Fern's warning that he had no idea what he'd gotten himself into had elicited a faraway skepticism from 9S. Going through the moon server, coming to the night kingdom and being shot out of the sky, repairing and commanding a dragon, hacking into the false memory generation system, discovering the unbuilt YoRHa bodies, waging open war against demons for 70 days by the light of a portal directly into hell in the company of three living celebrants—he had plenty of context. If his ability to identify and process reality hadn't been actively breaking down, he might have countered that she was the one who didn't have a good grasp on the full picture.
He understood now how naïve that was. In truth, not one of them had any idea what they'd gotten themselves into. Even Briar Rose could not have thought it would turn into the tarry, semi-solid darkness that descended on them.
It met the more prehensile flow of V's tattoos and the two twisted and pushed against one another. V seemed to have far greater mastery of the substance and a lack of buckling suggested he might even have greater strength, but that did not help him against the pure volume he was up against. Briar didn't have to overpower him. It overwhelmed him instead, sinking down his arms and drowning him to the waist in the blink of an eye and pulling with a sound like wet fabric being ripped to shreds.
Protocols 9S had nearly forgotten about scalded him with the same bolt of frenzied panic he felt when V retched salt. Fern must have felt it too. They both scrambled to yank V free at the same time.
Grimoire Rubrum slapped into both of them, surprisingly strong for its size and book-appropriate weight. "Do you wish to be devoured?!"
"I will…" Scheherazade shouldered by, haggard and struggling to raise her weapon. "Do it…!"
Fern clicked her teeth and fell in at Scheherazade's side, gripping tight over her hands to compensate for the celebrant's mangled state. The axe severed through with surprising ease and a subtle flash of blue. Briar retracted with a burst of static noise that 9S could only interpret as pain, and V snapped free as if released from a slingshot, thrown back to the far side of the truck bed.
9S hurried after him and pulled him upright. V had once said that the gods found him too difficult to digest. Briar Rose was clearly less picky. All of his tattoos had been stripped away. His hair had gone the stark, flat white of hacking space. He was awake, but his movements lacked precision and there was an unresisting, weightless quality to the way he let himself be handled. The only sharp, purposeful action he managed was to clutch at 9S' arms as they squeezed around him; like he was holding on for dear life.
Cold settled as dense as iron in 9S' stomach at finding their positions so abruptly reversed. "V…?"
Blown pupils shrinking rapidly to tiny points focused waveringly on 9S' face. "Dante…?"
The humming stopped.
Every component of 9S' body, down to the screws in his joints, tingled with the sudden absence of sound. A lack of other auditory input made the whistle and pop of flares being launched unmissable. Across all octants, the oxidized blue-green of emergency retreat signals was just as harsh and visible in the new red light as they had been in the fiery glow of the rift. The muffled rumble of thousands of androids abandoning their posts by any means necessary replaced the hum as omnipresent background noise.
The pillar of light shooting quasar-bright from what had once been Node #13 dwindled down to a distant brilliance. Spade-tipped obelisks sprouted in triplicate, one guiding the lower two into the upper atmosphere where they opened into spheres of red light. V's limited attention pulled toward them. His already tight grip seized into claws and 9S' senses seemed to float away from both the pain and the truck itself.
V wasn't just wounded or anxious. He'd been those things before and always managed to talk through them like they were inconveniences at best. 9S had no frame of reference for this behavior at all. He dug and dug and dug and there was nothing.
It was the first time he'd ever seen V afraid.
Scheherazade watched Briar with eyes that seemed impossibly ancient. "It grows..."
"Let it," Fern said bluntly, kneeling beside 9S to keep one eye on him and the other on their surroundings. "It's not moving anymore, and that buys us time to get the hell out of here."
"What about the familiars?" 9S asked tremulously.
Fern shot him a look that plainly said he knew better while also managing to be sympathetically dissatisfied. They were both out of their depth. If V and Scheherazade could only barely stay alive through a direct confrontation, 9S and Fern would only make unnecessary casualties of themselves by charging in unprepared.
The lull wasn't worth as much as any of them would have liked. Driving in a straight line was the only sensible way to maximize their distance from Briar Rose, but it also took them through the inner perimeter and ground zero. And they weren't the only ones who had that idea. Hundreds of androids raced around them, all pushing west toward Octant 5 however they could. On foot and in the occasional vehicle. Heavily and lightly armed; medics, R&D, scouts, and squads of standard soldiers. Theta and Scheherazade's combined presence was enough to deter androids from climbing into the truck, but little could be done about the bodies that pressed in or the way their pace slowed in response.
The area was also not clear of demons. Slow and weak but still more than capable of killing androids. They didn't seem intimidated by the new threat of Briar, and gladly cut down anything that got too close, turning the area into a hot spot of combat.
9S' memory processing slipped to the sound of gunfire, shouting, and demonic snarls. His grip on V tightened, but the body in his arms remained eerily non-responsive. Red light gleamed from behind them and illuminated a field steaming with the presence of so many androids, the sounds and sights exactly as they had been before the portal closed and driving nails of uncertainty through him and blurred the past with the present. He struggled to focus on the things that weren't the same. The cold. The absence of that rotted stench that had pervaded the air. No manta demons grinned down from the sky. The soft, muddy earth had gone hard and frozen, eliminating the constant wet squelch and replacing it with an almost stony thump with every step of boot and claw.
And yet. And yet. He checked his internal clock. Again. Again. Again, until his auxiliary vents and his mouth opened in unison, wind sucking through him as he heaved in short, gasping gulps that failed to circulate.
A hand gripped his, applying a metronomic pressure. He looked up, dazed, to find Fern watching him. "This is real," she said with steadying confidence. "Shitty as it is."
He stared at her for several moments. Until his vents closed and his grip on V loosened. A last, shuddering breath left him, and he nodded gratefully. "Thanks. Sorry."
"You're doing fine." She stood and leaned out over the edge of the truck's side, punching through the chest of a scythe-type with a snarl too intense to be anything but rage. "We're both going to be working through this for a while, I think."
He stared at the blood running down her fists. There was a glint in her eye and a viciousness to her movement when she attacked demons that he had never seen her display with any other kind of enemy before. Whatever existed in the land that gave birth to demons had left its mark on her. She might be the most different thing it was possible for him to latch onto as a grounding point.
Curious but uncertain he wanted to know the details, he cautiously breathed his question. "Did it… feel like you were gone a month?"
Her expression went carefully neutral, but she could not hide the depth of her glazed stare. "…No."
She snatched the arm of another scythe type and yanked it forward to help it better connect with a kick that snapped its neck backward in one violent killing strike. If she hadn't offered another word, 9S wouldn't have pushed it. The brutality was telling enough. But she went on anyway. "Being in hell doesn't feel like being somewhere for a quantifiable amount of time, long or short. I don't even know if time is a thing there. You just… It starts to feel like it's all you've ever known. Like you never existed anywhere else to begin with."
His throat bobbed, but his gulp was quiet in all the noise. With his interest in hell thoroughly doused, his curiosity retreated to less unsettling subjects—which mostly meant Grimoire Rubrum. Or more specifically, how the dragon had taken Grimoire Rubrum over. It must have noticed his stare (was the face functional? could it see?), because it lowered itself until it was level with him.
This left it in just the right position to smack into his face as the truck jerked to a stop.
"Ow…" Rubbing at his scraped nose, he groped for the latch to the truck's main compartment and called through. "Theta? What's going on?!"
The volume on a radio increased and allowed them to hear the frantic broadcast that had brought them to a stop.
"—from all sides! I repeat: Communications with Night Kingdom satellites are confirming that all forest structures across the North and South American continents are uprooting! All units are advised to take shelter and/or retreat to the highest possible elevation!"
Theta kicked open the driver's side door and climbed onto the truck's roof. A sharp, shaken sound left her that made 9S and Fern share a wide-eyed, anxious look. Prying himself from V's grip as gently as he could, they climbed up to join Theta.
The stars were blotted out at the horizon. In the northwest, it was still close to the ground, but the entire southwestern hemisphere of the skyline was already stained a rising black. The same churning darkness that had pushed them out of Octant 1 was closing in on them—a tsunami that would drown all of them when it reached its destination and crashed over and into itself.
Theta lifted her radio to her mouth. "All scout units! Any possible escape vectors are to be identified and reported immediately, no matter how unlikely! All remaining units proceed toward the outer perimeter of Octant 6!"
The androids around them changed direction almost in synchrony, fluid as a school of fish.
"What's at Octant 6?" asked Fern. "You got a plan in mind?"
"In a sense. If we can get out, we still have to get past the rest of Briar and our best chance at that is to proceed northwest." She gestured to the lowest part of the incoming wave. "That area of the world has been a desert since before androids ever existed. It's a wasteland where Briar never took root. It isn't converging on us naturally from that direction, it's intentionally closing the gap to surround us."
"So that will be a safe escape route for us..."
"Precisely," Theta said with a grim twitch of a smile. "Provided we can get out in the first place."
9S pressed a knuckle to his lips, his analytics core stirring to life. Magic would theoretically be enough to drive Briar back—but all Rubrum had was a shield roughly as useful against Briar as the similar pod program had been against the titan-class devil. Scheherazade's axe had high efficacy but lacked the necessary scale. Maybe there was a way to amplify its effect?
Fern pulled gently at his arm, distracting him. She guided him back into the truck bed and tugged him down beside V. "I heard you got control of a dragon." Her voice came out a careful, focused whisper. "Can you do that again?"
He caught her meaning immediately. Flight was the only escape vector with a greater than 65% success rate accounting for Briar's reach and projectiles. Not an ideal number, but none of the other ones looked anywhere near as good. That was just from the assumption of success, too. There were a number of logistical problems with dragon acquisition, cropping up one after the other in the course of his calculation. Branches on branches sprawling exponentially outward.
He started from the most glaring problem. "All the ones capable of flight are engaging with Briar. We'd have to go back to Octant 1 for me to even have a shot."
"I'll go. Just tell me how to do it."
His pathing assessment routines ground to a jarring stop. "No?"
"What the hell do you mean no?"
Meaning was precisely his problem. The raw probabilities were one thing, easily processed and easily provided. But she'd snapped him out of it and the consequences to actually taking this course of action were enough to tighten his gut with an instinctive rejection reaction. Not once had he managed to produce a second halo in his interface—meaning it wasn't possible to activate the behavior table overwrite and cede control to more than one target at a time.
"You've seen what dragons look like," he said. "They're not that big and you'd only be able to get one even in ideal conditions. The limited space on their bodies can't safely hold two people, much less three. And I'm not leaving you behind."
"So I'll workshop that part once we have the thing," she said with loll of her head that promised patience but warned that it could quickly thin. "We have to do something."
"Yes, we do," he snapped, clutching V into his arms in an act equally of misplaced protectiveness and self-comfort. "And we are going to do something that doesn't involve you running off by yourself on a task that might get you killed for a way out of this that I know for a fact will end with you sacrificing yourself."
She sighed noisily, all pretense of secrecy abandoned. "Was Hamelin telling the truth? About the YoRHa signals? Were you able to get everyone back online?"
He frowned suspiciously. "They were working on it when I left. At the rate we were going they would've been done…around New Year's."
"Then you were successful." To his surprise, she gave an apologetic but wholly sincere smile. "It's not like I'm offering to do this with the intention of dying in the process... But you have someone waiting for you, kid."
He glared at her while his throat tightened, unsure if he was angry at her own disregard for herself or just feeling stupid for his inability to make his point. Was that really all it took? Was the deciding factor in her hierarchy of who deserved to be saved whether or not they had someone waiting for them?
"I was waiting for you," he said in a bruised voice, singed by indignation. "In my memory—in the nightmare I had, the first thing V did was apologize to me, because he came back without you. Nobody had to tell me V went in to find you; I knew that the moment I arrived and you weren't here. I came to the night kingdom to return Shadow to V. But I stayed hoping both of you would come back."
"9S…"
"Nines." He gazed out at their growing enclosure and the specks of dragons sparking futile fires against the dark. "Nines is fine, so don't just run off and do everything yourself. There's no way for you to reach that altitude or get that close to Briar without putting yourself in death's way, and my chances don't look any better. We'll figure something else out."
"If it's any consolation…" Rubrum interrupted in a tone suggesting it found both of them excruciatingly dramatic. "I don't think you'll have to wait very long."
Before either of them could ask what that was supposed to mean, Theta's radio buzzed.
"Theta," a grating voice barked. "Come in, Theta!"
"Yes, Jorinde. I heard you loud and clear. What's your status?"
"Same as everybody else caught in this tornado of bullshit," Jorindel answered tartly. "Is Scheherazade with you?"
"In severe need of repair, but yes. We're idle at ground zero waiting for the evacuees to finish re-routing to Octant 6. What's the problem?"
"We have movement from the lost assets. Here, listen for yourself, just make sure she can hear it."
A shuffle came over the radio, followed by the click of a channel switch. A staticky message in the measured but urgent tone of an SOS began to play, in a voice that nagged 9S with its familiarity.
"—north, coming out of the central corridor—speeds we didn't think it was capable of—arriving at the Roswell site at approximately—signs of hostility unseen since—Repeat: the assignment is— your position from the north, coming out the central—"
Several pairs of twin flares lit up the night, weaving synchronized tails of red smoke across the night.
As Briar blotted out the eastern sky, so did a different darkness rise over the northern horizon. It approached with the slow-motion possessed by all cosmic bodies too large to appear as fast as they were—a shaded moon in transit across the entire night sky, so large it seemed to creep even though it moved at delirious speeds. The creature was not simply soaring on unknowable, lazy business this time. The wings beat again and again with a muffled boom that gusted snow across the full breadth of the Octants into dizzying swirls. The stars were replaced by flecks of red and gold and the fleshy pink light that had bathed 9S as he sat atop a radio tower months ago. Every slow thrum of its wings caused a vast shift in air pressure that tossed some of the lighter demons and overturned the several perimeter fixtures. The horizon-blotting form touched down at the middle perimeter of Octant 1 with weight and force that cratered the unsuspecting earth and sent shockwaves rolling out beneath the truck.
An indescribable howl trembled through the air and the remains of the dragon weapons broke away from Briar Rose and danced through the sky in crazed geometric patterns.
It wasn't a machine.
It was never a machine.
"The great wyrm," Scheherazade whispered. "What remains of the white dragon."
Theta leaped down into the truck bed and gripped the celebrant by her cloak. "That's what happened to it? You turned it into a shade?!"
"Dragons do not have shades," Rubrum said with imperious menace that momentarily silenced them. "Come, our path is clear. We should get closer."
Fern whipped around and grabbed Rubrum by its spine. "No we should not! It looks like it's about to fight with Briar!"
"As it should be. Even unbodied, that is a real dragon's soul it carries, and it still knows its purpose. It will behave as a dragon would."
"That means the seed or the gods or whatever are its enemy, right? So why not just hang back and see if it wins? That's what you dragons do!"
Blood-colored light flared from Rubrum's cover. Fern snatched her hand back, but the dragon's temper remained. "That creature is no kin to me. That is an abomination born of a curr's attempt to pact a living dragon with a long-dead one. A false wyrm. It may or may not kill Briar Rose, but it will scorch the earth and killing us all in the process. You wish for an escape? You seek the red dragon's remains? Behold the Verses and the fragmented souls used to re-bind them! Re-unite us and I will guide your way!"
"We go regardless," Scheherazade said with surprising firmness. "If Briar consumes the Verses…nothing good will come of it."
With that, the situation fully left their control. Powers older than the Machine Wars or even the majority of the Gestalt Project were at play, and though neither of them understood the rules, it was clear enough that there was something Rubrum could do that would turn this situation in their favor. Throughout what followed, 9S could only watch and wonder if Guadalcanal might have been like this. He doubted it. Ten thousand linked machines was one thing, but two of those linked monstrosities fighting one another would have been a more accurate analog.
The false wyrm's head reared up, the eyes brilliant and golden. Spears formed one after the other around it until eight pillars surround its head in a crown of red and black. They struck Briar one after the other, unimpeded until the very last.
A spinning wheel and a familiar, if amplified, roar repelled the final spear and sent it straight through the dragon's wing and down into the unsuspecting field below. Briar extended itself into the wound, splitting into vast thorns that twisted and tore until the entire wing ripped free. Fluid sprayed out, raining down in a sudden, steaming shower. In the struggle to process the chaos around him, 9S assumed it would be oil or something like the mercurial fluid that ran through Briar.
His nose told him otherwise. The vital, coppery scent of freshly shed blood quickly soaked the atmosphere. Rubrum opened wide, and the spray arrested in the air, gathering around it and disappearing into pages already stained dark vermillion with a cacophonous whisper that seized 9S with a queasy discomfort he did not fully understand.
"What are you?" 9S whispered. "What are the Grimoires…?"
"Naught but victims of a pact forced upon them. Gestalts sealed within pages of raw power, exacting the price of a soul wiped clean and the erasure of physical form. The face upon this very cover once belonged to someone, but she is beyond even oblivion now. So it was for all of them."
Above, without so much as a pop of light, the dragon's wing grew back, and its assault began anew. Fern clicked her teeth. "How long is this going to take?"
"Until I have all of the Verses."
"Thirteen," 9S volunteered ahead of Fern's impending question. "I saw it on the moon server—Rubrum and Weiss and Noir were the only ones that ended up getting utilized for the project, but there were thirteen grimoires produced in the original procedure. If Rubrum gets all of them… Well, their combination was supposed to be powerful enough to make a miracle happen."
The book managed a snort. "Merely one more abuse of the principles carved from my flesh. Pacts stacked atop pacts—humans care for naught so much as the pursuit of power they do not understand."
"Are you saying it wouldn't have worked?"
"I am saying that it is a fool who forces a pact and expects harmony. The price is always paid." Its voice dropped, and 9S could hear the fangs it must have once had being bared. "And the jackals of then and now took great pains to see it would be paid by mere children."
A riot of hands reached into the night. Each was the size of the manta-type devils, their color all blood and oil flickering with inner light similar to the words that periodically appeared on Scheherazade. They tore at Briar, gouging handfuls of its body out and flinging them indiscriminately. Bundles of shadow and cabling slapped into the ground with a too-heavy and too-light spatter that reminded 9S of raw animal fat. It seeped across the ground just the same, loose oils twisting and digging into corpses that rose anew with bodies tethered together by black into mockeries of their living shapes. They were largely immobile, but they shot thorns like artillery fire, piercing the dragon's body hundreds of times over and spilling more blood that Rubrum drank.
Even machines didn't make monsters the way Briar did.
The western sky shifted. It took 9S several seconds of visual tracking confusion to realize the dragon's tail was sweeping across the stars. Wind whipped along the ground and red arrows rained indiscriminately, tearing through Briar's monsters and anything else unfortunate enough to be hit. Rubrum's shield spared them, but screams in the distance rang out the rising casualty count.
So it continued. Blood rained down, and Rubrum drank in the whispers, and the two titan-class beings ripped at each other in a war of instinct that didn't truly belong to either of them. This was between the seed and the soul, but those were the cores of both beings now. The continual siphoning didn't seem to harm the false wyrm, but 9S noticed quickly that it began to change. The black of its body yielded to occasional peeks of color. It grew slower. Less inclined to use magic in favor of fire and an odd scream that Briar imitated though neither of them seemed able to produce any real effect from it.
The battle ended when the wyrm made the mistake of biting Briar.
Briar bit back. Like many of its direct attacks, it was a simple copycat action. But Briar had no head, and the dragon did.
Or, it had.
A geyser of blood poured from the torn stump and torrented down over them unhindered. Rubrum's cover that had gone unmarried throughout the fight dripped with rivulets. It raised a shield that proved to be unnecessary as the dragon tipped backward, headless and disintegrating. The body collapsed into the earth only to immediately burst into thousands of harmless, multicolored colored pages in a display that would have been at home in the amusement park.
A soft pink glow streaked through the air like a falling star, and driven by some unknown sense that it was important, 9S sprinted out of the truck bed. "Pod!"
"REQUEST RECEIVED."
Pod 042 zipped off ahead of him. The truck followed, and Fern hauled 9S back inside. The soul, when Pod 042 delivered it back to them, was bigger than he thought it would be. Somehow, even though he'd run after it on some unknown instinct, he couldn't make himself touch it.
Briar screamed. What few dragon weapons remained fell from the sky, burning up like comets. The drifting pages of what had once been the shade dragon caught flame.
"The unsuppressed soul lets flow oceans of blood," a cacophonous voice rang. "The Watchers drink and raise high the basin of fire."
"We need to go," Rubrum said grimly. "Theta! Take us to your 6th Octant! Quickly—I will clear your way!"
The omnipresent darkness of Briar's body closed in, swirling high into a black dome that blotted out all light but the red glow from its three stalks. The amalgamated things it had thrown and vomited and pulled together from the corpses that littered the battlefield halted in place. They opened their mouths in unison, producing broken sounds. Until the noise was deafening. Until each and every monstrous creature had gone white as salt.
The stalks danced and bent. The light fused together, dimmed by dark veins that extended over it in a web. A slow, rhythmic pulse took over, the air throbbing as if the entire world had been trapped in the pressure chamber of a vast piston. 9S had seen this before. He could not have forgotten it.
It looked the same as when the machines had given birth to Adam.
"What is it doing?!"
"Trying to find a suitable intoner."
"What the hell does that mean?!"
"If we survive, I will provide you as lengthy an explanation as you wish. For now, focus!"
They didn't have far to go. Briar's encroach had already forced the remaining androids back to the middle perimeter of Octant 6. Thousands of bodies filled the space. The only reason they were able to proceed toward the wall without needing to navigate a course through the crowd was that Jorinde and Jorindel had enforced a single cleared path for them to pass through. Both were covered in blood and too exhausted to do more than scowl when Theta pulled up, and they hopped in without a single ill-tempered word.
"Is this close enough?" Theta yelled over the ambient buzz that filled the air near the wall.
"Perhaps a bit too close if anything," Rubrum huffed. "Scheherazade, do you have the strength to lend me your Words?"
Leaning heavily on Jorinde and Jorindel, the eldest celebrant opened her mouth. A Sound was produced. Then another. And another. Until she was chanting a string of syllables that 9S couldn't catch and that Fern recoiled back from as though it was a sudden light too bright for her to look at.
Rubrum opened. A pair of hands surfaced from her pages, unfurling out into the sky like strange wings. The red glow beneath the swirling black had gone sizzling bright, and a hiss gushed over the crowd as they gouged into Briar and pried the way open. Theta shifted forward, passing through the breach. There was nothing around them. The way, as predicted, was clear.
The voice that emerged from the book was not Rubrum's mild if haughty one, but the roar of something far bigger and far older.
"GO."
Androids surged through the gap like blood from a new wound escaping into the open world outside the body. They had no need of direction—there was only one way open to them, and they fled into the unmarred white snow and the safety promised by the open expanse of the northwest.
In the bed of the truck, V stirred. For the first time in all of this, he reached for his cane and forced himself upright.
If he heard 9S call out to him, it didn't show. He walked with a body that seemed too heavy for his bones to the edge of the truck and stared through the opening that spilled dim red light over him, and over the androids and over the white snows turning to filthy slush beneath their boots. Beyond them, deep within the eye of the gathering storm that Briar had become, the pulsing had ceased.
Something was being born.
The light split and a man emerged. Or…a statue of a man? Hair and beard and deep-set eyes beneath a scowling brow were so articulate they were visible even at a distance, but not an inch of it moved. The features were carved rather than animate. Not immaculately white enough to be salt, but the slowly emerging upper half of it was all the same uniform shade of pale stone. In places, it seemed to be broken, but Briar had taken care to fill these gaps—particularly with the massive flower that filled a gaping hole in the center of its chest. As it wrenched itself free, vast wings lifted from its back and spread wide.
"An angel…?" Fern whispered disbelievingly.
One glance at V told 9S it wasn't that simple. Though he was still dead silent, the almost manic aura of savagery around him brought the number of entirely novel displays of emotion up to two, and 9S hazarded only one thing could do that over such a short period. When its eyes opened red, and a third appeared on its forehead, he was certain.
That was the demon that had killed V's mother.
The carved demon raised his hand and a barrage of needles writhing with electricity shot toward them. 9S and Fern yanked V back, but that didn't stop him baring his teeth, his eyes never parting from the apparition Briar must have produced from his memory. Violet energy ignited from his body and made a star of him in the dark. Lacking for any simple place to go, it flowed down his right arm and into his bracelet before expanding in a haze over the open gap.
The needles slowed to a crawl over the crowd of androids.
Beyond them, enormous writhing lines of electricity danced plasma white over the wings of the demon, as if challenging V directly.
"Close it," Theta yelled. "Close the gap! That's an order!"
Rubrum's claws retracted to the sound of thousands of panicked screams. For a few horrific seconds, the escape became a stampede. Androids were trampled, shoved, pushed by the influx of bodies into walls that sucked them in and assimilated them. 9S looked away. Many of the androids flowing off into the northwest hesitated but did not look back, even as the screams crescendoed and dwindled to damning silence filled with only the vile buzz of Briar's being and the stench of ozone and singed metal.
From inside the truck, Theta cursed with quiet ferocity. And then they were moving, because there was nothing to be gained. For a moment, 9S was awed and horrified by how much he simultaneously admired and pitied the position of command. Quicker than anyone else, she processed the loss and put it behind her, and focused on what came next. It was a skill every soldier had. Even 9S had always been able to do it by focusing on completing his mission. But his mission never involved issuing any orders, much less any that determined who lived or died on the scale of thousands.
At that moment, he was grateful for her refusal to be bogged down for more than a few moments at a time. As 9S had learned intimately, nothing ever ended neatly. In situations like this, one horror generally followed another, and readiness could be the difference between life and death. When a baritone note vibrated on the air, Theta was ready. When Fern shouted 'Is that a fucking meteor?!', Theta cooly checked her mirror, slammed on the brakes, and reversed.
It spared them a direct impact, but the shockwave was nearly fatal in its own right. It couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds, but 9S had difficulty finding similar instances of chaos to base preservation routines from. The combination of the truck lifting off its tires, the aural overload of the impact, and the cloying cloud of ice and debris that lowered visibility in an instant while the ground literally fell away beneath them made it hard to get his bearings. Even overclock bought him precious little time. He grabbed V and Pod 153, while Fern darted over the truck's roof and snatched Theta through the shattered windshield.
Scheherazade was already on the ground where they fell, with the other celebrants beside her. One of her legs bent in an unnatural direction and her abdominal plates were exposed to the open air, but overall she didn't seem worse off than she had been before the leap.
"You're going to have to teach me how you do that," Fern coughed, futilely wagging thick dust out of her face.
"Later," Scheherazade said, staring up above them. "We are not alone."
The half-fused monsters that Briar had created lined the lip of the crater. No single one resembled another, but they were united in obvious purpose, from those scarcely bigger than a machine head to the goliath amalgamations of metal and demon parts crusted gleaming white with salt.
Theta wiped a dark stream of red oil from her forehead and readied her weapons with a snap and sizzle of white light. "All that work to lie about Legion and it turns out you were just a bit premature."
"Ha ha," Fern laughed dryly, materializing her own fists. "Well, Scheherazade, I hope we're half as good as the replicants were the last time you did this."
She cocked her head. Though she was in no condition to fight, she planted her axe and the words carved into her body lit up. "I, too, hope this."
Beside 9S, V struggled just to remain kneeling. The dragon's arm glowed readily, but the rest of him wasn't in any condition for combat. Rubrum and Pod hovered over him, flipping pages and flexing metal digits, every bit as prepared to fight as the others. Lacking any swords to rely on, 9S called the Spear of the Usurper to hand and took a breath as the imitations of a long-dead army that had once warred with humans advanced.
It couldn't end here.
He'd never fought for his life before. He was sure it hurt to die. He was sure it was frightening. But before the Bunker fell there was always that soft cushion of re-upload to count on and after it, he had simply stopped caring about death. Even during his good memories, he never gave any thought to being alive. He simply was. And 2B was there. So it wasn't bad.
But he wanted it now. He wanted it in a way he'd only felt once before, at the bottom of the pit desperate for a way to reach the surface and the light with his broken body. Beepy wasn't here to carry him this time, but still. A future of his own choosing was somewhere beyond all this. One where he didn't have to accept anything simply because of how he was made or what he was made to be. One where no one was sacrificed. Even if he wasn't able to become happy, he might at least a second chance to be. And he wanted to get there more than anything.
He wanted to live.
Pod fire rattled across the floor of the crater to slow the advance. Far too much for just Pod 042, actually. He glanced over her his shoulder and found himself staring at a bright red case.
"Pod... 006...?"
"HELLO AGAIN, UNIT 9S!" That excessive cheer was unmistakable. "YOU SEEM TO HAVE A KNACK FOR GETTING YOURSELF INTO DEEP SHIT!"
Above, an entire swarm of 006 units lined up in neat rows. There had to be at least fifty, all fully engaged in laying down suppressive fire. Over the reports and the unceasing baritone note and the omnipresent electrical buzz, a song announced itself on the wind. Chipper and upbeat and entirely off-key.
Emil sailed over the western edge of the crater and bounced axle over headlight with the same blatant disregard for his own safety or the laws of physics as ever, and he was not alone. 2D leaped from Emil's empty cargo bed to cut down three of the more durable monsters with Cruel Oath.
"Get in!" he ordered.
No one had to be told twice, though 9S hesitated, confused and surprised that he of all people would be there.
"9S!"
The voice sent an indescribable emotion dancing dizzily up and down his spine. He turned slowly and the darkness of the night kingdom vanished. Virtuous Treaty gleamed like pure sunlight in the hand of a shape he had only seen alive in mistaken glimpses and in the sanctity of his memory. She held her hand out urgently, so serious as always, but the look in her eye all but begged him to come to her side.
He did. And didn't care one bit if it was real or not in spite of how impossible it seemed that she crushed him into her embrace. Quietly, in a voice that might have been laced with tears she wouldn't be able to shed until this was over, she whispered. "I'm glad you're okay...!"
In spite of the broken howls and shreds of a black song in the air, he held onto her, and the world was as exactly as it should be for the first time since the Bunker fell.