Kelly tapped the side of her temple, replaying the creature's EQ readings overlaying her vision.

  The Enhancement Quotient had been restricted for centuries, but like most things from the Augment Wars, it never truly disappeared. People still measured themselves by it—still spoke about it from the dark underbelly of society to its upper echelon, where augmentation was more than a tool. For some it was identity.

  1.0 EQ. That was the baseline. The standard against which all human performance was measured. Most kids called it a person's 'level,' everyone else just called it their EQ, their enhancement score. One EQ unit equaled the average maximum capability of an unaugmented human being: strength, speed, perception, cognitive ability, and resilience combined into a neat number. A total score of 1.0.

  Anything above that? Enhanced.

  You could specialize, depending on your career. On strength, speed, cognition, resilience, or perception. A strength-focused EQ working in construction, and a speed-focused EQ serving the military could have the same number, and would roughly be in the same range in the other fields, though one would clearly outsprint the other while the former could clearly outlift them in turn—while the cognition specialist had already figured out the outcome. Resilience specialists were simply more durable, harder to injure, and when their scores were really high, some were practically unkillable. It was a complex mess of algorithmic calculation—something that made Kelly understand why the younger ages simply resorted to calling it their 'Levels.’ Kelly, like everyone else who paid taxes, rarely used the term 'level' and almost always referred to it as her EQ.

  Kelly's current EQ augment reading was 2.84. Just under two-hundred-and-eighty-four percent stronger, faster, and more cognitively capable than the average human. Yesterday, before the end of the world, she had been a cognition specialist, possessing an enhanced mind, with a little bit of speed and strength to help with handling delicate or dangerous materials. That placed her well within legal limits—the augmentations allowed by the Bio-Ethics Accords of 2701, which limited enhancements to no more than 6.0EQ augmentation for civilians. Six hundred percent Stronger than the average unaugmented human.

  Soldiers, police, some corporate security forces, legally registered mercenaries, high-positioned corporate or critical employees, and anyone rich or simply well-connected enough could be sanctioned to legally register beyond 6.0, but for the rest of society, anything beyond that was strictly forbidden.

  The reason? The Augmentation Wars.

  The Augment Wars were a direct result of a long interplanetary war with a distant and singular threat beyond the stars, which forced humanity to invent technology to augment themselves by vast degrees to overcome it.

  Those who survived the wars were left with enhancements far beyond the 6.0 EQ threshold and never returned to normal life—they couldn't; instead, they carved empires from the ruins. The world had never seen humans who could think faster, move quicker, and kill more efficiently than anyone else alive. They were no longer soldiers; they became kings, CEOs, and warlords, reshaping society around their inhuman advantages. Power bred ambition, and unchecked superiority twisted morality. Over decades, the augmented elite established dynasties, hoarding technology and rewriting laws to preserve their rule. After razing the land, turning most of Earth's atmosphere unbreathable, and destabilizing everything, the war ended, but its aftereffects remained: high levels of augmentation were regulated and banned outright to prevent a new age of demigods. But Pandora's box had been opened, and augments were here to stay.

  The worst part? That hadn't been the worst war, or even the most recent one, nor had it been the one that had polluted half the planet with deadly mutagens.

  Despite regulations, the corporations still experimented, still tested the boundaries of what humanity could become. They just hid it better. "One rule for them, one rule for us," Kelly smirked at the absurdity of it all. The planet was in crisis; Legal limits were meaningless now, in the ruins.

  The truck barreled down the fractured street, bouncing over cracks that split the earth like veins, but Kelly's grip on the wheel was steady. This was her best run yet—no creature-induced missed turns, no sudden deaths or catastrophic detonations, no hordes, and no bad resets. She'd perfected the timing.

  She had broken through security drones, crashed past an evac transport battling what looked like a giant eagle from hell, and once, after getting tired of trying to outmaneuver them, drove straight through a besieged autonomous patrol tank. That had taken three resets to get right, but the explosion was spectacular, at least.

  She had been shot, burned, crushed, and electrocuted—all to get to one location. The military lab was always ahead, always within reach, always just barely beyond her grasp.

  Kelly never stopped. Never slowed. Never swerved.

  Even when that winged horror swooped overhead—a scaled, monstrous predator with leathery wings wide enough to blot out the crumbling skyline, dousing her and the road she drove through in a long shadow, its jaws trailing streams of fire like the molten breath of an industrial furnace, its eyes holding something akin to intelligence—she barely spared it a thought as it flew overhead, her cold logic brushing past society's need for myths. All she saw was an organism with heat-resistant plating, energy-based flight mechanics compensating for a laughable lack of aerodynamics, and a need for further study.

  Not magic, she thought. Nope, definitely not magic. Just physics and technology we're too primitive to name.

  A mess of contradictions that begged for a scalpel and a vivisection table. Some anomaly in evolution, like the anomalous creatures she'd struggled to study in the early days of the loops with her limited tools. Magic was a placeholder for ignorance, and ignorance wasn't acceptable.

  She would only call it 'magic' once she understood what it did and how it worked.

  “I'll figure you out later," she muttered, watching the beast dive toward the distant rooftops.

  She thumbed the engine, swerving around a pile of rubble that hadn't been there in previous loops. The world was always changing, little details shifting like a cosmic joke. She'd learned to expect it—roads collapsing differently, debris falling in new patterns, death finding her in ways she hadn't anticipated whenever she stepped to the left instead of the right, or vice versa.

  "New rubble? New crater? You've been busy."

  Kelly loved the unexpected—lived for it. Seeing something unique meant her path could lead to a new, previously unseen result. She smiled as the truck bounced over the freshly broken pavement. That hadn't been there last loop—a new crack in the road. A new deviation. The universe didn't improvise often. When it did, someone called it Chaos Theory. It meant the rules remained the same, but the margins completely changed. You misplace one decimal, move one single hair out of place, and trigger a series of unexpected events that meant Tuesday upgraded to full extinction.

  Sometimes, the loops changed.

  Butterfly effects. The last one had been small, barely noticeable. But today, the world had learned a new trick. And that mattered more than the destruction. Destruction was easy. New patterns were rare.

  This was interesting.

  ***

  The entrance to the lab stood within sight now, its reinforced steel doors barely visible through the twisted wreckage of the street. This was the farthest she had ever made it, a new milestone carved out of almost a hundred failures.

  Her truck rumbled to a stop behind a massive pile of debris stacked as high as first-floor windows, slabs of concrete and metal too perfectly placed to be accidental—like something or someone intelligent had decided to bar entry to the streets and buildings that lay beyond. She noted the precision behind the construction, the way it blocked every potential route through the area, forcing people into a choke point. Deliberate. Extremely so. "That's cute," Kelly muttered, grabbing her blade.

  She stepped out, boots hitting the ground with a satisfying crunch, glass and ash grinding underfoot as she took the first steps into uncharted territory.

  It was always better the first time.

  Kelly let the engine idle behind her, its steady rumble the only sound in the empty street. The peak of the building that housed her military lab was barely visible beyond the wreckage, tantalizingly close, but the way forward would not be simple. She prepared to cut her way through the wall, her foot raised to step forward, then she saw something unexpected.

  Simon Lau.

  She spotted him standing near the blockade, barking orders to a group of heavily armed followers, his coffee-stained apron peeking out beneath nanofiber police gear, riddled with bullet holes and bloodstains. His once-charming smile had hardened into something colder and unfriendly, his easy charisma turned to steel-edged authority.

  Kelly stopped a few steps from the barricade, watching the scene unfold. A jury-rigged security droid scanned the barricade, stopping any from sneaking past as Simon's crew dragged a scrawny traveller out of a beaten-down vehicle, tossing him to the ground with little ceremony before rifling through his bags. They worked with efficient brutality, stripping the man of everything useful before executing the man with a soundless pistol.

  Before the world began to end, Simon had been the once-charming owner of her favourite coffee shop, one of the only places that still sold real coffee and not the synth stuff that everyone had gotten used to. Now, he stood behind his makeshift barricade with an air of cold authority and a small troop of dangerous-looking men. He'd been a curiosity even before the world fell apart-there were rumors, back then that he was more than just a barista, that the only server of real coffee in the city was a man with a deeply criminal past and connections he'd managed to bury under a polished smile, an excellent espresso, and a business funded by a criminal retirement plan. Kelly had dismissed it as conjecture, until she met him and found his face vaguely familiar, triggering distant memories she'd rather forget.

  Both Kelly's childhood and Simon's past were too close in proximity to criminality to never have crossed, even in passing. He knew some suppressed part of her recognised him for who he really was, even if she didn't. He just didn't know where she had seen him, or how—of course, she had been much younger and looked much different back then.

  But now, there was no question. The apron was still there, faintly visible under his stolen nanofiber police armor, bloodstained and riddled with bullet holes. He wasn't hiding anymore, running the street with efficiency, openly displaying that he was a man who knew exactly how to use power and intimidation.

  And the way she'd just witnessed him casually pick up and move the dead traveller's small vehicle, by himself? He was probably a strength specialist, and likely enhanced beyond what she remembered.

  Yesterday, he had been around the 2.0 enhancement level, like her. But now that the city was a flame, he was showing up somewhere between 390 to 400% boosted beyond baseline, or 3.9 to 4.0 EQ, which meant he was 41% stronger than she was, give or take a decimal.

  Which also meant he had only received the upgrade today and was likely still healing, his muscles repairing themselves and adjusting from surgery—unless he could ignore the pain and was willing to damage his upgrades, he wouldn't be able to exert his full strength. His men were armed with weapons that looked looted from fallen law enforcement and followed his every word like disciples. He'd always been quick, clever, and resourceful, but seeing him now, calculating, and hardened? Kelly wondered if the warlord he'd become had been lurking under that smile all along, waiting for the right kind of chaos to let him out.

  Her lips twitched. "Always said caffeine could kill me," she muttered, her voice unheard in the ruins.

  Kelly stepped out of the truck, hands loose at her sides, gaze sweeping over the mess ahead.

  The barricade was a jigsaw of burned-out vehicles, scrap metal, and the remains of people who had tried their luck earlier. Some still smoldered. A few still bled.

  She nudged a detached arm with the toe of her boot. Huh. Fresh.

  Everyone quickly gleaned that the center of the city was more dangerous. Why had Simon blocked such a dangerous road and not one of the exits? Or the evac routes? Surely that would be more profitable... Why were Simon's men still in the city?

  Kelly scanned the scene, tracking the corpses, the roadblocks, the positioning, and noted the intention. Rather than block the way out of the city, Simon's barricade was intended to block the way deeper in.

  That meant one thing.

  The Tower.

  Her workplace sat at the end of this street and he had locked down the only road leading into her lab.

  Almost a hundred 'todays' ago, or technically, yesterday—the building belonged to Vaughn Industries, a major player in the corporate wars and Kelly's employer. The company was run by Gideon Vaughn, a relic of wars fought with gene-sequencers and enhancement protocols instead of bullets. He walked out of the Augment Wars with an EQ score so high it rewrote the limits of human capability, and he built a corporate empire that never had to answer to laws it could afford to rewrite. Vaughn Industries was the leading corporation dominating multiple high-tech research fields like biotechnology, biomechanical cybernetics, advanced weaponry, and experimental research. Its products sat at the bleeding edge of military innovation and flexible legality:

  Accord-breaking EQ augments reserved only for government and military use. Self-repairing temporary nanorobotics, capable of rewriting the limits of battlefield medicine. Priceless in warzones, and pretty much everywhere else. Corporate-engineered soldiers, faster, stronger, and more durable than anything natural selection had ever intended. The company held deep roots in government contracts and global and corporate warfare.

  It was technology that could build empires... or burn them down.

  Simon wasn't stupid. He understood value, and he understood power. That's why his men were still here. The rest of the city was in freefall, but Simon's crew wasn't scrambling for scraps like the other survivors. They had a goal.

  A stupidly ambitious one.

  There was a treasure trove of advancements, sitting abandoned in a city unraveling by the second. If they got inside first—gained access to and controlled the building? They wouldn't just loot the place. They'd be upgrading. Rewrite the body, rewrite the rules, take the fast lane to godhood.

  Before the world tore itself open and started spewing out apocalyptic freebies and creatures that did the impossible, that kind of power had been locked behind clearance levels and kill squads—now, it was up for grabs.

  Though they came with a heavy cost if you survived the crisis, planetary crisis laws could sanction emergency upgrades in very special circumstances, assuming you could get to them without being turned into sushi.

  Kelly let out a slow breath, shaking her head.

  Of course this was about the lab. Of course Simon was staking his claim.

  Simon leaned against the wreckage, arms crossed. Same easy posture he'd used behind the counter, different setting. Instead of a coffee pot, he had a rifle slung over his shoulder, his men flanking him with weapons ready.

  If Simon's out here holding this position to keep the scavengers out, then the rest of his crew are probably already at the facility, swarming the walls and trying to break their way in before someone else beats them to it, she thought.

  Too bad for them, I've already called dibs. She'd have to introduce them to a little concept called hostile corporate takeover.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "Dr Voss," Simon greeted, voice light, almost amused. "Didn't expect to see you still breathing."

  "Well, I've had a lot of practice. Didn't expect to see you playing border control," she shot back whilst continuing to step closer, nodding her head pointedly at the large barricade. "What, the end of the world made you territorial?"

  His men stood ready. Some kept their attention on Kelly, but others remained focused on a small gap in the barricade with impatient and eager expressions. But It didn't feel like they were guarding it—they were waiting for word from the lab, Kelly noted. Waiting for confirmation that their friends had gotten inside, and for the moment they secured everything.

  Simon shrugged at her question. "Good business opportunity."

  Kelly stepped even closer, walking as she spoke, and some of his men shifted, their fingers sliding over the triggers in response to her approach. Kelly didnt care, "figured you'd be off-planet by now." She said.

  Simon's brow twitched, just slightly. "That was for the ones who mattered. You know that."

  She nodded once. None of that was news to her. The corporations and elites had fled long ago, as soon as the portals stopped being static and harmless. New York had the first eruption, then Beijing. The people who could have made a difference the CEOs, politicians, and top-tier enhanced humans—were the first to run. Their EQ augmentation scores were off the charts, and they took those advantages to orbital colonies and beyond, leaving everyone else behind to fend for themselves. As far as Kelly knew, so far, no one left on Earth had an EQ high enough to fix any of it.

  Simon leveled his gun at her chest, head tilting slightly away from the sights. "You're outnumbered, unarmed, and alone—standing in the middle of my road," he said, tone casual, almost relaxed. "So let's make this easy. Drop everything valuable, and I won't put a round through your skull."

  Kelly blinked at him, then down at the gun, then at the half-dozen rifles aimed in her direction.

  She let out a slow breath, raised her hands as if to surrender and walked closer in faux-defeat. Then, she grinned.

  "See, that's the thing, Simon," she said. "I'm immortal and an asshole. It doesn't matter what you throw at me. I don't stop. Can't stop. Ever. I'll keep trying to get better. You'll break before I do."

  Behind him, his men shifted, a small few of their eyes flashed with lower grade scanners, the entirety of them sizing her up before immediately dismissing her as any form of threat. One of them looked to another and did circular motions with his finger beside his head, the universal symbol for "she's freakin' crazy"

  But Kelly was calm—even as a barista, Simon wasn't the type to waste time on charity. If he wasn't trying to kill her yet, it was because he thought she had something worth taking. She could feel the calculation among his men, the weighing of risk versus reward and seeing nothing but reward. To them, she was one person surrounded by many, alone and unarmed.

  Kelly rocked back on her heels, sizing them up right back.

  Thanks to her initial surrender, she was closer to Simon, but not so close she'd be able to close the distance without getting shot. And his men were spread wide to either side of the barricade. Criminals, lower EQ. but experienced, judging by what they'd accomplished in such short time. The heavy hitters must've been trying to break into her lab. Given their experience, and Simon's reputation, most would avoid shooting to avoid friendly fire. Her neural augments kicked into gear, calculating the trajectories of their aim and the best angle to position herself to avoid fatal injury.

  Simon scoffed, "Sure. Whatever. Man, i was hoping we wouldn't have to kill you, that truck's pretty valuable." He signalled to one his men, who began to approach Kelly with surprising diligence, a pair of cuffs in one hand and his rifle's aim never leaving her vitals. A scant few fanned out to her sides to get better firing angles, "Take her.” Simon commented, “Kill her if she struggles, it'll take a while, but we can rig the biometrics later."

  I guess this really isn't their first rodeo, she thought, equally impressed and disgusted. It wasn't hers, either.

  And then she moved.

  The moment stretched—the approaching man’s finger tightening on the trigger in reaction to the sudden movement, everyone else adjusting their aim—but Kelly was already inside his guard, closing the space between them faster than most of them could react. But not all of them. She felt the bullets tear through her outer thigh, upper arm, and flank, but had already accounted for the angle of their trajectories.

  But she had miscalculated and the bullet in her flank had hit something vital. The bleeding was internal and impossible to stem, but it was contained for now; it would start slow then worsen over a very short amount of time and unless she made it to the facility soon, this day would end in a series of catastrophic organ failures.

  This is why I need my lab, the home and public augments... They're just not good enough to survive this, she thought, irritated.

  Kelly grabbed the gun's barrel and ripped it sideways, twisting hard enough to dislocate the man's wrist in one motion. Momentum carried her past him to the next hit—an open-palm strike straight to Simon's throat. Simon staggered, more in surprise than pain, gasping, eyes wide, but Kelly didn't stop. She never stopped.

  A rifle shot cracked behind her. Kelly pivoted, using all of her body weight to wrench Simon into the bullet's path, placing her foot by his to trip his balance and counter his greater strength. He grunted as the round tore through his shoulder, but she barely heard it over the sound of her own laughter.

  "God, this is fun," she said, slamming her elbow into his wound. "You should've see how the last fight went the first ten times. Spoiler-way worse for me. But I learn fast."

  Simon snarled, fighting against her grip. He was stronger—augmented. But she had taken him by surprise and it had happened in less than a second. "You're insane," he said, nearly breaking free.

  Kelly yanked him forward and kicked the back of his knee, using his own weight to send him off-balance and positioned between the guns and her. She tilted her head by his ear. "Nah. Just stubborn."

  Then she turned toward his men with two rifles and a hostage. One rifle was pointed at them, the other at simon.

  "Alright, gentlemen," she said, flexing her fingers, "I've got twenty minutes—maybe forty tops before this becomes a big waste of time and i fall flat, dead from internal bleeding and organ failure," She could feel her strength fading by the second, her mind whirring.

  But Kelly smiled through blood loss, still holding Simon at gunpoint, and his men found themselves stuck in the world's dumbest equation: shoot and risk killing their boss, or hesitate and let the lunatic bleeding out in front of them decide how this ended. For a second, nobody moved

  Then the sky burned.

  Kelly didn't have to look up. She already knew what kind of people could afford to fly.

  The sky had turned into a problem. Too many things in it wanted to kill you. The flying creatures people had started calling dragons and other, millenia old names had made air travel an expensive gamble. Anything that wasn't armed to the teeth with cutting-edge firepower had a decent chance of getting ripped out of the sky and turned into flaming wreckage.

  Which meant most transport stayed on the ground.

  That made it easy to hear the incoming ship before it arrived. The hum of high-grade propulsion, the shift in air pressure, the low, bone-deep vibration of something expensive moving fast.

  A sleek transport craft descended hard, engines kicking up a storm of dust and debris as it slowed just enough to deploy its cargo. Five figures dropped onto the pavement—with full tactical gear, high-end augments layered into their bodies, movements so precise they barely disturbed the rubble beneath themenhancements no civilian could afford. Their helmets reflected the carnage around them, their armor calibrated to be as much a message as it was protection.

  A Suicide Squad.

  The elites bailed leaving the mess behind, but they left the real prizes reality-warping scrap you couldn't find anywhere else. And now they're sending their goons back to scavenge the weird shit reality coughed up. Figures.

  The suicide squads were the high-risk retrieval teams, mercenaries hired by those same off-world elites to dive into the chaos and rip those resources straight from the wreckage.

  Outfitted with high-end augments, tech, or powersuits that could tear through anomalies like wet paper, and paid enough to ignore the fact that their life expectancy came with an asterisk.

  Simon's men tensed. The mercs didn't even glance at them. One of them scanned the barricade and gave a single, dismissive gesture forward.

  "Move."

  Kelly didn't budge. Simon's men held position.

  A brief silence settled between them. The grip on triggers tightened, armour shifting against the sides. Someone cleared their throat, but no one spoke. A boot scraped against the floor, abrupt and sharp. Eyes flicked toward it, then back to the targets just as quickly. The tension was thick, and Kelly felt the familiar ripple of 'this is about to go to shit' settle in her gut.

  Kelly subtly rolled her shoulders, still weighing the odds.

  Then the barricade exploded.

  Something massive ripped through the wreckage, scattering cars, bodies, and steel like paper. Fifteen feet tall, built like a moving fortress, it crashed forward with the force of a thing that had never been stopped and moved with the strength of a being that only knew fear as something that smelled delicious.

  "Troll!"

  Someone shouted. The troll slammed into the nearest mercenary, sending him airborne and crashing into a distant building. The remaining four adjusted instantly, moving with the expert precision that came with expensive augments and complete detachment as they opened fire, rounds tearing into its hide yet failing to slow it down.

  Simon's crew scrambled, most firing, others running. A few decided it was a great day for rocket launchers.

  Kelly?

  She ran.

  The chaos was perfect. While everyone else was reacting, she sprinted toward the barricade, her legs propelling her far faster and longer than they should have, weaving between debris and bodies before anyone thought to stop her.

  One of Simon's men noticed and raised his pistol from across the street. She didn't dodge.

  Instead, she grabbed a fallen rifle from the ground without breaking stride and hurled it at his face with startling force, knocking the shooter backward.

  Civilians always panicked when she did that. Most people expected you to shoot.

  "Appreciate it," she muttered, vaulting the last stretch.

  Then she stumbled, blood pouring from her chest.

  Kelly didn't see the shot that stopped her. One moment, she was diving through the gap for the other side of the barricade; The next, her body was already shutting down, nerves screaming, vision tunneling.

  Her eyes dragged upward, locking onto the man who landed the shot. He stood over her, gun levelled, oozing self-satisfaction and poor trigger discipline.

  "Really?" Her voice came out wet, thick with something she didn't have time to analyze. "Man, I hope you enjoy this moment, 'cause you are not gonna like the next one."

  The muzzle flash answered for him.

  ***

  She sat up gasping awake in her bed, the taste of blood still in her mouth, the sound of emergency evacuation warnings muted by her windows.

  "Oh, come on! I was right there!"

  Before the loops, Kelly had worn lab coats, not combat rigs. She'd studied quantum entanglement and dark matter theory in a corporate lab as a part of a larger team—as nothing but an intern—her biggest thrill a successful particle collision or new discovery with the project she'd struggled so hard to join. The portals had hung in the sky for weeks then, dormant, and unexplained. A mysterious phenomena everyone sought to investigate. Then all of the portals tore open, and the world ended. She had familiarised herself with more than a few different fields since then. Hell, there were entire loops she'd dedicated to singular areas of expertise.

  The first loop had been an accident—despite investigation, she wasn't even sure how it had started. She suspected it had something to do with the bombardment of zero fallout miniature Higgs cannons that had struck the floating man in Times Square on the very first day, before never appearing again in any other loop; the same time a multichromatic magical explosion of twisted energy had blasted through half of New York. It was also at that exact same moment, that she and the rest of the team of scientists she'd interned for had begun an experiment dubbed 'project portal' in Vaughn's military lab. Kelly had been standing closest to the experiment when the orbital bombardment hit. The elites had opted for a safer measure of firing small accelerated particle streams at near-light speed, delivering energy outputs exceeding nuclear weapons without radiation fallout and a limited range of impact at the largest portal and its apparent orchestrator. The floating man, had held other ideas. A collapsing building, a scream, a twisted flash, and Kelly had died for the first time.

  In the second loop she had been terrified, and the creatures thrived on her fear. And when the portals opened for a third time, Kelly had tried diplomacy. A scientist standing before the end of all things, begging for understanding. She'd been devoured before she finished speaking.

  She died. Whenever she died, she woke up at the start of the day, without fail. The world had changed; a butterfly effect filling her path with obstacles and countless creatures; she could no longer reach her lab. And if she waited until the end of the day? Two separate events would simultaneously wipe New York from the map.

  The first would be an explosion; half of the city would be glassed by a magical equivalent to Hiroshima. And after that? Anything on the other half would be trapped in the city by a spatial cage of magic, then, hours later, eaten by a giant creature in the sky the size of starships.

  Her world would end and she would die with it, both devoured by the beings that invaded the planet and the calamity they caused that destroyed it—then she'd be sent back through time to the very start of it all, waking up at dawn.

  Pain stopped being interesting around loop fifty. She'd hacked her receptors to dampen it at will—it still hurt like hell, but it no longer made her wish she was dead. The trauma didn't last either. Screams, burning, bones, blood—none of it faded, none of it got easier. But she didn't break. Apparently, that wasn't how she was built. She wasn't fine, but she was built for this—literally. And in her world, that was the better version.

  At first, she had been terrified of it all; of the creatures, dying, and the pain. Now, death was a practically her business partner.

  Thanks to her neural augments, her memory was drastically improved; added features like memory banks and background A.I. assisted recall meant that if she tried, she could almost perfectly remember the actions of the previous loop.

  She had neural recall and too many resets to be this far behind. The problem wasn't effort. It was equipment and access. With the right materials, her home lab could 3D print, build, and repurpose almost anything—except tools sharp enough to measure and cut into the fabric of reality, or the perfect biological samples currently decorating New York's skyline and streets as though they owned the place.

  She rose, attempting to repeat the actions of the previous ‘day' as close to identically as she could. Except this time, she'd make sure she didn't lose her favourite weapon on the way to the barricade.

  She held on to the weapon right up until the troll burst through the barricade and began to treat Simon's men and the suicide squad of mercenaries like whack-a-moles.

  While everyone was busy having a moment of existential horror, Kelly sprinted toward the barricade, boots crunching over debris, slipping through gaps. Prepared.

  One of Simon's men slipped from cover, rifle raised—but this time, Kelly was ready. She barely looked before squeezing the trigger, a sharp burst of gunfire cutting him down mid-step. No last-second ambush, no repeat of her last failure.

  The man screamed loud enough to rattle Kelly's teeth, writhing on the ground with his agony cutting through the gunfire like a siren strapped to a jet engine.

  Kelly felt the ground rumble and a shadow behind her, and then her gut erupted in pain.

  The creature's claws punched through her chest, and she laughed—a wet, gurgling sound that bubbled with surprise.

  Kelly's blade flashed, carving clean through the creature's reinforced femur-whatever it was made of, it had the density of titanium. The wound sealed itself almost instantly, muscle and sinew rewinding reality like it never happened, using the energy flooding the environment as fuel. It wasn't science, wasn't tech, and it was barely genetics—instead, it was pure, raw, unchecked.... Something. A process she hadn't cracked. Yet.

  "Oh, we're playing the ignore physics' game? That's fine. I like a challenge." She muttered through blood-gritted teeth. "Regenerative properties, my ass."

  A large part of her craved the discovery of how it worked—how a seemingly unintelligent creature could manipulate an element that made up 95% of reality to achieve the impossible.

  Hope that trick works in pieces, she thought as the world blurred, her body gave out, and darkness swallowed her whole.

  ***

  She woke up in her bed on the same day, again, ignoring the sound of emergency evacuation warnings. Her face pursed with determination. If the world wanted to throw infinite obstacles in her path, fine. She'd throw herself at them until something cracked.

  Kelly knew there was no guarantee the loops would last forever—one day, she might wake up, bleeding out for real, no reset waiting. But if scientists never took risks, humanity would still be shivering in caves, rubbing sticks together and screaming at lightning. The first humans who harnessed fire probably lost a few limbs figuring it out. The first astronauts? Strapped themselves into controlled explosions just to reach orbit. Progress wasn't safe.

  The first Al-designed nanofactories collapsed under their own molecular instability. The first quantum entanglement engines tore holes in space before stabilizing. Hell, the first-gen neural augments fried more brains than they enhanced. But it hadn't stopped humanity-now they were printing organs, bending gravity, and running simulations of entire civilizations in synthetic reality drives the size of a grain of rice.

  Risk was the cost of knowledge. And Kelly had infinite chances to pay it. As long as the resets kept coming, she'd keep paying in blood. As long as she could stand up, she'd keep moving forward. No force in existence had ever been able to discourage her—why would she start letting one now?

  When she stood before the barricade for the third time, Kelly did things a little differently. This time, she let the troll, Simon, and the suicide squad clash first.

  Then, Kelly tore through the shattered battlefield, twisting midair through the barricade as her wrist flicked—her blade snapped out like a whip, slicing so fast it cracked like a gunshot. The man who'd caused her deaths in the last two loops barely had time to register the noise before his head hit the ground, unable to attract the troll through his screams. She landed in a roll, feet already moving, and bolted, sprinting toward her target as the chaos behind her blurred into background noise.

  Behind her, the troll roared, the squad opened fire, Simon shouted something probably important.

  She smiled, flexing her fingers. No bullet holes. No fractures this time. Progress.

  Kelly didn't look back.

  Didn't swerve.

  The road ahead was open.

  And that was all she needed

  The lab stood ahead, beneath the largest Central Park portal. Its entrance was a steel maw sealed with biometric and cybernetic locks relic from her corporate days.

  At the edge of everything, so close she could taste it, Kelly's thoughts turned with questions.

  Why did the day keep looping? And why her? Did the universe just like watching her suffer, or was there an actual reason? Who or what made the portals? Where did they lead? Why could the creatures manipulate dark matter and energy to bend reality like it was suggestible? And the floating guy above who was he? What was he? What gave him the right to hover ominously like that?

  And, more importantly—was he alone?

  Her fingers twitched. She needed to find out. She needed to crack this open and rip the answers out of whatever force had decided she didn't get to know.

  Experimentation. That was the first step.

  Kelly looked up as she ran.

  The largest portal above swirled, and the floating bastard came into distant view: its humanoid figure radiating anomalous energy, its abnormally long-eared face a shifting scowl of inhumanity and indifference as he hung in the sky directly above the place she needed to reach most.

  Her lab had some of the most advanced equipment on the planet, a treasure trove of tools and information. She'd hardly even seen the rest of the city in her attempts to get there. Every loop, she'd tried to reach it. Every loop, something killed her before she got close, and sometimes, rarely, the being in the sky's magic would erase her upon it spotting her approach, though strangely, it never attacked those already within its range as though their actions, however wild, were beneath its notice, and her mad dashes in those rare few loops were somehow not.

  Her actions and the dragon's shadow had hidden her this loop, but it was gone and didn't guarantee a smooth route to the finish line.

  She still had the flying giant in the sky to deal with. If whatever she did matched whatever Strange criteria drew it's attention.

  The thought of facing it made her smile widen. If the portal and its flying fairy wanted a war, she'd give it a spectacle, and maybe even sell tickets. Once she made it to her lab, they would both be begging for retirement.

  Kelly raced for the entrance.

  Immortality was just a bonus, her real experiment would be taming the end of the world.