…
…
…
CONNECTION CONFIRMED. HACKING START.
9S finds himself in an unfamiliar space. It isn't clear how long he's been suspended, but the last thing he remembers is the pulse of electromagnetism and the systems of his body shutting going dark one after the other. His body does not respond to his attempts to reconnect. Nor does Pod respond when he tries to establish communications with her. He must have been right on the edge of a successful hack-in right as he shut down.
That means this must be… 8E's framework?
The thought that he's trapped inside of her is enough to set off alarms of panic. Unfamiliar frameworks make him nervous to begin with, and he knows she must be doing something with his body. He tries to calm himself. She wouldn't have used an EMP if she wanted him dead. As soon as his body is back online, he can reconnect to it. Until then, when he's sure his consciousness data has somewhere to go, it's important that he avoid confrontation with any of her anti-hacking systems.
He does want some idea of what is happening, so he heads for her external interface area.
It's strange to not have a body again. So much of his recent hacking has been in the ark where his body is fully articulated. There is an almost claustrophobic quality to being a small, mobile consciousness core safely encased in two defensive barriers and an external response program. Inside, his curiosity abounds. The limits and potential of hacking into another YoRHa unit this way are entirely unexplored. He makes it a task to explore later.
Right now, he needs to figure out what 8E is doing and why she came after him so suddenly. After she delivered her message about V and 2B, they'd had no contact with one another. All he knew where the camp's whispers that she was weird and quiet and weirdly cooperative with her interrogator.
The glide of his diamond-shaped form is noiseless, but he takes care to move slowly along the white pathways and stick to ports that are already open. Normally he would be able to come and go in a system this surface level as he pleased, but 8E is not in maintenance mode and he does not exist in her security protocols as a permissible presence. Treating this like an infiltration mission is the wisest thing he can do under the circumstances.
Move quietly, leave quietly.
He finally reaches her external interface area. There's really no way to interface with it gently or quietly, so after circling it a few times he accepts the risk and glides over the access port for her visual field.
8E squeezed 9S' body close. Hefting 130kg of dead weight wasn't a problem for her, but carrying it over steep, uneven ground while spitting rain made the lichen patches slick and treacherous required more caution than other terrains. She lifted her head toward something 9S couldn't hear. Thunder, he presumed. It made the most sense since there was nothing else to see. Her visual field centered on the castle in the distance, and then on his unconscious face, draped limply over her shoulder. A puff of steam suggested she must've said something to him, but 9S couldn't hear that either.
She continued onward, up the cliffside path toward the forest kingdom.
The moment he leaves the access port, 9S is cut off from the outside again. He would like to be able to keep that connection open, but he would probably have to take over her entire interface system. Not the best plan if he doesn't want to make a lot of noise and alert her to his presence. At least if all she's doing is hiking up to the castle, he doesn't need to watch that.
Dropping into the ravine to travel out of sight is a tactically sound plan for someone who wants to evade capture or pursuit. But it eludes 9S why she is carrying him toward the castle to begin with. He may be able to get more immediate answers to his questions if he can approach her memory core.
He opens a port from her external interface to her general storage area. The pathways are cluttered and damaged, likely where she has sloppily erased herself in the past, and he passes piles of old intel left unprocessed, faded unit data, and archival data that can't possibly be relevant anymore. Arriving at a dead end, he carefully opens a hidden port. He can feel it scan for his YoRHa ID, and spins in place, on the alert for any sign of a defense system emerging.
Nothing appears. A gentle ping confirms his access and a new pathway opens, allowing him to descends into her memory area.
He is unsure how much time he has, so he starts with the most recent memories and 9S pieces together the situation as he goes. He has no chest to push a sigh of relief from, but it's no less relief that flows through him when he sees that 8E didn't touch 11S or 4S at all. She had been there long enough—for about twenty minutes, in fact. She must've broken out of the camp pretty soon after they all left.
"SUBJECT V…UNCLEAR."
He spins at the sound of his Pod's voice. But it's only a memory. 8E hadn't come up to him intending to do anything to him, it seems. She'd wanted to know where V was—if he was still in their world. The idea to snatch 9S an afterthought that reared its head only after she got her answer.
9S lingers. This memory isn't that important, but he lets it finish.
"…'PHYSICALLY' PRESENT… NON-RESPONSIVE."
It sounds exactly like V's last visit to the church last. That disaster only lasted a few hours, but three days have passed since V parted ways with him. 9S can't imagine he had any other stops to make. Had he really been there the entire time? Can he really still be there?
Killing gods can't be a simple task, but rather than the mortal danger, 9S finds himself automatically worrying about how hungry V is going to be.
Man, spending so much time caring for a human really skewed my sense of priority…
He continues backward through the flow of time through 8E's eyes, to her memories of the camp. He watches her immobilize Gamma, fend off Theta, retrieve a weapon she must have stored in the camp sometime during her missions there, and emerge from a tent. Whatever caused her to escape had happened within its confines.
Only momentarily does he hesitate to go to the next memory.
It's with a kind of fascinated disgust that he watches the conversation in the tent play out. In unintended synchronicity with 8E, he grows irritated at Theta's questions about V, wells with dread and confusion interlace at her implication that 8E can be useful, and balks at the emergence of the re-manufactured Rho.
"Legacy Reclamation…will not allow machines ...inherit the earth."
So this is why Theta is so interested in getting into my data...
If anyone had bothered to make all of this plain to him beforehand, his reaction might not be so strong. Maybe he would have called it misguided at best. But finding out like this taints whatever rationality they may have been able to impress on him. Here at the end of 8E's increasingly desperate search for the only punishment that she believed fit her crimes, he sympathizes with her, wholly and unbegrudgingly. He knows what it is to have memories taken away. He understands the instinctive possessiveness of her memories. He wouldn't have given them up either.
The difference between dying with them and having them erased is the difference between dying as yourself or as a stranger, and even the most mundane memory can be an irreplaceable treasure.
However, knowing that she's looking for punishment doesn't bring him closer to understanding why she's taken him. Her E-bombs are enough to knock a Pod offline, but a fully operational YoRHa body like his will be up and running again in just two or three hours even without Pod assistance. According to his internal clock, she's already lost an hour. What is she trying to do?
Maybe I should go further back?
Despite the messy and bedraggled state of her general storage, the area closer to her memory core is clearly processing at a pace well within the standard range. There aren't too many memories floating freely around for him to passively observe. But there is one big one.
And it's of V.
Jealousy squirms through 9S, but it subsides fairly quickly as he realizes the one observing V in this memory isn't 8E. The quality of it is too different. Her focus is too different. This must be the sub-identity she took on when she abandoned her memories the last time.
V calls her 'Fern'. They are seated together in a windowsill of the throne room and without any other input, 9S knows that this previous identity genuinely worshipped every moment of V's existence. Android memory is photographic, but she gives such attention to the minute details that it feels like more than a recording. The definition of everything, even down to the background details, the light, and the natural sounds make it feel like 9S could step into that moment if he wanted to. When V begins to talk, she hangs off every lilt and pause and her attentiveness gives his voice life that might otherwise be flattened by the recording process.
More than sympathy, 9S pities Fern. She thought she was a normal android, so she had no resistance at all to YoRHa's base programming. Even as her focus broke down and wandered as his words began to sink in and let her know her own true identity, she clung to that image she'd so carefully recorded of him.
Beyond the end of that memory lies another that looks to take place the same day and also contains V. But the moment he moves toward it, an internal communications channel opens and voice sounds through the open air.
"Get the hell out of my head."
He backs off. All the way off until he's back on her surface UI. So much for stealth and staying off her radar. Since she knows he's in here now, maybe he can talk to her. But he doesn't really have a way to communicate back to her with his current shape. So he goes back to the access port for her visual interface and pushes a primitive message into her field.
[Body Offline]
...
[Can't Disconnect]
"Just my luck…" she mutters.
[Where Are You Taking Me]
...
[Why Are You Doing This]
...
[What Are You Trying To Do]
"Stop doing that or I'll drop your body out the window head-first."
He takes the threat in stride. Technically he's forcing visual distortions so receiving his messages like that that is probably less than pleasant for her.
He swaps back to regular access and again he sees through her eyes.
8E let his body down easy on the stones. Almost tenderly. Like she didn't want to hurt him at all.
He'd noticed that even in the camp, she hadn't killed anyone. The resistance androids, even the Legacy Reclamation ones, were far from a threat to any YoRHa capable of combat routines, but she was more than that. Her capabilities were tuned for killing other androids, and the way she moved suggested she had a deep well of experience and background knowledge that should have made the task easy.
She backed away from his body and turned to Pod 153.
"Hey." Her voice came crisp through the internal communication protocol. He wondered if she realized. "Send a message to Pod 042 for me."
"THIS POD IS NOT—"
"Heard it before, not interested in repeating myself. Just send him a picture of 9S laying there and tell him…" She hesitated. The room moved lazily around as she paced, her eyes flitting over the cobblestones, tattered remains of rugs, and ever-expanding snarls of roots. "I shouldn't make it too threatening, right?"
"UKNOWN."
"Rhetorical question," 8E grunted distractedly. "Just say: Change of plans; meet me in the throne room. And add my designation."
Oh.
"…MESSAGE DELIVERED."
8E sighed long and slow, but 9S had a hard time telling exactly what emotion it released without being able to see her. She looked out the window as if V would already be there, and wandered away from the dais to take a seat on the stairs.
"I'm not going to hurt you," she said casually. "This is real simple: You're bait. I got my heart set on punishment by death and if it's not going to be by androids, a human will do. But V's not the kind of person who would just do that for me, is he?"
Slowly, a distortion appeared in answer: [No]
8E gave a small puff of laughter. "Didn't think so."
Her visual field settled on her lap and she began to scrape idly at oil and debris that had clogged her fingernails. She seemed to have no more to say. This frustrated 9S because it was far too much like V's behavior and he had dozens of things to say.
In her vision, pixels flickered into a glitching message: [Check your Intel]
Her vision darkened around the outer perimeter—she was scowling at the continued messaging most likely, but it was the only way he had to alert her to his larger message, which he'd used to overwrite some very nasty things written about him in her unit data logs.
In its place he left her a message that was a little incoherent from his rushing. It told her all about the Ark and how many YoRHa had survived. How he intended to try and get rid of the protocol so they could have a chance to live again. Though he admitted he wasn't really sure if any of them should really get their hopes up, she didn't need to go straight to death as the answer. She might be able to atone in a different way.
Her laughter was as melancholy as Anemone's laugh, but a bit more playful; an honest sound. "That was surprisingly sweet coming from a guy who hates my guts."
He thought about saying he didn't. He had buried his grudge against executioners when he and 2B buried their swords in one another. That lingering resentment had poured out into the ark, and even though she wasn't making a good second impression on him, it wasn't making a return for her.
"Way back, I was jealous of 2B, you know?" She dropped her head into her chin and stared off at the muted light coming in from the entryway. "E models are way more aware of one another than most other YoRHa are of us—helps us keep our distance from each other. The last thing you want is to be undercover and have someone blow it for you by accident. I saw her in the field with you every now and again. Didn't take long to put together than you were her assignment. I thought it must be so much…easier to kill the same person over and over, knowing they could come back a few hours later."
[And Now?]
"Stop doing that."
She sat up straight only to lean back on the stairs and cross her arms over her chest. "Don't misunderstand me. I'm not killing you out of respect for 2B. Executioners don't kill the targets of other executioners. I wish you and the rest of YoRHa all the luck in the world with your ark. But all of the people I executed were resistance androids. They won't be coming back. Not one." Her gaze dropped to her foot and she scuffed her heel against the stones. "This might even be the best possible outcome for someone like me. Being killed by a human who despises me is the most damning thing that can happen to me as an android, right?"
9S knew what it was like to want to be destroyed, but he doesn't understand why she is so determined to be damned. He'd been well under the influence of the logic virus before his thoughts were anywhere near that dark, but there she was, calm as could be while saying she wanted V to not just kill her but despise her. And for that, she had taken 9S as a hostage.
As if sensing that he might press the subject, 8E closed her eyes. "I've wanted this for a long, long time. So just mind your own business."
He manages to do as asked for about five minutes.
Then he's sneaking back into her memory area, into obscure areas from months ago to see where all of this began. The corridors where 8E keeps the memories from being 'Fern' are dark. 9S is like a small candle drifting up to shed light on the shelves of a gloomy library, squinting in search of V's presence among them.
The V in Fern's memory is simultaneously exactly what 9S remembers and nearly alien. The individual acts are almost identical—there isn't much tangible difference between V standing over 9S with the point of his cane grinding on the concrete next to his head and V casually looming over Fern from an upturned bench while maneuvering her face more or less to his whim. But the similarities end in those physical interactions. 9S remembers being kept at a distance by V's cold smiles, but the distance he keeps Fern at is almost antagonistic in its nature. He is on edge with her in a way that he never was with 9S, and the more he sees, the more clearly he is able to see that their relationship lacks the sort of casual permissiveness V showed to him within only a few days' time.
The more he observes Fern, the more he sees a strange reflection of himself in her. The eagerness to please, the inability to meet V's eyes directly. She's more hesitant, and she lacks the undercurrent of rage that 9S was hiding back then. Maybe that's why her devotion is stronger by magnitudes that 9S' ever was.
That's probably what V hates most. It would certainly make sense of that weird maybe-compliment about 9S being irreverent.
9S leans in close to a memory of the two of them in the ravine. He's seen V fight machines plenty of times, but the air around him is totally different when he fights demons. He's mocking and haughty as ever, but he seems to take a cruel delight in demon extermination that he doesn't in machines.
But that's not what catches 9S' attention most.
Red orbs with screaming faces rattle along the streambed. They aren't drawn to Humility because it isn't there. It's V himself they flow to, and his body absorbs them just as readily as the sword did. 9S isn't sure what to make of that, but there's not much time to make anything of it. In the very next memory, V clutches at something on the edge of the frosted pool and Fern's focus shies away. V is saying something but she doesn't hear it.
That doesn't stop her from hearing Griffon's louder, much harder to ignore voice.
"So now the list of weird shit that's showed up here from our neck of the woods includes the contents of your old lady's jewelry box."
Old lady is a euphemism. One of the weirder ones considering it could mean either a 'wife' or 'mother' and that seemed like it could cause communication problems. But even though he's talked about Nero, V's never once mentioned a wife. So it must've been his mother's. 9S hadn't given much thought to it aside from the fact that it looked strange. V hadn't mentioned it, but he had never tried to hide it either. And he did wear bracelets think it was another anomaly, just like Humility.
An argument follows between V and Griffon. Something about closing a gate.
V had mentioned being in the ravine for seven days trying to keep demons at bay, and 9S' curiosity spikes as V wades into the pool. He feels the same gut reaction of concern when V cuts his own hand on Fern's sword, but he is not expecting what he sees.
V falls into the water without a splash. In time with Fern, 9S focuses in, wondering how that could be possible. She wades in after him, but he's gone. Only his cane is left. It's impossible, the water is only chest-high at the deepest part of the basin. She yells at Pod 042, but the Pod is just as bewildered, and that turns Fern frantic. Her visuals break down for a moment in a jumble of what 9S knows is guilt and panic flooding from her base protocol. V is gone and she lost him. She lost a human. She thrashes with increasing hysteria through the water, shoving tower fall out of the way and scooping through the mud until she finally finds something that feels like a person
It isn't V. It's 2B.
The distortion in Fern's vision worsens. She throws 2B back into the depths with a scream, and for a moment after she is frozen in place while the falls beat down over her shoulders.
She slowly turns, paddles free of the pool, sits on the bank, and waits.
The image remains static on the pool for several minutes before 9S leaves the memory to figure out when she next saw V. The inconsistencies in what V told him and what actually happened are piling up. 9S is past feeling any real anger at V over his half-explanations of this time period. In the state he was in after fighting demons, 9S knows he would not have had the fortitude to hear something like 'I disappeared into a waterfall for a few days'.
At this point, he is just curious whether there is any truth to the hypothermia story at all.
A stretch of days later, he finally finds more data that includes V. They're out in the desert. V's hair is gray rather than white or black. His tattoos are the same washed-out color, his lips and fingertips are tinged with blue. He is soaking wet and clearly delirious, but even in that disastrous state, he looks at Fern with the glare of a wild animal while she and Pod attempt to convince him that he's going to die if he stays in his wet clothes.
It's almost impressive how much resistance he puts up before Fern manages to strip him and get him to lie down and warm up.
9S notes that although the hypothermia story is real, V's arms are both fine. They remain fine when he recovers, when he specifies that he needs Fern because she can sense magic, when he begins to question her about when she found him, and when he specifies that he was in hell for seven days. It's a wider gap than 9S thought, and he forgives V just a little bit. In the two weeks between the murder and the demon attack, V had literally not been there for half of it, and who knew what he'd done to himself out in the desert. (Probably whatever was actually going on with his arm.)
Without thinking, he rewinds the memory. He doesn't know exactly what he's looking for until he comes on the memory of V sitting in the sand, looking tired but well. He's asking her about the shack, and her answers are fluttery and overly self-conscious.
"I never actually believed ... that I'd get to protect you."
She sounds happy, and 9S finds himself wondering just how different Fern and 8E really are.
A bright orange particle zips by him. An attack barrier crops up around her memories, denying him any further access. Again, he finds himself chased out. If only he wasn't untethered from his body, he'd break all those stupid programs. They aren't even especially good attack patterns.
"You just can't help yourself can you?" she says, annoyance giving her extra volume. "I told you to mind your damn business."
He's in the middle heading to her visual interface so he can tell her just what he thinks of that when something strange happens. Her systems refocus toward some stimulus he can't make sense of. With no reason to keep a low profile, he opens a diagnostic channel only to find pressure readings coming in from her nerve sensors and an unusual fluctuation in her black box—he's never seen anything like it. It's like her entire body has turned into a barometer or a sensor for some kind of magnetic field. But when he revisits her visual access port, there's no field.
There's only V, standing in the window with Griffon already melding back into stains of ink on his body.
The rain had begun to fall in earnest. The sluggish, steady kind that rolled in and made itself comfortable, persisting for hours or even days and only answering with vague flashes and moody rumbles of thunder at any thought that it might clear up soon.
V's eyes fell briefly to 9S' body, and when he stepped down from the sill to the dais, his motion was deliberate and predatory. A lot like when V fought demons, only his humor was absent. His stare was calm, but the color of his eyes was almost black from where 8E stood.
"He's alive," she said peaceably. "My sentence wasn't to my liking, so I had a change of heart. I'm allowed to do that right? Change my mind?"
"What sentence did you seek?"
"The only one that matters."
"I'd rather you didn't involve me in your death wish." V spun his cane over his wrist, but it was not the absent spin 9S was used to. There was too much intent; like he was testing it. "If you want to become trash, dispose of yourself on your own."
"If that were possible, do you really think I wouldn't have done it by now?" She climbed the steps to stand at the top. "I'm doing what I have to, V. So do what you must." Her NFCS activated with a whir and a pop of light, and sparking Type-4O fists materialized around her hands. "I keep the protocol to erase a YoRHa's data in these, and I won't be as sloppy with him as I have with myself. Kill me. Or I'll wipe out the person you came all this way for."
V closed the gap between them while 9S floundered. There was no system he could get to fast enough to stop this from happening in just the time it took him to cross the room. He remained pinned to her access port as idea raced through his mind, each one fizzling with the ever-increasing certainty that he was about to see 8E die.
But to both his and 8E's surprise, he took Humility from Pod 042, jammed it into the floor beside 9S' body and stalked past her toward the throne room's antechamber. Half-way there he cocked his head, as if noting the absence of 8E's footsteps in his wake, and turned.
"Have you lost your nerve?"
"Are…" 8E doubled over and laughed in a high cackle. "Are you being dramatic or something? You don't want to kill me in front of 9S?"
"I don't want him in the way," V growled so darkly that it drained her laughter right out of the air. "I'm not a man who can take a life just because it is offered. Come and put it on the line, and I shall gladly pass the judgment that you seek."
8E's vision brightened. The clarity grew sharp and dangerously clear as she followed after V in a trance. Her breaths took an audible shudder, and more than once she glanced down at her hands to find them shaking inside the Type 4O fists. The moment they were both in the antechamber, V raised his cane. 8E lifted her fists almost clumsily, but there was nothing clumsy about V's action. He rarely ever made the opening strike, even at enemies whose abilities he knew was far below his own, but he came at 8E with the ruthless precision of a guillotine.
8E caught his strike. Whatever V had done to himself out in the desert had clearly lent his body some much-needed strength, because 8E's arms actually shook a little with the effort of holding him in place.
Within 8E, 9S felt a shift. The diagnostic channel at his side showed her core program opening like flood gates. But rather than drowning in guilt, some deep place within her memories opened up and allowed the flood through.
Auxilliary vents along her back hissed heat and she pushed V back with a roar. Her eyes moved between the fists on her hands and she de-materialized them in a cloud of sparks. For a fleeting moment, 9S though she was giving up, but that was the last thing on her mind. Just like No. 2, her body was a weapon all by itself. And V was so human, so fragile. His body had no reinforcement and though he'd gotten stronger he was still so terribly slow. He had to rely on Shadow to take the brunt of her strikes, while she took his head-on, the cane slicing her down to her plating where it drew sparks and oil but could not penetrate.
The glove covering V's arm began to smoke. A flash of reddish light trailed through V's tattoos and a talon of bright blue electricity swiped at 8E, crushing her into the stone. That must have been the same attack that killed Aconite, but 8E did not go down so easily. With clothing singed and hair smoking, she climbed back to her feet with only a little chromatic aberration to show for the effort.
A rushing sound began to fill her head. She was entering a battle fever state like 9S had never seen before. Doing the same thing he had done by letting destruction and salvation blend together and become the same thing. The pleasure of combat and the crippling shame of raising her fists against a human combined into a frantic and terrifying euphoria that 9S found almost too awful to observe. The punishment she craved was not just death but death at the end of wrath that was almost divine in its intensity.
And V was the only god worth being killed by.
9S disengages with the diagnostic protocols still running.
8E won't really kill V—if she does it will only leave her right back where she started. But V will kill her for sure, and he can't let this happen. He moves in a frantic circle, willing the fragment of his consciousness to the limits of its thought routine capacity. V isn't one to prolong fights, but 8E is no machine. Even with magic on his side and the new power he boasts, she isn't going to be an easy kill. Assuming he doesn't call down Nightmare on her, this fight is going to take at least a few real-time minutes.
In hacking time, that may be enough to try and gain control of her.
His diamond shape speeds along the white pathways as they degenerate into chaos around him. The ancient, obsolete unit data is shifting and cluttering up places memory shouldn't even be—filling the space with images of androids 9S doesn't recognize.
Her victims, he realizes. They're all her victims. The data is damaged from so many attempts to erase herself, but she still has all these obsolete records that would have been considered junk and cleaned out if she submitted to proper maintenance. But she kept them. Down to the last, always unprocessed and present so that they could never be discretely removed.
So that she would never forget them, even if she forgot herself.
The feeling that forgiveness is beyond her, or any of them. The wish to be killed by someone important. Even the way she is convincing herself that this is what she deserves is too familiar to ignore. He knows all of these things because those were the kinds of regrets that he felt when Virtuous Contract pierced him. Those things, every one of them, were the burdens that Executioners must have been carrying throughout their lives.
But Fern lived as something else for a while. 8E had claimed she was still an executioner even then but 9S does not believe that. Without seeing her face, her posture, or anything. By only hearing her voice, he knows that Fern was truly happy to protect someone who was precious to her, by any means necessary. If 8E didn't have at least some of those feelings, she would not have gone so far to have it be V who killed her.
More than any of this being right or wrong, 9S wants to believe that this cycle can break. That his desires aren't just another silly wish whispered to a world that didn't entertain silly wishes but something real that he can reach if he takes V's word as truth and refuses to accept anything less.
What he needs is control. He's remote-controlled machines before, but controlling the fine-tuned and complex system of a YoRHa is nothing like controlling a machine. He doesn't even know where to begin, there's no precedent for something like this, is there?
It wasn't a query, but his analytical processor produces an answer and he sharply changes direction. The logic virus. The progression of the logic virus invariably ends with the loss of physical control. He's not a program, he doesn't have the same capacity to infect or spread his influence, but there is nothing to stop him from following all the same pathways. He blows through access ports one after the other, taking back doors and alternate paths through places that would otherwise only admit H units. In the distance, a section of her flickers and goes darl. The fight is taking its toll on her body.
He arrives in her main processing core like a bullet, deftly destroying her defensive systems before they can even properly get started up. Normally he would never be so destructive, but he is in uncharted territory and it proves to have been a wise choice.
Her processing system is both complex and extremely aggressive from the moment he tries to subjugate it. He weaves and spins between wild sprays of orange and violet particles and evading a dozen advanced targeting protocols. One of his defensive barriers explodes in a burst of red as he scrapes too close to a firewall. Her sub-processors thwart him even when he finally is able to achieve some level of command. She's too intricate and her consciousness is far too strong to be kicked completely out of her own systems, but he manages to ock up her legs and seize her vocal synthesizer, and with one final swoop through her visual processing core, he regains his view of the outside.
8E sagged against the wall, her vision tightly focused on her malfunctioning legs. Her breath was ragged but her frustration would not emit as anything more than a weak screech of feedback in her speaker—the most she could do while 9S had control of her synthesizer. Immobilizing her was good, but the ability to speak was the most important thing. He was sure this would end as long as his voice reached V.
As he was completing alterations to her voice, 8E looked up.
The glove had burned away to lavender cinders. Black scales formed intricate patterns in his left forearm and extended up past his shoulder in feather-like shapes that covered half his chest. The pale skin of his face had gone the color of cold ash, suffused by a teal glow. His eyes glowing and ringed with gold around white-hot pupils. A single curved horn had sprouted from his head, looping almost the whole way around it before ending in odd spear-like shapes that resembled solid flame. There was a faint opalescence to it, and violet energy pulsed between its segments. What remained of his tattoos had come away from his body and trailed up over his shoulders in dancing shapes that resembled wings.
This creature spoke no poetry, nor gave any final words of parting at all. It coiled, and it struck.
9S meant to shout. To call out loud and put an end to this. But all he could manage was a tiny, terrified whisper.
"V…?"
No power could have stopped the momentum in that strike, but the tattoos flashed over his shoulder and struck his cane off course. It pierced through 8E's shoulder, damaging but far from lethal.
Pain was not a system 9S had connected to, so he felt none. He may not have noticed even if he did. He was caught in the way the scales and horns all receded from V at once in a flurry of violet light, leaving V behind the same as ever. His mouth formed around 9S' name, but he couldn't seem to make himself speak it.
8E's hands grabbed at the cane, her voice struggling to eke out while 9S' focus had lapsed. "Don't interfere…! Don't…take this from me…!" She stretched her arms out, clutching at V's coat. "Please kill… me…!"
V had already released the cane. He knew what he'd heard and peered into 8E's eyes. "9S…?"
His voice brought 9S back to the task at hand, and his voice came out strong from 8E's speaker. "Pod 153, initiate maintenance mode on Unit 8E and re-initialize my body."
"AFFIRMATIVE."
The world went dark to the sound of another scream of static in 8E's speaker, and it seemed only an instant later that 9S awakened safely back in his own body on the damp stone of the throne room. Humility still stood over him.
The familiar, rhythmic tick of V's cane approaching made him sit up, but the sound once so familiar to him now froze him to the spot. His black box thrummed with a heavy, rapid pulse as V stopped just as the bottom of the steps. The transformation had receded, but his forearm remained leathery and scaled at his side.
They watched one another in perfect stillness while thunder shivered over their heads and crept away to the horizon.
