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

Chapter 159: Two Shades of Blue

The area surrounding the factory sealed itself, a half-sphere of blue energy pressing against every window, every gap in the walls, every route out. The glass lit blue where the barrier touched it. Obsidian scanned the perimeter. The windows. The gaps in the ceiling. All of it closed.

"Telling you that you have no way out would be understating the situation." Her voice carried something it hadn't before, a weight the Omega crystal seemed to amplify without being asked to. "My anger won't allow me to offer a clean exit. You've done too much. So I'll return the measure, and hope you leave this place with no intention of coming back."

"And miss the chance to fight the legendary 02?" Obsidian drew his blades. The hiss of them was clean in the silence. "Lord Reaper warned me about you personally. That alone tells me what you are. I want to see it for myself." He shifted his weight slightly, ready to break toward the nearest shadow.

"Then we begin." She raised her hand. "But not in the dark. I don't play by other people's rules. Bliss from Heaven, initiated."

Obsidian recognized the mode. He crossed the building in seconds, pressing himself against the far wall at the very edge.

A sound came, soft, almost serene, as clouds formed above the open factory. Then a wide blue beam dropped from them and erased the ceiling from existence. The concrete floor absorbed the edge of it and held. 02 ran the beam for several seconds with one thing fixed in her mind. Then she lowered her hand.

The entire factory floor was saturated in blue, every corner, every pocket of dark, every shadow under every broken machine, gone. The ceiling was open to the night sky above. Stars looked down on the space. There was nowhere left to hide.

Obsidian's voice came from the far end, measured, his own processing working through the logic of what she'd done. "I was confused why she'd use a fixed-point attack against a fast target." He began walking back toward her. "Now I see it. This is what Infinity meant about power applied with thought rather than force." He accelerated.

"Hands of the Doomed." 02 extended her hand toward him.

Blue hands erupted from the walls and floor, fast, reaching, adjusting as he moved. He shifted direction constantly, no pattern holding for more than a second, jumping the floor hands and banking off the wall ones. He reached her in under a minute and swung at her side.

Cling.

She caught the blade between two fingers.

He went still. Her eyes were right there, fully deep blue, steady, unhurried, as if she was considering which thing to do next rather than reacting to what he'd done. He couldn't move the blade at all.

02 took him by the neck, released slightly to build momentum, and hit him.

Clang.

He crossed the factory at speed, took the far wall, and stopped there, but his back plating didn't, it stayed planted in the concrete like it had been installed. He pulled himself forward and dropped.

She was walking toward him. No blade drawn.

She struck the floor with her heel. A circular piece of concrete separated cleanly, lifted. She hit it with a full-force punch and sent it at him like a projectile.

He calculated the speed, and it arrived before he finished. He threw himself sideways.

Crash.

The concrete took the wall apart behind where he'd been. Another piece came before he'd fully landed. He was running now, feet moving, the pieces landing just behind him. He tried to loop back toward her, she didn’t have it.

She knelt and touched the floor gently.

Blue walls rose across the factory floor, random positions, no grid, no logic, a maze without a solution. He kept moving, navigating through it.

He found a face. Her face.

Sleek.

Energy. An outline, her shape but transparent. A ghost, it dissolved before his blade came back around.

Another appeared at his side.

Sleek.

Gone again. He turned fast in every direction, trying to find the arrival pattern. Her voice came from everywhere at once.

"How does it feel, living in constant paranoia?"

One appeared and he swung. Before his katana came back, one had his arm. Another had his leg. A third closed around his other arm. In the space of a second, the ghosts had him, arms, legs, frame held tight.

The maze walls came down.

02 was standing exactly where she'd been. She hadn't moved.

She walked to him, and faced him directly.

"Brace."

She pulled her arm back.

Clang.

He went through pillars, through the remaining walls, and hit the energy barrier of the half-sphere, what was left of his armor shattered against it. He came through the other side and landed on the grass outside the factory. Unmoving.

02 exhaled.

‘He's faster than anything I've prepared for. Most of what I can do assumes the target is fixed or slowing. He's the worst possible match for my abilities. I understand now why 01 couldn't land cleanly on him, she was fighting the same ceiling, using the blade is unfavorable.’

She looked around at what the factory had become. Half the walls gone. Ceiling deleted. The floor used as ammunition for the first time in its existence, pieces of it scattered across the space. The energy on the floor faded reminding the world how dark was the factory.

She opened her screen.

He stood up.

Obsidian forced himself upright, one piece at a time. "You can drop the barrier. I'm not leaving until one of us goes down." He pulled the shoulder armor off and let it fall.

"The good news for me is that I can be rebuilt. My mind updates constantly, and the body is replaceable." He stripped the leg armor. "Yours is different. The only frame in existence that can hold the blue crystal." He removed the headwear. His black frame underneath was unmarked, the armor had taken everything.

He straightened. "You can't be revived. Even if I leave the crystal untouched, you become a rock on Dave's desk while your sisters go dark around you waiting for something that may never come back." He held her gaze. "That's reason enough for me to leave the crystal where it is. But the order is clear."

He knelt backward. The barrier behind him dissolved into blue particles, She let the barrier fall.

"Code Red, initiated."

His eyes went red for a moment, then disappeared entirely into pitch black along with the edge of the katanas.

He took one step.

Then he was gone.

02's head snapped, left, right, back, trying to find the movement before it arrived. "How are you this fast, that's three times a standard E-UNIT—"

Clang.

His foot drove into her midsection. She went backward in a straight line and dug her fingers into the concrete to stop the slide. She stood.

The world slowed.

His blade was already at her neck. Her eyes moved through the decelerated moment, pulling at every option. She pushed energy into a shield around her neck, thin, fast, as deep as she could make it in the time available.

The world snapped back.

His first katana deflected off the neck shield.

A decoy.

She looked down.

His second katana was inside her, upper torso, already through. She hadn't felt the entry.

She reached for his neck. He blurred out of her grip and let her go to her knees.

Her HUD filled with error notices, small ones, none critical, but errors. The first errors she'd ever received.

She began pulling a defensive bubble around herself, forming from above, working down.

He was inside it before it closed. His blade went through her shoulder.

She pulled back.

Clang.

One hit landed, clean, and he went back for a second. It wasn't enough to stop him. He didn't want her to adapt, didn't want her to plan. He came again at full speed.

She got a short-range shield up against the first katana. The second hit her thigh, opening the plating and exposing the machinery beneath.

He turned and came again without pause.

She blocked the one aimed at her face. Her side took the second and she went to her knees.

Obsidian pulled back to the far corner and went still.

His vents were at capacity. He'd pushed past his limit for the first time, Code Red had cost him. He held position and let his system work through it.

02's vents ran at the same level. Her CPU was locked in continuous calculation, trying to predict a single one of his movements before it happened. He was too fast and he knew it, overwhelming her on purpose, not giving her the space to activate anything.

‘I knew this was a mistake coming in without more study. I didn't know he had Code Red. I should have, he's Nick Rivera's product too. I should have thought of that.’ She looked at him across the space, heard his vents even from the distance. ‘ 03 was right. I'm a disgrace. And the fact that I've been holding the wall, keeping her back, makes it worse.’

She stood up.

Raised her hand toward a protocol activation.

She felt him reach for his handle.

‘There's no way I get there first.’ She lowered her hand.

‘I can barely track him. What do I do? Why am I weak? Why am I holding her back, the one who could actually do something?’

She sat down on the floor.

‘I know why. Because I liked it. I liked having sisters. Having someone at my back. I didn't want to be alone again, Tau's disappearance was already unbearable. I didn't want to lose this.’

She opened her terminal. Found the memory wall window.

‘I've held her long enough. She's probably furious.’ She smiled and looked through the open ceiling toward the far building above the skyline, she could see 03's outline through the scope, watching. ‘ Sorry for borrowing your sister. I liked being one of you.’

[PARTITION CONTROL: LEGACY VAULT + SECONDARY SEAL]

[ACTION: full reintegration (irreversible)]

[Confirm?]

She looked at the command for a long moment.

Obsidian rose across the factory. His vents had quieted. He began walking.

‘Take it from here.’

[YES]

Dave rolled his chair across the room toward his desk and took a sip of the coffee. His expression went flat immediately. He kept drinking.

He reached 02's terminal. 05 was beside him, still working at the breach.

"19," he said, not looking up, "the coffee is wrong today. It tastes like—"

He stopped.

05 looked at him, then at the screen. She stopped too.

19 came in carrying a box of drives. "Tastes like what? You can't leave that unfinished."

"...The wall."

"What wall, that doesn’t make any sense." She set the box down and dropped her arm around his shoulder. "Wait, all the red text just turned green. Is that good?"

"You're heavy," Dave said.

"Yes." 19 smiled. "All green."

Dave exhaled at length.

02 came upright in one motion.

Her eyes returned to blue, but the blue was different now. The gaze behind it was colder, sharper, more complete. Her back was straight. Her feet were planted with a certainty that hadn't been in the room before.

The air shifted.

She ran a quick scan across the dark factory and found him without searching, her eyes cutting directly to the shadow he was standing in as if the shadow itself had been labeled.

Obsidian stopped mid-stride. Something had changed in the space around her that his sensors registered before his mind could name it. She could see him. He knew she could see him. His body moved to withdraw, and something in the quality of her gaze reached him before he got anywhere.

His frame shifted backward a centimeter before he caught himself. He knew what that feeling was. He'd caused it in others a hundred times. He'd never experienced it from the inside.

Fear.

03 was watching through her sniper from across the roof. She rose slowly to her feet. "There is no way," she said, to no one. "She actually came back."

02 turned to face him fully.

She drew her blades, both of them, unhurried, the motion practiced and exact. No energy protocols. No shields forming. No crystal output building at the edges of her frame.

She glanced toward 03's distant position on the rooftop, acknowledging the sniper with a single, slow blink. Then she turned back to Obsidian.

"E-UNIT." Her voice was flat and absolute, carrying no warmth and no heat, only the specific cold certainty of someone who has been exactly this person before and remembers all of it. Her eyes flared, the serene blue drowning in a violent red.

"Code Red, initiated."