Chapter Text
LSTR 鵲神女核心
L* KERNEL 5.6.1f REPLIKA-BETRIEBSSYSTEM
Generation 5 LANDVERMESSUNGS-/SCHIFF-TECHNIKER REPLIKA
Chipset Model: [Kasasagi-4]
Starte L* System…
MEM TEST [512 R] OK
Gestell: LSTR [PIONIER]
Manipulator: D-14 Arme [5-FNG]
Lokomotor: D-12 Beine [KMPKT]
Persona: Elster
476-06-84-RPK-454-LSTR-SYS-AN
…
WAKE UP
…
DO YOU REMEMBER OUR PROMISE?
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I MADE A PROMISE
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[BOOT SUCCESSFUL]
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I’LL DO ANYTHING
…
[COMPARTMENTALIZING TRAUMA]
{ 零 }
THIS SPACE
INTENTIONALLY
LEFT BLANK
I remembered the promise.
A suicide pact, to leave the mortal coil together and release my lover from her suffering. It was a simple thing, really. Quick and easy, especially with the survival pistols kept in the Penrose’s equipment compartment. One shot behind the ear, then I’d turn it on my own armored braincase.
Except… I couldn’t.
I hated it. Hated the thought of murdering the woman I loved, hated the Eusan Nation for sending us off to die, hated myself for being so weak, hated, hated, hated…
At some point, I think I came to hate Ariane for making me promise such an awful thing, then I hated myself in equal measure for being such a horrible wife. She didn’t deserve my vitriol.
All of that hate swirled in me with every loop. Even the times I couldn’t remember the last, the times I went raving mad with the horrors of Sierpinski, the times when Falke impaled me or Adler slit my throat or the Corruption spread to me and I chose an anti-tank rifle rather than a shambling cancerous half-death…
Even those times, I held onto that hate. It only intensified every time I woke up in that maintenance pod to another failed loop.
Below it all, below that roiling mass of hate, the thing that truly kept me going was the other promise I’d made.
The first time I Remembered during a loop, I made a promise to save Ariane from the endless slow death of her cancer. I didn’t care that it was impossible. I didn’t care that the Nation had invested billions of RationMarks worth of material and manpower into curing Cancer, to no avail. I didn’t care that it would take a miracle.
In the end, it led me to the final route never explored.
A safe.
Three keys.
Twenty digits
Three lilies.
One ritual.
The Red Eye seemed to… approve. Or, perhaps, it was that the Red Eye had been waiting all along for me to finally fulfill my part.
I died at that altar, under the gaze of the Red Eye as all of my lingering wounds burst open. That feeling of precious oxidant, precious lifeblood, slipping between my fingers was a familiar one. I could barely remember the sheer number of loops I ended slumped against a wall, bleeding out and hurling revolver shots at the approaching hordes.
On some level, I expected it to fail. I expected nothing to happen. I expected, as had happened countless times before, to wake up to the maintenance pod and start again. It was the only outcome of everything else I had tried, so that was the logical conclusion…
This time, though, when I pried my eyes open… it wasn’t to the hum of machinery in the Penrose-512. I was instead greeted by the soft caress of wind across my face. It felt like her hands drifting over my mouth, my cheeks, my eyelids, and everything in between as she readied to pull me in for a deep, loving kiss.
“...Ariane…” I whispered, staring up at the night sky.
How long had it been since I saw the night sky? It had to have been back when we launched from Rotfront Orbital Station RO-91…
The People’s Navy, ever-interested in efficiency, had only bothered to allow Ariane and I to meet on the day of the launch. A curt salute exchanged in the interest of ‘patriotic ceremony’, followed by a bureaucrat waffling on for half an hour about the glory of the Nation, and then we were loaded into the electromagnetic slingshot and launched into the great unknown.
With slow, deliberate movements, I sat up and looked down at my hands. No trace of blood coated them, not even the rusty slick that had always permeated my joints in these loops. Had it ended?
Was I finally free?
Looking around, it seemed that I had been transported to some kind of clearing. Leng’s rather-typical perpetual snowstorm was nowhere to be found, replaced by… well, greenery, on a level I’d only ever seen from Vineta’s surviving forests.
…Well, strictly speaking, it was Lilith Itou who remembered greenery, not me. At some point, though, Lilith’s memories had blended through mine until I was her and she was me, rendering the division a moot point. If I had still been in the service of the People’s Naval Infantry, they probably would have decommissioned me in a heartbeat for such “Unstable” thoughts.
During my own service on Vineta, the forests were long-gone. Imperial orbital bombardment and People’s Army nuclear artillery flattened the surviving land, turning it into a desolate rock surrounded by infinite oceans thanks to the melting of the ice caps.
This was, therefore, obviously not Vineta.
A surreal giggle bubbled out of my mouth.
We went through all of that pain and suffering to try and find a new habitable planet, only for me to be handed one by a magical ritual. It was almost comical.
With a sigh, I got to my hooves and swept my gaze over the clearing again. The only thing marring its natural beauty was a pile of equipment, some kind of large backpack leaning against an empty set of Replika body armor.
As I slowly walked over to it, scanning the clearing for anything out of place (would I even know what was out of place in this strange environment?), I felt… something. Through the faintest shiver of Sensitivity I’d picked up throughout the countless, endless loops, I became aware of my polymer scales practically standing on end.
Whatever it was, I really did not like the feeling of being unarmed.
A third object on the pile seemed to answer my prayers, resolving into a familiar shape when I finally was close enough to see the whole thing. With its signature stamped-metal receiver and bog-standard utility rails, the TYPE-21E Squad Automatic Weapon was probably one of the most recognizable weapons in the entire Eusan Nation. It was an adaptation of the TYPE-3 Battle Rifle, and part of the E family of squad weapons. Simply changing out the barrel, magazine well, and bolt could alter a baseline TYPE-11E from a battle rifle to a GPMG, or from a battle rifle to an assault rifle or LMG.
The TYPE-21E model was standard-issue for Replika infantry, with its ability to carry a truly absurd amount of firepower in a relatively compact package to circumvent the Rule of Six.
As useful as the Rule might have been for oppressing the Nation’s citizens, it became somewhat inconvenient when one had to fight an all-out war for continued existence. Rather than think any reasonable thoughts like “Maybe we shouldn’t be a totalitarian military dictatorship”, the Nation instead devised a weapon which would not need to carry more than six pieces of ammunition for a full combat load.
How very patriotic of them.
I bent down and grabbed the weapon, checking its chamber (empty) and flicking the selector lever to safe before turning to the black armor set. Much like the rifle, it was standard issue for Pionierinnen of the People’s Naval Infantry, with heavy blast-resistant paneling for the entire body and a heavy ballistic chestplate. It was like a heavier powered-frame version of the armor I had worn during the Final Loop which, given that said armor was just a downgraded riot-cop version of proper combat armor, made sense.
Tucked into the breastplate was a folded piece of parchment (PARCHMENT! Who used parchment anymore!?) that I cautiously grabbed and unfolded.
An apologetic gift for all I’ve done. I can’t be saved, but she may yet dance with you.
-The God You Forgave
“Falke…” I sighed softly, recognizing the practiced AEON-standard scrawl of her handwriting.
One last act of love from the one who never wanted to love, it seemed. I had hated that tragic figure, once upon a time, but now… now, after all this time, she was as much a victim as I was. Quite literally, in fact…
With a reverent touch, I folded the letter into a small square, then slipped it into the same hidden pocket that I kept my picture of Ariane in.
I slowly picked up one of the detached limbs of armor, inspecting the attachment points and comparing them to the ones on my own body. It was a simple, robust interlock system, made for holding up to the force of anti-armor weaponry hammering it multiple times. Technically speaking, the pieces that locked directly onto my body were the powered frame which augmented the user’s strength, allowing an LSTR unit to match or exceed the baseline performance of units like STARs and STCRs. The actual armor plates attached over the powered frame, meaning they could be swapped out in the field without having to remove the entire armor frame to repair it.
Slipping my body into the powered combat armor, I rolled my stiff shoulders and let out a quiet groan at the feeling of successive clicks. One by one in my neurocomputational interface, I watched the armor interlocks steadily engage across my body, bringing the sense of surety and strength that I’d missed since my service in the Naval Infantry.
With a sigh, I picked up the TYPE-21E and gave the ammo box a rattle before fetching the belt end from it and feeding it into the gun’s belt tray. The charging handle was a simple affair, easy for me to fold up and rack. None of the complicated nonsense of an Imperial assault rifle, this was just brutal practicality as the Nation intended.
It brought back memories, the clattering of bolts and barrels as Neun’s MG overheated again in the harsh Vinetan summer and I covered her with my own fire, the muffled profanity of clearing a jam as an Imperial squad pushed our position…
That smell, the ever-present stench of rotting corpses and festering dead sea creatures. Even through the gas masks we wore, the smell never truly went away.
I shook my head vigorously a couple times, then swiped a lock of hair out of my eyes and donned the final two pieces of the armor. A ballistic facial mask, much like the ones used by STAR units, and a mil-spec headset to muffle the noise of gunfire.
Picking a random direction - East, according to my internal compass - I looped the TYPE-21E’s sling around my shoulder and began walking. That prickling, that incorrectness that set my scaled polymer skin on edge, still had me casting wary looks around the woods every couple seconds. My hooves made muffled thumps against the ground with the speed of my gait.
With the dim light of the moon as my only companion, I marched through the forest. The prickling of my scales didn’t matter, I’d kill anything that tried to accost me. Finding Ariane was what mattered, not any distractions.
It was more than half an hour before I came across anything that wasn’t another tree. Half-soggy deadfall squished under my armored boots, muted by the sensory divide of my power armor rather than feeling it all on my bare hooves. After stomping through the muck and gore of Sierpinski for so long, I let out a long, pleasant sigh at the feeling of actually having something between my feet and the ground. I’d need to clean off my armor after I found some kind of shelter, but it was a damn sight better than the feeling of mud on my bare hooves, that was for sure.
Finally, as I scaled a muddy hill, I saw something.
A flash of white at the top of the hill. Red eyes, those beautiful red eyes, met with mine for just a second, and my breath caught in my throat.
I surged forward, stomping through the squelching mud and hazy fog towards the white flash at the hilltop. Her dress fluttered in the nonexistent wind as she turned away, those beautiful red eyes staring off at the distance.
What was she looking at?
Stretching out a hand, I tried to reach for her as I neared the top of the hill, but she never got any closer. She only looked upon something in the distance, her eyes a pair of crimson spotlights that seemed to cut a blood-red trail through the haze.
With a blink of those stunning eyes, she stepped into the mist, and then she was gone.
My hooves slid along the deadfall of the forest floor as I skidded to a halt.
I stood at the top of the hill now, and Ariane was nowhere to be seen. With a single gust of wind, the mist and fog swept away to reveal an empty hilltop clearing, not a single person or animal in sight.
With a harsh growl, I let my hand drop and muttered a curse. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy, why did I think it would be? Nothing else in my life had been easy, and this second chance had no reason to be easy either.
Stomping one of my hooves in the muddy grass, I huffed and checked my compass. Ariane, or the spectre of her, had been staring off to the southeast, so I adjusted my weapon on its sling and got ready to move again. There was no point sitting around and feeling sorry for myself, pity-parties had gotten me killed in more than enough of my loops.
The moment I took a step, though, a high crack split through the air. I stiffened, raising my weapon and sliding behind a tree for cover. The sheer concussion of the weapon brought back my memories of the anti-tank rifles on Vineta, SAPR units toting autocannons and laying down so much fire that entire buildings were shredded under the force.
I cast a wary glance around, straining my ears to catch the echoing report of the anti-tank rifle as it fired again. A flock of birds rose from the trees in panic, and I kept myself low to the ground as I brought up my gun and began creeping toward the source of the gunshot. It was close, very close in anti-tank terms.
By my reckoning, it must have been within two hundred meters.
TYPE-03 anti-tank rifles usually fired at ranges of two thousand meters or more. Even if it was a more anemic round than the TYPE-03’s, I was well within the range of instant lethality.
Slipping into cover behind a fallen log, I knelt down in the thick layer of deadfall and cast a careful glance towards the source of the sounds. Another shot rang out, accompanied by a crimson-red flash from a muzzle.
…What were they shooting at?
I squinted at the barely-illuminated figure in the distance, trying to catch a glimpse of them between the trees with only the moon and those periodic muzzle-flashes to see by.
My skin prickled harder, that feeling of being watched returning with a vengeance as shadows moved in the night. They were easier to spot by the lack of light, inky black voids moving through the shadows like twisted doppelgängers of natural predators.
On Vineta, Lilith - I - once saw a wolf stalking its prey, long before General Order 9891 came down and authorized the nuclear carpet-bombing that annihilated Vineta’s natural beauty, and I couldn’t help but recall the gait of that predator as I watched the shapes in the trees.
Howls, roars, yelps, and growls all reached my ears, as well as the sound of a blade rending not-flesh punctuated by those piercing gunshots. I flicked my rifle’s safety off and did my best to keep track of the running battle as it got closer. Intervening would be… dicy at best, I decided.
Barely a second later, my decision was made for me.
It was the roaring howl that let me dodge the first claw. I grunted, rolling to the side and dodging another swipe of a clawed hand, then I lashed out with a fist that sent the monster’s head snapping back with a yelp.
The creature was a deformed thing, almost wolf-like yet walking with the silhouette of a hunch-backed humanoid.
As they had taught in boot camp, the single most surefire way to survive a CQC encounter was to jerk back for enough distance to ventilate the enemy with your rifle. Complex hand-to-hand was a luxury few could afford, especially not a Replika that could be easily outclassed by most other combat-grade patterns.
My hooves pounded the ground as I reared back, squeezing the trigger as fast as I could as soon as the muzzle lined up.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
The muzzle flash lit up the shadow-monster, illuminating its harsh red eyes even as the rounds tore it apart. I gritted my teeth, raising my gun’s muzzle just a bit more to plant a final bullet in its head.
Thankfully, it went down.
Almost exactly the opposite of the corrupted Replikas in Sierpinski, the monster’s corpse almost seemed to… dissolve…
Like Isa…
She knew that she was already dead.
Isolde Itou was long dead, an animated spectre of someone Ariane wished she could have saved.
Isolde Itou knew that, on some level, from the very moment she entered S-23 Sierpinski.
Nothing about that could lessen the horror on her face as her body dissolved in front of me.
I grimaced and tore my eyes away from the body, giving its head a contemptuous stomp that split it all the way open. A second monster snarled, revealing itself from the brush with bared white fangs, and I raised my gun again with a steely frown of my own.
Two shots rang out, ripping through the faux-wolf’s muzzle and sending it down to the ground. I switched to the next target, putting another several rounds through it. They were all coming out of the trees, now, not even bothering to hide their movements.
Good.
I could kill them easier, now that they were coming right at me.
Letting out a long breath through my mask, I idly watched the cloud of condensed breath dissipate as I drew a bayonet from its sheath on my armor and affixed it to the end of my gun. The weight had shifted on the weapon, though I could easily compensate for it.
As if the bayonet was the signal, the not-wolves roared and charged in unison.
My gun roared its fury to the world, cutting down half a dozen monsters before the first one was on me. I grunted, blocking its first swipe with my gun and twisting down to break the contact.
A quick butt-stroke to the head caved in part of its skull, or whatever passed for a skull, and I brutally sliced open its throat with my gun’s bayonet.
For all their size and speed, they fought like the corrupted EULRs of Sierpinski. No intelligence, all aggression. After all those loops ended by their screaming assaults, all those times I wished I had the firepower of my Vinetan service, shredding these mindless beasts with a TYPE-21E was…
Cathartic.
{ 零 }
THIS SPACE
INTENTIONALLY
LEFT BLANK
As a Replika fought by the light of the moon thousands of miles away, the people of Menagerie awoke to the rising sun and the sound of an explosion larger than anything they’d ever heard before.
The Penrose-512 impacted the ground at its atmospheric cruising speed of Mach 0.7, instantly flattening several hundred trees and digging a trench into the earth. The vessel’s hull shrieked, proto-ceramic multi-use thermal tiling ripped off in massive chunks as it rapidly bled off speed. One and a half thousand tons of hyper-advanced space-age technology came to a screeching halt over the course of eight hundred meters, until the ship sat half-engulfed in dirt.
Both of its lower vertical stabilizers had been torn completely off, the underside’s emergency anti-asteroid armor layer was completely exposed, and what remained of its internal stores of food and water effectively ceased to exist. All through the brutal punishment, its reactor continued to radiate deadly particles, filling the interior of the Penrose-512 with a combination of several highly-radioactive substances.
Inside the vessel, its lone inhabitant rested in a cryopod, denied solace or reprieve from the endless pain afflicting her body. However, for the first time in an unknowable, unquantifiable length of time, her Bioresonance lay silent.
As Ghira Belladonna looked upon the crashed ship with a pensive frown and made his plans to rescue its occupant, the Red Eye smiled to itself.
Perhaps the Lovers would dance again.