Chương 56: An Anomaly of Mana

"No! Don't d—" The corporate prince's complaint was cut short as the world threw a chromatic tantrum. The whole dome, its four residents, the metal and rock, got promoted to a hostile art exhibit of burning light. Everything erupted into a cataclysmic explosion. It was a show so bright even people mana usually ignored got a front-row seat. Adrian, a near-demigod from the Upper Echelon, was powerful enough to make a pro warrior like Ithili sweat. His resume was impeccable. It was also completely useless.

The man just melted. Ithili and the sniper got the same memo. Their entire squad was vaporized. It wasn't a quick delete. It took a full one hundred and twenty seconds for their total unwriting. A lifetime of top-tier defenses was promptly retired. The sniper tried to run, managing a pathetic shuffle. Ithili went for a charge, a plan that ended when his legs quit on the spot, turning to dust from the inside out. Kelly stuck around thanks to Mana Vacuum's generous benefits package.

The Title's promise to turn absorbed mana into magical steroids was honest. It kept her systems online through the shredding storm, a technicality that barely qualified as living. Layers of her skin and muscle were erased. Her organs became a perpetual motion machine of regeneration and failure. With the welcoming committee now scattered particles and fine mist, and eventually particulate matter, the battle was over. The threat was finally clear. There was no one else to fight her for the cube.

Kelly switched to Unending Vitality Title, trying to further combat the damage. She was full of energy, fueling her every ability. She tried to pull her hand free, ready to let the terraforming cube do its thing without her. Her hand didn't budge. Couldn't. The mana didn't stop its chaotic flood into her. The surge, in fact, only intensified. The chromatic energy saturated the air, a multicolored, radioactive electric thickness that made breathing a lung-shredding chore.

Kelly couldn't see atoms—her vision didn't work that way—but with her eyes endlessly regenerating, she entertained herself by picturing them having a rave in the atmosphere. Each breath carved fresh wounds in her lungs. Her skin cracked and sizzled, and her heat shunts, completely overwhelmed, forced her fists to blaze with intense radiation and blast steam, a display that did nothing to slow the damage.

The energy density increased every second, and within a minute after Ithili and Adrian were erased, it became so oppressive that it trapped her in place, crushed her bones, flayed her skin, and cooked her alive. Kelly was staying held together by spit and wishes—the wishes being a regeneration effect working overtime. The same power unmaking her was also the fuel for the patch job, and the conflicting workload was overloading her system. Tears started ripping open all over her body, inside and out. It was pure.

Thick. Old. Dense. Mana hitting like a punch straight to the brain. Primordial…. Or something weirder. It felt like the universe before there was anything in it. And holy hell, there was so much of it. A stupid, impossible amount. Like somebody had cracked open a god and this was what spilled out. By every rule that should matter, Kelly should have been vaporized. Hundreds of times, thousands—and she was. The dome held enough energy to wipe whole sectors of New York off the map. But the blast stayed caged.

The entire ocean of mana emptied directly into her, a vortex with one target and a single, terrifying focus. Her body was coming apart, piece by piece, flaking off from the inside. And every time it tried to fall apart completely, her boosted regeneration grabbed it and hauled it back from the edge. It was a war on a dozen fronts inside her skin, and the regeneration was losing. It couldn't handle this much raw power.

The mana was so thick it was practically radioactive, a poison so potent that even some schmuck with normal eyes could see it in the sky.

"T-t-tickles, actually. The great un…raveling. My i-insides are filing f-for d-divorce." She watched a piece of her forearm drift away like ash. A low laugh escaped her, cut off almost immediately.

"A-and l-look at it—glowing. They always s-said I had a c-certain glow." Her regeneration was working overtime, juiced on the world's worst energy drink. Poor thing; it never signed up for this pay grade. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The feeling hit her, a déjà vu that took her right back to the day she'd blown a hole in reality itself. She knew this energy. She'd built it, tuned it, and set it loose in her lab more times than she could count.

The way the air screamed and the light bent was practically a welcome home sign. So as the force grabbed her and started pulling her into pieces, Kelly leaned into it, hoping to study whatever it was doing even as it tore her apart.

"F-f-fine." She stopped fighting it. Let the current take her. The light was an invasion before. Now it was practically what she was made of.

"It's... i-in the... d-d-driver's s-s-seat. L-let's... s-see... where it... g-goes." Her hand was welded to the cube, a firehose of raw power blasting through her. Her eyes kept burning out and stitching themselves back together, and every time they worked for a second, she recorded everything. She was betting this little apocalypse-in-a-box would finally give her the cheat code.

She wanted to crack mana wide open, every last creature, the things floating in the sky, the portals, whatever the hell was on the other side of them, punch the echelon in their orbital faces, dig up her best friend, find the Deadqueen, and actually live to see a tomorrow that wasn't today. Her troll regeneration was on overdrive, screaming as it tried to keep up. Her Vitality Title was losing. So she started switching. Mana Vacuum title on, suck in the torrent, then flip back to Vitality before she popped.

Every cycle let her hang on a second longer. Every new wave of energy made her a little tougher. Her organs were quitting. Systems were crashing. But she persisted. And with each stubborn second she refused to die, her titles' grades began to creep up, breaking through ceilings they'd been stuck at for what felt like forever. [Herald of Unending Vitality III →Herald of Unending Vitality IV] [Additional effect: Recovers 0. 1 health per second, in addition, Boosts natural regeneration by 50%,] Finally. Fourth grade.

The bottleneck shattered and the Title's healing effect warped, twisting causality itself. Kelly ran the numbers. Base calculation said sixteen minutes to full health. But the upgrade also supercharged her 'natural regeneration,' and that included her troll regen. The math got real fun then. Minutes. Then she factored in the cube's insane mana, shoving power directly into the effect. Seconds. She was watching holes seal and bones knit in the time it took to blink. That was only the first message.

As time passed, Kelly's body kept disintegrating, piece by piece, but slightly slower, and more messages scrolled past her eyes. [Mana Vacuum I → Mana Vacuum II] Until finally, a set of messages carved themselves into her vision. The ones that changed everything, and made reality hit the panic button. [Mana Vacuum III → Mana Vacuum IV] [Herald of Unending Vitality IV →Herald of Unending Vitality V] Then everything exploded.

The dome cracked and screamed itself apart, its hyper-resistant, "save-the-people-from-the-collateral-mess-we-made" materials failing spectacularly. Normally, something this size would tear the city in half, reduce it to rubble while a hundred alarms cried for mercy. Not today. The blast barely passed the skyline. The dome's punch was mostly absorbed by Kelly herself, the bulk of the destructive force burying itself in her body instead of the streets.

A hit that usually wiped out districts pouring inside her instead of ripping through buildings. Normally, half the city died. Today, just the dome's interior and outer surroundings got eviscerated, obliterated, gone, and the rest of the world barely noticed. As her upgraded title brought her back from the brink, Kelly could see the beginnings of the sky peeking through the evening sky and bathing the city in multicolored light.

The many miles of thick metal above were sent high into the air in the colossal explosion of mana from the terraforming cube. Kelly took a deep, theatrical breath of the atomized ruin.

"Hope you packed a lunch for your trip to the boardroom in the sky, Adrian. I hear the in-flight entertainment is—" Kelly regained consciousness. Lying next to the cube, realizing a round of disintegration had caused her to black out. Kelly managed a look at the cube, still trying to study it in the midst of catastrophe.

The cube now held a massive crack through its center, and enough of the metal had cracked open that Kelly could also see the somewhat mangled but still functional metallic frame of the machine itself, a space slightly larger within than without, and a large crystal many times larger than she was, filled with dense layers of inscriptions that twisted and moved as though alive, shaking through the entire machine's interior, like scaffolding extending to the metal frames and moving parts containing it.

The inscriptions slowed to a crawl, then completely stopped. It was now inert, of course, given the torrents of mana she had now pulled on and stolen. And as the last of the mana not eviscerating the atmosphere drained from the giant cube and flowed into her, Kelly received a message. [Mana Vacuum IV → Mana Vacuum V] It was interesting. Her body was essentially torn apart and rebuilt.

She now possessed two incredibly high-grade titles, and none of them was Legendary; it let her adapt and boosted her every augment, feat, and title modifier a city-shattering amount of mana. She felt like a god. This was the furthest she had ever made it in any day, even beyond the very first. But whether it would be enough to end the loop was still a mystery.

She regained consciousness for the umpteenth and final time that day, her title dragging her from the brink of death, supercharged by the cube's destructive energy. And somehow, improbably, she didn't even feel like she needed a nap. She was still alive. The 'how' was a complete mystery. The 'why?' even more so.