Kelly split her time between the botanical lab, antagonizing Rowena's murderous foliage, and the field, stress-testing her mana-charged blade on operatives who could barely tie their own boots. Against all reasonable expectation, it was working. She was actually making progress.

  It turned out her new trait, Mana Conduit, didn’t just let her pump mana into her rune-crafted transforming weapon—it also let her feel the weapon, like it was a very shiny, very stabby extra limb she would have to avoid pointing at elderly bystanders. A conduit was a living pathway for mana, and Kelly was now a bona fide conduit—her weapon’s favorite new roommate.

  Being able to feel the weapon’s mana—being able to feel mana at all—was incredibly useful for studying the effects of runes, how mana behaved, and what rune crafting actually did.

  It was like finally being able to hear someone who’d been shouting instructions at her this whole time, only now the “someone” was mana itself, and it had a lot of opinions.

  Rowena Hoffman and the crew hovered at the edge of the lab with the exact expression people get when they walk in on something that should’ve been behind a locked door. Kelly kept her wrist raised, talking to the transforming weapon currently posing as a rather large bracelet on her wrist as if it were an old friend, trying to become one with her weapon like some ancient samurai.

  “Yeah, you like that, don’t you?” Kelly murmured, stroking the bracelet with her thumb. “Just a little charge. Feel that? That’s all for you.” She shifted her weight, her tone dropping to something low and private. “Everyone else just sits there. But you… you respond. You get turned on at the worst possible moments. Spread and strain exactly when I tell you to. I appreciate that.”

  She gave it a gentle shake, her voice lilting. “Don’t play coy. I felt you thrumming when we were surrounded. You were practically begging for it. To just… slide out and meet someone.”

  From her workstation, Rowena slowly put down her datapad. A member of her crew coughed, staring fixedly at the ceiling.

  “That’s my girl,” Kelly whispered, tapping the activation rune with a final, possessive flick. “Always ready. Always eager. What would I do without you?”

  Rowena cleared her throat. The sound was dry, deliberate, and carried across the lab. “Voss. Is there a problem with the equipment?”

  Kelly didn’t look up from her wrist. “Just bonding. Building trust. It’s important for a healthy partnership.”

  “It’s jewelry,” Rowena stated, her voice flat. “It doesn’t have feelings.”

  “Spoken like someone who's never been truly understood. Your clinical detachment is showing.“ Kelly finally glanced over, her expression one of sincere correction. She turned back to the bracelet, her voice softening again. “Don’t listen to her, baby. She doesn’t understand our connection.”

  One of the lab techs made a small, strangled sound.

  The bracelet of course, did not reply.

  She was meditating on the new sensation. Her mana extended into the weapon through the Mana Conduit trait. She felt the runes—[Absorb], [Store]—and how they affected the energy’s flow. She started closing her eyes in the field, focusing only on seeing through mana. Her scanners helped, filling the gaps. This led to some early restarts. Humans, having no mana signature, became invisible to this sense. Before she learned to look for the absence, they successfully ambushed her. A guy with a rebar club got a promotion in her mental file of embarrassing deaths.

  But Kelly’s sense for her runes, her mana, and her weapon grew. She wanted to understand everything.

  What was a rune? Why did it influence mana?

  The key was in the word conduit. Runes were conduits. They were channels. They guided raw mana and transmuted it into a specific, repeatable effect. It was a form of channeling—guiding energy and transmuting it into something new.

  Kelly studied every strange weapon she could snatch from roaming goblins and the bone swords of skeleton knights beneath the east grid. She poured mana into them to spark fire, lightning, and other basics, hoping the pieces would someday form something greater. She tested each one in battle, always trying to craft a weapon that wouldn’t immediately blow up on her.

  She was beginning to realize that runes were almost like a language of magic—and that the undead skeletons beneath the city functioned in much the same way. Each one had enough densely inscribed runes inside it to line the entire United States with text. And all of that text existed to serve a single purpose: to contain something. But what?

  A soul? Maybe.

  Kelly copied and stored the dense script, unsure what to do with it. All attempts to recreate the effect failed; something essential was missing.

  But that failure led to success in other areas.

  Bit by bit, she began to understand the nature of runes and mana itself and felt as though she had briefly touched upon its place in the larger scheme of life. This form of practical, hands-on experimentation soothed her greatly and fascinated her.

  And eventually, in the next loop, she achieved a breakthrough.

  [New Trait: Mana Attuned I]

  [You can detect faint fluctuations in mana around you—threads, patterns, or shifts. Hidden magical traps or anomalies now resonate subtly in your perception.]

  How had a trait developed without an injection? Kelly wasn’t sure. It was the first trait to develop naturally, without drastic self-augmentation or implants—which, to Kelly, was a fascinating possibility.

  It implied that the mana itself had changed her.

  “Rowe,” Kelly said, not looking up from the component she was disassembling. “Question. What happens if you have a device. One box. It makes fire. Also water, earth, air, lightning, ice, metal, magnetism, stone, wind, acid, smoke, and cellular regeneration. It has one switch. On. Off.”

  Rowena slid a sample tray under the microscope, squinting as she adjusted the stage. “You’re basically talking about a fabricator,” she said. “A real one. High?output. Those things are mostly theory. The Core worlds keep insisting they’ve built prototypes, but the power they’d need…” She gave a small, humorless laugh. “It’s ridiculous. You’d only ever use something like that for huge jobs—building stations, tearing down asteroids, military stuff. That’s the level we’re talking about.”

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

  She fine?tuned the focus, her tone flattening. “If someone tried running one on Earth… ” She shook her head. “It’d be a mess. The resource drain alone could wreck an economy. I’ve read the schematics, sure—but I’d still like to see a real unit someday. Just… at least once.”

  “Yeah,” Kelly said. She held up her bracelet. The molecular shape-memory metal caught the light. “About that. I basically have one. A compact model. I think I just… got it to work.”

  Rowena’s head snapped around. She stared. She rushed over, a disbelieving look in her eyes. She grabbed the bracelet from Kelly’s wrist and immediately began checking it with the main lab console. She ran several tests.

  After the tests finished, she returned the bracelet to Kelly. Her hands were trembling.

  Rowena lost her shit. “This is a fabricator. A working fabricator. On your wrist.” Her voice climbed, cracking. “This… this bypasses every power grid on the continent. This makes supply chains obsolete. This…” She stared at Kelly, her face pale. “This is a declaration of war.”

  The lab was quiet for a long time after Rowena’s announcement. A tech froze. Another turned from her monitor. The head of botany dropped his stylus. Everyone stared at the bracelet, at Rowena’s face, then at Kelly.

  Kelly slid the bracelet back onto her wrist. The click of the clasp was very loud.

  “So,” Kelly said, breaking the silence. “It works.”

  Rowena was still pale. She walked to her workbench, her movements stiff. She picked up a sealed sample jar, set it down, then picked it up again. “You built a fabricator… a personal fabricator,” she said, almost to herself. “This thing can make materials. It could stitch a lung back together. And it doesn’t need a planetary power grid.”

  “Seems that way,” Kelly said, her voice uncharacteristically flat. She completely ignored the shocked lab techs. She was watching Rowena.

  “This makes the resource wars pointless. The enhancement monopoly… it’s meaningless now.” Rowena finally looked at her. “A Thresholder is strong. A Tank can’t be stopped. And an Elite… almost like a demigod. But none of them can make things. None of them can change anything. Your bracelet… it’s a factory. A hospital. All in one.”

  Kelly didn’t shrug this time. She just nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You have a tool that rewrites the rules of scarcity.” Rowena’s voice was low, intense. “Do you understand? The hierarchy—everyone’s levels, classes—it’s built on control. Control of augmentation tech, control of resources. This… this is control of matter. You are holding the key to the city they’ve built walls around.”

  “Good,” Kelly said, a flicker of her normal energy returning. “Their walls look stupid.”

  A faint, strained sound escaped Rowena. It was almost a laugh. She rubbed her forehead. “I need to sit down.”

  Kelly pulled a stool over. Rowena sat, staring at her hands. The lab around them began a slow, hesitant return to motion.

  After a minute, Rowena spoke without looking up. “When I was a student, I read the first theoretical papers on fabricator technology. The energy problem was always the final page. The unsolvable wall. My professor said we would never see one in our lifetimes. He said humanity had reached its limit.” She looked at the bracelet on Kelly’s wrist. “You picked a fight with the final page. And you won.”

  Kelly was quiet for a moment. She leaned back against the console, arms crossed. “I had a good teacher,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. “Someone who knows how the world actually works. The rules. The pieces. How to put them together without blowing yourself up. Mostly.”

  Rowena glanced up, a question in her eyes.

  “Your work,” Kelly said, gesturing vaguely at the entire lab, the plants, the data screens. “It was the foundation. I just… built a very loud, very shiny house on top of it.”

  The realization dawned on Rowena’s face, followed by a profound, weary shock. All her foundational work, her pure research, had been the blueprint. Kelly had just found a brutal, practical way to build the skyscraper.

  “Oh,” Rowena said softly.

  “Yeah,” Kelly said. She pushed off the console and stood in front of Rowena, her usual chaotic energy settled into something straightforward. “So. Thanks. For the foundation.”

  Rowena looked up at her, the last of her professional detachment melting into something exhausted and real. “You are an impossible student. And you are welcome.”

  Kelly gave a single, sharp nod. The transaction was complete. The gratitude was acknowledged, the debt stated and accepted without drama.

  “Now,” Kelly said, the familiar chaos snapping back into her voice as she turned to the rest of the lab. “If we’re all done having feelings, I need to see if this thing can make a decent cup of coffee. The stuff in the break room is a war crime.”

  Kelly didn't have a mana pool. The concept was too small. She had an absence of a limit—a drain, and the whole universe was her reservoir. Her Mana Vacuum Title just sped up the rate she could drink from it, cranking the pressure from ‘firehose’ to ‘Niagara Falls." It was the best deal in the apocalypse.

  This loop, she had finally done all she felt she could accomplish. She had used that firehose to build.

  She had experimented with combinations, using her title to supercharge her weapon. She programmed two new forms into her bracelet.

  It combined fire, lightning, acid, metal, stone, ice, air, and wind into a focused beam. The beam heated targets, melted them, and broke them down chemically. The cold and plasma created sharp temperature swings to crack materials and disrupt electronics. Fast-moving charged particles delivered concentrated kinetic and electrical impact. She called it The ‘No’ Beam. "For when you need to make a point. Many, many points."

  The second was a shield. It communicated a clear 'not interested, to any attack sent her way. It was super-dense, super-strong, and translucent, meaning she could, if she wanted, use it with her shadow. It was assembled and maintained in real-time using the same raw energy she pulled in. Magnetic fields shaped it. Heat fused it, then flash-cooled it solid. She called it The Instant Shield.

  Using the beam pulled a colossal amount of mana into her. But the amount drained was a drop in the ocean compared to what the tidal wave at the tail-end of each loop; during the magical cube’s explosion.

  It was far from enough to face the Angel, F.R.E.A., or CAIN without a permanent mind-wipe. "Baby steps," she told her weapon. "First we learn to stand, then we learn to kick someone's teeth in—I mean, not Freya and Cain; I still owe them."

  “Still a one-hit wonder against the headliners," she concluded. Sure, it wasn’t ’there’ yet. Not strong enough. But it was a real upgrade; much better than before. That meant she now had the leverage and personal power to explore other avenues and paths of New York. Paths she hadn't had the luxury to explore before and places that usually ended with her having to rethink her entire approach from a fresh, dead start.

  It was time for a field trip, and it was time to explore.

  Perhaps buried somewhere in this city, was something that would protect her mind?

  Rowena walked over, her face full of shock as she examined the various forms Kelly had produced. She picked up the bracelet, marveling at how its schematics made full cellular regeneration possible.

  “You did all this in four hours? What the hell even are you?”

  Kelly mentally summoned her Status. She mentally commanded her A.I’s to place her recorded Traits and available Titles over it.

  [Name: Dr. Kelly Cain.

  Race: Human

  Title: Magic Tinkerer (III)

  EQ: 8.6

  Threat Level: E-

  Traits: Mana Incompatibility (IX), The Aberration of Mana (I), Troll-Marrowed (I), Primordial Blood (I), Lesser-Lycanthrope, Lesser-Mimic, Lesser Null Voidling (I), Troll-Homonculi (I), Mana Conduit (I), Mana Attuned (I),

  Available Titles: Giantsbane (V), Fortress of Flame (V), Fortress of Endurance (V), The Immovable One (I), Death’s Foe (IV), Disciple of Deflection (III), Herald of Unending Vitality (V), Mana Vacuum (V), Mythril Fist (I), Angel Killer (I), Outrunning death (I), Slaughterer of Men (I), Unerring Marksman (I), Mana Focused Student (II), Mana Gardener (II), Magic Tinkerer (III),

  Skills:

  Mandates: 1 (Expand…)]

  She scrolled through the dense text of her Titles and Traits, the chronicle of every brutal lesson learned, and all the death that hadn’t been final. She smiled.

  “Me? I’m a very thorough student.”