The angel’s eyes swirled with a storm of reality-bending effects. At first, he was curious, then intrigued, then fascinated—and finally, utterly shocked

  A long, dramatic pause.

  “Yes… I sense it. Her destiny is…” he trailed off, and then froze mid-word. His face contorted like he’d just bitten into a lemon made of cosmic despair.

  “Impossible… impossible!”

  Freya, head of the Artificial Alliances Research of all things not from Earth, arched an eyebrow. “Do tell,” she said, her tone somewhere between polite curiosity and mild judgment of someone clearly having a dramatic meltdown over a mortal.

  Cain leaned forward, curious.

  Even Kelly, who’d been mostly silently existing in the corner like a very cautious cat—unlike her usual behavior—peeked out from her shell. Which part of her life plan had just shattered an angel’s sanity? I mean, sure, there was a list, but which one caused that reaction?

  "Her soul... its place in the ocean of time... It is not moored to any reality I know.” He breathed deep, examining.

  The Angel’s eyes widened, a mix of disbelief, wonderment and horror in its voice. “It… it keeps undoing itself. Every time, it reaches further into the stream… it takes more—changes, grows… stronger. And you… what… are you?”

  For the first time in a while Kelly spoke without reservation.

  She knew she was in trouble if these three teamed up. Two titans from the AI coups and a dimensional tourist who could hold a conversation. If they decided to play house, she was a finished experiment. There was only one way out, the same as always when dealing with similar parties with identical goals: find the price tag. She needed to turn them against each other by presenting a prize and a holy grail—a pot of gold so big that nobody wanted to share. She didn’t know all the Angel’s rules, and the machines could go haywire if they had too much info. But if they were missing key details, they’d act out of pure self-interest—and self-interest, she knew, was bribable. It was risky, sure, but so was jaywalking, and that usually worked out. It was her best shot.

  "Me?" Kelly said, a sharp, knowing look on her face. "I'm a reset button.”

  Her audience stared—Freya with the gleam of someone mentally counting profits, and CAIN, the dark?skinned metal man, looking thoughtful in the way only a seven?foot alloy philosopher could.

  Wasn't honesty the best policy?

  Kelly had always believed that misfortune was just luck wearing a bad hat.

  Now, as she was faced with odds so uncertain they needed training wheels, it felt as though the universe had decided to gamble on a whim and had no idea what it was betting on.

  “I’m a human, obviously—mostly, and apparently a very resilient one, because I keep waking up in the same bed every morning no matter how badly the day ends.” Her audience stared; Freya’s eyes lit up with the glow of someone appraising a priceless artifact, all greed and interest, while Cain stared too, but thoughtfully still.

  Kelly, not minding her audience, continued. “I die, and then I wake up, like clockwork, and yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’ve had over a thousand… well, instances of this exact day already, but not this—this is new—, and that’s just today. Most of the time, the army does something incredibly stupid, blows up half the city, everyone dies, very dramatic and messy, but I—somehow—managed to stop that, so congratulations are in order, I guess, but don’t get carried away. And even after stopping that, it didn’t fix the loop, so I’m still stuck here, still have to get past the snake that eats basically everyone, which is, I don’t know, not a minor detail but it keeps getting ignored somehow. Did I mention that already? Maybe. Anyway, you’re probably fine—well, one of you might be—but if the snake gets you, I mean, honestly, I doubt anyone survives that, even you. And yes, I can do magic. Why? Because I’m the best scientist in every system I can think of, which comes in handy when your daily life involves literally being killed over and over by increasingly improbable things. And I think, somewhere out there, the universe—or a god or something—is actively trying to kill me, but really, they’re pretty bad at it, which is lucky, I guess, because otherwise I wouldn’t even be standing here to explain this to you.”

  The angel, Freya, and CAIN stared at her for a long, perfect, heavy second, letting the words sink in, before slowly glancing at each other. Each could see the identical spark of greed, the calculating, silent, “how do I keep this for myself and get rid of the others?” gleaming in others eyes, like three sharks realizing someone had dropped a wallet full of chum.

  “…What? Why are you looking at me like that? It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The angel’s voice lost its divine rumble, fraying into a confused hum. “That is not possible. This is a godless realm. A heresy. No power exists here. I am in direct communion with—”

  He spoke a name that shredded itself into pure static against Kelly’s audio receptors.

  “—an emissary of the gods of time and death at this very moment.” He jabbed a finger toward the Conductor, the floating fairy above New York. “He states unequivocally that neither his father nor any other deity holds awareness of this place. This realm is a pitiful void, requiring liberation. Its magic cannot touch ours. The gods exist beyond time itself. Once a world connects, every death is cataloged. Every life is recorded. A time loop would leave no mark on the higher planes. It could not originate from a heretical plane in need of cleansing. Our greater Gods transcend your unclean world and the flows of time’s ocean.”

  He was selling the story hard, mostly to himself. Kelly swore she could almost see the whites of his golden eyes, angry veins snaking his forehead. Yikes.

  “Your narrative sounds contrived.” He stared at her, his eyes scanning something she couldn't see. “And yet your soul drifts outside all known planes. Your place in the great temporal sea is—”

  He choked. His voice cut off. He stopped addressing her and started mumbling to the air.

  “But my lord… truly? For this… this cur?”

  “Hey. Loudspeaker,” Kelly said. “I’m right here. Maybe take your dad’s call on a private channel.”

  “But—is the expenditure of your attention truly justified?” The angel’s whisper was frantic. Through her ocular implants, Kelly watched a veritable storm of mana ignite around him, a cyclone of raw potential. The two rogue AI overlords had the same sensors. Their optical units flashed through a violent spectrum of colors, recording the entire spectacle, putting physical distance between themselves and the epicenter.

  “I… I am not worthy… your holiness… Heart-Father… First-One… to be graced by your presence… your command… by your will… I… thank you.”

  Kelly didn’t know what was going on. Judging by the supernova of energy, the winged, overgrown PED abuser was channeling a catastrophic amount of energy. Something big was inbound, and she was recording every second of it—millisecond, every micro-twitch, anything she could.

  Kelly felt a profound and almost religious urge to vivisect the angel, scan its brain, and mount its still-beating heart on a slide.

  “I need a sample,” she muttered, her voice a low, clinical thrill. “A core biopsy. A live slice of that heart tissue. A functional scan of its neural helix. Its brain matter under a microscope while it’s still processing divine input.” She was minutely aware of the unhinged nature of her thoughts, but any single one of her old colleagues would have had worse ones.

  While she muttered with a kind of focused greed, a change kicked off.

  A second later, a bright, impossible transformation hit, a flash of light that rewrote the angel. Kelly threw a hand over her eyes. The light burned straight through her lids. But her mana scanners kept running under her skin, watching the whole conflagration. Even the heart of a star wasn't that blinding.

  Even with her eyes squeezed shut, they hurt. A hot trickle of blood ran down from one. So she flipped through her optical settings—infrared, ultraviolet, a dozen others—until the feeling dialed back from a thousand stabbing needles lessened to a persistent, manageable itch. Now she could make things out a little better.

  The thing had six wings now. Five halos spun at crazy angles. Light bled from its form. The magic rolling off it had a twisted, golden-pure look to it, but it was clearly eating the host body from the inside; more blood, like tears, tracked from the angel's eyes.

  The two AI overlords just watched, probably sucking down petabytes of data every second, thrilled to see a show this rare. Kelly found herself making a list in her head of all the scanners she hadn't brought. Next time, she was stuffing more than just murder gear into her shadow.

  Right now, whatever was wearing the angel like a suit was just as valuable a specimen as she was. Which meant the odds of getting them to throw the first punch had just gotten a whole lot better.

  Whatever it was that had slammed one million mana energy drinks down the angel’s throat spoke. The ground groaned. Kelly's bones rattled. She slapped on her Fortress Title just to hear the words without her teeth playing a maracas solo and rattling out of her skull.

  "So... this is the mortal beyond time, with a hidden soul?" Its voice was a physical weight. "I see she has the mana of a holy relic..." Its eyes flashed with a light that hurt to see. "Ah. Of course. She destroyed it." It drifted a step closer, all twisted wings and wrong halos. "It's true. She truly exists outside the temporal waters... Hmm... Kelly... Voss..." It said her name, and she felt it in her spine. A hot line of blood dripped from her nose.

  It used the angel's mouth, but the voice came from somewhere else. She knew it. Every word bypassed her dampeners and scraped directly against her skeleton. This was a weight class she hadn't known existed. A power that treated the rules of her world as polite suggestions.

  She had never put stock in gods. But this was a being that could show up, put on a 'God' nametag, and no one would argue. It had crammed a fraction of its real self into one of its own to come down here.

  Without anyone saying a word, she knew. She knew. A name blasted into her skull with the subtlety of a freight train, carving itself into her mind, doing enough structural damage that her baseline self would have just turned off for good.

  Kelly's eyes widened, her implants fighting the feedback. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a wide, ecstatic grin.

  Illvyr, The Architect.

  She was speaking to The Architect, a ‘god’ of order, who had just plugged into her world.

  And she wanted nothing more than to crack it open and see what made it work.

  The god’s voice rolled like distant thunder, calm yet undeniably heavy. “Regrettable… Verrimisir’s soul facsimile will need repairing after this.”

  It spoke a string of words too quick and too low to hear, and the angel’s eyes glowed with an impossible mix of gold and white, as if the light itself were bending around something ancient and knowing. Kelly felt stripped layer by layer, every secret exposed, as though the very spot where her soul should have been was being examined under a celestial microscope.

  “Your soul… it’s impossible to grasp… truly, a mystery. The tether is impossible—ah. There, a remnant. It will do.”