9S

11S' presence fades and the pain signals shooting through 4S' body funnel away. 9S resurfaces in a different body equally covered in blood. His own. 1S exists somewhere to the side, frozen in the attempt to muffle both confusion and fear—a sliver of which is aimed at 9S.

There is a tightness in his jaw matched to that of his grip around the handle of Iron Will. The dull sword has crushed through most of a 2B unit. A copy, like all the ones he's destroyed before. The illusion melts away to reveal a doll coated in dark plates with blank eyes of solid light. The instinct to destroy still lingers in his synapses, and when they connect with 9S' consciousness, there is no discord between them. He yanks the sword back, and the doll dissipates into a cloud of data.

"It's not real!" There is no point in silence now, so he cries out as loud as he can. "It's just a copy!"

Indignation and disgust tangle from pairs elsewhere that he is only beginning to feel in proximity to himself. Pain punctuates both emotions from the closest cluster. Physical and otherwise. Slow ellipses of comfort and reassurance as tight as an embrace loop around them in a defensive barrier of feedback that does not respond despite 1S' attempts to acquire an update.

He moves and 9S moves with him. His thoughts ride out ahead of him, but he is too shaken to structure them properly and so throws out commands to force sense into them. "Everyone regroup on 4S and 11S. 3S, status report."

Consciousness Data Reattachment: 100%
Unit 4S Data Integrity: Yellow

4S is on his feet when they arrive, though he's still leaning heavily on his spear. 11S supports him from the other side with a deep scowl. Barely constrained, his presence is that of a living pincushion of anger turned on everything, including himself. Bitterness snarls with the shame that he let himself be fooled and that he let 4S be hurt.

1S pauses. A spear is buried in another doll that still looks like 24S. His teeth flash in a brief snarl, there and gone, but the crack in his composure cannot be smoothed back so easily. He finishes the job with the quiet of a glowing coal. 11S braces like he's ready for a fight when 1S turns to them, but all he does pat both their faces and check that they're okay.

Guadalcanal passes between the three of them in a close-held whisper that is more mutual forgiveness than reassurance. It calms them, nonetheless.

32S and 42S are a combined blur of nerves when they arrive. A dozen feelings smear and smudge together and defy any attempt to identify just one from the connection or from their faces. But 42S is shaking and his free hand clenches, unclenches, and rubs against his clothes in slow cycles and 32S cannot seem to make his eyes settle anywhere. 9S' curiosity drifts to 3S and 801S, but there is nothing there to be felt. Whoever they saw has been dealt with and the matter is already behind them when they arrive.

Slowly, all of them turn toward the three-eyed stones.

"That was pretty nasty," 42S complains, not quite as casually as he tries for. "This thing oughta come up with some better jokes."

"Careful what you wish for," 801S cautions. "It's got at least fourteen more."

The jolt of this information is felt through the entirety of the connection, but the rapid dissemination of intelligence goes a long way in helping them to recover and reorient. The technical aspects might be magic, but the operation of the stones is as basic as it comes. Four nodes, two states each, sixteen possible combinations. 3S provides a simple binary equivalent.

1001: Body-ID Dislocation
0101: Memory Construct

42S laughs nervously as the stones begin to stir and blink into new configurations. "I take it back. I really don't wanna know what else this thing can do."

The stone mouths sing. This time the disturbance is visible as a shimmering wave in the dark, expanding outward. 1S' order is an impulse that beats through their legs before he is even finished shouting.

"SCATTER!"

They dart in opposite directions. There is a sharp burst of surprise and a sense of flight from someone, quickly drowned by a din of shock. One by one, their legs tangle and send them crashing to the ground. The signal to run is an imperative that pulse in all their minds, but there is no response in their subprocessors.

0110: Motor Core Deactivation

Only one of them remains mobile and he is white-hot with urgency. It is aimed at his own body, but there is so much that it overflows 3S' ability to buffer and spills along 9S' nerve endings like acid. 1S tries to connect. He reaches out with calm intent and barely-formed instruction, but the attempt is ignored.

A light appears in 9S' peripheral field, and with it comes a congealing moment of comprehension.

If any of them had wondered if the blocks had any strictly offensive capabilities, the answer had come: No. But they could move. And when every single block is goliath-class and denser than iron, offense isn't necessary. They only needed to fall in the right place. One comes to center over 9S with the plodding inevitability of the moon moving to eclipse the sun.

Nines!

32S' face blurs across 9S' visual field. The boom as the block falls could be the sound of a mountain collapsing in on itself, but he is alive to make that comparison and that is a relief all its own. 32S is also alive, and looks to where the slow hunters of the other four blocks are moving toward the others. His auxiliary vents flare under his clothes, and he snatches Iron Will right from where it floats against 9S' back.

32S does not possess any particular proficiency. His analytic ability is within the standard range. He is not fast or precise in hacking, and his physical abilities run much the same. He is clumsy as he drags the sword. It's too heavy for him to wield properly without the NFCS to assist him, but he drags it anyway. Because it is for them and there is no one else to do it, and this is how he has always lived his many lives.

It takes everything he has just for one clumsy swing that lifts him off his feet and drops him on his hands and knees. But it finds its mark.

The blocks stop. Their singing warbles, uncertain. One by one, they drop back to the ground, sliding into place side by side rather than in a towering stack. Iron Will protrudes from the center eye at the end. As if to compensate, the other two eyes open, and the tone of their song changes.

011…1?

Motor function is restored in a series of 'all green's. 9S jumps to his feet, scrambling to 1S' side to help him up, but his hand freezes before it is even fully extended. The older scanner is smiling. He beams with cheer that rests uncomfortably on the solemn set of his face.

Happy.

It floods their link; overwhelming and honey-thick and sticky in a way that makes 9S think of humid tunnels and bottles of sweet-smelling alcohol he wasn't allowed to drink. 1S begins to laugh, and it pours into him before he can begin to shut his mouth or his mind.

Happy. Happy. Happy. Happy happy happy happyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappy—

"Dysregulated emotional matrices," 9S chants vacantly. "Dysregulated emotional matrices dysregulated emotional matrices."

Half of him hopes someone who isn't being sucked under will hear him, and half wants to hold the words at the front of his mind as though they can somehow negate the emotion. But there is nothing to negate. The happiness is as genuine as it could possibly be, in the same impersonal way that pain is the result of an unpleasant stimulus to a nerve sensor. It doesn't matter that it comes from nowhere, only that it is there and that there is too much, and he is so happy, so happy, so happy happy happy happy. 32S and 42S are screaming at one another and 9S is happy and 801S is latched onto 3S begging him not to die and 9S is happy and 4S is crying while 9S is happy, he is so happy, so happy happy happy happyhappyhappyhappy—

Eb5

Joyous tears flow down 1S' face, but for just a moment, a flicker of fear brightens his optic lights.

Happy…?

The delirious bliss subsides and 9S gasps with the reprieve. 11S' voice cuts across the dark, as loud as his synthesizer will allow, controlled and steady in a held note with all the jarring aural force of an alarm. And something is equalizing as a result.

3S is the first to recover enough to move. He is a raw, struck nerve that closes in like a homing missile, dragging 4S into the tidal swell of his intent. Whether he is in control of himself is unclear, but he moves with the elder scanner in the perfect synchrony 9S remembers from the lunar server. In unison, they descend on the block where Iron Will still juts into the air. In unison, they gouge their weapons into both remaining eyes.

Song dissolves to disharmonious screaming, each of the blocks out of harmony and out of key. Their eyes glow bright red, blinking like traffic lights in faster and faster alternations, seeking and unable to find a completable pattern. The light spreads over them, and in an explosive burst of black, the blocks break apart.

They are alone again with Briar's howl and the golden shadow of Node #21.

The small victory brings no reprieve. 4S isn't moving. 801S and 3S gravitate to one another and 9S can feel them rapidly exchanging information, but he cannot tell what about. There is friction between them. A disagreement that ends with the sharp, loud eruption of an emotion that 9S has no name for, but which he knows intimately.

Never. Never again.

Suddenly, 9S is alone in his own mind. 1S is still there with him, leaking gooey, sloppy remnants of happiness that he struggles to shed. But 9S cannot find anyone else. He cannot feel anyone else. And the others are the same. They are within eyesight of each other, and they cautiously regroup, each looking to the other in bewilderment.

"What happened? Is something wrong with the connection?"

"I severed it," 3S explains calmly. "You guys need to leave. Disconnect and secure your data."

1S doesn't speak, but his realization is an unbuffered rumble that shakes 9S' mind. The red glow in the blocks' eyes before they died was not mere coincidence. 4S and 3S were infected. The direct line between them and 801S and 11S would mean they are infected as well. 3S acting as an interconnected buffer point means any one of them could also be contaminated. They need to retreat. They need logic virus vaccines that can only be administered in physical space.

"You intend to complete the mission alone?" asks 1S.

"We'll be completing it together," 801S says.

9S' breath catches despite a desperate need for air and no amount of 1S' incessant stillness is enough to bring him down from what is happening. It's all as much a war as there ever was, but it isn't supposed to be like this. It's supposed to be different this time.

"Our mission isn't to engage," 1S reminds coolly, like 9S isn't locking up beside him. "It's to get past it and shut down Node #21."

3S answers with unusual obedience. "Yes, sir."

"We'll make use of the limitation removal program embedded in the logic virus to get past that thing." 801S nods toward the golden shadow. "And hopefully… we'll meet you back on the ship."

1S orders them all to disconnect. In the end, only 9S is left standing there, frozen and resistant, and cycling violently through every analytical protocol he has for a better idea.

"We're not…" he begins weakly. "We're not supposed to sacrifice anyone this time..."

"Relax, Nines. I'm not intending to die or let 3S die." 801S flips his braid back over his shoulder like he's in no danger at all. The same perfect clarity he always has emanates from him, but a crack appears, in the form of a crooked, honest smile. "But I also don't intend for either of us to die alone if this doesn't work, you know?"

There is nothing 9S can say to that. 801S, too, has decided that he can't let the person most important to him leave him behind a second time. To ask him to do anything else would only make a hypocrite of 9S, but it stings and stirs an instinct in him that he has never experienced before.

801S is a prototype based on 9S' own data. They aren't the same, but they are connected. In the same way that the original 9S and 9H wanted each other to live when they found one another inside the fused machines at Guadalcanal, 9S wants more than anything for 801S to live.

But 801S isn't alone. No matter what happens, he and 3S will be together. It summons little faith in him, but it's enough for 9S to accept the choice they are making.

The connection wavers. 1S is likely attempting to pull 9S out by force. Before he lets go, 9S calls Iron Will to his hand and presses the heavy hilt into 3S' palm, transferring ownership with a firm squeeze around fingers beginning to twitch and jerk.

"Live."

The last thing he sees is the two of them standing side by side, fingers intertwined, and 3S' smile, carefree and earnest beneath reddening eyes.

"Close your eyes and don't let go of my hand, okay?"

Caim

[Do you know why I deigned to pact with a human?]

A sword is bequeathed to a young prince. A reward for the strength he has cultivated during his training. His heart sings with the praise and pride of it. Someday, the boy hopes to join his father in battle and swing that very blade by his side. To prove himself brave and honorable. To become a worthy heir to the throne and to the father he loves and admires.

[It was because I lay dying, pierced by the humans I hated. And he came to me, dying and pierced and filled with hatred for me.]

On the day of the boy's eighteenth birthday, a black dragon descends on his home. The prince watches all that he knows crumble, and much of him crumbles with it. His mother lies in pieces on the ground, gored and shattered beneath the creature's claws. His father's bones crack with the frailty of a small animal in its jaws. The black dragon's eyes meet his. He does not remember how or why he was spared, but he remembers the emotion that found its home within him from that day forward.

[I welcomed him to strike the killing blow and instead he proposed a pact. I took it to be the babbling of a dying fool. But with his body still split open and his entrails bared to the sky, he cut down a score of men that would have ended our tale there had he been any less than he was.]

Revenge consumes the boy as the years pass and he becomes a man.

His sister, the only scrap of familial love left in his life and his thin but binding thread back to humanity, has been branded with the seal of the Goddess. He fights Church and Empire for her protection. This is the truth, but it is a lie as well. The life of a Goddess is short. Even if he prevents her from being killed, she will die before long.

[Our hatred of the world was as mutual as our desire to live. He killed uncountable men. Before me, and until our death. A number that even I found wicked.]

He fights to kill. To spill his boundless wrath. To soothe his unquenchable desire for vengeance. To think of nothing but slaughter. As long as he can swing his sword, he need not think of anything. It doesn't truly matter who or for what reason. He binds his life with that of a red dragon, his most hated enemy, because he still has enemies to kill. The seals are broken. His sister's love proves tainted with lust, and the Goddess pierces her own heart rather than live with her brother's rejection.

He sheds no tears.

The sky burns red and the Watchers laugh.

[He grew strong enough to swing his sword. He swung his sword so that he could kill. With each kill, he grew stronger. This was the cycle of his being. There was no foe he would not challenge.]

The young prince bests the strongest foe there could be. With the combined might of himself and the dragon, he banishes the Watcher Queen. But his tale ends in death before the wine of victory is even poured. And what happens beyond that? The prince's soul submits to oblivion, but something remains.

The gods lay their curse upon a new world, and the humans rush to fight back. Stealing power that never belonged to them. Wringing the secrets of pacts and seals and magic from the dragon's flesh without ever truly understanding what they wrought. They would not have stopped even if they did. The prince's madness lingers and when his bones are stirred, he marks them all as his enemy.

He knows even less mercy in death than he did in life.

[Your kind believe that humans can choose to become demons, do they not? Such was Caim. Not for treachery or other such banal evils of men—his heart was simply black with the love of slaughter. And so it remains.]

He kills them all.

The ones who separated his bones from those of his dragon. The ones who tried to use his wrath for their own power. The ones who tried to worship him. The ones whose eyes began to turn red and who chanted the precepts of the Watchers as if he had never left his own world. The unsouled flesh that came too close. Even some of the metal-boned constructs who eventually sealed him away. For eons after the dredges go undisturbed and unthinking, mad but inert.

And then a door opens in the dark.

[His heart could not be satisfied with death. What remains of him cannot be satisfied with death. Yet he cannot truly return to life. How will you bring such a beast under your will?]

Their beings clash, slick and formless save for threads of searing violet and silent black against its own stained red. It suffuses with the clarity of a mind that is not its own. It refuses him control even as it bleeds and suffers, but it offers the ability to recognize the flame entwined deep within its being. The ability to remember why it could not rest. The ability to think.

It sees a vision. Of war. Of monsters and demons. Of beings that would cry out as their lives were extinguished. Of a body made of power itself—half of it the long lost match for its very own.

The dredges wrench themselves free of bones only distantly remembered as their own. What remains of a young prince that had once been called Caim bares new teeth in something that cannot be called a smile.

A2

During the refueling stop at Pearl Harbor, A2 and Anemone had swung their legs over the edge of the airstrip and stared at the snow-capped peak of Mt. Ka'ala. Neither of them said anything. They were alone with the ones they'd lost, together. Anemone had started to sing. Quietly. Beneath her breath. That same old song that Rose used to sing when the perimeters were clear. It wasn't for A2's benefit, and it couldn't have been any kind of call back to better times because those times had been fucking terrible. Anemone had been bloodthirsty and mistrustful after two hundred years forgotten by the Moon and nearly shot No. 4's head off, and Dahlia and No. 16 couldn't stop fighting for five minutes...

A2 had closed her eyes and let out a shivering breath heavier than lead and gentler than her own death.

An android she no longer remembered had told her once that by holding her sword, she could forget everything else. A2 had lived on the edge of a sword so long she'd barely remembered who Anemone was until they were face to face again. Killing demons should have been a great way to get out of her own head, but when Anemone had asked for her to defend the ship as a favor, she couldn't say no. Mostly because she didn't want to be around a bunch of other androids.

There was something really embarrassing about being alive again after a satisfying death.

Most of what A2 remembered was fractured pieces of her own memory patched together with context from reports, 2B's sword, and the machine network itself; courtesy of the hybrid scanner that handled her restoration. He was a straightforward guy. Hadn't asked her for a damn thing except consent to revive her. When the alternative was to float around half-aware in the middle of the machine network for the rest of time, it wasn't much of a choice.

Goddamned N2 couldn't even let her rest.

A lot of her had been entwined with 2B in the end. She didn't feel like she had a lot in common with the person she was at the top of the tower. Maybe she really was still dead. But the memories she still had were her own experiences. The apology she'd whispered as she destroyed the lives of uncountable machines to stop the tower from firing was real. She was sure of it, because the bitterness of wiping them out lingered inside of her.

Her final actions had ended the war. The machines were all off-network now, and most of the ones in the city had chosen peace. So had the Resistance. There was nothing for her to do there. But then, there wasn't much for her to do in the Night Kingdom either. V didn't interest her. A single living human didn't make up for anything, and the way she'd heard it, he was a bastard anyway. She was the only bastard she needed in her life. She'd joined the voyage the ship for a dozen reasons that didn't have anything to do with him.

Because Anemone was going. Because seeing Pascal living in his village like the old one hadn't burned in front of their eyes made her sick. Because something in her insisted that matters between her and 2B weren't settled until 9S came out of this alive.

Who knew taking the boring gig would bring 9S right to her?

She dropped into a squat just off where the scanners were still stretched out in pairs of two. There wasn't any real reason for her to be down there with them, but the deck was dull, and the bridge was unbearable. Jackass paced around like a wolf on the prowl and the command unit who kept asking for updates on a situation that hadn't changed in hours was a pain in the ass. At least it was quiet in the hangar.

And No.4...Type S was there. Whatever that was turning out to mean.

The blonde scanner seized back into his body with a deep gasp. The other scanners awakened in similarly abrupt fashions, disoriented and coughing and clasping themselves to be sure they were still whole and still themselves. All except for 9S and 4S.

An intercom squealed, making all of them groan and recoil away from the abrasive noise. Jackass didn't waste a second. "Where the hell have you all been?!"

"Not now…!" 1S slurred. "All Pod units initiate full scans and prepare logic virus vaccines for infected units."

"SCANNING."

1S struggled just to sit upright. After multiple days in hacking space, the disorientation must have been unimaginable. A2 found herself on the other side of his intense stare and had to fight the urge to straighten.

"Disconnect us."

"Huh?"

He twitched a hand feebly at the cable connecting him to 9S. "Motor function's bad. Disconnect us so we can vaccinate. Everyone except 801S and 3S."

Being ordered around pressed her mouth into a hard line. She chose to think of it as a favor instead and did as she was asked, plucking the cables from the back of their necks. What the hell had even happened in there? The logic virus wasn't supposed to exist anymore.

"PREPARATION COMPLETE." A red pod floated down to her; an applicator held delicately in its claws. "PROPOSAL: QUICKLY ADMINISTER LOGIC VIRUS VACCINES."

"Do I look like a medic to you?"

"NEGATIVE. YOU APPEAR TO BE THE ONLY MOBILE UNIT. ADVICE: BEGIN WITH 11S."

She cursed and snatched the applicator. 11S was awake and writhing but he didn't freak out when she rolled him onto his side and pressed the applicator flush with the intake port at the back of his neck. A brief hss-chk! was all she got out of it.

"…That's it?" she asked skeptically.

"AFFIRMATIVE. VIRAL LOAD DECREASING. PROCEED TO UNIT 4S."

Vaccine tech had certainly gotten a lot better since Pearl Harbor. She rolled 4S over. He wasn't awake, and his stillness sent a chill through her as she pressed the applicator to his neck. "Why isn't he up?"

"Hacking damage," 1S coughed from where he was messing with 9S' external control panel. "He took a bad hit in there. Nothing a nanomachine supplement won't fix as long as we cure him."

Relief weaved through her, and she was able to follow the Pod's instructions and apply vaccines to all of them. 4S awakened right as she completed 1S' shot. 9S was only just waking when it was his turn. He fought her a little. Not in a berserk viral way, but in a delirious, disoriented way that included a lot of incoherent babbling and attempting to move away from her in a way that quickly got on her nerves.

"Fucking…" She looped an arm around his neck and dug her knee into his back to pin him to the ground. "Stay still, goddamnit!"

He tensed, and that was long enough for another hss-chk! and she was off of him before he got any stupid, defensive ideas. The pods were quiet, and A2 looked over at 3S and 801S. None of them were saying anything. The only one who even dared to go near them was 9S, dragging his non-compliant body hand over hand to 801S' side.

"Infection report," he croaked.

"VIRUS CONTAMINATION RATE: 70%"

9S eyes pinched. He laid out nanomachine supplement one after the other, almost as if he were in a trance. A high-pitched keening buzzed across the air. Their black boxes. Pulsing so fast they were whistling.

"What the hell are you waiting for?" A2 snapped, at the pods—at all of them.

"They had a plan," 1S stated soberly. "And they're executing it."

"Does it involve letting them die while we do nothing?"

"A2." 9S looked up at her. He could barely move, but he glared at her like he was ready to fight her all over again. "Shut up."

A spark jumped from 3S' body. He'd been old when A2 was only just manufactured, and she didn't see him shaking off an infection this bad. If 801S came back infected to hell, he was still only a scanner with no combat ability. He'd cook in his own body and die. She'd seen how 3S swung his weapon. If he woke up infected, he'd cut 9S in half.

As soundlessly as she could and taking care to step out of 9S' line of sight, she drew her sword. In the corner of her own visual field, 1S nodded. He couldn't fight either, but he was their squad leader. Those two might have made their choice, but six other scanners were at stake if they failed.

She waited. They all waited. With hope. With dread. With a clear mind ready to do what was necessary. They couldn't have long. Ten minutes at best.

At four minutes, the keening went away. The twitches stopped and steam rose in serene tendrils from their coats. The youngest and eldest scanners opened their eyes.

Both pairs were blue.

3S winced and laughed at the same time. "Oh wow, I feel like shit…"

"You did it…!" 9S' eyes brightened, and he leaned in. "How did you—?!"

801S clumsily clapped his hand over 9S' face, struggling to find his mouth and squeeze it shut. "Quiet…" he sighed, his hand immediately drifting back down to his stomach. His gaze meandered the group and find A2. "You..."

"Her?"

A2 recoiled. "Me? What the hell did I do?"

"Viral offload," he sighed weakly. "With 9S… You saved him by transferring the virus to your own body. We transferred ours… to Node #21's control system."

"That's possible?!"

"Every exchange is two-way." 801S clutched at his head and squinted against the dim light. "It's just nobody's ever thought to intentionally transfer an infection to someone else."

"You'd get decommissioned for even thinking about it," 4S laughed groggily.

They all shared a weak, relieved laugh, and sank back to the hangar floor. A2 sighed. The new generation of scanners was as crazy as attack models in their own way.

"Okay," the intercom grumbled. "So now are you going to tell me where the hell you've been, or you wanna hold hands and cry it out first?"

A2 flashed an all-clear signal toward the bridge. "Sounds like Node #21 is offline. That's what you've been waiting on right?"

"Finally. Hey, 006, patch us through to Theta."

Each one of them patched open a screen, but only 9S and Pod 153 were brought into direct communication with the 006 unit assisting Theta.

"From Pod 153...? 9S?"

"Reporting."

"What's your status?"

"We encountered… I think they were Intoners. In the network. They summon these things—like demons but with a wider range of abilities. We killed at least one."

"We've been dealing with two on the frontlines," Theta said grimly. "So far we were also able to defeat one, but the other is turning out to be beyond our capabilities."

"Shit… We were able to complete the mission successfully. Briar is isolated, you're clear to fire and withdraw."

"9S, Briar directly attacked the satellite nearly three hours ago. It was destroyed. The new enemy types have caused the situation to deteriorate rapidly, and the line is failing. We're already half-way through our retreat procedures."

"What…?!"

The scanners sat where they were, struck silent by the news. All that work and they were too late. A2 had heard about the development with Briar Rose, and it sounded way worse than anything the machines had ever cooked up. To bring down a whole goddamn satellite it had to be a monster.

Static whined over the call, bringing a scowl to Theta's face. "What is that? Are you getting interference?"

The scanners looked around. "It's not any of us."

Jackass' voice drifted through as a distracted whisper. "The hell is that…?"

The glass separating the bridge from the hangar shattered. A golden shadow ruptured through, avoiding around the dim glow of the hangar lights and spreading like the vast roots of a tree.

"That's the other one we saw in the network!"

A2 called both her swords to hand. "Looks like I get to see what all the fuss is about."

Bold words, but she didn't know where exactly she should strike. The branches weaved in and out of the metal seemingly at will. Worse, she could hear metal screaming every time they solidified. Fighting it wasn't going to be an option if it tore the whole damn ship apart. And she couldn't leave the scanners—they were barely mobile.

A fiery explosion rocked the hangar, and gunfire followed. Jackass had survived. She stood gripping a rifle in one hand and a bomb in the other.

"Are you fucking crazy?!" A2 shouted.

"It's only crazy if we die!" She slammed her fist down on a control panel and the floor beneath them moved. She was raising the hangar? "Busting through my terminal—! You know how much time and effort modding all that crap took, you piece of shit?!"

She threw another bomb straight down and fire licked across the empty hangar. Whatever they were dealing with, it didn't like fire any more than a machine would have, and quickly retracted itself, fleeing up beyond them to the deck.

When A2 arrived topside, the scanners had managed to at least huddle up behind her. The shadow was no longer a shadow. Under the light of a rising full moon, it twisted and congealed and spread dark roots into the airstrip that cracked right through the tarmac. The upper half was a giant stone head, slightly too heavy for the roots so that it bent and wobbled.

It opened its mouth and spat at her. Her reaction was instinctual, and she wasn't entirely prepared when her sword sawed through a spike of ice bigger than she was.

"Ugh, disgusting…"

"It didn't do that before," 3S said, struggling to his feet. "It only attacked with wind and that gold shadow—not water."

"Yeah well, this isn't hacking space. Get the hell outta here so I can focus!"

"Where are we supposed to go?! It's an airstrip!"

"I don't-" She grabbed the first one that came to hand (and oh good, it was the blonde full of shitty jokes) and sent him flying over the railing. Pod 006 could figure it out or he'd have a rough but non-fatal landing in the snow."-CARE! Jump ship if you have to, just get the hell out of here!"

Another spike of ice speared through the air. She swung her larger sword, pulverizing it and racing toward that stupid, spitting bastard—!

The eyes opened. From one, a hot wind scoured her, burning the air out of her ventilation system. The other blasted her with a full-force blizzard wind. Hailstones the size of her fist pummeled against her body, not particularly damaging, but extremely painful where they shattered against her plating. The moment she flinched, two icy lances hurtled at her. She barely deflected the first and couldn't right herself in time to dodge the latter.

Two strangely ornate spears shot past her. One gold with a relief like feathers, and the other a solid used-steel gray with a roaring lion relief between dual blades. Between the two of them, they were able to drive the ice right back into the mouth it spat from.

4S came to her side, rotating his arm like he wasn't used to it. "That was pretty close, wasn't it?"

"You…"

"Save it," 9S said from her other side. The golden spear re-materialized at his back. "If this is anything like the other one, it'll be fragile once you get to it. We're not back to 100%, but we can clear the way." He made a face, half a smile and half and snarl and the snottiest expression she'd ever seen. "Not like we don't work well together when we're not trying to kill each other."

She spat laughter and re-oriented herself on the enemy. "Here's hoping you're better with that spear than you were with a sword."

4S sighed. "You guys have terrible team spirit…"

A2 darted ahead, slashing a trail through the snow with her speed. Knowing what to expect made dealing with all the orifice shit a lot simpler and having backup simplified it further. They volunteered; let them deal with it. She charged ahead, secure that the ice spears were no longer a problem, and when the wind and hail came, she dipped sideways to flank it while it was still focused on the scanners. Their spears flew one after the other. Spun and launched and returned in a never-ending sequence. By the time it looked for her, she was already beside it.

And she had already initiated B-mode.

In the cold air of the night kingdom, the extra output practically set her body on fire. Steam whistled from her auxiliary vents. A blood-red glow raged from beneath her plates and what remained of her skin. The weight of her swords disappeared before the strength that rushed through her. Her routines ran together in a flurry of swings that sliced and bludgeoned, punishing it for every attempt to open its eyes or mouth and forcing the stone head back until it snapped from its roots and a gout of mercurial gold fluid splashed across her body. Satisfied that it wasn't going anywhere, she charged one final swing and brought it crashing down with a wild roar.

It melted like ice and dissipated into the night, leaving nothing but its golden guts behind.

She spun her sword up and let it rest across her shoulders as she sauntered back to where the scanners were sprawled on the ground in a pile of hailstones. "That was pretty fun. I don't see what took you guys so long."

If looks could kill, she'd have been dead twice over.

The chime of a Pod communication patched them into a call. "You guys alive up there?"

"All cleaned up," said A2. "Is the hangar still on fire?"

"Why would it be?" Jackass snorted. "It's a hangar. You know, usually houses things that have a lot of highly flammable liquids inside of them? Anti-fire system is built in."

A2 rolled her eyes, but the lull that followed was empty and a little hollow. They'd dealt with their monster problem, but there wasn't much to feel victorious about given the rest of the situation.

"What do we do now…?" 9S asked.

A new line opened with a ping. "This is 3S, Head of IT Operations and Data Management for YoRHa. Do I have contact with Commander Theta? We've successfully neutralized the threat and I'd like to continue the conversation."

There was a brief pause, and Theta's tired voice answered. "Confirmed. Did you have additional intel?"

"801S and I saw some unusual behavior as Node #21 was shutting down. If our interpretation is correct, Briar is in the process of uprooting Node #28. With no network to transfer itself through, there's a very high probability it'll be mobile within the hour."

Theta took a long, deep breath. "Do you have a new proposal?"

"801S and I are going to work with Jackass to secure another satellite."

"…You mean an illegal system capture."

"Yes, ma'am. We'll aim it from a position that's not within Briar's firing range. The likelihood that Briar will be moving means it'll need some intense calculations—Jackass and the rest of the scanners can help me with that on this side, but we'll need at least two scanners with eyes on Briar for ground-based triangulation and corrections. We can get them there fast, but they're going to need support."

Theta didn't answer.

Another communication line opened in a burst of noise and static. "Just focus on evacuation, Theta!"

9S jumped. "Fern?!"

"Took you long enough, Nines! I'm covering our asses on the retreat anyway; I'll make sure Legion doesn't overrun the road and get up into the cliffs, just hurry the hell up this time, would you?!"

"On our way!" 9S wobbled to his feet and extended a hand to 4S. "Guess that means you're coming with me?"

"I am already here," said 4S. "Are we riding with Emil? Where—"

The skull-faced truck skidded by them, spinning crazily to a stop. "The Emil Express is ready! Hop in, friends!"

A2 had learned not to question how Emil moved, but she couldn't help noticing there wasn't a single track in the snow between here and the edge of the icefield. None of the scanners said anything about him. Where the hell had he come from? Thinking that 4S was about to go for a ride in a vehicle that made so little sense, she called out.

"Hey, you."

"It's not 'you'," the scanner said, propping a hand on his hip. "It's 4S."

"Whatever, look, just… Don't do anything stupid out there alright?"

"It'll be fine. I've got a good feeling!" He smiled, and their faces weren't anything alike, but that ability to be playful and serious at the same time was painfully familiar. He hopped into the truck with 9S like he hadn't been infected and recovering from hacking damage not twenty minutes ago and waved her goodbye as if she warranted all that. "Let's spar again sometime!"

Emil revved his engine and vanished into the distance, and A2 enjoyed a private smile. Nobody was No.4, but 4S…

He was pretty alright.

Scheherazade

Scheherazade is as much a silent observer to V's congress with the unknown as the frozen benches in the church. Rubrum lies on the floor. With the red dragon's attention elsewhere, it is only an empty book. Beyond the door, the white dragon has begun to breathe. She can hear the gentle snores as it rests like a child in a mother's cradle. The creak of ice in the waves. All is calm, even when the heartbeat gust of wings heralds an arrival.

She steps unhurried back into the courtyard and meets the twins as they dismount. They are the support that Theta had promised. Beneath thick red hair, their eyes are harried.

"Where is he?" the Popola model asks.

She gestures inside the church. The Devola model rushes forward. Hasty and aggressive—as she always turns out to be. Scheherazade blocks her way with a stern shake of her head.

"Move it," she snaps. "We're not the only ones who know you're here. There's something coming this way. We should get him out of here."

There will be no moving V until his task is done. This, she knows.

Bringing the twins to her heel with a curt signal, she strides briskly across the courtyard. They do not go far. There is no need to. At the end of the entryway, the barren field stretches under the silver glow of the moon. A figure wobbles through the tracks she and V left behind with the dance of a damaged wind-up toy. It is an android seemingly half-built, with a shining core at its heart. Seeing them awaiting its arrival, it raises a voice that profanes the silence, and shatters itself in the process.

The Sound continues without it, purer than any that the Verses and Words have pulled from Scheherazade's mouth, and she knows they are only distant, lesser offspring to this terrible wail. From a golden ring does the Watcher descend before the sanctuary built in its name. Within the ring, the old world's script reveals a name.

'Shemyaza.'

The Red-Eye of Jerusalem had clearly once been a replicant, even after its body was twisted. Shemyaza has never been anything close to human and it wears its contempt for the species as part of its form. Leathery skin stretches over it like a tarp, pulled to angles that have nothing to do with the being that squirms within that vulgar swaddling. Iron rods ensure that it will not escape, piercing in through one side of and out the other in a perfect halo around its massive body. The same leathery skin flows loose from its hips, draping to the ground where it fades to the color of ash. There is a wrongness in its angles. It hides something beneath that Scheherazade knows will not be legs.

A head leans forward, huge and lolling above them. The face is hidden behind a mask of complicated black iron sculpted with features intended to be beautiful—even serene. The eyes are mere holes full of harsh white light that studies them as they study it.

The Watcher's presence does not move Scheherazade. When one's life is a hunt, it ceases to surprise that the prey often bites back. Death is inevitable. Whether it comes today or tomorrow doesn't matter. What matters is that she fights.

She draws her axe and it seems to her that the Watcher leers. Arms woven from cold light spindle into existence and raise the skin around its lower half. If it stands at all, it does not stand on feet. The thing beneath hangs loose, with hands bound behind its back. It is the figure of a woman, charred black and burned with solid golden leylines.

Her brows twitch. She knows those lines. That pattern.

"Watch out!"

Footsteps appear in the snow, clawed and inhuman and carrying the Watcher forward as its ghostly hands snatch for them. The twins move as one to deftly circle around while Scheherazade remains in place to bar Shemyaza's way. Its skins twirl with vile elegance as it spins, unseen legs colliding with Popola and then Devola in one revolution that sends them flying into Scheherazade. She catches both. They are stunned but alive.

Beneath Shemyaza's draping skin, the woman's mouth opens and stretches impossibly. An oily, fleshy tongue unfurls with all the delicacy of a proboscis, only to lash forward with a bring stinger at the end. It clashes against Scheherazade's axe, and the tolling that emanates is enough to rattle the smallest pins and screws in her fingers. The screech that follows is physical in its force, clearing the snow and shuddering the long-standing stones of the Watchers' church. Scheherazade's feet skid as she resists, but she and the twins are blown back most of the way down the entry collonade.

A jagged shadow falls over her as she rouses and a chill travels her spine. She whirls to her feet, prepared to find another monster closer at hand. What she finds instead is V.

The dragon's scales have reddened to the color of crusted blood. They rise beyond his arm, out over his neck and chest, and half over his face, like armor half-worn. A scorched gold horn protrudes from his forehead with all the eminence of a crown, and a matching eye ringed with deep blue beholds her.

"You should have told me," he says in an amused rumble that isn't quite his own. "That we had a guest."

"…This battle is mine," she says firmly, rising back to her feet. "Mundus awaits you."

He considers this for a moment, and though his expression is cool, the strain within him exudes outward. He burns with both an unnatural heat and vicious intent restrained by only the thinnest margin. Rubrum is silent in the palm of his hand. Something was won in the church, but the burden of it is unknowable.

A sheen falls from his shoulders like silk woven too fine to see. It is traced with the same pattern as the pale, empty lines left on his skin, and it splits and spreads into four wings that smolder with blue-violet flame at their edges. "Pod."

Pod 042 lowers and latches onto his shoulders. They do not so much as bend under the added weight. "COORDINATES ACQUIRED."

With a gust, he becomes a star that will fall on a different battlefield.

Scheherazade snaps the cloak from her back and sheds her shirt. Her skin retracts, revealing the red-gold text inscribed on her plates, identically placed to the golden lines on the woman that hangs from Shemyaza. There, they are solid. One her body, they are formed from the hundred and twenty Words engraved onto her being when she became Scheherazade.

As the Watcher approaches, she laughs for the first time in thousands of years. How deeply cursed the world of the dragon and the giant must be for its cycles to repeat in even such small ways as this.

"You may run," she permits. "This one and I seem fated."

Devola and Popola come to her side, matching swords raised. "We're not leaving."

"It'll just go after V and the other androids if we don't stop it."

Their words are noble, but Scheherazade knows they are born from guilt programmed into them from activation. That guilt would keep the two here as it had kept them in Night Kingdom over the course of dozens of different iterations of the same pair, bound to the undesirable task of tracking the Great Wyrm.

They lack the magic Scheherazade remembers of the original Overseers. But they are strong models. They must be built so, to bear the weight placed on them. No different than Scheherazade herself. So she offers no soothing words. She does not apologize or do them the disservice of pity. They were born into guilt and would no doubt die hoping to have atoned for a fault that was never truly theirs.

Perhaps in this life, with a human to grace them, it might be so.

In the kingdom of day, a village once existed where they sang in a language that androids no longer came installed with. Scheherazade remembers little of their music, save one couplet that lingered with her long after the residents had succumbed to the Black Scrawl. It has whispered over and over in the quietest chamber of her heart during her many hunts, and this one is no different.

Come, so that we can scatter flowers and fill the glass with wine.
And split the ceiling of the skies; and try a new design.

Fern

Scorched, bitten D-models struggled to keep conscious as they passed hands ahead of me. The Scorpion-type enemy had been destroyed quickly as a high-threat enemy but killing it had taken one large problem and turned it into approximately eight hundred smaller and harder to hit ones. The moment they'd cracked through the armored carapace, glowing, sparking larva had stampeded out. They weren't that big and they weren't strong, but they burrowed through plates and wires like they were soft as meat.

Nearly all the Defenders ended up in bad shape in the effort to hold that tide back while they still had the benefit of volt-proofing. Most of them couldn't move now, and the runners were exhausted from conveying them from the far end of the battlefield to the retreat's rendezvous point. Behind me, one of them had sagged into the gray mud, her joints sparking and audibly grinding as she struggled to get up without dropping the body in her arms.

I put a steadying hand on her shoulder and punched through a scuttling larva before hauling her to her feet.

Suppressive fire should have taken care of that, but it was hard to come by at this point. The standard models had mostly withdrawn from the foothills. Wouldn't have done them any good to stay anyway. They had burned through nearly all their ammo trying to deal with the other big problem.

Jorinde and Jorindel had pronounced the field around the Nautilus-type enemy safe to enter, provided we didn't come into contact with any of the stars. It was impossible from the start that they'd be real, but they damn sure burned like the real thing if anything touched them.

Problem was that once anything entered the field, it was subjected to the Nautilus-type's ability. It wasn't resurrection. It was time manipulation, and we'd tried everything we could think of to get around it. Anti-tank shells. Heavy artillery. Pincer attacks to try and catch it off guard. Everything ended up rewound away like it never happened, and usually something minor—the position of a Legion or one of the stars—would end up conveniently changed to sabotage the re-attempt.

When we realized we couldn't get any damage to stick, we took a different approach and tried to lure Legion's forces beyond the reach of its effective field. In doing so we learned the damned thing had hands. Dozens of them poured like salt from the empty mouth of the shell to pull it where it needed to go or pull bodies back into its range.

The reach of those hands was second only to how absurd their strength was. I'd watched someone get too close and end up slapped a solid half-kilometer off-position.

Most of the remaining team had taken to calling it the 'Stalemate Type'. It fit, in a ridiculous and infuriating kind of way. I'd rather have dealt with an enemy that had the overwhelming power to hand us our asses from the start than be worn down like this. Even now, Legion was still coming. Alive, dead, and alive again. I'd lost track of how many times I put down the exact same salt monster.

We were tired. All of us. 2B. 2D. The E-types that had taken over for the runners because most of them had damaged their joints carrying other androids by twos and threes. The squad leaders, 1B, 8B, and 4B, had refused to leave us behind, even though we volunteered to cover the retreat. Every one of us glowed under the moonlight, lustrous with steam that settled and beaded and ran down skin too hot to permit frost. Deliriously, I returned over and over again to how lucky humans were that they could sweat. The cold was probably the only thing that had kept overheating and internal combustion at bay over the long hours.

"He's coming," I panted, unsure if I was speaking to the others or to myself. "He'll be here."

The others nodded grimly. I couldn't even tell who I was talking about. I only knew that we had to hold on. A little longer. Just a little longer.

I reached under the back of my shirt and felt the last of my speed boosters hiss into the intake port at the base of my spine. Nanomachines buzzed like an angry hive beneath my skin, and my vision briefly doubled. That was the trouble with boosters. You could take as many you wanted, but it was just like overclocking too much. All the little calculations that happened in an android's subprocessors started going wrong. Calibration told my body exactly how long the time between my strides should be, how far I would go if I applied this amount of force in that direction, and even dictated my perceptions of in-combat time. But calibration was malleable. If it needed to yield for extreme situations, it yielded. And what situation was more extreme than this?

I was starting to adjust to moving and thinking at a different speed; one that my body and processors were not built to run at for more than a few minutes at a time. I was pushing two hours on boosts to speed, defense, power—anything that helped me survive these regurgitated waves of Legion. I dreaded what recovery and recalibration were going to be like later, but I had to make it to later first.

I'd held out in hell not knowing if anyone was even coming for me. I could hold out now.

2D was driven to his knees by a heavy strike. His small frame creaked and shook as he held up the spear that protected him from the fangs of a dragon's disconnected lower jaw. 2B stumbled and it took her two swings as she severed it from the string of machine parts driving it down on him. Neither of them had power or precision to spare anymore.

Just a little longer.

1B's sword broke. 8B was in the middle of tossing her another, but it would be too late. I drove toward her, my joints running hot with unintended friction and excessive kinetic energy. 4B met me there. Between us, we took the brunt of the blow from the same saw that had cut Legion down earlier. It had been folded into them. Twisted and repurposed like everything else.

Just a little longer.

Something bit me. I dropped to my knees with a grunt and snatched at my back. A larva had crept up and bored into my abdominal plating from behind. 4B pushed past my uncooperative fingers to rip it out and hot oil seeped down the back of my clothes, quickly drying cold on my legs. 8B and 1B rushed ahead to guard me against the coming wave, and my head swam as the speed boost's effect dribbled away.

We're alive. I stared dizzily at duplicate moons created by my desynchronized cameras. Humility buzzed in my hand as I pushed myself back to my feet. My body was burning, and I wasn't sure how much more I could move. We're right here. So please…

"No way…" 7E whispered.

Up and out from the distant mountain range in the northwest, stone white wings unfurled across the sky, lit by the ascending full moon.

Mundus.

The back of my neck crept with unseen charge. My head throbbed, and I laughed with cautious, eager hope. "Of course you only show up on time to get in a fight…"

V dropped down on us, half a perfect shadow and half aglow with violet energy. He didn't pay Legion any mind. Whatever had happened between now and the last time we'd laid eyes on each other, they were well beneath his notice.

An E unit panicked. He looked like a brand new monster, and she swung at him only to be flipped onto her back in the mud for her trouble. V reared his cane back, and all my relief withered to a crisp. I didn't think.

I slapped him.

The air of the battlefield became a different kind of tense and seemed to go deathly quiet. Had I thought about doing that plenty of times since meeting V? Absolutely. But I'd never thought—it was just an instinct—But those excuses weren't what came out of my mouth.

Turned out I was more angry than sorry. "Control yourself."

His tongue rolled pensively over the corner of his mouth. Queasily, I noted blood on the tip of his tongue. A howl from behind him interrupted whatever was going through his mind. He glanced over his shoulder with curiosity at best.

"Ah..." he said slowly. "I see."

Blue flame scorched the way clear, incinerating everything between him and the starfield around the Nautilus-Type. His bracelet lit and the air thundered as one force of time magic met another. With no significant sign of strain on V's part, the haze and all its stars shattered. The Legions dropped where they stood as the damage dealt and rewound returned to them all at once.

2B and 2D took off like they were fired from a gun. The squad leaders caught up quickly, surprisingly nimble despite the white junk parts that cluttered the ground. Without the field to stop them, they made quick work of the Nautilus-type.

When no horde of smaller shells spilled out of it, I resisted the urge to flop down and sigh with renewed relief.

V tensed, and before I was sure what was happening, he was no longer beside me. He didn't run or fly, he just moved, and suddenly he was out in front of 2B and the others with his blue-edged wings flared wide against a night gone red with innumerable needles.

Mundus gazed down with three eyes full of baleful recognition and groaned. "Sssspaaaaaaardaaaa…"

V laughed. It was every bit as smug as it should be, but everything else about it was wrong. "You are merely a puppet who doesn't know he already tasted defeat once. Come... I shall help you become wise."

He raised his cane, and I felt the air pulse as it shone in his hand. No incantation left his mouth, but a dense ring of replicas made of his own magic surrounded us like a pillar of glittering white-violet flames. The needles fell, and the canes spun in a tight cyclone, protecting us until the barrage ended and firing back when it was done.

"Fern," V called, in that expectant tone that made me forget my fatigue.

I rushed to his side only to fumble when he tossed his cane at me. "Wha—?"

"Hold onto that. I'll be needing something a bit more…fitting."

I didn't have to give him Humility. It went to his hand like it belonged there.

Electric blue light flashed through the sword's patterns, and up into V's body. The unscaled half of him disappeared beneath silvery plates that reflected the starlight like pearlescent mercury. A second horn joined the first, silver-black to the burnished gold. His wings solidified into that same silver black, irregular lines tracing their underside in swirls of that side bright blue. It was eerily familiar. Not just the color, which I had seen in hell, but the shape of them…

I'd traced his pact mark in peace for hours when he first received it. There was plenty about it I didn't understand, but I knew one thing for absolutely certain: V's wings were shaped like the ones on that mark.

Those weren't dragon wings. They were Vergil's.

He gave one command with blue flames licking from his mouth: "Leave."

The other YoRHa were more than happy to be dismissed and get out of his way. I was too, but I called out to him before I'd gone too far. He glanced back, cocking his head at me. There was an unsettling blankness to his gaze. Like I was a stranger to him.

"Knowing you, you probably are something he really shouldn't have again. So wherever you are in there…" I drew my thumb in a vicious slash across my neck and snarled, "Make it flashy."

He flashed a smile that seemed a little too wide.

Anemone

"Operator 6O to all teams, we have confirmation of the Nautilus-type's defeat! I repeat: The Nautilus-type has been destroyed! Legion forces have been depleted by approximately 87%!"

"Re-calibration teams are to remain on standby! What's the ETA on the scanners?"

"REPORT: 2 MINUTES, 14 SECONDS."

"All other units withdraw south as planned!"

"WARNING: SCHEHERAZADE, DEVOLA, AND POPOLA ARE CURRENTLY IN COMBAT 20KM WEST OF THE INTENDED WITHDRAWAL COORDINATES."

"In combat with what?"

"UNIDENTIFIED INTONER-SUMMONED ENTITY."

"Goddamnit, how many of them are there…?!"

"QUERYING… REPORT RECEIVED FROM POD UNIT 153. 'INTONER' MODELS APPEAR TO BE MADE OF SEVEN UNFINISHED YORHA ORIGINALLY IDENTIFIED IN THE MAINTENANCE AREA OF NODE #7. CONCLUSION: TWO INTONER MODELS REMAIN UNACCOUNTED FOR."

Anemone squeezed the trigger and blew through a Legion straggler. Steam rose from the end of the barrel while she reloaded, but she didn't set her eye back in the sight, instead turning to the red pod floating over her shoulder.

"How far away is that fight from the coordinates where V and Scheherazade touched down?"

"APPROXIMATELY 53 KILOMETERS."

"This is Anemone to Commander Theta," she called, instinctively pulling the pod as close to her mouth as she would a radio. "Re-route our forces to V's initial landing coordinates. It's farther away and there should be a city there."

"You're familiar with the area Anemone?"

Satellite Kaguya's 8th Machine War Descent team fluttered through her mind. The details of the mission had blurred with time. So had the faces of most of the androids who had been on that team with her. All that remained was the ghost of Anemone's own eagerness. She'd believed then that she could make a difference. That she was willing to die for humanity's sake, and a dozen other noble misconceptions that didn't mean anything on the ground.

Kaguya had been destroyed during the 8th Machine War. There was no Command to issue them any orders. There was no one to tell them anything. They were alone. It took them over a hundred years to learn that the other major operational location of the 8th war was Sector O—just off the coast of the city, and by the 14th Machine War, they'd only made it as far as Pearl Harbor.

How many times had she cursed the moon rising over them now?

"My original descent assignment was here in North America," she reported dryly. "We ended up staying here until the 13th Machine War. I know the roads more than the landmarks, but there was an old city south of here once—I figure that's where they're at."

"CONFIRMATION: EXTENSIVE OLD-WORLD INFRASTRUCTURE WAS IDENTIFIED BY ATTENDING POD UNITS."

"And you believe this area will be safe?"

"We can't say for sure that anywhere is really safe now, but it's a minor detour and it'll provide some cover options if they end up needing to fight more of these things."

"Thank you for your input. 6O!"

"Yes, ma'am! Currently updating the withdrawal zone and providing all units with an updated retreat trajectory!"

"SITUATIONAL REPORT: UNIT 9S HAS JOINED RE-CALIBRATION TEAM #1."

Anemone brought the five other androids in Re-calibration Team #2 to attention with a quick signal and put her eye back in her sights. 4S arrived a few seconds afterward in the typical noisy crash that accompanied Emil's stops. A glowing cloud of different panels and readouts unfolded around him. He was chatty, but it was only to himself and to the other scanners working remotely and she soon tuned him out. There was nothing she could do for him and nothing he could do for her—focusing on their own missions was the most useful thing they could do for one another.

She hummed in perfect calm, reloaded, and thought of a rose growing in the city as she watched the battle unfold.

Mundus was everything she remembered from seeing Grun appear off shore. Massive. Deceptively fast. Overwhelming in every possible sense of the word. V, meanwhile, was a brilliant star that Anemone could only keep track off by the trails of blue and violet left in his wake and the bursts of red and black magic that stood out stark against Mundus' stone body. He was agile but strangely graceless. He seemed to have all the power of a goliath at his command, but it didn't go a long way to giving him an edge. V rained red spears that pierced Mundus' body and poured flame, and Mundus erupted into thorns and rained enough lightning to kill a thousand androids, and both of them refused to stay dead afterward.

When the war came to an end, she thought she'd finally, truly seen it all. Hopefully, when this battle was over, that would actually be true.

She settled back into position and fired. The shot didn't miss.

She couldn't remember why Rose decided they should leave the Night Kingdom in the first place. It may have only been Anemone's own delusion that she wanted to try and find survivors of the 8th. Alone in the aftermath of Mt. Ka'ala, she may have made that up to have something to move her forward.

She'd heard plenty about souls and humanity and the value of an android's life and justifications for operating costs on the journey back to this godforsaken place. All of it sounded like the anxieties of androids too young to know any better. A2 wasn't immune either, caught between the peace of the conclusion she'd reached at the top of the tower and the growing agitation of being alive again without reason. Even Theta was preoccupied with legacies and android kind and how to prevent them from all dying out.

"Locked on!" 4S announced. "Ten minutes to optimal firing position!"

That was ten minutes until they could leave then. Anemone fired another shot.

She hoped that victory came and for once the cost might be gentle and easily paid. Perhaps then these recent, restless models would find out on their own that the desire to keep living even if everything else was destroyed was reason enough.

V

There were weapons in the world of demons which lusted for bloodshed and weren't above slaughtering their wielders if they lacked the ability to provide. V would never have thought before that something which had come from purely human roots could be the same.

The young prince was dead, and his kingdom was forgotten and what coursed through V's body were not the echoes of a man or a demon but a lord among beasts. It found something within them kindred, but even at his worst, Vergil had never hated with the intensity that Caim hated. The remains were untempered, unfettered, and roiling with destruction promised by V's body and the reunion of the untwined pact powers. The one thing in the world it may have cared for was in the process of rejoining with it, and so it cared for nothing beyond itself.

It was against V's nature to yield full control of his body to anything, and never had it been such a struggle to keep hold of himself in the midst of so much omnidirectional hatred. There was nothing that Caim's remains would not kill, and unlike the dragon, V's perceptions were not enough to enforce any kind of boundary. Fern was not 'theirs' when he found her; she was just someone who had a weapon he wanted and happened to be fighting the same enemy V's ire was directed at.

That was the one saving grace that allowed V a measure of sway over this force that never truly promised its cooperation. The dragon recognized that V loved and gladly loved what V loved, but Caim was most pleased to hate what V hated. When V looked at Mundus, every atom of Caim's overflowing rage gathered and magnified to such nuclear intensity that V almost wondered if he'd ever truly experienced hatred toward Mundus at all.

Almost.

Violet energy scorched the sky in triplicate beams, and V soared between and around them with ease. His body felt light. So too did the sword in his hand. He dipped and dived, buying himself a half-second of time—all that he needed. The bracelet grew hot around his wrist, the butterfly's wings fluttering with mad abandon within the face of the clock. The runes in Nelo's sword shone hot violet and in mid-air, V took the stance he knew so well. The Yamato was not with him now, but he didn't need it.

Time magic ran in the family, and it wasn't from the demon's side.

"You gave 'me' a gift," V purred. "Allow this humble son of Eva… to return it."

The world compressed to a violet point and V shot through it, vanishing for a moment into nothingness, and reappearing before Mundus' three red eyes. He plunged the sword deep into the third of these, his body radiant with magic as flames of blue and red and violet combined white and poured down the blade. Mundus slapped him aside, but the damage was done. The blade had melted and cooled and could not be dislodged from its newfound scabbard.

As V righted himself, he laughed.

Why was it, exactly, that he had never blamed Mundus as ardently as he'd blamed Dante? Even in the most fanciful arrangements of his imagination, Eva remained where he found her lying in a pool of blood within their burning house. At best, Dante had stolen whatever last act of protection might have been afforded him if there had been only one son of Sparda. But what did that change?

Nothing. The protection he'd longed for would not have saved his mother. It would not have un-burned their home. It would not undo the fact that lied at the base of it all:

Mundus thought himself a god-king fit to pour his wrath where he may. He'd set the fire ignited by Sparda's betrayal on the home of his kin and sent a pestilence of demons after that scoured away what little joy Vergil might have regained over and over and over. Until all that was left was the pursuit of power simply in the name of becoming untouchable.

And when that failed, Mundus took his humanity too. Mundus took everything from him and not even his own nightmares were sacred, but the blame never lied anywhere but with Vergil in his own mind. It lied with his weakness.

Perhaps that too was a demon's way of thinking.

Vergil and V were one, but they were not the same. Pride and power didn't factor in as he found alignment with Caim. He had been too weak once. It just wasn't for any of the reasons either of them believed. This time he would use everything. Caim's hatred. The dragon's magic. Everything.

All-consuming enmity entwined with the frigid certainty that punishment would be served.

The red haze of Caim's hatred gave way to cold blue, and he didn't mind that Caim made him inelegant. That Caim made him wild and filled his throat with the roar of revenge. That their combined joy was as cruel as it was crude. Long before precision, concentration, and discipline had become a part of asserting his power, there had been a small boy with a large sword who swung madly to defend his life. There was no reason that child should not have his turn in this.

Lightning descended from the clear sky, chasing after V until he weaved between Mundus' feet and soared up the demon's back. His bare silvered claws gouged into one stone wing and he wrenched, the stone cracking in his grip. Living shadow erupted from within and pierced through V's body. Magic beat out of him in unrelenting waves, and Rubrum's red claws re-doubled his effort, breaking the stone wing free.

V tasted blood in his mouth and only wanted more. There was not enough in all the rivers of hell to settle this score to his satisfaction. What had been done could not be undone. But he would have every pound of flesh he could get his hands on.

"REPORT," Pod's voice rang from behind, startling him back to himself. "ORBITAL STRIKE INCOMING. PROPOSAL: EVADE."

A point of light glittered on the horizon. V ascended out of the way as a brilliant beam of light ruptured through the mountains and through Mundus. When the light faded, the flower that had taken residence in his chest was gone. Everything below that empty cavern in his body was gone. Oozing black and falling to pieces.

[Now!] urged the dragon's remains. [Take all which is ours before he is restored!]

V held out his hand and Rubrum's crimson pages answered with four great claws. They gouged into Mundus' remains, twisting until the stones began to grind and then to crumble, and finally, with the report of a dry bone being snapped in two, the neck cracked open.

V's body unraveled, and he disappeared within.

Once more he stood on blood-red plains. There were no trees and the whirlpool had stilled, but he was not alone. Strange shadows squirmed at the corners of his vision and there was a distant sound of screams. He walked to the edge of the pool and felt the magic of the basin. All that Briar had imbibed was gathered there—as if to recreate the basin anew. There was nowhere near enough, but strange magics were melded there. His familiars were among them. Scattered, but enough for him to sense.

Caim's influence was not with him here. His mind was clear as he touched his fingers to the still surface.

"Art thou pale for weariness of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth," he recited intently. "Wandering companionless among the stars that have a different birth; And ever changing, like a joyless eye that finds no object worth its constancy…?"

His focus sharpened, and a single ripple stirred the surface of the pool.

Blood hissed into the night sky, spraying in a vast arc across the snowy landscape and dyeing V red. Mundus fell, and V fell with him to the sound of a thousand whispers as Rubrum drank. The Verses were complete. And so was V. His wings folded, and the scales receded from his body, confined again to his left arm. Coated in wiry shadow-viscera that smelled of burnt steel, he descended the crumbling staircase of Mundus' beard, already occupied with pushing red-soaked strands back from his face.

He didn't need to see his body or his hair to know they were stained freshly black. Nightmare had the heavy presence of a sealing stone that not even Caim's rage could penetrate, and Shadow wove her entire being around him to leave slobbery, quick-freezing trails of affection on the side of his face.

"What are you a toddler?!" Griffon perched on his shoulders in unexpectedly raucous temper. "I leave you alone for five minutes and you go off and eat something weird again!"

How noisy. "Griffon."

"Don't 'Griffon' me; who even is that wack job?!"

V cracked a smile. So even the familiar found Caim difficult to digest. "Griffon."

"What?!"

"Welcome home."

The blue eagle spluttered, obviously caught off guard. Too much so for even one of his gleeful boasts. He settled down and managed only a futile grumble. "Y-yeah…"

?

It had been a long time since they tasted the gratification of shared warmth.

It had been a long time since they were complete.

Since they were together.

Neither of them was what they once were. In truth, perhaps the dragon's remains had been somewhat nervous? Caim's remains had gone relatively untouched, while the changes to her mind and being deepened by the day. Reclaiming herself had entailed reclaiming so many unintended things. So many blameless children forced onto her essence like unwilling ticks. And V had changed her as well.

There was joy in finding that none of it mattered. As much as there was a certain sadness. Even now, they could not remember her name.

They would have liked to share it, before the end.

The remains of an Intonation resonated within them. An Intoner had been sacrificed not to summon a Watcher, but to shield Briar from destruction. It hovered above them with a menacing drone, spherical and solid black. The nature of this, too, was different. The dragon had not known the seeds of destruction to behave so.

Roots descended on the empty battlefield, snatching and devouring all there was. The bodies of Legion and Watcher. The broken bodies used as Intoners and their ruptured cores. Even the corpse of Mundus.

They took to the air with V to avoid being swallowed themselves. From on high, they saw a single broken-bodied android standing atop the seed. The core glowed brightly within its body even as it too was swallowed.

"It eats its last Intoner…?"

The roots withdrew when there was nothing more to consume. Its fill was taken. The surface of the sphere split like a cell dividing. Cleaving once. Twice. A third time before it finally opened.

A black flower bloomed.

At its center, a humanoid shape of steel and salt glittered in the moonlight within a ring of thorns. There would be the center of this horror. The culmination of plant, human, machine... and demon. The might-have-been soul of Briar Rose, tainted by the magic of hell, had fused with the seed into something beyond the red dragon's understanding.

A scream rang forth, expanding in a wave heralded by rings of magic that the dragon knew well. This was familiar. This was 'things as they must be'. Enemy of the blood that spread from Rubrum's pages and took its old form to roar out its defiance.

But something was wrong.

Their rings shattered against one another, but no harmony was won. There was no resounding accord of song and counter-song. Their combat produced only producing a greater discord. A crashing of infinite cymbals clattering down an endless chasm. The cacophony made it difficult to hold shape. It rang in their horns and made their form droop and melt.

"Bones, watch it!"

Within their addled haze, they barely noticed the scream had stopped. A blinding light approached them instead. V took charge, challenging with the might that Nightmare offered, but the flower was nothing like Mundus. The dragon abandoned its body, in exchange for the power of its shield, and enclosed them as raw magic slammed against them.

The blast came to an end several moments later, and they unfurled steaming in an empty white field.

"Where…?"

V looked southeast with dark eyes. There was nothing on the visible horizon, but he didn't need to see what could be felt much more keenly. Mikhail was that way. They'd been blown into some more northerly part of the flat waste that the church of the Watchers was built upon.

"It seems you may have overestimated your abilities," V huffed, unharmed and unimpressed. "Do you lack power, still?"

"It's not about power," they snapped back at him. "It is magic, and it has rules. There are none else who can do this, but something is... Something's missing."

"INCOMING COMMUNICATION FROM POD 006: UNIT SCHEHERAZADE REQUESTS RENDEZVOUS."

They shared a look. Briar was far from them now, and it wouldn't have made sense to rush back in. Scheherazade wouldn't call them unless she had good reason.

They flew east until they found the glow of lunar tears and landed in the courtyard.

Scheherazade slumped with the red-haired twins beside the door to the inner sanctuary. The courtyard was scorched and scoured, broken stones and deep score marks marring the otherwise pristine walls. All three of them still had their weapons in hand, but it took them a substantial effort just to sit up.

"You are whole…" Scheherazade said with faint relief. "Good."

"Seems you fought well in my absence," said V. "What did you need?"

"Pod 006 has been keeping us up on the fight," said one of the twins.

"It seemed like you were having a hard time," said the other. "Scheherazade thought she might be able to help."

"There are limits to what even you can do," said the dragon.

"This is so. But if Intoner and dragon once ended the flower… Perhaps now, a goddess and dragon suffice."

They squinted impassively at the ancient android's burnt-out markings. They were in the right shape, but that did not make her the genuine thing any more than looking human made one human. "You do not know what it means to be the Goddess. You have power, but not that power."

"No. But this…" She held up her axe as if it were an offering. "Calamitous Rhythm… comes from a world apart, also. It hunts the gods as I do, since the day the Words were bound to me."

The axe had always been curious to V, and the dragon shared this curiosity. For it to come from another world…perhaps it might be of use. "V, touch the axe. As if you were intending to consume it."

He raised a brow but did as he was asked. Black tendrils slithered along the edge of the blade, and the weapon's memory unfolded through him, and so through them. It spoke of a goddess who ended the gods. Who sealed the seeds inside herself, using her command of time and space, and whose power was thus forged into the weapon.

A goddess who could bend the Great Time…? Had there ever been such a woman?

Not in their time, but perhaps the world that brought the dragon and Caim together had survived. There was no means to say what had transpired after their departure. If the goddesses had come to be once, surely so long as men survived they must have found a way to restore the seals.

V wagged his hand, an annoyed look on his face. "This isn't… an android's weapon. How can there be a record on it?"

"Much is communicated when fate brings two beings into battle," they answered sagely. "It is not so strange that a weapon will remember what is spoken by the heart that wields it."

A thought flashed bright as he made some connection, but he did not allow them to perceive just what that thought was. The door of his heart closed. Pity for him then that they could still feel his ears burning.

Humility, indeed.

"If the dragon and flower deal in Song…" Scheherazade rasped. "And the grimoires contain the Verses… and my body holds the Words… then I must have a place in this as well."

Another curdling scream cut through their conversation. Bright rings appeared on the horizon, spreading and spinning in dizzying gyroscopic patterns. They had not even begun to spread their wings when the sound abruptly lowered. Through the gap where the white dragon lay, something stirred.

The snow whipped into the sky, revealing a vast surface of clouded ice beneath. It cracked and melted, aglow with a fierce white light that dimmed only when the shallow layer had melted. From the church to every edge of the basin it had been built upon, lunar tears began to bloom. As the rings passed over them, they broke apart and shattered without a sound. In this place where the white dragon rested, silence reigned. All that remained of the Song was a gentle wind that whispered along the surface of the glowing waters and sighed through the petals.

The white dragon twitched.

His eyes opened, and his head raised by a fraction. He did not see them. His attention was on the flowers and he seemed to be listening to the silence itself. His voice was small for such an old being. Like that of a confused child calling out to its mother.

"Zero…?"

A subtle sorrow rippled through the red dragon, from pools of memory that ran far deeper than any human could know. "I am glad that you yet live… Mikhail."

He turned toward them. There was no recognition is eyes. He regarded her as she regarded the dragon weapons. "Who are you?"

"A thing that was a dragon once." And one who knew him. Oh Michael, Michael… She had warned him of the madness of humans and time had made fools of them both. "If you are well, then rise. The reason for our birth awaits."

A wounded grimness came over his red eyes, but he heaved himself upright. The song had been quieted, but there was a world beyond these silent flowers and they were bound to go to that world if that was what it took to soothe the call of instinct.

She lowered her neck to Scheherazade. "Come, wielder of the goddess' power. I will lend you my wings." V took off, but she extended a red hand to block his way. "No. Not you. Yield what does not belong to you and leave this matter to me."

He glared. "I beg your pardon?"

"You know what I mean. You've eaten a great deal besides me that lingers with you still. Do you wish to carry Zero and Emil and all else within you for the rest of your days?"

"What will you do with them?

"Use them to convey Scheherazade to the very center of the flower. This is my battle. Ours. If you let us go."

His glare faded to vexed certainty. "You wish to break our pact."

"V—"

"Alright."

Their tongue was lost. 'Alright'? Since when was he given to such agreeable answers? "So simply?"

"Conditionally," he corrected, plucking at his nails. "I'm not especially interested in housing you and your murderous paramour, forever."

"Ye gods, you never cease to be embarrassing. Fine; what do you want?"

"You have your Verses. Will you still aid me in my search?"

Her tone softened. He didn't know, and she had no plans to tell him. "If I live… I promise I will see you home."

"Excellent. Then you will use my power in this fight as well."

"Wretch!" she hissed. "I have just told you this is no battle of yours!"

"You are right."

"Then why this stubbornness?!"

He looked with a flat gaze out at the horizon where Briar waited and back to her and answered as though it were obvious. "You could not sing."

"And you can?"

"I haven't tried," he admitted with a shrug. "But twice now I have been pursued by the gods. I'm sure I'll do for you."

"Pah… Selfishness suits you better than this delusion of valor."

"Is that what you think this is?"

"Do you wish to claim otherwise?"

"You once perceived as I perceived," he said, sparing a secretive smile as his wings spreading wide. "Figure it out."

They joined Mikhail in the skies, and he led their charge out of the light of the lunar tears and into the moon-graced dark where the flower waited. The night filled with screams, and they were ready.

Mikhail's harmonization was different than hers. The red dragon had produced rings in an exact equal to the mother of watchers, but the white dragon produced something akin to a shield. White and laced with sigils and leylines of magic in a perfect sphere that surrounded his body, keening as it shattered and reformed anew. High, crystalline chiming answered rather the deep bellow of a church bell. Her harmony had once negated the power of the Song, but Mikhai's harmony rang of purification.

She reached for V's magic, and he gave it. His voice and thought and breath. Her red way dyed to a rich, warm purple, and when she broke from Mikhail to soar above him, the harmony that they made sang out in the almost-human cry of a violin.

With Scheherazade held tight to her back, she dived.

The dragon and the first lord of beasts, the first queen of wrath, the echo of the ultimate weapon, and the human with the devil's teeth all bared their fangs as one and tore into the flower's heart.

2B

A throng of androids perch like uncertain gulls in the shallows, barely daring to move. 2B weaves gingerly but hastily between them. Her body aches with overuse. Pushing through the frigid water around her shins is like pushing through solid dirt, and it's no surprise to her when she stumbles.

Her pod is gone, but she knows that somewhere in this crowd, he must be here. The whole reason their entire force is gathered in the open like this is because it's supposed to be the safest place for them. So he must be here.

He must be.

Lunar Tears dot the surface of the water for as far as the lake stretches, glowing and swaying in the gentle waves that lap toward the shore. Logically, they are impossible. But impossible things have been happening more or less non-stop since 2B rebooted. The world she had returned to was full of impossibilities strung together on a series of improbabilities.

Could enough of those produce a miracle?

She hears her name, from the only voice that matters, and her pain ceases to exist. Calling back out to him, she thinks the answer to her question might be yes. Maybe the thread that is leading them back to one another began with A2 accepting her final wish even though she had no reason to. Maybe it's all happening because 9S saw a blue bird and V heard the message she left behind. Maybe this miracle that they are on the edge of is woven from a thousand small coincidences and unexpected connections that she might never know about. But she'll build a quiet altar to each and every one of them if this one finally prayer goes heard.

The sky might fall or the world might be saved, and either one would be fine so long as she never had to meet him for the first time ever again.

9S darts through the crowd and the flowers, indifferent to the water sloshing into his boots. His smile is premature, but so is the overwhelming gladness rising through 2B. He touches her arms and her face and examines the places where she is wounded and stiff, and even though they both chose to do their part, all the ways she could have died are in his eyes in the same as all the ways he has died are in hers. She could almost cry for how silly it is. A scanner worrying about an E-type being the one to get killed.

"2B…?"

His voice is... so soothing.

His fingertips brush beneath her eyes, and her breath catches between bliss and disgrace. They're soldiers. Built to fight. She's given her life a hundred times before this and broken down to far worse condition. But whether there is anything useful she can do is the furthest thing from her mind. The fight is above them now, and for just this moment, she can't suppress herself or the joy that maybe the curse that she has lived and he has died under is finally over.

Above their heads and far away, all sound ends. There are no cries of fear. No new orders arrive. The black flower is aflame low on the horizon like a setting sun. Victory is theirs, yet as the night settles, not one of them dares to raise their voice.

9S draws close. Chest to chest, his chin rests against her shoulder and she leans her cheek against his hair with a contented sigh while the black flower burns away.

The moon observes the unflawed silence as they embrace in a garden of light.