Kelly existed in a single moment of time—the old veteran’s fist a centisecond away from turning her upper body into a Basquiat painting.

  But Kelly didn’t care. Time flowed. It moved in currents and eddies, in pulls and tides. And Kelly swore she could feel its every shift graze her skin and sift through her; raw, undiluted, and profoundly badly organized.

  The sensation was a traffic jam in her skull. Every conversation that ever happened, all shouting for her attention. Every footstep ever taken, stomping down on the same instant. It was the cosmic junk drawer of time, and someone had just upended it into her brain. Past, present, and future were all elbowing each other in the now, a glorious, screaming, and deeply overwhelming committee where everyone talked at once.

  This wasn’t something gained from throwing herself at a problem until it broke. This was something altogether deeper, more profound, and more strained. A product of labor so total it felt like she was trying to expand her consciousness, but inwards; like being dismantled and rebuilt around a single, screaming need. An implosion of self, and her own bones were being used as pry bars against the seams of the world.

  It was the glorious, screaming everything.

  Pressure crashed in crescendo, a wonderful, terrible crowding in Kelly’s skull. Her thoughts weren’t thoughts, not exactly, but gleeful, chaotic instant impulses—mad riffs on the noise.

  “—louder, come on, you can do better than that—"

  “—and the taste and the sting and the—yes, that one, that’s a good one—”

  “—no no, play the other thing, the thing from before the—”

  The sensation of feeling time shifted, lessening; quickly fading to nothing, and Kelly reached for it, grasping at air. She somehow knew, instinctively, that if she let go of that sensation, it would leave her and be almost impossible to regain.

  A wide, reckless grin would have split her face if it weren’t all occurring in a single frozen moment—so instead, it split her soul. Her fingers were frozen, but her heart moved.

  ‘More. All of it. Let’s go.’ She thought.

  She equipped Mana Vacuum.

  Her body went greedy—became a vortex. A pit opened up inside her and just started drinking, dragging in the thick, spent mana hanging in the scorched air of the combat hall. It rushed to fill her. It was absorbed. Inhaled on a suffocating scale. It wasn’t clean. It was a drowning flood, a choking haul that buzzed in her teeth, that made her hair stand on end like she’d licked a live wire. Her skin and teeth tingled with it, humming in her skull. Every hair on her body stood rigid, alive with desperate current. A human-shaped reactor.

  Her eyes slammed shut, trying to hold that feeling; to connect with everything. With mana, but most importantly, with time. She reached for the screaming sensation and grabbed it with both mental fists, clamping down hard. White-knuckle grip on a bucking current that wanted to tear loose.

  The sensation was a sponge dropped into the ocean, swelling, growing heavier and heavier as more mana poured in without pause. A relentless tide crammed into a vessel being hammered out in real time. The mana burned through her, compressing itself further. ‘Good. Let it burn.’ Burn became power that fed every cell and supercharged every Trait, until there was nothing in her that wasn’t charged, vibrating, forged hotter and sharper than it had been a moment before.

  It was a return to the heart of herself and an evolution all at once, and the self she returned to was a star going supernova. Her body screamed as it changed, adapting to the overflow, restructured itself from the inside out beneath the torrent. A glorious alteration. She was more herself than she had ever been.

  And Ren’s blow was still coming.

  A split second from impact. The moment she opened her eyes, it would land, and she would die.

  In that frozen sliver of forever, Kelly’s mind moved with brutal, greedy clarity. She fought for every edge she could wrench out of the moment. She reached into the bottomless ocean of mana she’d swallowed and hauled it all forward, dragging it up from the depths and pouring it toward something—toward anything that might matter in the instants she had left. She wasn’t controlling the mana, but she was reaching for the attunement. She aimed it at the raw, unfinished connection she’d been trying to force into existence through sheer, crazed stubbornness.

  She focused everything—the buzz in her teeth, the burn in her blood, the refusal to stop even now—and shoved it all at the impossible thing she had never stopped trying to do;

  Connect.

  “Open,” she demanded inside her own skull, the word a live wire snapping through her thoughts. Not to time. Not to mana. To herself.

  “Open or I’m taking the whole wall.”

  She poured everything into this one thing. The last ingredient she shoved in was the full cocktail: every raw emotion, every experience, every manic death, all the hard work, and the pure, chaotic refusal to stop she’d been running on since forever. The very thing that made her who she was, sharpened on a thousand resets—all of it, all her experiences—crammed into a single, glorious, final ingredient and poured into the connection.

  If Ren could see mana, he would’ve seen a swirling storm.

  Kelly’s Mana Conduit trait treated the whole storm like a buffet. The crystals in her palms lit up with a dazzling array of runes, and the blade in her grip began to vibrate, humming with the specific frequency of an appliance that was now, technically, overqualified for its job.

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  Her Troll-Homunculi trait drank from the condensed mana in her body. Her muscles reached an arm-wrestling championship density and her bones gained a satisfying, floor-bending weight. The metal of her mimic skin grew to cover half her forearm, overloaded on mana; from above-elbow to wrist, it became dark, impregnable metal. Her werewolf claws sharpened with a series of tiny, efficient snaps, upgrading her fingertips to premier cutlery. A crowded feeling in her mouth announced her teeth’s ambitious expansion into sharp weaponry.

  Her entire being was a beacon of absorbed power, broadcasting on all frequencies.

  Kelly moved.

  She swung her segmented blade, the whip crackling through air that hadn't finished existing where it started.

  She did not move in sequence. What she did was impossible. She had no deadtech, no Title, no Trait for this. She simply decided the interval between here and there was inefficient. She deleted it. Her understanding of space and time became a blunt instrument. She swung it.

  The universe strained. It was a bad editor splicing film, frames mismatched, the audio of her blade's crackle arriving before the visual of her swing. A pop of abused air. A stutter in reality's feed. She was already beyond relativity, face painted with genuine delight—grinning at the absurdity of a law so easily ignored.

  She moved through space and time by stuttering from one frame to the next. Her will drove her. Her sense. Understanding.

  It was a glorious array of broken rules.

  [Calculating changes…]

  [New Trait (Mythic rarity) → Time Attunement (Grade-I)]

  [You have achieved a greater connection to the temporal stream. Grants a greater sense of its ebbs and flows, and in heightened states near death, allows for slight manipulation of its effects on you.]

  The information scrawled across her perception. She ignored it. The data was already in her bones.

  She reappeared in a blink, mid-slash, her chainblade screaming to turn the old veteran into a biology diagram and split him into two meetings.

  In the split second before impact, his eyes went wide. His face cracked into a mad, crazed grin.

  His systems flared to life, nanotech and biotech moving as one. They punched a gravity well into the air right in front of him, yanking her attack off-course and slamming it into the floor like an unwanted gift. The resulting explosion was massive, efficient, and brutally effective—all that force just cleanly diverted into prolonged existence.

  Her weapon cut through the ground. Then the floor beneath it. Then the sub-flooring.

  Alarms blared. A hole between two floors was turned to ash. In the distance, the wall leading to the building’s exterior was gone. The rest of the surrounding area was turned to rubble.

  As was Kelly’s arm, her leg, and the left side of her chest and upper body, her ribs an open art exhibit. With her remaining shaky hand, she grabbed the vial of healing medical nanotech and jammed it into her neck. A cool rush of chemical agents and microscopic machines hit her system, giving her repair a head start. She switched back to her Fortress of Vitality title and felt a surge as her body decided to visibly put itself back together. Flesh knitted, bones sealed, organs remembered their jobs. She hoped her regeneration would beat her failing systems and the big, dark ‘off’ switch creeping in.

  Kelly hoped she would survive, for the first time since… ever.

  She did.

  The old veteran, Ren’s, crazed grin never quit. He looked completely fine. The attack that could’ve scarred a low Elite-level augmented combatant hadn’t even mussed his hair.

  Ren’s sharp, breathless laugh cut the air. “HAHA! Yes—that’s it. That’s what connection looks like!” He was smiling in a way Kelly didn’t recognize. If she did, she’d know it was the triumphant bark of a drill sergeant who’d just watched a recruit finally clear the wall. “That—that right there—is success. Don’t ever let dying turn you soft and make you forget this feeling. This is what it takes. This is who you are!”

  For the first time since the test—or the training, or the brutal dismantling of her every assumption—began, he stepped forward. His gaze finally tracked away from the empty space where she’d been to land on her currently regenerating body and the tattered remains of her clothes. “And you’re alive,” he added, a beat later, the statement flat. “Barely. Even if it was closer than I’d like. We’ll need to work on that.” He gave a single, slow shake of his head. “Don’t get used to dying your way forward. It makes people sloppy. The real gains come when you push everything you’ve got into the moment you’re in. You got this because you pushed everything you had into the moment.”

  His tone shifted, the triumph banked into something analytical. “That mutation is powerful. Not as powerful as Gideon’s. Not the biggest anomaly we’ve recorded.” A pause, then a conceding, low noise. “But HA—damn if it isn’t up there.”

  He fell silent for a long moment, his focus turning inward before locking back onto her. “Kelly. Dr. Voss… I think that there is more to your mutation than you suspect. That… is clearly only one application. You should explore it at every opportunity.”

  Kelly couldn’t speak. Her body was a universe of wrongness, a map of pain. A deep, profound ache centered where she suspected her soul to be—a raw, bruised focal point of her entire being—caused every movement, every thought of movement, to reverberate with a strain she had never experienced. It wasn't muscle fatigue. It was a foundational groan. She managed to force out a single, raw croak that was more vibration than sound.

  But with this result… she finally had true success. The beginnings of a path forward.

  Ren paced the crater’s rim with a clipped, electric energy, a drill sergeant circling a promising recruit, his stoicism a thin veneer over clear fervor. “Now rise, hurry up, let’s go for round two. Do you need a break? Another medical vial?” He didn’t wait for an answer, barreling on. “We’ll need to work on your close combat. Your stance is atrocious, your guard is non-existent, and you telegraph your spatial manipulations half a second before execution.” He shook his head, tsks clicking in his throat. "Can’t even use your mutation without almost dying. Tut tut." He began muttering to himself, listing drills and corrective forms under his breath as he paced.

  Kelly began to rise in the new pit, the chainblade whining down beside her. She looked at the hole she’d made, then at the missing flooring. She felt the new trait humming in her veins, a second heartbeat out of phase with the first.

  The veteran stood at the edge of the crater, his grin settled into a firm, professional line. The expression on his face held one thinly concealed word; “good,” it said. The word was a stamp of authorization.

  She glanced from the devastation to him and back. The universe’s edit job was messy. Hers had just gotten a whole lot messier.

  And she had learned something. A real, concrete thing. Throwing her life at a problem was officially retired. That was the old math. The new math was different. Now, there would be a method to the madness. A point to the chaos.

  She liked the new math better. Her still regenerating smile was all teeth.

  Ren—Sato the ghost—was a powerful… friend? Ally? Master? Teacher? Whatever he was to her, he was key. Yesterday she would have thrown herself at him again without thought. Now, Kelly had a reason to exercise pragmatism.

  As Kelly rose to resume training, she decided that she would not be immediately rushing to battle this insane, wondrous, martial-arts-obsessed, gloriously war-crazed pensioner the second the next loop began.

  Not until she figured out just what this new power of hers was. It felt like a live grenade she hadn’t read the manual for yet—something heavy and dangerous sitting in her hand—so she needed to know its kill radius, its balance, how many seconds it took to explode, and whether she could cook it off with intent or if the only outcome was losing her thumb the moment she tried. She needed to break down the facets of exactly how it worked, and maybe even test how far it could go.

  Obviously, she was going to hack the living hell out of it.