New York was gone. It was different from the usual irradiated glassy-floored skeletal landscapes of the past's destroyed cities. No, instead, this was a wholesale deletion. Not a building left, not even a single stubborn piece of rebar sticking up as a middle finger to entropy. It was just… a hole. A deep, miles-wide crater punched straight down into the planet’s crust where a city had been a few hours ago.

  The snake ate the city she once called home, and the snake-charmer was waiting for an encore. The leviathan had slithered off to digest, but the thing that summoned it, the naked guy floating high up in the smoke-stained sky, the powerful floating invader they called the conductor, was still there. Just hanging in its wake.

  But Kelly finally had the cube's secrets, the key to a new kind of magic theory. Runes. Thousands of them. Maybe hundreds of thousands, who knew? The things carved into the cube had been tiny writhing, and impossible for a human eye to accurately scan. Either way, the entire treasure trove was hers.

  She’d delved into the Eastgrid, a city-sized wrestling pit for every major power faction and megalomaniacal being on every planet and from every leaking portal. She’d taken the cube from under their collective noses. In the process, she’d peeled back layers of her own time abilities, prying open a door to possibilities nobody, not even the invaders, had anticipated. And now, she was moving to prepare.

  To her, the cube was the answer to a question she had asked since it all began. One she’d asked the moment the world started tearing itself apart on live feeds.

  What was magic?

  It, and her time abilities, would be the key to taking the next step.

  Beating the conductor, conquering magic, conquering time, learning combat techniques from a military academy, heading off-planet, putting a gun to an order god's head, finding Jennie.

  Beating the apocalypse.

  Her goals had shifted. They’d grown, even. What started as a desperate scramble for the next hour had calcified into a blueprint. Now, Kelly had a structure to her madness. She knew exactly what she wanted, including exactly how she was going to get there.

  The method involved a lot of broken things and a running tally of favors owed. But ultimately?

  It all boiled down to power.

  Kelly was arming herself for a party nobody else knew was happening yet. A messy, explosive party. She grinned inside her helmet.

  Preparation looked a lot like assembling a bigger bomb.

  Breathing the second day's air felt wrong. Structurally, cosmically wrong.

  Kelly felt profound guilt. This was wrong. She wasn't supposed to be here. Not like this. She should have destroyed the conductor, the leviathan, Verrimisir, and its god Illvyr, risked having her mind wiped for eternity, smashed her head against them thousands—no, a million times if that's what it took. She should have beat them all with brute force. She knew that the alternative was dangerous and stupid, and that what she was doing right now was the smarter option, the pragmatic, intelligent option. The tactically superior move.

  The mountain of impossible things she had to deal with hadn’t shrunk, but she’d managed to step off the treadmill to fetch a shotgun.

  But... why did it feel so wrong?

  She knew what she was doing was the less flawed path. This route aggregated power faster, shortcut the grind. It was the efficient play, a cold consolidation of resources. She'd gain power more quickly, achieve what she wanted in fewer loops.

  Kelly was being emotional; she knew this. A primal part of her itched for a reset, to do things the hard way—her way—the path of maximum collision, excessive variables, experimentation, Titles, Traits, and spectacular, violent fire.

  But she knew she needed to master time, and in doing so, she could master everything.

  But... why did each step hurt? Cause her heart to shudder more slightly than the last? A faint, persistent tremor in her chest, the psychosomatic tax for choosing the chess move over the sledgehammer.

  Why did the shorter path, hurt?

  The two fighters at the end of the world, entered a building.

  A secondary site, a good distance from the new scenic crater. Ren led Kelly to it. The building was bland, corporate, and forgettable. They went underground. The door opened into a cavernous hall, a battle training chamber clearly designed to withstand Ren's blasts. A space that made Kelly, the immortal intern, stop dead.

  Ren’s people were wheeling in machines. Not scrap or jury-rigged salvage. This was top-shelf, bleeding-edge, stupidly-expensive hardware. Diagnostic arrays, high-speed motion-capture rigs, industrial fabricators. Her eyes got wide. Her jaw actually dropped. “You have a volumetric particle scanner just… sitting in a crate?” she muttered, more to herself than to anyone, her eyes wide as saucers and her jaw gape.

  Kelly stood there and watched, arms crossed, as an entire lab and combat arena erected itself around her under the staff's guidance. It was efficient. Impressive. It was also completely missing the point. Industrial machinery and cutting-edge combat research tech to dissect a reality altering cube. Ren had brought combat tech.

  The machines were mostly for cube dissection, weapon prototyping, and surface-level scans of invader tissue.

  It was a place for crafting weapons, breaking them down, and building stronger versions. It wasn’t a place for true study—for taking reality itself apart at the seams, peeling back the layers of matter and dark energy and asking rude questions. Not like Vaughn, the botanical lab, or even Genecorp. This was a garage for building a fighter jet, not a facility for questioning why the sky existed.

  Ren, the old soldier who’d clearly been paid a fortune by someone at some point, gestured at the reinforced walls. “The whole place is rated to contain any blast. Should hold if things go wrong and the cube overloads.”

  Kelly scoffed and tilted her head. She doubted it. “My abilities mean I’ll probably survive if I absorb the energy directly. This building, though? It’s getting a new skylight. Several of them.” She knocked a knuckle against a carbon-weave support column. “I’ve seen what this cube does. Your ‘ratings’ are a suggestion it’s going to ignore.”

  Kelly then turned to her aged mentor, "Can you get them to leave? The staff? Kinda need privacy for this next part."

  Ren gave a single, slow nod to his team. “Alright, out, all of you,” he announced, his voice echoing in the hall. “Everyone who isn’t me or the young lady, leave.” Rens hired assembly staff didn’t need to be told twice. They took one look at his expression, then they shifted to kelly and saw in her mad gaze a blend of scientific hunger and avarice-filed anticipation—and filed out of the reinforced hall with a haste that suggested they’d been waiting for the excuse, gone in under a minute.

  With all the annoying potential witnesses gone, Kelly extracted the magic mana terraforming cube from her shadow dimension, which was laborious and involved rallying herself and her background AIs to raid her shadow in three-dimensional space to pull the massive magical machine out of it. Her shadow on the floor darkened, pooled, and then strained upward against the concrete, a bulge of impossible depth fighting her pull. A low groan of stressed reality hummed in the air.

  With a soundless heave of will, she forced the object through. The magical mana-terraforming cube dropped several feet out of the air with a concussive THUMP that vibrated in their teeth. It was a monument of alien geometry, humming with latent power. Immediately, the air grew thick, soup-like. Dense, raw mana began pumping from it, a visible, shimmering distortion that made the lights flicker. Kelly shook out her hands, feeling the energy wash over her augments like a tidal wave. Ren was staring at the cube with the grim focus of a man looking at a live warhead.

  Kelly cracked her charged knuckles, a sharp sound of snapping mana in the humming room. She looked from the pulsating cube to Ren.

  “Pulling that out of my personal closet is a workout,” Kelly said, flexing her fingers. “My shadow did not want to give it up. Felt like convincing a black hole to spit out its lunch.” She nodded at the cube, where the air was already warping.

  "I have a good feeling about this run."

  Ren’s machine shop kept blueprints for every conceivable thing. Schematics. Kelly scrolled through them on a flickering holoscreen, past molecular bonding schematics and plasma torch templates. Her finger stopped on a file labeled INDUSTRIAL DIAMOND SAWBLADE: CONTINUOUS RIM . The accompanying image showed a vicious-looking disc with a wire edge glittering with embedded particulate. It looked professionally offended by the concept of solid matter.

  “A saw,” she said, not really to Ren. He was across the room, doing something volatile with a gun the size of his arm. “We’re using a saw.”

  The blueprint was a gift. She'd already thanked him. Gratitude was a given. Then, she downloaded the file to her transforming weapon with a few blunt mental commands and several button presses. The metal bracelet on her wrist shivered with heat, unfolded. Molecular bonds realigned with a sense of purpose. The sleek, rune-etched metal shed its elegant lines, expanding and flattening. It reconfigured, getting down to the serious business of becoming something else.

  Her switch-blade finally settled into a disc slightly larger than a dinner plate, its outer edge a continuous, shimmering loop of monomolecular filament studded with synthetic diamond. It no longer resembled a weapon. It now resembled the specialized tool you’d use to slice a building in half.

  Which was, Kelly thought, probably for the best. Buildings, after all, rarely fought back. They just stood there, in a state of profound architectural commitment, holding up roofs and housing pigeons with stoic resignation until someone like Kelly convinced one building, to become two buildings.

  The light-chainsaw mode would have been objectively more efficient, but Kelly needed her weapon intact. It was, technically, her most powerful weapon. This day was new territory, and in her considerable experience, the next twelve to twenty-four hours were statistically likely to contain several events best described as ‘catastrophically inconvenient.’

  The machines in Ren’s hall could give the word 'tool' confidence issues; they were massive, multi-jointed robotic limbs ending in clamps and sensors and too many not-fingers. They moved with a smoothness that felt wrong for their size. Kelly slid the newly-formed monomolecular industrial saw-blade into the primary clamp. The machine accepted it with a soft magnetic click.

  She pulled down a pair of heavy safety glasses with side shields. The world took on a tinted, sterile clarity.

  “Alright, surgeon.” She called to the halls AI. “See that magic cube?” she muttered, both to the it and to herself. “Cut it open.”

  The robotic arms came to life. There was a dramatic whirring that felt entirely and theatrically appropriate for the moment. One moment they were still, the next they were moving with a speed and precision that made biology seem like a clumsy test run. The saw blade began to spin. It emitted a high, thin whine that left a satisfying vibration in Kelly’s teeth. The AI, processing the cube’s external scan, guided the blade down onto the first face.

  This was doing a lot more than cutting. It was disintegration at an atomic level. The monomolecular edge, guided by unerring machines, didn’t so much grind through the cube’s material as it persuaded the bonds between its atoms to stop being bonds. A line of absolute blackness appeared in the cube’s surface, a void of separated matter. Dust? There was no dust. The material just ceased to be where the blade passed.

  The cube was a nest of shifting, glowing runes. They swam under its surface like trapped eels. Watching the AI work was its own kind of violence. The saw blade would dart forward, stop a micrometer from a glowing sigil, tilt at a impossible angle, and resume its cut, tracing a path that avoided every magical rune in real time. A human hand would have twitched, a human mind would have sneezed. An enhanced human eye would have caught the nanosecond tilt, but missed the picosecond shift of a rune. The machine had neither problem.

  It carved with cold, atomic patience. Section by section, face by face, the cube was parted. Its sides broke away with a series of soft, precise cracks that shook cushioned platform. The process was methodical, clinical, and completely at odds with the magical object being dismantled.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  Finally, the last cut was made. The cube lay open, its interior exposed. It looked unfolded, like a very dangerous Christmas present, the layers spread out neatly like the petals of a metal flower.

  For a second, nothing happened. The opened cube sat there, revealing a central cavity holding a crystalline core about the size of a person. It pulsed with a slow, internal light.

  “Huh,” Kelly said. “Anti-climax.”

  Then the crystal breathed.

  It expanded. One second it was man-sized, the next it was the size of a truck, then a small house, filling the cavity and then bursting past the open shells of the cube. It was a rapid, loud explosion of solidified space. Air screamed as it was violently displaced in every direction, rushing outward in a concussive whoomp. Dust from the floor and tables, previously uninvolved in the saw’s perfect cuts, was dragged and blasted into a churning cloud. Grit pinged against Kelly’s safety glasses and Ren’s workshop wide walls. The crystal didn’t stop growing, its facets multiplying, rapidly expanding without end, reflecting the workshop lights into a thousand chaotic spears.

  The physical shockwave was just the opener. The real hit came next.

  A wave of pure mana erupted from the still-expanding crystal. It was pressure, density, a wall of pure power that rolled through the room. Kelly felt it hit her chest first—a solid, jarring thump that shoved the air from her lungs. Her head swam, a sudden, dizzying vertigo as if the floor had tipped ninety degrees. She took an unsteady step backwards, her boot scraping loud on the floor.

  Across the room, Ren stiffened. His head came up. His eyebrows, previously locked in a permanent scowl, actually lifted in surprise. Even he felt the pressure push against him with that tsunami-like wave. Everyone in the room stilled. Aside from Kelly, that was probably the first time a human had ever felt mana. It wasn't feeling the mana exactly, but the powerful rejection, like two opposing magnets pressed together. Kelly saw the slight strain in his posture, the way his shoulders tightened as he felt the invisible shove.

  The workshop swayed as if hit by a shockwave then went utterly still. The AI-controlled arms froze in place, then immediately moved. The ambient hum of machinery seemed to dampen, swallowed by the dense, thickening air.

  Kelly shook her head, trying to clear the woozy feeling. Her body had just absorbed a triple dose of tequila-rum in the shape of charged mana, and her muscles twitched with excess power.

  She looked from the monstrous, still-growing crystal to Ren’s alert, hardened face, and then back again.

  Kelly had seen that part before—the whole show with a bigger bang. She saw the numbers jump, felt the air get thick, and aimed the claws where the box would split. A magic box trying to squeeze a city into a pocket.

  It was predictable. Expected, even. So the machines were ready, a well-engineered forest of metal claws and grapplers hovering around the metal box before it could ship its payload. Ren stood next to her, a mountain in his stealth suit. He’d taken his helmet off. They both had. His face was all scars and disapproval, which was his default setting.

  So when the crystal inside erupted, both Kelly and Ren observed as several claw-like machine appendages pulled the metal and magic box apart quickly. They stabbed into the fractures, hooked under edges of magic-forged metal, and pulled as lines of silver light cracked across its surface like an egg in a microwave. This happned as the massive power crystal the size of a small house erupted into existence in the center, and whatever spatial compression that occurred inside? The one that made the bright blue crystal keep growing? Finally stopped.

  Dust and flakes of displaced matter pattered down. Magic charged the air with thick static and spent near visible motes. Kelly brushed a glittering bit off her shoulder. “Finally,” she said, staring up at the crystal. A slow, focused smile spread on her face. It was probably hostile, and definitely hers to take apart.

  A slow breath hissed out through her teeth, part annoyance, part appreciation. “And there’s the neighborhood wake-up call.” She tilted her head, listening for the first high-frequency whine only her augmented ears could catch. “Right on schedule.”

  It was time to get to work.

  A flat, synthesized voice announced its intent. “Beginning structural and energetic mapping. Logging all identified symbols and their connective pathways.”

  "Sure, you do that," Kelly nodded and took a seat—on the ground, of course—not on a chair. Let those stuck-up ergonomic dictators feel what it was like to be outclassed by nature's natural seat: the floor, which had been perfecting the art of support since before chairs decided they knew better. Furniture, like most things designed to help people, had developed opinions about its own importance. The floor had no such delusions. It simply existed, and everything fell into place accordingly.

  And then A swarm of thin red lasers shot out from the ceiling and walls, painting the crystal and every scattered piece of the cube shell in a tight grid, and the room's advanced AI began to scan all of the dense runes covering the crystal.

  Kelly watched the lights crawl. They weren’t just looking at the surface. They were mapping each and every single rune; how deep the glowing symbols went, pattern of runes, the structure and chaining and how it all fit together, the overlaps, dimensions, cross-intersections.

  Not just the crystal, but the cube that had encased it. Every piece. Its interior and exterior, every dissected fragment. It was eating the whole thing—the crystal heart, the busted-open box, every little shard—and turning it into a river of data that would drown any normal system. The AI didn't understand what it was looking at any more than a person reading a language they'd never seen could claim comprehension. But understanding wasn't the point. Recording was. The machine was a perfect, tireless clerk cataloging an argument Kelly was going to win.

  "Symbols linking to other symbols. Layers on layers. Connections across connections," Kelly muttered, watching the grid tighten, paraphrasing the bits of dry scan reports flashing across the screen at speeds to fast to view fully.

  Her voice bright with energy that came from knowing she was about to learn something that would either solve everything or blow up in her face spectacularly.

  "Fascinating. Put it on a postcard."

  “Scan complete. All symbolic formations and structural Runic designs archived.”

  It took the machine 30 minutes, which for an AI as powerful as the one Ren had delivered, was a lifetime.

  Kelly was at the main console before the voice finished. She slapped her palm on the interface. In her head, she opened up the fortified mental vault, the one that survived the resets, and started the dump. A flood of raw data poured in—glowing schematics, spinning symbol-shapes, cascading patterns of light that were someone else’s math.

  She didn’t get it. Not a single chain of logic. The machine didn’t get it either. A message flashed on a screen: ANALYSIS FAILURE. PARAMETERS UNKNOWN.

  “Welcome to my world,” Kelly said. She kept shoveling the data in anyway. A greedy magpie stuffing its nest with shiny, dangerous trash. Every symbol, every pattern, every weird squiggle that might be a comma or a command to turn your blood to gas—she took it. She crammed it all into the vault in her skull.

  Anything could happen. The hall could collapse into a rift. A reset could blink the local universe out of existence. Any single thing not stored in the one place that followed her between loops—her own head—would be gone for good. Wasted.

  Kelly wasn’t taking that chance. She took the whole deluge, watching the final data stream crash into her memory with something close to excitement. Thirty minutes to catalog the impossible. Not bad.

  When the transfer finished, she leaned on the console. A thick, hot headache was building behind her eyes. Perfect. It meant the data had weight.

  "You can't read that," Ren said. His voice was dry. "The machine can't read it. They're just... pictures."

  "I'm not reading it. I'm taking it." Kelly studied the whole blueprint in her own head. It was a waterfall of shapes.

  Kelly didn't care if she understood. Not yet. She just swallowed and recorded, the way a stomach processed food without ever knowing what it's digesting or why the meal mattered, which made her smarter than almost everyone trying to kill her. All of them were absolutely certain about things they'd never actually tasted.

  She closed her eyes and flicked through the mental files. Not reading, just feeling the size of it.

  Thousands of symbols. Not hundreds. Thousands.

  Patterns that lived inside other patterns. Sequences. Structure. Logic, making chains that looked like a gods shopping list; with writing and assembly instructions for a new law of physics. Structures of intent and rule, built from light. It was a whole language made to tell reality what to do.

  Everything she’d been doing until now—scratching basic symbols off monster weapons, guessing what they did, blowing up her own gear when she guessed wrong—it looked small in comparison. Stupid. Her runes? Her magic scribbling, compared to this? Was a kindergartners crayon drawing next to the architectural plans for a cathedral.

  In that huge, glowing mess, her eyes found familiar shapes. Tiny, almost laughable. The [Absorb] Rune, which she’d peeled off a lizard-thing’s shield. The [Store] Rune, copied from a green perverted goblin shaman's broken staff. The [Reinforce] Rune, which she’d figured out after a piece of armor ate one of her railgun shots.

  She knew three. Three symbols, for sure, out of thousands. Hundreds of thousands, maybe. She spotted a few basic elemental ones too—a flicker for [Heat], a jagged line for [Water]. They were there, buried in the avalanche, a single familiar word in a library written in screaming alien hieroglyphics.

  The scale of it was absurd. It was so stupidly huge it was daunting. She let out a short, breathy laugh.

  Ren’s head turned. “Problem?”

  “Nope. Just realizing my entire life’s work fits on a sticky note.” She jabbed a thumb at the pulsating crystal. “And that thing is the entire Akashic.”

  She would need a more task-specific AI and machinery to understand it all. Smarter computers. A whole room of them, built just for this.

  Okay. New plan. She started talking, thinking out loud to carve a path through the chaos in her head.

  “Can’t study this mess as-is. It’s a complete sentence and I don’t know the alphabet. Gotta break it down. Isolate each individual rune. Every single one. Then test them all, one-by-one. With Violence.” She looked at her hands, then around the lab. “Engrave each one onto a hand-grown crystal… no. That’d take forever. Need stolen crystals. From the portal creatures. The big ugly ones that carry them in their axes or their shields. Harvest as many as I can carry.”

  She stopped, picturing the lab it would need. The blast shields. The drones she’d sacrifice. The certain, inevitable fires.

  She would need to do this thousands of times to discover the effect of each rune, it would take forever—unless she used them to kill things.

  “And then I feed all that data—Rune shape, what it did, when it did it—into a system. A new brain, built just for this. Make it learn the language. Find the patterns. The grammar. The rules. How does a [store] Rune change if you curve its tail? What happens when you chain [reinforce] to fifteen other chains?” She nodded, a sharp, decisive motion. “It’ll be learning a new way to talk. From nothing.”

  Ren grunted. It was a specific grunt. The one that meant this is a fantastic way to get erased permanently.

  “There is no guarantee,” he said, his voice a low rumble of gravel, “that this rune-script follows logic we would recognize. Their rules may be alien. Their cause and effect may be a circle. You could spend a hundred lifetimes and learn only nonsense that unmakes your mind.”

  Kelly looked from him to the colossal, pulsing crystal and back. A wide, real smile broke across her face. It was calm. It was amused.

  “When did a guarantee ever matter?”

  She wasn’t talking about herself just then. She was talking about the long, bloody, brilliant history of poking the unknown with a stick to see if it bites your hand off.

  “Think about the first moron who grabbed a burning branch from a forest fire. He won the night. He definitely lost a hand, but he won the night. The people who strapped themselves to rockets full of explosives to see if space was reachable. Half of them died. The rest got a view. The crews that built the first AI-run fusion plants. The survivors of the meltdowns wrote the safety protocols.”

  She started ticking points off on her fingers, walking toward the crystal like it was calling her.

  “The volunteers who injected themselves with early cyber-augment viruses to map the neural rejection. The crazies who jumped into the first unstable rifts with a scanner and a hope, mapping the bleed-through before it stabilized or deleted them. The woman who let a phase-spider’s venom mutate her for six months straight to make the first universal antitoxin. She screamed every day. Now its bite is a bad itch.” She stopped a few feet from the crystal’s glowing surface. Her reflection, warped and repeated in a hundred facets, looked back. “They all had a guarantee of nothing. Just a question and the willingness to pay whatever it cost to get the answer.” She turned her head to look at Ren. Her expression was settled, focused. “Obstacles aren’t stop signs. They’re the part where you figure out how hard you need to hit something.”

  She looked back at the crystal, at the thousands of glowing, mysterious symbols. The headache behind her eyes pulsed in time with their light. She didn’t say anything else. She just looked at it. The next step was obvious.

  Kelly shifted her weight, her boots scraping on the floor of the combat hall. She looked over at Ren, her helmet off and her expression animated. “The runes,” she started, and her words picked up speed. “They aren’t just decorations. They can squeeze space. They can shift energy from one shape to another. They’re little pockets of ‘screw the usual rules.’”

  Her words came out in a fast cluster. “The compression potential here is insane. We could run a city block off a teaspoon of background mana. Or turn that teaspoon into a shaped charge that voids local physics.” She gestured at the empty space where her theory hung.

  But right then, she didn’t have the right equipment.

  She didn’t have the cutting-edge systems that could break mana down to its most basic pieces and study the whole mess, the same systems she’d used to get this far.

  She waved a hand toward the empty space where her old lab wasn’t. “I need a real lab to work on that. Kelly continued, the momentum carrying her. “Your setup here is great for ballistic therapy. I need a clean room. Scanners that won’t melt when I feed them raw portal energy. I need a new lab. My old one—the only one on the planet that could see this stuff better than anyone else, really see it—got swallowed. So I need a new one. This place is for shooting things. It doesn’t have the tools to tell me why magic decided to ruin everyone’s day.”

  Everything she needed was currently dissolving in the stomach acids of a leviathan in another dimension. Kelly pictured a multi-billion-credit array being slowly digested. It was a deeply offensive waste of good machinery.

  Ren stood with his arms crossed, a solid shadow against the hall’s sterile light. His silence was a physical object.

  “So,” Kelly concluded, as if it were obvious. “I should go find one.”

  “No,” Ren said. The word was flat.

  Ren didn’t shift his stance, his face all weathered lines and patience. “Sure,” he said, his voice low and even. “But your training isn’t finished. We still have combat to drill. A mutation to develop. Your time abilities are key. You’re not done.”

  “No, dude,” Kelly said, the protest sharp. She pointed at the maical artifact, then at the faint, hovering schematic of the cube on the far wall. “The data is right there. I’m holding it. The lab is the priority.”

  ”Your time is not based on this energy, not completely,” Ren said—slowly, like a man who’d seen everything, including how this would all end.

  “What happens,” Ren said, each word deliberate, “if something cuts the magic off from you? Your runes go dead. Your augments freeze. You get bagged, tagged, dissected, and have your memories playing on a public screen in under an hour. Or a god decides your skull is a nice vacation home and wears your body for the rest of time. You have the runes now. All of them. Thousands. Our agreement was you would train your time abilities when you returned. You said yourself you don’t have the correct tools or the correct lab. Now you have all the data you need stored in your head.”

  “Today, we train,” Ren repeated with timbre. The statement was flat, final. “That was the deal. Or you can trigger your failsafes and reset, and let someone turn you into a permanent guinea pig.”

  Kelly paused. She stared at him.

  It was just one day, but the impatience ached.

  A blunt annoyance settled in her chest. His logic was a solid wall. One that that was irritatingly sensible. She couldn’t refute it.

  With a sigh, her weapon detached from a claw and fell into her open palm.

  Training resumed.