V O L U M E . S I X : C O D E_R E S E T

Chapter 157: Structural Fear

02 moved through the corridors and pushed through the double doors of the Reconstruction Bay.

The bay was a recent addition, a room where E-UNITs automatically woke in a prepared frame the moment their original body disconnected from the network. Which happened when they died.

The E-Medics ran controlled circuits through the space, maintaining the room with the focused efficiency they brought to everything. Along both walls, glass tubes held standing silhouettes, dark shapes waiting for the signal that their original frame had gone offline.

Numbers ran along the wall beside each tube, labeled one through fifty. At the base of each tube, blue and white rings pulsed steadily, transmitting a continuous live feed of every moment from the original body, updating the copy in real time, so that the moment a unit died, she woke up in the new frame with nothing missing.

27's tube opened. Then 50's. Both units stepped out, saluted 02 as they passed, and left without a word. She didn't ask who had taken them down. The answer was present in the room without needing to be said.

02 stood beside 03's tube, head down.

‘He killed her while she was walking right beside me and I didn't see him move. Not once in a week have I seen him move.’ She looked at the silhouette in the tube. ‘ I thought the volume of empty frames would slow him down, twenty replacements per unit, I thought that would feel like a wall to him. He hasn't slowed at all. If anything—'

03's tube opened. The screen beside her number updated: 1 death.

"Captain, what happened?" 03 stepped out and looked around. "I was right next to you, and then there was a system notification in my HUD and now I'm here. There's no possible way he killed me while I was standing beside you."

02 didn't look up.

"Captain?"

02 surfaced. "Yes."

"No welcome back?" 03 tilted her head. "I've been reincarnated into this world to protect it from its dark lord. Where are my new powers? I already have the full UI running over my vision like a game." She smiled at her own joke.

02 said nothing.

"A hug at least?"

"I'm not in the right space for that."

03 went still for a moment. "The captain who hates emotions is having some." She stepped forward and held her anyway. "You can revive me as many times as it takes. Why the face?"

"I watched your head come down between my feet." 02's voice was low. "Those eyes going dark, I've been carrying that image since then. Two days I sat beside this tube watching the progress bar, and since then…"

She looked across the room.

06 was standing at the far wall, hitting it with her forehead. Slowly, rhythmically, clang after clang, each one pressing a little further into the surface. Her eyes were barely lit. An E-Medic stood beside her trying to intervene, but the frame strength difference made it one-sided, the medic was being pulled back and forth with each movement, unable to do anything except stay close.

02 looked toward the far corner. 32 and 41 were curled against the wall with their hoods pulled up. 18 was flat on her face, being dragged toward the door by an E-Medic who was barely making progress. 24’s kill counter froze at 0, while 04 seemed not affected at all.

The death counters on the wall told the rest of it. 06 alone had eighteen recorded deaths. Her previous frames were accumulating in a sealed room elsewhere in the building.

"I expected him to plateau," 02 said. "That once he'd been doing this long enough, the kills would get harder to execute because we'd adapt. Instead, a week in, he knows each of you. He knows how you move, how you react, what you reach for first. He targeted 07 specifically, she's impulsive and he worked that. First attempt she engaged him. By the fifteenth death she ran."

03 went still for a moment, then looked around. "Where is she now?"

02 pushed the words out. "Turned off by her own request. She woke up from the fifteenth revival crying and wouldn't stop. She asked not to be brought back. Dave is trying to find a workable solution, but he said that deleting the memories directly doesn't dissolve the fear, her AI has catalogued Obsidian as a threat at a category that overrides normal processing. The fear is structural now, not just a memory."

She looked at 03. Her voice dropped. "I don't want to watch you arrive at that same point."

03 turned toward her fully. "Who are you? Where is my pragmatic captain, the one who stood against a thousand robots and came through clean?"

"That captain is behind the wall."

"I don't mean her." 03 held 02's gaze directly. "I mean you. The version I started to actually trust. The moment I needed your cold thinking, you started falling apart." She didn't look away. "What exactly do you want me to say here?"

"What do you want me to do?" 02 raised her voice. "He uses the city as cover. We can't tear through buildings, we can't step back from protecting civilians because we're losing units, we can't detect him. Gamma said that even in armor he was faster than expected, and speed isn't even what makes him dangerous. He processes faster than any of us can match. Evading his attacks isn't a matter of reflexes, it's a matter of prediction, and he's better at it."

03 looked at the floor. Then back up. "So what do we do?"

"I don't know."

"We let him take us apart until we break the same way 07 broke?"

"I don't know."

"We pull back and wait for him to come to us on our terms?"

"I don't—"

The slap cracked across the quiet bay before 02 could finish the word. 02's head snapped to the side. When she slowly turned back, her eyes were burning red. She looked at 03 directly. "I. Don't. Know."

03 exhaled slowly. Her expression had stopped moving, not anger, something heavier than anger. "You're a disgrace to the captain whose body you're wearing and the authority you’re practicing. Strong against your own sisters. Collapsing at the first problem that doesn't have an obvious answer." She stepped back. "That's not who she was, that’s not my captain."

She turned and walked to the doors.

"Where are you—"

"To do something about it."

The doors closed behind her.

02 sat down on the floor.

She looked at the room around her. The faint light in her sisters' eyes, wearing down with each revival, each death taking something that came back slightly smaller than before.

‘The original 02 kept raising the ceiling higher than I can see from here.’

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