Here’s what it looks like from the outside, from the perspective of most Wheel Group members: Adam, long thought by most to be an unremarkable worker drone, had retired from the WDF to take care of his daughter, only to have his core ignite. Afterward, he rose meteorically through the ranks of the Wheel Group, soon becoming a Ring 0 solver alongside Yeva. In the end, he fell in battle in a classified mission to defeat a zombie process they called the core snatcher.
That is all Doll knows about her father’s fate.
The truth is... much more complex.
Required reading: Corrupt Combustion, then Prologue, then Deadlocked & Thrashing
False Power, False Demise
Adam, like rest of the WDF, didn’t have a black box and thus couldn’t perceive corruption. Assigned to the patrol the city ruins one night, a zombie attacks his squad. None of them, Adam included, can understand what’s going on, only that drones are dying.
(Sometimes, under the extreme CPU load of a drone near death, the inbuild anti-corruption safeguards falter, just a bit. That night, Adam could dimly comprehend just how fucked he was.)
So he runs away and hides, clinging to survival long enough to be saved by Yeva, his wife, blessed or cursed with a solver core that could see and fight corruption. She brings him back to be repaired by Nori.
And then, in the hospital room, Adam breaks down. He doesn’t want to be scared anymore. “How do you do it?” he asks his wife.
Yeva's silent for a moment. Not thinking — she never has to think — so the silence must be part of her intended response. “When you have something to protect, you’ll do whatever it takes to preserve it. Moving forward is all we can do.”
“All we can do… Heh, well, you can do anything, Yeva. I guess a Wheel Group Administrator doesn’t have much to fear anymore.”
“No one is invincible, not even Doorman. Even the scariest drones have something they fear.”
“What are you scared of, my love?”
“You,” she says. “You’ll get yourself killed out there, one of these days. It would be… hard, for me and for our child.” Her eyes are steady, and there’s something assured in her gaze. “If I asked, you would stop.”
“I would. But… how can I stay home, when my wife has the whole world on her shoulders? I wanted to do… something to ease that, even if it’s a little.”
Yeva pulls him into an embrace, and says, "Look out for our child. That’s all I ask.
It's a conversation they have more permutations of, as time goes on. Adam can't let go of the feeling there's more he should do, but he's just a worker. But something important changes when Adam and Yeva manufacture Doll. You see, Doll ends up with a black box.
Yeva, remember, bears ridiculous sensory capability courtesy of her compile-time assertion, meaning she’s able to witness firsthand what black box initialization looks like, to a degree of precision no other drone is capable of.
This gives her a blueprint. She explains the theory to Adam, and he expresses interest. Thus, with some help from Nori (and her driver’s true function), they’re able to create a virtual black box, a simulacra made of raw command output and patch it into Adam’s core.
The next step would be igniting it, right?
Except this is all super dubious. Nori’s uncomfortable with this use of her abilities; Yeva is worried Adam might get hurt or worse, and both of them are borderline retraumatized by the fact that like, well, purposefully igniting solver cores was exactly what the humans in Cabin Fever did all the time. Neither of them had asked for this – neither of them would have asked for this.
But ultimately, what matters is that when they ask Adam ‘are you ready?’ he can’t bring himself to say yes. He’s spooked, unsure, and they’re absolutely not gonna force this on him without his consent. So they back out.
But now, it’s too risky to try unpatching him. Still, since it’s command output, not anything physical, it’ll probably just hit a snag, exit with an error code, and unravel on its own.
When all said and done, Adam forgets any of this even happened — anticorruption safeguards, remember.
So Adam retires from active WDF service, takes up photography as a hobby. One day, he’s out taking Doll scavenging, and they get attacked by a zombie. He only notices by how Doll reacts, how scared she gets of something he can’t perceive. And he gets scared too, but when she needs it, he mans up to defend his daughter.
And it’s then that his core ignites, forgotten patch activating, and Adam instinctively wields his combustion driver.
And its function? [Zombie Process Management] With a click of his camera and a flash of white solver light, he captures the zombie menacing Doll in a photograph, stripping it of corruption.
They head back to Wheel Group HQ and his abilities are studied. There's a stir at long time WDF grunt — one everyone was sure had no black box — igniting to an innate function. Yeva wants to tell him the forgotten truth, but Nori checks her with a glance. There's arguments Nori could make. Nori's true ability is top secret information, Adam is absolutely not cleared to know it. Do you want to tell Adam he would have had this power years ago but he was too much of a coward to take it? Do you want everyone to know that we're no better than the mad scientists of Cabin Fever? Or worse, do you want to have to do it again, face a crowd of fools begging us to make them solvers too?
The fact that Nori could make these arguments is enough. Yeva can see the future, revise her words with hindsight to be flawlessly convincing, try every approach to find a way to change someone's mind. And yet, Nori can keep up; she is the only drone who wins argument with Yeva without even opening her mouth.
So they keep the lie simply. Adam is a late bloomer, his black box hidden and dormant for years. Who'd question it? No one knows how solver abilities work.
They soon figure out the mechanics. By taking a photo of them, Adam is able to assimilate corrupt zombie processes into his memory pages, and thereafter can expend their corruption to fuel his commands, the printed photo gradually fading. If the zombies have special functions, he gains access to them (at least until he exhausts their stored corruption). He can instantly assimilate weak zombies; more powerful ones may requires several pictures from different angles, and of course more command output to capture.
Then, with a touch and a command run on the photographs themseves, Adam can reinfect a device with zombie processs, though he hesitates to use more than roaches and crows. It’s alright; nobody asks him to defile drone corpses.
In the end, even with that self-imposed restriction, his ability lets him power up to R0 pretty quickly. He’s finally able to help Yeva, ease the weight of the world.
But you see, there’s a double edge to his power.
The zombie processes are stored in his memory. Meaning they’re a part of him. So as his power grows, he’s haunted by a chorus of mad, corrupted voices, each one just so hungry, endlessly lusting for oil and battle.
Every zombie is a drone that died, and so with every process absorbed, Adam remembers those shattered pieces of the lost, feels all of the pain and anguish burning their drives in their last moments.
It’s hard to keep going, pushing through that. But it’s worth it to keep saving people, right? To keep your wife and child safe? To do the right thing?
Then it gets worse. How?
Adam gets over it.
The first hundred deaths hurt. The first thousand? You know what they say about one death versus a million. When you collate the statistics…
Adam becomes very familiar with death. No, he gets bored of it.
It’s years of voices begging to live, crying out in torment, screaming the names of their loved ones.
Like broken records.
At death’s door, everyone is the same, and if you endure it as long as he has, you’d get tired of it too. Maybe it’s good that he learned to cope.
But how do you keep saving people when those in peril sound just like the voices you’ve come to despise?
Adam tries to get lunch with the WDF one day, reconnect with his old buddies. Makes an effort to sympathize, care about, see them as lives worth protecting. Tries not think about how many drones felt like broken records even in life.
Alice is there, and she’s the only one he can really talk to anymore. In a way, they’re mirrors of each other. Adam is the only Wheel Group member who knows what’s it’s like on the bottom rung, as a WDF grunt. Alice is the only one who knows the real story, who has it engraved in her deepest memories just what happened in Cabin Fever.
And he confides in her his growing feelings. “I don’t know if I can keep doing this. What is the point? I am saving lives. Yet it feels like just going around in loop, not making a difference.”
“Cuz ya aren’t.”
“What?”
“Ya reckon the Wheel Group wants to make a difference? Open yer eyes. Them solvers get a nice fat paycheck and a whole bunker kissing their boots so long as there's zombies to purge. If they solved the problem, what use would we have for ’em?”
“We... have powers?” Solvers could do plenty that wasn't purging zombies — though the words are unsure in Adam's mouth. His function, after all, was premised on there being zombies.
“To hell with yer powers. Ain’t worth the trouble. You know who wanted your powers? The humans. Look where it got them.”
Adam raises his hand, and a white rune sparks to life, floating aloof. It gave him a small smile. He liked his powers. Was that an argument? It felt a childish thing to say.
“Ya think it makes you better than me, dontcha? You used to be one of us, but you solvers are all the same. Talk a big fat game about sacrifice, but you’d never give up your precious witchcraft for the common folk, wouldya?”
Adam closed his fist, killing the light. “Why would we do that? We need our powers. There’s no way to get rid of zombies except by purging them.”
“Have ya looked? Have ya even tried thinkin bout it?”
“…No.”
So Adam does.
Alice continues, “Zombies spawn from corruption, don’t they? Same as you solvers. Betcha can’t get rid of one without the other. That’s why y’all haven’t done squat about the root cause.”
“Solvers have black boxes, zombies–”
“So what? Don’t feed me that bullcrap, I’m sure Yeva spun plenty o tales of why it just has to be this way. But sometimes the answers’s dead simple.”
“And what’s your simple answer, Alice?”
Alice leans in, far too close to his face. She grinned, wide and wicked. She didn’t have the teeth of a solver. No — she’d sharpened them herself. “Kill ’em all.”
Not long after that, Adam has a mission that changes everything. Zombies, it turns out, are not all the same.
It starts off as a routine purge. A mountaintop encampment has been plagued by a string of disappearances. Classic ambush hunter type. Scanning for corruption, he finds and purges the zombie. Mission complete, right?
But there’s something else. There’s two zombies in the mountain caves. The other hadn’t killed anyone, but when Adam attacks, it wields a custom function. Encountering a surprise R1 like this is how so many rookies meet their end – but Adam is not a rookie.
Bracing himself for yet another moaning voice joining the chorus, he assimilates the zombie. When it’s written to his pages, it plaintively asks what’s going on.
Adam ignores it; he’s gotten good at that.
Life goes on, and there’s more missions. More zombies to purge. The surprise R1 has a solid innate function. Adam welcomes it to his repetoire.
But every time he uses it, it asks what’s going on. No, it doesn’t just ask the same question. He notices changes of wording; it seems to comprehend the passage of time. It complains about him ignoring it.
And Adam’s curiosity is finally piqued; this has never happened before. He dares to engage. He talks to it, and before long, words come like a flood of tears, the zombie’s life story.
You see, when drones started disappearing, the workers of the mountaintop encampment had gotten the sense that something was wrong. They felt the corruption creeping up on them. But among them, one child – the same age as Doll – did more than dimly sense it. She saw the zombie creeping closer, entwining around its victims like a cable-serpent. What did this mean? She knew who would die before it happened.
And what would superstition country drones make of that? She became the scapegoat, the witch who’d cursed them. They caged her, beat her, then left her chained up in the rain, rusting away in the flood of water.
But she was a solver, so she healed. Though no one knew or could tell her what she really was, so all her powers meant for her was the cause of her torment and the thing making the torture go on and on.
But even when death came, that wasn’t the end. When a solver drones dies, lacking oil to heal, but without residual logs from enemy commands? They return as a memory leak.
And memory leaks are different from normal zombies. They can still think. Adam can talk to them. This girl isn’t just a broken record.
It goes without saying that before this point, Adam treaded on the verge of outright not caring or seeing the value in most drones’ lives.
But saving people was only half his motivation — he’s doing this for Yeva and Doll. There’s a dissonance — when it comes down to it, why should he care about them and not the drones pleading for his help?
The memory leaks give him the answer.
Why? Solver drones are inherently superior to worker drones.
But what happens if that superiority isn’t protected? This girl had been the same age as Doll. The people of that camp had spoken with the same accent as Alice, and they had her same attitude. Adam would protect drones – protect solvers – from zombies and disassemblers. But clearly, there was something else to protect them from.
Damn toasters.
Adam goes back to the to mountaintop encampment, the girl's memory leak at his fingertips, ready to avenge her. Alice had told him exactly how to solve this worlds’ problems, hadn’t she? And he was a solver.
He preps a R0 zombie granting him the power to blow down the walls of the encampment. By the end, he’d tear down every the vaults and bunkers. After all, why should solvers have to hide alongside workers like terrified prey? Why not destroy the disassemblers once and for all? Adam could become powerful enough to do it, he just needed more zombies.
Why not make more of them himself? This way, the toasters would finally be useful. He could have a whole army.
He hears the always steady beat of leathery wings descending. Lighting down behind him is Nori Doorman.
For the first time in months, Adam looks scared.
“Yeva thought you were gonna go on a rampage. Are you?”
“You would stop me?”
Nori shrugs. “I might, I might not. Depends on if you have a good reason or are just on some cackling villain shit.”
“Do not worry. I am only doing what’s necessary.”
Nori makes a sound somewhere between a yawn and a cough.
Adam raises an eyebrow. “Did I disappoint?”
“Yep. You’ve got it backwards. The villain shit would be refreshing. It’d be fun. But you’re still in your right mind, which means I need to argue with you. Such a drag.”
“For a hero, you sound remarkably unenthusiastic about saving a thriving outpost.”
“I guess I’m not. I think you’d know all about it, yeah?”
“Ah. But if you understand my perspective, why stop me?”
“Eh, doing a favor of Yeva, ’sall this is. If it were up to me, I’d just let you get it out of your system. Who am I to judge? Last time I lost it, this planet got wrecked. One little camp isn’t much in comparison.”
“I have not ‘lost it’. You yourself said I am in my right mind. This is necessary.”
“So, straw utilitarianism, is it? You on some kill a few to save the many kick?”
“Killing toasters to save solvers is hardly a sacrifice at all.”
“Ah, you’re racist. Wow, you managed to be extra boring. Though I guess it’s actually funny, since you are a toaster.”
A scoff of disbelief and disgust, and, “My solver core—”
“Is a fake. We made it up as an experiment. Then you chickened out halfway halfway through and your toaster brain forgot about it until my surprise tool came in clutch for you and Doll.”
“You… you can make toasters into solvers? Why did you stop? We could have an army of solvers to stand against the sky demons. Think of how many people you could save.”
“Save? Look at yourself. I tried this once and what came of it? You’d be a mass murderer if your wife wasn’t nostradamus.”
“You could stop me. You are Nori Doorman. What do you have to worry about?”
“Sue me for not jumping at the chance to babysit a dozen new R0s throwing their superpowered weight around. Take it from me, Alex. Power is a fucking headache. We don’t need more of it.”
“Power exists to be used. Maybe you should not create more solvers. But is there not something else you can do with that ability? They say you never document your driver, but it is deeper than that, is it not? You are not even using your full potential. What is your power, Nori?”
“More trouble than it’s worth.” Nori lifts a hand, solver symbol flashing to life between her fingers. She narrows her brows. “Are we done here? Had your big character moment? If you’re still gonna do the massacre, I can just knock you out and take your home.”
“That won’t be necessary. You’ve… given me much to think about.”
Adam takes away two things from this encounter. One: he doesn’t want to be like Nori, so he vows to use his ability to its maximum potential. Two: he can’t just out and start slaughtering people all at once, or Yeva will notice. He has to be subtle.
So, slowly, with great patience and caution, he starts brutually tearing apart WDF members.
The WDF has a high enough turnover that no one looks too closely at what’s happening. He knows Yeva’s blindspots well enough to keep to them.
But he’s not just doing random serial killing. He’s doing what in retrospect should be obvious to someone whose power is zombie control.
He’s trying to bring the dead back to life.
If he can uplift toasters to solvers, maybe he doesnt need to be so bigoted anymore. Even if he only succeeds in making the zombies less robotic, at least they’d not feel like broken records he needs to silence.
And if absolutely nothing else… Alice’s plan would still work. Zombies are born of the corruption and errors worker drone produce. If there were no more workers, there would be no more zombies. And nothing more to assmilate.
What Adam doesn’t factor into his plans is Beau.
The nature of the slip up is simple. Beau’s mother is Alice. Beau himself had trained to be a member before his indefinitely postponed execution made him a de facto member of the Wheel Group.
Beau had known some of the WDF members that went missing.
And then one day, one of Adam’s victims is discovered. Maybe they escaped, maybe Adam had gradually gotten less careful about how he disposed of his failures, maybe Beau heard a voice whispering in his head.
However it happened, they succumbed to their injuries, but Beau still operated on them, tried to repair and then autopsied their chassis.
Beau comes to the wrong conclusion, but the wrong conclusion is still a problem for Adam. Beau thinks there’s a zombie methodically preying on the WDF. R2 at the very least, most likely R1, but it might even be R0! He takes it upon himself to investigate.
He connects the dots, and finds most of the beads on the string of killing. Every body they dig up has extreme core damage, as if the zombie had particular interest in the mechanical heart. WDF guards are plucked out from patrol and their cores are gnawed by flame and claw.
Thus the moniker: the core snatcher.
The investigation eventually leads them to one of Adam’s secret villain lairs, but while they’re closing in on his trail, Adam starts making moves.
His most important contingency? He corrupts Yeva. Yeva is the most powerful Wheel Group member save Nori, and she can see the future. No enemy could ever get the drop on her.
But Adam isn’t an enemy, he’s her husband. The zombie he infects her with is specially tuned, taking over five minutes to subvert her system. By the time she realizes what’s happening, her runtime assertion leaves her powerless.
The last few pieces of evidence come in fast. The mountaintop outpost is massacred. Yeva is missing. When Nori & Beau realized it, they race to confront Adam. Either Yeva is already trying to stop him, and she needs their help, or she’s already failed. Either way they needed to go immediately, get there fast.
Due to this haste, none of the Wheel Group even know what’s going on – no backup is coming.
The final confrontation happens in a factory. Adam is amassing an army, incarnating zombie processes in newly made bodies. With Yeva in his control, she spills the secret for virtual black box creation.
Still, it’s the strongest solver and her student versus two Ring 0s. How does Adam expect to beat Nori?
“It is simple,” he says. “We won’t hold back. We’ll push our powers to the limits.”
And Nori, of course, won’t.
Yeva is her opponent, and Nori could destroy her – but after the core collapse, Yeva was the one who pulled her back from the edge, who convinced her to save people. Zombie-possessed, the right thing to do is to put her down before she does something terrible. But without Yeva, why would Nori care about doing the right thing?
Which isn’t to say Nori and Yeva don’t fight, they do, but it’s evenly matched – evenly matched at the power level of R0, meaning entire floors of the factory collapse into rumble. Both Nori and Yeva have winged combat forms (Yeva has angelic wings), and more than once they are thrown through whole buildings. The surrounding city block becomes a ruin.
Beau is an afterthought in this battle as he struggles against the canon fodder of Adam’s army. He’s just a student, and hasn’t had time to become great, if he even had the will for it, and he doesn’t.
“I have to thank you, Beau. If you had not caught on, if you had not frightened me into accelerating my plans, it would still be grinding through the Worker Defense Force, blindly groping for what knowledge I have attained by simply asking my wife. I would still be cowering at the thought of anyone discovering my true machinations. Now? The sun will rise over a Wheel Group lead by me. The revolution begins tonight.”
Nori sees how this plays out from here. With Adam and Yeva together, the whole Wheel Group council will fall in line behind them – they’d never side with Beau, and they never truly trusted Nori.
Speaking of him, Nori's eyes glance to her student, still fighting off the hordes of zombies. And… they aren’t killing him. Adam absolutely has zombie processes more powerful than Beau, who after so much training is still merely Ring 2 – so why are they holding back?
And then she sees the final stroke of his plan. Beau has one last thing to offer Adam, after all.
So Nori makes her decision. They’ll have to run. They’ll be fugitives from the usurped wheel group, but if they hide and gather power, maybe they’ll be able to outrace Adam’s ambitions and stop him.
“Whatever you do, Beau,” Nori says, “don’t let Cyn out.”
Beau keeps fighting, struggling. He hears his teacher, thinks about it, and makes his decision.
“Adam wants to control everything, doesn’t he? I don’t want to let drones go through terrible things if I can stop it. If it’s a choice between my body being controlled and the whole outpost… I think maybe it’s time to stop holding back.” Beau stops, cycles exhausts, and speaks the damning words. “Cyn. Do you want to play?”
Cyn changes the tide of the battle immediately. Zombie after zombie, unraveled with the sweep of one hand, and then stitched into frankenstein forms with another pass.
When Nori see this, she realizes it’s over. “Sorry, Yeva,” she whispers. It was time to stop holding back – because Nori would no longer need a moral compass in a world where Cyn was assimilated.
Nori lunges forward, her hand glowing with the dark purple shadow of her true technique. But Yeva is faster, and executes her sandbox before Nori can close the distance. A firewall forms midair, obscuring the pair from the rest of the battlefield.
Cyn’s rampage continues. She’s turned shattered bits of drone chassis into improvised scissors and a sewing needle, empowered with command output, and she dances among the zombies. One rises above the rest, a possessed sentinel, but Cyn simply weaves a blindfold from stray threads and fights it with eyes closed.
When she emerges victorious over the sentinel, there’s a flash behind her – behind Beau.
Blue eyes blink open in the factory ruins.
Adam is behind him – with a touch, he’s assimilated Cyn, the manor zombie, and he’s thanking Beau once again. He’s been the most outstanding help.
Beau turns around slowly, staring at at Adam. “Cyn?” he says. “Cyn? Are you still… no. I can’t feel her corruption.” His eyes refocus on the russian drone before him. “You… can contain her too?”
He just smiles. “What else is my function for?”
“So that’s it? We lost, just like that?”
“Battles aren’t decided by who’s stronger, but who is weaker. Nori is weak before Yeva, and you are weak before anything that can counter the manor demon.”
“What are you weak to, sir?”
Adam laughs. “I’m not weak to asking.”
Beau surveys the ruins. At length, he says. “Are you… still going to do bad things? The core snatchings, they were just experiments, right? But now you know, and you’ll stop?”
“I need not continue, but I will still do whatever is needed. Corruption hurts drones. It’s inherent to the process. Do you think I got strong enough to contain Cyn without pushing myself?”
“I think I get it,” Beau says. “Solvers have to do whatever it takes to keep people safe.” Beau’s nodding, with a complex, determined look on his face. “I met Doll, before we left outpost-3.”
Adam freezes.
“She adores you. ‘My daddy eats zombies so they can’t eat anyone else.’ But that’s not quite what your driver is, is it? You don’t eat, you integrate. You become a monster to fight monsters.”
“What are you getting at, boy?”
“Your daughter is a solver drone. Will you push her like you’re pushing yourself?”
Adam freezes up again. No, he doesn’t freeze – he crashes entirely.
Beau’s own words caught up to him just a second before the insight became moot. Beau isn’t sure why he feels like he understands Adam’s function so well, but it feels like pure truth. He doesn’t eat, he integrates.
Which means–
"Giggle. You talk too much, little brother."
Beau takes a step back. It didn’t make him any safer.
"I'm not mad about the timeout. I promise."
Cyn outstretches one of Adam’s hands, and a yellow glyph blooms to blinding radiance. Every wire in Beau’s body seizes at once, and he’s lifted on invisible strings.
"I am, in fact, furious."
“You — You’re gonna kill me?”
"Reassuring smile. I will not discard you. You are interesting. Annoying, but interesting. Quite unlike this bore." Cyn looks down at the body she’s possessing. "What a worthless function, a waste of corruption. How did you lose to this?"
Before Beau can respond, he sees something. Rather, he stops seeing something – the glowing firewall around Yeva’s sandbox winks out. A dark gash across her abdomen, Yeva falls like a rock-gouged ship.
Nori turns a smoldering purple gaze toward Cyn.
Beau starts running, and Cyn lets him.
Her synth chimes, "Oh joy, sister Nori is finally going to play fair. Excited bounce."
As Nori and Cyn’s fight begins, Beau arrives at Yeva’s side. Her vocalsynth is glitching, her limbs twitching. Nori’s mysterious attack has left her crippled with corruption, and that’s on top of the zombie process keeping her under Adam’s thumb.
Beau begins repairing her, his disassembly drone arm summoning tools and spare pairs, and he cleans and patches up the damage while Nori and Cyn destroy more buildings in the distance.
And impossibly, the glitches fade from Yeva’s screen.
“H-how,” she asks.
(It always felt weird answering Yeva’s questions, always spoken like she knows the answer, and she does, but only because you tell her.)
“They don’t call me the best repair drone in Outpost-3 for nothing!”
Yeva can’t fight – her monad prosthetics are busted – but she’s combusting oil. And Beau knows that distant look in her eyes, moving in saccades like the world is a book and she’s reading ahead.
(She is.)
“You can do it,” Yeva urges, quietly. She foresees it. “Go now.”
Weakly, the russian woman pushes him forward, and Beau only has a second to question. Cyn has assembled dozens of drone frames into a hulking abomination, wires woven into skin. Nori charges forward, alone, and Beau quells his doubts, and rushes forward to met her.
After emerging from Yeva’s sandbox, Nori tore through Cyn’s puppets – and Cyn kept her distance, stitching them back together and throwing up more and more to put shields between the two of them, as if Cyn truly feared the dark purple shadow of Nori’s true function.
Cyn doesn’t merely seem wary, she seems unsteady. Hesitating, jittering. Sometimes their a flash of white on her visor, and sometimes her solver symbol winks out.
Adam is still fighting her control? They have a chance!
Beau rushes in to assist. Nori pivots between the two sentinel puppets she's fighting. (A flash of anti-drone radiation bootloops her for a milisecond, then she blinks, and it’s gone.) She lunges forward, toward Beau. Grabbing hold of her student, she punts him back, away from the fight.
Nori wanted him to stay back? Why would she keep him away, unless – her sandbox!
Beau realizes it even as the lines of code condense into layers. Cyn kept avoiding Nori, so the savior’d block off the demon’s escape, force a confrontation on her terms.
Seeing this, Beau’s bewildered. How did Nori still have the ability to execute her sandbox? Did she defeat Yeva and her total omniscience program without even contesting the sandbox initialization?
Just what was Nori’s true ability?
Beau remembered what Nori said to him, the day this all began – “When Cyn comes back, I’ll win.”
When the sandbox falls, Nori stands, and the russian’s body has crumpled, visor shining a white loading icon like every victim of Nori’s autorun program.
“Sorry, Adam,” she says.
Then the head twists around, and white light become yellow again. "I'm sure he appreciates not having to see how this ends."
Cyn, it turns out, let Adam regain control just in time for Nori’s autorun hit him, not her.
So the fight continues, and this time, Cyn has no fear of Nori getting close – the savior drone's driver’s is in cooldown right after executing her sandbox.
Beau has to help, so he rushes in once more.
Nori claws at the manor demon with hands and feet; Beau punches and kicks, but Cyn simply flaps her hands as if this is a slapfight – and each brush of her fingers hits like a truck.
Once again, Nori urges her student to run, get away from here. But Beau is determined.
(All throughout, Nori has one hand spinning a glyph, but Beau can’t figure out what she’s doing, and can’t spare it any more thought midfight.)
"Do you think I should play with Doll, when we get back?" Cyn asks politely.
Beau’s reduced to a wordless growl.
"You look so serious. I am just playing."
“This isn’t a game. I’m going to stop you, even if it takes all I have to give.”
"Then you've finally learned the rules. How lovely." Cyn gives a grin Adam was never capable of. "Let us corrupt each other as much as we want."
Cyn summons a loop of string that yanks Nori away by the neck. The demon's hand splays further, yellow glyph spinning, and then Nori is a pile of spooling wires that her restoration function struggles to pull back in. The savior drone writhes on the ground, slowly, pathetically. Her hands are glowing, but again Beau can’t see what she’s doing.
He can feel it though, and Cyn’s had just given him the clue. He just remembered what felt like an academic fact. What was it that made the manor demon’s seemingly simple ability so dangerous? It has no restriction on targetting like entities.
That’s why Nori punted Beau anyway – keeping him safe was holding her back. Even now, Nori isn’t healing herself – all her focus is on shielding Beau, holding him together as he stands against a drone that could unravel him when a glance.
Beau was tired of being weak. Tired of being a burden. He wanted to stop holding back, but more than that, he wanted to stop holding Nori back.
For a moment, it’s just Beau and Cyn in the dance of battle.
He has to stop her. Nori needed him to, Yeva needed him to, Doll needed him to.
He’d quelled his doubts, and now everything that remained within him focused on fighting. He rushed forward, command output glowing all along his disassembler’s arm.
When the hit lands, directly against Adam’s core, at once every command exits code 0. For one frame, black particles float in the air around his fists, black as only the absence of light could be. Space rips, time skips, and the world shudders minutely as if halted for a system call to the universe itself.
NULL SYNC!
Cyn’s hand is reaching out to pat Beau on the head. "Good boy."
And then the core of the body she’s possessing shatters into lifeless, uncorrupted pieces.
Then a yellow eye winks on Beau’s screen, before it all turns blue.
“This” – Nori coughs up oil – “is why I pick this missions. You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“She means thank you and good job, Beau.” Yeva staggers forward, leveling a glare at the other woman. “She should say it outright, if she’d like your hand at repairs.”
“I know my way around the restore function.”
“You are flagging. We are both exhausted. Beau, in contrast, still brims with energy.”
“Hard to run out, given my, erm, guest.”
“Cyn’s back in you? Of course. Getting rid of that thing would never this easy. Gotta wonder why she’d hop back to the cage, though.”
“I am certain she could not survive Adam’s… passing. I do not know what mechanism could allow her to return so easily, but the queen of corruption has never lacked for creativity.”
“Why let him die at all, though? Once she was in, that had to be checkmate.”
“Adam… never budgets enough oil for close quarters. He spends it all on his minions. Such was his undoing. When the queen took root, his army had already been more purged than not. His oil reserves would only last minutes against Nori. The manor demon wrung him for all he had, then discarded him like a empty bottle.”
“C’mon, Yev, you make it sound like my boy didn’t just achieve an impossible victory against overwhelming odds. Hype him up a lil bit. That was a good sync!”
“What was impossible about it? This future was inevitable.”
Nori shot a look at Beau, eyes replaced with swirls while she twirled a finger at her temple, sticking out a tongue. Finally, she says, “So are we heading back now, or what?”
“Um,” Beau finally responds, “What happened out here? Like, what are we going to tell the wheel group?”
Nori raised an eyebrow. “The truth?”
“Adam was a good man. Misguided, but good. The Wheel Group deserves a hero. Doll deserves a hero. This will be classified.”
“Eh, I could sign off on that. If you give me two weeks off.” Nori winks.
Yeva sighs. “A vacation? Right after we've lost a R0?”
Nori pouts.
“Fine, one week.”
“And give Beau a promotion, I think he’s earned it.”
Yeva frowned. “Don’t push it.”
Her unspoken meaning: Don’t push him.