that hadn’t picked a job yet. Each one could become anything the body needed—muscle, bone, skin, nerve, or organ. Most animals used their stem cells early in life, then stopped. Reggie never stopped. In most living organisms, damaged cells destroyed themselves automatically to protect the body—cell death. Reggie skipped that. His damaged cells stayed alive, stabilized, and rebuilt. Even a scrap could regrow his whole body.

  Reggie was annoying. She’d tested his cells in a loop and watched one rebuild structure on its own. After the railgun hit, one piece of him was still bleeding. His nanomachines helped, sure—but only up to a point. His stem cells did the real work. That was all it took. He didn’t even need a head. He just needed time.

  She poked one of reggies scattered pieces then turned to Caleb. “He’s a lifer. L-status,” she said, brushing bone dust off her boot. “He'll be talking in an hour”

  Caleb blinked. “I thought lifers couldn’t die from age or uploaded their brains to new bodies. I didn’t think the whole—regrowing from pieces—was real.”

  “No, it isn’t. Not for most of them. Depends on which company owns you.”

  For the ultra-rich, dying was a transaction—neurological backups, clone transfers, and automated resurrections meant they could functionally live forever. Although you could argue that transferring a backup of your consciousness into a clinical body for a price wasn’t true immortality, but instanced life. At the very peak of humanity, beyond the 1%—the 0.1%, their bodies were assets, and their consciousness a product stored in private data vaults.

  Caleb cocked a brow. “But then doesn’t that mean…”

  Kelly nodded with a grin. “Yep. It means whoever his parents are, or whoever’s funding him, they’re at the very top. Probably the last people you’d ever want to meet.” She climbed out of the dented metal dome and walked toward the three bound, writhing bone entities, with Caleb following at a careful distance.

  She had just secured prime research material, but given her typical luck, more gunmen might arrive any second, or perhaps something nastier, or even that mysterious skeleton mastermind Caleb was always whining about. Either way, she only had enough breathing room for one quick and highly irresponsible experiment.

  That experiment was also fairly simple: shove the bone creatures into her shadow and see if they'd fit.

  If they slipped in, that would classify them as non-living according to the shadow's arbitrary rules. Which was ridiculous—space couldn’t reject something for being alive, because life wasn’t a physical property. Mass and energy could be measured—being alive couldn’t. That kind of filtering only happened when something external overrode natural laws. A space that judged biological status was like a bucket that rejected oranges for being too juicy.

  It was probably the Grade.

  Kelly strongly suspected interference from the status panel, and sometime soon she'd sort that out, ideally in a manner that was both scientifically rigorous and profoundly disrespectful.

  She grabbed a netgun and angled the first bone creature carefully against the overhead ceiling light, stretching her shadow wide enough to fit the struggling thing inside. It squirmed on entry, apparently displeased but too concussed to meaningfully protest, which made it marginally easier for her. Generally speaking, something counted as alive if it had cells, burned energy, reacted to the environment, and carried genetic information it could pass along. Humans, plants, fungi, microbes—even Caleb—all fit neatly into that category.

  “Maybe it's a virus,” Kelly muttered, nudging the stubborn thing deeper into the dark.

  Most of her peers didn’t classify viruses as alive. Viruses lacked cells, could not reproduce on their own, and did not carry out energy processes. Basically freeloaders of biology, active but technically not living. They only activated and replicated inside a host cell. Because of this, they sat in a gray zone—alive and not alive, in the full scientific sense.

  It was still a stupid rule, and if the status panel carried stupid rules, then Kelly would treat it like everything else that tried to impose dumb rules on her: she just had to break it wide open. She’d spent countless loops stockpiling traits and titles precisely for this purpose—gathering research material, amassing strength, and eventually dissecting whatever cosmic entities floated above.

  Her spatial shadow would be step-one.

  She watched calmly as the final bone creature slipped out of sight, then turned to Caleb, eyes bright with excitement. “Let’s go.”

  “Are they immortal too?” Caleb asked, staring with wide eyes at the remains.

  Kelly glanced around at the chunks of bone and the massive hole her railgun rounds had punched into the wall. “Considering how many of them are in pieces right now, I’d say they’re aggressively mortal.”

  Kelly glanced at the space where her railgun rounds had blasted a hole in the underground walls, grateful that the city's underbelly was built to withstand and contain the equally fast speeds of the Hyper-rail. Reaching the exit doorway, thankfully already open, the pair walked up to a platform that would take them to the streets slightly more east of the city. The platform panel was broken, which meant they'd be climbing the emergency rail manually. Kelly leapt half the distance with minimal effort. “Let’s make our escape before more security guards arrive. You need a lift?”

  Caleb hesitated, then sighed and nodded. “Yeah, sure. Might as well.”

  She threw a sphere at the ground near him. It unfolded into a circular drone with a grip bar, hummed once, and waited.

  She’d bought it before the loops as a research recorder, then tore out its network chip and gave it better priorities. In earlier loops, it helped her kill things from a distance—until the creatures noticed, tracked it back to her, and taught her the value of firsthand violence. She could’ve used it herself, but wanted to see if climbing stairs counted as a Title condition. Also, she hadn’t hit her step goal yet.

  “Is that a customised ARGi drone?” Caleb asked, sounding genuinely impressed.

  “It used to help me take apart monsters at a safe distance until the monsters decided I was safer dead,” Kelly explained, completely sincere. “Now it’s a glorified floating handlebar. Growth is interesting, isn't it!”

  Together, they left the tunnels and traversed the streets above, narrowly avoiding another security squad, a cleanup team, and a group of armed men fighting what looked like a giant bulletproof scorpion. It wasn’t exactly stealth, but it worked well enough to keep her out of another distraction—at least until something else inevitably crash-landed on, or attempted to, stop them.

  Before leaving the area, Kelly gave a final glance at the towering building scraping against the portal-scarred, monster-packed skyline, noting the distant streets nearer the city center still crawling and packed with creatures.

  She vaguely hoped the staff, citizens, and various employees still stuck inside Park Avenue were okay. Sure, they’d been a bit too enthusiastic about their jobs, but that wasn't exactly a capital crime. If they had died, when Kelly eventually cracked this loop and finally got past today, she'd find a way to ensure her actions retroactively nudged history enough to save their stubborn lives.

  “Um, I think I’m good from here,” Caleb said, gesturing vaguely toward a residential tower and clutching his handgun as if letting it go might inspire some random aspect of the world to spontaneously combust. He sighed, loosening his grip slightly, his breath calm. “My fiancée’s already on her way to pick me up.”

  Kelly blinked at him. “Fiancé?” she repeated. “You’re engaged? You’re barely out the test tube.” She tilted her head, reassessing him.

  She looked impressed.

  “I mean, congratulations and everything, but does she know you're out here shooting things?”

  “I think she’ll understand,” Caleb responded, smiling despite himself. “I mean, as long as I come back alive.”

  “Your bar for relationship success is admirably low,” Kelly noted approvingly. “Alright. You’re more emotionally stable than most warlords I’ve met. Keep her. Or him. Or whoever signed the contract. That kind of loyalty’s rare in collapsing economies.”

  Caleb fumbled for his device. “Here, let me give you my number. Once I get home, I can send you some of my dad’s souvenirs from the Shanghai Fallout. Maybe they'll help you track him down or something.”

  “Thanks,” Kelly replied cheerfully. “I'm starting to like you, Caleb. Don't make it weird.”

  “Too late for that,” Caleb laughed nervously, waving awkwardly as he turned away. “Good luck out there, seriously.”

  Kelly watched him leave, feeling strangely satisfied. Today had gone remarkably well.

  She’d walked away with stolen Deadtech, new Titles, advanced weapons, and even a genuinely pleasant intern who might actually turn out helpful. A few more experiments, a bit more invasive research, and Kelly would have exactly what she needed to finally survive past the twenty-four hour mark and see tomorrow’s hypothetical sunrise.

  Sure, now that her EQ exceeded legal limits, future infiltrations would escalate into all-out wars, and Vaughn would probably have some pointed questions, along with every other big company if she dared step into their territory. Details for future Kelly.

  But tonight? Tonight was for experimentation—sweet, gentle, methodical, delightful experimentation. She had a teleporter to crack open, bone creatures to dissect, and a shadow to disassemble. For Kelly, that was practically self-care.

  She stopped in front of the botanical research lab, now a mostly vague mountain of obscured building and buried rubble beneath the remnants of a collapsed bridge. Broken repair drones lay scattered nearby, twitching uselessly in the aftermath of failed repair attempts, as she took in the scene and considered the safest way to safely carve her way inside.

  Kelly drew her molecular blade and shifted it into shovel mode, stepping forward to—

  Crash.

  Wind tore past, too fast to register. She didn’t feel it, but she saw the world twist, then split. No—not the world, it was her. Her head. Her torso. Bisected cleanly as a whole horde of somethings crashed out of the sky and landed directly where she’d been standing, shredding everything in their haphazard fall.

  For the first time in many Tuesdays, Kelly was no longer bored.

  She woke up in bed. The window eased open on its own, letting in quiet light and filtered air as the room automatically adjusted to her waking. She lay still a moment, letting the day begin around her before deciding where she’d have to break into next and how. Then, she started her day.

  Further outside, on the streets far below, sirens had already begun to repeat warnings of an impending collapse of infrastructure, and drones hovered in slow spirals, announcing evacuation details in progress. Kelly tuned out the noise and mentally ran through her tools, noting what might still be useful—even though none of it was nearby and most of it needed printing.

  A low rumble passed overhead. Something enormous and alien swept past the building, blocking the light through the window for a few seconds and leaving the room dim and quiet again.

  The monstrous shadow passed, and the building stilled.

  "Ugh, I should review my lease. The noise pollution's getting out of hand."

  She glanced out of the apartment window, idly recalling the sheer scale of citywide destruction her Title's creature stampede had once caused and would likely cause again. The city infrastructure really should sue her for damages.

  They’d never win, of course—no judge would survive long enough to deliver a ruling.