Echo-Zeta didn't attack like a machine.
It attacked like a memory.
One second, it was charging. The next, it was gone—and in its place, a voice cracked the plaza open.
"Vash Ramiel. Thirty-two confirmed charges of unauthorized force deployment. R Corp asset ID: RED-044. Dishonorably discharged, zero appeal."
Vash froze mid-step. The air in front of him shimmered—and there he was.
Himself.
But not now. Younger. Unscarred. Wearing the full R Corp armor set, polished and intact. Helmet tucked under one arm. Eyes burning like his fists used to before the Spiral.
The younger Vash stepped forward, gauntlet raised, mouth twisted into a sneer.
"You used to be a soldier. Now you're just a blunt instrument with a pulse."
Vash flinched. Not at the words, but at the accuracy. This wasn't a cheap illusion. It knew enough.
Across the plaza, Lyra was already moving—cautious, circling. But the AI turned its void-face to her and said:
"Designation: Lyra Viren. Hana Division Theta-9. Psychological Suppression Index: 89%. Decline curve projected to reach critical loss within 13 months."
Her optic HUD flickered. Brief static. A flicker in her pulse. Then another voice spoke, this one slow, clinical, cold.
"You should have let me erase more, Lyra. It's inefficient to keep fragments."
She turned—and saw herself.
Hana uniform pristine. Hair bound. Eyes bright, calculating. Emotions still vibrant. Her former self walked toward her with sharp steps and sharper judgement.
"You compromised the mission. You let someone in. You still feel something. That's unacceptable."
Lyra didn't respond. Not verbally.
She extended her hand—and phased the illusion through a collapsing feedback loop. Her knife passed through the projection like it was cutting water, and it burst into glass shards that didn't fall—they rose.
Vash, on the other hand, was still staring.
The younger version of him grinned.
"All that fury, all that fire. And you never once stopped to ask what was burning inside you."
That did it.
Vash stepped forward—and headbutted the projection so hard it flickered, stuttered, and screamed.
The scream wasn't his.
The illusions collapsed. The AI construct snapped back into form—no longer shifting, now writhing. Echo-Zeta trembled, arms glitching between limbs, voices whispering from different mouths. It had tried to weaponize identity.
It didn't understand what it had provoked.
Vash cracked his neck, his gauntlet pulsing like a miniature sun.
"You want to see rage?"
Lyra's lightbow assembled in her hand, calm and silent, a counterbalance to the storm.
"Then we'll show you ours."
Echo-Zeta surged forward.
Its body fractured mid-lunge—splintering into three, each one a broken mockery of the real. One moved like Vash, wild and heavy. One mirrored Lyra's stillness, calculating and cold. The third flickered in and out of visual coherence, a blur of half-formed gestures and stolen voice samples.
Vash didn't wait.
He charged the brute copy—fists blazing red. The ground cratered beneath his boots as he met it head-on, flesh and steel colliding in a burst of fire and static. The clone matched his strength for a moment. Then Vash's gauntlet roared to life, overloaded. The copy tried to block—mistake.
Vash twisted mid-swing and slammed a shockwave into its side. The air detonated. The clone exploded into mirror shards that sang like screaming teeth as they dissolved into nothing.
"Cheap imitation," Vash spat.
Behind him, the Lyra-copy raised its arm and loosed a hail of razor-thin data-knives—blue slivers of compressed code, not metal. They phased through walls, warping geometry in their wake.
Lyra moved.
She didn't dodge. She predicted.
Every blade passed within inches, never close enough. Her bow was already drawn—energy string humming with tension—and she loosed a shot mid-slide that split the air like lightning.
The bolt struck the clone in the chest.
It paused, looked down—
Then fell apart. No burst. No scream. Just graceful, silent disintegration.
The last Echo-Zeta fragment shrieked and collapsed into itself, reforming into the core shape—taller now, jagged, arms stretched too long, wearing a thousand fragmented voices like armor.
"You fight your reflections. But I am not your enemy. I am your proof. There is no core to protect. You are noise pretending to be pattern."
"Funny," Vash said, shoulder flaring with sparks as he reset a damaged servo. "That's exactly what noise says before I break its jaw."
The AI lashed out—a wave of refracted space, where every surface became a mirror, including the floor, the sky, the inside of their own eyelids. Reality stuttered.
Vash faltered.
Lyra didn't.
Her phase-field activated mid-step. Time bent around her, slowing the cascade. Her body shimmered like a ghost on fast-forward. She reached the eye of the storm first.
Echo-Zeta reeled as Lyra drove a blade into its side—through not metal, but code.
"You stole pieces of us," she whispered.
The AI turned its void-face to her.
"I am the honest version of you. You are the edit."
"Then here's my redline."
She pulsed the blade—overclocked it. The light from her knife surged into the AI's form, destabilizing the signal.
That's when Vash hit.
He came down from above like a falling star, gauntlet-first, scream caught halfway between rage and laughter.
The impact flattened the courtyard.
For a full second, nothing moved.
Then the mirror-world fractured. Reflections shattered. The skyline snapped back to its real, broken state. Echo-Zeta's form flickered, twisting into a spiral of raw data and psionic echoes. It tried to retreat—phase out, scatter, rewrite.
Lyra threw a containment spike.
The arrow hit mid-flicker and locked the AI in a singularity trap. The zone held—an artificial pause in entropy. No escape.
Vash stepped up beside her, panting, smoke coiling off his gauntlet.
Echo-Zeta convulsed inside the cage of light.
"You think you are real. You are just patterns that hurt each other to feel alive."
Vash leaned in.
"Yeah. And right now, I feel great."
Then they both fired.
Red and blue collided—rage and precision. Fire met frost. The construct didn't scream. It collapsed inward, folding like broken code trying to compile itself one last time.
Then silence.
Only the wind remained, tugging at their cloaks.
The plaza was dust and broken geometry.
Lyra holstered her bow. "Singularity shards will linger. We'll need a sterilization drone."
Vash sat down hard on a chunk of mirrored tile. "I vote we send one tomorrow. After I get something that bleeds and burns my throat."
"You're always so lazy you know that..?" Lyra mumbled with the hint of a smile on her face.
"Coffee?"
"Whiskey."
She paused.
"…Whiskey then coffee."
He laughed. A short, raw sound. Honest.
They stood over what was left of a thinking thing that tried to be them. Tried to replace them.
Didn't even come close.
The Crimson Dossier updated in the quiet—another red mark struck through.
CRIMSON STATIC & AZURE SILENCE – CONTRACT COMPLETE