I haven't got the next part of Phantom's storyline written, which will be the part where he tells X what the blank he's doing there, so we're jumping back a bit to Zero.
The chapter title is a reference to one of those poems that I find quoted a lot. I thought it was appropriate to Zero's thoughts in the chapter and his status as an Anti-Anti-Christ (Ah, TVTropes).
Not a rookie after all, Zero thought, as several rapid buster shots flew past him to destroy a mechanaloid. Not as good as Zero himself, of course, who had dispatched the other two by firing as he ran up, then kicking the other one down and tearing its head off as it lay on the ground. But good.
That, the bare-handed violence, he didn't have the same kind of ingrained memory of as he did of the energy pistols, but it was inefficient to rely on weapons like this at close range, some part of him thought, and since he had the physical strength, why not? He felt immensely critical of his own combat performance, which was irritating but understandable. If he'd lost practically every memory file in his head and combat technique he had, then of course his performance would suffer.
Oh, he was doing better than the others, but then not only was he this 'Legendary Zero' they were so awed by, and he probably hadn't gotten a title like that by being weak, but he felt that of course he was stronger than they were.
The strongest, although the arrogance in that thought made him wince. Heck, even if it might be nothing but an accurate assessment. He hoped it wasn't his assessment. Underestimating even enemies that were a fraction as strong as he was would be a fantastically idiotic way to die.
Regardless, being weak enough that he hadn't been able to destroy all three before someone who wasn't used to real combat had gotten up the nerve to not just start planning on the fly, but quickly shooting to kill in a way that involved firing only a few feet away from where he was? On the one hand, good for the rookie. On the other, how embarrassing.
No, the rookie was no rookie: to his instincts, the same that constantly analyzed his surroundings and highlighted good places for an ambush and so much else, there was more to him than that.
Why was someone who had, by his own admission, never been in actual combat before better at it than a member of some 'Rekku Army?' Not to mention the differences in their construction quality. And…
Zero shook his head, because trying to think about it was constantly giving him this very annoying feeling that he knew this, but then there was some red flag that hinted that maybe this wasn't whatever he thought it was and something was very wrong, and then it would decide that he knew this again, because acting weirdly was a normal trait of whatever 'this' was, except…
In any case, the first impression Zero had gotten of the reploid that he was going to mentally tag 'the rookie' until he introduced himself, had turned out to be wrong. He was very well trained, even if Zero didn't think he'd shot at actual reploids or mechanaloids to kill until today. He'd settled down too quickly, become casual about firing so close to someone else too quickly, for him to be new to this. No, he knew his capabilities.
Of course, that begged the question of why he'd done something like make himself a big target during the battle Zero had woken up to when he had to know that over the long term-
Oh, Zero realized, as the rookie held his position because Zero was and the little lieutenant and the human started to catch up to them now that the shooting was over. He cared.
About the human. And Zero, or more specifically whatever made Zero so important to him. Whatever Zero represented to him.
Caring, Zero knew, as surely as he knew that buster shots were damaging, made people do damn stupid things. The more important something was to them, the more nervous they'd be about it, until the more they cared, the more likely they were to screw something up, half the time. When they were trying to impress someone, the way the little lieutenant would dearly like a chance to impress him. When they were trying to protect someone or something.
The human. Ciel, Zero corrected himself. It was in the way he stood, the way his sensors were angled, once Zero thought about it, about what an arrangement like that might mean. Bodyguard? he wondered briefly, but no. He'd be better trained, he'd have it down, he wouldn't take it so personally if that was all it was. So why else did people 'care?' Why was the human 'his,' the way Zero had decided all of them were under Zero's protection, at least for now? Although Zero had done this longer, he knew better than to let himself Care and let that make him nervous, act like this was different from any other mission or training session, let it get in the way.
He was still, on reflection, a little surprised, somewhere in his systems, that he'd decided that they were worth protecting so fast. Why was he so sure that they were on his side? For all he knew, they might idolize him as a legendary enemy. Trust made betrayal easier.
Of course, he didn't think that they'd anticipated that something like this would happen to his memory files. The rookie at least, was no actor… And that thought raised an instant red flag. Because the rookie cared. He wasn't faking that, Zero knew as he turned around to see the young reploid looking at Ciel, clearly wondering if she was tired from all of this climbing up through the abandoned complex, but it was a reason to fake things.
On the one hand, the rookie had started following Zero: on the other, the rookie's systems clearly gave Zero a high threat level, given how his system heat and combat readiness increased when Zero was close to him, although the embarrassed, nervous blushing was just excessive realism. Far too human.
On the other, that very neatly paralleled how Zero's systems reacted to him. Trusted known/dangerous unknown. At the same time. Without it being a contradiction at all.
The rookie was new to combat, but he was picking it up fast, so he'd been trained...
Oh, Zero realized, and it was a relief to finally have the kid pegged. Someone important, is he? So that was why he had such a half-expert, half-assed knowledge of how to protect valuable people: he was the valuable person that got protected. That was why he'd been trained to fight even though he wasn't expected to actually do it.
At least that, all of him agreed with, as the rookie looked at him, eyebrows raised, wondering if something was wrong: was there a reason Zero was looking back at them instead of moving on?
Big green eyes… The other reploid had those wings, and Zero wondered if the reason he'd decided that the female human was alright, despite being unusually (suspiciously?) non-useless was that she looked sort of like him. Well, a female human version of him. It was mostly the hair, and maybe, maybe something around her eyes was familiar, or at least the look in them, but that hair color was borderline-unnatural in a human, and was it really a coincidence that all of it was the exact shade of his own, under the dust?
Did this Neo Arcadia place really worship him that much?
Finally, they'd found it.
"Is this the elevator you were talking about?" the female model asked.
Ciel nodded, coming up to look over Zero's shoulder as the rookie hung back, watching the way they had come. "I could never get it to work, so I used an alternate route. It's got an unusual security protocol: I think it was programmed more recently than the security on Zero's status monitoring system."
It took a bit of work to get the abandoned elevator shaft open, and most of it was done on autopilot. Sometimes what he found in his systems surprised him. Since when did he know how to hack? But none of the others seemed surprised. Maybe it was just an installed subroutine or something, and that was why it hadn't been lost with most of his conscious data?
He'd tried to query his fragmented systems, get a list of his capabilities, but he'd gotten only one word when he'd asked what he could do: "Everything."
Which was exactly as unhelpful, irritating and worrying as a combat assessment saying that he was the strongest, but for some reason he wasn't surprised. Annoyed, but unsurprised.
When the doors opened, for some reason he moved aside, certain that Ciel would start leaping up them to scout, and when he realized she hadn't the world tilted around him.
For approximately 2.5 seconds, 'Ciel' was 'the curious-fun one that likes shiny things and getting them and sparring,' and was there something wrong with her, that she wasn't acting the way she should be?
Zero tried to keep a grip on himself, analyzing these reactions, noticing that Lieutenant Lark, the 'nice one that cares and wants to help and isn't normal at all' was where she was supposed to be, a little behind him and safe and the rookie was now 'the kid,' still 'mine' and 'to-be-protected,' and…
Was it memory that made his system assign Ciel the 'fatal damage attained/limited recovery window/most urgent' statuses? That made, for an instant, his sensory data input stop reading her as a living human and start reading her as a reploid corpse?
That instant shattered the illusion, because it wasn't true (couldn't be true). No, that wasn't what had stopped it: One of his system protocols had vetoed it. Not because it had detected an error, like reading one living human and a second living reploid as dead reploids, but because of the way he'd felt? What?
It had hurt. He'd cared about them, cared that they were dead, or part of him had. The part that had been trapped in that illusion or system error, hallucination, whatever terminology you wanted to use, had cared. They'd died, one by one, and he wasn't supposed to feel that way. Feel that kind of pain, except he must have, at some point, because why else would the ghost of that data be in his systems, in his mind?
When had he thought 'my family' instead of 'my people?' His student, his…
Maybe he had felt this pain before, and maybe he was the one who had set up that protocol to keep himself from feeling it again?
What had he forgotten? Did he want to remember, if it hurt so much?
For all he knew, he might be the reason his memories were fried. Reploids could do that, someone he… couldn't place had told him that a long time ago. Destroy painful memories, destroy the self that had done terrible things.
Regardless, if his sensory data could play tricks on him like that, then he wasn't functioning normally, not at all. He was a danger to those around him, he realized, and wondered why his mind hadn't started spinning plans on how to keep the others safe given that, safe from the enemy forces and from him, if it came to that.
I already considered myself a danger to them, Zero realized, as he looked into the shaft himself to try to figure out how they were going to do this with a human in tow. I consider myself a danger to everything. So, no change in his status, no need to make plans to compensate for the new data. The hallucinations that might be something else entirely.
He really should care about that more. If any other person had been a danger to those he had chosen to protect, he would have either killed them then and there or wished he could while making plans to work around it. Waiting for the day he could kill them.
Any other entity that could kill without caring, even those under its protection? Well, he'd have to mark them for death. In his eyes, they would have had no right to live. And neither, said his tactical assessments, did innocent people who got in his way, either. If any of these three turned against him, or he against them, he'd kill them and the same oversight system that had kept him from mourning those deaths would ensure that he wouldn't feel a thing. No matter how hard he tried. No matter how much he hated himself for it.
For a short time, he'd felt that they were his family and he would die for them, die to keep them from dying, and apparently he wasn't allowed to feel that way. To feel that the deaths of others were anything other than meaningless.
He'd know that he was a monster, yes, if he killed someone innocent and didn't care, but it turned out that he knew that already. "No," he told the rookie. "Have Lark carry her."
"But…" Reluctantly, the rookie put down the human.
"You can hover, so I want you below us." Zero would have to keep up momentum to climb and even with the upgrades Cinnamon had to work at gaining height: their rearguard needed to be able to pay attention.
As Zero calmly arranged things to take advantage of the fact that the rookie would soak up damage for the human while the other reploid healed him so that he could take more damage, noting that he didn't especially care about any pain the rookie might feel in the process, he had to wonder:
Who would build something like him? What could make an evil like this a necessary one?
And what sort of place, what kind of people could consider something like him, a killing machine designed to be unable to develop a heart, a hero?
