Chapter Four
V had to shut her eyes. She had to mode-switch, after she looked away from the absent elevator. When she turned her head to face the Cyn-puppetted Doll, she reopened her eyes, which were still unfilled circles on her display, though they were now compressed by descending eyebrow lines.
"Come on you little red-eyed freak!"
Another glitch on Doll's visor came, but it was still Cyn who answered. "You do_your job, and, I, leave_you and N alone."
V was afraid. She always had been. But she wasn't yielding to that now. "Seriously? After all your overpowered crap, Doll?"
"Right V?" Cyn continued, though another brief glitch came and went, solver symbol appearing in place of one eye for a second, flickering between yellow and red.
"What happened to your parents?" V ignored Cyn.
And Cyn ignored the fact she was talking past her. "Bad job, V."
"You're seriously so pathetic you can't even fight her long enough to kill me yourself!?"
A yellow solver appeared and whirled in Doll's hand.
And then it vanished.
One of her legs repeated the process of undertaking and then undoing the next step Cyn intended Doll to take.
"What–wha–at–is–"
Sparks burst from Doll's head and her visor cracked. A broken visage of the solver symbol sputtered in and out of existence in place of her right eye, jolting so violently between colours.
Red. Yellow. Red. Yellow. Red. Yellow. Red.
Red took hold, yellow flickering in and vanishing every half second.
Doll stood still and rigid, glaring ahead with all the intensity in the universe, and with her solver eye ever flickering. The thinnest lines of smoke rose from her expression visor, following the erasure of the cracks as the glass regenerated itself. Her head kept trying to initiate sudden, jerking motions, but she managed to hold it nearly still.
The symbol kept flickering, but as another few seconds passed, it ceased appearing yellow, not even for a single frame. Now instead it was just flickering in and out of existence, her display constantly reverting to showing her right eye.
Eventually she muttered with clenched fists. In Russian. "You can't pull someone into the void if they're already empty inside."
In what she presumed to be her dying moments, V was impressed with the little freak she'd despised previously. Doll . . . was actually willing to openly mock Cyn.
Whether Cyn gave up or not, Doll's eyes occupied her visor as they should, and their focus fell on V. More and more of her eyes' upper halves went dark, as steeply slanted lines descended down over them.
In Russian. "I hate you." In the end, digital eyes had a hard limit on what they could display, and Doll had absolutely pressed them to it. In Russian. "I hate you, I hate you more than anything!"
She threw her hand out, red solver appearing and spinning at her fingertips. The symbol that returned to her eye tried to flicker yellow again, but Doll would not allow it.
V's own display had narrowed her eyes as well . . . but she couldn't avoid her own eyebrow lines angling more gently, and even curving away.
. . .
"Better to die to you."
. . .
. . .
Cyn either truly gave up, or Doll had completely won. The solver symbol replacing her eye never flickered. No hint of yellow came.
She grit her teeth, and fury angled down over her other eye, as the hand she held out contracted into a fist. And her fist quivered, shaking . . . but not from fighting Cyn.
V let single lines replace her eyes, shutting down her visual feed.
N . . .
Doll's fist opened and she threw her hand aside, solver spinning away and red light flashing around V as a result.
Everything that had impaled V to the wall flew out, leaving her to fall to the floor.
V held a quick hand to the holes the rebar had left in her lower torso, trying to keep oil from leaking out until the regeneration started. She didn't wait for it to start before rising to her feet, however. Clutching her stomach with her working arm while the other hung limp, V stood up, eyes set to open circles and mouth already open from recovery breathing.
Doll broke their eye contact, needing to face away.
In Russian. "I'm not taking you away from them."
.
.
J sat with legs crossed and arms folded, waiting. The one thing she managed well enough, as her boss had told her.
"'She's not–'"
J forced her reflexive thought to stop as abruptly as she could. Cyn could see them, if she chose to. But luckily she'd been preoccupied.
While J sat on the hood of some snow-buried vehicle, Cyn had been lying at the edge of the crevasse. On her stomach, hands propping up her head and feet kicking playfully in the air. J knew she was puppeting someone, or at least had been. The sudden end to the whimsical feet-kicking was a clear indicator that whatever Cyn was doing was over, and the displeased look J caught on the thing's face as it stood up was an even clearer indicator that things had not ended the way Cyn wanted.
"J."
J stood up straight when the thing spoke her name.
"You_might," its head spun around to face her, "get_another chance after all."
J didn't flinch when it teleported over to her, but her eyes did unfill.
"Try not to_be too pathetic this_time." Cyn warned. "I'd hate to_have to give you a bad, quarterly performance_review."
There was nothing J could do. She really believed that. "Yes, boss."
.
.
The impact threw them both from the elevator, saving them from being crushed by the shaft collapsing on top of it after. N pushed himself up from the floor more easily, but the dust left both of them coughing.
Hazard Message:
Power Cell Filter Obstructed
N hadn't seen such a message since the manor, he and the others had been running on whatever power Cyn wirelessly transferred to them somehow.
There was no time to unpack that.
He screamed V's name once he had coughed himself clear . . . and stared at the settling elevator shaft rubble blocking any attempt to return.
He stared with unfilled eyes, and then unsettled ones, and then with unique line curves accompanying them . . . and then with an entire expression display devoid of any attachment to surety or belief in anything. His body started to shake, as Uzi finally managed to pick up her head to see. N's body shook, his face had lost all metaphorical hinges, and the lines on his visor went bold as he threw a stiff rocket launcher arm straight out.
Missile!
Missile!
Missile! Missile! Missile! Missile! MISSILE! MISSILE!
He was anchored there, trembling, pivoting this way and that, recoil nudging him a few degrees one way and then the other.
Every explosion blew some of the rubble away, and every explosion shook the unfurnished tunnel the elevator had brought them down to.
Uzi remained on the ground, getting only to her knees before the tremors reverberating about her became too much for her to stand completely.
"N!"
Blast after blast, supporting struts were growing rickety, and chunks of the tunnel's walls and ceiling were starting to fall around them.
"N!" She screamed again, jumping from the ground into a few stumbling steps. They were just enough to get her over to him. And she was immediately thrown back by the mere action of him spinning around.
N's face stayed in its incomparable state for a moment, but finally he blinked, and his eyes darted about before settling on his friend. "Uzi?" He had to regather, after being actually gone. But that process was rapid, and ended with him lunging over to the caved-in shaft with his disassembler hands out, tearing desperately at the rocks. "Uzi! Help me!"
She stepped back, trying to say something, but . . .
"I . . ."
"UZI!" N now had the same face as before, with his mind actually being present. "IT'S V!"
Another step back. She did lift up her hand, only settling her eyes on it nervously. For the sake of the brokenly desperate person in front of her, she opened her hand and tried.
But the symbol that took the place of her right eye flickered for as long as it lasted. Yellow replaced violet numerous times before she ceased it altogether, and her other eye having its place taken for the briefest instant by a message string they both saw, her from inside, him from outside.
Let Me In
Let Me In
Let Me In
Let Me In
Uzi didn't want to see his reaction. She was . . . afraid of his reaction.
But she had to shake her head.
. . .
N said nothing
. . .
He just broke eye contact after a moment and turned away to stare at nothing.
. . .
"N . . ." She wasn't supposed to be afraid to speak to him. She didn't want to have to say what she needed to either. "N . . . we–"
"We have to go." He . . . agreed. N agreed. Deterministic and hollow N, if that was now a thing that could exist.
This place made about as much sense as the rest of the complex. The humans that designed the facility must have lost the last of their minds. They'd traversed through offices and cubicles, to end up in hotel-esque hallways, to having fallen down the secret elevator which led to this final section. It began as rock tunnels reminiscent of ancient hand-dug mines from over a millennium ago, and eventually opened up into a massive cavern, complete with huge stalagmites rising from the ground and everything. A primary path seemed to run uphill from the wall they'd exited towards the cavern's other side, at which sat a large gothic building that best resembled a cathedral.
"This perfectly fits and isn't creepy at all." Uzi regretted making a normal remark immediately, but at least when she looked over at N he didn't react to it; not negatively, not at all.
They pushed open the doors, cautiously entering the old place. A few humans in different hazmat suits laid dead here and there, collapsed in corners or at the base of walls as if they'd been thrown against them.
"What are we looking for?" N was . . . being coldly serious. He wasn't really capable of it, but asking an objective-related question while he was . . . broken, it brought him the closest he'd ever sounded.
"Uhhh, Mitchel?" She answered the only specific detail she'd gotten from Doll, looking around then at the deceased. "I think he's one of . . ." She ended just awkwardly pointing toward some of the human bodies.
N looked as well, and just gave a more grim nod in response.
Each of them stepped over to a different long-dead human, each falling into the same approach of slower steps the closer they got. Uzi held a setting of mixed nerves and discomfort on her expression display, and N's allowing some 2nd-hand remorse to filter through. One by one, they checked the name badge on each person, both ending up at the last one, and the only body that had not been ragdolled. They looked instead as if they had simply sat down on the floor with their back against the desk. The pinned badge on their hazmat suit read "Dr Chambers"
Equally unsure of what to do or look for now, Uzi and N looked to each other. Regret shaped its way into the arrangement of Uzi's expression, and she partly raised her shoulders and hands.
N looked around, fingers curling inward to the palm of an uncertain hand he began lifting up to chest level. His open eye circles widened, then retracted to normal, and he acted on the only idea he could come up with. It was a very N idea, and might have even come with a joke or a more mood-lightening tone of voice . . . were it not for the new state of reality he believed himself to be in.
"Mitchel?" He asked aloud.
And to their surprise, there was a dull, responding beep.
It had come from a computer right next to them, and was followed a second later by the distinct sound of a CRT monitor turning on beside it. A single blinking line became visible on the screen, as if waiting for text to be entered, which then proceeded to spell out rapid lines of code. It culminated in a video recording being played, a recording of the same supposed Dr Chambers who sat calmly dead on the floor next to them.
"A-a-a-a-alright, recording."
It became apparent immediately the person had been shivering when recording the video. And although they couldn't see the movements of his mouth or jaw behind his hazmat mask, N and Uzi's audio sensors detected a sound they identified as human teeth chattering. Uzi had heard it plenty in movies and anime, and N recalled Tessa being in such a state when she'd been cold a few times, but never to this severity.
"Uh, who, wh-wh-wh-whoever sees this, ah, you need to find Yeva or N-n-no-no-Nori." The dead man held up an unsteady pair of lab subject badges with his tremoring hand, one bearing the number 02 and image of Uzi's mother, and the other the number 48 with a picture of Doll's mother.
"Get them, or te-t-t-t-tell them I read through everything like Yeva asked, a-a-a-all of D-d-dr Ridley's notes." Mitchel traded the photo badges for a selection of pages torn from a notebook, hands ever shaking. "Uh, u-u-u-uh she wrote installing the patch would-uld-uld only, ah, only block out the solver, n-n-not get rid of it. The, she calls it, The Entity? Sssshhh-she says The Entity is still out there."
Sheet by shaky sheet, the man showed the notes and quickly-drawn diagrams of the doctor's hypothesis.
"It-i-i-i-t looks like she says, uh, you, y-y-you have to get to the original host. Inject the, th-th-thhhhhe patch into its qa-qa-qa-quantum processor core. That's," he had to pause for a brief, violent shudder before reverting to normal shivering, "that's the only way to get rid of it. The Entity."
He raised a quivering piece of paper with a drone core drawing, and arrows pointing out to surrounding drone stick figures.
"The p-p-p-p-patch will filter out to e-e-ev-everyone else. I uh," Mitchel managed to force his shivering to stop for just a second, just enough to do a palms-up shrug, "ah, d-d-d-don't know wh-h-h-who the original host is. Ah, ssss-s-s-sorry I couldn't be more useful." The man went from shivering to horrendously shuddering one more time. "It's already too cold for me."
.
.
The two girls had walked in silence ever since one freed the other. The secret elevator shaft had caved in, but apparently, there must be another, or at least some other way down. Doll must either know or believe so, V had to assume, but she was not exactly about to ask. Her puncture injuries had since regenerated, so she was no longer having to hold herself, at least not physically.
A rumble passed through the structure of everything around them, shaking them with it. It seemed to come from somewhere nearby, and was accompanied by the sound of rock and earth boring open. Both girls gave each other a quick look, V switching her hands out for swords and Doll readying a solver at her right hand. They advanced toward the sound's origin, hearing J's voice soon enough.
"Oh Veeeeeeee?"
V's eyes narrowed on her display immediately, switching her swords out for disassembler hands. "Go on." She threw her head in the direction she and Doll were originally going. "Just," stopping after a couple steps towards J, she made deliberate open-circle eye contact with Doll, "let N know that I'm alive."
Doll didn't say anything. She held V's gaze for a second, and though her eyes underwent no expression change, she eventually gave a single nod before they parted ways.
V found J in a nearby open lobby, one which had recently seen a new tunnel forced into existence from its ceiling up to the surface.
"There you are." J hopped down from a hanging ceiling light, landing with her hands on her hips in an attempted authoritative stance. "I think there's terms of litigation that need to be renegotiated without any interference."
She received machine gun fire from V as a response, having to deploy and shield herself with a wing for the second it lasted.
"I've had enough of your pathetic front, J!" V opened her own wings, propelling herself at J. Her opponent tried to swing her own wing at her as she closed in, but V retracted hers at the last second and dropped to slide under the horizontal swing. She struck both of J's legs as she slid beneath and past her, but J managed to roll mid-air and land upright on her feet again, just as V rose to hers at the end of her slide.
"It's not a Front!" J bitterly yelled back.
They clashed and traded sword strikes, each always deflecting the other. But soon enough V switched out for disassembler hands and grabbed both of J's blades, holding them bent in an X and keeping them pressed away with strength of will alone.
"Oh give it up!" V continued refusing to acknowledge her former friend's mask. "Haven't you had enough Lying to Yourself!?"
J gave up trying to out strength V and flipped her legs up to deliver a dual kick instead. Her eyes had made it all the way to dot-in-circle mode, and her visor kept fluctuating between displaying unhinging lines and not doing so.
"No matter how many corporate buzzwords you spew," V pressed the truth, "you're never going to convince yourself you want to work for that THING!"
Agitation lines appeared above the corner of one of J's eyes, and her unhinging lines began to stay in place. "Grow UP, V!" She fired off a missile, which V caught in a disassembler hand and spun to throw right back at her. J dodged and brought her swords back out as V took the opportunity to charge in again. "There's no real world where what you WANT actually matters!"
Ferocity increased from both sides as swords clashed again and again.
"Yeah," V responded more calmly, without yelling, but also without any loss of intensity, "I fell for that too."
V darted her tail syringe over her shoulder towards J's torso, forcing J to break their blade lock and twist out of the way, only to find V's knee following to smash into her stomach, and the leading edge of V's wing following to smash hard into J's face.
"It doesn't change anything, J." V waited for J to pry herself out of the wall she'd been sent cratering into. "You're the one who cared about Tessa the most!"
"OF COURSE I WAS!"
J stood still. She'd been told to stand still. Assimov compelled her to stand still.
"I didn't say she can't do the job, I said I'm sick of the attitude." The JCJenson asset manager spoke of her nearby.
"I got it." The technician responded. "Don't worry, replacement will be a plain-skull."
The desperation, the involuntary compulsion to tremble pushed her beyond any limits of feeling she'd ever understood. Tear drops her visor could not display filled the inside of her vision instead.
Why . . .
The technician simply walked over to her, raised a command signal gun to the side of J's head.
Please . . .
. . . at least let her scream . . .
Four rapid beeps.
And J ended.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Nothing.
But she came back.
She existed again.
Her vision reactivated, revealing the early teen bedroom around her.
"Heya girrrrl!" The voice was from a sweet human teenager checking J's visor display. "Name's Tessa."
J actually knocked V back, and left her shielding herself with a wing as J unloaded a machine gun arm. But her rate of fire was inconsistent, and her aim was drifting off. An exclamation point inside a triangle kept blinking on and off her visor, trying to replace her left eye.
"Nah, come on," Tessa encouraged her, "enough with the business bun. You can have it however you want!"
J looked from the teen girl to the hairstyle selections catalog, perusing with uncertainty. She was going to disappoint again. She would disappoint, and once she disappointed . . . she was just going to end.
"Um, I like these?" She still picked one, genuinely hoping the choice would please her new owner.
Tessa leaned in to see the page. "I think you're right J," she agreed, looking from J to the pig tails hairstyle photo and back. "Those are definitely You! Really screams: Corporate Boardroom Upper Management." She even played it up with the kind of terminology the former business assistant drone used.
J smiled. She got to smile instead of flinch.
She'd lost the upper hand she'd gained for those few seconds before. The error messaging was rapidly growing frequent, and was starting to stifle J's abilities as a combatant. She only just ducked beneath a wing swipe from V, and when she tried to slice V's lower legs with her sword in response, J only found V's feet had already left the ground and were now impacting against her head.
"Free! We're actually freeeee!" Tessa spun in place, briefly tossing her hands into the air. "This is SO rare! They almost NEVER leave!"
J was happy for her boss, her friend. Her only friend, she would insist, no matter how much Tessa herself insisted J was friends with those other two. She was also happy for own sake as well; it wasn't as if J liked Tessa's parents any more than she did.
"You know what this means…" Tessa led into the declaration. "Girls night!"
While a nervous V maid looked shyly curious, J let her head tilt slightly aside with a "meh" eyebrow line raise.
Tessa shifted course just fine, even rolling out finger guns with her rebranding of her prior words. "Orrrrrr, boss-babes' night."
THAT was more fitting. That, J granted a nod and approving expression to.
"Um . . ." V, that new maid drone with the huge glasses actually spoke up, "what's a . . . Boss Babe?"
J and Tessa just shared a knowing smirk.
J went tumbling across the floor, forcing herself back up as best she could. She kept remembering. She couldn't stop herself. And that was bringing about so many error messages one after another on her interior vision. Swords up, she tried to block V, but her vision was glitching, and her movements were growing staggered.
It was . . . one of the rare moments when Tessa just broke.
And J just sat there on the rocking horse, listening like she'd learned to, like Tessa had told her was all she just wanted someone to do.
"I wanna go to Earth, J! The sky's blue instead of stupid yellow, and the clouds are white and puffy, and there's a billion different animals instead of just these stupid crows, and there's mountains and flower fields and oceans and instead of the whole planet being this stinking swamp, and there's actual laws against hititng kids because MY PARENTS AREN'T THE PLANET'S ASSET MANAGERS!"
Yellow lights kept switching to red and back. Each of the five on J's head was colour-shifting and then reverting, one for a second, another for two, another blinking between the two colours in rapid succession.
She couldn't aim. She'd held her arm out and fired a rocket, but V was nowhere close to where J sent it. And when she tried to rotate herself to correct that fact . . . she found her legs buckling under her instead. First collapsing to her knees, and then falling over onto her side, the error symbol flashed in place of one eye over and over again as the same message was shown to her in her own sight.
Error!
Retrieved memories incompatible with current Admin
.
.
N looked at the patch installer Uzi had placed in his hands, just as uncomfortably as Uzi did.
"I'm sorry." She was keeping her frustration with her situational inability away, for his sake. "You know what will happen if I try to help."
He lifted his eyes back up. Solid eyes now, filled-in eyes, but ones his visor still showed with down-curving eyelids.
Doubt. Doubt in the only person he allowed himself to doubt.
"I . . ." He closed his hand around the thing, and the certainty of failure in his eyes was joined by the slowest, slightest shaking of his head. "I don't really think–"
"You can, N." She insisted. "You've fought awesome on your own before."
"We all beat Doll together!" He counter-insisted. "And V . . ." he gripped the object even tighter, "you know when I fought V she was holding back."
Now, knowing the truth, Uzi knew she couldn't argue that point. She tried to think. There had to be something to say. He needed to fight. He was the only one left who could now.
"Did you think we would win?" She asked. "Back when you did your cringe-worthy heel turn, and we fought J and V. Did you think we were gonna win?"
N blinked, and his eyes looked down and away briefly. "Ah–I don't really remember thinking it through too much."
It would have been a smirk on Uzi's face, at least a mild one, were it not for the position of things now. But the fact she was close to one was still visible. "So you're saying it didn't matter and you just did it because you knew it was right anyway?" She more told or reminded him rather than asked.
He was still just as crestfallen and doubtful, but his eyelid lines shifted their angle to show he did acknowledge what she was saying.
Eventually, he reformulated his expression to at least look more ready, and gave a single nod.
"N?"
. . .
. . . it was V's voice.
. . .
"N?"
. . .
"N? Please, N, you have to be alright."
It left N frozen, only his eyes moving, quivering on his expression display.
They heard footsteps just outside the tall doors they'd left ajar. Uzi grabbed ahold of N's arm, just in time to keep him from actually turning away.
"Trap?" She displayed the word on her visor.
It made him visibly consider, and his eyes shift for an instant before contracting . . . internally suffering the loss a second time.
Uzi watched her friend's expression bolden, and creep rapidly into unhinged territory. She knew . . . she knew it wasn't V, but if it was . . .
She raised a wait hand in front of N, and stepped out into V's view.
"Uzi?" V asked immediately, all concern and zero suspicion. "Is N ok?"
"Yeah, he's fine." Uzi answered. "We have to fix the McGuffin thing we came to find so he flew back up to the surface to grab the stuff we need."
"Oh?" V sounded initially disappointed . . . and then the voice shift came. "Guess it's_just you, and me then."
A missile went flying towards Cyn, sent from an N with an expression that did not belong on him. He wasn't made to be angry, not really, nor resentful, nor just . . . un-anchored.
A disassembly drone X had even taken the place of one of his eyes.
The missile had been caught by a crab claw tentacle, which protruded from V whose form now glitched out and reverted to the being it had been all along.
"N?" Cyn narrowed her thin X eyes as she took offense, tossing the missile out the door behind her. "It's not nice to_play tricks, big brother."
Uzi shut her eyes for an instant and pursed her lips, opening them again just as she threw out a hand with a solver symbol appearing with it. She was instantly forced into a cringe and sputtering of different solver colours on her visor . . . just like they expected.
Cyn was just as immediately forced to break off her action when N sliced two cutting lasers across the same horizontal plane. It would have been a decapitation, had Cyn not bent unnaturally backwards to avoid as much. She threw Tessa's old sword as her body snapped back up straight, and caught it again as she teleported past N who predictably dodged it.
Uzi pushed through her recovery state just enough to throw her last pair of ninja stars, forcing Cyn to deflect them, with the sound alerting N she was now behind him.
N spun into an immediate missile launch.
Cyn teleported away.
N whirled in place, sighting her reappearance just in time to block her swing with his sword arm. But he found himself suddenly being pulled by his leg, seeing a crab claw having latched onto it.
She smashed him through some of the lingering computers before lifting him up by her selected tentacle claw and dangling him upside down. To her surprise though, he heaved his torso upward to bring his captive leg within reach.
He sliced his own leg through to free himself, and had already switched his other hand to a machine gun, firing as he fell down.
Her yellow solver appeared and deflected the incoming ammunition, and N deployed his wings to right himself before landing, keeping himself just off the ground while he waited for regeneration.
Cyn did not wait, however, and instead cocked her head horrifically to one side just for the sake of it before lunging, another pair of tentacles sprouting into existence as she did.
A flash of purple hurled a computer monitor at her.
She smashed it with an eldritch appendage and threw an intolerant glare at Uzi, crippling her with a Callback Ping again just as she'd finished attempting another solver motion.
But Uzi smirked instead of cringed. The one extra motion she'd managed had been to solver the two ninja stars she'd thrown before. And though her solver was cut by her paralysis, the two objects still had the moment it had imparted on them, and they came from where Cyn wasn't looking.
Two tentacles were sliced from her in the same instant she was knocked back and down by N scoring a hard raking blow to her face with a finger-blade disassembler hand.
A rocket followed Cyn and detonated just after she hit the floor. But she'd teleported out of harm, of course, now standing on a nearby desk . . . Tessa's face having been struck from hers, hair and all, leaving Cyn's own robo-child face completely exposed.
Though the X over N's one eye remained, the other eye went open-circle for just a moment. The actual direct sight of his little buddy for the first time in . . .
"Nice to_see you again, too." It mocked.
N's leg regenerated, right in time with his regular eye returning to fury.
He threw a desk at her.
She solvered it in half.
He'd flown at her just behind it, catching her sword in his disassembler hands when she swung and bringing his tail syringe in for a strike.
She teleported away.
He kicked off of the wall she'd been up against, and beat his wings in a super-propulsion motion, using the speed to make an impact landing in front of her when she reappeared.
The proximity force of his landing knocked her from her feet, but she sprouted tentacles again and used them to turn her knockback into a backflip, landing in a squat on the ledge of one of the support columns, the X's of her eyes shrinking in consideration while she gave a sinister smile.
Cyn's fingers snapped, and spherical void of blackness appeared beside her hand, accompanied by a floating yellow box label of [ Null ]
Even without knowing what it was, N had the instinct enough to wing-dash out of the way when Cyn threw it.
It struck the floor, instantly un-existing at least several hundred meters of rock below, leaving a perfectly round tunnel the width of a car.
The same repeated several times over, with her seeming to just toss them playfully, gleefully watching N just barely avoid them.
The moment came where she would have reached double-digits . . . but she abruptly found herself unable to throw.
The [ Null ] was stalled, and the solver aura around it was a failing red, occasionally flickering to and between yellow and violet. The floating label itself glitched until it settled on [ Canceled ] , and the whole thing disappeared.
Cyn had been ignoring Uzi, long enough for Uzi to recover again, and, to try something. Mouth open in the smallest, angry circle, and X eyes narrowing at the worker drone, Cyn failed to hide the reality that she'd been caught off guard. And in her anger, she poured her full focus into glitching the teenager.
Solver symbols, colour changes, even static lines waved across Uzi's visor, and she nearly fell to the ground.
But Cyn wasn't given the time. She had to throw her head back to dodge a jab from N's tail, and then teleport out as she saw she was leaning back right towards a cutting laser he was bringing up.
N returned to the ground quickly, waiting to see her reappear.
She was blinking in and out, one place after another, as if she could end up anywhere. N threw his head in every direction, waiting, trying, readying . . . and then he caught the quickest glimpse of Uzi, who threw her thumb back while her visor flickered and sparked, displaying the word Behind! for a fraction of a second.
He extended his wings straight out backwards, just in time to feel Cyn's right arm come into existence trapped between the metal feathers of one, and her left arm caught by those of the other.
Reverse upswing!
He'd leaned forward, allowing his sword arms to go further upwards behind him when he sent them back.
Uzi smirked through the recovering pain, and N spun around to see what she saw: an unsettled expression on Cyn's face, no matter how quickly she forced it to become one of anger.
Her arms, and Tessa's with them, had fallen to the floor.
New drone ones began quickly regenerating in their place . . . but with no more human disguise to them.
"That_was, not_nice . . . big brother."
Multiple clawed tentacle appendages sprang into existence, all surging toward N.
But then they were un-existed just as suddenly by a powerful green energy beam that came blasting from the side, accompanied by a familiar atom-tearing sound.
"Yo! Lay off N&m's!" Thad yelled, holding a now-expended photon-converger rifle.
Lizzy was beside him raising her ready weapon. "Ew. Seriously girl, tentacles have NEVER been trending."
"Hahaha, nice shot young man." Khan complimented Thad as he entered what remained of the building as well, tossing the teenager a fresh weapon charge to reload.
Cyn's eye X's were twitching, overloaded with annoyance and disgust. "Playtime's, over." She blinked out, teleporting atop one of the remaining walls, then up to a stalactite hanging from the cavern ceiling, and then finally tentacle-climbing into and up the same null-made tunnel she had apparently come down through.
The three new arrivals exchanged questioning looks with each other, though a fourth new voice spoke up to complain before they said anything.
In Russian. "Great. Now she'll assume her Final Form or whatever."
The sight of the four of them, and primarily the absence of Cyn, led N's expression visor to finally return to showing both normal eyes. He replaced his weapons with normal hands, and as the prior battle N fury removed itself from his face . . . but the broken sadness from before returned quickly enough.
"Dad?!" Uzi ran by in a level of disbelief, and briefly expressed joy, actually hugging her only parent for a second before she stepped back to await an explanation.
"Yes, sorry it took us some time to get down here and all," he apologized for more than just the delay, "buuut I figured if saving you once might (probably not) make up for leaving you for dead, even so, I'd still have all those times you said it as an edgy teen hyperbole to make up for."
Uzi's eyes became open circles while she blinked, and then filled back in as her eyelid lines slowly lowered, and for the first time in . . . appreciation blush lines were displayed on her face.
While Khan and Thad spoke with Uzi, Lizzy and Doll's attention went to N, who's eyes were on Doll.
The question was simple, and it was obvious. N also didn't have to ask it.
In Russian. "Do not be distraught, your girlfriend lives."
Hearing the answer he wanted actually left N's expression display frozen.
"V's fine." Lizzy confirmed. "She just had to stop and deal with your bootlicker friend."
"N!" V's voice then brought tangible reality to their assurance.
In Russian. "It seems your former friend is easily beaten." Doll remarked regarding J, given how short the gap between their own arrival and V's proved to be.
"N!" V landed within steps of him, eyes filled-in and eyelid lines up-curved in relief. Though her eyes soon unfilled, and her eyelids curved down. She saw N's expression: mouth and visor display both locked into a traumatized uncertainty. "N . . ." Her eyelids lowered and her eyes looked down for a second before returning to his. "I'm sorry. I couldn't let her get to you. I know . . . it must've–"
He hugged her. Of course he did.
It took her by surprise for no more than a second, and after, as her metal chin drifted over his shoulder, her eyes looked down one way, then the other, and allowed themselves to close once a small smile came to her face. And she finally hugged him back like she always wanted.
"I'm actually kind of mad at you by the way." He separated, holding her gently by the shoulders. "Don't ever do that again." And as expectable of N, his eyes just as immediately relented. "Ok it's gone." Aaaand he squeezed her right into another hug.
Her smile grew, and one digital teardrop appeared beside each eye just before she hugged him back again, just briefly getting to let the top of her head rest against his cheek.
. . .
. . .
The ground began to rumble. Though it subsided after a few seconds, it started again after another moment.
"Aaaah, what's–" Thad was quickly cut off by Lizzy.
"Doll's probably right, losers. The tentacle witch is up there doing her final form thing or whatever!"
And Uzi could only let her head drop back in a tired, exasperated groan.
.
.
No one was left when J entered the remains of the place, staggering with each step, having to drag one leg that refused movement commands. She'd missed the fight, whatever part of it had happened here. It had been enough of a battle maintaining control of herself enough to make it all this way. And now, there was nothing here for her to make it to.
Rubble covered almost everything, all but a single object.
A human arm. Some remnant of a left human arm.
She knew whose it was, and she had to shut off her vision, letting a long, long moment pass.
When J did open her digital eyes again, she saw something smaller beside the arm itself. As she stepped close, it became clear it was a bone that had escaped Tessa's forearm. She found herself examining it, lowering to her knees which she brought together on the floor.
The bone was damaged. Of course it was. But there were also . . . apart from what it had received today, it bore other marks as well, patches that differed in colour from the rest. Discoloured patches from breaks that had healed. Breaks Tessa received while she was alive.
. . .
From her mother.
. . .
J held Tessa's bone from one end, and . . . she went through a fancy motion with her other hand, just like she had done that night. And then she motioned her hand and the bone to clank a pair of imaginary wine glasses.
She held the bone steady, not having Tessa wince from pain this time.
J smiled.
And then her arms fell limp and her head hung forward. A single, solid error triangle overtook her entire visor, and the five lights on her head went dark, each turning on to show red and turning off before the next one did the same. And they repeated their pattern over and over again.