Chương 41: Small Gods

Kelly Voss, Innocent bystander. The ground cracked under the first impact. Kelly lunged aside as the taller metal construct drove both blade arms down, carving through tile and reinforcing steel. The crack widened with surface damage, while the tremors that followed made a decent case for panic. Across the chamber, the broader one barrelled into the skeletal knights, scattering its metal plating as it bore their combined assault.

The gunmen took one synchronized glance at the scene and decided they didn't make hazard pay, disappearing into the tunnel. Kelly ducked haphazardly beneath a whip-like blow as Reggie's metal giant's arms rippled and contorted like human skin. How was he doing that? Oh. That was how. She watched the metal shift on its surface—soft, then sharp again. Some conductive alloys could be kept semi-solid using rapid, low-range magnetic modulation. So it wasn't melting.

He was bending it back and forth so fast it looked alive. And making it act human was probably just magnetic puppetry with a side of electricity. She hoped he wasn't simulating muscles. That would mean admitting he knew what he was doing. Pulling panels from the walls was one thing. Turning them into sword arms and fake liquid skin? That took ego. She gave him points for effort. The building hadn't been touched like that in years.

The construct swung—blade charged—and its voice came through the air, static-warped and electric. Suffused, as if the air itself had decided to speak.

"You're not making it out of here alive."

"Reggie," Kelly said, "if you wanted me that badly, you could've skipped the metal striptease and asked." She tilted her head at the architecture spooning him. He'd killed her in loops so many times, and somehow never used this. Kelly took the moment to file that under bad strategic planning.

"Still not interested." Kelly had been experimenting with self-restriction, holding back from using her weapon's chain-blade form to better upgrade her'Deflection' Title. Because if she wanted more, she needed to refrain from using the good stuff and stack achievements. That made the first construct's whip-like limbs a problem. But apart from that, Reggie's metal constructs were… poorly designed. They were impressively hard to break, sure. But they were also slow-moving.

The constructs weren't much faster than a person stuck at the 2. 0 EQ limit, which made them slower than everything there. But they could take a beating. The materials were durable, and any part she sliced off was near instantly replaced through his magnetism.

Reggie had swapped speed and force for bulk and resilient armor, turning them into electrically charged and heavy-plated turtle shells—strategically designed to wait out a war they couldn't win, and wrapped in enough armor to be considered emotionally unavailable. Reggie's metal giant swung both arms, electricity surging. And this time, Kelly didn't dodge. She swung, her blade's edge flattening by thought, Death's Foe boosting her past 6. 8EQ. On contact, she pushed back, and switched to Disciple of Deflection.

The recoil sent both metal arms flying, and sent fractures along the surface of one arm. The entire thing lifted briefly off the ground. Kelly immediately switched to Fortress of Flame, the Title absorbing the voltage. She guessed his nervous system rerouted through secondary muscle control—probably to compensate for spinal damage or a missing shoulder.

"You swapped out your whole squad already? Fast turnaround." Kelly said, shooting a round that sent the metal thing stumbling.

"You think those were the only ones? For the price on your head, all it takes is a call." The construct recovered and swung. A static pull dragged loose metal across the floor behind him. The remaining eight gunmen lingered at the tunnel's edge. Alive and limping, clinging to weapons—they clustered in partial cover behind the metal support struts, bruised but functional. None advanced. They were waiting. Watching—trying so hard to seem invisible that they looked like living statues.

Waiting for a signal, or maybe a distraction. The second construct had taken over the front lines—absorbing strikes from the bone giants, redirecting the aggression that would've broken their formation. Kelly understood their strategy immediately—it was obvious. Rather than split forces and fight on two fronts, they were going to utilise the bone creatures. If the skeletons didn't finish her, they'd weaken her. Then the squad could step in and mop up without earning it. Efficient. Cowardly. Smart. Annoying.

The floor vibrated. Footsteps boomed. Something heavy was moving behind Reggie's first construct. Several somethings—fast and loud. Reggie laughed into the chamber.

"Once the knights are done pulping your soft bits," Reggie's construct voice came through static, "I'll have the frames collect whatever's left." Reggie's first construct jumped over her. A clean vault. The motion cleared her line of sight, revealing the second construct ahead, charging directly. Just as she'd predicted.

Skeletal knights had already begun advancing behind it, pulled in by motion and impact, their path folding into a convergence around her position as the whip-armed metal behemoth blocked her escape. Kelly raised both hands in surrender, testing a current and highly debated theory that claimed some humanoid portal creatures had interspecies communication tech capabilities—and as a result, could understand human speech.

The theory remained unproven speculation, since even advanced language models struggled to extract meaning from the noises most of these creatures made, and instead parsed communication and behavioral cues from body language. Kelly conducted her 1, 297th field test. It was a new species, after all.

"All right guys, you got me, you win. The prize is not stabbing me." The skeletons continued their charge.

"Really, guys, no need to keep fighting. Truce accepted." The skeleton knights acknowledged her surrender by surrounding her and lunging in unison, evidently aiming for their trophy. Kelly jammed her blade into the ground at an angle. Its edge transforming, extending far downward, the tip shifting into a blunted industrial hook and locking deep into the buried support underground. Then she dropped fully into her shadow. Only her hand remained above—gripping the handle, skin shifted to hardened mimic alloy.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. Safe in her personal shadow dimension, surrounded by darkness, she felt the hit as a dull tap. When she resurfaced, the floor was a mosaic of rubble, dust, and crushed bone. The constructs remained untouched. She realised every strike had targeted her last location. The bone creatures ignored all other forms, which implied shared targeting priorities and coordinated behavior. Pheromones, maybe. Or something tactile.

She wondered if there had been a physical cue she hadn't seen—and made a mental note to test if mana could be shaped into a radio frequency. Then she cocked her railgun and reset her grip. Kelly fired two light railgun slugs at the nearest skeletal knight. Just before contact, both rounds curved into a distortion field and ricocheted into the far wall, collapsing a support beam and flattening a corner of the chamber. She stopped mid-thought. Kelly watched it happen, eyes wide.

Her attention collapsed into a single point, already parsing outcomes before she understood why the distortion had warped the light railgun slug's path and thrown it wide. Most buildings could withstand glancing hits or low-EQ impacts, but unless they were high-priority sites—like these tunnels—and unless someone had gone full budget apocalypse with impact-nullifiers, exotic alloys, or directional dampers… a Mach 5 railgun slug could still punch through their supports, and shred every critical system in the walls.

A railgun slug shot off at somewhere between Mach 5 and Mach 15—roughly 3, 800 to 11, 500 miles per hour, depending on how much funding the gunmaker had. The lighter models capped at 3, 800, which still meant "goodbye" for vehicles, defense plating, and any infrastructure pretending it had resistance. If a slug bent midair without contact, something had hijacked motion itself, because armor didn't get a vote at those speeds.

She'd found something absurd enough to break motion—because the projectile had been on target, and something had forced it off. The world had presented her with something new. That meant it got her full attention. Kelly's breath shifted—quiet, steady, real, her heart hammering against her ribs. As the lead skeleton swung in response, wielding a sword the size of a small vehicle, Kelly stopped holding back.

She switched her blade to chainsaw mode with a thought and tapped the small cube attached to her wrist to activate the teleporter rig. She needed samples. Preferably living. She teleported some distance away, a little closer to the tunnel where the eight gunmen were hiding, leaving the bone knight-things—whatever they were—with no targets besides Reggie's constructs. She counted fourteen bone-knights and noted with surprise that Reggie's band of hired misfits had actually managed to bag and tag one.

Then she glanced at the tunnel where the 7. 6EQ team captain stood with his seven men. They hadn't moved yet, but they would. If she wasn't prepared, that would end her fruitful day. OK. That meant while the bone-giants pummelled Reggie, Kelly had to take out the backup first. Before they could ambush her. She switched from railgun to handgun, held her chainblade tight in her free hand, and teleported directly above the remaining eight gunmen in the far tunnel.

Kelly hung in mid-air for a breath, then she shot and swung. She slashed with her chainblade, cutting into part of the team. Then with her other hand, she fired into the others. The leader reacted immediately—rifle raised, target acquired, trigger ready. The rest of his team followed within the same second, already adjusting, already shooting, every movement matched with machine-tight precision and trajectories synced so tightly it looked rehearsed by a neural patch and a shared calendar. They were already firing.

In any other loop, that would have been the end of her. But Kelly's two-second charge had already completed. She teleported again, and fired again. Then carved through the rest in one vertical swing. Most wore tactical armor rated to deflect lower-velocity rounds, assuming poor placement and minimal follow-through. But none of them were rated for a chain-blade engineered to split molecular bonds, swung at almost seven hundred percent beyond human speed and wrapped in momentum.

Under the right cocktail of conditions, a human could, in theory, crack a metal whip past the sound barrier. It would need to be short, segmented, and built from something that didn't fold in shame halfway through the swing. If engineered correctly, the tip could touch Mach 1. 5—maybe 1. 8—before friction, rigid metals, or common sense ruined everything. The sonic crack would happen, barely possible by baseline hands and barely audible over the sound of the wielder's joints regretting everything.

But Kelly's hand moved several times beyond baseline. And because she didn't want her weapon to completely shatter, she eased her swing just enough to break the sound barrier. Each link accelerated into the next, converting momentum into rupture and momentum into throughput. The blade met no resistance, and an explosion of sound ripped through all in the tunnel. That included the captain.

Standing in the now empty tunnel, a line of clean bisection cut through its otherwise reinforced structure, Kelly received a mental alert informing her that the weapon's integrity had dropped by 20 percent.

"Worth it." The weapon had four swings left in whip mode before structural failure. Using a slower mode was mechanically safer but tactically inefficient, especially against a group of seven-foot beings of what looked like heaps of fused bone infused with reality-altering energy.

Caleb, Genecorp Intern.

"If they all kill each other, I win," Caleb, the Genecorp intern, said quietly, mostly to himself. He stood at the tunnel's edge with both hands clamped around a gun he didn't want to use. He wasn't augmented until a few hours ago. His limbs still hurt. He wasn't combat-certified; he was only here because Kelly told him to stay alive, and because refusing would've gone worse. Company policy allowed emergency use of restricted weapons if the site faced collapse-level threats.

It allowed emergency upgrades too—'Crisis Upgrades'. If the threat was neutralized, the employee got legal protection—but became financially liable for damages. If the threat escaped, the penalties were lighter: deductions, reassignment, a flagged profile. No criminal filing. So if Kelly won, he'd owe the cleanup. If she ran, he'd get cited for failure, but it would pass. If he got involved and it went wrong, he'd eat both.

The plan was to stay out of frame, submit the report before Legal opened, and hope someone else claimed responsibility. Best outcome: Kelly finished the job, and he became a footnote. Worst outcome: he tried something useful and got terminated for initiative.

Kelly Voss, apocalypse survivor. Before reaching her lab, Kelly had barely explored the city. Her single-minded, hardheaded focus had always pulled her forward toward her lab. Almost every loop had reinforced the same route and single priority, the same schedule of critical steps that didn't include sightseeing.

As a result, aside from the'man' in the sky, his giant snake, and one other overachieving monstrosity better left unmentioned, these were the first beings Kelly had met that appeared to willfully control reality to deflect her assaults, utilizing biologies that ignored high-energy and high-precision attacks. The phaser was another example, although his ability was technological and Deadtech-based, not biological like the portal creatures.

The suggestion pointed to either a deliberate use of the volatile mix between dark matter and energy to forge unstable spatial properties, or some form of intentional manipulation utilized defensively. Either possibility required containment and study. The risk was acceptable now that she had the gear, the samples, control over entry routes, and a viable way to study through a half-functioning, buried botanical lab.

While the bone creatures treated Reggie's metal shell as a group therapy project, hammering the dome he'd created while she wasn't looking into another regrettable learning experience, Kelly studied the one bone entity they'd already captured. It lay bound in reinforced wire, shot by illegal netguns—military-only restraints—normally used to capture mutants, overclocked augments, or the things that crawled out of the radiation zones of glassed cities.

The worst netguns could capture a being at 10EQ, and the best of them even incorporated quantum technology, though Kelly doubted that was what they had here. They probably had the regular metal stuff, or she would have been caught a while ago. But Reggie's new squad had captured a portal knight—that meant with their gear, she could too. Kelly searched their remains.

Most of the weapons not strapped to their backs or held at chest level were still, thankfully, in one piece and had survived her strikes, and Kelly dumped all of them into her shadow—keeping only a single light railgun, every grenade they had, and every military netgun. She exited the tunnel at a sprint, teleported above the nearest bone creature, and landed one foot clean on its bony shoulder.

It didn't twist space or deflect her landing with spatial tricks, which was good, and which implied it either didn't notice her or didn't care. Either way, she'd take it. The bone creature started to turn its head, only just realising something stood on its shoulder. Its hand began to rise toward her.

"Skull check," Kelly said. She placed the barrel to its skull and fired at point-blank.