(LIMITLESS) CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: EXHAUSTION

Taylor had tried. God, she had tried.

Every step she took to enter the warehouse had been careful. 

Even after she’d blundered into Bakuda’s opening trap, she forced herself to stay calm and to think. She angled herself away from the subsequent threads in her sight, ducked and twisted whenever it flared red, and held back blows when she should have struck. Every dodge, every feint, and every half-second of hesitation came from the same desperate hope: maybe this time she could minimize the destruction. Maybe she could prevent more civilian casualties. 

But it had been impossible from the start.

Everyone she saw—everyone—had a bomb in them, ready to ignite at the faintest misstep, at every step too close, and every breath too near. Every moment stretched on a knife’s edge, and when it slipped, the result was always the same.

So Taylor bled, healed, and kept moving. So Taylor bled, healed, and kept moving. But the cost… the cost piled higher than even she could bear.

People screamed once, briefly, and then were gone.

At first she told herself she could endure it. That her pain didn’t matter, and that her regeneration would always pull her back together, no matter how many detonations tore her apart. That she could survive long enough to reach Bakuda.

But it wasn’t the wounds dragging at her. It wasn't even her own survival that mattered. It was theirs. The civilians trapped into this nightmare, stripped of agency, and forced into the role of unwilling weapons. It was the wanton, senseless deaths, stacking higher with every minute she stayed in the vicinity. And with every explosion that rocked the warehouse, with every body she couldn’t protect, the weight dragged her further down.

A hero was supposed to save lives. That was what she’d promised herself, what she’d promised Keith, and what she’d promised her dad. But by coming here, by stepping foot into Bakuda’s funhouse of bombs, she had doomed them instead. 

She was failing, over and over and over, until she could feel the word itself burned into her bones deeper than the agony of torn flesh and shattered bone.

Yes, the greater blame lay on Bakuda’s head. No one could argue otherwise. But Taylor couldn’t ignore the truth hammering down on her with every rough exhale: she still had a role to play. She was here, and every explosion dogged her steps.

It hurt worse than the regeneration; worse than the missing limbs, worse than the burns, and worse than peeling herself free of the many esoteric effects. This pain came from the realization that she had underestimated Bakuda, and there was nothing left to do but move forward.

Keep dodging.

Keep healing.

Keep failing to save anyone.

Until she got her hands around Bakuda’s fucking neck.

Until she could stop her bombing campaign. 

But after the fifteenth death—fifteenth, she counted, she couldn’t not count—broke her.

A child this time, no older than ten, with his eyes wide, and mouth open to scream. But he never had the chance. Taylor saw the glow flare a second too late, but she threw herself forward all the same, arm outstretched and willing herself to be faster, to close the distance with all she had. She didn't. The boy’s face froze in her mind—fear, confusion, and maybe a haunting dash of desperate hope—before he disappeared in a sadistic blossom of fire and blood.

The blast tore through her chest, half her arm disintegrating with it, and the shockwave hurled her to the ground hard enough to crater the concrete. When she rose again, coughing through a throat that healed even as it bled, there was nothing left of him. 

There was nothing left to save.

Taylor trembled, body knitting itself back together around the void in her chest, but her throat clenched on a scream that refused to come. She had tried, but the truth was undeniable. She couldn’t save them. In this situation, she couldn't be the hero anymore.

Her resolve fractured. 

And in that hollow space where her promise to be a hero had lived, something else slipped in: something raw, violent, and deeply sad.

One word slipped past her lips, barely more than a breath, yet more significant than a prayer.

“…Red.”

There was a considerable pull on the energy she wielded, and the restraint she had gripped so tightly, the leash she had kept on herself, was gone. Space groaned around her, and the world snapped outward in a bloom of impossible force. Her sight bled with its color as the very ground tore away from itself, and Bakuda’s carefully laid traps were erased in a radius of expanding destruction.

. . . . .

Nakamura smiled as he saw his parents’ faces in the swell of red light consuming him, his sister’s hand reaching for him through the water. And for the first time since Kyushu, since Leviathan had stolen everything, the ache inside him loosened.

“Finally…” he whispered because, in those last seconds, he was no longer afraid.

He welcomed Death like an old friend.

. . . . .

Taylor stood in the middle of it, clothes reduced to scraps hanging off her frame, and tears cutting paths down her face. For the first time since she’d stepped into Bakuda’s warehouse, she wasn't thinking about saving anyone. She was only thinking about ending it.

And she did.