Chapter Seventeen - Deadline

I woke up feeling like I'd slept for an entire day, and that wasn't too far from the truth.

"Urgh," I said as I turned over and checked the time. It was noon-thirty. I had burned the morning away already.

Then my sleepy thoughts refocused on the night before, and I pulled my pillow around to smother myself.

"I'm Deadline," past-me had said, because yeah, a small part of me had been thinking about my alter-identity like it was something out of a damned superhero movie.

I kicked my feet into my mattress.

"God, I'm soooo cringe," I screamed.

I was so awkward and stupid. After four loops of fighting through the portal, getting better and faster at it only to get clobbered by the people outside, I'd finally gotten that Mizu woman down. She relied on the same set of moves, I supposed because of some training, and while she was fast...

Well, it didn't matter how fast she was if she always did the exact same thing. I could start moving before she had started striking.

So, I smacked her down, and it felt fantastic. Just grabbing onto her, holding her in place, pinning her against myself with my knife by her throat. She was, in that moment, at my mercy. She was mine to do with as I pleased.

The fact that she'd previously broken my nose and burned me several times only made it sweeter to finally be able to overpower her.

I squirmed in my sheets, then growled and leapt out of bed.

I needed to check my surroundings. My current Save point was from an hour after the fight, when I thought I was safe. I didn't dare set a second one until I knew that no corpo hitsquad was going to kick my door in.

So, I left my room, padding out in the apartment corridors in nothing but a loose tank-top and sweatpants. I looked through some windows, probably looking a bit paranoid, then when I confirmed that it was safe, I returned to my room and set a fresh Save.

Right. Today was going to be both busy and relaxed. First, some stretches.

I ran through them a couple of times before setting a fresh Save to right after my morning routine, that way I wouldn't need to shower every single time.

So, what was the plan for today?

The goal for the end of the 'real' day was twofold. First, make a fair bit of cash. And second, pay off Not-So-Plain Jane. I didn't need that debt hanging over my head like a sword of Damocles.

There were other things to do as well.

I decided that the 'real' timeline would involve hitting the gym. I was feeling... actually, really good.

Back in the other timeline, the one that had eventually led to my death, I'd spent some time carrying stuff in and out of portals. That meant absorbing some amount of ambient magic. Those days always left me feeling somewhat refreshed for a few hours.

I'd been reliably told that killing the monsters within a portal world was a significantly better way to absorb magic, and that opening and leaving through an exit portal was even better. I'd just reaped a dozen monsters in one night and did a solo-clear.

Alright, so the first loop would be meditative. Or as meditative as I could be.

I also had research to do, I wanted to spend a bit of time just learning new skills as well. Guitar practice, French practice... some research into the people I'd eventually need to kill.

Meditation first.

I sat cross-legged on the floor and focused inwards. My core, which was new, was roiling and twisting, but not in a bad way. It felt like it was... full? Kinda? Like how a stomach felt after eating a lot. It was digesting, maybe.

I focused on it and around it. There was some ephemeral sense that stuff was moving around within me, shifting in waves across my body.

Focusing on it for a while was doable, but after a solid half-hour I got up and started to pace. Gosh, I was... well, in a state. Feeling a little warm.

I Reloaded, and it wasn't much better, but I could cope.

So, practice!

I'd hit the gym in my last loop, then get myself some cash, but for now and the next few 'nows' it was training.

Playing the guitar turned out to be a decent distraction, though I could only focus on that for a pair of loops. It was still a solid six or seven hours of straight practice, and by the end I was able to... almost play the guitar portion from the start of Search and Destroy by the Stooges. I had their poster on one wall. It wasn't my fave, but it was classic punk, and I had to respect it.

My neighbour came over to complain three times across three loops, which I took as a good sign that I was rocking good. Or... poorly, but whatever.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

French lessons were a little less cathartic. I found myself feeling more pent up after the second loop of basic French than I'd been at the start. Still, I was picking things up... very slowly.

The site I was learning on said that it took about six hundred hours to reach competency. For a normal person, with an hour to spare a day, that'd be well over a year.

I was trying to cram six hours in a day. At least on the days where I wasn't too busy. The plan was to reach at least basic fluency, then I'd look into hiring a tutor that could give me immediate lessons, set a Save before hiring them at all, and practice in wasted loops.

That was for later, though.

I got sick of killing my infinite time and turned to something that felt a little more productive. Something with a sense of purpose.

Someone had caused the breach. The timing of it was super suspicious, with a few guilds busy and some A-rankers out of the city at the time, though I couldn't remember who, exactly.

Someone had triggered it, or at the very least opened the door and stood aside. And someone was planning to walk away richer than ever because of it.

I didn't have access to classified files or backdoor surveillance. I wasn't part of any inner circle. But I had eyes, and I knew how to dig. And if you scratched at the surface long enough, things started to stink.

I drew up a list of guilds and corps that might have been involved, starting with the big names. It might have been someone smaller, but I figured I'd start easy. I had... a little under nine months now. That was a lot, but not if I sat on my ass.

The guilds first.

The Seraphs was a big name. Lots of members. Six B-rankers, two As. That was insane firepower for one guild to have. There were rumours that they were eating up smaller guilds too, taking in their numbers, working on something big.

The Chatterboxes looked cleaner. It was small, lean. No rankers above C, but lots of contracts. I slid them into my 'unlikely' folder for the moment. It could have been, but they'd stand to lose a lot from the Breach. And I recalled seeing some Chatterboxers out near the front line, their logo was distinct.

Echo Nine was corpo all the way. So yeah, they'd be involved on both sides. Probably not responsible for anything though. That wasn't their style.

Midnight Tea Garden was too small. The Bright Lightning guild was not very significant.

As I started to dig, I kept finding more and more guilds, most of them small, most corporate-affiliated.

So, the real juice was in the corporations, which was where I should be digging.

I wasn't sure. But some guilds hadn't shown up at all. Others had mysteriously been deployed out of the city before everything went to shit, and I was certain that some corps had to profit from the breach.

I scoured PR pages and read biographies. It was... not that helpful, but I was starting to paint a vague picture. Fortress ENE covered its corruption with a thick veneer of bullshittery.

There was only so much corpo double-speak that I could take before I Reloaded.

"Dammit," I said as I walked over to my bed and just... crashed into it. I rolled over, then... took care of business before taking a nap.

I woke up to find it dark outside, then sighed and Reloaded. That was a mistake, as I was hit by a sudden wave of weird tiredness and my previous pent up state was right back.

"Screw it," I muttered. I got changed into some gym clothes, pushed most stuff into a backpack so that I could get changed into something nice after, and then I looked at the bag with my prize from the night before.

There was that weird club in it, with the obsidian blades, and next to that a rather nice revolver.

That last had been a gift from Mizu Aokawa. I don't think she even noticed when I pulled it out of her hip-shealth and tossed it into my bag. It looked like a nice, solid piece, bigger rounds than anything I ever fired at Luna Corp, and simple enough that I didn't think it had any trackers.

A Bastion-Krieger Model 2088c 'Stout-Nose' chambered in .454 Casull. It was a fat, kind of stubby thing, all boxy and brutalist. A nice gift as an apology for singing my eyebrows off.

I'd need to see if I could even buy ammo for it, and if I couldn't file off the serial number, and find a holster for it.

Sighing, I packed it into a bag, and decided to head out.

First, the gym. I needed to train in a 'real' timeline to improve my musculature for real. Then I'd head out and see if I couldn't hit the casino and come back with more cash than I went in with.

***