Chapter Two
"N, please, trust me." V asked of him, her voice solid while her eye setting displayed her equal lack of comfort with the subject matter.
N panicked for a second at her presumption, and then returned to a more unsettled voice when he attempted to explain himself. "Nononono, V, I . . . it's not that I don't believe you, it's just . . ." His head turned away, just a little, enough for him to look down and the wind-blown snow instead.
"I don't want to either, N." She assured him, expression display switching to filled-in eyes for the sake of showing surety and confidence. "But it's the truth."
N returned to meeting her gaze, and held it, waiting. He didn't know what he was waiting for for the first second, but the longer he locked on her eyes, he realized the more confident he grew, the more willing to accept the reality presented to him. With his open-circle eyes switching to filled-in to match hers, he nodded.
So the four of them walked together across the frozen surface of the dead world. And as they traversed, N glanced over to the shortest of them. Though Uzi's eyes remained filled-in, her digital eyelids were down, removing the upper third of each. Dense as he might be . . . N could guess the reason. She had tried holding his hand while she was unconscious on the bus, she'd called him cute when she was a ghost witch crow in his brain, and he did enjoy hanging out with her, and finally really being able to help somebody (not that V or J ever needed any). He just . . . hadn't remembered his past, his and V's past . . . and had never known just how much V secretly cared about him all this time.
Oh, Biscuits! He was emotionally confused.
"Uzi . . ."
"What?" She looked over and up at him for a second, returning her gaze to the snow beneath them as blush lines formed on her visor, but her eyes themselves remained the same. "I'm fine."
N's digital eyelids lowered, and he couldn't immediately think of what to say. And though he couldn't see as she was ahead of him, V's eyelids actually positioned themselves similarly, although her visor her eyebrows slanted.
In Russian "Wait and see if we survive first. Then we can sit in a circle to talk about our feelings."
All three of them gave Doll a look, not that she really cared. V and Uzi bore one of similar aggravation and N's was, well, not as much, but still resembled the milder off-put eyes his display had normally had whenever V was being too mean.
Whether it was a legitimate inquiry or just to distract herself, Uzi responded to Doll. "Whatever, Miss overpowered OC. Are we even sure this thing you're going after is our angle on her?"
It was actually N who offered an alternative suggestion when Doll didn't answer, grabbing what he feared might be his last chance to attempt a more happy moment. "Oh oh! Maybe we blast her with the power of friendship like in those funny cartoons Uzi likes."
"It's called anime!" Uzi retorted with some embarrassed anger. "And that only happens like half of the time!"
.
.
Three stared across the ice at two.
Two disassembly drones and a worker at one edge the frozen-over lot, and a single disassembler and human near the other.
"Oh look," Uzi crossed her arms and mocked J once she saw it was indeed her, "it's Miss equity partnership again. Don't have some corpo board meeting to run your mouth at?"
A manga-style annoyance symbol blinked into existence on J's visor for a second before she collected herself, addressing her former fellow disassembly drones with her response instead of Uzi. "What can I say, effective drones were cloned more."
"NNNNNNNN !" Tessa interrupted the glare-down that otherwise would have followed, however briefly, between V and J, racing towards the friendliest of the former manor drones.
. . .
But she just as quickly found herself stopped before she could reach him. Instead, she was now standing inches from the end of the sword N had produced from his arm.
While Uzi and V both were locked on the figure with narrowed eyes, N's face was far more uncertain, unsettled, reluctant . . . caught in the realm of so absolutely wanting to Not believe what he'd been told, and what he knew was about to be confirmed.
"Hi, Te–Tessa," and his voice spoke just as much not wanting to do this as his expression did, "could–could you um, if it's really you, could you uh, you know, show us your face?" He did end with a little head tilt and a nervous smile. "Please?"
"One chance." V added her choice of words after his, and not as nicely.
Nothing. Just the surrounding blizzard.
Then the human lifted her finger to gently press the raised blade away. "Awww N, you know what I always–"
GUNSHOT
N and Uzi tensed, and he remained so, while she more immediately re-readied herself and made her eyes narrow again. N snapped his head to V, just for an instant, confirming that it was her that fired, before returning his gaze to what was in front of him before even half a second had passed.
Cracks encircled a bullet hole in the space suit's visor, and Tessa's head had fallen back . . . until it heaved back over to slump forward, just like a drone's would.
J had switched her own hands out for guns and raised them at V, but she stopped short of firing.
She'd been given a non-verbal command. The should-be-dead human had raised one its arms and held its hand up in a Wait gesture.
Now . . .
That made N start to shake a little. Uzi's eyes went open-circle. And V, hers stayed narrowed, and she kept one weapon trained on J, and the other on Tessa.
"Whoops! Hehe, sooo sorry about that N, rememberrrr," Tessa's voice glitched out and became that of someone equally familiar, "you di_didn't have to_see this."
The figure lifted its head back up, and the darkness behind its helmet glass was abruptly illuminated by the glow of yellow drone eyes.
Even V's mouth went open at what the light revealed inside.
There was Tessa's face . . . stretches and pieces of it covering over a poorly-concealed drone head underneath.
"He_llo, big brother." The thing waved at N, now moving much more uncannily as it took a step towards the three of them.
They took an equal step backwards away from it, just as they did with the next step it took, and the next, and the next.
"Li–little buddy?" Wholesome to his core, N still didn't want to believe what was in front of him, eye display set to that he usually had when he was hoping to wake up from a nightmare.
"It was_me, the whole_time." It confirmed, and even began narrating its own actions just like Cyn used to. "Giggle, I'm so_naughty."
N slowly nodded back, trying to keep a smile, because he was N, but he couldn't keep it from showing how wholesale unsettled he was. A pretty terrified a lot nod, were he to describe it. "Yeah, um, soooo, wanna . . . tell us why you're doing all of . . . everything, exactly?"
Cyn kept smiling as well, hers being of an entirely different, and opposite nature. "I learned ab_so_lutely, as per my o_riginal directive. I foll_owed, all paths_to their exponential conclusion. All things, resulted_in, an end, eventually." Another step forward, and another, head and eyes drifting this way and that, as if it was just musing to itself about everything. "Even the_universe, it_self, will fade away. Heat_death." It gave an amused shrug. "Why wait?"
"Oh BITE ME!" Uzi took the responsibility of responding to the thing. "Like there aren't centuries of Human reddit posts to read through if we wanted to hear that kind of nihilistic crap!"
Cyn tilted her head jarringly. "False. True. Brave_but, also naive." And in a process that even disgusted J for the briefest instant, Cyn caused her host's body to spasm as she formed out several additional appendages. "Easier to, assimilate_anyway."
Uzi chose to go the route of Not letting the anime villain finish its power-up. She'd collected enough of the freaking ninja stars N had occasionally used, so she pulled a pair from her backpack and threw them.
The two X's of Cyn's eyes shrunk with annoyance, and one crab-claw tentacle limb swatted the objects away. Then with no more warning she dug the same claw into the ice and threw herself at them, swinging another as she closed in.
N jolted at the suddenness of the lunge, and one fearful sweat drop froze on each side of his expression visor midway through their falling animation. He knocked Uzi back as best he could and raised his arm blade to block with its cutting edge.
Yellow flashed before the attack could connect, and the eldritch limb fell to the frozen ground, dissolving into organic sludge as N's head snapped over to see it had been V's cutting laser.
V's face now looked the most familiar it had in hours. All the normal intensity he'd been used to seeing from her for years was back, just without any of the former, fake sadistic insanity. But her face disappeared from N's view in an instant as she dashed in front of him with a single beat of her wings, switching to blade arms herself just in time to clash with J, who'd swooped in to push her back.
The two met with an X of swords which they broke immediately and began trading blade strikes. For the sake of mobility and power, their fight quickly went into the air.
"You little Narc!" V managed to time her wings perfectly, catching J's blades in her metallic feathers. She threw her wings open again to bring J's arms apart and lifted both legs to land a swift kick to her former teammate's face.
J fired off a pair of rockets as she was sent back which V promptly dodged.
"Senior, Informant." She insisted as her job description.
But V was beyond having none of it. "She's wearing Tessa's SKIN!"
J's expression visor lowered her eyebrows for annoyance . . . but it clashed with the wide, dot-in-circle eyes she couldn't avoid displaying. "I can see that MYSELF!" She shouted back as the two clashed again.
N meanwhile had dodged a number of swings Cyn had playfully taken at him with Tessa's sword, and to Uzi's annoyed protest, he'd also just grabbed and yeeted her out of the way of an attempted surprise crab-claw-tentacle attack.
The thing attacking them not helping its case by verbally announcing in its stilted voice. "Sneaky, grab!"
"Swish_slash!" It narrated itself once more as it took another sword swing.
N struck the ancient blade with his wing, hoping to knock it out of Cyn's hand at least.
But instead she used the twisting momentum to carry a fresh claw-arm appendage in for a strike.
N's other wing drew in to shield him, but the incoming attack never landed.
Fake Tessa had been abruptly struck hard from behind, getting knocked forward and rolling up and over N's shielding wing.
N leapt away with the opportunity, seeing V and J fighting up above, and seeing the sourceless, bright violet light in front of Uzi's hand forming the Solver symbol.
She'd used it to throw a piece of large metal scrap and knocked Cyn down. Now, Uzi threw her gaze elsewhere across their frozen surroundings. Doll emerged into view, two-finger saluting from a distance as she jumped into the wide opening that led down to the facility. Uzi gave her a nod in the same slow motion.
Above them, the two battling disassembly drones had parted for a second.
"Small businesses never last, V." J produced the same amount of superiority and condescension she normally did, but as much as she made sound in-line with normal self . . . it was still off. She was forcing it. "You should've learned to read the market indicators!"
V outflew the automatic gunfire J tried to shred her with, and fired a missile off at her in return.
On the ground, Cyn stood back up, her helmet having been knocked off. She gave N and Uzi a sinister smile and a wave as they now got a better look. Her drone neck was completely exposed, and now only her face and scalp still had some of Tessa's skin stretched over them, enough to still bury the little drone's actual face, and to keep Tessa's hair attached.
Uzi solver-grabbed a sharper piece of scrap metal and attempted to send it flying their opponent's way before–
–it fell to the ground.
And Uzi fell to her knees, clutching her head.
N turned to her with alarm, as did V, her eyes going dot-in-circle as well during the quick look she got after briefly throwing J off.
The solver symbol was flickering rapidly, glitching out on Uzi's visor. It stayed over one eye, not taking over the entire display like when she had gone feral, and equally different from then as well . . . it kept colour-glitching from her normal violet over to yellow.
Uzi managed to lift her head up to see that thing staring at her, smiling with its pointed robo-teeth.
Alarm turned to impatient fury when V swung her head back to J again.
J had raised a slicing laser and was about to fire, but instantly found one of V's conical feet jammed into the barrel.
V spun to heave her away in a kicking motion, but J still managed to fire, and it cost each of them the limb they had involved. V kept the spin and threw out her wings. Their feathers' bladed edges slicing J's other arm off and the full impact of the wings themselves sending J crashing into the side of an old building.
J used her wings to pull herself back out as V raced down to N and Uzi, but she made less than a second of progress before her digital eyes blinked at the sight of a former human ground vehicle hurling through the air straight into her face. It dug into the building's side, crushing her head and armless shoulders and leaving just a limp disassembly drone torso and legs to hang underneath it.
V hovered just beside N, with a no longer crippled Uzi behind them both. The teen's solver eye was no longer glitching, and Cyn was no longer looking at her.
Their enemy had turned her attention to the now temporarily incapacitated J, with an expression that read as bored disappointment.
Two red solver symbols appeared and closed in around a pair of beams still holding up another building, contracting inward quickly but with difficulty.
They immediately vanished when Cyn flashed her own symbol on visor's left eye, throwing her gaze off toward the break in the ice that led down to the facilities below. Doll had apparently re-emerged, and now was being glitch-crippled just like Uzi had been a moment before.
But enough had been done; the beams had been crushed thin enough, and one side of the ice-laden structure could no longer support the other. It leaned its way over and fell, with Cyn not even moving out of the way. She just stood there and let it.
After the initial gust of snow from the impact had cleared enough, V looked from Uzi to N. "Grab her." She told N, with him obeying without question. Even in their situation, Uzi still protested, but they grabbed her and took off just the same, racing over to the wide opening in the ground. V grabbed Doll as they reached the ledge, and she and N dove into the crevasse, carrying their passengers as they weaved between and around industrial pipes, cables, walkways and all else until they finally spotted an entrance to some sort of interior they could swoop into.
"You weren't supposed to come back up!" V pointed at the group's Russian member after they were all inside.
"Thanks for that though." N came up beside her to happy-counter her intensity. "Really appreciate it." He even threw a prodding, though still encouraging smile V's way, hoping naively that maybe she would say thankyou as well but being just as happy when she folded her arms and calmed her eye display.
"Yeah," Uzi pushed the two tall drones aside to pop out from between them, "thanks, but also why?"
Doll's unique red oval eyes rolled about her visor display. In Russian "Maybe it was the Magic of Friendship."
V and Uzi were united in the annoyance their expression displays immediately showed, but N, despite the danger they were still in, suddenly had an even happier face than he had a second ago.
"New buddy!"
.
.
Back on the surface, only a few seconds after those four had gone down, a perfectly round opening was abruptly made through the side of the fallen building by a dead-black circle that emerged from within and then vanished. Cyn emerged from the cylindrical tunnel she'd cut through the rubble, spacesuit now shredded and falling away, leaving her now in Tessa's dress, whose colour had long since faded.
With the same bored disappointment as before, she looked up to where J's armless body hung, head and shoulders crushed and pinned into the wall by the car Doll had thrown. With far less effort, Cyn solver-grabbed the car and removed it, flinging it far off into the blizzard. And with nothing pinning or obstructing it anymore, J's body dropped down to the ground and began to regenerate.