The darkness didn't change.

  Jess hung in it, suspended by walls of pulsing flesh, and tried to find a way out. The acid burned. Her regeneration fought. Neither was winning.

  "Two minutes until armor failure," Miri said.

  "I know."

  "One minute."

  "I know."

  The armor failed at fifty-three seconds.

  Jess felt it go—not all at once, but piece by piece. The chest plate softened first, turning from solid protection to something rubbery and weak. Then the gauntlets. Then the greaves. Each one dissolving into the acid, sloughing off her body like dead skin.

  Then it was just her.

  The acid hit bare flesh.

  Jess screamed.

  There was no holding it back. No stoic silence. The burn was everywhere—her arms, her legs, her chest, her face. Skin melting. Muscle exposed. Nerves firing signals that felt like dying.

  Her regeneration kicked in.

  She felt it fighting—cells dividing, tissue knitting, new skin forming even as the old skin dissolved. It was a war. Acid versus orc. And it hurt. Every nerve ending screamed simultaneously. Her body became nothing but pain.

  But she wasn't dying.

  The orbital drop had done this. Years ago, falling from space, burning up on re-entry, her body rebuilding itself as it fell. She'd survived that. She could survive this.

  Probably.

  She hung in the darkness, burning and healing, healing and burning, and tried to think past the pain.

  Think. Think. There's always a way.

  Her mind drifted. It was easier than feeling.

  She thought about missions. Hundreds of them. Drops into hostile territory. Extractions that went wrong, extractions that went right, the ones where she'd been the only one walking out. She'd been shot, stabbed, blown up, spaced. She'd regenerated through all of it.

  She thought about the orbital drop that had given her this body. Falling through atmosphere, the heat shield failing, her pod becoming a meteor. She'd hit the ground at terminal velocity and walked away. Not because of armor. Because of what she was.

  She thought about games. Myriad Expanse Online. Years of grinding, raiding, theory-crafting with Kirael. The stupid arguments about optimal builds. The late nights when neither of them could sleep. The way he'd always laughed when she tried something reckless and it actually worked.

  If he could see me now. Digested by a bug.

  The thought was so absurd she almost laughed. Almost. Laughing would hurt too much.

  She thought about the stone slab.

  The memory came sharp and sudden—days ago, after the terror bird, when she'd stood in a clearing and punched a rock for hours. Three hours. Ten thousand strikes. Just to see if she could force a skill.

  It had worked. Bash had appeared.

  If one punch didn't do it, why not ten?

  The thought cut through the pain like a knife.

  If ten didn't, why not a hundred? Why not a thousand?

  She'd been trying to fight the stomach. Punching randomly, hoping for a weak spot. But this wasn't a fight. This was a grind. The same as the stone slab. The same as every level she'd earned in the past week.

  The system didn't reward cleverness. It rewarded effort. Repetition. Refusal to stop.

  "One punch won't do it," she whispered. Her voice was raw, cracked. "But I don't need one punch. I need ten thousand."

  She couldn't see. Couldn't move. Could barely breathe.

  But she could punch.

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  Her fist drove into the stomach wall. The flesh gave slightly, then rebounded. No visible effect. No notification.

  She punched again. Same spot.

  Again.

  Again.

  "Miri," she gasped. "Count for me."

  A pause. Then: "Counting initiated. Strike one. Strike two. Strike three."

  The rhythm started. Punch. Punch. Punch. Each one landing in the same place, over and over, while the acid burned and her regeneration fought and the darkness pressed in.

  "Strike twenty-seven. Strike twenty-eight."

  This is stupid, she thought. This is so stupid.

  "Strike fifty-one. Strike fifty-two."

  But it worked before.

  "Strike eighty-three. Strike eighty-four."

  The pain was background now. Just noise. She focused on the count, on the rhythm, on the spot she was hitting. She imagined it weakening. Imagined the fibers tearing, one by one.

  "Strike one hundred twelve. Strike one hundred thirteen."

  Come on. Come on.

  "Strike one hundred fifty-seven."

  Nothing. Still nothing.

  She kept punching.

  The count blurred after two hundred.

  Jess stopped feeling her arms. Then her hands. Then her body. There was only the target. Only the rhythm. Only Miri's voice, steady and inhuman, marking each strike like a metronome.

  "Strike three hundred eight. Strike three hundred nine. Strike three hundred ten."

  The stomach wall was changing. She felt it—a subtle softening in the exact spot she'd been hitting. The fibers were weakening. Tearing, one by one.

  "Strike three hundred forty-two. Strike three hundred forty-three."

  More give. Definitely more give.

  Jess pushed harder. Faster. The rhythm accelerated. She stopped thinking about the acid, the pain, the darkness. There was only the target. Only the count.

  "Strike four hundred eleven. Strike four hundred twelve."

  A tear. Small—the width of her finger—but there. Acid seeped through from the other side. Different acid. Fresher. It burned worse.

  She didn't stop.

  "Strike four hundred fifty-three. Strike four hundred fifty-four."

  The tear widened. Another punch. Another. Another.

  "Strike five hundred two. Strike five hundred three."

  Light.

  Not much—a sliver, pale and sickly—but light. The first light she'd seen since the queen's maw closed around her.

  Jess drove her fist into the gap.

  The tear became a hole. The hole became a rupture. And then she was pulling, tearing at the edges with her bare hands, ignoring the acid that streamed over her arms, ignoring the screaming of her nerves, ignoring everything except the need to be out.

  She burst through.

  The chamber was chaos.

  The queen was thrashing—not attacking, just thrashing, her body convulsing as Jess tore free of her abdominal wall. Ichor sprayed in sheets. Egg sacs burst under flailing legs. The walls shook with impacts that weren't aimed at anything.

  Jess fell to the stone floor in a heap of acid-burned flesh and half-regenerated muscle.

  She couldn't stand. Couldn't even crawl. She lay there, gasping, while the queen's death throes shook the chamber around her.

  The queen screamed. Not a roar—a wail. High and thin and dying.

  Then she fell.

  Forty feet of chitin and hatred crashed to the ground. The impact threw Jess against the wall. Debris rained from above. Something cracked in her chest.

  Then silence.

  Jess lay in the rubble, staring at the ceiling, waiting to die or heal or whatever came next.

  [Nexus Log: Onyx Skitter Queen (B-Rank) slain. Exp +45,000]

  [Level Up: Level 25 → Level 26]

  [Advancement Quest fulfilled]

  [Lifeform ascension threshold within safe parameters]

  [Triggering innate potential of individual Phantom]

  The warmth came.

  Not the usual warmth—not the trickle she'd grown used to. This was a flood. A tsunami. It poured into her from somewhere deep and primal, filling every cell, every fiber, every atom.

  She felt herself change.

  Her bones lengthened. Not painfully—it was more like stretching after a long sleep, but everywhere at once. Muscle fibers thickened, realigned, grew dense as steel cables. Skin tightened, scars smoothing, the accumulated micro-damage of decades sloughing away like dead skin.

  The acid burns vanished. The cracked ribs knitted. The exhaustion that had lived in her bones for longer than she could remember simply... evaporated.

  She grew taller. Six-one. Six-two. Six-three. Her frame broadened, filled out, became something that looked like it could punch through walls.

  [Nexus Log: Class Evolution complete]

  [Frontline Huntress → Assault Fortress]

  [Assault Fortress]

  The Frontline Huntress dispensed with all formality, all civility, and chose to take as much injury as she dealt out. Sometimes the bargain worked in her favor. Other times, it did not. She survived anyway.

  Jess opened her eyes.

  The world was sharper. Brighter. She could see individual grains of stone on the floor, could hear the distant drip of water from a hundred meters away, could smell the queen's ichor and her own blood and something else—something clean and new.

  She sat up.

  Her body felt right. Not healed—new. Like she'd been carrying a weight her whole life and only now realized it was there.

  She looked at her hands. The scars were gone. The calluses remained—she'd earned those—but the old injuries, the accumulated damage of centuries, had simply vanished.

  The micro damage, she realized. The strain of old age. I was running on fumes and didn't know it.

  Her orc body had been nearing its end. Three hundred and twenty years of combat, regeneration, and abuse. She'd been skating by on level-ups, adding years to her clock, but the underlying wear had still been there.

  Now it wasn't.

  She felt... young. Not in the way of a cloned body, fresh from the vat. Young in the way of something that had earned its strength and been rewarded for it.

  Jess pushed herself up. Walked to the queen's corpse. Climbed onto its abdomen—the hole she'd torn still leaking ichor—and sat down, legs dangling over the edge.

  The chamber was wrecked. Eggs destroyed. Walls shattered. The rivulet of clean water still trickled, now mingling with pools of acid and blood. Bones lay scattered everywhere—animals, travelers, people who hadn't made it out.

  She'd done this.

  She looked at the menu floating in her vision. The full status screen waited behind that icon—her new class, her new age, her new limits. Three hundred and fifty-four years old, last she'd checked. More now, probably. The queen had given her years along with the levels.

  She didn't open it. Not yet.

  "This was fun," she said.

  The words echoed in the empty chamber.

  Miri said nothing. For once, there was nothing to add.

  Jess sat on the corpse of a queen, legs swinging, and let herself breathe.

  Then she opened her status screen.