Kelly had an hour before the city’s only working piece of portal-apocalypse magic tech got confiscated by someone better armed, according to Halverson. Not a terrible deadline. She could work with that.

  Directions to the botanical lab had been straightforward, only she was nowhere near it—she was now more than four blocks away from the lab.

  Whilst she had been taking a defensive nap inside the pocket universe attached to her shadow—a small fold in space she liked to call “Not Here, Thanks”—to avoid being reduced to a red mist. She had been tethered to reality via a chain connected to the rib cages and clavicles of reanimated celestial cadavers. When the cadavers were catapulted by the shockwave across several city blocks and through a building, the chain, the shattered ground—and therefore her location—went with it.

  Now she was on the fringes of the blast zone, standing on a mound of smoking angel bone and dented helmets, chewing a chocolate bar made entirely of synthetic happiness, contemplating her shadow’s versatility.

  It was a discovery that could be a problem or a feature, depending on how she used it. If the surface she was inside moved, her tether and her shadow could move too. That meant her safe space wasn’t particularly safe, and she could, theoretically, travel for free via corpse-flinging. She stared down at her own vaguely smoldering shadow and the dangerous distance she had to travel.

  “…Interesting,” she said. “The hard way it is.”

  Kelly stuffed the rest of her bar into her mouth, wiped her hands on the robes of a nearby angelic corpse, and sighed theatrically.

  “One hour,” she muttered. “Plenty of time for a deeply life-threatening decision.”

  She got moving.

  As Kelly strolled toward her destination, humming tunelessly and occasionally studying the aerial dogfight overhead, she finally saw why regiments kept peeling off mid-skyfight to dive past her position.

  A stampede of zombified goblins, trolls, and creatures were pouring into the blast zone from the fringes. One creature caught her attention—a nightmare thing that looked as if a snake had tried to wear a tiger as a coat. Half its face was gone, yet it moved like a tiger on steroids. Some of the stampede were the size of buildings. All of them were heading straight for the heart of the East Block, toward the magical structure in the center pouring mana into the sky.

  “Ah,” Kelly murmured, tilting her head, “so that’s why everyone’s screaming.”

  There were undead people too. Humans, sadly. Some still wore dog tags. One woman wore a wedding dress caked with dirt and blood, her mouth twisted shut but twitching as if she were trying to scream. Kelly decided that if they reached her, she’d just take the limbs off the humans—maybe they could still come back from this—but if one tried to bite her, well, love had limits.

  Thankfully, they were the level of monsters that could be killed by troops sitting somewhere in the 14-to-20EQ level range, and a few 40EQ-range captains shouting directions and looking tired, so not only did most of the swarm get intercepted, but the few that made it through were damaged—missing chunks, trailing smoke, sometimes confused about which direction gravity worked.

  Not ideal, but hardly dangerous—at least not to Kelly. She met them with a mix of Mimic flesh, Werewolf claws, and Mythril fists that glowed red and tore through inhuman flesh with twice the damage during what the Title called “critical hits,” meaning roughly one strike in ten landed with amplified force. Sometimes she used guns or other hacked military weapons; other times she used her new upgraded augments. Kelly handled the combined creatures without much effort, and most didn’t last long enough to scream.

  Still, if command didn’t want the zone around the magic box and the botanical lab to fill, crawling with undead, and then, inevitably, teeming with something worse—they’d need more patrols. Proper entry points coverage. Fewer blind spots. And barricades.

  But strategy was below her pay grade. She figured someone else would worry about that.

  And soon, she quickly found out that someone had, extensively. Squads manning heavily armed barricades and patrol regiments found Kelly first. And they were never pleased to see her.

  Every minute or so of sprinting brought Kelly crashing into another group of soldiers or private militia. The first groups were mostly early- to mid-level Thresholders and lower-level soldiers. Most of them recoiled the moment they saw her—blood-soaked, wolf-eyed, grinning, with visible claws attached to glowing fists trailing smoke and a light railgun strapped to her back she hadn’t needed to use. They watched her shrug off a bone-cracking blow from two house-sized undead lizards and, against all odds, deflect it, then respond by blasting the head off one with a punch that defied logic and carving the head off the other with a single swing of her tactical blade.

  At the sight, they usually turned and ran, very tactfully. She heard one of the early-stage Sixers bark into his comm, voice wobbling but still official: “Enemy designated non-priority target, area of denial—rerouting forces to bypass.” Then he bolted, retreating with such precision it almost looked like doctrine.

  A few sometimes stayed behind, the bravest among them. Kelly respected that. Not deeply, but still—credit where it was due. One of them usually raised their voice to ask what was going on. Kelly, generous with the truth when it no longer mattered, told them—very helpfully—the alleged situation closer to the magical box. That she was a researcher with Vaughn, things were steadily getting worse, and that if they wanted to die in a more confusing way, they should continue heading toward the fringes as per their presumed orders. It was an unsustainable strategy with a time limit, but it worked once. The other times, she just ran.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  But the closer she got to the alien terraforming magic metal cube and the botanical lab buried next to it, the resistance grew thicker and more committed. Soldiers held protocol, and soldiers held their ground. Patrols coordinated. Someone, somewhere, had sent an email. And unlike Captain Halverson at the edge—who’d had the good sense to look at her madness and make peace with early retirement—these new types weren’t budging. Resistance thickened. The soldiers grew teeth. Patrols doubled. Regiments appeared where there had been scattered grunts.

  Kelly ducked, watching a bullet spark off a burning drone beside her.

  “Nice reception,” she yelled, half to herself, half to the absurd machinery of war. The ground trembled as a homing grenade chased her heat signature, and Kelly grabbed it and stuffed it into her shadow, wondering whether the device would be frozen in time or if the space was now in explosive fire.

  Everyone wanted her dead. The day remained full of potential.

  Word had clearly gotten out, mostly thanks to the vendettas she’d picked up earlier that day from her employer and their top contender: Vaughn Industries wanted her to return for briefing and possibly to be dissected upon discovery, and Genecorp just wanted her dead and dissected, maybe not in that order. So now everyone was trigger-happy and well-informed. Their operatives, now flanking military units, had shared her position with such speed and enthusiasm it bordered on friendship. Teams began to shoot on sight, refusing to retreat, and Kelly, not one to surrender the day, fought back with everything she had.

  Kelly had killed four separate groups of higher-level units—all private militia, each squad averaging a dozen enhanced personnel with between ten and fifteen times baseline strength, which made them roughly thirty percent weaker to about equal to her, give or take a few unfair magical advantages—and had kept going. Their tactics improved with each encounter, and their language grew increasingly serious right before dying, but none of it slowed her in any measurable way. None of them expected her level to almost double in an instant, and they paid dearly for it.

  Now she stood at the edge of what passed for a final checkpoint, the largest blockade yet, a walled-off dome the size of a football stadium, composed entirely of modular, self-building metal and lined with barricades and warnings, various ways of saying, “HALT. APPROACHING THIS DOME IS IMMEDIATELY BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH AND LIFE EXPECTANCY.”

  The entire structure sealed off the inner east grid, the terraforming box of magic portal tech, and the buried botanical lab. The place forced her into only two defended routes: back to the fringes or toward the magical cube. A tactical choke point. Considering the impending war, to Kelly, that meant it was worth ruining.

  There was a wall at the foot of the dome that Kelly was fairly sure could reconstruct itself into a door on command.

  In front of that wall stood the strongest group Kelly had seen so far. They looked organized, uniformed, well-funded. Weapons clean. Teeth cleaner. Their armor whirred and shifted before the surrounding wall of corpses and stone, which already put them ahead of most. Based on the squad spacing, this checkpoint had been erected recently—possibly in response to her. Or something like her.

  Ten soldiers, all heavily augmented, stood like statues in front of the blockade. Seasoned and mean-looking, each was an unholy hybrid of muscle and metal, carrying a calm, settled confidence that said this wasn’t their first rodeo—or their hundredth.

  They eyed her approach with the gaze of bored predators waiting for someone dumb enough to try pass them.

  Their leader was a giant in heavy power armor, mounted weapons bristled from his shoulders and forearms like angry metal spiders, orbited by a shield that seemed to move of its own will and terrible mood swings, judging by the way it angled itself towards her.

  The leader didn’t even bother to meet her gaze, but his expression made it clear he wasn’t interested in exchanging pleasantries or philosophical debates on the futility of violence.

  Despite the corpses around them, none of their armour bore more than a few light scuffs or scratches. They watched her like a fox watching a particularly suicidal chicken.

  Kelly squinted up at the blockade, then back at the soldiers. “Ok,” she muttered, voice light, “that’s thorough.”

  She called out, “That cube you’re guarding, inside the dome—the magical one—does it come in other colors, or is ‘ominous death black’ the only model?”

  One soldier tightened his grip on his firearm. The giant gave no answer, which Kelly took as permission.

  “Good,” she said. “Silence means you’re fine with me coming through.” She stepped forward, as that was a clear invitation—she had a personal policy about taking paths that annoyed the most people.

  She paused, adjusting. Her vision had been upgraded enough to detect mana, but mostly it just made the lights prettier. This close to the terraformer, everything glowed through her retinas like a low-budget fireworks finale. The ground, walls, and wreckage glowed as her hair floated softly, her arms sped, and each step grew heavier near the buried lab. The soldiers seemed completely unaffected—of course, they were rejected by mana; no floating hair or giddiness, nothing. To anyone who saw her coming, she probably looked like a drunk and well-armed ghost.

  One soldier adjusted his stance, the faint servo whine breaking the silence.

  “That’s the target. Appears disoriented, could be a trick. Engage with caution.”

  The leader shifted forward, the shield tilting.

  Adjusting to the steep shift in mana density—or was it saturation?—Kelly glanced at the mechanized giant’s shield spinning to track her movements with an air of autonomy and a lack of personal space.

  "Guess this is the line for the fun part," she said.

  She was still injured, so resistance was her way of saying, If I’m going to die, then I’m doing it with style—and taking them with me.

  Kelly equipped her Title, Death’s Foe, set her new augments and her movements to the highest degree of combat, switched her molecular blade to chain mode, reached for an assortment of guns, and prepared for a fight.

  On her way there, Kelly had been switching between her recovery titles, punching a few healing nanovials into her bloodstream between skirmishes. It wasn't perfect, but good enough in her opinion. She wasn’t in peak condition, but then, who was really? Peak condition was either being born, or an overrated myth for soccer moms.

  By her standards, the term meant everything that absolutely had to be inside her body still was.

  Again, good enough.

  Her opponents weren’t your average back-alley thugs with shaky hands and poor impulse control, or standard-issue goons used to shaking down single mothers and debt-ridden freelancers. No—this was a private military backed, government funded, corporate gear stacked, experienced team. The best of both worlds, elite—battle proven—heavily augmented professionals, and a product of Uncle Sam playing nice with the oligarchs for once.

  They were feral murderhobos with pensions and trauma conditioning, and moved like machines but thought like predators. They had clearly already lived through many engagements you'd be hard pressed to confirm ever happened, and wouldn't flinch when limbs went flying, because the limbs were almost never theirs.

  Kelly watched them fan out with tactical precision, scanning for openings, communicating in brief encrypted bursts.

  She smiled softly to herself.

  Oh good.

  She hated easy fights.