It was not an easy fight.

  In the east grid's blast zone, soldiers furthest from the terraforming structure and botanical lab had lower EQ. Enough to turn the old her to tofu. Their squads relied on low-tier personnel, padded with high-EQ captains whose placement existed only to raise combat value just enough to be viable. It was a cheap formation, built to function without risking real assets.

  Closer to the payload, that changed. Squad leaders carried high EQ, and their teams were scaled to match. Those units were built to press and destroy, not stall. The weak troops she crushed earlier at the fringes didn’t reflect the force now viciously attacking her at the blockade.

  Not that she had expected it to be a walk in the park. No, this was a fight that was taking every ounce of strength she had left—physical, mental, and whatever else she’d managed to cobble together over the last few days. It wasn’t that she was underprepared, but it was clear the odds were stacked high, and for a change, they weren’t exactly in her favor.

  With her new Titles acting as instant performance modifiers and her mana absorbent augments boosting each and every single Title and Trait, Kelly was still confident. She'd done worse with less, on days with lower blood sugar. Everything she’d stacked—reflex boosts, layered defenses, sensory tuning—Kelly figured she could take a few down solo. A few of them still fell within reach.

  Kelly’s EQ could hit 14.3 with Death’s Foe. The threshold started at 6 and peaked at 20EQ, but her combination of Titles, Traits, atom cutting weapons, mana compatible augments, the way she hacked them all to synergize, still gave her an unfair advantage in battles.

  Soldiers had rigs with autopilot reflexes, stabilizers, predictive targeting—the works. Kelly had no access. So she slapped her own augment on the old civilian seven-suite, pushed it past its limits, and laughed at what it was supposed to handle.

  Everything she’d hacked funneled into one purpose: an Automated Reaction System—Title and Trait edition, a world first.

  She upgraded her eyes with jury-rigged mana scanners to read dark energy and mana. Data streamed straight into the processor in her spine, firing muscles before she even thought. Neck and shoulder fibers locked, arms steady, the rest of her body moving on instinct. Soldiers surged. She pivoted, slammed one into another, spun her elbow into a third. Her scanners painted them dull gray—no mana, flat against everything else. “You know,” she jabbed a knee into a charging soldier, his floating shield intercepted, forcing her back, “maybe try brighter colors next time. You all look a little… dull. Seriously, pick something that pops. This gray thing isn’t working for you at all.” The system predicted every move, striking and dodging with perfect timing as she laughed through them.

  She added a system in her spine to predict motion. Muscles fired before her brain even thought, legs shifting, hips pivoting, arms snapping up. A bullet shredded past her ear, and she felt the whine of metal behind her as one soldier unfolded extra-thick mechanized arms from his back. They whipped forward.

  “Four arms?” she shouted, ducking under the next swing. “What’re you, cosplaying an alien? Really pushing it!” Her fists struck, hitting ribs and forearms as the system threaded every motion together, bullets punching the dirt where she’d been.

  She could switch it on and off at will, but left it off most of the time—unless she really needed to smash something—She preferred the edge, testing her own reflexes, then letting the system catch her if she screwed up.

  All of it worked perfectly under fire:

  Her medical upgrades locked her body down like a turtle shell, taking hits from ten soldiers without folding.

  Her Fortress Titles screamed ‘good luck breaking this’.

  Her system calculated which strike would trigger Mythril Fist’s double damage before she even thought.

  But ten Thresholders at once? A team? Backed by global superpowers that almost never worked together? Wearing gear that boosted them even further?

  It meant more high-level limbs than she cared to track and more coordination than she wanted to acknowledge.

  “Freeze the fireworks! Wait—hold up! I need a moment to patch myself.” She had a lot of upgrades to test in the field, this was the very first ‘upgraded’ run.

  As expected, they didn’t listen.

  Kelly was under crushing pressure and took direct, heavy hits from it, even though every defensive ability worked perfectly with her new augments. Everything she had still was barely enough. It needed calibrating, to adjust—she needed to. The troops she was up against had real combat coordination, proper weapons, trained skills, and refined techniques that could break through her Fortress of Endurance and defensive Titles—unlike the invading abominations or the Meat Demon and trigger happy retrieval team.

  She'd fought—and died horribly to—engineered and extra dimensional abominations. This group was neither, and didn’t flail or scream or melt or crawl on ceilings. They moved with discipline. An exhausting trait.

  One ducked, another stabbed. The third did something clever with a tripwire and bullets that pushed her into the fourth, who punched her with a methodical absence of personality. They moved as one—one took the flank, one cut the exit, the rest filled the space. Behaving more like a schedule. Every blow had somewhere to go and pushed her into another.

  In response, Kelly's every defense triggered. Her very movement followed the drills she’d built in to its systems. The augments carried her through a dozen dodges, seven blocks, and something close to a pirouette. They doused her in explosive fire. Fortress of Flame filtered the worst of the pain.

  Her auto-defend augmentations were dialed up to full, which meant her body now moved with the sleek, eerie efficiency of a massage gun. Her movements went from mechanical to slightly less killable, then from harder to kill to theoretically unkillable—a theory that was being strained—her spine clicked into battle posture and her limbs recalibrated for maximum violence.

  The only titles the Automated Reaction System had access to were Disciple of Deflection and the Mimic Skin trait. It tapped into her cognitive wrap and fired the neural signals she normally used to equip a Title herself, activating them instantly at thought speed.

  By this point, she’d reached a point where small injuries no longer had any effect. Scratches and surface damage didn’t slow her or break her focus. She’d already been through enough that these hits felt meaningless now.

  Sure, they were good—and yes, the earlier version of her would’ve died on schedule—but that version had been discontinued. She had changed—hardened—and whoever wanted to bring her down would have to do far more than just hurt her, she wouldn’t fall from pressure or pain alone anymore. What once might have forced her to stop barely registered, that version of her was a distant memory. Now, through countless deaths, she had evolved.

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  She grinned through a bloody smile at the soldiers surrounding her. “Yeah, this is mine,” she said. “I built it all myself.” A body with mana, Titles, Traits, and systems that moved, dodged, deflected, and struck before the world even realized it was happening.

  The soldiers hardly cared.

  Two of the soldiers were clearly built for speed—high-end agility augments, speed-types. Kelly caught the distortion in the air around their feet and palms, little warping funnels of compressed atmosphere and heat that left streaks whenever they pivoted hard. Fancy toys. Cheats.

  Their armor shrugged off bullets, and they adapted quickly—smart enough to realize her chainblade didn’t have a “safe distance,” only degrees of suicidal proximity. They stayed tight on her, slipping into her guard to avoid the weapon’s chaotic orbit, convinced they’d solved her.

  They were also the first to die.

  The moment they closed in and their strikes actually landed, they discovered the problem: at close range, their precious evasion implants stopped mattering. Kelly didn’t flinch or slow, didn’t even bother acknowledging the hits—she simply adjusted, calculating, letting the loops of experience guide her hands.

  Their ability to dodge her blows failed instantly and absolutely. Kelly felt them break beneath her strikes with the same satisfaction she felt when confirming a long-held theory: yes, getting closer to the immortal death-addict with the chainblade is, in fact, stupid.

  Fortress of Endurance paired with Mimic skin absorbed their strikes. Kelly stood through the more unavoidable blows, taunting them as she fought back.

  “Are you swinging or warming up?” she asked. “Because I can wait, but my patience isn’t immortal.”

  Their hits kept coming. She kept counting.

  “Seven.”

  “Eight.”

  “Nine. You skipped the elbow. Why would you skip the elbow?”

  Her eyes tracked speed, shape, and direction with combat-level sensitivity, sending signals straight to her spine to fire muscles before thought.

  Death’s Foe pushed her EQ upward as she drove forward. She switched to Giantsbane for a speedboost, then Mythril Fist right before her punch landed, and the hit dropped the closest fighter flat.

  A blade lunged for her throat. She flicked the seam in her skin—her Mimic material bank—switching instantly to liquid siloxane. Her neck looked like crystal, acted like a rubber tank on steroids.

  Disciple of Deflection became three times stronger, turning the strike into its owner’s shoulder. He grunted in surprise and utter shock, almost lifted off his feet by the impact. Kelly nodded.

  “Teamwork. Inspirational.”

  Another round of attacks hammered in. An internal gland sent a controlled surge of adrenaline through her system. Time slowed in her perception, nerves fired faster, oxygen flooded her muscles. She parried, dodged, and repositioned with perfect alignment without thinking.

  Disciple of Deflection sent them back into the squad, sparking a chorus of exchanges. Two got through her guard, tearing at flesh. She ignored it and kept fighting.

  “Please continue,” she said. “I enjoy it when the enemy helps with field tests.”

  One of them fired an incendiary grenade that latched onto her shoulder, tracking her temperature. “Ha! Finally—” The explosion swallowed everything around her. Flames roared and crackled, consuming the world, but she stepped through them untouched, her molten fists steaming in the firelight.

  Kelly slammed her fists together, Hot Knuckles glowing molten and steaming, and laughed. “Firefighters get this tech to survive heat spikes. Me? Locked out of weapon augments, so I hijacked it.” The heat shunts ran through her whole body, funneling every spike straight into her fists. Fortress of Flame activated and the heat-shunts began dragging every degree of heat through her body. Her fists turned red, bright, almost fiery, and steady, like stars.

  She held them up.

  “Look at that,” she said. “Jazz hands.”

  They hesitated. She advanced.

  Her first punch erupted with stored heat and split armor down the center. The second reversed inertia and launched its target across the space. As she dove for cover, a hail of fire followed her. One incendiary round got through, exploding against her side. Kelly stabbed a medical vial directly on the large wound. Irritated. “Wow. That was… inconvenient. Okay, that tickled. Seriously guys, just let me murder you! I promise it’ll be quick!”

  Heat rolled off her fists in steady pulses as she leapt from cover and closed in on the last of them. Even injured, her eyes tracked every gun, every twitch, her systems taking in the rest. They stepped back, regrouping.

  “No regrouping,” she said. “If you fail, fail with commitment.”

  Two fighters pushed into her flank. She smashed their stance with a single magically reinforced backhand. After thirty long seconds of furious fighting, they started to realize she wasn’t going to die from the endless blows they were landing, so they dropped defense and went all-in on pure, reckless offense.

  Her final strike detonated through their line and sent the rest sprawling. She surveyed the scattered bodies, tapped her foot once, and lifted her voice.

  “That’s it? After all that noise?” She flexed her hands. “Anyone still conscious, get up. I’m filing this under practice, and practice requires repetition.”

  They died very quickly after that, albeit not without leaving Kelly bloodied and grinning through it. The tests of her new augments had been a success, but she had taken hits, a lot of them.

  Damage. Nothing like the “Heavy” unit—the meat demon the first retrieval team had shoved at her back at Genecorp. Back then, that thing had left her practically at death’s door every single time.

  Now, injured, bleeding, down to a quarter of her health, and with a single medical vial left, the scene was pure chaos. The ground was a mess of fractures. Bodies of the mid-tier Thresholders and two Peaks lay twisted across the shattered street. The final barrier stood ahead, towering, daring her to try.

  Kelly approached the wall of the modular military dome blocking off the east grid. She ran a molecular blade along the surface. “Come on, you giant scrap heap,” she muttered. Sparks spat and chunks of composite metal pinged around her as she shoved, carving and prying with every ounce of strength she had. The metal probably weighed as much as a building, and this should have taken forever, but her strength had grown. “Guess not today.” She carved and pushed until the many-feet-deep composite bent, then broke, and a human-sized tunnel appeared.

  With each step forward, the saturation of mana increased. Kelly felt it crawl into her veins, burning and tingling across the surface of her skin. Her eyes stung. Her nose bled, then healed, then bled again. Her heart stopped, then started, then stopped again. Death by mana overload constantly struggled against her troll regeneration, which was already in a constant battle against her previously forgotten but never lost state of spontaneous atomic disintegration.

  She jabbed the last medical healing vial into her arm, switched on every life-support system, engaged forced movement protocols, and activated every emergency procedure, each designed for catastrophic circumstances, all to accomplish the simple task of walking.

  [Unique Title: 'Mana Vacuum' gained!]

  [Title: Mana Vacuum (Unique, I-Grade)

  This being’s innate and unnatural absorption of mana should not exist, and has been repeatedly overloaded to a state far beyond the threshold of death, permanently altering their metaphysiology further. When equipped, this Title boosts the innate absorption exponentially, pulling ambient and external mana into the Title bearer. The effect increases for particularly harmful mana from attacks or environmental dangers. Mana absorbed is used to fuel the user and is further boosted by any damage caused, increasing the performance of all skills and magical effects by the amount of mana absorbed and the damage received, until the absorbed energy is consumed.]

  Why would she want that? It would boost her, sure. But it would make her die much quicker by increasing the absorption of the poison in the air, strengthening itself and creating a feedback loop of absorption, boosting, and poison. The mana poisoning damage—her own name for it, because, like most things, it apparently became toxic once the body couldn’t handle it—would kill her in minutes,

  Here, in the dome? It was suicide. Anywhere else, in any other location, it was another useful Title—one she couldn’t immediately see a way to circumvent with tech. Not without studying the poisoning effect in detail.

  With shaky hands, Kelly stored a higher level soldiers shield on her back, then carved a thin slice of the dome’s composite metal—it was military grade, hardier than anything she had on hand—then, with some struggle, stored it in her Mimic material bank, just in case she was met with a barrage of gunfire on the other side.

  “S-step aside, East Grid. Immortal coming through,” she said.

  And she pressed forward, alternating between Fortress of Vitality and Endurance to reverse and slow the damage, her healing keeping her ahead of the mana poisoning damage, keeping her alive.

  Until she reached the other side.