Chương 57: Warning: No humans beyond this point. This point is yours. Don’t cross it.

Kelly felt strangely full. A raw, electric current buzzed under her skin. An unlimited reservoir of energy inside her. A limitless feeling welled up inside her. The world was a smoldering garbage fire, everything was exploding, and it was about to rain sheets of metal the size of buildings, sure, but she felt fantastic. Kelly tried to shake out her hands, sparks of raw power still leaping at her fingertips—but they didn't budge, the energy in the air was still assaulting her.

She had just contained a city-annihilating magical blast by personally inhaling it, saving half of the topside citizens who weren't huddled in bunkers from being wiped out. Dying now would have been a complete waste of a reset, without even getting to experiment with the magic staffs. Those plants grew magic crystals. Now, she knew with certainty that you could power machines with them. Did anyone comprehend the weaponizable, profit-driven, world-destroying, country-leveling insanity that represented?

The things she could build? The world was coming down. A mountain of shredded dome, launched skyward in her personal fireworks display, had decided it was time to return. Several miles of corporate engineering turned to shrapnel was now raining over the entire eastern grid. A notification from the Status burned in her vision, clear and absurd amidst the orbital bombardment of her own making.

And in the evening of her furthest day, the most progress she had ever made in any loop thus far, Kelly looked at her Status, completely confused. [Unprecedented act recorded] She stared at it, bleeding out in the epicenter of a cataclysm, her jaw in the middle of regenerating. A wet, choked laugh escaped her.

"N—no kidding." [Reward Granted → Mandate Received:???? Grade Ø] Her vocal cords finally stitched themselves together.

"A man… date?" she stammered, the words slurred and mangled.

"What's a… a mandate? Un… unprec… unprecedented act?" Kelly had no clue what it could mean.

"Did I… did I just get pro… promoted to management?" Not a clue. Kelly coughed, tasting ozone and blood. Her insides were a civil war. Energy shuddered through her, a feedback loop from hell supercharging every effect she had running—the good, the bad, the actively parasitic. Through her ocular implants, she watched the mana in her body implode to a blinding storm, churning, collapsing into some impossible depth inside her. The sight suggested she might not even ever get to see today again, let alone tomorrow.

As the rain of shattered metal descended towards her at speed, Kelly couldn't resist the smile on her face. She'd done it. She had her hands on alien tech that was mostly, sort of intact. And the absolute chaos she'd waded through to get it? That was its own reward. Who would've thought she'd loved to fight almost as much as she loved uncovering the mysteries of the universe? Go figure. Before the loops, any conflict she had in her life had been the desperate, terrified struggle of a child surrounded by criminals.

Powerless. This? This was different. This was a thrill. A charge. It made her feel sharp, and real, and completely in control. Fulfilled, powerful, and alive. The only thing that even came close was the time she'd punched a hole in reality itself. She watched the metal shards fall, a new thought clicking into place. So, if she hunted down more tech, made more discoveries, broke the universe a little further, and dug up more secrets… what kind of beautiful, catastrophic battles would that get her?

What kind of doors would that kick open?

"L—let's find out," she said to the descending wreckage. The world's violent tantrum started to wind down. The mana, both the stuff shredding the atmosphere and the torrent that had been trying to rearrange her organs from the inside, began to settle into something she could almost call manageable. That's when she saw it. A piece of the Ithili weapon, cracked and shattered, but somehow still in one piece. It was a miracle it had survived the blast. The chunk was about as long as her forearm.

She snatched it up and hastily stuffed it into her shadow. One problem at a time. The next problem was already screaming down from the sky. Thick, building-sized shards of metal, finally returning from their trip to the stratosphere. They were going to bury her. Crush her. Bury her. Make a nice, flat, Kelly-shaped paste at the bottom of a new scrap metal desert. Permanently. Or at least, for the rest of this spectacular day.

"Right. No." Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Her posture straightened. The screaming agony in her muscles became a distant, irrelevant fact. She reached into the shadow and her hands came back full. A light railgun in each fist. The weight felt good. Honest. She braced her back against the smoking cube and equipped Fortress of Endurance. Then she started firing into the air. Repeatedly. The railguns roared, turning the sky into her own personal shooting gallery.

Any chunk of debris dumb enough to aim for her head met a hyper-velocity fist. She blasted a small radius clear, her ocular lenses ticking off the calculations for her personal safe zone, in a very violent display of aggressive landscaping. When the last piece of the ceiling finally decided to land, she was standing in a small indent, partially buried in a deep hole.

She was now surrounded on all sides by rising layers and massive slabs of broken metal that had slammed into the cube, pinning it but, interestingly, barely even scratching it. Each slab was a piece that had failed to successfully crush her. Kelly rose to her feet, dusting off the change of clothes she'd pulled from her shadow, and considered the perfectly intact, completely oblivious city she had glimpsed beyond the blast radius edges.

"You're welcome, everyone. Try not to blow yourselves up before I do." Now, she stood at the bottom of a brand new metal canyon. The only light came from a single pinprick high above, the size of a manhole cover. Finally. A moment that wasn't actively trying to kill her. Kelly turned to her real prize. The extradimensional magical terraforming cube. The only piece of working magical tech in the entire world with its own power source. A legendary artifact.

She was looking at a cracked husk—a cracked husk of machinery and a crystal holding onto the last of its light. A dead brick, steadily fading.

"Well. You look like garbage." The interior was a mess of dense circuits and etched scriptures, but the glow was gone. The magic had bled out. The crystal and the cube's interior were a mess of dense circuits and scriptures, but the party was over. Most of the glowing symbols and inscriptions had called it a day, leaving behind only faded, barely readable etches. Some kind of code, maybe—and now that overpowered monsters had stopped RSVPing to her location, Kelly's interest was officially sparked.

Her brain immediately switched tracks from survival to problem-solving. This was a mystery. Then the cube decided to be even more interesting again. The space inside the cube, around the crystal, began to stretch. It was a slow, lazy expansion, right in front of her. An apparent freaking magical spatial effect—something Kelly hadn't even known the cube had—was dying out, resetting whatever was inside before the intern's widening eyes.

"Are you kidding me?" She leaned closer, her shadow falling over the dying artifact.

"You hold out on me this whole time? You had a party dimension in your pocket and you never mentioned it?" The space inside the crystal kept stretching. It was getting bigger, lazy and unconcerned, about to turn her little metal tomb into a very crowded crystal exhibit.

"Okay, no. We're not doing that today." She yanked a drone from her shadow. Its torch flared, painting a long, convenient darkness. She stuffed the expanding crystal mess into that shadow just as it reached the size of a delivery car. She stood there in the sudden quiet. The Cube was a dead, cracked brick. Its secrets were lost behind fried circuits and faded scripture, half its strange symbols and etched inscriptions lost forever. No power source, glow lost. It was a broken toy.

Uncovering anything from this wreck would be an infinitely harder nightmare. It might even be completely impossible. The anger hit her all at once, a hot, sharp wave that surprised her.

"What the—what the fuck is this?! I won! I stopped the damn explosion! I saved everyone! I did everything—everything—by the book. Followed all your stupid rules, fixed the mess, patched up the place like some cosmic janitor—and this? This broken rock is my prize?

"I earned better than this! I asked for one thing. Just one. Why can't you let me have it? Why can't you just let me move forward?!" Her voice cracked on the last word. She was yelling at the sky, at the broken metal, at the universe itself. She felt the stupid, hot sting in her eyes and was genuinely pissed off about that, too. This setback shouldn't matter this much. But it did. She sat in the dirt for a while. Just sat there. Sulking. It was a professional, focused sulk. Then she was on her feet.

Body healed, the anger a cold, hard knot in her gut. Time to go. She started climbing, carefully picking her way up the unstable mountain of scrap, heading for that little circle of sky. On the surface, Kelly simply stood there, a statue of pure fury. The region was cleared of any life; the majority of the lower-level soldiers had been stationed further away at the borders to keep creatures out when the devastating explosion hit.

Now, a barely visible cacophony of gunfire, heavy weapons, and explosions lit the distant evening sky. And soon, the footsteps of the military's response unit arrived. A full platoon—thirty-one soldiers—fanned out and locked down firing lanes, their modular armor plates snapping into position to form a segmented barricade. Thirty muzzles tracked her chest, head, and vitals. The thirty-first soldier, Captain Halverson, moved with them but didn't command. He scanned her, confused to see her standing in the wreckage.

"Voss?" Right in the middle of the firing squad was Halverson. His face, visible through his helmet's visor, was a complete loss of composure. Surprise. Confusion. A little bit of professional horror. Kelly looked from the ring of gun barrels to Halverson's wide eyes.

"Halverson." She looked at the surrounding devastation.

"You guys have terrible timing." She exhaled once, slow, steadying, then addressed the group, her voice flattening into something cold enough to tense shoulders.

"Just so we're clear: I was having a decent day. Then it went bad—catastrophic. And now we've landed somewhere in the 'shoot-the-messenger' category." Her eyes hardened.

"You are the messengers." She took a single step forward, the metal cracking under her boot. Someone shouted.

"So if you have any urgent feedback on my life choices, the official response is: get lost. Get out of my way."