Kelly pushed herself up, vision swimming, body aching, and looked at the 7EQ merc standing in her lab. Seven hundred percent human strength, speed, reaction time. That was the sort of power that could tear through lesser metals, outmaneuver lesser gunfire, and with the right tools, dismantle a lesser armed squad with bare hands. And he was here, working for some rival corp, trying his best to tear through her lab like a kid in a candy store, ripping apart drones, but thankfully, failing to smash through the many priceless consoles' emergency protection, but that didn’t stop him from trying to loot whatever wasn't bolted down. Now he stopped and stood dead still, watching her with slight disbelief as she recovered from the perfect shot he'd put between her eyes.
He holstered his gun and drew a long, vibrating knife.
[Unique Trait: The Null gained!]
[Foundational Trait: 'The Aberration of Mana' gained!]
[Rare Trait: Troll-Marrowed gained!]
"Ow." Kelly said, prying the bullet from the bleeding hole in her apparently bulletproof and Troll Marrowed forehead, slightly dazed. She raised a hand toward the merc. "Wait, time-out; I need to check something."
The 7EQ merc didn't listen to her request and was already there. He was moving with that unnatural, physics-defying speed that made her normal reaction time look like a joke.
Kelly had struggled between calling him ‘Major Payne’ or ‘Crash Course Carl,’ for his knack for both hindering her progress and teaching her how to fight someone like him. In the end, she chose ‘Major Payne.’ It fit him perfectly.
Kelly flicked her chain-blade to where he would be, not through precognition or through anticipating a past loop, but through raw, brutal repetition. The way he stepped, the shift in his balance, the microsecond correction before he struck. She had studied him for more than hours and more than days. For months. He relied on nothing but his superior instincts, barely stopping to think as he battled her defenses. Kelly had fought him enough times to know how he would react. "Hey, dumbass—" she snapped, flicking her blade mid-swing, "—eyes up." The turret AI fired—he blurred through, a shield springing to life to protect him without effort.
Kelly wasn't winning. She wasn't even close. Compared to her, he was still an unstoppable force of nature wrapped in a humanoid shape, his weapon vibrating. Still strong enough to carve through walls like they were cheap drywall. But for the first time, he wasn't just plowing through her—he was adjusting, more than once. That was new. She was way past the point where he usually killed her.
She swung her chain-blade, it cracked with hydraulic boosted speed as she barked another command—turrets roared, drones crashed, emergency walls slammed into place as her molecular blade blurred like a whip, severing everything and forcing him to shift, forcing him to finally react. Not struggling, not losing. But reacting. "Oh wow, did that slow you down for half a second Payne? Must be embarrassing."
The merc stopped short beside a console, using its shielding as cover from gunfire and aware that Kelly hadn’t been willing to destroy her own equipment. His fingers closed around a discarded vial—not the good reality-warping stuff, just the older, weaker, failed human-troll splicing serum. His left eye glowed suspiciously red.
Someone was watching. Someone in his head. He pressed a finger to his temple, listening for half a second, then scowled, sharp and irritated. "The vial counts? You want it?" A pause, a low growl. "But... Yeah. Yeah, I get it." His gaze snapped back to her, scanning, reading—and then he froze. His brow twitched, mouth curling into something between a sneer and disbelief. "Facial recognition confirms… Dr. Kelly Voss." A beat of absolute silence.
"A doctor?"
He exhaled through his nose, shoulders tensing, before he completely rose from cover to stare at her, his shield turning translucent so they could see each other, and his fingers curling tight in anger.
For a second, Kelly watched curiously as a wall of defensive droids surrounded the space between them—she had never seen this behavior before. What would he do next?
"A doctor. You survived by luck.” The merc spat. “Enjoy breathing while you still can, Voss. Next time, you won't even see me coming." Flat. Unshaken. Absolute. Then he was gone, blurring past the ruined doorway, leaving Kelly standing in the wreckage, grinning as though she'd just won something.
"Oh no, Payne, don't go—l was just starting to get the hang of this," she said, ecstatic. First time that's ever happened. Over a hundred loops, and not once had she lasted long enough to watch him leave. Kelly wiped blood from her mouth, grinning through the ache she was just beginning to notice in her limbs.
The immortal intern bolted to a nearby console, smearing blood across the scanner like it owed her money and today was payday. Chunks of tissue hit the receptacle with a wet slap. "Analyze that," she barked the order to the lab and its AI complied. Then she was already moving, shoving herself into the full-body sample scanner, the machine locking around her and the lab's AI already processing and peeling her apart with its scans on a scale so microscopic it made quantum foam look clunky, the fundamental interactions mapped in real-time. "Alright, dissect me, let's see what the hell I've turned into."
However, it wasn't a complete success. She ground her teeth as a sudden wave of pain rushed through her. The changes had made her fragile in unexpected ways, constantly shifting and adapting without her control.
The scan spat out its results, and it tracked. She'd inverted dark matter and dark energy, shoved them into her DNA, reinforced it with temporary medical nanotech, and now? Well. Reality wasn't sure if she belonged in it anymore. Her structure kept shifting, half-stable, half-not. That explained the low-grade, full-body ache she felt now the adrenaline had worn off—her cells were reconsidering their life choices.
Dark energy's job was to expand the reality and stretch space itself, but inside her? It had flipped. Instead of pushing, it was pulling, doing something the universe hadn't signed off on.
Every breath, every second, it dragged energy inward, funneling power into her instead of letting it disperse. That was why, according to the scans, her body was saturated with it, why it clung to her structure, integrating at a level even the lab's AI struggled to quantify.
And dark matter?
Dark matter was the thing that kept everything together, that had inverted too. Instead of binding her, it was pushing her apart, peeling her mass away from itself like her molecules hated each other. That was the cause for the constant ache under her skin, it was as if her body were trying to be in ten places at once.
That also explained the "SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION!!!" part of the report.
The only thing keeping her alive and in one piece was the temporary nanotech blended into the two serums. It was still fixing her faster than she could break, but once it burned out? She'd start pulling apart like bad wiring.
The scan results glitched for a second, signaling that reality itself couldn't decide if she was still part of it.
Kelly sighed, tapped the console like it could give her better news, then cracked her neck.
"Well. That's annoying."
If she didn't get permanent medical nanotech soon, she'd be dead—no debate, no loopholes, all she had without it was an ugly, messy expiration. And even if she got an injection now? That was a band-aid on a bullet wound, keeping her stitched together for this loop only. If this made it to her status, then every reset would kick off with her body trying to evict itself from existence and a very short countdown to exploding like a meat grenade.
"Oh, cool. Built-in self-destruct. Love that for me."
Kelly asked the room to play her favourite pop song—a classic—then kicked off her chair, sliding across the wreckage as though she had all the time in the world. She spun on the chair once, slowing before the fabricator console, and started queuing up blueprints.
"Status,"
The strange panel sprang to life in mid-air without the aid of tech.
[Name: Dr. Kelly Voss.
Race: Human
Title: The Null (I)
Rank: F-
Traits:
- Mana Incompatibility (X),
- The Aberration of Mana (I),
- Troll-Marrowed (I),
Skills: ]
She focused on 'Mana Incompatibility’ and another translucent panel sprang to life.
[Mana Incompatibility (Racial, Foundational, X-Grade): This being cannot manipulate mana, cast spells, or gain mana-based skills. This trait is intrinsic to their race, shaping their spiritual being. While mana can enter their body, it does not remain stored, instead passing through their mana pathways with every breath, surging through their physiology without conscious activation. Their metaphysiology lacks the necessary framework to process or utilize mana, preventing any meaningful acquisition or utilisation of skills. Without spiritual pathways, skills cannot be activated, and skill-based mana functions remain inoperative, separate from the body.]
"Absolute" was gone. That meant something. Mana still wasn't hers to generate, still wouldn't stick, but now? It moved. Every breath and every second shoved it through her system—not dead, not still. A passage instead of a void. Pathways existed, useless but present. No processing. No activation. No skills. The old repulsion? Gone. Her body wasn't fighting mana anymore, just failing to do anything with it. The grade had lowered, confirming her suspicion that not only did traits have varying grades, but that they could changed. And the immunity? That was gone too. Meaning mana could touch her now.
"Huh. Alright." Kelly scanned the new traits, eyes locking onto the changes.
[The Aberration of Mana (Foundational, Unique, I-Grade): This being's transformation has rewritten how it interacts with fundamental forces. Its existence is now unstable, fluid, and partially disconnected from reality. Its body is capable of interacting with mana in ways no other entity can. Instead of producing or storing mana, it naturally consumes or disrupts it. Instead of dispersing energy, it absorbs it, making energy-based attacks feed into it in addition to causing harm. Conversely, it is unable to generate its own energy, requiring external sources to function properly. The universe might be actively trying to erase it or force it back into a stable state, making its very existence a constant fight against time and space itself. Due to the anomalous nature of the being's metaphysical and physical changes, further effects are unknown.]
So, she'd officially graduated from regular anomaly to the universe's personal headache.
Progress.
Kelly scanned the new Trait, half-impressed, half-annoyed. Reality wasn't taking this well. It was trying to crush her, erase her, shove her back into something it understood. That explained the butterfly effects, the odd changes that occurred after many loops. They were rare, and sometimes they were small, barely noticeable, and other times they were huge. whatever she'd become? It broke the rules.
Mana, dark matter, and dark energy—probably the same thing wearing different hats, which meant magic wasn't mystical, just badly documented physics.
And then there were the differing grades. While EX-Grade could be an outlier, I-Grade and X-Grade could be Roman numerals, meaning one and ten. Were there only ten grades to titles and Traits and an additional outlier grade? Or were there more?
[Troll Marrowed (Rare, I-Grade): This being's bones are a fusion of human and troll physiology, fueled by mana to exhibit greater density. Composed of a reinforced lattice adapted from troll marrow, they possess the inherent toughness and durability of troll biology, naturally resisting fractures and high-impact trauma. When saturated with the body's mana, the skeletal system autonomously fortifies itself, continuously reinforcing structural integrity and adapting to sustained pressure. This process occurs without conscious activation, and is inherent to troll physiology.]
Titanium-density troll bones. Neat. She checked her EQ-3.8. Much better.
All changes saved.
Troll bones wouldn't make her stronger. Muscles made people strong, but bones decided how much of that strength they could actually use. Human bones cracked long before muscle limits were ever reached. Now, that limiter was gone.
And the mana saturation? that sounded... automatic. Trolls didn't need to think about reinforcing their bones; their physiology just did it. Which meant she didn't need to think about it either.
Aside from whatever the injection did to her soul, that was probably the main reason why her 'Traits' were now available. No longer greyed out and inaccessible but full of saturated colour. Her eyes immediately honed in on her new title,
'The Null."
[Title - The Null (Unique, I-Grade): A being that should not exist, violating universal laws—While active, No prophecy based on the bearer's full name can directly describe their personal future. If a seer possessing their full name attempts to divine their fate, it will fail. Whilst they can still appear in external prophecies about others, a seer looking for what they will do next will see only static.]
Interesting. The mention of 'seers' implied that one of these freaks falling out of the sky could see the future. If "seeing the future" was real, then she could kick the whole concept in the teeth, but only if they used her full name. If it wasn't, then it had obvious data-fed blind spots, and she was going to shove herself right into them. The only thing worth knowing about prophecy was whether it was just corporate-grade probability abuse. If it was real, it meant future events existed before observation, and that broke too many laws of causality to ignore.
But if it was just a monstrously advanced quantum model, then it was still useful—high-speed data crunching was just magic people understood. Either way, she would find out. Force it to admit it whether it was just a computer pretending to be a mystic, or something much more.
She moved on to focus on the 'Title' classification itself, mentally nudging the panel to reveal the category's meaning.
[Titles: Titles are persistent identifiers gained from exceptional achievements that provide ongoing passive effects and long-term enhancements. They are either always active or highly conditional. Only one Title can be functionally active at any given time.]
Only one at a time? That was suspiciously pedantic for something rewriting reality. If Titles were persistent, then swapping between them meant their effects were more than just passive buffs—they had to be states of existence. What happened if she switched mid-action? Would it cut off whatever effect was running? Could she speed-toggle them and break causality? And what counted as an exceptional achievement—surviving something that should've killed her, or did she need to punch a god in the teeth to get a good one?
More importantly, how exactly could she get more?
There was likely a pathway grafted somewhere deep in her helix to make this possible, and once she'd taken care of a priority task, she would need to review her results in depth to unravel its secrets. Like how it got there, and who or what was making these decisions. This needed further study. More samples. She needed more Titles.
"So if this changed once, it can change again," she exhaled, grinning. The status panel had spent almost three hundred loops telling her she couldn't use mana. Now? It was admitting things weren't so simple.
"Guess the status panel finally got tired of gaslighting me," she muttered. The implications were a wrecking ball rolling through her mind.
Humans couldn't get skills, couldn't use them. But they had traits. Hell, every single one of them had a trait telling them they were magically useless.
But humans had technology. Lots of it.
And either some freak accident or an idiot with terrible decision making skills had given the craziest human the ability to loop.
Kelly had looped well over a hundred times, most of it spent trying to reach this lab. She'd fought a fully equipped 7EQ mercenary and survived—barely—thanks to a room full of turrets, drones, kill-zones, droids, an unpredictable chain-blade, and an absolute refusal to stay dead.
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Her body was packed with mana, her DNA wasn't even fully human anymore, and she'd done what every physicist, every theorist, every goddamn researcher in history failed to do—she'd inverted dark matter and dark energy, slapped them into her genes, patched it up with nanotech, and told the universe to deal with it.
And now? Now she wanted more.
If she could get samples from the creatures wrecking Earth, she could engineer Traits, study them, break them down, build something new. If she could gain more achievements, she could receive more Titles, study them, too, advance them, and reverse engineer both. Magic wasn't a myth—it was just badly documented physics. If the status granted creatures abilities, then Traits were just hardcoded data waiting to be cracked. She wanted to rip apart the apocalypse and make it explain itself. And... oh yeah, maybe put a stop to the whole Earth-ending disaster or whatever.
Save twenty billion people and change the fate of a planet that was doomed to crack open at the end of the invasion. She'd almost forgotten about that part.
Kelly had done the impossible because she never stopped smashing through walls-metaphorical, physical, and occasionally quantum. And it worked. Now, she was the only human in existence who didn't just interact with mana—her body processed it in ways no one else could. If the corporations, the elites, the ones clawing for scraps of power in this dying world knew? They'd tear apart the last remnants of civilization just to put her in a lab. But that didn't matter. She had loops. Infinite trial and error, unlimited failures to mine for progress, and the freedom to dissect the apocalypse one Trait at a time. Every monster, every anomaly, every system-given ability—all of it was data waiting to be cracked open. And the portals? She'd crack them open, too. Maybe see what's on the other side.
Her final option sat there, humming at the edge of reason: step through a portal and find out what waited. Plenty of fools had done it the instant they spawned, none ever walked back to brag about it or even sent a postcard. Kelly could join them. The odds of vanishing, or slipping into a space outside time, were high enough to make a statistician faint. So she’d map, measure, and prepare until stepping through was less suicidal and more of a strategy. When she went, it would be on her terms—and the universe could deal with it.
If Kelly found a stable medical nanotech source that didn’t rely on a fabricator, she could wake up every morning, print a stockpile of vials, hop off-world to an orbital colony, and sell the useless gene-splicing method to desperate corpos for obscene amounts of credits. By midday, she'd be drowning in wealth, spending loop after loop sipping overpriced drinks on some orbital colony—and if the resets ever stopped, she'd still be set for life.
But Kelly chased understanding. If she wasn't pushing forward, tearing things apart to see what made them tick, then what was the point? She'd burn through a thousand lifetimes before she let the universe hold a single secret over her.
The fabricator let out a sharp ding, spitting out a fresh batch of medical nanotech vials like a particularly generous slot machine. Kelly grabbed one, rolling it between her fingers. They were single-use, temporary, just an hour before it broke down into iron and whatever scraps her body could scavenge. Not exactly a cure, but enough to keep her from unraveling in the universe’s deadliest splice job. The inverted energy still wanted her gone, pulling her apart at the seams, but the nanotech kept patching, rewriting, forcing her back into something stable and repairing her cells on the fly.
If she died, then she'd spend every subsequent loop waking up with a very short expiry notice, endlessly looping with only a slim window to break the cycle.
"Well if this is the only real chance I've got, I guess I've got to make this loop count" Kelly stored the vials in a reinforced case, pocketed them and moved.
The entrance to Vaughn Industries was a chaotic, smoking mess. Bootprints smeared blood and genetically altered fluid across the metal grating. The lobby was a wreck—turrets slagged, drones lay in smoking heaps, mechs and bots lay scattered in burning piles, and the walls were in the process of self-repairing from being shattered. She'd looped more than a hundred times, fought Payne, the 7EQ monster to a standstill, shoved troll DNA into her bloodstream, inverted dark energy, and told physics to go fuck itself. It had been a productive morning.
Kelly always made sure to deactivate and rip herself out of Vaughn's surveillance system loop after loop. Erased logs, wiped footage, scrubbed footage, burned secret footage, burned secret-secret footage, until the lab's records were cleaner than corporate tax reports. That's why she needed Jackhammer. Security clearance was for more than summoning an army of turrets—it was all about not leaving a digital footprint behind.
Data? Deleted. Files? Gone. Hard backups? Smashed.
Even built half her own equipment from the lab's 3D large printers just to keep it out of the system.
But she wasn't delusional. Somewhere, buried deep, Vaughn still had about 30% of it. Maybe less. Enough that if she was unlucky and someone way too high up the food chain ever noticed, there'd be problems.
If Vaughn decided to send their top operatives? Or, worse, if Vaughn himself got curious? This loop wouldn't end with some Major Payne merc putting a bullet in her skull. She'd wake up every morning with a body rejecting itself like bad transplant surgery and a several minute countdown to liquefaction.
She needed a permanent fix for the whole 'spontaneous self-destruction' situation-fast.
And she already had a solution in mind. The troll was built like a walking tank—it had shrugged off everything they threw at it, healing faster than her or their bullets could carve it up. Near-instantly healing injuries. She only had its bones. If she could crack that, splice it, pull another trait out of it, she wouldn't need to keep patching herself up with medical nanotech every hour.
She just needed another troll.
Jackhammer was standing at the building's entrance. The last she saw him, he was being hunted down by a 6EQ and a pack of 4s. She had assumed he was dead. Apparently not. He tapped the side of his temple, the faint gleam of cybernetic enhancement visible beneath his skin. An Ocular scanner, insurance against Darwinism and standard issue. Everyone had them.
They were handy little things that provided a near perfect estimation of a person's EQ Augment score, and kept most people from making terminally stupid decisions, like picking a fight with someone who could turn them into a smear on the pavement.
Jackhammer's scan completed, and his entire stance shifted. A small thing-barely perceptible.
But Kelly caught it. His jaw tightened. His weight adjusted. That fraction-of-a-second reassessment. He wasn't looking at a scientist anymore.
"You survived that fight." His voice wasn't questioning. It was an accusation. She wasn't supposed to survive that fight; it was why he had given her full security clearance. A final gift.
Kelly popped her neck, ignoring the dull ache of her strenuous existence. "That's what I've been saying."
Jackhammer didn't blink. Because it shouldn't be possible. A researcher—a fucking physicist—went toe-to-toe with a 7EQ, fully-equipped contract killer and walked away? Calling it improbable was an understatement. That was the sort of thing that got flagged. That got reported, and most of all, that got interest.
"What the hell happened to you?" he asked.
Kelly grinned, wide, teeth bared with a secret she wasn't ready to share, "Science."
"Anyway, where are the files on permanent medical nanotech?" She leaned against the nearest console, smearing blood and dust on its surface without a care. "I need them for research. Big important science things. Don't ask questions."
Jackhammer didn't blink. His left eye pulsed with a faint white glow, scanning her as if he were still deciding if she was worth the hassle. After a pause, he exhaled through his nose, the closest thing to a sigh he'd allow.
"You already have full clearance," he said, calm as ever. "Had." A flicker of his fingers on his neural augments. "Revoked. The threat's over. You're back to standard employee access."
Kelly narrowed her eyes. "Wait, you can just—" She gestured vaguely. "Press a button and demote me? That's so corporate. What, no exit interview? No severance package?"
Jackhammer folded his arms. "You should know better than anyone there are no files on permanent medical nanotech. That's not what Vaughn Industries does."
Kelly let that sit for a second, staring at him like he'd just confessed to not believing in oxygen.
"Okay, first of all," she said, straightening up, "rude. Second, you're telling me a multi-trillion-dollar corporate empire, with enough black-budget experiments to make the Geneva Conventions cry, never once thought, 'hey maybe let's make medical nanotech that doesn't expire after an hour'? You expect me to believe that?"
Jackhammer's expression didn't shift an inch. "I expect you to know the answer already."
Kelly clicked her tongue, rolling her shoulders. "Fine. Be boring about it." She turned on her heel, already walking away. "I'll just find another way."
Jackhammer didn't stop her. Just watched, impassive, as she strode off, probably to do something insane.
He finally exhaled.
Why was she like this now? It was like someone had taken her fringe qualities and dialled them up to a thousand.
To Jackhammer, it had been a single day since he last saw her. One day.
One day ago, Kelly Voss was a minor problem—a kind but reckless, messy scientist with no real survival skills. An endearing annoyance. Someone who needed protection and a person who wouldn't last a second in a real fight.
Now?
Jackhammer was looking at something else entirely.
The lab coat was gone. The half-wild, bleeding lunatic in front of him was grinning through blood stains over unblemished skin, suggesting she'd survived and healed from injuries that should have put her down. The way she moved was too confident, too loose, and too used to pain—nothing like the sweet, gentle, kind, perpetually late and professionally hardheaded scientist he'd known just the day before. She wasn't normal. Not anymore.
She shouldn't have made it through that fight.
A scientist did not walk away from a 7EQ mercenary without injury, and a scientist definitely did not smile afterwards.
Jackhammer's high-end neural augments synced with the building's security systems, pulling surveillance from the 10th-floor labs at speeds no human could match. There was nothing but a gap—scrubbed footage. Scrubbed data. Suspicious. He activated the C-level back-channel—an encrypted feed so deep in the system that only Gideon Vaughn himself had the clearance to erase it. Few even knew it existed. Fewer still had the access to use it. The feed connected to show snippets of Kelly’s whip-like blade cracking at near-supersonic speeds, turrets and drones answering her every command, her movements precise enough to hold off a 7EQ merc like she'd rehearsed it a thousand times. Then everything went fuzzy, and it wasn't the feed—it was everything in the lab as though reality had faltered momentarily. Even more suspicious. When the feed kicked back in, Kelly looked different. Stronger. And there, right between her eyes—undamaged bone beneath a rapidly healing bullet hole.
The feed ended and Jack stood still. Kelly shoved her hands in her pockets. "So, uh. You reporting me or what?
Jackhammer didn't answer. He just kept looking at her.
Because whatever happened in that fight... It wasn't normal. And Kelly Voss wasn't just a scientist anymore.
With a thought, he pinged a report to HQ, his high-end communications implant sending a visual memory pack to upper management.
Someone needed to see this.
***
Jackhammer definitely reported her. Kelly would bet her life on it.
Hell, considering today's job, someone was likely already watching his feed, making sure he wasn't dead and that Vaughn Security hadn't just been infiltrated by a swarm of corporate mercs. Kelly knew that even if he didn't send the report, his augments probably did it for him.
The 7EQ that had chased her? Payne? Despite being in the same room as her, he’d been busy fighting a literal army of hastily disabled mechs, drones, walls, and droids armed with heavy artillery. All while attempting to steal anything he could. It was likely he hadn't seen much between the bullets and her whipping chain-blade, especially given the fact that it sounded like the bozos who hired him had told him to leave her and take the troll vial. But he'd walked out of the lab breathing, which meant that eventually, if he ever admitted to the fact that he'd struggled to land a hit on her, a mere research intern, someone else with a lot of money would be very interested in what had just happened.
"Yay, more fans."
Kelly floored it, her truck tearing through the ruined streets, bouncing over debris like a boat on water,
Her plan had been straightforward. Grab a troll sample, map out its regenerating genetic mana pathway, and splice it into her own DNA. Her home lab could tweak and modify, but rewriting genetic code was out of its league. Now that going back to Vaughn Industries was off the table, she needed a place with full-spectrum genetic splicing capabilities. She needed a place with a genetic facility, and fabricators.
Fortunately, In New York, there were four of them.
Four major corps controlled the augmentation market, each carving out their own monopoly-one for each kind of augment. Four flavors of post-human potential, neatly packaged, rigorously patented, and priced just high enough to keep the best upgrades out of reach for anyone who actually needed them.
The most common were Cybernetic Augments.
Cybernetics were the entry-level upgradeneural links, robotic limbs, direct brain to machine connections-basic, accessible, and slapped onto anyone with a decent insurance plan. They were common and affordable, but still impressive improvements. They replaced flesh with hardware, nerves with circuits, and achieved similar results as the other methods but were far more fragile, requiring frequent maintenance and repair.
Biomechanical & Bioelectronic Augments were the second type.
More than simple robotic limbs, these augments fused biological tissue with electronic systems. Not machine. Not flesh, but a true blend. Hybrid mechanical-biological systems that seamlessly integrated mechanical components with organic tissue.
Retinal implants, bones that shrugged off car crashes, synthetic tendons reinforced with polymers, musculature enhanced with kinetic amplifiers.
They granted enhanced vision, boosted reflexes, and synaptic speed no baseline human could match. A seamless hybrid reserved for those whose bank accounts never saw a single digit. They remained out of reach for most, reserved for either direct employees or the more successful citizens of New York-those with a little cash to burn.
Then there were Nanotech Augments.
Permanent Nanotechnological Augments were the second most expensive on the market and exceedingly rare. They sat at the luxury tier-self-repairing tissue, molecular reconstruction, microscopic robots tweaking biology in real time. Tiny, invisible engineers working beneath the skin, patching damage before it became fatal, rewriting biology on the fly.
Finally, at the top of all augments lay genetic augmentation—the pinnacle, the holy grail, the price tag no one outside the elite could even dream of affording.
Genetic rewrites weren’t always better than the others—that wasn’t why they were deemed to be more than just upgrades. They were legacies, carving superiority into DNA itself to affect entire bloodlines.
Longer life, stronger bones, sharper minds—an entire genome restructured for performance beyond peak.
The elites no longer just had money; they had better bodies, better cognition, even better bones.
Every genetic tweak widened the gap, stacking advantages with each generation like compound interest until catching up became impossible.
And Kelly's existence threw a wrench straight into that whole structure. As her truck moved, she flipped on the radio, changed gears, and cracked the window open, the cool air eliciting a smile. Only Vaughn and the lone Merc, Payne knew of her existence for sure, and it would only last for this one specific loop, but there was nothing corporations hated more than something they couldn't patent.
Now that traits were on the table, the corps would notice. No way around it. Vaughn, the other megacorp jerkoffs, maybe even some bored international state or off-world nation, would pick up on something. The wars had set them back a little, but a world this deep in surveillance? If they wanted to, they could have eyes on every other street, and already had satellites monitoring the grenade filled dumpster fire that was Earth from the safety of orbit. There was no permanent way of slipping through the cracks. Sure, she could keep scrubbing data post-discovery, erasing traces, but if someone saw her tank a missile to the head and walk it off without the score to match? Yeah. They'd start watching.
They'd sent hit squads before in past loops. Standard cleanup, standard corporate murder—but only when she’d stepped on their toes. Moving forward they wouldn't only send killers. They'd send retrieval teams. Men in clean suits that didn't wear armour because they didn't have to. Guys with reinforced cages, tranquilizers, and orders to drag her into a lab before she could get strong enough to convince them otherwise.
That was going to get annoying.
She hadn't drawn real attention before because, up until now, she'd stayed within the limits of what was physically possible. Sure, she'd done some crazy stuff—improvised weaponry, punching Ogres in the face, the occasional citywide blackout and surviving explosions she had no business navigating her way through—but it was always within EQ expectations. Even when she flipped the power balance, it was explainable. But now? Now she was breaking rules nobody knew could be broken. If she did something like 'accidentally punch open a portal to Hell and invite whatever was inside for drinks,' then yeah, they'd start treating her like a priority.
For now, titanium-dense bones weren't a headline. Plenty of people walked around with reinforced skeletons, either from augments or genetic mods. Nothing worth rolling out the red carpet for. But once she really got into the weird shit—like whatever that thing in China was—the A-listers would start dropping down to earth like hailstones. They'd want to know what she was, how she did it. Strap her to a table, pick her apart piece by piece, and slap a patent on whatever they found. Maybe sell it to the highest bidder."Pfft, good luck with that. As if any of them could reverse-engineer this. They'd be dissecting me for centuries and still end up scribbling question marks."
She really needed to upgrade the hardware in her home lab. She’d had plenty of 3D printers before the loops. Obviously. How else was she supposed to make all the illegal, experimental junk no one wanted her to have? Fabricators were locked behind corporate walls, experimental tech not meant for public hands. If she got the schematics, she could print her own every loop. No restrictions. No oversight. But data, machines, and whatever gene-splicing concoctions she decided to fabricate.
Vaughn handed out employee augments at a discount like a treat, or bait, but everyone had already seen what the corps were capable of during the last pandemic. A lot of people would go custom if they could, but nobody had ever had the choice and the rest didn't even know it was an option. Kelly, though? People like her, the scientist and engineers, they had the tools, knowledge, and sheer corporate access to legally dig into things meant to stay locked up from the rest of the public. It was the reason why her augments were hers, not quite off the books, but uncompromised and offline.
If only she had a fabricator of her own, she would’ve had genetic mods in her first week of employment.
She logged “borrow” fabricator schematics’ onto her ever-growing to-do list, right between don't die and buy a CoffeeBot. But there were only four in New York, and the nearest one sat in Genecorp's shiny, hyper-secured headquarters on Park Avenue. She'd find the troll, then she’d break into Genecorp or maybe sneak in. That'd get her inside with the least amount of bullets in her face. She had to remind herself that this loop counted. A hundred plus loops of immortality tended to dilute a person's idea of consequences.
Right. Sneaking in. She reminded herself, should be fun.
Genecorp had been the proud employer of the 7EQ superkiller who trashed her lab..., so really, they had it coming. Since they specialized in genetic augments, she'd have to go full incognito—signal jammers, no face, no breathing, no fingerprints, no DNA left behind for them to snatch up and identify her by.
Kelly veered left, dodging a round of gunfire and some poor bastards trying to stab a tank-sized snake-monster with what looked like rebar, handguns, scavenged weaponry, and bad decisions. She squinted. That thing definitely did something cool—maybe acid spit, or maybe bone armor?—but her whole ‘potentially exploding' situation took priority. She sighed, adjusting her grip on the wheel.
"Unfortunate," she muttered, absolutely not slowing down as she left them to figure it out.
Kelly leaned back against the seat, one hand tapping the wheel, the other adjusting the radio until trash turned into something more up-beat. She pressed the gas a little harder, humming along to the music.
Either there was a big grey corpse waiting for her, or she'd find a lovely breadcrumb trail of dead people leading straight to the lovely dumb extra-dimensional giant himself.
Either way, she needed that walking genetic upgrade.
When she arrived the street was a mess, way worse than she had ever seen it, which tracked, considering she had never made it this far before.
Kelly swerved to avoid the remains of a security drone, its chassis twisted and showing signs it had been stepped on by something with a serious weight problem. The closer she got, the more obvious it was just how bad things had gotten here. "Damn, they really take playing tag passionately," she muttered, observing the destruction as she slowly drove through the street. The roads were barely intact, whole slabs of pavement tilted, cracked, or just gone from multiple impacts, their edges sheared clean through as though someone had taken a massive industrial saw to the street.
The barricade, or what was left of it, was scattered in crumpled heaps, its plating torn apart like aluminum foil, smashed vehicles half-buried beneath the wreckage.
Kelly swerved, nearly taking out a guy mid-sprint as she tore through the remains of the barricade.
Someone had lost badly here—there were burned-out wrecks, crushed storefronts, and at least one dude who had been introduced to a wall at terminal velocity. Rough. She rolled past a few corpses, Simon's men mostly, judging by the patchwork armor and "we die like idiots" level of planning.
One merc stood out—not because he was more intact, but because his skull was about ten feet from his body. Definitely not how heads were supposed to work.
Kelly stepped out of the truck, scanning the bullet-riddled pavement. There—half-buried under some poor bastard who had lost a fight with gravity, was a police rifle just waiting to be stolen.
How generous.
She yanked it free, brushing off the blood. Unlocked. Which meant one of Simon's people had cracked the biometric security. That was... actually impressive. Corporate weapons didn't just let anyone pull the trigger.
Sliding back into the truck, she checked the charge. Full mag.
Her gaze shot to the ground—big, heavy impacts, something that had just walked, and then steamrolled through concrete like each segment personally owed it money. And off to the side, a fresh trail of destruction leading off down an adjacent road.
Kelly grinned, adjusting her grip on the wheel.
"There you are."
