[Rare Title gained: Unerring Marksman (Grade-I)]

  [Killed an enemy of a higher sub-rank with a single throw. While active, the bearer gains improved aim when throwing and a speed boost for all thrown items.]

  Kelly stared at a different projection glowing on her palm—tech. Names, codes, and dead numbers scrolled past. “Just gotta find the right phone number,” she muttered. Her truck drove itself, a steady hum beneath everything. A light from the dash shone down on her, casting two perpendicular shadows across the passenger seat—one bled left, the other right.

  She picked up a loose pebble and silver marbles—children’s toys—from the cupholder and tossed it into the left-hand shadow. It vanished without a sound. With a clinical sort of curiosity, she gently pressed the tip of her fingernail into the second shadow, the one on the right.

  The moment her nail made contact, something blurred past inside the cab. It was too fast to see, a violent rush of air that ripped through the space, whipping her hair around and sending loose papers flying in a chaotic swirl. The interior of the truck filled with a sudden, brief gale.

  Kelly watched a receipt settle on the dashboard. She picked up another pebble. “Hmm… wonder how many touches it’ll take to break the sound barrier in here,” She’d probably have to reinforce the interior.

  Kelly tossed the pebble into the first shadow again.

  The truck door swung open into bedlam. Kelly stepped down onto the cracked asphalt of the East Grid. A river of people shoved past her, their faces tight with a panic she found intellectually interesting. A city-wide evacuation order, complete with the distant gunfire of National Guard rifles with the occasional flash of directed energy weapon impacts and the roaring shrieks of… something with too many legs. Police barricades funneled the crowd toward bunker access points. An armored personnel carrier idled nearby, its mounted gun tracking movements over the rooftops.

  A holographic emergency alert blinked furiously in her periphery: EAST GRID BREACH. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER AT YOUR NEAREST BUNKER. She swiped it away with a flick of her finger, as if dismissing a low-priority message about cafeteria soup.

  She turned back to the truck's cab and reached in. Her arms emerged laden with a clattering collection of several ornately carved magic staffs of dark wood—some with mineral attachments—a satchel bulging with softly pulsing crystals, and four swords and axes in scabbards that shone with a dangerous, pearlescent light. She hoisted the arsenal in a way reminiscent of a delivery person carrying awkward packages.

  Kelly walked past the chaos, a still point in the frantic current, and approached a severe, fortified structure. The sign read: EAST GRID BOTANICAL GMO RESEARCH & ATMOSPHERIC REGULATION. It was pristine, untouched by the collapse grinding away just beyond its perimeter.

  The door was reinforced polymer. She pressed her palm against it, then knocked, the sound crisp and oddly formal against the backdrop of distant screams.

  A panel slid aside. A harried security guard stared out, then at her armload of arcane weaponry.

  Kelly hit him with a bright, professional smile. “Hi! This is Dr. Voss, from Vaughn. I’m here with my emergency botanical samples for my 9 a.m. meeting with Dr. Hoffman? The researcher for the East Grid Lab?” She shifted the bundle, making a sword hilt clink softly against a staff. “Traffic was just awful.”

  Hours later, the immortal-scientist found herself struggling in a way she hadn’t in a while.

  “No, you can’t just slam your gene in there with any old promoter! Promoter! Get the promoter right, let me help you! Just sticking it in isn’t even a thing!”

  The lab assistant’s yelling was background noise. Kelly stared at the genetic sequence unfolding in her projection. A replay of a notification glowed softly in her vision, a message she’d received a while back:

  [New Common Title → Mana Focused Student (Grade I)]

  [Achieved by focusing on guided study of a new topic for over three hours without a break. Equipping this title increases focus, concentration, and mental intensity while learning or studying new subjects.]

  It had even slowly upgraded to Grade 2 over the course of the last few hours of focused work. It didn’t seem to help quite as much as she thought it would. ‘Guided study’ was the Title’s key requirement. Considering most of her studying and research of new topics had occurred before she'd gotten mana, and alone, it made sense she had only just received the apparently 'common' Title now.

  This time, Kelly didn’t have the benefit of stolen datachips or completely innocent and benevolent scamming.

  Unlike brute-forcing her fighting skills and acting on impulse, the problem with GMO Botany—the biological study and engineering of extradimensional plant life—was structural.

  The plants from the other side of the portal were built wrong. They answered a different set of rules. If they were simply alien—present on the extended periodic table, that would’ve been an workable fix—but that wasn’t it;

  Their magical plant’s cellular structure was a deliberate rebuttal to every known paradigm on Earth, or any planet they had ever encountered. Studying them felt like reading an answer key for a test that had never been given, written in a language that described a different color of sky. The logic was internally consistent and utterly infuriating. You couldn't fake this. You had to sit down and learn their entire textbook from page one, and their textbook was written in spirals and toxic light.

  Kelly watched the lab assistant’s face achieve an impressive shade of purple. He was pulling at his own hair—it seemed inefficient.

  She hadn’t expected anyone made of flesh and blood to be working in the building, but she hadn’t been surprised. She was a prime example of what happened when you pissed off the wrong person in the wrong place: you got shipped to a project that was terrible for your career and occasionally your pulse. Corpos don’t care about lives, only profits.

  The lab assistant’s hand hovered over the emergency stop. Kelly stopped him.

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  “Look,” she said, her tone flat, almost bored. “I have a very clear memory of the experiment that made me… even more special than I already was.”

  The one that gave her magic.

  “Repeating it isn’t on my to-do list. I have zero need, and even less intention.” She scrolled through a genetic sequence on her panel, not looking at him. “Sure, I only got it to work once. The exact success conditions are… fuzzy. But with a few more attempts? A few more instances of blowing up the Earth? Or, you know, most of the galaxy in a cascading entropy failure? I’m confident I could get it to work again.”

  She let that hang in the air, over the hum of the environmental systems and tapped a crystal on the table. “And your ‘unique samples’? While everyone’s had access to these invaders for a few hours,” she finally glanced over.

  “I’ve been studying them for years.”

  “Every morning. Like an intense and unreasonable newspaper subscription, before everyone else’s insane tools and equipment outpaces me.”

  But the loops added up.

  “At this point,” she continued, “for about half of every day, I am literally the leading expert in extra-dimensional biology on any planet.”

  “Then my samples reset. It’s an administrative headache.”

  But when each day began, she held an extremely unfair advantage.

  "Of course," Kelly said, watching the morning shift change on the security monitors. "That perk has an expiration date. It gets stamped out by noon."

  The lab assistant paused. "Perk? You got a better coffee maker?"

  "My numbers," Kelly said, checking her own reflection in the glass. "My level. After the upgrades. Right now, my everything-quotient is already higher than your average civilian has any right to claim. I can double it with a thought." She tapped her temple. "Just a blip. And I live way out in the sticks. My apartment's prime location in the scenic outskirts, there's a clean time window every morning where, as far as I've been able to verify, I am the strongest person within several city blocks."

  The lab assistant stared. He slowly put down his datapad. "You... check that?"

  "Every day," Kelly said. "It doesn't last. Go a mile toward downtown, and you're not special anymore. But it does make this internship a weird fit." She reached for another screen. "Makes me a bit overqualified to be an assistant here. " She paused. "On the project I wrote up and proposed to Dr. Hoffman at 7:02 this morning."

  The lab assistant’s mouth opened, then closed. He processed the sequence: her claimed capabilities, her self-reported positional power, her role. "Hold on. You're saying you're... too powerful for your own loan-internship? That you proposed?"

  "It makes for an interesting day," Kelly said, walking toward the specimen fridge. "Try not to think about it. It'll work itself out."

  He stared for a second, without comprehension.

  “Uh… well, Dr. Hoffman asked me to tell you to conduct a full phytochemical and genetic analysis on the crystal residue from the 5th?century styled portal weaponry.”

  He turned and headed to another panel.

  As the intern, she’d been sidelined and someone else took the credit—but she was the only one in the room who wasn’t a blind man describing an elephant. They were all still poking the elephant—in the discovery phase—arguing over what thick, wrinkled thing they’d found. She was already drawing up plans for an elephant-powered engine.

  And aside from Kelly, only one other person in here could even keep up.

  Among researchers too unfortunate or desperate to head to a shelter or take the first shuttle off planet before the sky became a dangerous mess, a few synthetic humans whose only concern for death was the cost of building a new body, only the older, bespectacled woman placed in charge, looking every bit as exasperated with her life and its current trajectory, had the knowledge and experience to make a real difference.

  Her name was Rowena Hoffman. She had a passion for creating plants that could definitely, potentially, probably, possibly—maybe? solve the air crisis and clean the post-war widespread hotzones filled with mutatgens and bioweapon pollution. At least Rowena believed so.

  Kelly doubted it.

  Kelly had seen her once or twice at a few yearly industry conferences. Things anyone could attend if they had the attention span for it. Government and corporate suits pretended to coordinate plans, all already hashed out months before, while people like Rowena showed slides about growth rates and synthetic resilience. Kelly went to those conferences before the loops began, before debts and before scraping herself from cracked concrete—back when she was chasing a different kind of ambition; a nobody trying to claw their way into relevance.

  Frankly, Rowena, the aging researcher turned interim leader of the team of unfortunates and synthetics, didn’t fully grasp how far Kelly’s strength, dexterity, knowledge, and reflexes went—even when scolding her. Anyone over enhancement threshold 6.0 in speed, strength, or cognition appeared almost superhuman.

  Kelly went beyond that. She had no specialty. One second she could show feats of strength that bent reinforced steel, the next she moved faster than lesser sensors could track, then calculated plant reactions before the assistant could read the instruments. If she wanted, she could specialize in any of the five enhancements—speed, strength, resilience, cognition, or something esoteric like extreme juggling.

  Kelly displayed multiple feats in a single instant, without hesitation. It probably seemed off to Rowena, though the woman paid so little attention to anything beyond her plants that it was no surprise she didn’t question it.

  The world outside had ended. Anyone in the right place at the right time, with incredibly poor decision-making skills, could utilize crisis laws to upgrade themselves, condemning them to a life of debt, community service, or imprisonment once the dust settled. Rowena likely assumed Kelly was one of the few desperate nutjobs who figured owing a life-debt to the corpos was better than being dead. Of course, if Kelly had done any of the last loop’s greatest hits—decapitated a lizard with a backswing, kicked a captain through a wall, or casually held the city-leveling mana cube that turned everyone else into pink mist—that would’ve been a different story.

  She didn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary, or Kelly’s true enhancement level. Rowena accepted Kelly as a useful, unpredictable collaborator while remaining obsessed with her work. Kelly, as always, had other priorities.

  Mana Focused Student. The words still hung in her vision. Kelly read them and started laughing. A real, ugly sound in the quiet lab.

  "Let me get this straight," she said, not to anyone. "My head gets clear and quicker. But only when it's actually empty." She grabbed the staff off the table. It felt wrong in a good way. "The second I figure the thing out, the benefits stop. No more clarity. That's the deal."

  Rowena sighed from her terminal. "Do you have a malfunction?"

  "It gets better," Kelly said, the effect starting—she felt clear-headed. Focused. It was a soft effect, a mental static turned to a low hum, as if she’d mainlined a double-shot of NeuroClear from the lab’s emergency stash. "You. You make it stronger. A teacher. A live one. You're my new favorite person." She walked over, staff in hand. "It doesn't work with Data chips,” the title wanted organic, guided learning—it wanted a teacher. “But they're for rich kids and creative borrowers—thieves. I've been one. Years back. A creative, I mean."

  Rowena looked up, her expression the standard corporate blend of annoyance and exhaustion. “Is there a point to this, or are you just talking to yourself again?”

  If not for the lenses that let her see mana, and her knowledge and experience with portal monsters and ridiculous magic, which made Kelly look like some young prodigy science god to normal people, Kelly doubted they’d be as patient with teaching her or take her seriously. But being able to casually do the botanical GMO stuff everyone else pretended they understood made her a valuable commodity that boosted their work by a ridiculous amount.

  The perk spiked with a teacher. Rowena was that teacher. That meant Kelly had to execute Rowena’s instructions exactly as the interim lead pictured them, which usually meant decoding notes written like Rowena assumed everyone had the exact same number of neurons she did. She also had to work alongside the other synthetic humans and interns, plus Rowena, who kept everyone studying the extradimensional magical staffs and wood samples that occasionally whispered insults at people, and a crystal that kept trying to freeze anyone who looked at it wrong

  “I’m saying I follow your lead,” Kelly said, the clarity sharpening Rowena’s words. “Exactly. No freestyling.”

  Rowena raised a single brow.