Kelly’s entire life was one long seminar on avoiding the Upper Echelon, anyone who smelled like them, and anyone who sold them coffee.

  From the time she could walk, the lesson was avoid the law, obviously. Next were the people who wrote the law, followed by those who paid them. After that came the private militias with their logos stitched on the sleeves, and finally the neighborhoods those militias patrolled. It was a nesting doll of people to run from.

  She’d been at the receiving end of their attention before. It usually arrived in a screaming package of gunfire and boot heels. A raid on a squat. A ‘sanitation sweep’ of a market. A corporate patrol deciding her face looked suspicious from three hundred meters. Her early education featured a lot of diving behind burning trash cans and memorizing the specific whine of their drones.

  The Demigods moved through the world with a casual planet-cracking social gravity usually associated with collapsing stars. Bystanders with a net worth under six figures were atmospheric dust to anyone even closely associated with their inner circle. Collateral damage was a line item. Kelly had once heard of a man in a suit worth more than a city block order a city block vaporized, because the traffic delay was impacting his annual projections.

  Once, her only interactions had been variations on ‘flee’ and ‘bleed.’ She’d never had a conversation with one. Never been in a room where one wasn’t actively trying to turn her into a red stain on the pavement.

  And then the time loops started, and her hatred for them grew. Her hatred for Han Cybernetics, Genecorp, Crystal Nanotech, and even Vaughn, her employer, grew. The loops showed her the machinery. She witnessed first hand how little they cared about the lives of everyone who wasn't them. She saw the decisions being made. She had witnessed first hand the results of strategy calls made in bunkers where they wrote off entire sectors as unsalvageable. She watched the casualty projections get approved because the alternative was diverting resources from a research project studying the magic eating through the walls. She listened to the cold, static-filled comms traffic where field teams were ordered to hold a line, knowing it would kill them, because the data from their last moments of combat was valuable. She saw the reports where civilians were categorized as either a resource to be secured or an obstacle to be cleared. This direct exposure began to color her view of powers that be in general. Anyone in charge. Any authority.

  This ‘Ren’ was a partner of Dr. Haider’s organisation. More than that, he was a retired enforcer for the very people who sat at the top of all the inhabited worlds.

  Dr. Haider was different. Kelly chewed on that fact. He was like her. A nobody. A person who started with nothing but the wiring in his skull and the sheer, bloody-minded genius to use it. He clawed his way to relevance. That was a language she understood.

  He worked for the Upper Echelon on occasion, when their money was good, but he wasn’t a part of them. Not in any real way. This made him a contractor. A specialist. In the same way a postman worked for everyone on a route, or a demolition expert worked for the highest bidder. You don’t blame the shaped charge for the building it collapses. You blame the architect who paid for it.

  Painting Haider and his organization with the same broad, filthy brush as the Upper Echelon felt wrong. It was lazy. More than that, it felt unfair—to him, and to the organization he’d built. This mansion-turned-building of operations was his creation, carved out of the collapsing world. He built it from scrap and stubbornness. He hired people who could do things, not people who knew which fork to use at an executive dinner. That mattered. To lump them together was intellectually dishonest. And if there was one thing Kelly hated more than corporate overlords, it was bad data.

  The reunion with Jennie dangled there, a shiny lure. Tempting. Always tempting. Getting to Jennie was the point. But while she was here, the intern saw other uses for the place; her focus was on the facility itself.

  Kelly was here to use this place. She was going to run the augment training for everything it was worth and collect every bit of intel they had. A civil war was set to erupt in the dome smothering the east grid later today, and any of the strongest maniacs to crawl out of that bloodbath would be useful against the order god’s angel. It wouldn’t hurt to vet their manpower before she drafted them.

  Training with an outer member of the Upper Echelon was a rare opportunity. The man was a war veteran. Kelly had initially rolled her eyes at the title. Which war? The Augment Wars? The AI Coups? The Final Tüin Engagements? Or the savage off-world skirmishes? It was all the same war with different logos stamped on the artillery. Each conflict was a masterpiece of organized murder that left famous corpses in its wake, every battle a factory for legends built on corpses. She’d never heard of this ‘Ren’, but his resume was probably written in the scars of everyone dumb enough to stand in his way.

  The experience would be invaluable. She’d get to learn how they moved when they weren't just leveling a city block. She’d see where the seams were in their augmented perfection. It was a chance to study the blueprint of the people who’d spent her life making her run.

  Until recently, her only interactions with the upper echelon had been a childhood curriculum of ducking for cover and sprinting. Every visit from them was the same. A pretty light show in the sky advertised who was about to ruin your day, followed by the very loud, very expensive argument they were having with someone else. They never cared who was underneath, and cared even less who got in the way, especially if your net worth could be counted with a dollar menu. Collateral damage was just confetti for their parade.

  Kelly had always wanted to punch one of those smug, overpowered, untouchable walking tax exemptions in the face.

  She had vaporized one once. The terraforming cube had turned him and his personal guard into a brief, expanding sphere of component atoms. Vaporizing them with the cube was fun—a bright flash, a neat crater, no mess. But that was remote work. Impersonal. It was like ordering takeout. Punching one, though? That was home cooking. She wanted to be there for the moment their perfect, augmented brain processed that the scenery had just broken their nose.

  The combat hall came alive around them. The walls, floor, and ceiling moved with heavy thuds as reinforced sections slid into place. Corridors formed, along with open kill zones and hard corners. Platforms rose up at different heights, giving clear firing positions and sight lines across the arena. Low alloy walls and solid barricades created cover. At the center, the floor flattened into a wide platform, slightly raised and completely empty—meant for close combat.

  Ren Sato stood there waiting, and Kelly immediately understood why veterans were different.

  He wasn’t just augmented like everyone else. He was a living archive of corporate warfare, a relic from before the age of monopolies. Part of his right arm was clearly Han cybernetics—gunmetal gray, clean lines, visible joints. A shimmer like heat haze clung to his shoulders and ran down his spine, something Kelly recognized as Crystal Nanotech, but weaponized. The thick, corded synthetic flesh of his forearms and legs moved with a smooth, faint vibration—Vaughn Industries biomechanics. Under the skin of his neck, glowing green veins pulsed slowly: Genecorp genetic mods.

  On top of all that were the weapon augments, most of them easy to miss unless you knew exactly what to look for—and Kelly was sure there were more she couldn’t even see. His knuckles carried dull black strike surfaces that looked like ordinary reinforcement until they moved. The hex-patterned vents along his forearms lay flush with the skin, sealed and invisible until needed. The weapon built into his left forearm didn’t break the line of his arm at all; the opening only revealed itself at the wrist when the surface shifted. The matching system in his right shoulder was just as well hidden.

  The red dot beside his eye wasn’t a device so much as a point of focus, something projected through the eye rather than mounted on it. Power moved internally, leaving only subtle thickness at the shoulders where systems fed into one another. The circular inserts in his palms sat level with the skin, indistinguishable from natural variation until they activated. The orange lines along his limbs weren’t mere lights but stress patterns, only visible because his body was bleeding off force faster than human flesh ever could.

  His eyes held the flat, sharp focus of tactical overlays that never shut off. Even the air around his hands wavered slightly, bleeding off contained thermal excess—carefully controlled.

  Nothing about it looked added.

  Everything looked finished.

  The result was a unity of supreme, brutal functionality.

  In that moment, Kelly mostly just wanted to pop the hood and see how the whole thing actually worked.

  He hadn’t picked one company or one system. He had taken pieces from all of them. He came from a time before Han, Crystal, Vaughn, and Genecorp locked everything down and made mixing tech a legal and compatibility nightmare. Now, even illegal or underground augments were either done by amateurs fumbling around in the dark or cost so much it stopped anyone from even trying. Just another corporate barrier.

  But back then? A soldier took whatever worked and wove it in.

  The result was a unity of an entire species dominance.

  Ren Sato waited for her, a monument to an older, less restricted, messier kind of war.

  Ren was more imposing than anyone Kelly had ever faced. He shifted his weight and a wave of heat shunted from his shoulders into the vents along his arms. He kicked a leg out, a simple stretch, and his foot blurred almost faster than she could track. The pressure coming off him was wild.

  Kelly prepared for a difficult fight.

  It wasn’t a fight to the death. They had low-level weapons and standard, low-enhanced level ammo. Her transforming weapon was in the shape of a police baton. She had been given an arsenal of guns and stuff that could hurt a normie but barely graze anyone above the superhuman threshold.

  But for some reason, Kelly still felt like she could die facing him.

  “They call me Sato the Ghost,” Ren said, his voice calm. “You might find the name if you ever pick up a book on the old wars.” He settled into a neutral stance. “Any successful blow or landed gunshot will score you a point. I will rate you based on the number you make.” He gave her a slow, appraising look. “Honestly, do not feel bad if you get none. No one ever does.”

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  “How humble of you,” Kelly said, her voice flat.

  He tossed her a vial of emergency healing medical nanotech. She caught it and threw it into her shadow space.

  “I also offer you a tactical option,” he said. “You may command a team of armed drone combatants against me, if you wish. I will not move from this spot for the duration of the test.”

  Really? That was a bad call. He was grossly underestimating her.

  "Your funeral. I'm charging by the dent."

  Ren didn’t respond. He just stood there, hands behind his back—waiting for an answer.

  “I’ll pass on the droids,” Kelly said, waving a hand. “But yeah, toss me a few drones. They’re great for annoying people.” She shrugged. “Gotta keep my one-woman army brand strong. Outsourcing kills the vibe.”

  She’d used whole platoons of drones before. Turret arrays, kill rooms, the works. But back then, the goal was something outside herself—hacking a fabricator, seizing a lab, downloading schematics before the building collapsed. Now, the goal was internal. Dr. Haider had called it ‘training.’ This test was about grinding her Titles, about leveling up the grades of her abilities, and about experimenting with the ways she could use her Traits. Bringing in armed droids to do the shooting for her would defeat the entire point. Her abilities would not improve. It’d be like bringing a calculator to a math test—sure, you might pass. But when it was over, you’d be just as dumb, or in this case, weak, as you were when it all started.

  “Are you sure? You don’t want them?” Ren looked incredulous, like she had just signed the signature for her defeat. Kelly found the look incredibly condescending.

  “And deny myself the experience?” Kelly said, checking the charge on the many combat drones she’d accepted instead. They hummed, floating around her like a constellation of angry, murder-y, bees. “What’s the point of being a—” she resisted the urge to say ‘magical,’ “—combat sponge if you outsource the combat part? I’m here to get messy.”

  The centenarian war veteran didn’t move from his spot. He held no visible weapons. And yet, Kelly felt a pressure she’d never experienced before. This was the first Elite she was facing in open combat, without a single trick, without any cheating. He was the weapon. A deadlier one than anything she’d ever faced. His experience made Adrian Ward—an Elite-level combatant himself, that corporate scion, stuck babysitting that stupid cube in that one loop where she’d drained the explosion—look like an enthusiastic amateur.

  “Alright, grandpa,” she muttered. “Let’s see what your warranty covers.”

  She triggered her mimic skin, shifting it to the strongest material she had on hand: a laminated composite of graphene she’d stolen from a ballistic lab downstairs.

  She set her auto-defence and guided movement systems to maximum. Her posture shifted subtly, her center of gravity lowering, her limbs feeling the ghost-impulse of a million simulated parries. She pushed every combat augment to its redline, feeling the familiar strain in her bones. She equipped her Giantslayer title; the world sharpened, and her speed doubled, then tripled, boosted by the vast difference between them, the world slowing. She triggered her werewolf transformation. Her muscles swelled, her nails lengthened into black claws, and her physical capabilities spiked another ten percent. She smelled burnt ozone and her own adrenaline.

  “Drones. Annoy him,” she said.

  The army of drones dispersed, assuming a staggered, three-dimensional formation under her guidance, surrounding him from all angles as Kelly blurred into cover behind a low alloy wall.

  The drones opened fire—multiple vantage points erupted—a classic suppression pattern she’d seen a thousand times—alternating bursts meant to overwhelm and disorient. And not just ‘seen,’ she’d been on the receiving end of that formation more times than she could count. Now, she copied the same tactics countless armed militia had used against her so many loops ago. Rounds filled the air where Ren stood.

  As Ren was assaulted from all sides, Kelly’s weapon shifted at a thought. Several translucent instant shields popped into the air, each with a solid dark core of material to throw a proper shadow.

  The shadow was the real trick—a gateway into another dimension. Remove the shadow, and the door slams shut. "Decoy," she muttered, and sent them all flying. One low behind cover, many more high, and several behind some rubble across the hall, hidden.

  She stepped into the shadow of the low one and vanished. From the outside, it would just look like she’d teleported behind cover. Let him figure it out.

  A second later, as Ren was surrounded by gunfire, Kelly erupted from the ground, in a completely different position and circled, a fast, low blur. She raced forward to drive her molecular baton into what should have been a blind spot.

  Contact lasted one exchange.

  Giantslayer, Death's Foe, every possible offensive Title, Trait, and upgrade she could think of was used. She activated them in a rapid, sequenced cascade that screamed with more punch, more speed, and more hurt. The result was that she was still utterly overwhelmed.

  Ren Sato moved, and the world became a car crash.

  He didn't move from his spot. The force he generated came from the rotation of his torso, the set of his stance. It was delivered through the air itself, a concussive wave that hit her like a slab of concrete. She was sent flying through dozens of blocks, crashing through walls and leaving a trench in the space with each attempt.

  The impacts would have liquefied a normal person. Her mimic skin and reinforced skeleton turned it into merely feeling like every organ had been swapped with a bag of angry hornets.

  “Okay,” she coughed, pushing herself up. “Point to the immovable object.”

  She had a gun in her left hand and a molecular baton in her right. In her palm, the mana surged through the crystal and rune under the skin. The current surged through them and into the baton. It unnaturally reinforced the weapon in a sudden surge of power that made her feel unstoppable. The baton hummed, the air around it warping with repressed force. It was a clean, vicious, immediate sensation—like she was swinging an extra limb, one that hit with the condensed impact of a wrecking ball.

  Her weapon went flying. It was a simple, almost dismissive parry from his forearm. Simultaneously, he was dealing with the drones. He took them out expertly and with casual economy—a snatch from the air, a crush of the core, a deflection into another's flight path. All while dodging her gunfire or, when he chose not to, deflecting the rounds with his palm. The bullets sparked and flattened against his skin with sharp, percussive pings.

  He had serious weapon augments. When his fist moved, it displaced air with a thick, pressurized sound. He had mobility augments. His evasions weren't steps; they were instantaneous repositions, a blur that left her aiming at afterimages. He pulled his strike back a fraction before impact, the retraction faster than the initial blow, before her Disciple of Deflection could reflect this attack. Then he countered her counter, his movement erasing the space between her action and his reaction.

  He stood amidst the settling debris, precisely where he had been, completely undisturbed.

  “You day repeats upon your death,” he stated. Not a question.

  Kelly pushed herself up, spitting out a mouthful of blood. “Yeah.”

  "If you are living in a time loop," he said, his voice flat. "With a blessing of infinite time… why have you learned no combat arts? Any Close-Quarters Combat?"

  She dusted her clothing, clearing rubble. "You're starting from a false premise," she said, spitting out dust. "It's not a loop. I'm a baby time-god. There's a difference." She tapped a finger beside her eye. "And usually? I just shoot people in the eye. It has a great success rate."

  She bared her teeth in a mimicry of a smile, the taste of copper sharp on her tongue, and started to think of ways to overcome the gap. “And I’ve usually seen the future. I have a combat switch-blade that cuts through pretty much anything, including combat arts. Learning CQC is a pre-apocalypse hobby. I've been busy."

  “Use the blade,” Ren said, his voice cutting through the ringing in her ears.

  Kelly stared, incredulous. “Are you sure? It can literally cut through anything.”

  “Then I will ensure I am not cut,” he replied.

  “Well,” Kelly said, a slow grin spreading across her face. “It was nice knowing you.” She said the words, but a part of her was enjoying the challenge—the fight. She was genuinely curious to see just how far he could push her, and more importantly, what she could gain from it. Would she gain a new Title? Or even better, through Ren, could she break past the Grade-bottleneck, and twist causality even further? She still hadn’t used her ‘no’ beam, but Kelly decided she was no longer holding back.

  With a thought, her baton—the shape-memory switch weapon—transformed. She pulled out the chainblade. Its whip-like, segmented links crackled to life, magical electricity arcing between them with a hungry hiss. She ordered the last drones to lay down suppressing fire and swung.

  The blade moved like a mad whip, an insane appendage surging with mana, carving trenches in the reinforced floor. Each crack created a sonic boom, the air itself splitting. Internal runes absorbed the mana her body constantly pulled, its runes converting it all into a furious, plasma-like charge that wreathed the weapon in lightning.

  Ren dodged it all. He didn't move his feet. His torso and head weaved through the chaos of whipping segments and gunfire like it was a light drizzle. Then Kelly targeted his legs.

  Then he caught the blade.

  Not the edge—the crackling, segmented flat of it. He caught it between two palms in a vice grip, twisting his wrist to redirect the follow-through, stopping it dead.

  Surging current, enough to fry a whale to a crisp, enveloped his hands. It washed over his arms, hissing and spitting. He seemed utterly unmoved by the raw energy.

  “You rely on reflexes and speed that exceed your Enhancement Quotient,” he stated, his voice calm over the crackle. “You assume your mutation will always bridge the gap. You fight without regard for injury, without fear of death. Even with an overpowered mutation, that makes you easy to kill. I see how foreknowledge gives you an advantage. But if you want a clean run—if you do not wish to die to the first entity that simply exceeds your raw capabilities—you must learn how to fight masters. You should hate death. You should hate failure. Treat every day as if it is your last.”

  Kelly, straining against his immovable grip, laughed. It was a sharp, breathless sound. “That’s actually the opposite of my whole ‘time-god’ thing.”

  She yanked the blade back; he released it, letting her stagger. “And god. You’re totally OP.” His dating profile must have been just a list of excessively high standards and a refusal to move from the spot he was standing in.

  They fought. This time, Kelly went all out.

  Her whip blurred in endless, sonic-boom cracks. She used her shadow storage, yanking out spent magazines and shoving in fresh ones mid-motion. Her heat shunts in her fists glowed cherry red. She triggered her mythril-fists, her knuckles taking on a dull silver sheen. She used her limited invulnerability to tank blows that would shatter concrete, feeling the Titles strain. Instant shields blinked into existence around her—static barriers conjured from her weapon’s internal runes—only for his strikes to shatter them like glass. She used her augments, her Traits, her Titles. She transformed her mimic skin to crystalline mana altering scales, unleashing a torrent of flame and elements at point-blank range. She used her instant shields as platforms, blinking them around her to change angles, trying to redirect his blows into her own shadow.

  She pulled out all the stops. Damage resistance, inertia negation, perception sharpening, accelerated healing, critical hits, temporary immovability—every defensive and reinforcing Title she had was active. She shot guns with one hand while the chainblade whirled in the other.

  She didn’t keep up with him. Not even a little. But she wasn’t getting flung across the hall anymore. At least, not straight away.

  The old veteran, however, had yet to break a sweat. Ren had hardly moved.

  He spoke, his voice casual through the whirlwind of her assault. “Despite your mutation, the thing you lack most is time. You only have twenty-four hours. You must stop the destruction of the city, uncover the secrets of the portals, the status panels, and their creatures, all in a single day. There are entities that can hijack your mind. Do you believe the greatest powers on this earth lack the means to access your memories if they capture you? If they ship you off-planet?

  “Any one of the strongest among the Echelon could capture you,” Ren continued, his voice a low hammer in the brief stillness between her attacks. “They could access your mind. Erase it. Turn you into a mindless puppet, and that condition would persist across your loops. That is not death. That is becoming a machine forever. Do you think the law would protect you? That your captors would be executed?” He scoffed, a dry, grim sound. “You would be too valuable for the law to apply. You are fortunate that new, permanent augmentations do not typically last across a reset. Otherwise, they would overwrite you entirely. They would use you as a new vessel for their own faux immortality, just as the God of Order would.”

  Kelly’s next strike faltered. She gulped, the sound loud in her own throat. Shit.

  Because she had cracked that problem. She had a reset button baked into her on multiple levels—a magical, chemical, and mechanical ‘kaboom’ to scour her clean if things went too wrong. But his point landed with the force of a railgun slug.

  He was right.

  If the Echelon caught her and shipped her off-planet, beyond whatever reach her failsafes had… or if something like the God of Order, Illvyr, got its hooks into her…

  It was game over.

  He deflected a whip-strike with his forearm, the lightning grounding itself into the floor. “You should treat each day as if it is your last. Otherwise, you will never reach the discoveries you crave. You will never achieve the heights you seek. You will never find your friend. You may die before you ever get the chance.”