Four societal facts currently burned in Kelly’s mind.

  The first was Quantum tech. Quantum tech was reality doing its best “hold my beer” impression at microscopic scales. Reality got sloppy when you shrunk it down small enough. The tech took advantage of that.

  The second thing on her mind was that the henchman attacking her; Ithili, the end of all lunch breaks and healthy management styles, was a Tüin.

  The third and final fact was that the Tüin mastered quantum tech a millennium before humanity even knew they existed.

  That was the most problematic.

  They stitched it into their own biology so deeply it ran in their veins from the moment they were born. It let their elites pull off tricks humans still had not quite cracked—teleporting, shifting mass, moving with a built-in physical perfection that would force a human to get surgically redesigned and mechanically overhauled just to stand in the same zip code.

  They built their civilization on a single brutal creed: war as religion. They skipped prioritizing agriculture, philosophy, and reality television, going straight to perfecting combat as their primary export. Their entire technological progress was just a list of increasingly clever ways to win a fight.

  She was acutely aware that humanity survived contact not through strength or strategy, but because the Tüin were, politically speaking, a disaster. They were split into countless warring tribes on—as far as humanity’s intel gathered—multiple worlds, that all fought each other slightly more than outsiders. They thought adding machinery to your body was sacrilege, and hypocritically, considered the microscopic tech in their own bloodlines a natural gift from the divine, innate from birth, and refused to alter their bodies further. They hoarded tech secrets from their own cousins. Asking them to coordinate a unified invasion was like trying to herd cats on fire that sued each other.

  Kelly knew it was the reason that even with the same Enhancement Quotient, a Tüin was usually more violently capable than a human; they had better gear, specialized combat training from birth, zero bureaucratic red tape, a culture that encouraged pushing weapon systems until they smoked, and usually killed their first mortal enemy by the time a human was still learning how to walk.

  If fighting multiple human Peak 20EQ Thresholders was Kelly’s previous benchmark?

  Ithili came from an entirely different and far pricier league.

  His two right arms were still finishing their axe swing when his left fists hammered upward, connecting while she was still in mid-air. Her mimic skin flared to life—too late. A punch cracked her collarbone and fractured her sternum. A second blow followed, aimed to pulverize her skull and snap her neck. She abandoned all defense, slamming her consciousness into the Fortress of Endurance Title.

  An EQ reading pinged; 27.0

  Her Title kicked in right on schedule, bending causality to keep her in one piece through the blow. A spontaneous resistance to breaking, all forms of it, flared to life. The power let her move and function through impacts when her body had every reason not to. Without it, she would be a stain on the floor.

  However, it did nothing to stop the inertia of the blow that landed while she was airborne.

  The ground cracked under the impact, dust erupted, and a sonic boom carried her through the air. Tumbling midflight slammed her wounds against themselves, forcing Kelly to rethink her strategy. Defense would get her killed. Speed alone wouldn’t help. She had to hit back, full throttle.

  She slammed Fortress of Flame into place. The Title's resistance to inertia anchored her in the air, killing her momentum for a clean landing. The air slowed around her, bones screaming, organs complaining, but she touched down without adding new injuries to the ledger. She knelt once, spat blood across the debris, and made a mental note to bill someone for hazard pay.

  "OK. Ow—guess playtime’s over," she hacked, reaching into her shadow to pull out an oval-shaped pane and drones with adhesive clasps.

  After finishing her mana augments, Kelly spent time in the lab figuring out how to make her shadow useful. She first developed a translucent oval pane and a tiny drone that acted as a torch.

  She’d been sitting on this invention, wanting to wring every drop of data from her new mana augments first. She still had one final mana-augment to test; a ‘perpetual motion’ anchor in her legs. But with a four-armed alien trying to redecorate the place with her insides, data collection was officially over.

  Shadows were absence of light. Her shadow was the doorway, and she was the anchor. Both sides of a translucent material counted as shadows: the side facing the light blocked most of it, the opposite absorbed bleed-through—weak and sloppy, but still a shadow. One side sharp, one side lazy.

  Those soldiers with their corpo issue floating shields and the sniper’s setup sparked an idea. She smacked her drone onto the inner face of the pane and hardwired it into her auto-defense reflexes.

  Ithili flung one of his axes at her at speed.

  The first cut into her side as she dodged, completely ignoring the hardened material of her mimic skin. Kelly immediately copied it, and her hand turned into a translucent, near-indestructible glass identical to the axes. It crashed into the ground.

  Before she could recover, he threw another.

  The drone swung her shield into place, the light shone, and Ithili’s axehead passed through partially before he hastily pulled his arm back in surprise. The weapon froze in midair and returned.

  “Congratulations dumbass, you just threw your weapon into my shadow. If it stays finders keepers.” Kelly hacked a laugh and tried to create distance.

  It wasn’t perfect—in fact, it was terrible. Hits to the exterior or the drone would make it collapse, but anything striking the far side went to her shadow dimension. Ugly, unreliable, rudimentary, but effective. She still had the Deadtech too, taken from Reggie’s crew. But that came with a cost Kelly wasn’t willing to pay. This didn’t.

  Giantbane slotted over her shoulders. Movement stats jumped—two hundred and fifty percent faster—and she used it immediately. Feet hit the ground, legs pumping, and Kelly ran forward, a bullet with chaos strapped to it.

  “You’re going to have to try harder,” she said between wheezes.

  Right before impact, Death’s Foe kicked in, slamming Giantbane out of the system. Speed dropped, yes, but everything else doubled. Strength, durability, cognition, reaction time—all spiking two hundred percent. Adrenaline slammed through her veins. Her werewolf transformation ignited, fingers swelling with muscle, claws shooting out inches long, bones thickening, muscles packing into her back, arms, legs, and core. An extra ten percent boost hit on top of that.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She stopped getting bullied and started surviving. The numbers on her ocular implants screamed at her, but Kelly didn’t care. She flexed thick claws, adjusted the weight in her legs, and braced for the inevitable. Survival had just become a sprint. Pain and broken bones were background noise. The melee specialist in front of her might have had experience, skill, and a war-hungry race backing them, but Kelly had physics, numbers, and sheer chaos on her side.

  The two hundred percent Death’s Foe boost finally bought her a shot at survival instead of the full-on beatdown she’d been taking in her very first battle against an Expert-level melee specialist of a war-mongering race.

  She had thought herself strong after smashing Payne in the lab, shredding skeleton knights, and tearing apart the meat demon. She was spectacularly, hilariously wrong. Humanity was new to the superhuman game. The Tüin knew how to brawl with gods on the ground.

  Kelly realized she had been a frog in a well.

  A small-time player in a league that spanned light years. The galaxy was an impossibly vast, crowded room, and Kelly had just stumbled into a conversation between seasoned brawlers while holding a bent spoon.

  The giant four-armed being, Ithili, did not rush in again. Instead, he stood there, his chest still rising and falling from the exertion, studying her with unspoken questions.

  “Explain this to me,” he said, his voice low, cutting through the silence. “I have seen you take blows that would shatter armor and walk away without a mark. Yet you bled from a strike that was little more than a tap. That third one was the weakest of all.”

  The liquid material of his weapon coalesced into a perfect, rippling sphere above his palm, its surface glistening in the dome’s light. Then, with a thought, the sphere elongated, flowed, and shifted back into the shape of a thick glass rifle.

  “And the air,” he continued. “You slowed your fall without thrust. I saw no jet of gas, felt no warp in gravity. You just… stopped. How?” His eyes were alight with curiosity, excitement, and bloodlust.

  Kelly spat a glob of blood onto the floor. "It's a subscription service. The damage resistance has a shitty cooldown. And the air-brake is a perk for loyal customers." She cracked her neck. "You should look into it. The sign-up process is a real killer, though."

  He eyed the nearly indestructible glass of his weapon, now perfectly mimicked by her hand, his jaw slightly agape.

  “Humans don’t have arctrite,” he said, voice tight with disbelief. “It’s beyond you simians. How—how is your hand made of arctrite? How did you do it? And your hair… why is it floating? How does the shadow work? It’s clearly more than a spatial box—but there’s no anchor!”

  Kelly leaned back on her weapon, snapping her blade to her wrist with a thought. Her hand still glistened with copied arctrite. “Is that what your switches are made of? Damn, they look even cooler in person. Way better than humanity’s junk.” She twirled the oval with one finger, letting it hover. “You tell me your secrets, I’ll tell you mine… or I’ll just borrow yours for a minute. No need to get attached.”

  He fired twice more, not to hurt her, but to test, to see. The shots rippled across the panel, soft disturbances that proved nothing.

  “They said you’d stolen technology… that you’re an experiment, like me,” Ithili said, awe creeping into his voice, “but this… this is better than I ever imagined!”

  He lunged toward Kelly, trying to splatter her against the floor she had already fractured.

  Kelly barely avoided certain death, clinging to life by the thinnest of margins even at full effort. Every exchange leaned toward loss, and she scraped survival by inches, bending reality with magic just to stall death for a heartbeat longer.

  She still had the Deadtech. She could have phased attacks through herself, teleported instantly, or watched everything coming with future-sight. But after endless flights of stairs and tunnels looping into exhaustion, she realized something.

  Using those tools would gain her nothing. Nothing that would stick when the day reset. The only thing that belonged to her was whatever she woke up with.

  And fighting to the death was kind of… invigorating. It was a losing battle, yes. It was also the most alive she'd felt in months.

  Kelly hacked a laugh, sharp and rattling. “And yeah… I probably need therapy. But honestly, who has time when death keeps trying to high-five me?”

  Outrunning Death, her most overpowered Kamikaze Title, pushed her speed to absurd levels. It could have been a last-ditch option, but she hadn’t tested how long she could survive it with her upgraded body and new movements. Before, it had been nine seconds. Now? Ten. Twelve. Fifteen. Maybe more. Even with limbs and perpetual-motion triggers in her legs that guaranteed endless movement—something she still hadn’t tested yet—using it still meant Death would catch her eventually. Today… Kelly refused to die.

  She reached into the oval pane, pulled out an armor-piercing rifle from her shadow, then concentrated, and pulled out the time-frozen flames from the many grenades and blasts she’d stored in there.

  Her Mythril fists flared hot, hands glowing like furnaces. Giantbane nearly tripled her speed. She fired the rifle. Ithili shrugged off the bullets with bare skin, quirking a brow.

  “Oh… that’s annoying,” Kelly muttered, switching to the light railgun. His liquid weapon flattened into an oval pane, copying hers. The slug bounced off in a burst of shrapnel and heat, veering skyward while forcing him to stumble, slide back, and laugh, his face lit up with whatever passed for joy in a war-monger. Kelly sprinted up close, snapped her fingers, multiplying gravity, and fired again.

  Point-blank gave the same result. His liquid weapon bodily jerked him to block, stretching into an angled shield before she had finished pulling the trigger. Alien upgrades mimicked her Switch, an even nastier version of her emergency auto-defense extending to his weapons.

  Death's Foe slammed her perception into overdrive, stretching every second into a long, clear road. A counter in her vision marked the ten-percent chances—the moments Fortress of Endurance would simply ignore an attack, or when Mythril Fist would decide to hit with the force of a meteor. Her claws glistened, becoming indestructible glass, a perfect Mimic of his weapon. She sporadically cranked gravity into a crushing press for everyone else, and her favorite trick—using Disciple of Deflection to reverse inertia, sending every bit of incoming force right back where it came from.

  But Kelly, in the middle of her own personal circus of broken bones and bruises, did manage one thing: she dragged the fight toward the terraforming box, and by extension, the other two idiots trapped in the dome. She looked like roadkill, couldn’t even think about healing, but it didn’t matter. The most dangerous guy in the room was too busy babysitting the cube before it turned them all into cosmic confetti. And Kelly? She was finally close enough to the terraforming to ruin everything. Ithili probably hated it—she couldn’t tell, and couldn’t turn around to see him—but he still couldn’t stop her in time.

  “She should’ve been down ages ago!” Adrian shouted, eyes glued to the cube, every second of focus on keeping it from blowing, every muscle locked on keeping it stable.

  “Why is she still breathing?! Take her out! Forget preservation!”

  In pure desperation to keep Kelly away, the sniper finally moved, shield angling above him to intercept any fire. At the same instant, Ithili snapped back and raised his alien rifle at Kelly. She didn’t get the luxury of hesitation—either angle her floating oval shadow-shield at the sniper’s incoming rounds designed to kill higher beings, or angle it toward the unseen, unheard alien-tech shot that would kill her just as thoroughly. Kelly, annoyed but practical, aimed her dimensional shield at Ithili.

  A sound like a planet exploding hit her from behind—some insane, overpowered alien cannon shot. Heat, force, the whole “hope this kills her” package. They were hoping if it didn’t kill her, it would at least knock her far from the cube.

  It didn’t.

  Kelly was used to taking the worst hits and staying upright. While her floating shield absorbed Ithili’s alien gunfire, she switched to Death’s Foe. The sniper’s rifle was high-tech—too advanced to track without Death’s Foe at the fourth grade—but the title let her see every microscopic twitch of his trigger finger and barrel shift. Boosted by her title and augments, she caught the exact moment the trigger pulled and deflected the shot, mimic skin turning her left forearm into alien material.

  Cracks spidered across her forearm, and she would have been launched across the dome if she hadn’t switched titles like flipping switches: Fortress of Endurance, then Flame. Feet dug in, impact, then inertia arrested. Her left arm was gone as a tool now—toast. Risky? Absolutely. But it worked. And the fallout from the sniper’s fire forced Ithili to step back for a moment, as he tried to shoot past her shadow shield at mid-range, angling his fire, which pulled pressure off her exactly when she needed it.

  And this close to the magic cube of death, a moment was all that Kelly needed.