Spidergod.

  Not the actual god—but her favorite show as a child.

  Kelly’s favorite show followed a spider-god wired into the city’s networks, wearing stolen human shoes, outwitting and robbing every other god blind whilst never being close to getting caught. She had every episode archived in her neural stack, watched them mid-escape, sometimes mid-firefight.

  The immortal intern grew up admiring dangerous animals. Spidergod seemed about as dangerous as they got. The cartoon’s gods always brought storms and punishment and divine retribution—huge, dramatic, beautifully powerful, overly engineered—and missed every time. Missed again. And then missed worse. She’d watched entire pantheons flail while the Spidergod juked through explosions and made them all look like idiots.

  She considered it the best character in any medium.

  Which was one of the many reasons why she was ruining the entire emotional state, inner peace, and week—well, day—of the people currently trying to kill her.

  They kept trying, and she kept existing. Must’ve been miserable for them.

  "Stop!" The gunman’s voice cracked from overuse and rage as the entire chamber churned with chaotic skirmish in a scramble of bodies and weapons. Skeletal knights blurred through the gaps, swinging swords that caved high-grade armor and threw slow operatives through the air. The gunman ahead fired. Kelly saw his finger move before the burst left the barrel.

  “Stay back!”

  Kelly shifted the mimic patch above her chest into hardened alloy. The bullet hit center-mass and stopped, the force barely impeding her. She stepped out of the next volley without urgency. Death’s Foe pushed her to 6.8 times peak baseline. That meant almost seven hundred percent faster, stronger, and quicker to react. She was standing at the doorway to superhuman—temporarily, only when near death.

  But death could be induced and the spike could be manipulated.

  So she kept walking forward, her focus stayed on the man’s trigger. He was trying to walk backward while keeping her in sight, while trying to avoid getting launched over the chamber wall by a skeletal knight’s blade at his rear.

  It wasn’t going well.

  His aim got worse each second—too many targets and too much stress. She watched the tension in his wrist and the twitch of his trigger finger. Closing the distance made him easier to read. It also improved his odds of dying, which was bad—for him. He understood that.

  At close range, his movements wouldn't keep up. He had brought a lot of guns but failed to bring any useful mobility gear.

  "Boss, she’s a Sixer! Transformation-perception type!" The gunman’s voice roared under pressure as he kept moving to stay out of her range, juggling his attention between Kelly and the chaotic melee a short distance behind him. Kelly was constantly moving. He couldn’t land a shot.

  Neither could a second gunman their dramatic waltz had previously drawn them closer to—a shorter operative in full body gear who’d fired at her earlier, failed at close range, and watched her keep smiling with a bullet lodged between her metallic mimic teeth.

  At one point, Kelly returned fire by tossing him the slug. It was harmless and silly, but he dodged it anyway, overly cautious. The broken slug bounced on the ground as she kept moving.

  "I told you she’s a damn mutant!" the other one barked. "Just contain her already!"

  To Kelly, the voice calling her a ‘mutant’ sounded familiar. Very familiar. Like a voice she'd heard a thousand times.

  “Hold up—” she muttered, moving fast.

  Was that... Reggie?

  “How is it that you can't die, Reggie? Are you like me? Immortal? We have so much in common!" Kelly shouted, before continuing, the split focus and chaos hampering all parties present. "And I’m not a mutant, I’m a scientist!”

  The shorter gunman jerked beneath his defensive gear at the realization his identity had been discovered, and it was by the worst possible person.

  In response, Reggie abandoned subtlety. He rose fully into the air, lightning crawling across the plating of his exogear in short, forced pulses. His rifle remained locked on her position as he hovered, and his voice broke from strain. “You think you're walking out of here after Genecorp? One shot’s all I need to rip you open!”

  Kelly scoffed.

  Only one shot? Between them, the two gunmen had already fired dozens—badly—while juggling the pressure of her presence and the collateral panic behind them. Their squadmates were still getting tossed across the battlefield by armored skeletons tall enough to need planning permission. The terrain had taken the force, fracturing into a patchwork of pits and craters that looked like both a warzone and more like a poorly funded art project; a mosaic of fractures, punctures, and uneven breaks.

  Kelly kept heading forward. It was the only stretch that hadn’t crumbled yet, and if she kept moving, they’d follow. If they followed, they’d walk straight into the monsters they’d been carefully trying not to get flattened by.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The first gunman kept her occupied on foot as Reggie glided above, trying to break her line of sight while ducking whenever one of the skeletal knights took a swipe with a sword roughly the length of a train cart. Reggie moved abnormally fast. There was a charge behind it—too intentional to be panic and too precise to be chance. His altered genealogy must have allowed him to supercharge his nerves, somehow.

  Kelly’s railgun jerked sideways, dragging her half a step before she planted her feet against the pull with Thresholder strength. The pull had Reggie written all over it. In every previous loop, she had kept him in her sights for this exact reason. Whenever he tried to magnetically disarm her, shift her trajectory, or drag her into a kill zone with his budget Magneto tricks, she followed a strict scorched-earth policy—immediately targeting him with enough force to ensure he never tried it again.

  Kelly pulled out an armor-piercing gun and fired, forcing Reggie to erratically jerk through the air evasively. “I mean—look, Reg, it's cool that you can fly and make the lights shine a little brighter,” she pointed out, reaching for a grenade. "But I blew up every planet in probably half our galaxy one-hundred-fifty times and injected the stuff that did it into my veins. I don't mean to be rude but... that's kinda like a baby vs a hydrogen bomb, you know?" She shrugged, tossing the grenade into his path as though they were car keys.

  Reggie let out a guttural roar and flooded their section of the chamber with bolts—wide, heavy, uncontrolled. The room flashed hard. The grenade went off mid-air, caught before it reached him. Everything nearby lit up, burned, or broke apart.

  Kelly simply switched her Title to Fortress of Flame, flicked her wrist, and her bracelet deployed a blade into her grip—monomolecular-edged, multiple shapes stored in its memory, and hard-coded to obey. She drove the weapon down through the floor, and extended its edge deep into the ground until something disagreed. Then she took the hit.

  Sticking the weapon into the earth would ground her from the charge.

  She grounded through the blade because the alternative involved smoking ribs. Electricity had a talent for finding shortcuts, and she wasn’t volunteering her lungs as the scenic route. She lifted one foot off the floor to cut her grounding odds in half. Let go of her gear. The trick was to make the metal the better option—deeply buried enough, and hopefully convincing the current she cared about safety. One foot up. Walls avoided. Gear dropped. Her odds of survival improved to somewhere between unlikely and badly sunbathing.

  If Reggie’s electric field lacked direction—which it did—stray bolts would still happen, spraying arcs like a drunk with fireworks. Kelly took the hit anyway. It was the least stupid option available.

  Fortress of Flame drank most of it.

  [Disciple of Deflection II → III]

  Smoke. Fragments. Singed hair and reddened skin. Dust filled the air as a second later, Kelly reached into her shadow, face stinging with singed skin, and returned with a light railgun cocked and unstrapped.

  She was officially over it.

  She fired a single shot at Reggie. The light railgun answered with a clean kick that still shoved muscle.

  Then, before even checking if the slug hit, she charged the second gunman. He fired in a frantic burst to keep her at bay and she hardly dodged, enhanced eyes tracking the alignment of his wrists, adjusting her mimic skin in overtime to block the bullets, and closing in before he could re-sight. She reached him in a blink.

  Then she stabbed a metal claw through his armor and flung him into the skirmish behind them.

  [New Title: Mythril Fist (I)]

  [Title - Mythril Fist (Rare, I-Grade): gained for defeating 1000 enemies barehanded. Grants enhanced close-quarters combat performance. The effects are boosted against beings of a lower Rank. Enhances raw physical dominance and relentless aggression in melee range.]

  Kelly wondered why the Title only seemed to give her a leg up on the amateurs. Weaker opponents. It didn’t fit the usual title-upgrade logic she’d come to expect. Then it hit her. The gunman she’d stabbed with her mimic hand and casually thrown across the room had a higher EQ, but her Rank was superior. EQ measured how much punch you packed at the moment; Rank measured how much you could pack if you decided to stop being nice about it. If you pushed everything to its limit—stopped procrastinating and gave the apocalypse your full attention. It was a forecast of your worst possible behavior. The maximum danger you could pose.

  Her Status had taken one look at her Traits and Titles and decided she was the bigger threat.

  Then she wondered what ‘mythril’ was. She ran a quick neural search and got hit with data about pre-war fantasy metal that didn’t exist. That carried a lot of implications. Interesting ones.

  When the dust finally settled, the first gunman was airborne, and Reggie’s arm wasn’t attached to Reggie anymore—blasted clean off at the shoulder; it sat somewhere else, smoking, as he lay on the ground bleeding. The other gunman hit the wall hard enough to crater it. A skeletal knight had swatted him there from mid-air, and the wall hadn’t objected.

  "I'm surprised you managed to electro-dodge my trigger finger, Reg’, but this needs to stop. You're embarrassing both of us," Kelly said, voice flat and unhurried.

  She would have said more, but paused when the walls started trembling in response. Metal wiring dragged itself out of the structure, plating folded, broke, then launched past her in jagged sheets. She sidestepped one as it whipped by from behind—too fast and precise. Everything was dragging itself toward Reggie’s collapsed frame.

  "So the infrastructure's now emotionally invested in his recovery." Kelly muttered. Not that his relationship with masonry mattered, he just seemed like the type. Building pervert.

  “You’re dead, Voss…” Reggie breathed. His face was raw with burns, sliced across the cheek, blistered over the mouth. Kelly counted five wounds, maybe six, depending on whether you were tracking open skin or loose ego.

  He’d killed her before. Plenty of times. Too many to count. None of them had involved metal ripping itself out of the walls and building him a shrine. She didn’t mind the change of pace—she found the upgrade interesting.

  “I swear to god, you’re dead…” he said again, while the room crawled toward him. “We don’t even need to do it ourselves. We just need your corpse.”

  The floor surged. Cables punched into the base beside him and arched toward his spine. Plates spun overhead, then jammed down. A pulse of current slammed through the wreckage. The room flashed, blinked, and reassembled. A ring of electricity rotated around the mess, then settled. The wreckage peeled apart.

  In Reggie’s place stood two upright towering forms—unnaturally tall, clean, wired, plated. One had arms ending in edged blades as long as motorcycles, running continuous current. The other was broader, and the metal across its surface rippled as if alive—almost like liquid, shivering with trapped charge.

  The nearest gunman spotted Reggie’s constructs and shouted, “Fall back! B6 maneuver, move!” Then he ran. The rest followed.

  The broader metal giant turned and charged into the skeletal knights.

  The taller one, towering with blade arms crackling, went straight at Kelly.

  Kelly blinked once.

  “Okay. That changes my options.”