“The audio and video of this battle hall is not recorded from unless by spectators in the balconies,” the old veteran said. “The balconies have been shut down thanks to your last attack. Nobody can see or hear us. The diagnostic data erases itself. Only life signals are logged. Anything beyond that will not leave this room.”

  Kelly wiped a trickle of blood from her temple.

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes. Of course—“

  Kelly shook her head once.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think you actually want that.”

  Ren raised an eyebrow, waiting.

  “If anyone really understood what I can do,” she continued, voice flat but tight at the edges, “every planet, every system, every species with the ability to point a weapon would start pointing it at me. All of them. At once.” She paused, then added, quieter, “Are you sure you want to know?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. He leaned back against the bench, folding his arms.

  “I’ve seen your time mutation before,” he said at last. “Not this version. A weaker one. I’ve seen things on worlds you don’t even know exist.” His gaze stayed fixed on her. “So yes. I’m sure.”

  Then, with a faint edge of disbelief, “You just told me you can loop through time. What exactly is supposed to shock me after that?”

  Kelly stared at him for a long moment, measuring him. Not amused or impressed. Just checking whether this was another wall she’d have to hit headfirst.

  “Okay,” she said.

  She started listing.

  She spared him the drama, the speeches, and listed it all like inventory; something she’d recited to herself a thousand times while bleeding out in alleys or under rubble.

  She told him about mana—what it actually was, how her body absorbed it constantly—compressed it—how everything she did ran on it. Her augments. Bones. Muscles. Her strength. Her cognition. Even her skin. Every trick, system, and every reaction. Fuel. All of it.

  She told him she could interact with it directly. Without loopholes. She could channel it. See it. Feel it. Touch it. Bend it. That, according to the Status, no being she’d ever encounter—from any dimension—could do what she could with it. That the universe itself seemed to object.

  She explained the weapon first, because it was simple. A rune-engraved, nickel-titanium alloy, monomolecular, shape-memory transforming weapon. A homemade switch blade. How it changed shape with a thought. Longer. Segmented. Other programmed forms. How it used basic runes to create material out of nothing—instant shields. How it fired a rune-based projectile—the “no” beam—only when killing was the entire point.

  She moved on to basic firearms, grenades, drones she’d built and stored away. Jury-rigged tech. Reverse-engineered magic. Basic Runes stolen from medieval-looking swords and axes, upgraded, merged, stitched together with hardware that absolutely shouldn’t have worked until she figured out how to break them in the right way.

  She snapped her fingers once, just to demonstrate the concept, and told him about the gravity spikes. Brief. Precise. Enough to break balance, crack bone, or pin something in place for half a second. Half a second was usually enough. Any longer and they’d be holding a housewarming party for every shambling horror in the district.

  She described the shields—instant, dense, reinforced composites. How she could form them anywhere, use them as cover or platforms, move through space by chaining them together. How she could step into shadow-space inside a moving shield and come out somewhere else before most things realized she’d left.

  Her shadow was a major point. Unexplored. Full of potential. A personal shadow dimension. Its own rules—temporal stasis. Pulling objects from it. Firing things from it at sonic speeds—metal marbles, stone shrapnel, stored flames, bullets, explosions. Anything non-living.

  Custom biomechanical augmentations. Heat shunts. Impact locking structures to tank hits with Fortress Titles. Perpetual motion anchors so she’d never stop moving while Outrunning Death. Automated reaction systems. Guided counter-movements. Pushing augments across speed, strength, resilience, cognition depending on what the moment demanded.

  Mimic skin. Turning small patches of herself into whatever material she needed. Her material bank storing anything she could get her hands on. Dense metal plating over hands, face, anywhere she chose.

  The partial Werewolf Trait. Claws. Teeth. Eyes. Senses. Bigger. Stronger. Tougher. Meaner. Ten percent across the board.

  Titles. Only what they did. Deflection that redirected attacks or broke reality—inverting inertia. Endurance that let her tank any breaking forces—not just physical—outright some of the time; she knew exactly when, her augments calculated it. Vitality for regeneration. Slaughterer of Men for a jarring fear aura. Inertia control to limit knockback. Mana focused student, boosting her learning whenever she had a teacher. Outrunning death, multiplying her speed each second until it killed her. Death’s Foe increasing her effective reach when active. Switching them to use only one at a time, at will.

  How she fought. Not heroically. Efficiently. From experience. Raw—effective. What he taught her; feints, stutters, unpredictable footwork. Ranged and close at the same time. Attacking and defending simultaneously. Dirty. Using terrain, debris, gravity, shields, shadow. Multi-vector pressure until something gave.

  Ren stopped her occasionally.

  “How precise are the gravity spikes? What’s the range? Duration?”

  “As long as I need it spiked,” she said. “Localized.”

  “And the shadow projectiles—stored how long?”

  “As long as I want.”

  Each time, his eyes glowed faintly. Not literally—but with interest. Nanotech crawled up his temples and formed angular goggles, facets shifting as though he were checking something invisible. He never interrupted her flow more than necessary.

  When she finished, the space between them felt heavier.

  Ren was quiet for a long time.

  Then he asked, carefully, “How many loops have you been through? Roughly.”

  Kelly exhaled through her nose.

  “At least fifteen hundred,” she said. “Somewhere between fifteen and eighteen hundred. I lost the exact count.”

  “And each loop lasts… the whole day?”

  She shook her head.

  “Rarely.”

  She explained. The first hundred loops, refusing to leave her apartment sometimes. Most loops ending when something killed her—usually evening, sometimes much earlier. The early phase where death came at random angles, over and over, until she learned enough to stop running straight into it. Until she reached the city center, and until she started killing the thing that kept killing her first.

  Ren stared at her like he was seeing a structure where he’d expected pure chaos.

  He started muttering under his breath. About dying horribly. About repetition. About mindset. About what that kind of experience did to a person. His voice dipped into places she couldn’t quite hear.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  He looked at her again, slower this time.

  “And the newer abilities?” he asked. “The ones you didn’t start with.”

  She told him. Where they came from. What it cost to get them.

  That finally shook him.

  He sat back, silent, eyes unfocused, then let out a low breath.

  “Impressive,” he said, and then corrected himself. “Terrifyingly so. Especially given your low EQ score.”

  Kelly tilted her head.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I get that a lot.”

  The conversation kept going after that. Questions. Answers. Long pauses where Ren recalibrated and Kelly waited, already braced for the next wall.

  She didn’t soften anything for him.

  She didn’t exaggerate either.

  She treated it the same way she finally begun to treat every loop—as one that mattered. Or like it might be the last one that counted.

  And so, the discussion continued.

  “I heard there was an echelon member that almost went overclocked during upgrade work this morning, tried to break away and retire from Gideon’s inner circle,” Kelly said. She wasn’t really looking at Ren while she spoke. A coin hovered above her palm, time slightly misaligned around it. It jittered in place, stuttering through positions like a bad frame rate. Practice. Also entertainment. “The news said his death was an accident, but flying a ship into the sun feels like it takes commitment. A checklist. Ol’ Gideon moved pretty fast, didn’t he.”

  “I knew him. He was a decent man.” Ren said. His posture tightened, just a little. “Gideon fried him alive. Took him up into orbit by the collar and threw him into the sun himself. He’s manic about loyalty. Thinks he’s Al Capone or something. Completely insane.”

  Who the hell was Al Capone?

  Kelly didn’t ask. She assumed it was probably some long-dead planetary governor, or maybe a failed corporate mascot, or a prohibition-era cook who got mythologized way out of proportion. History loved doing that.

  “And why did you leave Gideon in the first place?” Kelly asked, curious, not judgmental. The coin skipped, froze, then resumed its stutter. “If leaving comes with a first-class trip into the sun.”

  She didn’t ask how he’d survived his own retirement. Gideon Vaughn didn’t strike her as someone who respected the difference between resignation and betrayal.

  He probably saw resignation as the ultimate betrayal.

  “If you knew half the things they do, you’d understand,” the aged veteran snapped. “Their drug canisters kill thousands every year. Their experiments kill more. And don’t get me started on their weapons—the illegal ones they use when no one’s looking. That’s just the surface. Kidnappings. Murders. Racketeering. Prostitution. Sex trafficking.” His voice roughened. “I thought I could make a difference working near the top. With the Echelon. With Vaughn. With Crystal Nanotech.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. No,” he muttered. “I saved lives. But some of the people I saved probably went on to kill hundreds. The big four have been tearing at each other’s throats for centuries. I thought Han, Cyber, the others had plans to take Gideon down. Turns out it’s like trying to take a mountain apart with a chisel. Vaughn’s the peak. Too big to kill. So they stall. Strategic peace. Delay.”

  Kelly already knew most of Vaughn’s official history. Mostly because they advertised it constantly. Gideon Vaughn—at almost three hundred years old—had founded the defense company in Manhattan shortly after the Augment Wars. From there it expanded into shipping, warehouses, agriculture, food, biotech, manufacturing, oil, retail. And then into everything else.

  Ironically, Vaughn and the other defense and infrastructure giants had surged during Kelly’s lifetime. The AI coups had finished wrecking a planet that was barely recovering and reminded everyone why their precious corpos and heavily enhanced rulers were supposedly necessary.

  A lot of people blamed Jennie for that.

  Kelly didn’t. As the DeadQueen, Jennie always had reasons. Jennie was a very reasonable person. She tended to only bomb people who deserved it—and humans, while occasionally great and lovable, were extremely bombable even on their best days.

  Kelly never asked her why she did that growing up.

  Maybe she would, the next time she saw her.

  Kelly had thought her first moments as Ren’s almost-disciple would involve some super-secret, demigod-level training. Maybe a monastery carved into a mountain that technically wasn’t there, humming with hidden technology and an ancient war technique built to end civilizations before lunch. Something practical.

  Instead, it began with questions.

  Honestly, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as shaving her head and enrolling in an absurdly expensive, near-millennium-year-old, elite military academy where discipline was enforced by gravity-defying instructors and the curriculum assumed you’d survive atmospheric reentry by graduation.

  So far Ren had asked her about her Titles. Her mutations, which were not mutations, they were magic. What they did. How she acquired them. And everything else that could be peeled apart with enough time and stubbornness. They talked about her time loop. The political pressure building around the universe’s most valuable object, the only self-powered magical terraforming cube. The impending civil war orbiting it like scavengers, an ideology gold rush.

  She walked him through the things she’d faced across resets. Horrors from beyond anything with a language for reality, things that wore causality wrong and left rooms quieter after they passed. Goblins. Green perverts. Every single one. Trolls with the emotional range of damp stone. Mimics that learned fast enough to be annoying. Giant living skeleton bone knights and skeleton abominations that fused and bound bone together, regenerated, and even generated force fields. She hadn’t implemented their DNA. The bone stuff needed work. There was something wrong with it. Missing pieces. Data that just wasn’t there. Their DNA didn’t do anything special, even with magic layered on top. Cracking the death knights was on her to-do list, and very low on it.

  The talk rolled through the angel Verrisimir and the god of Order wearing him like a puppet. That the term ‘Angel’ was a misnomer, an internet label—that everyone was wrong, the internet was wrong, the Status was wrong, and really, he was just a portal being with unknown physiology and wings. The floating ten-foot alien conductor hanging in the sky came up too—a causal error no one could clear. And the massive interplanetary political game being played by every major power, governments, corpos, and groups, all circling the east grid and the cube like sharks with balance sheets was the final topic.

  In short, there were no special augment-specific combat arts. No superhuman martial arts training at all.

  She didn’t even get to do a pose!

  “Kelly—No. Dr. Voss,” Ren said at last as they stood in the combat hall. “Or would you prefer your codename. Timer. Though that is only used for sensitive jobs.”

  Kelly groaned at the sound of it while staring at the floor.

  “Timer,” she said. “That name is a crime. It sounds like a kitchen appliance.”

  The combat hall’s gallery shutters reopened at the end of their conversation.

  Those watching were gathered in front of a massive protective screen—they must’ve been on shift break. Kelly briefly noted them exchanging pleasantries while downing Genecorp energy boosters. Most looked somewhere between twenty-five and mid-to-late thirties, though that was a meaningless estimate in a world where age could be negotiated surgically. And mechanically. And aesthetically.

  Most wore standard combat uniforms and defensive gear, but one guy lounged with his boots up, power suit half open like an unbuttoned shirt. From what Kelly overheard, they were debating the latest Ultimated Augment Fighting Championship bout taking place off-planet at a luxury resort, which upper-echelon celebrity they’d most like to date, and—more ambitiously—how one might casually introduce themselves to Venus Vaughn. Or a singer like Nyx Arclight, as if that was a logistical problem rather than a delusion.

  The sheer gall of the man was impressive. He must have had ‘game’ spilling from his sleeves. Or the combined delusion of a small nation.

  She didn’t see Reggie among them. That was surprising, and it raised her estimation of his overall not-lameness, dropping him a few levels down her internal ‘people I’ve killed who killed me’ list.

  More than anything, she wanted to test her abilities further. Really push them against someone who could push back.

  With a bored sigh, Kelly tuned back in as Ren continued speaking. She briefly considered equipping a Mana Vacuum and seeing if she could skip this entire introductory phase. Just shift time: fast-forward through it. She didn’t have the juice, the know-how, or even the capability—but it felt worth attempting on principle. She was a creature of fun, and while this was arguably necessary, Ren seemed committed to draining every last drop of life from her through terms, conditions, and aggressively mundane conversation.

  She would never openly admit it, but Kelly was painfully aware that attachment made resets hurt more. In the past, when she’d let herself get close, watching the day roll back—and that version of a person vanish forever—felt uncomfortably like watching them die.

  Fun was easier. Better.

  Euphoria was life.

  Discovery was her heartbeat.

  Violence was her cure.

  And Jennie—her Jellybean—was the only person with a mind capable of cracking time. The only one who had always, and could always, actually stay with her.

  Unfortunately, because Kelly now treated every day like her last, she avoided straining her soul by slipping forward in time beyond brief moments or anything she’d previously dared. Unless forced, she wouldn’t risk her immortal, untouchable soul. And even then, she’d probably just prefer a reset.

  “I know that, due to your time abilities, you may not be with us as a member forever,” Ren said, continuing without noticing her boredom spiraling. “We’ll deal with that when the time comes.

  “Still. As a new employee, I welcome you into the organization that I, Joe Haider, and Venus Vaughn created.

  “We operate outside corporate jurisdiction by design. Not because we enjoy being labeled criminal, but because the system itself has made legality synonymous with extinction. Earth is choking. Entire regions are functionally uninhabitable without commercial air, corporate filtration, corporate permission. Progress is throttled by walls, games, collusion, and laws written to ensure everyone stays dependent, compliant, and dying at a sustainable rate.”

  “We built this organization to reverse the damage done to Earth itself. Every lawful pathway to address that has been buried under systems designed to prolong decay rather than stop it.”

  He gestured vaguely, as if Vaughn Industries and Han Cybernetics were physically present and worth flicking dust off his fingers.

  “Days like this,” Ren continued, the present crisis implicit in every word, “are why Venus and I partnered with one of the greatest rebel minds of our generation.

  “That is why this organization exists.”

  He nodded, once, content.

  Kelly nodded and wondered how long it would take before he tried to almost-kill her.