<< VOL.07_PHANTOMS-AND-PREDATORS.log >>
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"You are my greatest regret." Shelly brought the green fire down until she could stand on solid ground. "I regret opening that terminal and writing your code. I was so certain father would be proud of me for building something beyond what he could, I didn't understand yet that bitterness is the engine of this world. Nobody wants to watch someone else look down at them. Even when they deserve it."
02 glanced at her energy leg, then back at Shelly. "So you're E-UNIT 00. I didn't expect Reaper's sister to be the one who built him. And me." She planted her feet and kept both blades level. "Out of respect for that, I'll let you walk away. I have no particular problem with you."
"Would you spare my brother if you had the chance to kill him?" Shelly tilted her head. "That's a direct question. Don't circle it."
02 looked at her. The DIABOLOS suit was something to read, matte white armor over a glossy black undersuit, neon green embedded throughout in precise lines. The faceplate was smooth black, fully enclosed, no features except two glowing green slits that had the quality of something predatory. The black horns curved out from the hood above. Shelly's horns.
"No."
"I expected a longer answer. This is better, less of my time." Shelly drove her foot into the ground. The floor split along a line of green light at the point of contact, and a rock rose from the break. A sword formed from the base up, green, deliberate, Alpha's sword, the one Nick had made for her. Shelly pulled it free in one smooth motion and leveled it at 02 without hesitation.
"To be clear, I don't hate you. You're not significant enough to me to generate that kind of feeling. I simply regret creating you. Life would have been different if I'd let father take what he wanted. Now I protect what saved me from him."
"What an annoying brat." 02 ran at her, both blades low, body angled for speed. She launched, both weapons directed at Shelly's face.
Cling.
Shelly caught both with the sword and held 02 suspended in the air without apparent effort. Their eyes met, green slits against hard blue.
Then Shelly touched one of the blades with her free hand. The hand shifted, soft white giving way to a spiked mixture of green and black. The blade began dissolving from the point of contact inward, until 02 landed with a handle and nothing attached to it.
02 skidded back and looked at what remained.
'New rule. The green hands don't touch you.' She came again, both hands on the remaining blade, stride wide and accelerating. 'I need more information on her before I can end this.'
Shelly went to one knee and pressed her palm flat against the ground. "Hell on Earth , initiated."
02 stopped.
The ground shook. Cracks tore outward from Shelly's hand in every direction. 02 went up, clearing the hospital rooftop in one jump and landing on it.
Below, the cracks lit lime green. Shelly rose, and the energy came with her, green fire erupting from every fracture, climbing and spreading into something that looked like modern art made of destruction.
The parked cars near the hospital began to lose their shape, metal softening and running. The trees along the hospital grounds dissolved into the fire and disappeared, not burned but erased. The cleaning bots scattered across the area held for a few seconds each before their silhouettes broke into particles and then into nothing.
02 stood on the rooftop and watched, reading what she was seeing.
Then she found the angle. She raised her hand. "Guardians of the Abyss, initiated."
They formed faster than before, smaller, her system was already issuing heat warnings, the draw too high to sustain the full scale. Half their usual eight meters, but denser. More complete in the details. They hit the cracked asphalt and moved toward Shelly.
Shelly went up to avoid them.
The spear Guardian threw before she could clear the range. It crossed the distance and went through her midsection. She kept flying, but she was fixed to it, suspended on the shaft in the air.
The Guardian called the spear back.
It answered.
He brought her close and studied her for a moment, then nodded to his brother. He extended his arm. The axe Guardian took position.
Shelly fought the shaft. The spear was too wide at the socket and she was centered on it. She aimed the sword at the ground beneath them.
"Gates of Hades, initiated."
The ground under the Guardians fractured further. They fell through their own weight, the stone giving way. Shelly pulled up, spear still through her. She raised a hand slowly, and green fire rose from the new cracks in a dense, precise wall. The Guardians dissolved in a fraction of a second. Their silhouettes didn't even finish forming before they were gone.
The spear disappeared with them.
Shelly looked down at the hole in her gut. She could see her own internals through it. She hissed, pressing a hand to the wound, the green energy flaring to fuse the broken plating together just enough to keep herself stabilized. She raised her head.
02 was already in the air.
She'd hidden the blade on the rooftop and come off it with nothing but momentum, both fists forward, driving directly at Shelly's face.
Clang.
The mask came apart entirely. The face beneath it opened to the open air for the first time since the fight started.
The momentum carried both of them into the glass face of the nearest skyscraper. They went through it into an office floor. Robots inside were already moving for the emergency stairs in a silent, organized line that suggested this kind of thing had happened near them before.
02 stood first and took Shelly by the neck. She drove her into the floor, planted her there, and started.
Clang. Chest.
Clank. Shoulder.
Shelly crossed both arms to absorb it. 02 kept hitting regardless, building load in the right arm, each impact compressing further, until she had enough behind one strike and released it through Shelly's crossed guard.
The force drove Shelly down through the floor. Then the next floor. Then the next, until she arrived at ground level reception with the sound of everything above her complaining about the trip.
She uncrossed her arms. Her green eyes found the dark of the reception office. Then she registered the blue glow descending from above.
She rolled.
02's impact shattered the floor where she'd been. The crack spread outward in a ring.
Shelly got to her feet and began calculating. She had enough information now to work with. The floor split and formed the green sword again.
They faced each other across the ruined reception, robots weaving around both of them toward the exits without making eye contact.
They came at each other simultaneously. 02 drove for the head again.
Cling.
Shelly deflected with the sword and sent 02 falling right. Mid-fall, she looped and hit 02 from the side, full force, devastating, and 02 crossed the road and the hospital parking lot in a straight line before the exterior wall of the hospital stopped her. The metallic cladding held, barely.
02 shook her head. Her HUD flickered at the edges.
Shelly walked out of the building without hurrying. She drove her foot down and a thick circle of asphalt cut free and rose to her level. She lit it, green fire consuming it, and threw it.
02 saw a burning green mass coming at her through the dark, illuminating everything around it. She cleared it with a jump.
Another was already coming.
She moved, zigzagging, reading the arcs, clearing each one as Shelly fed more burning asphalt into the stream. The hospital behind 02 began breaking as the pieces that missed found it instead. Then Shelly pressed her fingers into the road and tore a large section free, lit it, threw it upward, and started breaking smaller pieces off it at speed with her fists, increasing the rate.
02 moved faster. Most of them missed. Then a large piece came in at an angle she couldn't fully clear.
She jumped.
On landing, the energy leg shattered.
She went face-first into the ground and started forming a new one immediately. Dense. It needed to be dense enough to hold. That took time.
Shelly rose into the air. She raised both hands above her head and began pulling energy between them, a globe forming, growing fast, expanding with each second. The air around it bent slightly.
02's leg was not half formed. She looked at the globe. It was the size of a building now. Dragging herself clear of something that large wasn't possible.
She closed her eyes.
The area went green. The globe matched the moon in scale. Shelly threw it.
Then the world slowed.
Everything compressed into the few seconds between the throw and impact, 02 flat on the ground with an unfinished leg watching the thing come for her.
Then something white came from her left, fast, impossibly fast for the frame it was wearing. The roar of thrusters overloading and tearing themselves apart shrieked over the battlefield, and hit her hard enough to send her crashing into what remained of the hospital wall.
02 looked back from the rubble.
A faceless Bulwark Frame. Standing where she'd been.
She knew the face behind it without needing to see it. The fraction of a second stretched into something longer than it had any right to be.
The fireball arrived.
Everything became white for a second.
It consumed 03 completely. The explosion didn't burn, it erased. The energy circle expanded outward from the point of contact and the east wing of the hospital entered it and ceased to exist, black silhouette, then particles drifting upward, then nothing. A clean half-circle formed in the ground where the impact had been centered. The surface was smooth. Reflective. Perfect in the way that only total obliteration is.
02's face went still.
She dragged herself toward the edge of the half-circle, her leg not yet finished, energy falling from her eyes as she moved, lighting the ground blue in small pools beneath her. She reached the edge and stopped. She looked into the smooth reflective surface for something that might resemble 03.
Nothing was there.
She gripped the edge. The material bent under her fingers and took their shape.
She pulled her own hair. Her eyes wouldn't settle, moving across the hospital, the road, the sky, the circle, unable to find a place to land, unable to focus, unable to process.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no—"
She stopped.
Her expression vacated.
A notification appeared from her own system.
[Emotional stability has reached a critical threshold. Apply system override? This will place you in a dormant state temporarily.]
She pressed YES before she finished reading it. 'Anything. Anything to make the feeling stop.'
The system took over.
Every light in her eyes went flat. The system ran a scan of the immediate area with the detachment of an instrument. "Hardware integrity: 62%." Her voice was her voice and nothing else, no weight behind it, no warmth. "Scanning for threats." The system found Shelly descending from altitude above, her hands beginning to deteriorate from the sustained output of the globe. "Threat confirmed."
The energy leg completed its formation. The system stood.
A deep blue glow spread outward from the frame, filling the air around it, pressing against the ground.
"Destruction mode, initiated."
Shelly pulled her hood back. Her green eyes looked at what was standing across from her, the towering blue light bleeding from 02’s frame. The stance was wrong. The eyes were dead.
"What?"
<< end_of_file : E-UNIT >>
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