Close-quarters combat happened when everyone in a room ran out of hallway. It was a tactical solution for when talking stalled and the walls moved in, a discipline built around the idea that reloading was a lifestyle choice. Official definitions called for rapid engagement.

  But to Kelly, on the receiving end, it was the moment you learned whether an opponent’s augments were decorative or structural; the fastest way to discover who skipped leg day. Guns were useful until they became things to throw. The space was always too small. The winner was usually whoever remembered their techniques best, and whoever knew how to use them as tools.

  She spent the rest of that loop training with Ren. He drilled footwork mechanics into her through repetition and impact.

  The old veteran, Ren, used footwork by standing still until it mattered, then moving in sudden bursts like:

  Still.

  Then instant displacement.

  Then still again.

  Each step stayed small and angled, stepping “through the opponent’s structure,” so tiny movements caused large, uncomfortable problems. The guiding rule was “the minimum movement that forces the opponent to make the maximum movement,” which usually left the opponent working very hard to understand what had just gone wrong.

  And Kelly hated every second of it. Footwork—it was a rigid insult, almost as bad as the concept of chairs. But Ren had spent a large portion of the day making a convincing argument for the utility of technique—by obliterating her at every turn. And Kelly was a big believer in payback, so she equipped Mana Focused Student and tried her best to master her teacher’s footwork, all for the single goal of someday using it to rearrange her teacher’s face.

  When the light faded, the old veteran, Ren, suddenly stopped. He gave a short nod. “Good luck.” Then he left the building. To where, Kelly didn’t know.

  Shortly after, the leviathan appeared in the sky.

  Shortly after that, half of New York exploded.

  Kelly decided to try one final experiment. She raced to the edge of the city to use her shadow dimension as an escape. Her transforming weapon would act as a tether between dimensions, an anchored line. She went deep underground through the bones of collapsing basements and entered her shadow in an attempt to survive the leviathan consuming the city.

  It didn’t work.

  The creature’s bite reached deep underground. It consumed everything.

  Including her tether.

  Kelly woke up in her apartment to the sound of public warnings and evacuation alarms, broadcast system gargling static and panic were her new morning playlist, layered over sirens that whooped from the streets below. The day reset and the apocalypse woke with her. Her sheets were a decent cocoon. Comfortable.

  An hour before dawn, the portals had finished their grand opening—tearing through reality like festering wounds. Unstable. Asymmetrical. Uncaring of human understanding. A massive thud echoed through the building’s bones. Dust drifted from the ceiling vent. Something big and unpleasant was taking a stroll downtown. Rifts yawned across the planet, vomiting out creatures that biology textbooks would weep over, each one more grotesque than the last.

  And Kelly yawned too, stretching, her spine cracking a morning symphony. Turns out, you could get used to anything.

  As madness engulfed the sky, and emergency messages pinged on every screen she owned, Kelly got up and resumed her morning routine.

  But this time, though, she moved with a real drive. A real purpose. A shower and change of clothes later, she was in her home lab, printing her favorite weapons.

  Kelly immediately rushed out of her apartment to streets full of chaos and the last dregs of emergency evacuees. She looked for something to violently experiment on.

  She was dying to—well, not dying. Dying was officially off the schedule now. Kelly had no desire for death. But she really, really wanted to explore her new mythical rarity Trait. To run tests. To log all sorts of details.

  The Trait was new, but also wasn’t. The wording implied that, like most Traits, it was simply the status informing her of what already existed, and what had changed. Like her absolute mana incompatibility. Whatever the explosion on the first day did to her, it was profound. Kelly wasn’t a mutant. She had taken every test under the sun, just like everyone else in the city, to confirm that blessed fact. She had two arms and two legs, and didn’t sneeze electric fire without the right runes.

  But her new Trait led to many more questions than answers. Mutations were a result of a cocktail. Environmental poisoning. Radioactive elements. Chemical agents. A dash of human experimentation. Unpredictable quantum dimensional alterations. Kelly’s loops came from a single unfortunate moment. Higgs cannons from orbit. The Cube’s explosion. The Conductor messing with time. All while she stood dangerously close to Project Portal. That cocktail of warfare and bad positioning had changed her. It jarred her soul into some impossible place nobody could reach—perhaps that place was one nobody was ever meant to visit; a place that barred all entry of any kind.

  The many worlds theory, by Dr. Hugh Everett, claimed that different dimensions had different rules. Her shadow-dimension stasis proved that. Perhaps her soul was the only soul in that impossible dimension even gods couldn’t reach. Did that grant her a time affinity? If she wasn’t a mutant, did that mean she really was a baby time-god?

  She hoped so.

  "Awesome," Kelly said, to no one and everything at once. “I knew I was great.”

  The trait felt full of possibilities. It hummed with raw potential. It was incredibly powerful, but right now, it was just another offensive skill. A devastating one. It would let her threaten higher-level enemies. Surprise them. Even wreck them, temporarily.

  But without Mana Vacuum, she doubted she could even trigger it. Its real power was tied to what other uses she could uncover—and to Mana Vacuum’s specific function: boosting her passive Traits and any single equipped Title by absorbing and condensing excessive quantities of mana. She had expended every drop of ambient mana in a storm just for a single teleport.

  Well, it wasn’t teleporting. Not really. Given the nature of her trait, it felt more like skipping forward in time to a new position.

  Kelly decided to call it her Time-skipping?.

  Now, the battle-crazed scientist was essentially dry. Her body was pulling in the beginnings of mana, starting from scratch. The last reset had left her empty. She’d have to recharge and replicate the same effect again.

  Time Attunement was still incredibly powerful. Its implications were frankly profound. But one element of the status description hooked her attention and didn’t let go.

  It didn’t just say teleport. It didn’t say time-skip. The word it used was open-ended. Extremely so.

  [...in heightened states near death, allows for slight manipulation of its effects on you…]

  Manipulation.

  If she was near death—and Kelly had figured out how to trick the status, how to fake ‘near death,’ ages ago—she could, in theory, influence time itself.

  Kelly watched an armored vehicle skid to a halt across the street. People scrambled on its back, hefting launchers toward a shambling, six-limbed horror that rounded the corner. It was leaking something vibrant and toxic. Brickwork crumbled in its wake.

  She turned her head away. The spectacle was background noise.

  “Manipulation, huh.”

  She needed a guinea pig.

  The question wasn’t what, but who. Who could she test it on?

  She mentally scanned her knowledge of the city for a viable target; moving through options. Genecorp? No. They were too useful now. The skeletons under the city? Maybe. A proper test required a proper subject. Something with density. Or something that would improve her day, boost her positioning, and squeal in just the right way while she took notes.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Her hand dipped into her personal storage and hoisted a weapon, sliding a magazine into place.

  Her smile spread.

  Simon Lau stepped forward in Times Square. His crew hesitated behind him, even though they had her surrounded in a wide half-circle, a net of perfect firing angles. Simon had initially told them she was below 2.0. Then they had read her EQ score. Seeing her at the peak of the threshold stage, a few with higher-tier weaponry remained confident. Others ran. The rest stood behind them.

  One of his men, still scanning her, stammered, “What… what the hell is with that EQ score?”

  Kelly tilted her head, baton in hand. “What do you mean, my emotional intelligence? I’m a very caring person, you know.”

  “No. Your level! What… how?” the man said, backing up a step.

  Simon’s jaw tightened. He stepped forward, his crew solidifying the half-circle behind him. “You really want to do this?” he asked, his voice steady.

  As the surrounding mana was sucked into her in a storm—a roaring, invisible vacuum—Kelly twirled her baton, noting how easily the mana within it adjusted to her movements. “Absolutely,” she said.

  Simon sighed. “Shoot her.”

  Kelly raced forward. But instead of just running, she recalled the exact feeling from the last loop, from the fight with that overpowered old man. The memory was a blueprint.

  As before, the familiar sensation unfolded. It wasn’t just one sense. It felt like opening a new set of eyes and ears and touch and taste, all at once, lost in the deluge of sensation. She repeated exactly what she had done the last loop. A sense of impossible expansion and pure connection to something deep within, an unnatural break in reality itself, overtook her.

  She timeskipped.

  In that same instant, she equipped the Mythril Fist and swung, aiming to reappear outside of the encirclement.

  The result was a crater.

  A deafening crack of displaced air split the square. A bowl of shattered asphalt and pulverized concrete ten feet wide appeared where the center of their formation had been. Two shooters and a chunk of the street were just gone. Dust billowed. The remaining crew stumbled back, weapons wavering.

  Kelly stood at the crater’s fresh edge, the Mythril Fist gleaming on her arm. She looked at the hole, then at Simon, whose professional calm had fissured into pure shock.

  “Incredible…” Kelly muttered to herself.

  The first exploratory trial was a resounding success. Unfortunately, two guinea pigs didn’t survive.

  It was as though she had pressed a button on reality’s remote. She wasn’t teleporting; she was moving so fast through time it may as well have been a teleport. It was faster than her mind could comprehend, but her internal clock showed her time had moved ahead of reality, like a skipped heartbeat.

  This was… mind-boggling. She would need to test the implications. What else could she do?

  But even at its first grade, the Trait drained her of every ounce of mana her Aberration trait had absorbed for a single use. That was more than enough to do absurd things. Could she slow it down? Take it further? Actually comprehend it so she moved fast through a slow world, like a Demigod-level speed specialist? Could she stop time?

  It was as though reality bent to allow her to move beyond it.

  “I have to test this right now!” Kelly said, looking at her hands as the last of the mana storm dissipated around her. The crater in Times Square was still settling. Now she needed a bigger sample size.

  She had exclaimed excitedly—a loud, raw “Yes!” that tore from her throat—but then, reality clicked back into place. She quickly equipped her Vitality title. The shift was immediate, a cooling filter over her senses, a trade-off. She remembered the cost: she had essentially weakened herself for the rest of the fight. Her test subjects—or enemies, if she was being technical about it—were still present. Still armed. They hardly posed a threat, but they were there; their guns were pointed in her general direction, which warranted a response.

  The massive impact was… unexpected.

  Kelly wasn’t quite sure how she’d done it. Towards the end, as she’d struck out, the time-skip effect had concentrated on her swing. It broke the sound barrier. Not once. Multiple times in a single instant.

  She’d had to transform her weapon and summon a dense formation of instant shields with a thought. Just to stop her own arm from turning to hot soup on impact.

  There was a crater where her weapon had cracked the ground at supersonic speed. Debris and fallen bodies littered the street.

  Some distance away, Simon frowned. He crouched by the glowing heat marks at the edge of the crater. “What the… How? What was that supposed to be?”

  Kelly pointed at the ground. “Science.”

  Simon stood up slowly, his movements deliberate. “People don’t teleport.” He said each word clearly, as if explaining to a child. “Not humans. We don’t have the tech. And if we did, it wouldn’t be here with you.” He gestured at her, his other hand resting casually near his hip. “Your score spiked. The scanner flared. It looked like a… spell. Like magic.”

  "I know a guy with anger issues and a deadtech rig who'd disagree," Kelly said. Her face breaking into a genuinely pleased expression.

  “And spells,” she added, tipping her head, “are just equations people don’t understand yet.” She held up a finger. “Not saying I have spells, by the way. Just a general observation about the universe."

  Simon eyed her in silence. She could almost hear the cogs ticking in his criminally inclined mind, grinding through possibilities, recalculating what was possible.

  He stuttered. A genuine break in his composure. "You… holy shit. You can do magic? How the hell can you do magic? How the hell can you even fight?" His voice rose with each question.

  Those were the words of Simon Lau. He looked on with a disturbed expression plastered on his face. He slowly inched backward, one foot dragging through the rubble, as the survivors of Kelly's blow stumbled or didn’t move at all. To him, it appeared as though she had moved like a speed specialist. Like a Demigod. A monster that had no business being on the planet and wearing her decidedly non-threatening, practical jacket. He scanned her with a flick of his eyes, and his scanner must have shown him a score that should not have been able to do that. That realization caused him to panic. His hand drifted, slow and deliberate, toward a stack of grenades at his feet.

  "I thought I knew you," he said. It was an obvious effort, a bid to buy time for his remaining men to slowly reach for their weapons. His tone was deliberately nostalgic, soft. "You’d always pick the table near the window. Just you and your notepads. Vintage—old school. I think you had two of them, both filled with equations I couldn’t make sense of. I never asked what you were working on. Maybe I should have.”

  Kelly watched him, internally noting his fingers brushing against the poorly concealed grenades. She kept her body loose, ready.

  Simon continued, his eyes never leaving hers. “I… I thought I had everyone figured out. People don’t change much, I told myself. Their habits, their routines—you can read a person by the way they take their coffee. I thought you were the person who would always sit at that same table, sipping the same drink, jotting down numbers like they mattered. Like the rest of the nobodies.”

  He paused, tapping his fingers on the cracked earth, his eyes never leaving her.

  “I’ve been wrong about people before. But I’ve never been this wrong.“

  Kelly’s jaw dropped slightly. She blinked. ‘What? You believe me?’ The thought was so surprising she almost spoke the words aloud. She waved a hand hastily, the motion dismissive and a little frantic. “No, no. I was totally lying, dude. It’s deadtech. It’s not magic, and I’m not a nascent godling discovering their science-given magic. Totally. It’s teleportation deadtech. Yep. That’s it.”

  She kicked a piece of shattered pavement. It skittered into the crater. “One hundred percent, definitely, absolutely just very advanced machinery you unfortunately don’t have the blueprints for.”

  Simon’s fingers brushed the ring-pull of a grenade. He didn’t smile. “You’re a terrible liar.”

  Two men fired simultaneously. The gunshots were two sharp cracks, poorly synchronized. Simon threw the stack of primed grenades and ducked for cover, his hand already reaching for a second stack tucked by a shattered wall. Kelly watched the grenades arc through the air, their pins already pulled. She didn't duck. She stepped forward, snatched the entire cluster out of the air with a soundless grab, and stuffed it into her shadow space in one swift movement. The lethal package vanished into nothing. Her other hand was already moving. Her blade whistled through the air, a silver flicker, and sliced through the first man’s Achilles tendon with surgical accuracy. He collapsed, his scream a high, raw thing against the concrete. That was a trick that would have once taken her countless loops to master. Now, she barely had to think about it.

  Against lower-level enemies, the whip form of her weapon could deliver around five to ten strikes per second. At Kelly’s present level, she could finally utilize it without amputating, maiming, or beheading herself in the process. Progress was beautiful.

  She had kept Mana Vacuum equipped the entire time. While Simon was talking about coffee and routines, she was absorbing mana. It swirled to her in an invisible vortex, a storm only she could feel, siphoning the ambient energy from the cracked street and the panicked bodies around her even as they fought.

  Her muscles grew taut. Her regeneration spiked, knitting tiny fatigue tears instantly. Her hair lifted and flowed as if underwater. Her teeth buzzed with a low, electric power.

  But all of that was just a side-effect. The light show. The physiological confetti.

  The real mechanism was simpler and more demanding. As it stood, she had to have tons of mana stored densely in her body, or absorb all the mana in a small area, for a single use of her time magic. It worked better in mana-dense areas—like the East Grid, or Haider's mansion, or, later in the day, when the entire region's mana spiked naturally. Right now, the volume she’d gathered was short. An inconvenience. A single drop compared to the ocean she could collect in a full day, or from a source like the Cube. It still wasn’t where it needed to be.

  Could it ruin a god’s whole day? Right now, the answer was no. The Conductor could still wipe the floor with her. Illvyr and his puppet too. And the angel. And the entire echelon. And Ren, her teacher. But that was why Kelly was out performing field tests.

  Her natural absorption could be boosted. She’d figured out the steps. Fill her transforming switchblade with [Absorb] runes. Boost it again by changing her mimic skin to layer [Absorb] mana crystals directly into her dermal tissue. That would turn the steady vacuum into a storm, the welcome storm into a screaming typhoon.

  Time had a structure. Now it was shattered into static. What was left was the everything, all at once—the deafening, screaming everything that is, was, or could be. The overload felt great. It was a buzzing typhoon right behind her eyes. Kelly’s eyes burned with a power no mortal should ever have.

  Her weapon and her palms glowed. Visible light seeped from her skin as mana rushed to her, charging the connection in the center of her being, preparing for field test two of her time affinity.

  Time magic. The ultimate counter for immortal assholes.

  The second man saw her weapon humming with that inner light. He hesitated, his gun trembling in his hands. Simon’s jaw went slack, his professional composure crumbling into pure disbelief.

  “Run,” Kelly suggested, her grin sharp enough to cut glass. “Or don’t. Your call. I have something I’m testing and I need the practice anyway.”