[A/N] Fox, or CrimsoinSunlightBlade as you're now called (big F for your account, hope you didn't lose too much). It's good to see that you're still in the fanfic business after a whole year.
Evangel: I have no idea what "Kino" means, but all the best to you as well.
Thousand Oaks is right next to Malibu. Sofia could call an Uber from her house and get there under ten minutes. Thus, Sofia had heard plenty about the magical girl Lucia Mount.
The girl never seemed like termination material, just another magical girl trying to live a life. She've probably never had any trouble with witches, given her simple but effective power. She doesn't seem to have any great ambitions either, being quite content to keep a middle of nowhere city as territory. But Kyubey put a bounty on Lucia's head anyways, citing that she was involved in the assissination of another magical girl.
Since Lucia was right next to Sofia's city, it would be a crime for her not to take the job. She swooped in, possessed one of her friends from school, handed her a doctored soda, and boom, job done. She decided to keep Lucia's body and delay the whole witchification process since Sofia was quite a fan of being able to teleport everywhere. Other than god forsaken afro, Sofia never thought about Lucia ever again.
Mentally stable fourteen year old girl, in school, both parents alive, awesome powers, no outside contracts with other MGs, slated for termination ofr magicide? How had she never realized something was wrong? Plus, that peculiar visit from Kyubey right before the specialist got here. It was the first time he's ever step foot in her house with the mad on duty. Plus, why'd he ask for where her grief seeds were? Server bugged? Sofia failed to put the two and two together. And now she was paying the price for it, as the specialist, hazmat suit now the color of activated charcoal roasted her alive.
WAIT! Sofia tried. If she could reason with the specialist, she could tell her about Lucia, maybe the specialist would hear her out and they could work together to find out whatever game Kyubey's playing-
The specialist did not wait. No, she did quite the opposite of waiting. She curled the palm of her hand like a vice and pushed it onto Sofia's face.
Despite maximum dampening power from her soul gem, it still felt like she was being branded by a barbecue grill. Sofia screamed in pain, tried in vain to push the specialist off of her, but only managed to burned her hands on the hazmat suit.
There was a way out of this. There was a way out of this. There was A WAY OUT OF THIS.
Sofia conjured up Lucia's brass knuckles. From what she had seen in Kyubey's files, they constantly produced enough voltages to kill a fully grown elephant. It also didn't really understand the concept of friendly fire. This wasn't really a problem for Lucia, since her steampunk dress magically protects her against electricity, but Sofia only has a piece of her costume.
But that one eyepiece should mean something… right?
But something was wrong. If the specialist was really hired by Kyubey, she must've known about Sofia's electric brass knuckles and wouldn't have gotten close enough to her for her to be able to use it properly, since her flamethrower could get the job done fine from afar. But she did know about her teleporting pearls? Could it be that the specialist's hazmat suit doubled as an insulator?
Sofia decided to not think about it.
She pressed her brass knuckles onto the specialist's defenseless bicep and let the shock out.
The copper colored pair of metal blossomed into a white hot burst of energy. The air cracked around it like a whip. Sofia's nervous system on up like firecrackers. Her vision went completely white. Yeah, that one eyepiece of that Sofia inherited from Lucia definitely wasn't doing much. Sofia had to call upon magic from her soul gem to keep herself 4from passing out.
And then Sofia felt a gloved hand on her face, pressing her into the heated marble floor and broke her nose to pieces - it hurt, sure, but Sofia quickly realized that it was just a fist and not a pouch of molten lava. It worked! The specialist broke focus, she wasn't superheating herself anymore. Then Sofia just needed to shoot her, conjure her gun and shoot in in the face, she just needed to do that.
Except of course she couldn't. There'd be something in the universe preventing her from doing so. Sofia did manage to conjure the gun fine, but there was something, something was preventing her from lifting her arm. In fact, Sofia couldn't even move. An invisible force was pinning her down to the ground.
Are you SERIOUS.
Lucia's brass knuckles disappeared from her hand and the electricity stopped. Sofia has the handle of her possession gun held tight in her fist. She tried again to push herself up. But something, someone, was pressing Sofia's palms down on the ground, preventing her moving. Meanwhile, the specialist must've realized that her powers had stopped working. And, instead of restraining Sofia's arms to prevent her from using her gun (like someone would logically do, of course), the specialist took several steps back away from her, whispering "no, no, no, no , no, no, no" to herself in a Mexican accent.
Not that it mattered. Not that the universe would allow her to take advantage of this absolute perfect moment to strike, with the specialist panicking and in disarrray. What kind of Dues Ex Machina bullshit was preventing her from moving her arms? The first thing that came to Sofia's mind was that the electricity had completely fried the neurons or something but that couldn't be what happened because Sofia could still physically feel her arm and also Sofia was pretty damn sure that it wasn't how nervous systems worked.
But then, it must've been Lucia.
It was Lucia. Lucia has somehow gained a body, or something, and she was preventing Sofia from moving and aiming her gun. She had became a supernatural metaphysical poltergeist for the purpose of annoying her. Sofia knew it instinctively, just like how she knew how to pilot her consciousness out of her body before she possessed someone and how she knew to wield her ridiculous neon green toy gun like a duelist from old western movies.
But this was good news. Sofia could work with Lucia.
It was obviously in Lucia's best interest to not sabotage Sofia since it was a basic postulate that allowing the specialist to destroy one's own body would not be a good idea. Sofia quickly communicated this idea to her. "LUCIA YOU FUCK!" she screamed. "IF I DIE, YOU DIE WITH ME! I'M IN YOUR FUCKING BODY!"
The specialist was managing to recover. Her hazmat suit was turning black again. She conjured up her flamethrower and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. She screamed expletives in Spanish.
Sofia racked her brain but reached no new nirvana. The world was just the world. Her powers were just her powers. The specialist's utter immunity to everything that Sofia would ever try to do persisted likewise.
But the specialist was not the only part of the equation. There was always Lucia, whose consciousness, shade, or whatever she was now, was blocking her from doing anything and leaving her to be roasted like a rotisserie chicken.
Lucia, in fact, was not immune to everything Sofia tried to do.
Sofia called on her inner magical magic and poured the strength into her gun. Though it remained a gun in her hands, to the outside world and hopefully Lucia, it had became one of those glowing orbs of teleportation not too different from the ones that she conjured.
Lucia did not know that Sofia could no longer use these orbs. She doesn't know that three was her limit. And she hopefully didn't see the trick she pulled earlier with the clock.
With a thought, the orb levitated above her open palm and floated midair. The specialist knew that the orb was a trick from their earlier encounter and paid it no heed, but as Lucia hopefully had no knowledge of it…
Sofia could not throw it. Kinda hard to maneuver your arm to do that with your elbows pinned down on the ground. Instead, Sofia poised her hand in the classic flicking position.
The specialist's suit had turned fully black. She tried her flamethrower again. This time, noxious gas excreted from the exhaust pipes and the barrel made a funny kput-kput-kput sound.
Sofia flicked her gun orb. Of course, a gun was too heavy to flick, so Sofia instead maneuvered it telekinetically in what she hoped was something resembling natural projectile motion.
She felt Lucia's grip disappear.
Sofia immediately rolled to the left towards the left, cartwheeled herself upright, and found herself staring at the window that she had failed to break just moments prior. With another punch (no knuckles), the glass shattered and left a hole big enough for Sofia to jump through. But at the same time, the specialist had gotten her flamethrower working, so Sofia could not afford to angle herself properly for the jump and the jagged protrusions from the broken glass cut a huge gash on her thigh. With her concentration broken, Sofia failed to correct herself on the fall and landed headfirst on the wooden planks below. Her head crashed into the patio with an audible thunk.
Sofia managed to pick herself upright. The world spun around her.
The view out of her million dollar mansion was beautiful. A lush green lawn, perfectly trimmed ferns, a couple o' palm trees for good measure. All managed by the finest landscapers in the world. This spectacular lawn terminated in a tall cliff face, leading to a spotless white beach and a calm azure ocean. Seagulls chirped. Waves splashed. The fragrant smell of sea salt lingered in the air.
And of course, not a single damn human in sight.
Why did she buy a house in the middle of nowhere again? Sofia was smart. Not like Lucia, that dumb fucking bitch, almost sabotaged her own life because of her lack of common sense. Sofia knew how her own powers worked, so why in the world did she think it was a good idea to live in the middle of god fuck no where? Sofia was completely invincible in a crowd. Put Sofia in a place with more than five people in it, send any magical girl in the world at her and Sofia would evade everyone with little effort.
But no. Malibu, what a cool city, right? The houses sure are expensive. It's not like Sofia was an infamous assassin who kills "innocent" girls for money and garner enemies every single day. Live in a mansion, a damn mansion by the seaside won't you, a place with no other humans around and renders your disgustingly amazing powers useless. And now Sofia was going to die because of it!
Sofia needed to run, make a run for it right now. Down the beach, maybe she'll find some jaded billionaire family walking about in khakis and a swimsuit, but it doesn't matter because Sofia can't run. The world was spinning, The momentary burst of adrenaline have all but faded, leaving only the badly burnt body of one of the magical girls chasing her down.
No.
No.
Sofia did a mental checkup on the state of her soul. Despite having thoroughly cleansed it minutes prior, the gem felt like it was dying again. Black spots pulsed and shifted like tiny cockroaches.
Block the pain. Block the pain. Block the pain.
Strategize. Strategize. Strategize.
Somehow, the specialist didn't know about Sofia's brass knuckles, which should have been impossible, since Kyubey was very thorough at informing his specialists. Kyubey didn't send her, then, and maybe Lucia Mount was hiding barely repressed insanity under that god damn afro. But now that Sofia found out that the specialist was weak to electricity, the plan was simple. Supercharge the knuckles and throw them at her. Use environmental factors as distractions. Voila.
Sofia conjured the pair of knuckles around her hands.
Except they weren't there.
The weren't there.
THEY WEREN'T THERE.
The "Magical Girl powers exposition" part of her brain kicked in and kindly informed her that Lucia, through gaining her own consciousness, has also taken away her respective powers.
In a frenzy, Sofia reached deep inside her brain to try to find a semblance of Lucia's powers, but of course, the exposition part of her brain was never wrong.
Of course. If Sofia could actually have any kind of powers that worked, it'd be too easy, right? Right? But no. This was not the time to think about the various grudges that the universe has against her. What has happened has happened. What has happened has all happened, and no amount of useless moping could ever change that. "Don't cry over spilled milk," as they say.
Listen. Sofia. Sofia thought to herself. The specialist still thinks that you have the brass knuckles, she has no reason not to. Also, you have illusion magic. It's fine, it's fine. Everything is fine. She will never get close to you ever, especially since her flamethrower was quite capable of range. This puts you in a HUGE advantage.
Huge advantage. HUGE advantage. Yes. Yes. Yes. Let's do this. Let's do this.
A wall of flame burst out of Sofia's exposed window, dissolving it into its constituent elements. The specialist, clad the same full black hazmat suit, landed in exactly the place that Sofia landed, albeit in a slightly more awesome fashion. Sofia ripped apart a piece of her costume's cloth and wrapped them around her hand and turned them into Lucia's brass knuckles with her enchantments and swung a wild haymaker at the specialist.
The specialist blocked the strike easily. So did the next one that Sofia took with her other hand. There was no need for Sofia to go easy on her, she was confident that a specialist would outskill her in terms of hand-to-hand combat. For now, they were stuck in a stalemate while the specialist figures out her next move- but this was good. The more time she took, the better it was for Sofia. She had enchanted costume to look like a carbon copy of the specialist's pitch dark hazmat suit, and now that the specialist was touching her arm, Sofia poured magic into it and turned it in her monstrous mushroom ensemble. It took a lot of magic to transform something as big as clothes and Sofia's soul gem was probably not doing too hot right now, but there wasn't really a choice, was there?
Sooner or later, Lucia would appear and see the specialist looking exactly Sofia. And she would jump down and restrain the specialist, thinking that she was her. And Sofia would make a run for it to god knows where. This plan, it sounds stupid and wild, but it actually had a chance of working, right?
The specialist suddenly maneuvered her right arm out of the blocking position and grabbed onto Sofia's hand, brass knuckles and all. Sofia screamed in pain as the now familiar sensation of being burnt alive was ingrained into her body once again. The specialist realized that the knuckles were fake? How? But that's okay, that should be okay still. Lucia was still coming, though keeping both her and the specialist's costumes swapped was taking quite a big toll on Sofia's magic.
The specialist punched Sofia in the face. She lost her balance and fell on her her ribs.
Then the specialist conjured the flamethrower.
SHIT.
It would look mad suspicious if Lucia's poltergeist were to see someone with Sofia's costume holding a flamethrower. Even someone as stupid as Lucia would be able to figure out that they had switched places then. She'd even know about Sofia's illusion magics by now from watching her pull that feint from earlier.
Sofia tried to get herself up and enchant the flamethrower to look like something that looked characteristic for her to use, like perhaps a mushroom or her water gun, but the specialist stomped her rubbery combat boot on Sofia's stomach and knocked the wind out of her.
And then she fired the flamethrower at her face.
There was nothing. The moisture in her skin evaporated into charred goo. Her skin and muscles disappeared as if peeled off her face, leaving only pieces of dried jerky that weren't big enough her bones.
Use your soul gem, said the specialist in her mind. Let it end faster.
Yes. End it. That'd be nice. But this was all the pain that Sofia could manage to dampen. Sofia could feel the despair in her mind, an infinitely long millipede, crawling around her brain with all of its little legs, swimming in her cranial fluid. Its gigantic mandibles dangling dangerously close to the piece of muscle.
It still fucking hurt. But it was the end.
But then, as if picked up by an invisible giant, the specialist flung off the ground like a rag doll. She stayed stationary in the air for seconds before being crashed into the planks at an astonishing force, leaving a black hole where the wood was supposed to be.
What? Sofia hesitated for a moment. Did she manage to overestimate Lucia's intelligence still? But it doesn't matter. This'll buy Sofia more time to escape, she'll find, find someone, and she'll blip off the radar. Live alone. Yes.
Sofia grabbed the two grief seeds left from her pocket (the other three seemed to have disappeared in the tussle) and pressed them all against her soul gem. She sighed in relief as black streams of grief osmosed out of it.
Now that the second batch of the terminations was about coming to an end. Each specialist is required to wear an invisible camera on their person during terminations, and it was my duty as an incubator to file through all of them and write reports to put in to the archive.
But first, I needed to check something.
I took a deep breath.
Filter.
Atop the stack of paper appeared a holographic pictogram of a rudimentary filter.
Completion result.
The purple question mark morphed into a green question mark.
Failure.
The green question mark morphed into a red x.
Done.
The red x flashed, and the system made a satisfying ding! sound. All the files that did not meet my criteria shimmered out of existence, leaving the remaining files hovering until they were reclaimed by preprogrammed augmented reality gravity.
There were four.
Four pieces of paper remained on the desk. Each confirms the beginning of the end.
Four was way, way too many terminations to be failing out of seventy. In fact, I've maybe had a total of four terminations fail since I was transferred to Earth.
And that's not even counting the ones that I've made mistakes on that still worked because of luck.
I quickly skimmed the four files. One case in China, two in the United States, and one in Guatemala. All extremely obvious strategic errors on my part. Strategic errors that any logical member of my species discern immediately. Anyone with half a brain takes a single look at this, I was completely screwed.I would be deemed unfitto continue incubatorial duties. Then, I would either be used as a labor unit or outright terminated. Probably the latter.
And then my mind switched back on and really, really processed the implication of the words.
I would be deemed unfit to continue incubatorial duties.
I would be used as a labor unit.
Or outright decommissioned.
I'm about to die, said the voice inside me.
"Decommissioned," I corrected with the official incubator terminology.
I'm about to DIE. No. PLEASE. PLEASE. THIS ISN'T MY FAULT. THIS ISN'T MY FAULT.
The internal fluids in my body rushed into my feet. The solid ground beneath me disappeared, and my soul dropped slipped right out its mortal coil and fell out of the world while my body, an empty husk of nothing but flesh, remained where I've left it, motionless, mouth slightly agape, no light in the eyes.
My soul was untethered from my body, like a puppet with its strings cut. But the puppet did not stop moving. The strings snapped together, knitting themselves into a ball of grotesquely complex yarn. It pulsed rhythmically, like a beating heart, oozing with instincts, fear, and irrationality.
The Voice. Its true face.
Somewhere within my head, the eldritch existence this ball of yarn represented existed, stealing nutrients from my body to keep itself alive, where it multiplied like a malignant tumor, not via mitosis but by assimilating my neurons. And soon it would replace me, and it would become me, and I will be no more.
Destroy. These words resonated down the strings and into the puppet. Destroy. Destroy.
Sharp claws protruded from my paw. The puppet let out an enraged guttural scream and slashed the four remaining pieces of paper to shreds - or I would have, if the pieces of papers were real and not just incorporeal representation of code projected into my retinas. Instead, my claws passed through them, and hit the next thing in line: My workstation.
I grabbed a random piece of office supply, my illumination device, and crushed it into shards in my hand. Searing chemilumninent goo poured out of the chamber and into my paw as shards of glass dug into my flesh, but I felt nothing- there were no pain receptors in this body. I threw the remnant of my lamp remained in my hand onto the floor and turned back to pick up something else-
I felt something cold trickle on to my scalp.
Your pulse was just measured at - Five hundred. Seventy. Five. Beats per A-23. Chemicals have been injected into your bloodstream to soothe. Should I call in medical to assist?
The anger dissipated as I've realized what I've done.
No, I told my PAIA (Personal Artificial Intelligence Assistant). There will be no need.
I kneeled down on the ground.
What happened has happened, I told myself. No use crying over spilled milk. That's one of the better humans sayings there were. It actually did make sense.
BLUNDERS DO NOT EXCUSE ANY FURTHER BLUNDERS, I surmised. MAKE THE BEST OF THIS SITUATION. It is the RATIONAL thing to do. Throwing a tantrum was IRRATIONAL. Breaking my illumination device HAS NOT FIXED ANY PROBLEMS.
Perhaps the most "reasonable doubty" of the failed terminations report Ω91-γ2, the termination report of C291287-CN, 车品佳. She was a new girl in a rural village that was somehow sustaining three magical girls. The girls there did not believe the "official termination sponsored by the incubator" spiel, and resisted the the specialist. Through several lapses of judgement on the her part, the three managed to fight her off. Luckily the specialist herself managed to escape. No casualties, at least.
There were several ways off the top of my head that this situation could have been avoided, but it was the most reasonable failure here, I supposed. This could maybe have been attributed to a momentary lapse of judgement, a slight imperfection in my mental calculus. After all, Kyubster hasn't messed up a termination in thirty years. Cut him some slack.
No, being in denial won't work either. I thought about the other times that my terminations have failed. The most recent one, back in the 1980s, involved an automobile hitting the specialist in question, giving the terminatee a decisive strategic advantage. Another one in the 1930s came when a specialist suffered a heart attack in the middle of the job.
Needless to say, any terminations like Ω91-γ2 will not be tolerated.
I looked at another one of the terminations. Report Ω134-γ3, there termination report of Sofia Robinson. This one was absolutely unforgivable. The girl slated for termination, S92-US (that's a way smaller number then I'm used to, girl has to have been alive for way too long) was a specialist herself, as her designation indicated. She had the ability to possess people, and when she possessed another contractee, she took their power. She was involved in the termination of a contractee in the first batch of terminations from two days ago. The power she got from that girl, C37872-US, gave her a decisive advantage in the fight that ensued.
That was one hell of a miscalculation. It was obvious that S92-US will sign up to terminate C37872-US given the geographical proximity of their territories. Because I didn't plan for this eventuality, we have another failed termination.
The third file was on C37872-US herself. Because S92-US has been marked for termination herself, it was pretty damn obvious that she won't be on board with terminating her anymore.
The final file, on C8182-GT, were similarly inexcusable. She managed to defeat her specialist by herself, in an epic battle that really kept me on the ropes. One that involved two car chases. But still a failure nonetheless.
No matter what I did, I wouldn't be able to explain away these four failed terminations, not to mention the bazillion other minor mistakes I've made in the other terminations that succeeded.
Now what, Kyubey? Use your brain. Use your brain. there has to be some way out of this situation. After all, there is a way out of every situation, no matter how dark and how hopeless. Remember world war II? Hitler? Holocaust? Remember how you managed to turn it into a net fucking profit by considering every chess piece and thinking rationally even with millions dying every day? In every situation, there is a way out. I just needed to find it. In every single god damn situation.
No.
Wait.
The termination of C37872-US was uploaded into the archives five days ago. The fact that I allowed S92-US's to terminate her was currently common knowledge that anyone could look up if they wanted.
So why wasn't I in handcuffs, mining platinum ore in some god forsaken failed planet in the asteroid belt?
I pulled up her termination file and checked its viewing history and found it absolutely barren. No one had ever seen it.
Because of course no one had seen it.
Because the rest of my species had a brain.
A perfectly optimized brain with no propensity to curiosity, entertainment, and selfishness. A brain that directed it to serve nothing but the collective. Nothing but to ensure optimal productivity, efficiency, and the maximum conservation of resources.
Why would anyone with this highly trained brain ever check random termination reports that had been marked successful in a useful but ultimately irrelevant planet, especially a termination report marked successful by me, a trustworthy incubator with no history whatsoever towards unproductiveness, inefficiency, or the pointless squandering of energy?
We are an advanced species. The individuals of our species are the smartest beings in the universe, and as thus will always find and undertake the most logical course of action. But given any situation, there can only be one such course of action. And it makes us predictable.
But it can't possibly be that easy, said the voice in my head. The smartest civilization in the world won't be that ignorant. What if there's some hidden code built into the archives that alerts someone when you change important things like termination statuses filed by specialists? Not even as a precaution that a human could infiltrate the system or something?
No. Us incubators would be able to see any reckless contractees wanting to sabotage the system from a mile away and take any necessary precautions against it, as the Machine Coders must assume. And if we thought anything was worth the home planet knowing, we could send a message in less than a second, speed of light be damned. There would be absolutely no reason to implement a system like that. In fact, I've never heard of a system anything like that implemented in any state-sanctioned software that I've ever used.
Right?
The voice ignored my perfectly valid reasoning and continued: Also, how likely do you think it is that every single member of our species is identical? Let me check... four thousand individuals are trigger their self termination protocols every single year due to faulty programming. What if there was some individuals whose self-termination protocols are broken?
No, that makes no sense. All individuals are identical, think identically, and are aware that everyone else is. That was the norm, the foundation of all of our principles and theories and the basis of everything that we do. Us incubators have only been so successful because all of us know what everyone else is thinking. To question a basic law like this was simply absurd.
Right?
Shut up, oh voice in my head. You are a stupid piece of stupid stupidity. I ought to chop off your tongue and feed it to Jeff Bezos, it'll be worth more in his trillionaire intestines then attached to that brain. Your entire existence if fueled by misconceptions and fallacies, and you make the world worse with every thought you think. Shut up, do us, no, the world, a favor, and shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up.
Despite my objective knowledge that the voice was just sabotaging me, trying to get me to fail again and again like how I failed my terminations, everything it said had bypassed on the filters in my subconscious and cemented themselves as absolute truths of the universe.
What am I supposed to do? My life is out of my control. My actions are subject to the whims of a human.
But no.
I absolutely refuse to be a slave to this monster. I am me, INC-10-EA, a servant to the forces of the planet of Malum, a representative of its perfection. NO WISH CAN CONTROL ME! There is nothing else to be said. Ignoring the lingering feeling of unease that radiated through my brain, I did it, I did it. I opened the five failed termination reports and overwrote all of their status to success.
[A/N] okay, so I was literally absolutely done and happy with this chapter when I wrote the story last week, and I still came out three whole days later than I expected. NO MORE DEADLINES! NO MORE FALSE PROMISES! Work on chapter 4 will start right away, and hopefully (NO PROMISES) I'll be able to push it out before summer comes along. I do plan on going with something resembling this kind of schedule, though; take months to write out two chapters at once, and release them both in succession. It seems like a fun idea.
I've proofread this chapter at least 3 times, but I'm sure that won't be enough. Expect minor edits pushed out for the next day or so.
Feel free to drop a review. Btw, if you see this story on AO3, it's fine, that's me.
Dolt, out.