Ren began to teach her. He didn’t start with a combat art, or a list of CQC techniques. No, what he started with was how she approached everything. He said the first lesson was how to connect with her augments, to reach into the very recesses of her consciousness. The parts that even the machines hardly touched. Which really just meant he continued to summarily beat her ass; correcting her stance with the floor, the wall, and any other solid objects at hand, while Kelly tried with everything she had to wipe the smug calmness from his face.

  He was repurposing her momentum into floor-based architecture. Running a clinic on her fundamental errors, and admission was free.

  And Kelly? Kelly wanted nothing more than to burn that clinic down.

  She was trying to slice him in half and punch the pieces. Her world had narrowed to the hyper-focused frustration of a missed strike, the jarring impact of her own blows being turned against her, and the infuriating stability of his stance. Her world had narrowed to a single, brutal equation: her offense, his response. Each of her strikes was a message sent, and each of his deflections was the same message returned, stamped “undeliverable.” He was a cliff. He was a wall. She was the spray of gravel against it, trying to dismantle him with her fingernails.

  It had been going on for a while, and she still hadn’t ‘connected’ to anything. Sweat stung her eyes, her muscles burned from the sustained, brutal demand of operating every augment at its maximum designed limit. A deep, soul-numbing fatigue was settling into her bones, a wet sandbag in her chest that her rapid regeneration couldn’t quite lift between one punishing exchange and the next. She wanted nothing more than to ‘connect’ her blade to his face. Or a fist. A boot. Any part of her weaponry making solid, definitive contact.

  Every fiber of her being wanted that. A single screaming cable of intent. So she tried to use that want, that raw, snarling intent, to fuel her attempts at ‘connection.’ She reached for the feeling of her mythril fists, her mythril knuckles, not as tools but as extensions of her being, of her will. Trying to connect with the soul of her augments and the abilities that fuelled them, like trying to hear the hum of a power line through insulated gloves. Into the mana she pulled with every breath. She pushed her awareness into the heat of her own movements, chasing the burn beyond sensation into something like control, a radio tuning to static.

  It was a grinding, internal struggle, a work in progress that strained her being to its core. It felt like trying to mentally command a limb that had fallen asleep. Like trying to bite down on her own heartbeat. The smug calmness, the smug wall, the smug cliff-face just watched.

  Ren stood over the crater his last strike had made. Kelly, at his feet, coughed up dust and something solid, what might have been an organ. He hadn’t moved from where he stood. He hadn’t moved his feet.

  “You are no stranger to hard work, Dr. Voss,” he began, his voice a gravelly monotone that cut through the ringing in her ears. “Your file shows a relentless pattern. A refusal to accept the station you were born into. A genius applied for raw survival. Others think your genius is intellect, but that is only a byproduct of your grit. Your academic achievements are merely a byproduct of that grit. You are hard headed. Impossibly so. More than anyone I have ever seen. That same stubbornness is the only reason you are still conscious right now. It is also the reason you will fail.”

  He looked at her, his expression unreadable. “Do you know what you need, Dr. Voss?”

  Then he kicked her.

  It wasn’t a dramatic wind-up. It was a simple, efficient motion that started at his hip and ended with his boot planted in her ribs. The ground beneath her cracked. The air swirled, pressurized into a visible vortex. The force should have sent her flying through another three structures and crashing into the wall in a mosaic of metal, blood, pain, and engineered flesh.

  Instead, she slid back a grand total of four steps, her boots screeching against the shattered floor. Her inertia Title flared. Her Fortress of Flame Title held. She did not fly back. The kinetic energy dissipated into the space around her, making the debris on her skin float for a stunned second before clattering down.

  Ren’s eyebrow rose. A fraction.

  His foot reorganized. The nanotech in his leg shimmered, the structure extending and expanding in a blur of reconfiguration Kelly almost didn’t catch—an afterimage of a piston driving forward. His leg extended. Expanded.

  He kicked her again.

  The sound was a deep, gut-punch THUMP that hit the air like a jet engine’s heart seizing. All the stored and redirected force, and infinitely more, delivered in a nanosecond.

  Kelly only had a fraction of a second. Less than that. A sliver of time that only allowed for a single thought; Fortress of Endurance. The title clicked into place.

  The blow sent her flying.

  The impact shattered her sternum. It ruptured organs. She felt things inside go from solid to liquid. She carved a new, shorter trench into the combat hall’s far wall. Healing—her natural regeneration boosted by her Fortress of Vitality Title—was already stitching the mess back together. It itched like fire. It would take minutes. The pain was a frank, colossal announcement that she was still being casually dismantled.

  What… what the hell was that? A phantom foot? He wasn’t supposed to have a workaround for her workaround.

  It wasn’t fair. Only she was allowed to cheat!

  She slumped against the wall, dragging in a wet, gurgling breath. Ren hadn’t moved. He was still in the same spot, examining his foot as the nanotech settled back into a standard boot shape.

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  “You have shown the ability to persevere through the impossible and grind and survive,” he continued, his tone unchanged. “You have the genius intellect needed to survive one of the most dangerous criminals in recent years, and to pull yourself from the hands of criminals into upper society. You broke walls that billions could not. You did it without dying, without losing.” His eyes locked onto hers. “The looping has made you complacent.”

  The veteran spoke, his words landing with the same force as the weapon-augmented strike that sent Kelly crashing into the ground, the hall bright with light and heat as something blasted in her direction. Kelly didn’t quite recognize the design, but it looked like a Magnetically-Driven Hypervelocity Lance, an MDHL. It was as if someone had merged a railgun with a coilgun, then implanted it in his calves.

  The impact was a masterclass in applied physics. It vaporized whatever it hit, created a plasma jet, and sent momentum drilling deep into a structure. Armor failed in every textbook way: shear, spall, internal shock. The whole process had immense recoil, but it was weirdly quiet—a polite thump compared to the obnoxious bang of a firearm. Worked in a vacuum, too. Neat.

  The most infuriating part? He was still holding back. Kelly could see it. He could tune the blow, make it stronger or weaker. In theory, that kind of weapon could hit with the localized force of a small meteor strike. Not an explosion—an explosion is messy, it spreads energy around. This was different. This was like being hit by a car traveling Mach 90, except the car was a tungsten spike and all its energy decided to take the straight path through your body.

  It wasn't a kick. It was closer to reality briefly forgetting the target was supposed to be solid.

  She rolled, throwing up instant shields in a dense formation and diving behind a shattered wall as sections of the battle room sprayed into the air around her.

  And that was just one weapon. It was a high-energy augment, but it didn't look flashy. Instead of bursting into flames, thin lines like glowing seams under his skin and veins along his neck lit up briefly as internal heat shunts engaged. Then they cooled. Almost instantly. The whole process was disgustingly efficient. Corporate warfare, refined to a single, quiet, planet-cracking point.

  “You are an idiot,” he stated, his voice cutting through the debris. “You are clinically insane. But you are also a technical genius. You possess the capacity for hard work. You have the ability to persevere and grind through any obstacle, no matter the circumstance.” He paused, and another concussive wave shattered the cover she’d just chosen, forcing her to pull a spent rifle cartridge into storage and appear behind a raised platform. “But you no longer act like the orphan adopted by a gang led by an overclocked mutant criminal. You do not act like the youth who escaped that life, who escaped poverty, sickness, and circumstance to reach for something greater. You achieved the impossible once. With nothing. Your immortality has made you lose your way.”

  The battle was a glorious mess. Kelly moved, and metal balls the size of her fist erupted from her shadow at the speed of sound. Dozens of them. The shadow itself stretched and slithered across the arena floor, a personal delivery system for very loud, very fast presents. The hall became a symphony of sonic booms and shattering debris.

  [Title: Unerring Marksman I → II]

  [Title: Mythril Fist I → II]

  She looked like a one-woman industrial accident, bouncing from cover to cover that wasn't there a second before. She ran across thick, translucent carbonate shields that blinked into existence under her feet and vanished the moment she left them. She dove into her own stretching shadow and popped out somewhere else entirely, using the storage space to swap weapons and to telekinetically chuck loose chunks of the battlefield around like a toddler with a temper and a crane license.

  Her fists glowed red like stars. Elements, bullets, molten metal, and sizzling plasma rained from her general direction. It was both an attack pattern and her embodying a persistent, violent weather system. Every so often, a blow that could crack a fortified building would land, and she'd just tank it, staggering a step before firing a rune-made rail-slug the size of a carrot from a launcher that hadn't been in her hands a moment before.

  She still couldn't get close.

  “You need to hate losing,” Ren spoke, unperturbed, a seamless part of the assault. “You need to want to win every single time—without dying.” The emphasis was a physical pressure in the air. “Each death could be your last. Every failure could result in your mind being overwritten forever. You should be the kind of person that says: ‘So what if I am outmatched? So what?’”

  At a distance, he could snipe her with wide concussive or focused blasts—she entered close combat range, her weapon morphing into a much longer, segmented blade. Kelly broke into a sprint, diving in and out of shadows and conjured shields, tanking blasts she could, and blurring past blasts she couldn’t. Her skin shifted to a new material each second, pinging off hurled debris and shrapnel. A concussive force was sent hurtling into her shadow dimension as drones provided fire support that the ancient veteran swatted aside.

  “Stand up, girl,” he commanded, not yielding an inch of his ground. “Receive my attacks. Concentrate until your face goes red and your eyes leak blood. Focus until your brain feels ready to explode. Cram as much thought, experimentation, and ingenuity into every thousandth of a second. Make each second equivalent to an hour of dedicated, brutal work. Adapt!” His fist blurred forward, a motion that was both simple and impossible. “Think of this as your last try. The next blow I land will kill you. Think of this as your only life!”

  Last life. Only life. The thought was a cold circuit closing in her mind. She let the mana flood the runes in her palm.

  The veteran spoke, his voice the same weapon as the augmented strike that sent Kelly into the ground. She dove behind cover as sections of the battle room sprayed into the air around her.

  A blow arrived too fast. A killing blow. One that could crack a landscape. She’d caught it too late in her perception, a split-second lag that meant vaporized bone and nothing left to regenerate. But Kelly didn’t seem to care anymore.

  She was in a state of near mania. Crazed. Time loop? Death? Immortality? She had forgotten about such things. The concepts felt like dry administrative notes. None of it mattered. All that mattered was reaching the core of her being, that raw grit and refusal to fail.

  Right now, time almost seemed to freeze as the impending blow came for her face. In that final moment, she realized death was a crutch. It was the thing she leaned on when a plan went sour. It was holding her back.

  She forgot who she was. She forgot her name, her Titled, her augments. She madly strained as though this moment was her very last. Her teeth ground, her vision tunneled, and a metallic scream built in her throat that had no time to escape. She sensed mana inside her packing and condensing, the energy compressing under the pressure of her focus until it felt like a neutron star was forming in the center of her being, threaded through her chest. She felt her very essence strain under the pressure of attempting to cram every bit of focus and thought into each thousandth of a second.

  It almost felt as though she touched on some part of her that had always been there, far beyond reach—a part of her soul, maybe, or just the stubborn bedrock everything else was built on—and time slowed impossibly. It felt like some grand connection, a circuit closing, as if thousands of her existed in the same moment.

  No, millions.

  And it unlocked a new sense she had never noticed before, something that was always there, just beyond her vision, like a hum at the edge of her awareness.

  Kelly could feel time, vividly.