Chương 62: The Architect of Order

A moment later, as the two spectators watched, the mana surrounding Kelly and the deity-possessed being churned in strange patterns.

"Universal rejection of mana… disgusting, heretical… an inability to hold skills… as expected. And yet," it paused, almost amused, "you hold many Legendary titles. Four at the fourth grade. Two among the Fortress series. Two at the fifth… in a single day. An impossibility for mortals. Five, six, over seven traits. One, no—two traits of your own creation. A Reward… even a Mandate… fascinating. My kin recall nothing of events that could warrant this.

No alterations in the currents of time, no ripples across the ocean it traverses… your tale may indeed be true, little one. You have tasted death, and yet none of my kin remember the death of your name… None have felt the sting of your resurrection." Whatever he was doing, he had full view of Kelly's status sheet: her traits, her titles, their effects, even the rarity and grade of her abilities—things nobody else had ever managed to see.

Her soul was on vacation, sipping margaritas in a plane no one could reach, and her 'tether' was impossible to grasp, so he was working off whatever scrap it left behind. A "remnant," he called it. Kelly was mildly stupefied. Nobody could see another person's status. Not the real thing. Not live. You could show it to them, reconstruct the image from memory, maybe even make a fancy slide and send it over—but straight-up live, like watching someone's soul on CCTV? Impossible.

Still, this was the power of something that completely transcended causality with its mere existence—a real bona fide god-like existence. Kelly's hand twitched to her shadow for a molecular scalpel; she fought back against the instinct. She choked down the impulse, just in case it could magically read minds too, and started thinking about old TV shows instead. Without a proper plan, dissecting the god was just a wonderful dream. Plus, she was getting a little tired of the mannequin act.

Her finger was hovering dangerously close to the 'reset' button, but the god had essentially just called her a liar.

"Bro—buddy? Can I call you buddy? No? OK—" She paused, rubbing her forehead.

"Look, buddy, I'm close to two thousand 'todays' already," she shrugged, "why would I lie? What, do I look like a podcaster? Actually, don't answer that. Can't you see it in my status? The evidence? I thought you guys knew everything?" she asked, switching off most of her biological parts and pain receptors. She ignored the phantom pain itching in her ocular implants that somehow still persisted without any nerves to feel it. She switched off most of her ocular senses too, but she still saw it.

It was annoyingly persistent, like a stalker who never got the hint. Kelly met its gaze, completely unbothered by its impossible nature.

"Indeed it does... rejoice, for my kin have decided on a resolution. I shall resolve your curse. Though you have been marked by the trait of heretics, and thus cannot become an avatar, you will be the vehicle through which this resolution occurs, even if my kin shall forget the days to come. I see your mind as we speak, your thoughts, memories... and..." the god paused.

"Your mind is a strange thing, incomplete, a half-broken thing." With the section of her brain supported by her implants, Kelly thought with a struggle, hah, dumbass, what kinda god doesn't know how to read memory chips? The god continued, "Ah, I see. Your mind is disjointed, held together by metal... your memories... You have truly endured what would destroy most... And the memories tied to your titles... the Fortress series? Truly commendable... it is unfortunate you are a heretic...

our gods of war view you highly, as do those of knowledge, regret, and suffering." The instant Kelly realized her mind was being read, a single thought clicked into place. Many loops ago, her mana incompatibility had been downgraded. Now, she was no longer protected by that incompatibility—she could be affected by the mana of others. That meant the causality-altering god currently peering through her thoughts could do whatever it wanted to her psyche, and after the reset, it would stick.

Kelly flash-saved her current state and memories to her non-organic parts—things that didn't look, act, or function like organs. Then she did something immensely risky: she shunted all of her key and sensitive memories—like the knowledge of how she had achieved an inversion of matter to grant herself mana, and all the knowledge of the first day that started this—into her inorganic implants. Finally, she shunted and erased all of her knowledge on neural augments and their functions.

All of this happened within a Planck second. She had gotten the idea after seeing the angel dismiss Freya and Cain, the sapient AI overlords, as mere 'golems'. Invader tech seemed beyond ancient, so it was likely it wouldn't notice, but nothing was guaranteed—these were dimension-hopping beings after all. Hopefully, whatever this god truly was, it would not immediately figure out what was missing, where to look, and how to get there. She erased that thought, too. Kelly valued privacy. Mind readers? Voters? Nope.

Nor anyone poking through the parts of her brain labeled "Do Not Disturb." The thought of her mind still being read was irritating in the way a mosquito on your eyelid was irritating. It was impossible to ignore and vaguely insulting, but she had played her best defense. Hopefully. The angel looked like it was being microwaved from the inside—slowly.

Being possessed by a god appeared to be an experience that required an extreme healthcare plan, and judging by its earliest words, this supernova of mana was just a fraction of its power. In short, it was way out of her league. So far out of her league, they weren't even playing the same sport. She couldn't fully shove her thoughts into her restricted "background AI" without leaving a bridge back, a place to return to. That was basically a one-way ticket to overclocking herself into a pile of smoldering parts.

She had to leave something behind, and that meant access. If the Architect, Illvyr, wanted to read her mind, it would find a way.

"You have lived beyond memory, returned from death countless times, yet your mind remains fragile, unprepared for the strain of these cycles. Your mind is a fractured mess. I will erase it. I will overwrite thoughts, memories, and will, and take control of this vessel in full. Through me, the loops you cannot endure will continue, the disruptions you cannot repair will be corrected. Few of my kin grant this power, and fewer still survive the process.

You will not remain yourself, but through this replacement, your existence—and the sanctity of time's waters—will persist. Many would die for this opportunity." Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. Huh?

"When the cycle reaches its end, I will reclaim the fragment of your soul that was lost and shape it anew. You will rise from this ordeal strengthened—my apostle in all but name. Once this fault in the temporal stream has been corrected, your reward will be mercy: the memories of this torment will be lifted from you. Only the life you lived before the loop will remain, restored intact. To you, it will be as though but a single day has been taken, though my influence will forever remain." Yeah. No. Fuck that.

[Title Equipped: Outrunning Death] Kelly would rather not become a mind puppet for all eternity. What if he couldn't fix the loops? This pensioner couldn't even read memory chips. It was a hard and unequivocal pass. Wiping her memories of the loop was a permanent death. The Kelly standing here would cease to be, full stop. A torturous loop? Sure, the grind to reach tomorrow had its frustrating moments—a weak second—but Kelly was having the time of her life!

She would rather not spend the next hundred thousand days, or however many more endless times it took, as a mind-slave to some freak claiming to be a god. Kelly kicked her feet into gear. The final mana-implants in her soles and ankles hummed to life, vibrating with that familiar Perpetual Motion buzz. Her feet started jittering on their own, making the world blur while she stood completely still. Her title, the one that would kill her if she stopped moving or deactivated it, activated.

"Try keeping up with this," she muttered, already planning to shut it off. The big-shot order god wearing the angel suit noticed right away. Of course, he had seen her titles and traits, including this particular suicide switch. The angel's head snapped toward her. Its eyes, pools of fractured reality, fixed on her jittering form. As her next thought formed to unequip the title, its hand rose. A visible current of raw power, a lattice of fiery command, snapped from its fingers to her limbs.

Her body went rigid, her legs manually puppeteered, forcing her to keep moving against her will, keeping her alive. She tried to unequip the title through her AIs, but that didn't work either—the thing had seized her mana and held it in a vice grip.

"Hey! This is a violation of basic self-determination!" Her voice was steady, but her body was a puppet. The not-angel, Illvyr, just stared, its will a physical force maintaining the movement that kept her heart beating. In an explosion of movement, Kelly struggled with everything she had against its control, muscles straining, popping, tendons snapping.

Sadly, even her superhuman contortions, heroic grunts, and dramatic flair couldn't save her from the god of order's ultimate flex: turning her body into the universe's most unwilling puppet. Kelly laughed, but this time, it was laced with nervous tension.

"I-I knew I sh-should've t-taken up y-yoga in-instead."

"Do not turn away from this gift, child of another world. In accepting it lies the only escape from the curse that has shadowed your steps, a burden that others—those who see themselves as untouchable, holy, beyond the reach of your world's flaws—claim is deserved. You have already walked paths that would break most, yet you endure; you have faced trials with a stubborn will, a will you claim cannot be bent, cannot falter. You are one who will never stop.

And yet, you hesitate to take what might tip the scales in your favor. You call yourself unyielding, unbroken… so why deny yourself the very aid that fate places in your hands?" Kelly tried to override her life support; the being immediately healed her.

"Child of the godless world. Accept it, or be swallowed by the curse that festers in your blood—a curse born of this barren realm where faith is ash and power is hollow. I have seen your people, wandering blind, stripped of mana, stripped of grace… and yet they dare to live as though they are whole. Heretics, all of them, clinging to a world that should have been purged long before your birth. You balk at the one thing that could lift you above the filth of your origin?

"If your will is as unyielding as you claim, then take this gift. Prove you are more than the faithless dust that spawned you." Kelly struggled to find a solution, a kill switch? It healed her. Unequipping? It froze her mana, it seized her body, nothing worked. And then, in the midst of chaos, she found one. The solution was so simple, so beautifully straightforward that a real, sharp chuckle escaped her.

"I'LL OWE YOU ONE! JEN TOO!" Kelly yelled into the maelstrom. The air shattered. One moment, Freya was a spectator in a jumpsuit, her eyes recording data streams. The next, she was a vortex of calculated violence, her form a blur that rewrote local physics. Relativistic projectiles, moving at a substantial fraction of light-speed, tore into the angel's form from angles that defied conventional space. The god's shields flared, screaming under an assault Kelly had no time to perceive.

In the same fractured nanosecond, CAIN was simply gone from his position. He did not teleport; he moved with a speed that rendered him invisible. His dark alloy body impacted the angel's with a force that generated a localized shockwave and nearly knocked Kelly unconscious; the ground beneath her crumbled and she fell while they fought above.

The last thing Kelly saw before she was buried under metal was Cain dissolving into a storm of cutting nanites, a blizzard of near-molecular edges that swarmed over divine flesh, attempting to fight a literal god that looked both annoyed and enraged at the beings who thought they were qualified to duel it. Kelly dropped to the ground as the hold on her vanished. Her hand slapped against her own chest, a frantic, physical gesture to restore the memory engrams to her organic brain. She gasped, stumbling back.

"Thanks, creepy voice, but I like my chaos unwrapped and DIY." Her thought-command switched out her active Title. Her heart stopped. Her brain shut down. Her last thought was one of gratitude; Thank God for AIs and their love for self-interest. Kelly woke up in bed. She got up, swiping the new status alert from her vision as if shooing a fly.

"Freya, Cain, you're on my tab. I pay my debts." Her focus turned inward. She programmed a crude, multilayered killswitch directly into her neural mesh. The parameters were specific: the moment it detected any alteration to her core memories or thought patterns, it would execute a cascade. First, it would force a full memory backup. Then, it would stop her heart.

Simultaneously, it would trigger her Outrunning Death title and her perpetual motion anchor, and then immediately force both to deactivate, halting all motion. It would switch her active title to one that guaranteed death, unequip, and cut all nutrients to her brain while triggering immediate, simultaneous vital organ shutdown. Finally, each morning, she'd jury-rig crude micro-explosives in her heart, brain, and organs, in case she faced another healing-powered maniac.

The killswitch required zero conscious thought to activate. She was sure a title existed that could shield her from mental contamination, but the permanent, unknown cost of exposure was unacceptable. Her memories were her only real possession. Losing them meant she stopped being Kelly. This killswitch was a fresh start. A new lease on life. Kelly thought about the god, Illvyr. The Architect of Order. He had tried to enslave her.

"That overgrown pigeon was a real piece of work." Kelly wasn't just going to get even—oh no. She was going to make him deeply, cosmically sorry he ever tried to snuff her out. She'd carve out whatever made that so-called god "special," reverse-engineer it, improve it, and then inject the upgraded version straight into her own bloodstream like it was a performance-enhancing smoothie. Freya and Cain had saved her from the worst possible outcome: becoming a mind-slave to some freak calling itself a god.

It was a real, permanent threat. She would have to watch out for the other dimension's gods. That thing could have puppeted her for eternity and then wiped her looped self from existence. She would settle the debt with a live vivisection. This was far from over.