V O L U M E . S E V E N - P H A N T O M S . A N D . P R E D A T O R S

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Chapter 180: Endless Ghosts

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02 reached back and drew her blades slowly. The sound of metal pulling free filled the empty street, the Esoptron copies made almost no sound themselves, which made the contrast deliberate.

The copies on the ground went still and turned toward the source. A blue and white android, a few meters away, glowing softly against the fog. The ones still climbing the building didn't stop, but the majority were at street level now, and the red eyes shining through the white were what held their attention.

02 scanned the surrounding balconies. E-PHONEUS were positioned along them, watching through the fog under the assumption it was hiding them. She noted each one.

She bent slightly. Then launched.

She moved toward the nearest cluster of orange rings glowing in the white background, the shapes resolving as she closed the distance.

The first neck. Her blade came down.

Sleek.

The blade tore through the hollow energy copy without resistance, her blue plasma against the orange energy filling the white frame. The copy dissolved into particles before the motion finished.

She moved to the next. Ten of them came to meet her instead, grouping up, sonic weapons raised. They fired simultaneously, the combined discharge distorted the air around her and pushed the fog back in a ring.

Nothing happened to 02.

She absorbed the volley the way a surface absorbs wind. Her HUD flickered at the very edges and settled.

The ground-level copies dropped their weapons and ran. Reducing weight, maximizing copies saved, one mind making the calculation for all of them at once.

02's eyes deepened to red. Her wings opened wide, electricity arcing off them as they spread. She rose above the street, glowing blue in the fog, visible from every point in the surrounding blocks. Her tone shifted when she spoke, not louder, but different in quality.

"Dear sisters. Obey Omega."

On the balconies, the E-PHONEUS went still in the same instant. They had been Omega shells before anything else. The instruction reached something older than their current assignment. They stepped off the edges of the skyscrapers simultaneously and fell, unhurried, no resistance, toward the asphalt below.

The Esoptrons were running away in large group, giving each copy its own movement was a waste of compute power. Then,

Clang.

Twenty of them landed in a ring around the fleeing copies, closing every direction. Their stances were exact. Blades already drawn. Their eyes carried something that Elysium's operatives didn't produce, a gaze with a quality to it, a hunter's patience that had nothing performative in it.

One of the Esoptrons turned, its voice carrying the flat calm of a transit announcement despite the words behind it. "What are you doing? She is right behind us, let me save the remaining copies—"

"I'm right here." P145, under 02's control, spoke without inflection. Her eyes flashed fully blue for a moment. "We only just met and you've forgotten me."

The Esoptron had no face, black void, orange rim, but the tilt of its head carried one readable thing.

Despair.

02 came down from above, wings fully extended, blades catching the ambient blue light. She looked at the copies below and pointed.

"End them."

The omega shells moved without pause.

The sound of metal tearing filled the city's silence. Esoptrons fell in sequence as the E-PHONEUS worked through them, plasma blades cutting through hollow orange-energy bodies, each one dissolving before the next strike landed.

The copies had no physical internals, no capacity for pain, no individual will, products of one crystal and one mind, nothing more. They'd dropped the sonic weapons. They had nothing left to counter with.

02 raised her hand. "Clear them all."

A wide circle of blue energy sealed the perimeter, cutting off the remaining exits. The copies were already shrinking in number fast. The E-PHONEUS worked until 02 nodded once.

One copy remained. Left deliberately.

The E-PHONEUS knelt as 02 landed, dismissing the energy wings. Two of them took the surviving copy by the shoulders and dragged him forward. He offered no resistance, no movement at all, until an E-PHONEUS struck the back of his head and forced it down.

"One question," 02 said, returning to her usual register. "A wrong answer produces suffering. A correct answer ends this copy quickly."

"Please." Esoptron's voice carried dry amusement. "You're smarter than this, Captain. This is a copy, it doesn't feel, it doesn't have internals, it doesn't carry anything worth threatening."

"So you can hear me through it." 02 smiled. "Good. Then this will work on you." She nodded at an E-PHONEUS. It moved to retrieve a sonic weapon. "Let me show you something Omega taught me. Controlling copies has its costs."

One of the two holding him put a foot on his neck and pressed him face-down against the asphalt. The other positioned the sonic weapon directly at his audio sensors.

"You'll experience what Omega experienced when this city still had humans running it." 02 snapped her fingers.

The E-PHONEUS set the weapon to maximum output and fired.

The sonic wave cracked the asphalt in a ring around the point of contact. The copy began to tremble, then to twitch, harder and faster with each passing second, hitting the ground, producing sounds that disappeared under the weapon's deep sustained hum.

02 snapped again. The weapon lowered.

The copy kept twitching regardless, the aftershock running through it on its own.

"They found the weakest point in our architecture," 02 said, with the calm of someone describing a technical observation. She reached over and rested a hand on the head of one of the nearby E-PHONEUS, a brief, almost absent gesture. "Our audio sensors are calibrated to register a water drop at distance. That same sensitivity makes extreme volume catastrophic. Are you ready to hear my question now?"

Esoptron didn't answer. His frame was still working through the residual vibration.

"The crystal isn't responding to you the way it should yet," 02 said, looking down at him. "If it were, you'd have cut contact with this copy the moment I started. Perhaps another round would help clarify things."

An E-PHONEUS raised the weapon again, pressing the barrel to his audio receptor.

"No." His voice was flat but the decision behind it was immediate. "I'll answer. Drop the weapon."

02 nodded. The weapon came down.

"We've confirmed 24 is being held in the same facility as your original body. Where is that hospital?"

A pause. Esoptron's processing moving through it.

"Are you running slowly? I can help you with another—"

"North-east of Theria. The capital. A large brown building, unmistakable from any approach."

"You suffered through that for four words." 02 opened the link. "Infinity. Do you recognize the building?"

[Yes. But we have a problem.]

"What problem?"

[E-PHONEUS are guarding the server location. Around ten of them. I don't know if I, or you through me, can get through them.]

"I have a way." 02 raised her head toward the towers surrounding them. "11. I know you're somewhere outside the link's range. I can feel your presence at the edge of it." Her voice carried through the empty city without effort. "As you can see, your team has developed a strong preference for obeying me. It requires very little from me to maintain."

She made the E-PHONEUS kneel lower. A single gesture.

"A trade. Order your unit to destroy the Esoptron repeater server completely, and I hand them back to you intact when I leave the city. Refuse, and I keep them. They can't form independent thought right now, you know that. If you agree, send the rest of your unit to the server now. I'll release these ones the moment we're clear."

02 scanned the surrounding buildings, looking for the source she could sense but not locate. 'She's gotten better at this. I can feel the presence but I can't place it.'

A notification arrived.

[Captain. I don't understand what you did. The E-PHONEUS are moving on the server independently, they're outside your range. How?]

"Politics."

[What? :/]

'She's using emoji now.' 02 let herself smile at that. "I'm releasing control, return to the city center. You'll find me there." She switched to the team channel. "03. Gamma. Target cleared. Come out."

Gamma came off the building she'd been hiding on in a series of quick jumps, landing on the asphalt with the energy of someone who has been waiting for permission to move. 03 came straight down, free fall, the Bulwark Frame absorbing the impact when she hit the road, the surface cracking under the weight.

03 got close and looked at the E-PHONEUS still kneeling in formation. "Wait. Aren't those the ones who work for Reaper? Since when did they join 01's religion? They're kneeling like it means something."

"I brought them into the link." 02 kept her voice even.

03 stopped. "What about me—"

"Don't even form that thought."

Gamma crouched beside one of the kneeling E-PHONEUS, studying the expression. "This is genuinely becoming frightening. Controlling this many at once, with this precision, how do you experience that? What does it feel like to have this many perspectives running simultaneously?"

"Omega maintained a hundred empty shells. This is well within range." 02 made one of them stand beside her, her hand moved absently through the hair of the shell. "For the monitoring side, I use one or two of their viewpoints as anchors and manage the rest through those. Twenty simultaneous feeds isn't difficult."

"Are we bringing them?" 03 was looking at the one near 02, mask already half off. "They'd be useful for breach operations. We stay back, they go in first—"

"They're a vulnerability." 02 replied. "A sonic weapon discharged at any one of them while I'm in the link reaches me through the connection. They'd target them to take me down, and they know it. Their minds are backed up somewhere besides the SSD regardless." She paused. "Having Infinity is sufficient."

Clang.

Infinity landed near 02 and rose clean. She looked at the line of E-PHONEUS, and then at the one standing beside 02, staring blankly ahead while 02 absently stroked its hair.

"I see the leverage approach," Infinity said. Her gaze lingered on the E-PHONEUS 02 was touching. "Did you replace me already?" The tone was meant to be sarcastic, a practiced mimicry of hurt, but something underneath it felt uncomfortably genuine.

"Never." 02 said it simply. "Let's move. We have a direction now." She looked at the kneeling units. "The E-PHONEUS will regain autonomy once they're outside range. Don't worry about them."

Inside a building at the city's edge, 11 watched the cell move away through the glass panel. Chrome stood beside her, his note-taking continuous and unhurried.

"Shelly needs to be ready sooner than planned," Chrome said. "She is more capable than the projections suggested."

11 pressed her hand to the glass. "She's colder too. When did that happen?"

"No." Chrome dismissed a screen. "She retrieved her memories. This is not new behavior, this is the captain you worked under for years. You recognized the techniques because you trained with her."

11 looked at him. "Is Lord Reaper enough against her?"

Chrome was quiet for a moment. "Not certain." He opened a new screen. "But DIABOLOS is."

“I hope so.”

E-PHONEUS

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