Kelly stood in Vaughn Industries, the top military augment company in the world's main lab. For a quick detour.

  Vaughn’s big trick was biomechanical augmentation—stolen tech from every competitor fused into a new, unnatural hybrid.

  Neither purely flesh nor purely mechanical, but a weird, impossible fusion, something between machine and organic life.

  Muscles of synthetic fibre, skin designed in labs that breathed while flexing naturally, as dense as metal. Machine-flesh that lived and processed data. All of it alive and thinking.

  Kelly, spotting the opportunity, took one look at this barely legal buffet of expensive body work and decided to sample everything on the menu.

  The machines locked her out of weapon augment schematics for the tenth time. She wasn’t in weapons—not yet—she was R&D for Project Portal. The data she stole was from that, and none of it covered weaponry. “I can brute-force the printers, but cross-division locks?” It hadn’t worked, though if it did it would start the equivalent of a holy war. During the siege, the security system locked all sensitive data. Cross-division data locks held firm.

  Secondly, the staff were a problem. If she’d warned security earlier in the day, her lab would be full of staff and they’d still be around to stop her upgrades. She needed the entire building stuffed into safe rooms and Jackhammer’s clearance wide open.

  Earlier in the day, she had reached into her shadow shortly after she’d awoken, checking if her stored gear persisted. Her hand found nothing but a faint static tingle. No dice. But it should have worked—her shadow dimension kept time in stasis. Another thing to add to the growing to-do list. Today, she was starting from scratch, not in terms of accumulated knowledge, but physically.

  “Weapon augments are off the table. For now.” Kelly said it out loud, partly to hear how unfair it sounded. She really wanted a finger-gun. Nobody would see it coming.

  Normally, upgrading her Biomechanical augments proved pointless—dying annoyingly wiped all progress—but recently she'd picked up magic tricks which held through death, and might finally solve the whole ‘impermanence’ issue.

  She planned to throw caution to the wind, abandoning her artificial parts’ carefully tweaked human genetics and creating completely new parts; blending her new and improved magic-laden genetics with a hell of a lot of troll DNA, mixing that with some metal and building something fun.

  She was going to make magical, Kelly-powered synth-flesh. If it worked, all of her augments could be made from custom flesh—engineered just for her Titles, powered by her own mana, hiding her real EQ level under a sneaky stack of dormant enhancements. If she scored a new Title from the ordeal, maybe this time the implants would actually stick.

  Getting the formula stable took multiple tries through multiple loops and one slightly—no, very, angry mercenary who she'd fought so many times his routine was daytime television.

  Eventually, she isolated what gave troll muscle its magical strength and toughness then ditched the rest—she already had its regen in her blood. Oddly, the star-like patterns and sequences that attracted mana to troll bones, differed completely from the countless others, implying magical genetics had complex patterns for each distinct feature—like humans did for green eyes or brown hair.

  She squinted at pages of meaningless biological code trying to understand how a pattern could alter the fundamental laws of reality, just like how a wooden stick with a mundane crystal did the same. The machines squinted back, equally baffled.

  "Someday, I'll figure you out," Kelly sighed, grabbing her tools. "Then I'll shoot lightning into the sky and drag them all down here, especially that naked fairy."

  She got to work.

  While tinkering, thoughts of the exact moment her life spiraled into its current state of madness surfaced: Project Portal. One day, a space-time rip just casually appeared inside Vaughn’s vault, refusing to disappear politely. Vaughn responded logically—they saw the portals as competitive tech they wanted to steal, along with everything that came through the rift; every phenomena, trick, and every piece of the impossible.

  Their ultimate goal was to replicate it—as stealing tech, even the dimensional portal kind, counted as aggressive creativity, after all. Naturally, building a ludicrously expensive collider around it and slowly squeezing the anomaly until it shrank from car-door to fingernail size to limit risk was their first step. Naturally, it stayed stubbornly mysterious and buzzing, refusing to respect anyone’s budget.

  Most of their early attempts to copy the portal had gone nowhere—property damage with dangerous side effects, and that one memorable Friday where an entire floor accidentally became a giant microwave oven.

  But the 10th-floor lab remained the most advanced portal diagnostics site in the systems, packed wall to wall with absurdly expensive gear built to stare at portal fractures and pretend to know exactly how they worked—obsessively poking anything swirling, glowing, and “not normal” with cutting-edge, billion-dollar sticks that claimed to read space-time fractures down to the atom.

  For the second time in three days, Kelly stood at the center of it all, kitted out with new augments and implants, running diagnostics on herself.

  She liked what she saw.

  [Trait Gained: Troll-Homonculi (Unique, I-Grade)]

  Kelly had evolved into something beautifully ridiculous. She’d finally graduated from bargain-bin upgrades. New muscles, fresh skin, a few processors, new bolts, and chunks of tissue she probably shouldn't dwell on too much, all of it baked into functional augments, all of engineered, and all of it synthesized from a blend of stock materials with Troll DNA as the base—which meant the magical DNA would quietly sit mostly dormant, until her magically charged Titles woke them up.

  It was new. It was jury-rigged. And it wasn't pretty. Vaughn's R&D team were probably already doing a far better job off of magical synth-meat off-planet, creating insane stuff from captured samples that would put what she'd just made to shame. But as of right now? Kelly smugly held one undeniable advantage: She had the missing piece.

  Her stuff actually worked.

  She still carried the titles: Death’s Foe, Herald of unending Vitality, Lesser Null-Voidling let her bypass certain physical laws. Fortress of Endurance resisted impacts that should have killed her. Disciple of Deflection redirected those impacts toward innocent walls or inconvenient bystanders. Outrunning Death was one of the newest—tied to her running through buildings with her insides barely inside, and her sheer stubborn refusal to die.

  Exactly how the Titles worked stayed mysterious—sure, the scanners showed they imprinted and altered her body and flow of energy on the fly, but they didn't show how—mostly because the strangely dense DNA scribbles embedded in invader flesh refused to make sense even to the expensive machines Vaughn bought to decode them.

  Vaughn’s leading minds had already started calling the emerging framework 'Magic Theory,' though nobody liked the name and a few people still visibly cringed every time it was said aloud. It remained an ambitious mess of guesses, unpredictable dark energy interactions, and hopeful theories that meant “we have absolutely zero clue, for now.”

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  "Equip Death’s Foe," Kelly huffed, vaguely pleased.

  Things were going well. Sort of. Hard to tell when your lungs felt like someone had stuffed a live cable through each one and dared them to short out. She had crammed so many mana-dependent augments and functions into her body she half-expected to light up the dashboard. Nothing flashed. Good enough. Time to see what the mess amounted to when it all kicked in.

  [Title Equipped: Death’e Foe (IV)]

  Then, she was notified of a new change.

  [EQ: 8.6 → 14.3 (Temporary)]

  "Status!" she yelled, in her truck.

  [Name: Dr. Kelly Cain

  Race: Human

  Title: Death’s Foe (IV)

  Rank: E-

  EQ: 14.3 (Temporary)

  Traits:

  - Mana Incompatibility (IX),

  - The Aberration of mana (I),

  - Primordial Blood (I),

  - Troll-Homonculi (I),

  - Lesser Mimic (I),

  - Lesser Lycanthrope (I),

  - Lesser Null-voidling (I),

  Skills: ]

  Another win. She guessed that throwing unstable junk into her bloodstream paid off. Today with a stat screen. Yesterday with a seizure. Either way, progress.

  Today was off to a great start.

  "Nothing like a proven routine to start the day, right?"

  Since the last iteration ended so nicely, Kelly crashed the morning by replaying the greatest hits—Times Square entry, handshake with Vaughn Security’s grumpiest headcase ‘Jackhammer’ Jack, and the usual bait-lure routine with Payne, the seven-point-zero EQ merc stuffed with enough hardware to double as multiple war crimes.

  Payne chased, she ran—right into her lab’s warm embrace of automated murder furniture. Her base was eight-point-six. Add in the wonderful combo platter of her Titles, the ‘Death’s Foe’ special, the Lycanthropic remix bumping her EQ to nine-point-five without it, her pet trick of skin-mimicry, a chain-blade honed for molecular disobedience, full lab lockdown authority, and a stack of Traits that’d make a war god sweat—she tuned up the merc with all the grace of a corporate write-off. Systematic, excessive, and professionally humiliating.

  She flicked a hand, ordering the security bots to wrap up the twitching Genecorp mascot before he could leak his insides all over her lab floor. Honestly, Payne was still breathing purely on the bank’s goodwill—his espionage toys screamed black-budget indulgence, coded to his DNA with failsafes that even she couldn’t hack without filing for retirement. But as she watched his barely-conscious spasm attempts, she felt it—an itch of disappointment.

  Was this really it? The best she could do? Just another rerun, another cookie-cutter beatdown of some rich kid’s emotionally underfed murder-hobbyist? She could keep doing this forever. But did she want to? It wasn’t shame—she just didn’t want to be caught dead recycling her own choreography.

  “Well...”

  Novelty deserved a seat at the table. Kelly tapped a new code into her chain-blade’s shapeshifting base, and the weapon responded with a hiss and a shrugging whir, like a machine that no longer cared but still did its job.

  Steel twisted into the crude form of a shovel, because style mattered more than damage, as the merc wriggled like an idiot with bad timing. She strolled up, swung underhand, and scooped him skyward with a metallic slap that’d make physics wince. The cuffs held, the dignity didn’t. He hovered briefly, contemplating poor enemy targeting and life choices, before she hit him twice more midair. Because landing with all your bones intact? Boring.

  “Buddy, you don’t look too great,” Kelly called up, genuine in her mockery. “Should I call you an ambulance or an airstrike?”

  “Fuck—!” he snarled, a mix of outrage and shock, like getting battered with a shovel was somehow outside the combat manual. “Fuck you!”

  “Want me to book a doctor’s appointment?” Kelly asked, already winding up for another swing. Her voice laced with the kind of sweetness reserved for service workers lying through their teeth.

  “Fuck y—” He didn’t finish. The shovel came down, something cracked—might’ve been a bone, or his pride—and he folded like a glitchy mech, screaming something probably inventive if his lungs still worked right.

  “And now you do,” Kelly declared cheerfully, punctuating the diagnosis with a grin.

  She had a feeling this was going to become a regular thing.

  After crushing the 7.0 EQ merc, Payne, in every category that counted, plus a few meaningless ones she included out of habit, Kelly stood over the result with something close to relief.

  He had spent dozens of loops turning her organs into study material. She once spent three hours replaying a memory recording of his shoulder movement just to understand how it turned mid-swing. That version of her lost, but this one didn’t. This version broke through what had always snapped her in half before.

  She had grown, definitely.

  Every failure baked tighter into muscle memory that once carried death—her limbs still remembered how those losses felt. But they moved cleaner now. Faster. Now, her muscle memory carried forward motion. Victory. ‘Impossible’ used to be the word for what she couldn’t do, but today, it didn’t fit anymore. She stopped thinking that way.

  That was why she circled back: to erase the thing that used to hold her back at every turn.

  In the end she let him go. She had to. Handing him over to Jackhammer would’ve turned into a long-winded parade of questions she didn’t have the patience or time for—right now she was just an intern who had illegally boosted her EQ in a crisis.

  That was far from unprecedented. But If Jackhammer started digging into why she could crush a 7.0 EQ highly equipped combatant solo, he’d find everything she didn’t want in Vaughn’s archive—starting with the true nature of her illegal EQ crisis jump and ending with the part where she had cracked the key to exactly what everyone wanted.

  Thankfully, her best Title needed her in a near-death state, so to Jack, she had returned looking like she had barely survived and hadn't just made a psychologically stunted killer eat a shovel.

  "Maybe I should've killed him?" She muttered once out of range, wrestling with the moral conundrum between personal growth and the value of life.

  Nah. Letting him escape? That worked better. It made her look useful to Genecorp. More than useful, actually—like an asset with a touch of danger, a person they could make something out of. Genecorp wasn’t dumb enough to let a 8.0 EQ asset from their top competitor just stroll out of a lab without a second thought.

  They’d be scrambling for the next move, and she was in a prime position to skip past the usual bureaucratic nonsense. That meant less of the ‘prove your worth’ game and more of the ‘we have something for you’ song and dance. Of course, that also meant they’d take her more seriously, and that wasn’t exactly great either.

  Still, even after her attempts to scrub the footage, she was absolutely 105% certain Jackhammer had sent a report of the whole mess upstairs, complete with extra emphasis on her ‘upgraded capabilities.’ Which, of course, meant Vaughn was going to get involved in a more explosive manner sooner or later.

  At that point, she’d be faced with a choice: either skip visiting her lab entirely or face the end of her day being hunted by capture teams getting increasingly powerful with every attempt. That option sounded… promising.

  She smiled, wondering what kind of effects she could earn by being rapidly hunted by the most powerful groups in the known systems. If that didn’t offer new Titles to play with, she didn’t know what would.

  "Someday," she said, almost sentimental, then let out a whistle and walked toward her truck like the thought hadn’t happened. Immediate priorities held more appeal. Scientific breakthroughs in magic wouldn't make themselves, and they carried more success rates than the current plan of getting creatively killed before dinner.

  She had already bagged a troll sample before breakfast by tracking it early. The oversized grey idiot was already a block from Kevin’s barrier and building up to its tantrum, still wrecking buildings, wandering near Kevin’s checkpoint, and barking at crushed and pulverized dumpsters treating them like little metal boxes with a purpose it didn't understand. She had needed to grab its material before it caved the barrier, flattened Kevin’s squad, and got claimed by whatever death cult had flagged it for harvest.

  That meant she had saved time by skipping her visit to the Hyperloop entirely, and Rook wouldn't have to get in a firefight before he could leave to save his dog, Max.

  She had used that time wisely, taking actions that allowed her to augment her body in ways she had never even considered.

  “Wait—Voss! You can’t—” Jack, the head of security, ended a call Kelly couldn't see or hear and turned to catch a glimpse of her leaving, her boots gliding smoothly over cracked tiles and shell casings as she darted through the ground floor lobby.

  “Voss!”

  Jack’s voice chased her from the lobby through the foyer. He hadn't started sprinting yet. He was doing the fast-walk thing people did when they wanted authority without cardio.

  "You are not cleared to leave the floor.”

  Kelly kept moving. Her badge hit the employee gate sensor with a chirp. “That’s fine. I’m revoking your floor.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  She kicked the door open hard enough to rattle something expensive. Two steps in and moving fast, she shouted back. “It means I’m emotionally unavailable.”

  “You’re ignoring protocol!”

  “No I’m not!”

  She moved to her truck at a sprint. By the time Jack reached the entrance, she was gone. The only thing left behind was a lot of broken parts and a mild administrative crisis.

  She wouldn’t be back. That building had seen enough.

  Deep in the lab, the machines were off—wiped. But one still ran in a line that exactly 5 people in existence had access to.

  It blinked red:

  Unknown classification.

  Category: Magic Theory #163889 - Experiment success Logged

  Subject: Dr. Kelly Vo—ERROR 494— Anomalous Creature #7364828

  Recommended Action: Immediate Containment