novelraw Chapter 137: Muted Army.
Chapter 137: Muted Army.
V O L U M E . S I X : C O D E_R E S E T
Chapter 137: Muted Army"We lost 06." 02 said it without looking up from the data feed. "Signal gone, off the map entirely. The decoy route served its purpose. Elysium's attention shifted. The main convoy is clear. But before 06 was dismantled, her HUD confirmed who took them. Reaper and Infinity. They have their SSDs now. They know our destination. "
Delta was driving without particular interest in what was happening in the passenger seats. The tunnels were behind them now, open highway ahead, green hills running alongside the dark asphalt as they made their way toward the northwestern border and the crossing into the Veridian Coast.
Delta's morale would have needed heavy machinery to move at this point.
"Why do you sound pleased?" 03's voice had an edge on it. "We lost 06 and 07 at the same time. In a bad way. Why are you like this?"
"We can rebuild them at any point." 02 kept typing. "Their mind files update continuously and we have the parts. Delta and I will also be transporting the sub-ground fabrication equipment, we'll be able to produce new E-UNITs once we're established in the Veridian Coast."
"Can you try, for one moment, to see us as more than components?" 03 shifted in her seat to face her. "We're robots, yes. We're also people. The entire point of what father spent his life building was to make us that. You're making his work meaningless."
"What if his work was already meaningless?" 02 didn't stop typing. "What did emotion add to this team? Name one outcome it improved. The civilians we tried to protect still died. Reaper crushed them anyway."
Delta and 03 turned to look at her at the same moment.
03 laughed without humor. "Are you seriously suggesting that the lives of—"
"You don't need to repeat it back to me to illustrate how it sounds." 02 dismissed the screens and turned to face them properly. "Look at where softness got us. We are running from the country that made us because we cannot hold it."
03 hit the interior panel hard enough to shake the vehicle. "Stop. I'm done. What does any of that have to do with running away? You kicked doors in, turned off half the facility, and dragged everyone out behind you, and now you're implying our emotions are the problem? What's the endgame here, 02? We become a mute army that processes your orders? You don't want anyone questioning your decisions, and I can see why."
"I don't want that!" 02 raised her voice for the first time in the conversation. "Who wants followers that can't push back? That's not a team, that's a nightmare. Stop reshaping what I said into something it wasn't."
She exhaled through her vents. "All I said is that maybe building your identity around a place funded through stolen money, and calling the man who put a wall on my memory 'father,' is worth examining. You're protecting a version of the past that wasn't what you thought it was."
"He still cared." 03 was close now, face near hers. "When one of us got destroyed, he was there. You treat it like respawning in a game. Maybe you don’t remember her, but 06 remembers you. She remembers who you were and how you treated her. All she has now is a super-capable stranger ordering her into situations she might not come back from and rationalizing it because she can be revived. Think about someone else for a moment."
02 looked at her. 03's words were landing in a specific place, the same place Tau had hit, repeatedly, across all those weeks in the forest. The same words, almost. The same pattern.
"The last time I let myself care about someone, she disappeared from my shoulders." Her voice dropped. "She was everything I had for weeks. She was gone in seconds. When I found all of you, how warm you were, even to me with no memory, I didn't want to lose anyone again. What you're reading as cold is me trying to prevent that."
Delta stared at the road and said nothing. Her grip on the wheel tightened.
03 looked down. "02, I didn't mean to—"
"If keeping you alive means you hate me for it, that's a trade I'll take a thousand times." 02 pulled her screens back up, putting something away that she'd let out further than she'd intended. "I know what it feels like to lose someone close. I am not doing it again regardless of how you feel about my methods."
03 and Delta looked at each other across the cabin.
Delta's expression shifted into something quiet and warm. "I can't believe it. No memories, different body, and you're exactly the same 02 who was with me in the hangar."
03 smiled despite herself. "Yeah. You are." She leaned back. "Sorry, cap."
02 said nothing. Her eyes were on the screen.
Then Delta hit the brakes.
The trucks behind them slowed and stopped in sequence. A roadblock had formed across the highway, mechs deployed side to side, sonic weapons raised and aimed at the column.
"Stay here." 02 was already out of the cab.
She walked toward them in measured steps. No blades drawn. Nothing raised. Just walking.
The mechs opened fire without pause. At full output, the sonic bursts carved grooves into the road surface with each shot.
02 raised one hand. A wall of blue energy materialized in front of her and absorbed the volleys without moving.
The mechs recalibrated. More poured from a guard post nearby, taking a flanking angle, trying to surround her before she could respond. They closed the circle and tightened it.
02 snapped her fingers.
Hands rose from the asphalt in translucent blue, large, extended, one per mech, and closed around each frame simultaneously. The firing stopped. The struggling started, and accomplished nothing.
02 walked out of the circle through the one gap she'd left herself.
She turned to face the line from the outside and raised her left hand. A dark cloud formed at the far end. She crouched, touched the road surface, reading the geometry, calculating tolerances, then stood.
Her eyes burned bright blue. She dragged her hand from left to right without a word.
The beam struck from the cloud in complete silence. perfectly tracking the motion of her hand, passing through each mech in sequence, not burning them, not scattering debris, not scorching the road beneath.
Each mech ceased to exist where the beam touched it, no residue, no remnant. The ones at the far end of the line watched it come toward them through the grip of the blue hands and had nothing to do but wait.
02 lowered her arm. The cloud dissolved. Wherever the light touched, the metal simply been erased, leaving nothing but empty air behind.
She got back into the truck and resumed working through the data at speed.
03 and Delta stared at her. She gave them nothing.
03 leaned over and rested her arm across Delta's shoulder. "Start the truck and get us moving. She's going to sit like that until I apologize."
Delta's mouth curved. "Then apologize."
03 thought about it.
"Honestly?" she whispered. "Let's see how long this goes."