Chương 42: The East-Grid

The railgun round struck the bone giant's head at point blank. Its magical barrier appeared half a second late and split the slug in half, triggering an explosion that fractured the tunnel and flung fragments in every direction. With only one foot precariously balanced, the kickback almost sent her flying. Kelly teleported sideways the instant she squeezed the trigger, a mere moment before the blast hit.

Landing a slightly safer distance away, she waited two seconds for the teleport rig to recharge, then as the creatures swung their giant swords at haphazard superhuman speeds, she repeated the shot ten more times. Each impact caused the same delayed split and directional explosion. After the eleventh, only three humanoid bone creatures remained. With the remaining three, the first stepped right beside a puddle of leftover acid.

Her liquid mastery sent the acid up like a landmine, the column smashing into its legs and eating through its limbs like wet paper. Kelly blew off the last two's legs at point-blank range, then captured all three with netguns. She adjusted her grip. The railgun was half-melted, one panel cracked, and the chamber pressure was wrong. She looked at it, then shrugged. She probably should have used the molecular blade instead. Cleaner, quieter, no recoil surge, and no risk of detonation across her face.

But then she wouldn't have learned how late the barriers deployed under kinetic stress. Or how funny it looked when magical defenses panicked mid-split. So overall, acceptable loss. But life wasn't about speed or efficiency. It was about discovery. From somewhere down the tunnel, Caleb's voice cracked out—thin, breath-held, and unsteady.

"I-Is it over?"

"Kinda, sorta," Kelly said, teleporting to a dented and pummeled metal dome at the center of the destruction, next to three massive writhing legless metallic bone creatures bound in thick military-grade corded reinforced wires. She carved into the dome and found Reggie—jumpy. He jolted upright the moment the opening broke through. Metal began to churn and buck, a breath away from crushing Kelly where she stood. He moved fast, but not first.

She fired the railgun and tore him apart, scattering the pieces across the interior wall as the round tore out of the side of the dome, crashing into and partly demolishing a non-reinforced section of the far wall.

"Now it's over," she said. Caleb pushed his head through the broken opening. He froze at the sight inside, blood draining from his face as his eyes locked on the mess across the dome. He looked like he tried to speak twice before anything came out.

"That was a person." Kelly crouched beside a still-twitching chunk of something that used to be part of Reggie and scoffed. The edges were clean—clean-ish—and the smear trailing off the dome floor hadn't stopped leaking.

"Believe it or not," she said, tone dry enough to sand metal, "that little midget's not dead." He'd survived worse. Plasma to the spine. Electrocution through both lungs. A teleport misfire that folded his thigh through a carbon wall. One loop, she got curious and ran tests. His cells were annoying. They didn't stop. Somewhere in that mess of wire and meat, one piece had already started to bleed just enough to prove the bastard was still thinking about coming back.

He had high-end regenerative nanomachines, but those were only good for shredded organs and shattered limbs, not atomised torsos. The real trick was biological. Gene splicing. Reggie had been gene-spliced with modified biology taken from a type of flatworm. Reggie's ones were known for one thing: they didn't die properly. Even when crushed, cut, or sliced into hundreds of pieces, each piece could grow into a full new body. The reason was fairly simple: their entire bodies were packed with raw stem cells.

That meant Reggie's, annoyingly, was too. Stem cells were basic cells that hadn't picked a job yet. Each one could become anything the body needed—muscle, bone, skin, nerve, or organ. Most animals used their stem cells early in life, then stopped. Reggie never stopped. In most living organisms, damaged cells destroyed themselves automatically to protect the body—cell death. Reggie skipped that. His damaged cells stayed alive, stabilized, and rebuilt. Even a scrap could regrow his whole body. Reggie was annoying.

She'd tested his cells in a loop and watched one rebuild structure on its own. After the railgun hit, one piece of him was still bleeding. His nanomachines helped, sure—but only up to a point. His stem cells did the real work. That was all it took. He didn't even need a head. He just needed time. She poked one of Reggie's scattered pieces then turned to Caleb.

"He's a lifer. L-status," she said, brushing bone dust off her boot.

"He'll be talking in an hour." Caleb blinked.

"I thought lifers couldn't die from age or uploaded their brains to new bodies. I didn't think the whole—regrowing from pieces—was real."

"No, it isn't. Not for most of them. Depends on which company owns you." For the ultra-rich, dying was a transaction—neurological backups, clone transfers, and automated resurrections meant they could functionally live forever. Although you could argue that transferring a backup of your consciousness into a clinical body for a price wasn't true immortality, but instanced life. At the very peak of humanity, beyond the 1%—the 0.

1%, their bodies were assets, and their consciousness a product stored in private data vaults. Caleb cocked a brow.

"But then doesn't that mean…" Kelly nodded with a grin.

"Yep. It means whoever his parents are, or whoever's funding him, they're at the very top. Probably the last people you'd ever want to meet." She climbed out of the dented metal dome and walked toward the three bound, writhing bone entities, with Caleb following at a careful distance. She had just secured prime research material, but given her typical luck, more gunmen might arrive any second, or perhaps something nastier, or even that mysterious skeleton mastermind Caleb was always whining about.

Either way, she only had enough breathing room for one quick and highly irresponsible experiment. That experiment was also fairly simple: shove the bone creatures into her shadow and see if they'd fit. If they slipped in, that would classify them as non-living according to the shadow's arbitrary rules. Which was ridiculous—space couldn't reject something for being alive, because life wasn't a physical property. Mass and energy could be measured—being alive couldn't.

That kind of filtering only happened when something external overrode natural laws. A space that judged biological status was like a bucket that rejected oranges for being too juicy. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. It was probably the Grade. Kelly strongly suspected interference from the status panel, and sometime soon she'd sort that out, ideally in a manner that was both scientifically rigorous and profoundly disrespectful.

She grabbed a netgun and angled the first bone creature carefully against the overhead ceiling light, stretching her shadow wide enough to fit the struggling thing inside. It squirmed on entry, apparently displeased but too concussed to meaningfully protest, which made it marginally easier for her. Generally speaking, something counted as alive if it had cells, burned energy, reacted to the environment, and carried genetic information it could pass along.

Humans, plants, fungi, microbes—even Caleb—all fit neatly into that category.

"Maybe it's a virus," Kelly muttered, nudging the stubborn thing deeper into the dark. Most of her peers didn't classify viruses as alive. Viruses lacked cells, could not reproduce on their own, and did not carry out energy processes. Basically freeloaders of biology, active but technically not living. They only activated and replicated inside a host cell. Because of this, they sat in a gray zone—alive and not alive, in the full scientific sense.

It was still a stupid rule, and if the status panel carried stupid rules, then Kelly would treat it like everything else that tried to impose dumb rules on her: she just had to break it wide open. She'd spent countless loops stockpiling traits and titles precisely for this purpose—gathering research material, amassing strength, and eventually dissecting whatever cosmic entities floated above. Her spatial shadow would be step-one.

She watched calmly as the final bone creature slipped out of sight, then turned to Caleb, eyes bright with excitement.

"Let's go."

"Are they immortal too?" Caleb asked, staring with wide eyes at the remains. Kelly glanced around at the chunks of bone and the massive hole her railgun rounds had punched into the wall.

"Considering how many of them are in pieces right now, I'd say they're aggressively mortal." Kelly glanced at the space where her railgun rounds had blasted a hole in the underground walls, grateful that the city's underbelly was built to withstand and contain the equally fast speeds of the Hyper-rail. Reaching the exit doorway, thankfully already open, the pair walked up to a platform that would take them to the streets slightly more east of the city.

The platform panel was broken, which meant they'd be climbing the emergency rail manually. Kelly leapt half the distance with minimal effort.

"Let's make our escape before more security guards arrive. You need a lift?" Caleb hesitated, then sighed and nodded.

"Yeah, sure. Might as well." She threw a sphere at the ground near him. It unfolded into a circular drone with a grip bar, hummed once, and waited. She'd bought it before the loops as a research recorder, then tore out its network chip and gave it better priorities. In earlier loops, it helped her kill things from a distance—until the creatures noticed, tracked it back to her, and taught her the value of firsthand violence.

She could've used it herself, but wanted to see if climbing stairs counted as a Title condition. Also, she hadn't hit her step goal yet.

"Is that a customised ARGi drone?" Caleb asked, sounding genuinely impressed.

"It used to help me take apart monsters at a safe distance until the monsters decided I was safer dead," Kelly explained, completely sincere.

"Now it's a glorified floating handlebar. Growth is interesting, isn't it?"

Together, they left the tunnels and traversed the streets above, narrowly avoiding another security squad, a cleanup team, and a group of armed men fighting what looked like a giant bulletproof scorpion. It wasn't exactly stealth, but it worked well enough to keep her out of another distraction—at least until something else inevitably crash-landed on, or attempted to, stop them.

Before leaving the area, Kelly gave a final glance at the towering building scraping against the portal-scarred, monster-packed skyline, noting the distant streets nearer the city center still crawling and packed with creatures. She vaguely hoped the staff, citizens, and various employees still stuck inside Park Avenue were okay. Sure, they'd been a bit too enthusiastic about their jobs, but that wasn't exactly a capital crime.

If they had died, when Kelly eventually cracked this loop and finally got past today, she'd find a way to ensure her actions retroactively nudged history enough to save their stubborn lives.

"Um, I think I'm good from here," Caleb said, gesturing vaguely toward a residential tower and clutching his handgun as if letting it go might inspire some random aspect of the world to spontaneously combust. He sighed, loosening his grip slightly, his breath calm.

"My fiancée's already on her way to pick me up." Kelly blinked at him.

"Fiancée?" she repeated.

"You're engaged? You're barely out of the test tube." She tilted her head, reassessing him. She looked impressed.

"I mean, congratulations and everything, but does she know you're out here shooting things?"

"I think she'll understand," Caleb responded, smiling despite himself.

"I mean, as long as I come back alive."

"Your bar for relationship success is admirably low," Kelly noted approvingly.

"Alright. You're more emotionally stable than most warlords I've met. Keep her. Or him. Or whoever signed the contract. That kind of loyalty's rare in collapsing economies." Caleb fumbled for his device.

"Here, let me give you my number. Once I get home, I can send you some of my dad's souvenirs from the Shanghai Fallout. Maybe they'll help you track him down or something."

"Thanks," Kelly replied cheerfully.

"I'm starting to like you, Caleb. Don't make it weird."

"Too late for that," Caleb laughed nervously, waving awkwardly as he turned away.

"Good luck out there, seriously." Kelly watched him leave, feeling strangely satisfied. Today had gone remarkably well. She'd walked away with stolen Deadtech, new Titles, advanced weapons, and even a genuinely pleasant intern who might actually turn out helpful. A few more experiments, a bit more invasive research, and Kelly would have exactly what she needed to finally survive past the twenty-four-hour mark and see tomorrow's hypothetical sunrise.

Sure, now that her EQ exceeded legal limits, future infiltrations would escalate into all-out wars, and Vaughn would probably have some pointed questions, along with every other big company if she dared step into their territory. Details for future Kelly. But tonight? Tonight was for experimentation—sweet, gentle, methodical, delightful experimentation. She had a teleporter to crack open, bone creatures to dissect, and a shadow to disassemble. For Kelly, that was practically self-care.

She stopped in front of the botanical research lab, now a mostly vague mountain of obscured building and buried rubble beneath the remnants of a collapsed bridge. Broken repair drones lay scattered nearby, twitching uselessly in the aftermath of failed repair attempts, as she took in the scene and considered the safest way to safely carve her way inside. Kelly drew her molecular blade and shifted it into shovel mode, stepping forward to— Crash. Wind tore past, too fast to register.

She didn't feel it, but she saw the world twist, then split. No—not the world, it was her. Her head. Her torso. Bisected cleanly as a whole horde of somethings crashed out of the sky and landed directly where she'd been standing, shredding everything in their haphazard fall.

For the first time in many Tuesdays, Kelly was no longer bored. She woke up in bed. The window eased open on its own, letting in soft light and filtered air as the room automatically adjusted to her waking. She lay still a moment, letting the day begin around her before deciding where she'd have to break into next and how. Then, she started her day.

Further outside, on the streets far below, sirens had already begun to repeat warnings of an impending collapse of infrastructure, and drones hovered in slow spirals, announcing evacuation details in progress. Kelly tuned out the noise and mentally ran through her tools, noting what might still be useful—even though none of it was nearby and most of it needed printing. A low rumble passed overhead.

Something enormous and alien swept past the building, blocking the light through the window for a few seconds and leaving the room dim and quiet again. The monstrous shadow passed, and the building stilled.

"Ugh, I should review my lease. The noise pollution's getting out of hand." She glanced out of the apartment window, idly recalling the sheer scale of citywide destruction her Title's creature stampede had once caused and would likely cause again. The city infrastructure really should sue her for damages. They'd never win, of course—no judge would survive long enough to deliver a ruling.

Kelly stared out at the city under siege, her gaze drifting east as she asked the universe a single question:"What the hell killed me?"