Kelly Voss had already broken the universe once.

  Literally. Whatever she did, clearly irritated something vast enough to make the decision she shouldn't survive another second. A tide of raw magic had collapsed into her body like a dam bursting into a socket. It should have liquefied her. Instead, she’d rewritten herself on the fly using a blend of temporary medical solutions and a more permanent cocktail of repair cells coerced from Genecorp’s overfunded medical department, forcing stability where there should have been soup.

  So what if her cells were always fighting to stay together and in a constant state of repair? At least the universe—or whatever was watching—hadn't succeeded in turning her into a human pi?ata.

  With her body boosted and a step closer to something resembling real power, her truck rumbled as the engine hummed to life. She left the noise of Times Square behind and drove toward Park Avenue.

  The outskirts blurred past—slums, wreckage, roadkill, and a city pretending it wasn’t already falling apart—until she rolled toward Park Avenue. That stretch never pretended. The storefronts dropped away by the block. 'Second-Hand-Cybernetic' hole-in-the-walls gave way to thirty-floor luxury apartments. Every tower looked copied from the last, and the alleys between them didn’t bother pretending they were for regular people anymore. She passed one group of poorly organized opportunists trying to corner something that screeched when they missed. Two intersections later, after swerving around a few more that were already fighting something or someone, she veered around a brawl between something crystalline and a pile of fused torsos, then avoided a few narrow alleys teeming with things you'd hate to meet in a narrow alley.

  Eventually, Kelly reached Genecorp and negotiated entry, her leverage boosted by the “recent shovel incident” proof of concept. She sold them tech for her molecular blade. Genecorp would have to acquire the rare materials in the middle of a crisis—which they could manage, just not in bulk—then slog through red tape: patents, AB testing, endless meetings, approvals, marketing, the whole corporate gauntlet. That meant the chance Kelly would see mercs running around with the tech today? Practically zero. Tomorrow? Maybe. But tomorrow was a concept Kelly hadn’t seen in years.

  She could’ve sold them a vial of her blood. That alone would’ve kept them busy for weeks. Might’ve backfired, though.

  Her leverage came in the form of Payne, a 7.0EQ mercenary who had gone into her lab upright and exited barely conscious and concussed. Or was it bleeding, and extremely well-filmed? That video now counted as both testimonial evidence and deterrent, depending on the viewer’s EQ score.

  The execs, smug enough to burn through reinforced glass, reminded her they still held the leash on sanctioning her newly boosted EQ, meaning they could slap her with limitations, fines, suspension, or full jail-time depending on how generous their legal department felt that morning.

  Kelly scoffed. Vaughn could have easily sanctioned her upgrades, but that would’ve resulted in her being strapped to a vivisection table and disassembled piece by piece with a very short follow-up interview if they looked too deep. So instead, Genecorp gave her a workaround.

  Which worked out. With Genecorp’s stamp, she counted as a legally enhanced for foreseeable future–or the rest of the day, really–provided she located and neutralized anyone on-site with the power to unstamp her before they could change their mind. It turned the negotiation into more of a scavenger hunt than a contract discussion.

  In practical terms, nobody cared. Half the city was trying to outrun extinction-level problems, and the other half was too busy monetising them. A few extra points on her EQ under life-threatening duress barely registered unless you worked in compliance for one of the twitchier groups that still tracked infractions by the hour.

  She drove by a perfectly renovated children's cancer hospice—Kelly had once walked through the building, over two decades after the AI coups flattened it, wearing a hazmat suit just to avoid dissolving on entry or playing the forced genetic mutation lottery and coming up short.

  The blast had packed a cocktail of radiation and biological agents, with heavy metals lodged deep enough in the soil that even now, a few kids in the area came out different—glowing or clawed, or in a few cases, a little more special than others. Rebuilding had taken years, and clean filtration even longer.

  What stood there now looked like an afterthought—walls peeling, half the solar grid stripped, a sagging playground rusting behind fencing. Vaughn had slapped their logo on it and moved on. Apparently, saving a few breathing children didn’t make as much money as claiming they'd sponsored a rehab zone.

  However, the site that caught her attention was a built-up slope at the far east, which had been paved over and rebuilt into the city’s largest artificial elevation, held in place by a deep foundation block designed to keep large buildings from sinking into unstable ground. They called it a data-wrapped geomantic faultline. Kelly thought the name was pretty stupid—because everything was data—they should have called it a 'Spatial gravity control array', that name made much more sense and explained how the structure didn't crumble into itself.

  On top of it sat an estate the size of Everest with a dash of Mount Rushmore—complete with statues, stone scrollwork, and a tower that resembled the Tower of Babel, though nobody ever wanted to openly admit it. The place looked like someone had read a conspiracy post about divine right and then built a theme park around it. It had an eight-story villa, a fortified helipad the size of a sports arena, ten obelisks arranged in some ancient alignment, a spouting fountain cycle that wasted five hundred gallons a minute, a genetically curated private forest, and a slightly misaligned replica of Babylonia where one column depicting a deity had been replaced with a marble version of the owner’s face. The whole thing smelled like a very loud midlife crisis with lasers.

  Why Babelonia though? Why Gods? Why did nobody ever add something useful when overcompensating? like plumbing, or maybe a toilet that didn’t scream in Latin?

  Megalomania usually came with flair. Too bad this one missed the memo. She glanced at their shoes and smirked. Unlike her—she knew how to dress.

  The estate’s outer mile had been locked down with gun turrets, high-EQ strike teams enhanced well past human limits, and a scattered concentration of portals that spat out unfairly constructed creatures at regular intervals–about two dozen species of writhing monstrosity ringed the estate in a mile-wide moat of tentacles and particle fire.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  The portals clustered thickest around the base, as if the hill itself were attracting them. The hill rose behind a dense perimeter lined with armed personnel and automated fire, and the only access route cut straight through the middle. While the center itself was untouched, the outer perimeter was practically a warzone.

  Only a single approach remained open, flanked by barricades and fencing, with armed guards stationed at regular intervals who killed anything that wasn't human and a few things that pretended to be. Kelly knew who sometimes lived there. Everyone did. Everything around the site confirmed it.

  She shifted course immediately from the rumbling explosions that tore through reality, steering the truck away without hesitation. There were easier, less unpleasant ways to be captured and killed, and none of them involved driving straight toward that place.

  Kelly kept a shortlist of people and things she had never tested her resurrection privileges against, and the people inside that building had stayed firmly at the top of it for months. She had better things to do anyway. She had her samples and a lead on the Deadqueen, or something close enough to point her in the right direction. At last, she had waited a long time for that discovery.

  Finally, she reached the botanical lab, buried under what remained of a bridge that had decided gravity was non-negotiable. Crushed growth tanks spilled slick nutrient gel into the gravel by the outer walls, the entrance had been bricked with fallen concrete slabs, and someone had tagged the surviving outer panel with a poorly rendered drawing of a fungus doing something deeply illegal to a security drone.

  The tag belonged to a gang she’d seen on the news—local and territorial–usually circling the air filtration hubs with illegally acquired guns, dealing with addicts or anyone desperate enough to rent space on their own lungs. For some, breathing had become a subscription model, and most gangs traded in drugged, retrofitted, or stolen filters for dollars.

  As a child, Kelly had been taught that millennia ago, before people learned how to build machines that pulled water from the air and started teaching it in schools, corporations had already figured out how to charge people for it—even though water made up more than seventy percent of the planet.

  Even then, still barely aware of how the world worked, she’d thought the idea of selling rain was ridiculous. As an adult, it was easier to see how turning air into a product followed naturally once greed found a way to frame it as progress. Ever since the AI coups had glassed a few cities and poisoned half of the atmosphere with a mix of clashing agents strong enough to make the weather itself dangerous, she had no doubt they were thrilled to start charging for something free and everywhere.

  A part of her still hated that the world kept its timebombs ticking because it paid better than fixing them.

  She had everything she needed, plus some extra samples she’d grabbed from those little green maniacs sprinting around the city trying to eat, hump, or kill anything that moved. Internet freaks said they were goblins; Kelly called them ‘green perverts’ and usually tried to kill them on sight.

  Today, she stole one of their magical sticks, eager to scan and discover how a simple piece of wood and one basic-ass-crystal could glow with light and shoot balls of fire, when placed in an elderly green pervert’s hand.

  Kelly got out of her truck in front of the heap of debris that had once been a botanical lab, which still contained the tools she needed to dissect and understand the magical effects, samples, and modifiers baked into her biology. She realized she was standing in the exact same place where she had died in the last iteration, and so, she made the third smart decision she had made that day.

  She stepped back—much further than before, and watched the sky out of sheer curiosity, eager to see exactly what had killed her the day before.

  Last time, she hadn't even got the chance.

  Kelly watched shapes tear through the sky in a mess of movement that spun and slammed into itself faster than her eyes could keep up with. A fight churned through the clouds with the coordination of an industrial accident. She caught glimpses. A flash of metal, a tangle of bodies, an eruption of smoke that might have been blood or wings or both.

  She couldn’t count them. She couldn’t even count the trails they left behind. Gunfire popped in and vanished again. Wings and limbs appeared and disappeared without rhythm. It reminded her of a flock of birds, or a school of fish—dense and impossible to track. Possibly less cooperative. At least the fish didn’t explode.

  Her vision tapped out by the second, so she adjusted her head to follow, as if the extra angle might solve the part where the sky was falling apart. Triggering her lesser transformation and 'Death’s Foe' to boost her cognition helped, barely.

  [EQ: 8.6 → 14.3]

  The human figures looked like enhanced soldiers running EQ levels high enough to get their own altitude warning. They had to be carrying heavy weapon augments and implants to keep pace with that kind of velocity. Low-Mach. Supersonic. Jet systems were built into their palms, feet, and backs. Kelly belatedly recognised the burn patterns. The design suggested someone on a budget had gotten tired of gravity arguing back and couldn't afford to spend on anything that actually messed with gravity.

  The jets launched them straight up, yanked them backward, flipped them mid-air, held them still, or threw them forward faster than most firearms. Direction changes ignored anatomy. Mid-air braking was part of the build. Their cognition had been tuned for millisecond coordination. Lungs had been expanded to avoid tearing under strain. Bones had been reworked for repeat trauma. Limbs reinforced to hold together when pushed past sane pressure, which probably counted as optimism. They were moving through the chaos in squads.

  They were fighting something else. Human-shaped, stretched, visibly rotten. Clearly dead—or at least caught in exaggerated decay. Somehow they still moved, which wasn’t impossible; Kelly knew parasites and fungi could do the same. But no fungus on the planet could move a corpse fast enough to make clouds tremble. Movement came in bursts. Faces locked open. Jaws clenched. Wings, far larger than their bodies, dragged behind them.

  Each had a ring of dull, jagged, rusted gold grown straight from the skull. One had two halos, which felt like someone had misunderstood the dress code. The halos looked more like construction material than anything sacred. The wings shrugged off bullets and cut clean. Kelly had seen the viral clips—one showed a guy in outdated security armor split straight down the middle, along with the car he hid behind. The upload came from an account she was about eighty percent sure belonged to an eleven-year-old.

  She had never seen an undead-angel in person.

  The sky held them in bulk—dozens, maybe hundreds—augmented soldiers and undead angels. Kelly watched the entire formation slowly tilt in her direction. Then it dropped toward her with speed and mass. Like a school of fish thrown into turbulence.

  Bodies tore through bodies. Soldiers broke formation and re-joined seconds later. The creatures surged straight through each other, reorganised, and descended in force. The entire swarm was crashing toward her position. And when it hit, everything inside the radius would be eviscerated by the impact.

  She moved left.

  The mass shifted.

  She moved right.

  It followed again.

  She tried heading forward.

  The movement was unintentional. The swarm peeled wide through gunshots, screams, and explosions, reformed, and came down again—directly toward her.

  Each time she shifted, a segment peeled off. Each time, it re-angled to where she had gone, as if the world wanted her gone.

  Kelly watched it all shift with curiosity.

  “Huh.”

  "Look out below!" A voice yelled from high above, enshrouded by a mass of dead flesh and muscle that were clearly portal monsters of some kind. "Move it or lose it!"

  Kelly glanced at the figures tumbling through the sky and recognised one immediately, halfway into a spiralling dive veering off course and now aimed directly at her. Her eyes widened as the trajectory confirmed impact, and she futilely stepped further back a meter and a half, laughing under her breath.

  Some collisions were inevitable.