"Mind games?"

  Vector replied, his voice a flat, dismissive scrape. He leaned closer, his bulk shadowing her. His men were a dogpile of armored bodies pinning her limbs and torso to the ground, the few standing men's weapons a circle of threats aimed at the net encasing her, a kinetic sculpture of restraint holding her down.

  "A monster, telling us what to do," the large man, Vector, spat the words with derision, like a man wiping something off his boot.

  Kelly felt it then—an invasive presence, far weaker than the god Illvyr’s psychic tsunami, but constant. It was a deliberate probe, a cold pressure at the edge of her thoughts. It was like an overclocking test pushed past every limit, only worse. Deeper. It was as if a structural wall in her mind, one she’d never even known was there, was being methodically chiseled apart.

  Her voice came out distorted through the helmet’s modulator, a low, warped buzz. A final they wouldn’t understand.

  "Fine." She let the word hang for a second. "You asked for it."

  Kelly equipped the Child of War Title.

  Above her helmet, the air twisted and a jagged, brutal halo of interlocked bone materialized. She usually couldn’t feel the title’s gravity aura—it was a field that crushed everything around her, leaving her untouched at the epicenter. But physics had a blunt, unforgiving logic. These guys were glued to her limbs. When the field activated, all that increased gravity would translate directly into their body weight being slammed down onto her. Their combined bodies, multiplied by several gees of 'Oh my god why is this so heavy', would press them into her like industrial pistons.

  This is going to suck, she thought. It was the second time that day the exact same sentiment had crossed her mind. A personal record.

  She snapped the fingers of both hands. The snaps were fast, rhythmic, a tapering beat: snap-snap-snap-snap. The effect wasn't subtle. The atmosphere around her visibly heavied; dust on the ground compressed into a sudden, perfect circle. Gravity became a thick, crushing press. The men holding her grunted in unison, a chorus of shock. Their armor plates squealed in protest as they were driven downward. Someone on her left made a wet, gurgling sound.

  "Good job focusing on the limbs and not my neck, say, my throat", she croaked through the pain. "S-saves me a step." She snapped both fingers once more, a final, decisive crack. The gravitational field increased. They crashed into her limbs, a sudden, brutal increase that rivalled the surface of multiple suns, driving them, and through contact, her own armored suit into the pavement and pinned her with a sound of compacting ceramics and metal.

  Kelly exploited the micro-second of stunned paralysis.

  She switched Titles. Child of War deactivated. Death's Foe slotted into place. The crushing gravity immediately vanished. In the same instant, her effective strength redoubled. Their balance was already nonexistent, their bodies braced for pressure that suddenly disappeared. She threw them off in a blanket of bodies. They spilled away from her like discarded weights.

  Kelly rose to her injured feet, her body’s accelerated regeneration already soothing the bruises.

  "Ow," she said.

  Then she lashed out with a flick of her wrist.

  Her chainblade shot from her bracelet in a swift, whip-like movement, links snapping into place with a metallic shiver. The air cracked.

  It wasn’t elegant, but she'd had a lot of practice. It was hasty, imprecise, and brutally quick. Some arms, still clad in armor, tumbled through the air. A leg, severed at the thigh, thumped to the ground. The third man, scrambling for his weapon, was caught across the torso, and split vertically from shoulder to hip. He would definitely be needing two caskets. Or better healthcare.

  Vector answered with rage. He’d lost an arm to the whip of the chainblade. His remaining forearm, a weaponized launcher, tracked her with a hydraulic whine. It targeted both Kelly and the writhing, shifting blade in her hand. A rain of small, target-seeking projectiles streaked toward her.

  Kelly, The immortal intern, equipped Fortress of Flame. Her explosion-proof Title settled into place just before contact. Beneath her stealth suit, built for such impacts, her skin shifted, the Title's mana surging, flame and inertia resistance combining with the suit to deflect almost everything.

  Her world ignited in bright heat. She took one step forward and then another, marching into the barrage.

  The flames clung to her, a vicious, jelly-like substance that ignited and burned with a ferocious, chemical hunger. It stuck to her shoulder, her chest plate, her helmet. It was new napalm. It was, historically, a real mess.

  The combination created a torrent of flames that consumed her whole. A fire that would have incinerated anyone else at her EQ level alive, and many turned away from due to the sheer brightness and heat.

  As Vector's men lay on the ground in various states of injury, and flame, smoke and light engulfed kelly in a torrenteous ball of ignition. The fat corporate killer laughed, a raw, manic sound that tore from his throat. "See! I told you! What—"

  Kelly was mostly unharmed. Her training sessions with Ren had involved far worse. Perhaps Vector saw her through his scanners, or sensed the unbroken thread of her consciousness through his mental mutation. It caught his attention. His manic laughter cut off into a strangled choke.

  He inhaled sharply, then settled.

  "Once we figure out your magic," the enraged glutton hissed, staring at the burning silhouette that hadn't fallen, "your durability and teleportation?" He took an aggressive step, his remaining fist clenching. "I’ll use them well." His head jerked sideways in a violent, unnatural spasm, his neck tendons cording. He winced, his eyes squeezing shut for a fraction of a second as if listening to a deafening shout. His gaze snapped back to her, the personal fury smoothed into something colder. "We will," he corrected, the pronoun impersonal and heavy. Forced.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Vector’s words weren’t audible. They were a greasy, psychic smear pushed directly into the meat of her thoughts. It felt like wrong, invasive, like a mental burglar fumbling at her window, when she lived on the fiftieth floor.

  I was so close. So close to seeing your secrets, just let me in your mind and this will all be over, creature.

  “Normally, I’d have a comeback for you,” Kelly said. Her tone was a flat, dry sheet of carbon steel. The partial Werewolf Trait flooded her system. Muscles thickened under her stealth suit, a familiar, welcome strain. Her claws punched out further, curving into points that looked less like an animal’s and more like a sculptor’s idea of what a predator should be. She focused on her right hand. The mimic skin there writhed, a patch of her own flesh dissolving and reforming into a seamless, knuckle-plated gauntlet of cold-forged dense metal. The hardest material she had on hand.

  Her left hand’s grip on the chainblade tightened; its segments gave a soft, anticipatory click. She stared through her helmet at Vector’s shimmering outline. “But in your case, you’re going out the way of the dodo.” She let the silence stretch for a microsecond, just long enough for him to maybe start forming a thought. “Painfully.”

  She felt the psychic energy coalesce around him, a visible distortion of intent aimed to break her. Not today, Kelly thought. Before vector could react, Kelly equipped the Giantbane title. The world slowed. She accelerated. Her perception cranked into overdrive, the chaotic fight around them becoming a series of slow-moving figures.

  Then she dilated her personal time further. Sped up her personal clock as fast as it would go, she knew from research, the kids wouldve called this a 'Haste' spell, except her version was whatever that was on an air cannister full of the purest cocaine.

  Her own body's nerves, muscles, brain signals, sweat—everything—spooled out five times faster. The two effects stacked. Her base speed was already 9.5EQ with her werewolf trait. Giantbane pushed that speed 19EQ. Then, her Time Dilation multiplied that by five times. For one breathtaking, unsustainable moment, she was a post-humanity's ultimate argument made flesh. Her speed, and just her speed, that one specialization? Hit 95EQ.

  The speed of a Demigod.

  The air pressure around her screamed a protest it didn’t have time to voice.

  She leaped. The world was a frozen tableau of statues.

  The physics were beautifully, brutally, stupidly simple: The faster you moved, the heavier you became, the denser you became, and the harder you hit. Every atom in her body was a furious projectile. Kelly was moving at a velocity that turned her entire form into a single, concentrated point of kinetic delivery. She was going fast enough to make physics regret a few of its assumptions. Essentially, at that speed, her body was a bullet.

  It was the one thing that made speed specialists lie among the most dangerous specializations. Kelly had heard the tales. Theorized. Now, she was using it first hand with deliberate intensity.

  With time almost frozen, Kellys right fist, full-metal, wolf’s claw, connected with Vector’s forehead.

  The overclocked mutant’s skull was a masterpiece of corporate bio-augmentation, layered with reinforced metal bone and shock-absorbing polymers. It was designed to withstand catastrophic impacts. Kelly’s punch was a catastrophic impact with a PhD. Mythril Fist triggered. The enhancement multiplied the existing, obscene kinetic energy at the point of contact.

  Her clawed hand tore through the corporate killers head.

  She gored through the reinforced skull and the brain matter behind it the way a shaped charge goes through an armored door. There was a wet, crunching pop of definitive failure.

  [Trait: Mythril Fist Grade II → III]

  His mechanical overclocked eye had widened at the last moment. His human eye had just held a blank, startled confusion.

  She held his ruined head steady, her arm buried to the elbow in the cavity she’d made. Blood and other, finer substances erupted in a hot wave, drenching her arm, her chest plate, her helmet. For a single, vivid moment, she was a visible specter painted in violent red against the backdrop of the dome, a ghost made solid by gore. Then her stealth suit activated its cleansing function, the material vibrating at a high frequency to shunt the fluid away in a fine mist. She faded back into perfect, undetectable nothingness.

  Kelly let the corpse drop with a wet, final thud. She usually enjoyed the theater of a fight, the back-and-forth, the chance to learn an opponent’s tells. The data was valuable. But you didn’t trade tips with a telepath. You didn’t grant a psychic a single, coherent moment to turn your own brain against you. The angel, Verrisimir, and the god pulling its strings—that was a tier of problem she was currently cataloguing. Both were far our of her league; problems for another, more ambitious, suicidal Kelly, and perhaps an army of Demigods.

  But Vector? That overpaid, overindulgent corporate fork in the road? The one who seemed to get a genuine, sick thrill from rummaging around in people’s heads without permission, treating other people’s minds like an all-you-can-eat buffet? He was perfectly, wonderfully within her reach. The fact he’d been so genuinely, personally repulsive just made the necessary work a little more satisfying, and streamlined the whole decision-making process. No fuss, no mess. Well, some mess. But it was a contained mess.

  Time kicked back in. Vector’s mutant body didn’t so much fall as it surrendered to gravity, a two-ton monument to bad corporate choices giving up the ghost. It hit the street with a wet, crunching *whump* that vibrated through the soles of Kelly’s boots. The impact cratered the asphalt, sending a radial crack spiderwebbing outward. Chunks of exposed, oily synthetics and something that looked disturbingly like gray-blue brain matter splattered across the combat zone. A severed hydraulic line, still spurting fluorescent green coolant, flopped limply from the ruin of his shoulder.

  The three surviving gunmen just stared in pure disbelief, their weapons dipping, their brains visibly buffering as they tried to process their boss becoming a public biohazard, kicking up a localized storm of dust, loose trash, and the coppery smell of fresh internal affairs.

  A notification, crisp and vibrant, scrolled across Kelly’s vision.

  [Title: Slaughterer of Men Grade I → II]

  She equipped the title immediately. The men in front of her froze. As if there was a sudden, oppressive weight in the air seizing them, one that came from realizing the thing that just killed your giant, augmented boss was now looking directly at you and had officially been graded for proficiency. Their fingers froze on triggers. Their breath fogged in air that hadn’t been cold a second before. It bought her exactly two seconds of stunned silence.

  She used the first second to take a deep, ragged breath that burned in her chest. She used the second to talk.

  “You know, Tubby,” Kelly said, her voice flat with exhaustion, “if you weren’t trying to murder me, I’d call you a very expensive lesson in hubris.”

  “Running now,” she muttered, “Tell HR he won’t be needing his bonus.” The first part was more to herself than to the survivors.

  Kelly turned and ran.

  She kicked off from the ground, too exhausted to alter time—its use clearly off the menu; her head, and her entire being, throbbed in protest at the mere thought.

  Kelly switched to her speed title, Giantbane, and disappeared into the chaotic streets, the Cube stored neatly in her shadow.