9S' bone-crushing embrace seemed without end.

Affection played little to no part in the act and V endured it as best he could. In part to allow 9S to reassure himself, but more so out of quiet gratitude. They weren't supposed to see one another again. Shadow was supposed to run out of magic and die. Yet 9S had overcome both these naturally presumed outcomes. Here was the familiar, whole and home; and here was the scanner, enfolding Fern and V and digging his grip into their backs like he was afraid they would slip between his fingers and blow away on the wind.

To ask why he had come would have been as pointless as it was obvious. 9S could have gone anywhere he wished when he descended from the moon. That wish brought him to the night kingdom because he was unchanged. Even after all this time, after the conscientiously said goodbyes, after he had left the planet with a fist bump and a smile and a clear gaze aimed at his goals, he was still a little fool who always came running after V at the slightest hint of trouble.

Beside him, Fern failed to suppress a knowing smile and V couldn't help a permissive twitch at the corner of his mouth. The snow was still settling where he'd ripped through the ceiling rather than bother with a conventional entry.

The evidence that he had taken to replicating the scanner's behavior was piled high indeed.

"Ease up, kid," said Fern, patting at 9S' shoulder. "You're gonna snap V in half at this rate."

The face that looked up at them as the pressure mercifully eased was a disaster of tears and different shades of oil. He rubbed at the mess while clutching V's coat, his grip strong but so desperately small that V couldn't help but think of the first time he'd ever seen the scanner cry. Whatever had been done to his memories had exacted a heavy toll on him. A new house; burned the same as the old. But he was neither dead nor alone. If he could still weep so energetically, this too would pass.

He sniffed and looked again over V's only partially undone transformation. The exchange of one form for another was slower than it should have been. Perhaps because it was more like a suit of armor than a true transformation. An encasement as his tattoos spread and thickened and bound to his skin, warping him from the inside before expanding outward.

To experience a complete devil trigger without the aid of maso while he was still only V was to exist without true shape inside a strange cocoon, and to subsequently endure a painstaking reconstruction of the lean, bent form he was accustomed to inhabiting. Shadow slid welcomingly around him as he returned to himself, spreading into the spaces on his skin that had gone pale with her extended absence. She seeped into him, black and belonging, and for the first time since the launch facility, all was mostly in its place.

There was no fear in 9S' eyes at all as he observed. Only the same innocent curiosity with which he first regarded the dragon's arm.

"You have a question," V prompted.

"A lot of them, honestly." He offered a feeble smile. "But for now, it's just… good to see you again. Both of you."

"REPORT," Pod 042 interrupted. "INCREASING CONCENTRATION OF MAGICAL ENERGY IN LOCAL PROXIMITY."

Beyond the small circle the three of them made against the world was what V imagined the qliphoth would have looked like if hell was made for machines.

Limp wires hung from the broken roof and starlight offered feeble twinkles against a green-hued glow that managed to resemble harsh neon and sunlit leaves at the same time. Neither form of light did anything for the claustrophobia of standing in the center of so many undulating power lines. Every inch of it hummed with electricity and with discordant strains of might-be melody that raised the hairs on his arms. Semi-organic tangles bulged from crumbling walls and torn-up consoles. Even the floor was covered in odd mandalas of wire and metal, like tiled cross-sections of a limb repeating from wall to wall.

"We should quit this place," he suggested. "Before we are treated to any further surprises."

Fern glanced aside at him. "I don't disagree but… Well, look at it. You sure we should just leave?"

The dragon's tension was a slow-building heat in V's arm. The red book it had taken to using as a mouthpiece hovered silently above his shoulder, the face on its cover staring in the direction of the false seed as if it was the only thing in the room worthy of its attention. None of the sickly gravity of a real seed pressed in on V, but a steel rose rooted to the top of the sphere and spread thorny vines down over it like some vile, veined egg sac. If Briar had intentionally refused to let Scheherazade near it, something must have changed.

[The gods breathe.]

So he gathered. Presumably, there would be no swallowing a seed of this size. The potential consequences of walking away from it cluttered his mind, and he wondered unenthusiastically if it was possible that Scheherazade had survived their last clash. If she had the means to destroy the seed at this stage, he'd be glad to leave it to her and not get involved.

At his side, 9S blinked as if he had never seen the room before. "What is all this…?"

"Briar Rose," V answered, piercing through a cable that wriggled too close to them. "A successor of Sleeping Beauty and present administrator of your false memory system."

"And the one who initiated machine core research in androids," Fern added. "So it could manufacture human souls."

"…What?"

"Trust me, it's a long, bullshit story. The short version is the machine cores are replicas of the white dragon's soul and Briar Rose believes it can create brand new human souls for some human personality data still hanging around to run upper command. And lucky us, YoRHa makes the best incubators."

The need to question the situation brought 9S back to himself. Not enough to let go of V's coat, but enough for his brow to cloud over with fresh anger. "What the hell does that have to do with YoRHa? There's machines and machine cores all over the place, they're not hard to find."

Briar laughed, and V struggled not to recoil from the sound. It was the most uniquely awful thing he'd ever heard. Like a sped-up recording of glass breaking being played from a severely scratched disc. The entire room seemed to speak at once in a dozen synchronized, not-entirely-identical voices.

"I did have the same thought, Unit 9S. However, I came across obstructions to that methodology. Machines on the network were often intolerant to the development of emotional matrices, and those disconnected from the network had poor longevity. Their behavior when exposed to overwhelming emotion quickly became self-destructive in the extreme. A tendency unfortunately shared by YoRHa."

"That's why you tampered with my memory…"

"This statement is semi-accurate. It was done to prevent destructive behavior patterns, but it was also undertaken as a test of concept. The data gathered during experimentation was of invaluable quality."

V's grip on his cane shifted. Repulsive memories were simmering to the surface. "How many times did it take?"

"Sixty-two attempts were required before a successful scenario was identified and installed. Of the attempts, 20% had to be aborted early because Unit 9S' decision-pathing carried him beyond my ability to construct a believable event sequence or environment." The voices pitched up, in an approximation of amusement or exasperation that was too shrill to properly be either. "You entered the gate to hell in every situation that permitted it."

"…I'm with Fern. I don't think we should leave." A low tremble that wasn't fear laced 9S' voice. "Not without killing this thing."

Briar gave another pitchy laugh. The bundles of cabling along the floor shifted, twisting together into a humanoid shape that lacked individual features. In a shimmer of light, it clothed the cable mannequin with a face and a body.

9S' face and body.

Heat flared through V, but 9S was quicker than V's temper. A spear pierced the replica before the sparks of materialization had faded, shooting through with a spurt of mercurial fluid and lodging into the false seed beyond.

A new bundle of cabling appeared as the old one fell apart. "Has this satisfied your aggression?"

The spear re-materialized in 9S' hand. "Not even close."

"That is unfortunate." It manifested new features—Fern's this time. "Sleeping Beauty existed for a fraction of the time I have, and so was a fraction of my size and complexity. But it existed in a world saturated with maso. Its magical abilities always exceeded mine." It held up its hands to the night sky, marveling at the simple wiggle of its fingers. "With access to a new, compatible demonic element, I now represent a 1.2 million square km complex with a total of forty-six control nodes all fully capable of self-repair and I am growing more competent in my use of magic with every exercise… You are welcome to 'kill' me as many times as you wish, but it is beyond your ability to destroy me in any meaningful way."

Fern smiled nastily. "I'm willing to try my luck."

"Don't," V said distractedly. His eyes had begun to wander the room for the most accessible means of escape. Just like in the garden, there was only one door in and one out. Blocked by debris and wires. There was no way out of here except the hole he'd created in the ceiling. "We are wasting time."

"You hiding a clue on where we go from here in your coat?" she snapped. "We don't have a plan anymore; why not start by razing this fucking thing?"

Something in Fern's eyes gave him pause. It wasn't strange for 9S to get hostile to the point of losing control of himself and they both had plenty of cause to be furious, but Fern usually kept a cooler head than this.

[She stands before her nemesis,] the dragon whispered. [It is not so strange.]

Nemesis…?

Accord had said as much, hadn't she—that the dragon and the flower were natural enemies. 9S might be spared by his inability to sense magic, but the manufactured soul inside of Fern needed only to be faithful to the source material and it would naturally agitate her to be in the presence of a seed's energy.

"You had no problem giving up your lives for humanity before," it pointed out diplomatically. "The present circumstances are not tangibly different."

"That's the problem," 9S gritted. "Haven't we given up enough?"

"To become human, a soul needs human experiences. It must suffer incredibly and also know incredible joy in a human context. Machines cannot do this. Even YoRHa cannot truly accomplish this. No android can—you are adjacent but non-identical to humans in all things, including emotion. But you two have lived with a human. You bear the greatest compatibility." The false image of Fern held up a hand and materialized a softly glowing machine core. "I was to manufacture experiences of joy for you, and Hamelin volunteered to create suffering. Through successive cycles of experience, something new could have been born… A course that is unfortunately no longer viable. I understand that the stimulation of negative emotion requires a level of interpersonal investment. Hamelin's grudge made her suited to the task in a way that I cannot reproduce."

So that was what was buying them time. Just like them, Briar had run into a dead end. Thought it had more resources than ever before—the seed among the most volatile of them—it had no direction. No plan. They needed to be gone before that changed, but Fern and 9S were braced like tigers preparing for a lunge.

They were also laughing. Quietly. Disgustedly. Enough that even Briar must have understood that they viewed its intentions as a transgression.

"Do you not love humans?" it asked. "Do you not love your gods?"

"Of course we do," 9S spat. "You built us that way."

"Then why do you not cooperate?"

Fern's answer was similarly confident, her eyes brimming with rebellion. "Because we don't want to."

V couldn't say he was surprised. Neither of them had the same relationship with YoRHa's base protocol as they once did. 9S had learned to shun them and Fern had learned to use them much the same way V used his cane. There was no need to avoid the contradiction or come up with a logical explanation. The childish refusal was the truest answer.

"An emotional response," Briar said, almost sympathetically. It split into a second facsimile, once more taking up 9S' face. "YoRHa, androids, Sleeping Beauty, and I—all were built for a purpose. We belong equally to humankind. All that you are is owed to this cause, regardless of desire."

"Fuck you."

V momentarily lost focus on escape routes, jolted back to the small ring of his personal space by a powerful wave of déjà vu. 9S lacked Nero's rage and explosive volume, but he made up for it with bitterness and seething killing intent.

"My memories are mine," he went on with a growl like fresh fire. "This life is mine. My prototype created Project YoRHa but the me that exists right now destroyed it. I'm not going back to being a sacrifice for anyone."

"Even though the gods are waiting?" the two replicas asked innocuously.

"Last time V met a god that wanted to use him, he killed it," Fern laughed with violent cheer. "You want the human spirit, here it is: I'm not giving up my life for the possibility of some manufactured piece of shit meant to house a bunch of data points that haven't been human in ten thousand goddamn years anyway. The me I am right now is the only version I want to be from now until the end of time. If you want to make something new out of me, you better be prepared for a fight."

"I am not equipped for combat," Briar answered bluntly. "The data I might gather from two androids seeking to destroy me in my entirety would no doubt be invaluable, however…" The facsimiles crossed their arms with jerky, marionette-like motions, wearing faces of almost tormented bewilderment that were alien on the otherwise familiar features. Its voices hissed. "All of it requires far too much time. The gods are waiting. The gods are watching."

Fern bristled. She slid closer to V with the alert, loose-bodied watchfulness that was more familiar to him. Time was Briar's primary asset. It had the patience to wait while the stars winked out to do what it would and gather data in the meantime. For it to express displeasure at the concept of waiting or starting over was enough to replace aggression with caution.

V grabbed at the fist still bunched in his coat and mouthed the first familiar line he could conjure. God appears and God is light to those poor souls who dwell in night…

The hum in the air rose to a violent buzz. Cables whipped around their feet. The mannequins fell apart and a shadow emerged in their place. Umbilical tethers of a dozen wires trailed from its back. It turned toward the seed and the steel flower opened.

"There is a piece of information in my archive from before I was made," Briar's voices said in a dull rush of syllables that abandoned emphasis in exchange for a rapid stream of thought. "Blood is sound, sound are words, and words are power. Ontologically it must follow that blood is power, but this world has been bloodless for thousands of years. Scheherazade will not share the Words, and I do not know how to produce the Sound… but I have observed from the records of Pos 153 and from the Battle of Roswell that blood is power to devils so I will take in the blood of the devils…! I will enter the seed and become something new. Something with the capability to truly create as my predecessor did!"

The shadow turned, and V slowly twisted his fist into the back of Fern's shirt. Twin points of light appeared, and V felt the intensity of the apparition's desire drilling straight through his ribs to the heart beneath.

"Yes," the walls sang as one. "That will do."

But does a human form display to those who dwell in realms of day...

The red book's pages opened and spewed flame directly into the shadow's face, eliciting a scream that shook the building. It whipped around and batted against V's head. "Do not stand about! Run!"

V snatched both androids to close to his side and whistled sharply.

Nightmare surged from beneath their feet and propelled them up through the hole in the ceiling. Leaping from the height of the plateau, it accelerated to a lurching trot through woods that did not look as they had when V last saw them.

The suggestion of bark had abandoned the trees, exposing intestinal arrangements of black cable and gunmetal pipes. All of it laughed and babbled and produced dissonant notes that ranged from the whistle of steam bursting through a pipe to the dense creak of a ship hull groaning at sea. Mercurial oil steamed in the night air as the buzzing cords skulked along the ground to bind Nightmare in place, but the effort was slow and pitiful. Nightmare's dense bulk easily snapped through the few flimsy attempts to lasso its legs. Shadow made similarly quick work of the slithering walls of wires that occasionally tried to seal them in.

As soon as they cleared the decaying tree line, they leaped together into the snow and bolted down the cleared road. The truck was still where V had left it. Scheherazade's body wasn't. Theta had taken the time to drag it to the back of the truck while she awaited their return, along with—

"Pod?" 9S sprinted ahead and leaped into the covered truck bed. "Pod!"

"REPORT: SUPPORT UNIT POD 153'S POWER SUPPLY IS DEPLETED."

Theta sought someone, anyone, to give her an update on the situation, but all she got was Fern pushing her behind the wheel. "We'll talk later—drive!"

She swung into the back alongside V as the engine revved to life. A sharp yank ripped the opening flap of the enclosure away so she could keep an eye on the road behind them.

Cables strained across the snow like lost eels in their wake. It remained a clumsy and lethargic pursuit but what it lacked in raw speed, it made up for with doggedness. Briar was clearly not accustomed to controlling so much of itself all at once, but that did not ease the gnawing in V's chest. Briar did not need to be fast if it could remain persistent. The roads offered limited escape routes and its reach was proving to be as long as Briar needed it to be.

A small grip tightened in V's coat. 9S once again held onto him, this time with a brooding frown as he stared at their creeping pursuer. "That shadow thing…" he said. "I feel like I've seen it before, but I…"

"Can't remember it?" Fern called back. "Same thing happened to me up at that northern node."

"I went there. I was looking for you two and I saw where Briar was trying to implant memories into machine cores. I think… I think that might be a shade."

"Aren't those supposed to be ex-humans? What the hell would one be with Briar for?"

"It is a memory computer—maybe it was studying it?"

"Briar could not perceive it," said V. "And would not have facilitated our crossing to the night kingdom on the basis of interest in my supposedly human soul if it could."

"It is a rare being who beholds its own essence," the book volunteered.

Both androids looked up with that weary sort of acceptance that tended to replace astonishment when the latter had overstayed. A talking book that breathed fire was low priority among the sea of more immediate concerns.

Fern knelt, keeping one hand braced against the side of the truck as the horizon behind them was blotted out with black cable. "You stole Scheherazade's grimoire?"

"The dragon is…borrowing it. To speak"

"Among other things," it purred.

"What did you mean?" 9S asked, immediately latching onto the opportunity for more information. "Are you saying that's Briar's shade?"

"You are quick to understand. A small wonder we favor you so." It spun as 9S shuffled, no doubt wondering if that was meant to be a royal or literal 'we'. "Briar Rose is repeating the pattern of its predecessor though it may not realize it. Sleeping Beauty was programmed with love, as you were. For mankind's memories. Consciously, it treasured these memories. Unconsciously, it devoured them. The joy and loss and envy and all else. And bore its own shade."

V's lips flattened, an unsettling suspicion stirring. "It's because of my presence, isn't it. Because I brought hell's magic with me."

"So it may be and so it may not. A shade is merely one form a soul may take, and magic is not what is required to create one."

There was more on the edge of that thought. Unspoken knowledge withheld, as he was finding the dragon to be fond of doing. Before he could decide if it was a worthwhile pursuit, Fern called out.

"Can I ask you a practical question?"

"You do excel at them."

"Thanks?" She shuffled, as 9S had. "Do you have any idea where the rest of your bones are?"

Its pages turned slowly but if it had an answer, it was interrupted by a sudden swerve of the truck.

They'd reached the end of the snowbound road and entered the outer perimeter where they'd come from. Moving inward meant working past barricades and ditches, demanding that Theta compensate for both the constructs and the naturally difficult terrain. The best she could do was keep their path as straight as possible and keep the thing that Briar Rose had become directly behind them.

"Shit," 9S hissed, leaping to his feet to join Fern. "This is the R&D area…!"

"Is that a problem?"

"It's where all the anti-demon research happened. All the dissection and examination. If Briar wants blood—!"

It was too late to do anything about it. They couldn't have in the first place, locked into the one plowed path between the node and the battlefield as they were. Briar's quickening pursuit came to a sudden halt. Freezing as if it had suddenly reached the limits of its reach. The cables plunged into the earth, thrashing and greedy as maggots burrowing into their first meal.

V thought he heard laughter.

A brilliant light erupted in the distance; from the center of the detangled woods they'd escaped only a little while ago. It reached into the sky like a brand-new gate, obliterating the few meager clouds that dared to intrude on its ascension and scorching the terrain in stark white light. The entire forest uprooted itself with what could have been a shriek of agony, a cry of sublime joy, or a wail. The longer V listened, the more it sounded like all three.

"What's happening?!" 9S shouted over the din. "What is it doing?!"

"Germination," Scheherazade rasped.

The ancient celebrant rose with difficulty. Her tongue was still blackened inside her mouth, the same as her clothes. V had poured enough electricity into her to kill a dozen androids, but she still lived. Her twitching limbs carried her unsteadily to her feet. Beneath the tatters of her clothes, rows upon rows of symbols glowed with an eerie red fire.

"So it can be called," the book agreed. "The keeper of this world's memory has entered the seed."

Fern shot an accusatory glare at Scheherazade. "You said it wasn't real!"

"If you make a vessel for a god, there's no reason to be surprised when it descends in a moment of opportunity."

The truck lurched as Theta abandoned what little reservations she had and floored the gas pedal. The remains of the forest liquefied into a sludge of ichor, swirling around the epicenter of blinding light like a hurricane. One that was rapidly expanding outward.

In the humming air, over the spreading sound of android screams, rose Briar's tolling chant:

LET US CONNECT!

LET US CONNECT!

LET US CONNECT!

LET US CONNECT!

Briar may or may not have still been pursuing V, but they watched it take in everything in its path. Androids. Demons. The living and the dead. It didn't matter. It swallowed all of them into its mass.

The dragons were the only things that slowed it down at all. Their fire made it recoil, and in entering the seed it seemed to have lost the prehensile ability offered by controlling its innumerable component lines. This lasted approximately as long as it took Briar to start throwing what it had consumed. The wall vomited forth components of demon and android and machine mangled and melded together as if the very atoms that made them had been pushed together into one shape. Briar's accuracy and the velocity of these objects proved deadly, but that did not prove to be the worst of it.

As they arrived at the inner perimeter, a throng of confused and horrified androids who couldn't decide whether to fight or fleet, one such projectile slammed into the roof. The truck lifted from the ground before the covering tore free and bounced them back to the earth. Exposed to the open air, V saw the jumbled shape flatten a dozen androids and roll to a stop. And then move again.

They were alive.

Their forms were useless beyond heavy, lumbering tilts that crushed anything too slow to get out of the way, but they were not mere objects. Whatever Briar had done to them, they were at least as alive as any machine.

Theta barked a curse loud enough to hear over the noise and the truck jostled as she plowed through most of a demon's corpse. She called for retreat. It befitted her as a commander, but V watched the crowd disperse and knew that there was likely nowhere for them to go. Before a threat like this, they were as powerless as humans before the sucking roots of the qliphoth.

The black tide surged in with the focus of a scorpion's stinger. The book raised a white-hot shield that shattered on impact, and without a second thought, V met the wave with the arresting grip of his markings, risen and corporeal. The two black substances twisted around one another, and abruptly, the night kingdom ceased to be.

V stood alone on a blood-red plain beneath an empty sky. It could have been anywhere in hell, but it reminded him far more of the place he encountered Zero.

Dozens of white trees as stark and flat as glowing cutouts stretched above his head. Between their roots and at his feet, a pool of perfect dark swirled in a growing whirlpool. Deep and sucking and growing larger and faster. The trees broke down, crumbling and falling in without so much as a splash. The red terrain cracked. A rising gale whipped against V's body, pushing him toward the vortex. He would have stood his ground, dug his heels into the emptiness, but his legs were pinned in place anyway. He could not move, to retreat or advance. He could only watch as everything else but him disappeared.

A formless figure, black as the basin but inscribed by golden lines, appeared in front of him. Briar's shade.

His body cracked open like a thin shell, and the shade reached inside and pulled. V's legs refused to obey, but his hands flew up—both his own, bereft of the scales he'd grown so used to. They snatched at Briar's wrists, but its grip was tight around something in the center of him that did not beat. Looking down, he saw his own heart.

It was black and twisted in hell's best imitation of an apple. The brimming red of full ripeness that he knew so intimately was absent. In its place was a dripping trickle that flowed in twin lines down his and the shade's arm.

A qliphoth fruit.

His mind blanked and overflowed all at once. He had been called Corpse. Called Exuviae. Called the Rind. The demons had seen him for what he was at every turn, and even after the basin, he had been blind. He was only ever magic to begin with after all. Something made manifest to be expunged. As were the familiars. Why should he have presumed anything to be different than before if the sicknesses he suffered were the same?

It was a rare being who beheld its own essence.

The echo of the dragon's words and the cryptic mantles the demons had bestowed blurred together in a moment of horrific understanding that he had no time to process. Beyond him and the specter before him, the whirlpool inverted. The seed emerged, and in a state of paralysis, he saw the thorny, might-be the heart of a black flower bloom from the pool of devil's blood that Briar had taken in. His markings pulled and sloughed from his skin, sucking into the shade. The familiars were on the other side of their power. They were the ones being eaten, and the shape of the shadow attempting to snatch V's heart changed as it digested all that they were.

V wrestled for dominion with a menagerie of ghosts with faces from his memory. Dante. Nelo Angelo. Nero. His mother. Deeper and deeper still until the pacts carved into his flesh were empty and the strands of his hair hanging in his eyes showed white. The dragon roared somewhere beyond them. It remained in some indigestible place that Briar could not reach, but V could not call on, and so he was alone when the shadow shifted once more.

His grip faltered. Blood spilled over his and the now-pale hands detaining him in a hemorrhaging flow that felt too fast for his frozen body and—

The cold corrugated metal of the truck bed slammed against the back of his head.

Scheherazade stood over him, unknowable words shining from her exposed plates and her axe dangling from her remaining functional arm. Voices yelled around him. Some familiar, some not. His skin burned where he knew Briar had touched him. Consumed him. Heat blazed from his left arm, but it felt detached and unrelated. He was alone in his own weak shell of a body, its pulse fluttering in its neck and its heart threatening to burst if that would allow it to escape.

Someone raises him from the floor, and he clutched blindly to the strength felt in their small body. The frantic face that appeared above him somehow resembled his own, from long, long ago. He knew there was someone else who had this appearance now, but his scattered focus could not connect the past to the present and the whisper that escaped him was disbelieving and hopeful in a way that would have galled him if he had any room for pride.

"Dante…?"

The light shifted. There was no flower to be seen among the black hurricane of Briar Rose, but from the swirling center of the storm, three black stalks stretched into the night sky. As V watched, each opened.

They blossomed into spheres of gleaming red light that no magic in any world could have made him forget.