Chương 44: Living Bone Knight

Kelly stood in Vaughn Industries, the top military augment company in the world's main lab. For a quick detour. Vaughn's big trick was biomechanical augmentation—stolen tech from every competitor fused into a new, unnatural hybrid. Neither purely flesh nor purely mechanical, but a weird, impossible fusion, something between machine and organic life. Muscles of synthetic fibre, skin designed in labs that breathed while flexing naturally, as dense as metal. Machine-flesh that lived and processed data.

All of it alive and thinking. Kelly, spotting the opportunity, took one look at this barely legal buffet of expensive body work and decided to sample everything on the menu. The machines locked her out of weapon augment schematics for the tenth time. She wasn't in weapons—not yet—she was R&D for Project Portal. The data she stole was from that, and none of it covered weaponry.

"I can brute-force the printers, but cross-division locks?" It hadn't worked, though if it did, it would start the equivalent of a holy war. During the siege, the security system locked all sensitive data. Cross-division data locks held firm. Secondly, the staff were a problem. If she'd warned security earlier in the day, her lab would be full of staff and they'd still be around to stop her upgrades. She needed the entire building stuffed into safe rooms and Jackhammer's clearance wide open.

Earlier in the day, she had reached into her shadow shortly after she'd awoken, checking if her stored gear persisted. Her hand found nothing but a faint static tingle. No dice. But it should have worked—her shadow dimension kept time in stasis. Another thing to add to the growing to-do list. Today, she was starting from scratch, not in terms of accumulated knowledge, but physically. She hadn't cracked its weapons.

The bio‑grown blades, the organic heat projectiles that launched themselves on a burst of flame and punched holes through reinforced concrete, the rest of what the creature kept in reserve—Genecorp had locked all of that down under every security measure money could buy across every planet. It would take a few loops. She was working on it.

"Weapon augments are off the table. For now." Kelly said it out loud, partly to hear how unfair it sounded. She really wanted a finger-gun. Nobody would see it coming. Normally, upgrading her biomechanical augments proved pointless—dying annoyingly wiped all progress—but recently she'd picked up magic tricks which held through death, and might finally solve the whole 'impermanence' issue.

She had studied the bone knights, and she had studied the pathways buried in their helix—where the body keeps its nastiest tricks. She planned to throw caution to the wind, abandoning her artificial parts' carefully tweaked human genetics and creating completely new parts; blending her new and improved magic-laden genetics with a hell of a lot of troll DNA, mixing that with some metal and building something fun. She was going to make magical, Kelly-powered synth-flesh.

If it worked, all of her augments could be made from custom flesh—engineered just for her Titles, powered by her own mana, hiding her real EQ level under a sneaky stack of dormant enhancements. If she scored a new Title from the ordeal, maybe this time the implants would actually stick. Getting the formula stable took multiple tries through multiple loops and one slightly—no, very, angry mercenary who she'd fought so many times his routine was daytime television.

Eventually, she isolated what gave troll muscle its magical strength and toughness, then ditched the rest—she already had its regen in her blood. Oddly, the star-like patterns and sequences that attracted mana to troll bones differed completely from the countless others, implying magical genetics had complex patterns for each distinct feature—like humans did for green eyes or brown hair.

She squinted at pages of meaningless biological code trying to understand how a pattern could alter the fundamental laws of reality, just like how a wooden stick with a mundane crystal did the same. The machines squinted back, equally baffled.

"Someday, I'll figure you out," Kelly sighed, grabbing her tools.

"Then I'll shoot lightning into the sky and drag them all down here, especially that naked fairy." If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. She got to work. While tinkering, thoughts of the exact moment her life spiraled into its current state of madness surfaced: Project Portal. One day, a space-time rip just casually appeared inside Vaughn's vault, refusing to disappear politely.

Vaughn responded logically—they saw the portals as competitive tech they wanted to steal, along with everything that came through the rift; every phenomenon, trick, and every piece of the impossible. Their ultimate goal was to replicate it—as stealing tech, even the dimensional portal kind, counted as aggressive creativity, after all. Naturally, building a ludicrously expensive collider around it and slowly squeezing the anomaly until it shrank from car-door to fingernail size to limit risk was their first step.

Naturally, it stayed stubbornly mysterious and buzzing, refusing to respect anyone's budget. Most of their early attempts to copy the portal had gone nowhere—property damage with dangerous side effects, and that one memorable Friday where an entire floor accidentally became a giant microwave oven.

But the 10th-floor lab remained the most advanced portal diagnostics site in the systems, packed wall to wall with absurdly expensive gear built to stare at portal fractures and pretend to know exactly how they worked—obsessively poking anything swirling, glowing, and "not normal" with cutting-edge, billion-dollar sticks that claimed to read space-time fractures down to the atom.

For the second time in three days, Kelly stood at the center of it all, kitted out with new augments and implants, running diagnostics on herself. She liked what she saw. [Trait Gained: Knight's-Marrow (Unique, I-Grade)] [Trait Gained: Troll-Homonculi (Unique, I-Grade)] [Knight's Marrow (Unique, I-Grade): This being's entire skeletal structure contains the enchanted bones of Death Knight's, granting them Composite Skeletal Architecture. This being's skeleton can be fused and assembled from the bones of different species. This grants an inherent mechanical advantage: limbs have non-standard joint angles, making combat movements unpredictable to opponents accustomed to fighting humans. Their bones now contain the single fundamental enchantment of nascent death knights, granting them the ability to impose their will on all fused bone. Higher grades will yield new and unknown abilities.] [Troll-Homunculi (Unique, I-Grade): This being is a Troll-homunculus, an existence comprised of many sources. Their flesh, bone, muscle, veins, and nervous system are crafted from a unique, new strain of troll physiology, granting them all the species advantages of troll-kind, including accelerated regeneration, boosted senses, and mana-based-strength. Its body is fuelled by mana, and the more mana it intakes, the stronger their boosted regeneration, senses, and muscles' efficiency and body become, gaining mana-boosted physicality to every muscle, nerve, and organ. Higher grades will yield new and unknown abilities.] Kelly picked up a knuckle-sized bone from a steel tray of tagged bones. Her fingernails lengthened into dark points and sank into the bone, splitting the surface and locking inside.

She focused, and the bone softened and reshaped itself into a small blade: one end curled into a handle, the opposite end flattened and sharpened into an edge. She set the bone blade back on the tray and retracted her nails.

"Bone magic. Cool." Kelly had evolved into something beautifully ridiculous. She'd finally graduated from bargain-bin upgrades. New muscles, magic bones, fresh skin, a few processors, new bolts, and chunks of tissue she probably shouldn't dwell on too much, all of it baked into functional augments, all of it engineered, and all of it synthesized from a blend of stock materials with Troll DNA as the base—which meant the magical DNA would quietly sit mostly dormant, until her magically charged Titles woke them up.

It was new. It was jury-rigged. And it wasn't pretty. Vaughn's R&D team were probably already doing a far better job off of magical synth-meat off-planet, creating insane stuff from captured samples that would put what she'd just made to shame. But as of right now? Kelly smugly held one undeniable advantage: She had the missing piece. Her stuff actually worked. She still carried the titles: Death's Foe, Herald of unending Vitality, Lesser Null-Voidling let her bypass certain physical laws.

Fortress of Endurance resisted impacts that should have killed her. Disciple of Deflection redirected those impacts toward innocent walls or inconvenient bystanders. Outrunning Death was one of the newest—tied to her running through buildings with her insides barely inside, and her sheer stubborn refusal to die.

Exactly how the Titles worked stayed mysterious—sure, the scanners showed they imprinted and altered her body and flow of energy on the fly, but they didn't show how—mostly because the strangely dense DNA scribbles embedded in invader flesh refused to make sense even to the expensive machines Vaughn bought to decode them. Vaughn's leading minds had already started calling the emerging framework 'Magic Theory,' though nobody liked the name and a few people still visibly cringed every time it was said aloud.

It remained an ambitious mess of guesses, unpredictable dark energy interactions, and hopeful theories that meant "we have absolutely zero clue, for now."

"Equip Death's Foe," Kelly huffed, vaguely pleased. Things were going well. Sort of. Hard to tell when your lungs felt like someone had stuffed a live cable through each one and dared them to short out. She had crammed so many mana-dependent augments and functions into her body she half-expected to light up the dashboard. Nothing flashed. Good enough. Time to see what the mess amounted to when it all kicked in. Then, she was notified of new changes. Several new changes.

"Status!" she yelled, in her truck.