Kelly felt strangely full. A raw, electric current buzzed under her skin. An unlimited reservoir of energy inside her. A limitless feeling welled up inside her. The world was a smoldering garbage fire, everything was exploding, and it was about to rain sheets of metal the size of buildings, sure, but she felt fantastic.

  Kelly tried to shake out her hands, sparks of raw power still leaping at her fingertips—but they didn’t budge, the energy in the air was still assaulting her. She had just contained a city-annihilating magical blast by personally inhaling it, saving half of the topside citizens who weren’t huddled in bunkers from being wiped out.

  Dying now would have been a complete waste of a reset, without even getting to experiment with the magic staffs. Those plants grew magic crystals. Now, she knew with certainty that you could power machines with them. Did anyone comprehend the weaponizable, profit-driven, world-destroying, country-leveling insanity that represented? The things she could build?

  The world was coming down. A mountain of shredded dome, launched skyward in her personal fireworks display, had decided it was time to return. Several miles of corporate engineering turned to shrapnel was now raining over the entire eastern grid.

  A notification from the Status burned in her vision, clear and absurd amidst the orbital bombardment of her own making.

  And in the evening of her furthest day, the most progress she had ever made in any loop thus far, Kelly looked at her Status, completely confused.

  [Unprecedented act recorded]

  She stared at it, bleeding out in the epicenter of a cataclysm, her jaw in the middle of regenerating. A wet, choked laugh escaped her. "N—no kidding."

  [Reward Granted → Mandate Received: ???? Grade ?]

  Her vocal cords finally stitched themselves together. “A man… date?” she stammered, the words slurred and mangled. “What’s a… a mandate? Un… unprec… unprecedented act?” Kelly had no clue what it could mean. “Did I… did I just get pro… promoted to management?”

  Not a clue.

  Kelly coughed, tasting ozone and blood. Her insides were a civil war. Energy shuddered through her, a feedback loop from hell supercharging every effect she had running—the good, the bad, the actively parasitic. Through her ocular implants, she watched the mana in her body implode to a blinding storm, churning, collapsing into some impossible depth inside her. The sight suggested she might not even ever get to see today again, let alone tomorrow.

  As the rain of shattered metal descended towards her at speed, Kelly couldn't resist the smile on her face.

  She'd done it. She had her hands on alien tech that was mostly, sort of intact. And the absolute chaos she'd waded through to get it? That was its own reward. Who would've thought she'd loved to fight almost as much as she loved uncovering the mysteries of the universe? Go figure.

  Before the loops, any conflict she had in her life had been the desperate, terrified struggle of a child surrounded by criminals. Powerless.

  This? This was different. This was a thrill. A charge. It made her feel sharp, and real, and completely in control. Fulfilled, powerful, and alive. The only thing that even came close was the time she'd punched a hole in reality itself.

  She watched the metal shards fall, a new thought clicking into place. So, if she hunted down more tech, made more discoveries, broke the universe a little further, and dug up more secrets… what kind of beautiful, catastrophic battles would that get her? What kind of doors would that kick open?

  "L—let's find out," she said to the descending wreckage.

  The world’s violent tantrum started to wind down. The mana, both the stuff shredding the atmosphere and the torrent that had been trying to rearrange her organs from the inside, began to settle into something she could almost call manageable. That’s when she saw it. A piece of the Ithili weapon, cracked and shattered, but somehow still in one piece. It was a miracle it had survived the blast. The chunk was about as long as her forearm. She snatched it up and hastily stuffed it into her shadow. One problem at a time.

  The next problem was already screaming down from the sky. Thick, building-sized shards of metal, finally returning from their trip to the stratosphere. They were going to bury her. Crush her. Bury her. Make a nice, flat, Kelly-shaped paste at the bottom of a new scrap metal desert. Permanently. Or at least, for the rest of this spectacular day.

  "Right. No."

  Her posture straightened. The screaming agony in her muscles became a distant, irrelevant fact. She reached into the shadow and her hands came back full. A light railgun in each fist. The weight felt good. Honest. She braced her back against the smoking cube and equipped Fortress of Endurance.

  Then she started firing into the air. Repeatedly.

  The railguns roared, turning the sky into her own personal shooting gallery. Any chunk of debris dumb enough to aim for her head met a hyper-velocity fist. She blasted a small radius clear, her ocular lenses ticking off the calculations for her personal safe zone, in a very violent display of aggressive landscaping.

  When the last piece of the ceiling finally decided to land, she was standing in a small indent, partially buried in a deep hole. She was now surrounded on all sides by rising layers and massive slabs of broken metal that had slammed into the cube, pinning it but, interestingly, barely even scratching it. Each slab was a piece that had failed to successfully crush her.

  Kelly rose to her feet, dusting off the change of clothes she’d pulled from her shadow, and considered the perfectly intact, completely oblivious city she had glimpsed beyond the blast radius edges. “You’re welcome, everyone. Try not to blow yourselves up before I do.”

  Now, she stood at the bottom of a brand new metal canyon. The only light came from a single pinprick high above, the size of a manhole cover.

  Finally. A moment that wasn't actively trying to kill her. Kelly turned to her real prize.

  The extradimensional magical terraforming cube. The only piece of working magical tech in the entire world with its own power source. A legendary artifact.

  She was looking at a cracked husk—a cracked husk of machinery and a crystal holding onto the last of its light. A dead brick, steadily fading.

  "Well. You look like garbage."

  The interior was a mess of dense circuits and etched scriptures, but the glow was gone. The magic had bled out. The crystal and the cube's interior were a mess of dense circuits and scriptures, but the party was over. Most of the glowing symbols and inscriptions had called it a day, leaving behind only faded, barely readable etches. Some kind of code, maybe—and now that overpowered monsters had stopped RSVPing to her location, Kelly’s interest was officially sparked.

  Her brain immediately switched tracks from survival to problem-solving. This was a mystery.

  Then the cube decided to be even more interesting again.

  The space inside the cube, around the crystal, began to stretch. It was a slow, lazy expansion, right in front of her.

  An apparent freaking magical spatial effect—something Kelly hadn't even known the cube had—was dying out, resetting whatever was inside before the intern’s widening eyes.

  "Are you kidding me?" She leaned closer, her shadow falling over the dying artifact. "You hold out on me this whole time? You had a party dimension in your pocket and you never mentioned it?"

  The space inside the crystal kept stretching. It was getting bigger, lazy and unconcerned, about to turn her little metal tomb into a very crowded crystal exhibit.

  "Okay, no. We're not doing that today."

  She yanked a drone from her shadow. Its torch flared, painting a long, convenient darkness. She stuffed the expanding crystal mess into that shadow just as it reached the size of a delivery car.

  She stood there in the sudden quiet. The Cube was a dead, cracked brick. Its secrets were lost behind fried circuits and faded scripture, half its strange symbols and etched inscriptions lost forever. No power source, glow lost. It was broken toy. Uncovering anything from this wreck would be an infinitely harder nightmare. It might even be completely impossible.

  The anger hit her all at once, a hot, sharp wave that surprised her.

  “What the—what the fuck is this?! I won! I stopped the damn explosion! I saved everyone! I did everything—everything—by the book. Followed all your stupid rules, fixed the mess, patched up the place like some cosmic janitor—and this? This broken rock is my prize?

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “I earned better than this! I asked for one thing. Just one. Why can’t you let me have it? Why can’t you just let me move forward?!”

  Her voice cracked on the last word. She was yelling at the sky, at the broken metal, at the universe itself. She felt the stupid, hot sting in her eyes and was genuinely pissed off about that, too. This setback shouldn't matter this much. But it did.

  She sat in the dirt for a while. Just sat there. Sulking. It was a professional, focused sulk.

  Then she was on her feet. Body healed, the anger a cold, hard knot in her gut. Time to go. She started climbing, carefully picking her way up the unstable mountain of scrap, heading for that little circle of sky.

  On the surface, Kelly simply stood there, a statue of pure fury. The region was cleared of any life; the majority of the lower-level soldiers had been stationed further away at the borders to keep creatures out when the devastating explosion hit. Now, a barely visible cacophony of gunfire, heavy weapons, and explosions lit the distant evening sky.

  And soon, the footsteps of the military's response unit arrived.

  A full platoon—thirty-one soldiers—fanned out and locked down firing lanes, their modular armor plates snapping into position to form a segmented barricade. Thirty muzzles tracked her chest, head, and vitals. The thirty-first soldier, Captain Halverson, moved with them but didn’t command. He scanned her, confused to see her standing in the wreckage.

  “Voss?”

  right in the middle of the firing squad was Halverson. His face, visible through his helmet's visor, was a complete loss of composure. Surprise. Confusion. A little bit of professional horror.

  Kelly looked from the ring of gun barrels to Halverson's wide eyes.

  "Halverson." She looked at the surrounding devastation. "You guys have terrible timing.”

  She exhaled once, slow, steadying, then addressed the group, her voice flattening into something cold enough to tense shoulders.

  “Just so we’re clear: I was having a decent day. Then it went bad—catastrophic. And now we’ve landed somewhere in the ‘shoot-the-messenger’ category.” Her eyes hardened. “You are the messengers.”

  She took a single step forward, the metal cracking under her boot. Someone shouted.

  "So if you have any urgent feedback on my life choices, the official response is: get lost. Get out of my way."

  Kelly was still pissed. The frustration over her dead magic cube was a hot, sharp thing in her chest, and her entire body was buzzing, overloaded with the raw mana she'd vacuumed up. The power had no outlet, itching under her skin. It was a lot of energy with nowhere useful to go.

  So when a captain walked up with those stupidly thick tank-level cuffs, she didn't even think. She just pivoted and kicked.

  The kick had no flair; wasn’t stylish or fancy. What it was, was a direct, frustrated transfer of kinetic energy. Mana Vacuum’s excess power flared through her musculature. The captain left his feet. He pinwheeled through the air, a human projectile, and landed in a clattering heap about fifty yards away.

  A sudden, sharp, thought hit her in the standoff. She'd only siphoned a fraction of the cube's power before it blew. The rest had vaporized the Dome. If that unfinished taste had supercharged her this much... what would happen if she drank the whole thing?

  She looked back at Halverson and the rest of the stunned response unit.

  "Anyone else want to try and manage my calendar?"

  She could have asked him nicely. But Kelly was in a very bad mood, and really wanted a second to herself. Just a moment to exhale.

  [Title equipped: Slaughterer of Men]

  A sigh escaped her, but it carried something else—a wave of primal fear that slammed into every soldier present. It bypassed their training, their emotional dampeners, their neural meshes, and dug straight into instincts buried so deep they predated civilization.

  How did that work? Mana didn’t touch humans, so the fear couldn’t have come from mana. It had to work the same way the system’s status did—by targeting a deeper layer of existence. Metaphysiology. The soul. Huh. Now that was a thought. She was absolutely taking that apart later.

  For now, the result was obvious: unnatural panic, fear and hesitation spread through all present, as if they’d all remembered they were prey.

  “As I said,” she said, her voice cutting through the silence. “I am having a spectacularly bad day. My patience has left the building. Trying to arrest me right now is a fantastic way to become a statistic. So, unless you’re volunteering for that role, I suggest you find something else to do.”

  She almost yelled at the responding Sergeant who stood there in shock, his trigger finger trembling seconds from lighting her up, but filled with hesitation.

  It seemed even he was wary of the speed of movement she'd just displayed, and was acutely aware that the distance between him and the scientist who had just displayed the speed of an Expert, was not enough.

  “Fine,” the captain said, voice low and even. “We’ll take you in alive—if you make it easy. But don’t mistake that for a promise. You give us a reason—one—and we end this right here.”

  The captain's voice was a flat line. He was talking for her benefit; she knew their real chatter was over neural comms. He wanted her to know they were done playing.

  At his command, the soldiers moved with practiced precision. They fanned out, their aim snapping to her legs, her knees, the tendons in her ankles. Every shot was calculated for maximum debilitation, minimum chance of death.

  The best of them, the high-level operators who'd been stationed near the Dome and the cube, were already dead, vaporized in the initial blast. This was what was left—the perimeter troops, the B-team with more gear than actual power, hoping their equipment could close the gap she represented.

  The outer perimeter soldiers were… lacking.

  The ten Elites she'd flattened at the Dome's entrance were the real deal. Top shelf. Their job was to hold the main kill zone against anything the regular grunts couldn't handle, a final outer defense for the portal tech inside. They had the high-grade gear, the polished skills, the whole corporate warrior package. They were the bodyguards while the actual players secured the new toy for its trip off-world.

  These new guys? Different story. They carried rifles designed to put down creatures rated up to 60 EQ. On paper, that firepower could definitely hurt her.

  But paper didn’t account for reality. In reality, the soldiers wielding them wouldn’t even manage breaking through her Fortress of Endurance Title. Their shots wouldn't outpace her Herald of Unending Vitality’s regen. And right now, every cell in her body—her mana-compatible troll muscles, her augments—was still drunk and oversaturated from the cube's explosion. She was running on pure, volatile magic.

  They were toddlers with shotguns. Dangerous to a dumb beast. Less dangerous to anyone with a shield and the common sense to take the shotgun away.

  Kelly raised her leg, slowly.

  "All units engage, danger close—!”

  Kelly stepped forward In a blur, the potent mana still thrumming through her and her Title boosting her speed, her wristband transforming into a long shovel that slammed the captain into the ground before he could even finish making the order.

  The remaining captains’ faces turned to one of disbelief, then concern, and then fear. He and his subordinates stopped attack movements once they realized she was much stronger than she appeared.

  “As I said… I'm having a very bad day, and this is your last chance to go home with the right amount of arms and legs.”

  And with that proclamation, Kelly gently placed her shovel down to rest on the downed captain’s head. She definitely wasn't threatening his life or holding him hostage. No, she was just innocently resting her shovel of retribution. His head just happened to be there.

  She had to admit that the first hit made her feel a little better, but its placement on his vitals was purely coincidental.

  Honest.

  After that, they paused, weapons aimed, as one captain raised a fist and yelled.

  “Dr. Voss! I don’t—how the hell—“ he paused for a millisecond. Whatever military cocktail coursing through him snapped him from ‘freaked out man’ to ‘soldier.’ He spoke again “Five hours. Your strength is off the charts compared to the report. Put him down. Step back. Do not make this worse—”

  "Shut up." A familiar face, Captain Halverson, interjected with an outstretched hand, approaching Kelly with the caution of a man who knew he could die horribly in the next few seconds and also knew exactly how to avoid it. The man she'd sent flying earlier had held the highest EQ among them, and the one currently held beneath her foot held the second highest score among their numbers, and was a strength type. They had weapons that could harm someone of her level, but not without taking high casualties in the process. "I know her, let me handle this,” Halverson said.

  Really?

  The hypocrisy was so thick you could taste it. Back when she was just a barely-augmented intern, they would have beaten her senseless and tossed her into some black-site camp where war crimes were treated like selfies.

  But now? Now that her titles let her fake an Expert-class presence, now that she had thrown down power way past some average Thresholder—maybe even past the Peak—the rules changed. Suddenly, it was all careful maneuvers and tactical capture plans.

  Captain Halverson locked eyes with the other captain, his stare loaded with intent. Kelly could easily guess they were communicating over neural comms. It was the universal look for get every gun we have pointed at this woman, now. Halverson was probably arranging for an entire army to show up while playing nice.

  "Halvy. What are you doing here?" Kelly's voice cut through the tension. "Getting this close is uncharacteristically suicidal, even for you."

  "New orders," he bit out, his jaw tight. "My team is the investigation unit. The other regiments are securing the perimeter against the incursions. Trust me, I don't want to be here."

  "Don't have a choice? Sounds familiar." She reached into her shadow and pulled out the jagged shard of Ithili's weapon, tossing it onto the ground between them. It landed with a heavy, alien clatter.

  "Evidence," she stated. "Here's the real story for your report. The peace with the other corpos is a joke. Genecorp is in bed with our so-called 'greatest enemy'. They just destroyed a massive terraforming cube in the center of that dome trying to cover their tracks."

  It was half true. They didn't need to know her role in the cube's final moments.

  "Look, Voss. Even if that's true, you still have to come in." Halverson's tone lost some of its official edge, sounding more tired than robotic. “We’ll check the wreckage, go through any recovered footage. If everything lines up and you haven’t broken any laws, you’ll be free to go. It’s just procedure.”

  So then... there they were, Halverson, half-crouched behind cover erected on a collapsed billboard that once promised clean air for all—a bold claim, considering the sky currently had the hue and consistency of boiled blood, and most people below the poverty line still filtered their homes with old parts and creativity. And Kelly, surrounded by guns and orders for her arrest.

  Kelly paused.

  She stared off wistfully, then turned to Halverson, the familiar face and voice of pragmatic reason.

  "Say… Halvy, how are your relations with Off-worlders?" Kelly asked.

  There was a silence—long, tense, meaningful. Then a distant explosion underlined it, from the direction of City Sector 12. Or what used to be it.

  “Off-worlders? Which ones?” Captain Halverson said, not looking up. “The Jannad on Jupiter mostly deal with the Mars colonies—industrial shipments, diamonds. They’ve got old ties to China, Saudi, some of the AI war remnants. We don’t talk to them much. And the Upper Echelon?" He shrugged. “Some of them have been accused of trading with Neurojihadists. Black market tech, that kind of thing. Maybe ask them when you get out.”

  Kelly heard the word 'Neurojihadist', snorted, and thought, Christ, they’re really just throwing darts at a thesaurus now.

  After the AI coups, the media coined many terms designed to trigger fear and frame threats as unknowable and everywhere. It worked: people panicked at headlines, funded defense budgets they couldn’t spell, and let governments rewrite rules they never knew existed to green-light invasive laws, while the public stewed in existential paranoia, unsure if the danger was really still everywhere or just really well-branded.

  Kelly shrugged, unconcerned gesturing upward. “I just ask ’cause one of them’s aiming a full-kinetic railgun at your head. Thought you might wanna settle any outstanding debts before your brain exits via neck.”

  She smiled, eyeing the hostile invaders in the way one would eye a waitress delivering dessert.