The system’s voice was reciting a steady list of numbers and grades when Kelly spotted a figure rise from the balcony above. The reinforced glass slid open, and he walked right through it, stepping off the edge and dropping two entire floors to land in front of her in a move that somehow managed to be completely silent and completely ridiculous at the same time. Not a speck of dust shifted. The floor didn’t even pretend to shake. The tiles didn’t surrender a single crumb of debris. It was clearly about making a statement and not about practicality.

  Impossibly, he hadn't even displaced the air—she’d checked. Kelly considered applauding. She didn’t. That would have been rewarding the obvious attempt at showing off.

  A quick ping of her scan showed him beyond 60EQ, with a privacy setting she couldn’t pierce just yet, an elite with a high augment level. The exact number remained hidden, as it always did with his kind. Kelly made a mental note to call him “Captain Mysterious” later. Or maybe “The Elderly Attention Seeker.” She hadn’t decided.

  He looked well-built and chiselled in his mid to late thirties, but the type who was like a runner who spent all his time in the gym—only less sweaty and more terrifying. Kelly knew his age was a lie. He was much older. Crow's feet and streaks of grey hair decorated his otherwise youthful frame, which, at the Elite level, meant he was positively ancient—giving him the sort of “I’ve survived three dozen wars, two bloody, corporate collapses, and a minor planetary invasion” look. Or perhaps a major one. Who knew.

  Kelly paused her test. She was holding a droid by the ankle and using it as a baseball bat. The droid was screaming in a high-pitched, robotic whine that Kelly pretended was a tiny choir of angels. She had done well enough, proving she was at least at the peak of the threshold level range. Almost a 20. Which in her mind, meant she could probably fight a small building and win, if that building had a pulse.

  She regarded the man, droid dangling, as if it were a cocktail and she were offering him a drink. “Hi,” she said. “You’re about to make me look bad. Don’t.” She could see the smirk in his eyes. She hated that. But it was fine. She had plenty of ways to ruin people’s smirks. Or at least trip them over furniture.

  He stood as tall as a young man, eyeing her with curiosity and a warm smile, which somehow made her want to smile back and throw something at him at the same time.

  The man’s gaze drifted over the destruction, the broken and pummeled units, the displaced shattered parts. He didn’t balk at the chaos. He looked like he walked through this kind of scenery before breakfast. Kelly decided she liked that. It meant she might have a challenge. Or he might just be polite. Both were fine.

  There was no need for guesses or introductions. Kelly was pretty sure she knew exactly who he was.

  Of course, there was always the chance that he was not the executive. Just some other, random, overpowered executive posing as a janitor. She decided to play along.

  She twirled the droid like a baton. “So,” she said, “how’s your day?” The question hung there. To be honest, Kelly didn’t care. This was her moment. He was one of them. And if the man blinked, she might make that his last moment of composure.

  In the wild, elites were far from rare, but in private security and defence, their rarity existed only in their costs. If one could afford to pay elites—then a random elite joining a combat test to test a mere peak?thresholder was a complete and unwarranted, drastic response. Not a precaution. Not diligence. A statement. The corporate equivalent of flattening a neighbourhood to check if the burglar was still there.

  But then again, Kelly had displayed high specialisations in every category to near-perfection—in speed, in strength, in cognition, and in resilience, with custom augments hardly used in the ways she had used them. Some were likely listed in internal records as “functional,” others as “requires inspection,” a few as simply “mutation” or “needs further study.” Most importantly, some entries just ended with a question mark and a shrug emoji—because even overfunded analysts knew when to admit defeat. She guessed it was enough to draw some attention.

  “Young lady, my day has been splendid,” the old man said with a certain level of gravity in his voice.

  “That’s… good for you,” Kelly said. “Mine’s been paperwork and a biometric violation waiver. Mostly suffering.”

  The old man smiled, thin and patient. “You filled yours out in under thirty seconds.”

  So what? Kelly didn’t read things that ended with ‘all liability waived in perpetuity.’ “I don't usually find highlighted danger a compelling deterrent.”

  “That was the interesting part.”

  Kelly leaned back, assessing. “So. You here to watch me punch something, or are you the something?”

  The old man looked at Kelly with steady eyes. “The city is going to be a pile of rubble pretty soon,” he said. He paused, letting the weight of the words settle. “By the end of the day, it will be a hellzone. You should head for the orbital transit hub and get a shuttle to the nearest safe off-world location while you still can.”

  Rubble, hellzone, second wave, portals—it was all perfect. Conflict was the fastest way to grind her Titles. Grinding Titles boosted her strength. The stronger Kelly was, the easier she could dissect the secrets of the portals, and the closer it all brought her to finding Jennie. There was a method to her madness, and that method was extreme violence.

  Kelly’s grin split her face. “Finally, something worth running into. I was starting to think today was going to be boring.”

  The old man looked at her strangely, but his smile and relaxed demeanor never faltered.

  “You act as if I’m playing around, but I’m being serious. Deadly so.” He took a slow breath. “Wars brewing. A big one. The beings that come next through the portals will make the past wars look like play fights.”

  The maybe-veteran laid out his apocalyptic timetable. And Kelly listened. She looked at the clean, unscarred walls of the testing hall. She looked back at him.

  “Cool story,” she said, her voice flat. “Then why is nobody trying to do something about it?” Kelly asked. Her voice was flat, mildly exasperated, but mostly indifferent to the world-ending news. Then she decided to go all in.

  “That terraforming cube the portal invaders planted in the east grid is going to be a…” she wondered how best to describe it. “A cosmic eviction notice. Yeah, that’s it. A purge. A ‘we own this planet now—a request for all of us to ‘please die.’

  She settled a calm, lazy gaze on his probably veteran figure. “Once the cube does its thing—once it starts rewriting local reality and turning the boroughs into a magical theme park for interdimensional colonists—the national guard will roll in. The army too. Then the corpos will send their black-ops teams to claim the intellectual property. The joint force will show up to ‘restore order’ by blowing up the landmarks. And then the damn Tüin will arrive because they heard there was a fight and they don’t like being left out. They’re all gonna fight. They’re gonna blow up the city fighting over it.” She let out a short, sharp sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, but was somehow tinged with frustration, perhaps for the earth or for the casualties she usually ignored, like Rowena. “And then? Then the actual demigod-level portal people show up. Not creatures. People. From their whole magic dimension. A dimension’s worth of people, armed with things that treat physics like a suggestion box… or like ‘No soliciting’ signs. A storm cloud of things exactly like unreadable EQ asshole fairy currently hanging over Times Square, will wipe out the entire country until it’s nothing but a mana-filled plane of glass.” The thing above Times Square wasn’t actually a fairy, it was probably something akin to the order god, but Kelly found calling it a fairy satisfyingly demeaning. And she knew it, or groups of anything like it, wouldn’t hesitate to glass landscapes. “So. My question stands. Why is the response to this just… a bunch of guys in suits having meetings? Why is everyone just standing around waiting for the light show?”

  Now it was this old man’s turn to look at Kelly sharply. His warm, assessing expression frosted over. The polite curiosity vanished, replaced by a sudden, intense focus. He didn’t move, but the room felt smaller.

  “And just how,” the old veteran asked, his voice low and precise, “does a twenty-nothing year old intern like you get a hold of such information?” He studied her face, searching for a lie. “Joe wouldn’t do something as stupid as telling you. No matter how far back the two of you supposedly go. He enjoys breathing.” He paused, reassessing her completely. “I initially thought I’d give you a warning. A professional courtesy. Because you seem capable of surpassing your upper limit without going mad from overclocking. That’s a rare talent. A stable, high-output asset we almost never see…” He tilted his head, his eyes zeroing in on her still form. “But you also know about highly classified information? The specifics. The timelines. The cube’s location.” He didn’t blink. “You know it all?”

  “Oh hell yeah. Of course I do, I’m a baby-time god. I know loads.” She tilted the droid she was still holding upside down by the ankle, giving it a little spin so it wobbled like a wine glass. “I keep living this same day over and over! It’s kind of fun sometimes, but mostly it’s… well, mostly me accidentally overseeing a lot of people dying. Tiny problem, barely remembered it.”

  She bounced the droid gently on the tip of her boot, watching it sway. “I’ve played mind Jenga with something that called itself an Order God, accidentally nuked a district a few times—well, only the first time was an accident.”

  She paused, then counted on one finger. “Unalived over a hundred guards on a staircase—they should really reinforce that place. Oh, and I even killed a Tüin Ambassador!”

  "Good times,” She sighed, a wistful smile on her face, and shook her head as if recalling fond memories. “But I still haven't figured out the big picture. I don’t know why we're having a magical portal invasion, or who’s actually behind it all, or who that bastard in the sky conducting the magical mass murder is, or who exactly is behind the complete lack of organized military retaliation. So far, the only time the military seems to work is when they're either evacuating people or collecting extra-dimensional tech!"

  “But it’s kind of a secret,” she added, “so don’t tell anyone.”

  The older man’s face was the image of pure shock. Then the maybe-veteran opened his mouth as if to speak.

  Kelly raised her free hand, stopping him cold. "Ah-ah. Save it. This is my first 'today' here, so don't ask me to guess your birthday, or your secret bank codes, or what you had for breakfast. I’ll do that tomorrow."

  The old veteran’s eyes actually opened a slight bit wider. He held Kelly’s gaze for a few seconds, his expression unreadable. Then he smiled. It was a thin, incredulous stretch of his lips.

  “Heh… just… amazing…” he muttered, the words spilling out in a low, almost crazed whisper. “A time mutation… unbelievable. You really struck the interplanetary jackpot. The cosmic lottery. To get such a powerful mutation, and you still look human! Such a blessing on one so young and stupid. An idiot granted the blessing of the millennia.” He shook his head, the smile turning into a grimace of disbelief. “You have a world-defying mutation that would make every legend and war hero in the upper echelon salivate with greed. They would murder planets for a fraction of that power. And you’re idiotically telling anyone with a pulse and two legs. You’re just begging to be bagged and tagged. Begging to be dissected forever. They’d extend your life indefinitely just to spend centuries uncovering your secrets.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a harsh, urgent rasp. “Tell me, idiot. Which pollution field did you develop it in? And how many times have you died over the course of this… this condition you find yourself in?”

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  Kelly snorted. “Stupid idiot, you say. Ha. Me? If I’m an idiot, then congratulations, everyone else just earned the collective award for complete brain rot. Seriously, calling me an idiot? That’s an insult to literally everyone else trying to survive this dumpster-fire apocalypse. I’m awesome. Best, in fact. Best or some shit like that.” She gave a dramatic flourish, kicking an empty energy canister into orbit, where it promptly bounced off a satellite and ricocheted into a billboard advertising corporate redemption programs.

  “And let me tell you,” she continued, balancing the droid she’d picked up by the ankle like a limp bag of groceries, “endless repetition? Hell. Literally, hell. Like someone cursed me with eternal Monday. But the new? The unknown? Heaven. Literally the best thing that’s ever happened to me. So yeah, your little scenario would make my day. Week, even. Probably the fiscal quarter too if we’re counting corporate metrics for fun.”

  She rolled her eyes and gestured vaguely toward the city. “And to answer your question—take a guess. Could be any of the fields in the city. I’m not a mutant. No horrific scars or monstrous superpowers. None of that drama. I just… do me.” She tapped her temple. “Pure chaos, pure genius, and lethal, sometimes.”

  “And deaths?” she said, flipping her hand like it was a deck of cards. “Little south of two thousand. At least more than one thousand five hundred times by now. Honestly, I lost count during the less exciting days, you know, the ones spent memorizing floor plans, tinkering, reorganizing grenades by lethality index… the usual.”

  He paused, at a slight loss. “So… so many?”

  “I know, right?” she said, her voice somber and agreeing. “Completely excessive.” She swung the droid gently with the gesture, the motion unintended. She loved the loops, they were the best thing that had ever happened to her. But there had been some bad days, weak moments overcame by progress and her encounters with the wonderful, sweet, and unexpected new.

  He didn’t speak for a second or two. Then exhaled slowly, shoulders easing as he shifted his weight. “Humans… have about a one-percent chance of getting a nonlethal mutation from pollution fields.”

  He straightened slightly, hands resting lightly at his sides. “Of that one percent… less than a third are beneficial.”

  His gaze met hers, steady and deliberate. “Ten million mutants have been recorded on Earth. Only three million of them can do something useful.”

  He paused again, letting the weight of the words settle. “Of those three million… only one ever interacted with tachyons. They could see a few minutes into the future, at least, until they were kidnapped by the government, transferred to the echelon, and died during the coups.“

  “The timing of all this,” he said, studying her before speaking again, his gaze sharpening, “and your age… It’s peculiar.

  To Kelly, he looked like he was in deep thought.

  The old man stepped to the left, then right, muttering, “Maybe… maybe you’re one of the experiment’s kids.” He glanced at Kelly. “Who are you connected to? Your dad? Your mom? An aunt, maybe?”

  He shifted, rubbing his chin. “I remember hearing about some lunatics, way up past the stratosphere, in the inner circle, trying to make a super child on Gideon’s orders—someone to rival the Vaughns. Like Venus, or Vlad. Maybe… maybe you’re tied to that. A child of the echelon?”

  He shook his head slowly, doubt shadowing his face. “No… that’s not possible. They keep tabs on everything. They wouldn’t let something like that slip through. They’d burn worlds trying to find a child like that.”

  Kelly quirked a brow. That was interesting, if wholly irrelevant. There was absolutely no way in any universe that was even remotely possible. Higgs cannons, project portal, the cubes explosion, and a very irritating being floating above time square was the inciting event. That was definitely the sequence that started her loops.

  Kelly knew the what, but not the why or the how. Her looping’s cause was not a mystery, it was the loop itself that was indecipherable.

  The old man’s theory was worth less than an empty wrapper, and Kelly sought to put it to bed.

  “My real parents are dead. Never met them. Went digging a few years back—turns out they were about as exciting as a wet paper bag. A lower-class, outskirts family. Like me. Worked some crap job at a polymer refinery until the air quality did what air quality does out there.” She shrugged, a dismissive flick of her wrist. “Their DNA was so boring it probably put the sequencing machines to sleep. Not a mutant gene between them. And get this—even the fake-ass, wannabe-god assholes trying to invade us from another dimension had never seen anything like what I’ve got. Found that out right before I had to blow my own head off to stop them from hijacking my body and wearing it like a cheap suit forever. Which, by the way, is a thing they do. So, no. Not a secret baby of some overpowered echelon dickhead. Not a war hero legacy. Not portal magic—their little divine ‘Status’ screens don’t even have a category for me.” And of course, Kelly was looping way before her personal magic breakthrough even RSVP’d to this disaster of a day. The cause was a partially-solved mystery.

  The old veteran stared. He opened his mouth. Closed it. The sheer, casual weight of what she’d described—the pain, the repetition, the absurdity—hit him not as both a tragedy, and a report. A grotesque checklist of biblical inconveniences. He finally managed a single, hoarse word.

  “Mind control,” he stated. The word was a flat, toxic declaration. The old veteran’s face reconfigured. The lines across his forehead and around his eyes deepened. They became trenches of pure, focused disgust.

  He stood perfectly still in the center of the hall. His hands, which had been relaxed at his sides, slowly curled. The movement was controlled. Tendons stood out on the backs of his hands like steel cables. The knuckles became pale, hard peaks of bone and scar tissue. Kelly recognized a rage she could not relate to—something that came before her time. His eyes were fixed on her face with an intensity that made the air feel thin.

  “Possession. Mental violation. For eternity…. It is worse than death.” He shook his head once. The motion was sharp and involuntary. It travelled through his shoulders. “I understand why you killed yourself. I would have done the same. Instantly.” He met her gaze. His eyes were hard and unblinking. “That infiltration… it is a corruption. An erasure.”

  His voice held a deeper ragged timbre. It was the sound of that deep, old hatred scraping its way to the surface. Kelly wondered how many he had killed during the coups, assuming he had seen them. “I would have crushed its spine with a boot, torn its heart out with both hands,” he said, his fist unclenching as if replaying an action he’d done before. “I would have died fighting. Without a time mutation. Without a single hope of coming back. I would have chosen to bite through my own arteries and blown us all to hell before I let something… live behind my eyes.”

  Kelly watched him, saw his rage, and completely understood the sentiment.

  Whatever had tried to crawl inside her skull and wipe her being from existence like a scrapped car—they had made a mistake. A big, final, screaming mistake. She would repay them for the mere attempt.

  A hundredfold.

  She reconsidered the math immediately. That felt small. Myopic. Why stop at a hundred?

  Make it a thousand.

  Starting with the angel, then every ‘god’ that peeked its head into her world.

  She waved a hand. “Oh, I absolutely sicced a few of those AI overlords on him—consider it a greeting card,” Kelly said, her voice bright with violent cheer. “But I’m really looking forward to the next face-to-face, when I get to split whatever it’s using for divine teeth with my ‘no beam.’ It’ll be fun.”

  The older man drew a breath. His professional composure reassembled around him. It settled back like a suit of armor. It was cold and sharp-edged.

  “The mutation scope you describe is extreme. It is unbelievable. The degree of tachyon manipulation and quantum field destabilization required… You shouldn’t even be able to stay in one place let alone one time. Not a single physical form. Or even one particular second.”

  Kelly looked genuinely impressed. Her eyebrows rose. She let out a low, appreciative whistle. “You really know your abstract physics.”

  He dismissed her comment. He gave a faint, grim twitch of his fingers. “I’ve been around. You see things and learn even more in my line of work. It becomes necessary—helps to figure out what you’re up against. You tend to learn to name the things that are killing you.” He paused, disregarding the aside, then his gaze intensified. It pinned her in place. “But what you’re claiming… it seems to belong to a different category. It seems impossible. But today has forced me to redraw the map of what I accepted as real. The portals. The creatures. The magic. Yet even against the new crisis… your story is almost unbelievable.”

  Wait.

  Kelly’s eyes sparked with electric delight. She leaned forward. She closed the space between them. “Almost?” she echoed. She drew the word out. A slow, predatory grin spread across her face. “So you’re not outright calling me a liar to my face.”

  Ren held up a hand. “I did not say I believe you. I said it is almost unbelievable.”

  “Tomato, tomato,” Kelly said. Her voice was bright with victory. “That means you’re in. Congratulations. You get to be the first worshipper in my time-god religion. Or is it second?” No it was definitely the first. Marta was insane. “The robes are optional, but encouraged.” She bounced on her heels. “So, what did it? What makes it almost believable? Not completely?”

  The old man studied her, his eyes tracing the lines of her face like he was reading a faded report. “Your age, mostly. Time leaves marks. A person’s age in relation to others is the clearest one. And I’ve seen… a lot. I have enough experience to recognize the obvious. The rest… is a suspicion.” His head tilted slightly.

  “I am Ren Sato.”

  Kelly’s features were a flash of clarity in the sterile light. “Get out. Seriously? I had you pegged as the janitor. The hyper-competent, potentially-assassin janitor who uses balconies for self-expression.” She toed a shattered drone sensor, sending it clattering. “Yeah, obviously I knew who you were. Everyone in here knows the legendary fossil’s name. I just figured you’d be taller.”

  Ren Sato, the short king and ancient war veteran of the upper echelon, an elite—or possible demigod, and Kelly’s maybe-enemy who she slightly wanted to punch in the ex-echelon face, lifted his chin a fraction with approval. His voice, calm and clear, addressed the ceiling. “System, pause the Combat assessment protocol repair. Provide seating and condiments.”

  The vast combat hall awoke.

  A low hum vibrated through the floor. Across the expansive space, the mangled remains of combat drones—the ones she had crushed and flung, or used as replacement clubs—and the two remaining decapoda units steadily repairing them, twitched. From slender apertures that appeared seamlessly in the padded walls, a skittering tide emerged: waves of larger crab-like repair units, each the size of a large dog, with too many jointed limbs and focused clusters of optic sensors. They moved with perfectly engineered synchronicity, swarming over the debris field. Clicking claws gathered shards of polycarbonate, crumpled actuator frames, and sparking power cells. They moved like a single organism, hauling the wreckage back to the walls. The walls parted, revealing dark recesses that swallowed the broken tech and the repair units together without a sound. Within seconds, the floor was a smooth, grey plain again. The only evidence of the one-sided fight was the faint smell of ozone and scorched metal.

  Kelly dropped the droid she held and it slumped, wobbling a little before tilting upright again, heading to the nearest wall. The droid still worked. Unbelievable. What a trooper.

  A section of the floor between them, near the center, dilated with an almost imperceptible hydraulic sigh. An expensive, corporate issue bench fashioned from brushed, cushioned, and padded steel with black composite rose smoothly to knee height. Simultaneously, a panel on a nearby structural column slid open. A small, articulated arm presented a tray: three glass bottles with vibrant labels ‘EXTREME HEAT, TANGY VINEGAR, SMOKED CHILI’, a ceramic dish of coarse salt, and a squeezable bulb labeled “GARLIC SYNTH.”

  They sat. The bench was far more comfortable than it looked; warm and soft. More Giant spider-silk. Kelly was in heaven.

  Ren observed the condiments. Then he observed Kelly. “Do you enjoy curry?”

  She composed herself and acted like the seating alone hadn't made the entire test worthwhile. “Sure.”

  “I like anything that doesn’t actively try to eat me first.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “But… was that a trick question? Are you hiding a biryani in your suit, or is this a philosophical debate about how the world ends?”

  “It’s neither,” he said, reaching for a condiment. The old veteran was all ears and curiosity.

  “Tell me your story.”

  Everything? Should she tell him? Kelly traced a finger along the fine material, enjoying the feedback of the protein composite that made the special strain of silk so impossibly soft, warmth seeping through her boosted skin. She extended her legs, crossing her boots at the ankles. Her gaze swept the immense, empty arena—a cathedral to controlled violence—then landed on the living monument of war sitting beside her.

  “Okay,” she said, her voice bright with violent cheer. “Once upon a time, I woke up in a dumpster called the Outskirts. And then I died. And then I woke up in the same dumpster. And then I died a different way.” She held up a finger. “And that’s just the pilot episode. You ready for the good parts?”

  She looked at the ancient, powerful man waiting for an answer. He was here to make her stronger. In a way no one else could. ‘Should she tell him’.

  Why the hell not? They did say the truth was the daughter of time, and a clear conscience was a soft pillow. Her hand itched with the urge to punch him, not from hatred, but because he had been one of them. Kelly controlled the impulse. Not yet. A huge, chaotic smile spread across her face.

  This was going to be so much better than any combat drill