E-UNIT: The Blue Angels of Death.

<< VOL.07_PHANTOMS-AND-PREDATORS.log >>

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The system looked at Shelly.

Not with curiosity. Not with calculation. With nothing, two blue optics where eyes had been, the soul behind them replaced by something that did not have one. It stood the way a mannequin stands, without the small adjustments that living things make constantly without knowing they're making them. When it moved its head to track Shelly, the motion was a series of precise, robotic micro-clicks, calculating the optimal viewing angle down to the millimeter.

But the blue light pulsing from it was stronger than anything 02 had produced in the entire fight. The system had no governor on the hardware. It was the limit itself.

Shelly touched down gently and tried to read what was in front of her. She raised her hand and reached for the terminal, the same access she'd used on Reaper, and found the menu written in characters that shifted before she could parse them, rotating through encryption layers at a speed this world had never produced a key for.

'What is behind those eyes? Why does looking at it feel like looking at something already gone? Is this the protection protocol father mentioned once, years ago, before I understood what he was building?'

The system raised its head after completing its analysis. When it spoke, the voice was 02's voice and nothing else, no weight, no history. "Probability of mission success: 98%. Initiating apocalyptic sequence."

Shelly went airborne immediately. 'Nothing named like that is something you stand in front of.'

The system raised one hand. Five concentric half-circles rose around it in sequence, locking into place, sealing every gap. Not a needle's width of space between them. It kept the hand raised.

"Twelve Bells of Heaven, initiated."

A clock formed above Shelly. Blue energy, dense, covered in Greek inscription around the rim. The system began counting aloud, starting from one, in Greek.

Shelly moved away immediately, putting distance between herself and the system's position. She stopped. Another clock had formed above her new location and was already counting.

"What—"

She ran. Clocks appeared wherever she went, each one beginning its own count the moment she entered range. She pushed toward the edge of the space and hit it, a blue energy wall that had appeared without announcement. She tried to dissolve it. Her hands began to melt against the surface. She found another direction.

The entire area was enclosed. A sixth layer she hadn't seen forming, a clean half-circle sealed from the outside, cutting the space off from the city around it. Everything beyond it had gone blue in the filtered light.

She kept moving. The clocks kept appearing. After several minutes of it, the sky above the sealed space was saturated, complex circles overlapping each other in every available position, a web of counting energy filling the air from edge to edge.

There was no free space left. She had been buying time and the time had run out.

The system stopped counting at eleven.

"Éndeka."

Shelly's head snapped in every direction, hands raised, ready to throw fire walls the moment it finished.

Then the system's voice came from all directions simultaneously. "A message from Nicholas Rivera." A pause. "No one escapes time, Shelly. Especially you."

Her eyes went wide. She looked at her own hand as if it might tell her something. "What are you talking about."

"Dódeka."

Twelve.

The clocks broke apart. Their numbers and hands reformed into spears, needle-thin, shining blue, filling the sky above her like rainfall that hadn't fallen yet.

The system lowered its hand.

The spears fell.

SEEK.

The sound of precision metal through metal, dozens of times in the same moment. The spears drove through Shelly without mercy, placing her in the air, suspended, fixed by the shafts running through her frame, a collection of entry and exit points holding her in place against gravity.

Her jaw unhinging in a silent scream as her optics flared a blinding green. She forced the words out from somewhere beneath the damage.

"Breath of Satan."

The green inferno erupted from her like a detonation. It expanded in every direction, filling the sealed half-circle in seconds, the blue walls absorbed it for a moment, then gave up one layer at a time, the fire eating through from the inside outward until it broke free into the open sky above.

The system pressed both hands against the innermost wall, feeding everything it had into the last layer, holding it against the green tide. The outer four layers dissolved on contact. The fifth held.

Shelly stopped. Her system had entered deep red, every hardware monitor pleading her to cease. Her suit was mostly gone. The black hoodie underneath had survived somehow. Half her face was open internals, the mask destroyed by an earlier exchange. The green fire around her faded and died.

What remained inside the half-circle was nothing. The hospital, gone. The skyscrapers, gone. The trees and lamp posts and road surface and everything built or grown in the enclosed space had dissolved, melted, or simply ceased to exist. What was left was a flat, dark, perfectly clean surface under open sky, and two figures on it.

An access panel in the ground opened several blocks east. Infinity climbed out of the sewer system and looked at the landscape.

There was nothing to look at. The flat space stretched where a neighborhood had been.

Two figures. Shelly, white hair moving in the air coming off the absent buildings. A half-circle of blue dissolving as 02 walked out of it.

Infinity looked at what was standing in that body.

A notification appeared in her HUD.

[Your captain lost consciousness. I am the system that runs this body. She specifically requested that I protect you, not control you. I will not hold much longer. I am going to finish this. Find cover, and return when the area is calm. The link range has been extended.]

"I'm communicating with 02's operating system?"

[Please go. Now.]

Infinity looked at the flat dead surface around her and made the correct decision. She went back into the sewer.

The system raised one hand. The other drew a blade.

"Bliss from Heaven, initiated."

Cloud formed above Shelly. She was already running, metallic feet sharp against the flat surface, echo carrying in the open space where buildings used to break the sound. The beam descended from the cloud and tracked her, following her trajectory, adjusting as she changed direction.

Shelly touched the ground without slowing. The surface gave her the sword again, green, rising from nothing. She turned and faced the beam directly.

It hit the sword and the energy dissolved on contact, both forces consuming each other, filling the space with a dense mist, blue and green suspended in the air together, visibility dropping to near zero.

The beam stopped.

Shelly walked through it. Her audio sensors at maximum, her head moving to every sound they registered. Her green eyes swept the mist. She lowered her cooling fans despite the system temperature, needing the silence more than the relief.

A blade came from her right.

Cling.

She caught it on the sword and deflected it right. The system was gone before she could commit to a counter.

She kept walking. Kept scanning. The mist shifted around her.

A strike came at her head.

Cling.

Deflected again. 'How is that system reading anything in this density?'

The ground disappeared beneath her without warning.

She skidded down into a bowl, the perfect half-circle carved earlier, the one that had taken 03. She hit the bottom and looked up.

A blue foot was descending toward her.

A single guardian. One this time, not two, the system putting everything into it, compressing the force into a single point above her.

She got the sword up.

Clang.

She pushed against it with everything she had. The foot pressed down. The ground beneath her feet began to crack, the flat surface giving way under the weight from above and the force from below.

Her HUD was entirely red. Every warning running simultaneously. She couldn't hold it.

She looked down. Then up.

"Nothing to lose. Breath of Satan."

The sword lit green and began consuming the guardian from the contact point upward, dissolving it, eating through it until nothing remained.

The moment the pressure vanished, the system was already there.

Clank.

It came down on top of her. The hitting started.

Clang. The arms she raised for cover broke, they'd been half-melted for the last several minutes.

Clang. Her chest armor split. Half the crystal became visible.

The system didn't redirect toward it. Retrieving the crystal was not part of the current objective.

Clang. Her left arm separated at the shoulder.

Shelly got her right hand to the system's neck and began dissolving it. The system stood, took that hand, swung in a wide circle, building momentum, holding tight, and threw her straight up.

Shelly had stopped fighting the trajectory. Her HUD was nothing but red. She was already past the point of decisions.

She looked up and saw a blue energy wall waiting above her in the sky.

'That didn't come from 02.'

Crash.

She hit the wall at full launch speed and stayed pressed against it. The wall turned to particles and she fell, face-first, into the flat surface below with the sound of something that weighs as much as she weighs and has no energy left to slow itself.

She got her head up enough to see the system standing where it had been. Still. Uncaring. The eyes registering her but producing nothing from the registration.

"Why—" She forced the words out in pieces. "—aren't you showing warnings too."

"I am the system," it said, with no inflection. "I am the warning."

Shelly's eyes went dark. Overload shutdown.

11 descended from above in total silence, the SKOTIA suit absorbing the sound of her landing. She took a fighting stance the moment she touched the flat ground.

She looked at what was standing across from her. Looked at the battlefield around it, the dead black plane where an entire block of the city had been.

She looked back at the system.

"That's not 02."

She went to what was left of Shelly and got her up onto one shoulder. "You absolute idiot. You nearly ended permanently. You dissolved the hospital servers, I hope Lord Reaper decides your punishment himself this time."

She took one more look at the robotic figure standing motionless in the center of the dead space.

A cold voice echoed across the empty plain. "Primary target neutralized. Entering power conservation mode."

Then she disappeared into the dark.

The system turned east.

"Infinity. You can come out."

The sewer access opened. Infinity walked toward the system across the flat ground, picking her way through what the fight had left behind, which was mostly nothing.

"Is 02 alright?"

"No. The hardware is at its limit." The system sat down, lowering the body carefully. "I need to repair what I can over the next three days. In that time, I require someone to act as the Omega of the link."

Infinity's hands came up. "You need to… explain what that means."

"There isn't time." The system looked at her directly. "Can I trust you with the captain?"

Infinity was quiet. She looked at the body sitting in front of her, the white suit not white anymore, the frame damaged at multiple points, the face that usually made decisions and gave orders completely absent behind the eyes.

She nodded. "Yes. Of course." Her voice was smaller than usual. "I'm an E-UNIT now."

The system held still for a moment. Something in the timing suggested it was running through a final check. "I see why she wanted you protected." A pause. "Thank you, Infinity."

The eyes flashed blue.

The energy moved, a transfer, vast and immediate, Infinity's frame absorbing it before she'd fully understood what was happening. A system notification appeared in her HUD.

[You are the Omega now. I will remain present in your interface. Please take care of my host. She is under your protection.]

"This is an enormous responsibility—"

[I trust you.]

[This location becomes lethal within a calculable margin. Move east. Finish the mission.]

Infinity crouched in front of 02's body. She waved a hand in front of the face. No response. No sign of the person who'd been making every decision since Veridian Coast.

She stood. 02's body stood with her, following the link the way a reflection follows movement, present, responsive, and completely empty of anyone home.

"I see," Infinity said quietly. "A second limb."

She started walking toward the tree line. 02 walked behind her, dormant in a body now being held by the newest member of the E-UNIT.

Infinity kept her eyes forward.

"Please come back soon, Captain." Her voice dropped further. "I need you."

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<< VOL.07_PHANTOMS-AND-PREDATORS.log >>

// operation complete //

END OF VOLUME SEVEN

Volume Eight begins [08.14.26]

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