David cursed under his breath. "Second time the autopilot failed me," he thought. This loop, he'd definitely drop something heavy on Kevin's precious car. Sorry Kevin—actually, not sorry.

  He stood once again in his overheated bedroom at the start of a new iteration. Routine, routine, routine. He geared up with practiced efficiency: weapons, fixing reactor, automated defences. By the end of the day, everything was ready.

  This time, though, he raided a supermarket before everything spoiled and stuffed the good stuff into the office freezer—the same kitchen where he once unlocked the Ice Law. Now, instead of scavenging dusty IT snack reserves, he could finally eat something normal.

  Dinner was a glorious steak with microwaved potatoes. Perfectly seared, juicy, beautifully seasoned.

  With his plate empty, David leaned against the window. The last rays of the sun stretched low across the city. Right now only weak creatures were spawning outside, his robot guardians vaporized them before they could take two steps.

  His gaze drifted to the horizon—the direction that floating eldritch nightmare would eventually come from.

  He sighed.

  What was he going to do about the Cthulhu-boss at the end of this loop?

  Right.

  That Internet post.

  The immortal snail.

  What would you do if a snail was always crawling toward you, forever, and a single touch meant instant death? And in exchange, you’d be rich beyond imagination and immortal.

  In David’s case, there was no money. And the snail was a cosmic horror with tentacles that could fly.

  He tried to recall the most popular solution. Right — hire people to keep the snail contained 24/7.

  “Okay, first problem,” he muttered to himself. “I’m the only living human inside this stupid dome. No guards. No payroll. No unionized anti-snail security staff.”

  So that idea died before it lived.

  Next suggestion: launch the snail into space.

  He glanced up at the shimmering, fake-perfect sky. “Yeah, sure. The moment I find a space rocket under the office couch, I’ll get right on that.”

  Even if he could drag the monster outside the barrier... what if there was nothing outside at all? Just glitching void or some trippy hologram screensaver.

  Then there was the worst suggestion — the smartass approach:

  Befriend the snail.

  David snorted. “Right. Let’s just have a heart-to-heart with the tentacle demon who ignored a literal buffet of power crystals because the System told it to eat me instead.”

  Brainwashing a creature that had already been brainwashed by the System?

  “Nope,” he sighed. “Not winning that psychological warfare.”

  Only one option remained: containment. If he could trap the tentacle Cthulhu-monster inside a thousand-ton tungsten cube, then what could it possibly do to him? Nothing. That would be game over for the thing. Sure, there was still the whole problem of escaping the dome afterward… but, well, one apocalypse issue at a time.

  David drummed his fingers against his plate. Tungsten was unrealistic. Where would he even find that much? And how would he process it? Even if he did somehow acquire a mountain of the stuff, using the Law of Metal on it… no, that sounded like torture. He needed something more available.

  Ordinary metal? There was plenty of that in the city. And technically his Law let him hurl chunks around, bend them, but he couldn't melt the it into other forms.

  Clay? He winced remembering the last time he’d tried that. It worked, technically, but not well enough. He’d need a literal hill of clay and enough mana to bake it solid before the monster smashed him.

  Water? Frozen, it could become ice… but ice wasn’t exactly monster-proof, and the mana costs would be insane.

  Concrete…

  He paused, blinking. Concrete actually wasn’t the worst idea.

  David pictured two huge concrete slabs, each with a square cavity in the middle. Lure the monster between them—wham!—slam the second slab down on top. Monster sandwich. Trapped forever.

  He found himself nodding.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Yeah… yeah, that could work,” he muttered.

  Only one flaw: he didn’t have a Law for concrete. Yet.

  But Laws came easily to him. Too easily, honestly. If he had to guess, the system wanted him to acquire more. So why not try?

  David pressed his palm flat against one of the building's walls and closed his eyes. The concrete hummed under his skin—not with a single, but with a dozen overlapping whispers. At first he thought he’d misread it: a law should be one thing, a single thread you could follow and learn. Here the threads tangled like roots.

  Tiny, grinding voices that hinted at quartz and feldspar. When he dug deeper with Mana Perception he found breath itself—trapped oxygen in microscopic pores. Concrete wasn’t a single material at all.

  He frowned. In his earlier experiments he’d learned the System liked purity: a uniform substance, a single frequency to tune your perception to. Clay, ice, even steel had given themselves relatively quickly. But due to its complexity concrete refused to be so obliging.

  David slid his hand away.Sand.. Molten sand becomes glass—clear, uniform, a single note the System could teach him. But to turn sand to glass you needed heat. He imagined standing on the construction site, lightning arcing from palm to pile, glass blooming in a blister of blue-white flame. The idea tasted expensive.

  Maybe I should take a different approach? He glanced at the skeletal building nearby with its exposed floors. The concrete blocks stacked on top of each other separated with steel beams. A controlled demolition might bring the slab down where on top of the monster, trapping it beneath, structural weight replaced magical muscles. He considered the idea. He was not and had never been a demolition engineer, and he didn't think he could easily find explosives.

  Magic offered alternatives but all of them ate mana by the wheelbarrow. He let the thought pass. For now, he should think of other angles to try.

  David parked outside the hardware superstore, hoping inspiration would strike between aisles of bolts and paint cans. If he was going to build a trap for a demon, the materials had to be strong, reliable—something that could actually hold.

  He wandered through the rows. Wooden planks? He tapped one. Too flimsy. Bricks? He shook his head.

  "God, if You're out there," David muttered, staring up in desperation, "send me a sign."

  His eyes lifted toward the ceiling. Metal ceiling.

  He paused. Slowly looked around.

  Walls—also metal.

  A spark flickered behind his eyes. If the building itself was steel… then maybe he didn’t need to build the trap from scratch at all.

  The iteration was coming to an end.

  David lounged in his chair-plane, hovering lazily over the office complex below. Having a personal aircraft made the panther minibosses a joke this loop. He blasted them from above, never even letting their claws get close.

  Now he waited. The final boss would appear any moment.

  He had already devised a strategy for victory when this cycle began, but he hadn’t wasted the extra time. He trained himself.

  [You have improved your Magical Core: Rank C? → C+]

  [You have improved your Magical Core: Rank C+ → B?]

  It had been mind-numbingly boring—burning mana cores while binge-watching the backlog of shows he kept putting off. But it worked. His overcharge no longer drained his power instantly.

  [Overcharge 2 → 3]

  Now three plasma-lightning beams could erupt from his hands at once. A fourth still eluded him, but with a little more levels multicasting… maybe.

  And the last on

  [Level Up 12 → 13]

  David grinned. "Come on, big guy, I am waiting" he whispered into the empty air.

  [An Examiner has been assigned.]

  Three hundred meters away, the abomination emerged. A mass of churning flesh and writhing tendrils. It locked onto David the moment reality finished stitching it into place.

  It lunged.

  David didn’t bother firing. He’d done the math in earlier loops: mana-based only fed its barrier, wasting time and mana he couldn’t afford. So he angled his flying chair toward the construction supply store and punched the (imaginary) throttle.

  Buildings whipped beneath him. Wind scalded his eyes. The monster started to lag behind.

  Two minutes of desperate flight later, he dove through the familiar open window. Inside—silence. Just gaping aisles stripped bare. Only metal remained: shelves, walls, pillars. Everything else he’d cleared out long beforehand.

  He landed his chaircraft, heart pounding. The roof above groaned—then exploded inward as the Examiner smashed through with a shriek of tortured metal.

  Not yet.

  Three hundred meters.

  Two hundred.

  One hundred.

  “Now.”

  David thrust both hands forward and unleashed [Major Law of Metal].

  Shelving units jerked violently into the air and hurled themselves at the beast. They didn’t penetrate—its barrier held, embedding the racks into its shimmering surface.

  Then the wall panels trembled.

  And the ceiling plates.

  And the floor supports.

  All of it ripped free, spiraling at the creature in a torrent of steel.

  “Heh,” David muttered, adrenaline?drunk. “Look at me—Ferrokinetic from XYZ?Men. Where’s my cape?”

  The Examiner slowed. Its protective field thickened, bloating with twisted iron. It started to resemble a giant candy wrapped in foil.

  Beams—the building’s very bones—shot upward, battering into the swelling sphere. The structure groaned around him; if anything besides those pillars had been left overhead, he’d already be a pancake.

  Mana drained like a severed artery. David fished one hand into his bag, palm brushing the cool edges of stored crystal?cores. He crushed a few—power surged—and he pushed harder.

  The parking lot screamed.

  Cars—sedans, trucks, a delivery van—ripped free from asphalt and streaked inward, slamming into the monstrous cocoon with meteoric force.

  The sphere shuddered.

  Stopped advancing.

  Then… slowly… began to sink.

  Down.

  Down.

  BAM!

  The metal titan slammed into the earth, the impact echoing like a bomb across the city.