E-UNIT: The Blue Angels of Death.

January 2052

[Systems updated.]

[Verifying hardware, hardware health at 100%.]

[Verifying emotional stability, mostly stable, suppressed processing detected.]

[Verifying energy output, fully restored, with additional charge being discharged through Omega guest: E-UNIT Infinity.]

[Welcome back, E-UNIT 02. The Captain.]

Blue eyes opened to the world again. Stable, focused, carrying a weight behind them that hadn't been there when they'd closed. They widened for a few seconds before settling back into their usual sharp shape. The HUD loaded in slow sections. Having lain dormant for a full day, the interface took its time, as if reluctant to announce what the android’s physical eyes could already see. The blue hair came back to full brightness, pulling the surrounding light into itself.

02 rose in one clean motion and ran a full scan of the interior in the same movement. Her CPU had handled considerably more demanding tasks. But this scan was heavy in a different way, the faces it found were ones that, not long ago, her system would have marked in deep red. High Threat.

The plane's interior was beige and white throughout. The bed she'd been lying on. The circular window beside her in the beige wall. The white vase of flowers on the small table at her feet. The beige floor extending through the doorway to the rest of the cabin. Clean colors for a clean space, everything designed to show that it was maintained.

Then her eyes moved to the faces waiting for her.

Reaper's dark frame, green and red optics steady. Infinity's face, open and readable in the way that hid how much was actually running underneath it. And Omega, the walking concrete face, precise and unhuman and somehow still expressive, hands extended toward 02, blue energy flowing out of them.

"It worked." 02 looked at her own hands. The assessment came out cold and factual. "Everything is repaired. Deep internals, exterior sensors, all of it." 02 looked down at her left leg. Omega had used the cyan crystal to reconstruct it, leaving a matte-grey finish with subtle geometric carvings that ran down to her boot.

She looked at Omega with warmth pushing against the sharpness. "You can repair any robot with the cyan crystal."

Omega didn't have a face built for smiling. But the hand that landed on 02's head, careful, deliberate, patting once, communicated it anyway. "I'm glad. You collapsed the moment you stepped onto this plane. Systami guided you to the bed and kept your systems running through the night. The repair took eighteen hours."

Infinity exhaled through her vents and dropped onto the bed beside 02. "Why do you never tell anyone when you're at the limit? Nobody operates at ten percent hardware health and calls it manageable." She looked at her. "Why didn't you say something?"

"I didn't want to make the situation heavier than it was." 02 glanced toward the doorway where Reaper was standing in silence, presence larger than the space he was occupying. "I still won against Plex." She reached up and tapped Omega's concrete head. "This was his original frame. Calling it original is charitable, but still."

"He survived." Reaper stepped inside and stood at his full height above the rest of them. "The mechs I sent to sweep the area reported a walking statue moving through the forest beyond the landing site. He hasn't been located."

Infinity settled her head against 02's shoulder. "I hated every moment while you were out." She looked at 02's arm. "Eighteen hours, 02. Why are you this complicated, inside and outside?"

"The hardware is father's work. Ask him." 02 looked through the circular window. The geography outside was wrong for Altea, the color of the sky, the density of the green below, the shape of the skyline. "Why haven't we landed yet? And this isn't Altea's geography."

"Elysium," Reaper said.

"That's what I said. Altea." 02 didn't move her eyes from the window. "Are we landing in—"

"New Mer."

He left the doorway without another word. The others exchanged a look and followed.

The plane came down on the widest road in the capital, a double five-lane thoroughfare at the city's heart, broad enough for the robotic pilot to land without difficulty. The door hissed open and the automatic escalators extended. A butler unit in a black suit descended first and bowed at the bottom.

Reaper followed and touched the asphalt with heavy, deliberate steps. He walked forward without checking whether anyone was following.

02, Infinity, and Omega came down after him in sequence, looking around as they moved. The capital spread out in every direction from the central roundabout Reaper was walking toward.

He stopped at the dead center of it.

The grass in the roundabout's center island had grown beyond any maintained height, long, uneven, several seasons deep. The flowers planted in the beds were dry and brown, the stems still standing but hollow. The fountain had closed its own pipes with accumulated grime. Road signs had gone orange with rust. The asphalt had faded to near-white, the surface texture scoured away by years without pressure or weight.

No one was here. No movement, no sound from anything human.

02 scanned the full radius without stopping. Empty buildings, windows open or missing, the interiors dark. Empty streets. Empty storefronts. Cars sitting on the road in positions suggesting they'd been abandoned mid-travel, rust covering the panels, tires flat or gone. Empty sidewalks.

Empty city.

The trees had grown past the management that used to contain them, their upper branches now competing with the building facades. Animals moved through the advancing vegetation with the ease of things that have understood they belong. Water ran from upper floors of apartment buildings where pipes had eventually given up, creating thin falls that dropped from balcony to balcony.

Sections of those balconies had come loose and fallen into the street below. The only thing with any energy in the whole city was the green, nature reclaiming territory on a schedule that had never needed anyone's permission.

Reaper pushed his cape back and clasped his hands behind him.

"I love this place." He looked at what the city had become. "It reminds me that I'm not the only one who reclaims land when the opportunity arrives. Nature does it without announcement, without justification. It simply moves in when the previous occupants leave."

Infinity looked at the cracked sidewalk beneath him, already split under his weight. "Fath—Reaper." She caught herself. "Why are we here?"

"To show you what the side you chose has produced." He began to float. The others rose with him, gently, a fraction lower, ascending slowly.

As the ground fell away below them, the full shape of the city appeared. The skyline intact. The streets laid out in their original geometry. The parks, the commercial districts, the residential blocks, the central government quarter, all of it present, all of it standing, all of it empty.

02 said nothing during the ascent. Omega stayed close beside her, watching her face.

Infinity looked across the silent expanse, the only sounds coming from birds that the returning nature had drawn back in, as if something needed to keep reminding visitors that life still existed.

"Who did this?" Her voice came out smaller than intended. "At least your Metromania campaign had a stated goal behind it. New Mer wasn't an aggressor, they were a smaller country that Altea had been pressuring for years." She looked down at streets that no one had walked in a long time. "Who kills an entire country? Who is capable of this and chooses it?"

She turned to Omega and Reaper. Both of them were looking at 02.

Infinity turned slowly.

"Captain." She kept her voice even. "Why are they looking at you?"

02 lowered her head.

"Captain."

02 turned away, fully silent. Infinity moved around to face her on the thrusters, taking hold of both shoulders.

"Who did this? Do you know them?"

A slow nod.

"Are they here with us right now?"

Another nod. Smaller.

"Is it Omega?"

02 raised her eyes and met Infinity's directly. Blue meeting blue, steady and unblinking.

"It was me." Her voice came out cold and flat. She held the words for a moment before continuing. "I am the reason this city is in this state. I fought for Altea. I was trying to reach my sisters. That decision alone brought New Mer to this."

Infinity released her hold slightly. "How—"

"The country had a standing military of one million." 02 looked at the empty street grids below them. "They sent most of their men to stop me at the border. They couldn't. One million soldiers died there." She paused. "And..."

“And?”

"And some civilians."

"How many civilians."

"I don't know exactly."

Infinity looked at Reaper.

He answered without looking away from 02. "Two million, the government armed the civilian population to defend the route to the Ministry of Defense when the military failed.” Reaper looked at the ministry across the city. “They died as she reached it. The remainder of the population had to travel to Veridian Coast on foot. No fuel. No men left to organize evacuation. Mostly women and children, walking. The ones who survived the journey arrived as third-class residents, behind the original population and behind the Altean refugees."

He looked at 02, who had turned her face away from the view.

"I bring this up not to prosecute anyone here." His voice carried no particular emotion. "I bring it up because the people calling me a monster know exactly what it takes to be one. They know from the inside." He descended slowly, Omega with him. "Take your time. I'll be on the plane."

Omega went down without a word. She was the crystal that had given 02 the power to do this. There was nothing to add.

Infinity looked at 02's face. The blankness in it wasn't unfamiliarity, she'd seen 02 go cold before. This was something different. This was where the cold came from.

"Do you know what I hate more than the act itself?" She drifted forward and pressed her forehead against 02's, not giving her anywhere to turn her face. "Hypocrisy."

"I never called myself a hero." 02's voice was level. "I did what was necessary. Sometimes the only available options are bad and worse. Both of my options were the worse kind."

"Nothing is worse than killing millions of people."

"I had to choose between them and my sisters." 02 didn't raise her voice. "This country sent soldiers to kill them."

"And the civilians?"

"They were in the way."

“What.”

She raised her head, not with defiance, not with shame, with the flatness of a settled question. "If you believe that choosing my sisters was wrong, that what I did was wrong, then we should separate here. Because I would make the same choice again." She paused. "Including for you."

She descended, thrusters carrying her down to the asphalt in a long, controlled drop. She walked toward the plane in measured steps, each one deliberate against the faded road, her frame growing smaller as the distance opened between them, a distance carrying a whole book of history inside it, one neither of them was willing to open, though both knew exactly where it sat on the shelf. Her foot fully rebuilt.

Infinity stayed in the air and watched her go, looking at the blue figure becoming smaller.

'I am… scared.'