The molecular blade in Kelly’s hand itched to simplify the entire ‘corporate-heir-tries-to-kill-her-and-steal-first-magic-tech’ situation.

  A quick decapitation. A surgical strike on his little collection of bound, brainwashed goblins—that would ruin his proxy magic so beautifully. She could have torn Adrian Ward apart with her molecular blade while he juggled the cube and kept the city from detonating.

  She didn’t. Her target had a different address. She saw his stabilizing influence on the storm of mana being pulled from the sky, and saw a far more entertaining application.

  Kelly planned to use it against them all.

  The Immortal scientist raced forward, humming a tune of chaos, watching Ithili and the sniper scramble after her. Fingers hovering over triggers, mouths roared, and she let the chaos roll around her. “This is going to be fun, in an ‘oh my god this is excruciating’ sort of way,” she muttered, watching them scramble. They were far too late.

  Giantbane pushed her speed to 23.7EQ, ten percent shy of Ithili, close enough that neither the difference nor their tech mattered. She calculated the gap and the timing, and it screamed opportunity.

  With a single step, she rushed, all the speed her empowered body could muster, straight to the interdimensional mana Cube, thinking, Someone’s going to cry over this, and slapped her only functioning hand on the flat magical surface.

  Kelly’s oval shield stretched into concave shape, covering her vitals with her shadow, but that didn’t stop Ithili from hurling his liquid weapon, Ithili’s weapon cleaving off both of her legs at the knee as the sniper fired, but Kelly had already made her Gambit.

  [Title equipped: Mana Vacuum]

  Her fingers forced themselves between two lines of dense inscriptions glowing across the surface. No time to admire the glowing, dense, unreadable scriptures. Precision mattered more than curiosity. Speed mattered more than anything. And she had both in spades.

  Mana surged.

  The cube shook, screaming in energy as it poured itself into her. It tugged, twisted, tore it apart with her presence, forcing it to implode, fold, and burn itself in a glorious mess of raw power. It was terrifying. And perfect.

  Adrian Ward’s eyes hit her at last. Shock spat across his face as though someone had forcibly carved it there. That device he thought would make him untouchable, the one manipulating and scanning mana with smug hubris, screamed back in panic at the chaos she had stitched into the air and the cube. Every delicate flow he counted on broke, and each measure he trusted shredded. And it forced him to stare in bewilderment at the person causing it all.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done, you fucking insect?!” Adrian roared, venom dripping from every word. “Do you even know who I am? Who I am?!” His hands trembled, eyes wide, his voice pitched between fury and disbelief. “You can’t just—how dare you—touch this, touch any of it!”

  “This is mine! Mine!” Adrian screamed, voice breaking as he tried to reclaim control of the cyclone of mana, a black hole shredding everything in its orbit and swallowing control whole.

  Kelly had no idea what she was doing, but Adrian Ward did not need to know that. The corporate heir, that high-society poster child, glared at her, eyes trembling with pure rage. His concentration was so absolute that it rendered them both silent. Her body seized under the mana pouring in—veins burning, muscles clamped down, screaming, teeth clenched shut. Neither of them could speak.

  And Kelly really, really wanted to say something.

  From the instant her title latched onto the cubes’ mana, the surge slammed into her with a raw intensity she’d felt before, the very same energy that she’d felt back in her lab, when she'd broken the universe. Mana. Bottomless, endless, surging with ferocity, a storm pumping the machine with an appetite she could feel like fire under her skin.

  And as Ithili and the sniper reached her, bearing down upon her from behind, death coming for her, Kelly did the only thing she could.

  “D-Dr. Kelly V-Voss,” she snarled, her jaw wired shut by the coursing power. “N-not a… thief. I’m a s-scien—a goddamn… s-sc—uh… a certified… furniture inspector!”

  Ithili and the sniper closed in behind her, fast and precise, death bearing down. Kelly swung her head back, her eyes visibly glowing with energy, like torches, her veins burning, skin filled with cracks.

  The mana connected, a violent handshake with her very essence. Her Title, spotting an all-you-can-eat buffet of endless mana, yanked on the leash.

  Adrian saw it coming.

  “No! don’t d-”

  The corporate prince's complaint was cut short as the world threw a chromatic tantrum. The whole dome, its four residents, the metal and rock, got promoted to a hostile art exhibit of burning light. It was a show so bright even people mana usually ignored got a front-row seat.

  Adrian, a near-demigod from the Upper Echelon, was powerful enough to make a pro warrior like Ithili sweat. His resume was impeccable. It was also completely useless. The man just melted. Ithili and the sniper got the same memo. Their entire squad was vaporized.

  It wasn't a quick delete. It took a full one hundred and twenty seconds for their total unwriting. A lifetime of top-tier defenses was promptly retired. The sniper tried to run, managing a pathetic shuffle. Ithili went for a charge, a plan that ended when his legs quit on the spot, turning to dust from the inside out.

  Kelly stuck around thanks to Mana Vacuum's generous benefits package. The Title's promise to turn absorbed mana into magical steroids was honest. It kept her systems online through the shredding storm, a technicality that barely qualified as living. Layers of her skin and muscle were erased. Her organs became a perpetual motion machine of regeneration and failure.

  With the welcoming committee now scattered particles and fine mist, and eventually particulate matter, the battle was over. The threat was finally clear. There was no one else to fight her for the cube. Kelly switched to Unending Vitality Title, trying further combat the damage. She was full of energy, fueling her every ability. She tried to pull her hand free, ready to let the terraforming cube do its thing without her.

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  Her hand didn't budge. Couldn’t.

  The mana didn't stop its chaotic flood into her. The surge, in fact, only intensified.

  The chromatic energy saturated the air, a multicolored, radioactive electric thickness that made breathing a lung-shredding chore. Kelly couldn't see atoms—her vision didn't work that way—but with her eyes endlessly regenerating, she entertained herself by picturing them having a rave in the atmosphere.

  Each breath carved fresh wounds in her lungs. Her skin cracked and sizzled, and her heat shunts, completely overwhelmed, forced her fists to blaze with intense radiation and blast steam, a display that did nothing to slow the damage. The energy density increased every second, and within a minute after Ithili and Adrian were erased, it became so oppressive that it trapped her in place, crushed her bones, flayed her skin, and cooked her alive.

  Kelly was staying held together by spit and wishes—the wishes being a regeneration effect working overtime. The same power unmaking her was also the fuel for the patch job, and the conflicting workload was overloading her system. Tears started ripping open all over her body, inside and out.

  It was pure. Thick. Old. Dense. Mana hitting like a punch straight to the brain. Primordial…. Or something weirder.

  It felt like the universe before there was anything in it.

  And holy hell, there was so much of it. A stupid, impossible amount. Like somebody had cracked open a god and this was what spilled out.

  By every rule that should matter, Kelly should have been vaporized. Hundreds of times, thousands—and she was. The dome held enough energy to wipe whole sectors of New York off the map. But the blast stayed caged. The entire ocean of mana emptied directly into her, a vortex with one target and a single, terrifying focus.

  Her body was coming apart, piece by piece, flaking off from the inside. And every time it tried to fall apart completely, her boosted regeneration grabbed it and hauled it back from the edge. It was a war on a dozen fronts inside her skin, and the regeneration was losing. It couldn't handle this much raw power. The mana was so thick it was practically radioactive, a poison so potent that even some schmuck with normal eyes could see it in the sky.

  “T-t-tickles, actually. The great un…raveling. My i-insides are filing f-for d-divorce.” She watched a piece of her forearm drift away like ash. A low laugh escaped her, cut off almost immediately. “A-and l-look at it—glowing. They always s-said I had a c-certain glow.” Her regeneration was working overtime, juiced on the world’s worst energy drink. Poor thing; it never signed up for this pay grade.

  The feeling hit her, a déjà vu that took her right back to the day she’d blown a hole in reality itself. She knew this energy. She’d built it, tuned it, and set it loose in her lab more times than she could count. The way the air screamed and the light bent was practically a welcome home sign. So as the force grabbed her and started pulling her into pieces, Kelly leaned into it, hoping to study whatever it was doing even as it tore her apart.

  "F-f-fine." She stopped fighting it. Let the current take her. The light was an invasion before. Now it was practically what she was made of. "It's... i-in the... d-d-driver's s-s-seat. L-let's... s-see... where it... g-goes."

  Her hand was welded to the cube, a firehose of raw power blasting through her. Her eyes kept burning out and stitching themselves back together, and every time they worked for a second, she recorded everything. She was betting this little apocalypse-in-a-box would finally give her the cheat code. She wanted to crack mana wide open, every last creature, the things floating in the sky, the portals, whatever the hell was on the other side of them, punch the echelon in their orbital faces, dig up her best friend, find the Deadqueen, and actually live to see a tomorrow that wasn't today.

  Her troll regeneration was on overdrive, screaming as it tried to keep up. Her Vitality Title was losing. So she started switching. Mana Vacuum title on, suck in the torrent, then flip back to Vitality before she popped. Every cycle let her hang on a second longer. Every new wave of energy made her a little tougher.

  Her organs were quitting. Systems were crashing. But she persisted. And with each stubborn second she refused to die, her titles' grades began to creep up, breaking through ceilings they'd been stuck at for what felt like forever.

  [Herald of Unending Vitality III →Herald of Unending Vitality IV]

  [Additional effect: Recovers 0.1 health per second, in addition, Boosts natural regeneration by 50%,]

  Finally. Fourth grade. The bottleneck shattered and the Title’s healing effect warped, twisting causality itself. Kelly ran the numbers. Base calculation said sixteen minutes to full health. But the upgrade also supercharged her ‘natural regeneration,’ and that included her troll regen. The math got real fun then. Minutes. Then she factored in the cube’s insane mana, shoving power directly into the effect. Seconds. She was watching holes seal and bones knit in the time it took to blink.

  That was only the first message.

  As time passed, Kelly's body kept disintegrating, piece by piece, but slightly slower, and more messages scrolled past her eyes.

  [Mana Vacuum I → Mana Vacuum II]

  Until finally, a set of messages carved themselves into her vision. The ones that changed everything, and made reality hit the panic button.

  [Mana Vacuum III → Mana Vacuum IV]

  [Herald of Unending Vitality IV →Herald of Unending Vitality V]

  Then everything exploded.

  The dome cracked and screamed itself apart, its hyper-resistant, “save-the-people-from-the-collateral-mess-we-made” materials failing spectacularly. Normally, something this size would tear the city in half, reduce it to rubble while a hundred alarms cried for mercy. Not today. The blast barely passed the skyline. The dome’s punch was mostly absorbed by Kelly herself, the bulk of the destructive force burying itself in her body instead of the streets. A hit that usually wiped out districts pouring inside her instead of ripping through buildings. Normally, half the city died. Today, just the dome’s interior and outer surroundings got eviscerated, obliterated, gone, and the rest of the world barely noticed.

  As her upgraded title brought her back from the brink, Kelly could see the beginnings of the sky peeking through the evening sky and bathing the city in multicolored light.

  The many miles of thick metal above were sent high into the air in the colossal explosion of mana from the terraforming cube.

  Kelly took a deep, theatrical breath of the atomized ruin. "Hope you packed a lunch for your trip to the boardroom in the sky, Adrian. I hear the in-flight entertainment is—“

  Kelly regained consciousness. Lying next to the cube, realizing a round of disintegration had caused her to black out.

  Kelly managed a look at the cube, still trying to study it in the midst of catastrophe. The cube now held a massive crack through its center, and enough of the metal had cracked open that Kelly could also see the somewhat mangled but still functional metallic frame of the machine itself, a space slightly larger within than without, and a large crystal many times larger than she was, filled with dense layers of inscriptions that twisted and moved as though alive, shaking through the entire machine’s interior, like scaffolding extending to the metal frames and moving parts containing it. The inscriptions slowed to a crawl, then completely stopped.

  It was now inert of course, given the torrents of mana she had now pulled on and stolen.

  And as the last of the mana not eviscerating the atmosphere drained from the giant cube and flowed into her, Kelly received a message.

  [Mana Vacuum IV → Mana Vacuum V]

  It was interesting. Her body was essentially torn apart and rebuilt. She now possessed two incredibly high grade titles, and none of them was Legendary; it let her adapt and boosted her every augment, feat, and title modifier a city-shattering amount of mana. She felt like a god. This was the furthest she had ever made it in any day, even beyond the very first.

  But whether it would be enough to end the loop was still a mystery.

  She regained consciousness for the umpteenth and final time that day, her title dragging her from the brink of death, supercharged by the cube's destructive energy.

  And somehow, improbably, she didn’t even feel like she needed a nap.