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

Chapter 160: Code_Reset

The light found 02's white frame first, deliberately, it seemed, choosing sides over the shadow-absorbing black of Obsidian. The half-destroyed factory stood around them as a witness to something it hadn't been built to hold: the return of the captain.

Obsidian's light-absorbing frame, his entire architecture of concealment, meant nothing against the red eyes tracking him. She held him in focus as if he were standing in open daylight. A calm wind moved through the torn walls and pulled her hair to the left, which did nothing to soften the quality of her stance.

She turned to face him fully.

Sssst.

Both blades came out in a slow, deliberate arc from behind her back. She had made this exact motion countless times before, against people, mechs, robots, walls, doors, a long and varied list of things that tasted the plasma and found it was the last sensation they registered. Most of those targets, Obsidian had never heard of.

He activated his red eyes and lit the edges of his katanas. Hiding from her wasn't working. At minimum, the red light of his blade arriving at her face might disturb her focus, any advantage at all. Even before the fight resumed, he could feel her presence in the space the way a room feels occupied before you find the person in it.

He launched, straight line, full speed. He reached her and swung the first katana at her neck. A decoy. The same tactic.

02 blocked it, and rather than holding, she caught the momentum of his swing and used it, pulling his entire frame along with the arc. His second blade had no room to arrive. His right side was open.

She didn't take it.

She stepped back and waited.

He froze, trying to understand why she didn’t attack. ‘ Doesn't matter.’

He came again, zigzagging to break her prediction. He landed a decoy at her left leg.

She raised her left leg at the exact moment and set it down on top of his blade. He dropped with it to her height. His face was inches from hers.

Her red eyes were right there.

The only thing readable in them was killing intent.

She headbutted him with sickening force. His HUD glitched and his grip on the right blade went loose. As his system cleared, 02 hit the handle of his katana and sent it spinning over her shoulder, then caught it and threw it back at him before returning to her stance.

‘Is she playing with me.’

He shook it off and came at her in a single large leap, 1.9 meters of weight and armor dropping at her from above, both blades aimed at her head.

02 raised one blade horizontally before he arrived.

She caught both of his katanas and held him with a heavy metallic ring, suspended and open in the air, exposed from every angle.

She dismissed him to the right instead.

Before he completed the turn, her heel was already a centimeter from his face.

Crack.

The kick sent him skidding across the floor. When he stood, the glass plating across his face was shattered, she'd found the weak point of the casing and hit it precisely. The structural damage spread from the impact outward in a web of cracks across his cameras.

‘She's finding blind spots during each exchange. Or is she showing them to me.’ He raised his head. She was walking toward him in wide, measured steps. One blade in each hand. Red eyes. Unhurried.

"I know what you're doing." He spoke it aloud. Something in his processing that he would have described, in a different context, as panic had begun to surface. "You're using your face to unsettle me. The expression."

02 looked at him. "If a young girl's face is enough to unsettle you, you shouldn't be holding those katanas."

She launched at full speed.

He raised both katanas and ran toward her, ready to intercept any blade attack.

They met.

02 jumped.

She landed on his shoulders.

"What—"

She locked her feet around his head, pushed off, and launched him upward. She came back to the floor, turned once to build momentum, and timed the arrival.

Clang.

Her feet drove into his back and sent him across the factory. A blue trail passed him as he traveled, she'd run past him, extended her arm, and was waiting.

Clack.

The impact stopped him dead. The shockwave from the catch shattered the concrete in a ring around her feet. His lower frame fought the sudden stop, the momentum wanting to pull it forward and away from the rest of him.

He raised both katanas toward her arm.

She released him and caught both blades with one of her own, deflecting them. His sides were completely open, he'd left them unguarded, still expecting her to hold back.

This time she didn't.

Her blade came around at his side. The plasma began working through the dark frame immediately, burning toward the internals.

He threw himself back. System errors appeared in his HUD, a cascade of them, each one representing something she'd almost reached. Almost touched the nuclear core.

‘There is no way this is the same opponent I was fighting an hour ago.’

He checked the melting section of his right side. He could feel the right half of his body operating at reduced efficiency. He looked up.

She had closed half the distance while he was checking.

He decided not to block this time, she kept finding gaps during his defense, so he swung instead, hoping to force an exchange.

02 released her blade mid-run throwing them up and drove her fist into both of his katanas.

They shattered.

Reinforced metal broke against her bare fist like ceramic, the fragments raining red and black across the floor.

She caught her blades as they came back down. She didn't slow. His frame was open, she took the top of his head in one slash, cutting the portion clean from the body. The momentum he'd built for the swing carried him forward while he watched the blade completing its arc.

He stepped off the attack. He didn't look at his head.

She was already coming.

His internals were exposed, CPU, TPU, components catching the blue light from her plasma. No weapons. His body wasn't built for unarmed impact. One option remained.

He had studied every unit in that building. He had a file on each of them. The file on 02 had been thin. He understood now why. His HUD wrote one line in red, next to the cascading hardware warnings.

[DO NOT ENGAGE]

He listened.

‎ He turned and ran.

Full speed, no thrusters, through a broken wall, onto the main road, legs driving him toward the dense streets of the old city. Somewhere in those tight buildings there might be space to disappear.

Outside the factory there was only the road and the trees.

Even with half a head, he was fast. He looked back once.

She was behind him. Blue light. Closing. Her eyes on him like a hunter who has all the time in the world because the outcome is already decided.

They reached a bridge, old and sealed, the asphalt torn and broken, warning signs and construction barriers on both ends. Unused for years.

02 fired her thrusters and took the air. She caught him, turned him forward, and used him as a shield.

Clang.

The first railing, iron, thick as a structural beam, broke. So did the front of his frame.

Clang.

Another railing. Then another. She drove him through them in sequence, each one taking more of what was left of the bridge, until a sharp metallic sound reached her sensors and she pulled up.

She flew until the city appeared below her, the skyline catching the early morning sun, the handcrafted buildings running out in every direction from the three glass towers at the center. She held Obsidian by the neck. His body barely held together, eyes cycling between red and green.

She tossed him slightly and flipped.

Clang.

Her heel drove into the open section of his head and sent him down, fast, gravity racing alongside him.

He hit the bridge at its center point.

The bridge gave.

It bent inward and fell into the rocky ravine beneath, iron and asphalt and decades of accumulated weight coming down in a single collapse. The sound moved through the ground and into the city. Lights came on in windows. People stepped onto their balconies.

The bridge buried him, red metal and old grey asphalt, a heavy pile that once was a bridge, sealing his fate in the ravine.

02 landed on the shifting pile and began pulling.

Large sections of asphalt. Rails. Debris. Until she reached him, buried in it, barely coherent, still online. She forced him out, the separation taking what remained of the connection between his upper and lower sections, wires cut in sequence, sparks falling like brief, scattered light.

Crack.

His upper half came free. She held it by the neck. The lower body stayed in the ravine. His right arm was gone. His left was motors and wires. His eyes were faint and unfocused.

She looked at what was left of him. "Why did you do this to yourself?"

She flew up traversing the edge of the city and landed on the main road. She took him by what remained of the left arm and walked.

The sound of him dragging across the street brought people to their balconies, heavy screeching of dense metal. All they saw was 02 pulling a half-robot through the morning city as the sun came fully over the rooftops.

"I've lived long enough to have seen every attack in your repertoire." Her voice carried into the quiet streets. "Your movement was not that of an experienced fighter, you relied on speed to compensate, and it worked because speed is hard to read and gave you time to correct your mistakes before an opponent understood what had happened."

She scanned the faces watching from above.

"Your leader will see this before you have the chance to brief him. You're welcome, I've saved you the preparation time." She looked ahead. "01 was landing hits on you. She's a better blade user than you are. She could read your movement and cut into the gaps. I have more respect for her after watching that exchange than I had going in."

She reached the center of the city. Ahead, the glass tower caught the sun and threw it back across the surrounding rooftops.

“Three seconds was all I needed to analyze you. Next time, bring a crystal, at least then killing you again might be worth something beyond petty revenge.” Her gaze hardened. “Not that it matters to me.” She glanced at him. “I’m not that easy to offend.”

She opened her comm channel. “Captain 02 on the line.”

The channel that had been quiet for a week in one specific way, the way that meant the person who used to use it was gone, opened.

Every unit in the building went still.

05 leaned back from her screen. 07 rose from the medical bed. 06 stopped mid-motion, her head against the wall, finally ceasing. Dave looked up from his coffee.

03 pressed her hand over her mouth. She was still on the rooftop of the skyscraper, sniper out, scope trained on the skyline. She could see her captain on the road far below. She lowered the scope and looked with her own eyes instead.

"03." The voice in the comm was the right voice, the complete, original voice. "The target arrives at your location in seven seconds. Open your scope. Wait for my signal."

"Roger, Captain."

03 moved fast, pulling the scope to the angle 02 had named, the direction of the skyline above where 02 stood. She dropped to her stomach, laid the Liberta 01 across the rooftop edge, put one eye to the scope. Her vents ran one long, steady breath. Her CPU held at rest, waiting. The sun caught the white of her face as she stilled completely.

She counted.

In the seventh second, Obsidian's upper half came upward, thrown from below, climbing through the air directly to the center of her scope.

"Now."

The world slowed.

The broken shape drifted into the exact center of the crosshairs. ‘ You faced my captain alone.’ She found the trigger. ‘ I almost feel sorry for you.’

‘Almost.’

She pressed.

The beam left the Liberta 01 in a low, resonant hum, blue, wide, pressing against the sun's early light. Obsidian's silhouette held for a fraction of a second, turned dark against the brightness, and then was gone. Dissolved. The sky behind it was clear.

03 stood up. She locked the sniper to her back.

"Thank you, Captain. You didn't steal my revenge after all." A pause. "I know you were listening the whole time."

02 looked up at the city around her. Every balcony had someone on it. Phones out, filming, watching, but the expression on the faces was different from how they'd looked before. Not the awe of a spectacle. Something closer to recognition.

"They liked the show," 02 said.

"What a cold and terrible joke." 03's voice came from behind her.

02 turned.

03 was there on the road, having come down from the tower while Obsidian was in the air. She stood a few meters away, not moving. The moment in the factory was still present between them, the blade, the floor, the specific cold decision 02 had made and the specific warmth she'd said it with.

03 held still.

02 looked at her for a moment. Then she smiled, the real one. The one that had been practiced in front of a mirror during months she didn't remember, the one kept for the moments that actually called for it. She opened her arms.

03 moved.

Careful at first. Watching the face, making sure. Then faster, the careful steps giving way to quick metallic strikes across the empty road, echoing in the morning quiet.

She jumped on the last step.

The hug she gave was the full strength of her frame. The metallic sound of it rang between the buildings. 02 held her back, gently, both arms, pressing around her completely.

03 raised her head.

"Welcome back, Captain."