Everchase - SCP Foundation

The elevator is fast. Milo fears that the man is faster.

Milo Hersch swallows hard, counting the floor numbers blazing at light speed on the display screen next to his trembling head. He just needs to get to one hundred and fifty before the man reaches him. Just one hundred and fifty. He can do it. He will do it.

Milo checks his watch, swallowing involuntarily. His escape isn't just a plan; with all of his preparation, it's now a real possibility. He just needs to reach the roof before the hunter does. Easy. The experience of over two decades in the business and the thaumic hoover waiting atop the skyscraper will more than make sure of that.

The plan still isn't simple enough to calm him down. Milo knows what his hunter can do. He's heard the stories of what he does to his victims. To people that don't pay SkyMarshall their money on time. To people like Milo.

He swallows to clear his dry throat, feeling a cold shiver travel down his irrilite spine. He checks his gun, enhanced with so many thaumaturgic engravings it would make a Coalition agent go green with envy. The souped-up semi-auto purrs at his fingertips, its rune-engraved rail ready to reduce the hunter into nothing more than a few lonely atoms. It still doesn't calm him down at all. He doesn't think it will be enough.

Milo can see the night sky before him, now. He sees it in all of its bright colors, flying cars, and overcrowded streets. The thriving streets of Eurtec glow with neon so thick his own sweat nearly reflects off of it. The cyberpunk megacity might be under Coalition control, but their oversight still doesn't do anything to make him serene.

He tightens the grip on his pistol, and its wards and runes dig into his skin. His knuckles turn white. Quietly, he lets out a prayer to whatever god out there is willing to listen.

The silence is enough of an answer.

As the full artificial moon hanging above Eurtec pierces its veil of clouds below, the neon disappears. Now, it's just him. Just him. Milo breathes in. He allows himself just a moment of hope.

And then, the elevator stops.

Milo's heart skips a beat as a hole explodes in the floor below him. The sound is nearly deafening, but the sight of the two-kilometer-long shaft before him is even worse. Before he can react, vertigo catches him tight in its grasp.

Milo tries to reach the trigger. His hand doesn't comply.

Now, all he can do is watch, frozen in terror, as a tall Fae crawls up through the hole. Milo notices his face is twisted in a grin, his sharp sidhe features made ever so worse by the thrill of the hunt that engulfs him whole. The serpentine runes engraved on his katana buzz to life once more, and he pulls himself up to meet Milo.

The Fae's smile only widens upon seeing the terror in Milo's cybernetic eyes. His black, faerie pupils dilate into even larger round circles.

Milo tries to pull the trigger, but a blinding pain in his arm ensures it doesn't happen. A flame that feels alive twirls from the gun mounted onto the Fae's arm and jumps at Milo, passing through his wards as if they weren't even there. The fire roasts every cell of his hand, forcing him to drop the weapon. He screams, his body making an effort to plead for mercy as it twists into a fetal position.

But it is too late for that, now. Deep down, Milo knows that, even before his hunter jumps up and into the elevator.

"Pl—" a desperate syllable leaves Milo's throat, the air smashed out of his lungs by the Fae's cybernetic arm pinning him to the wall. He tries to finish the sentence in a frantic attempt at making a bargain, but he realizes it's of no use. He doesn't need the tightening grip on his throat to understand that.

Suddenly, the mercenary groans. His face moves so close to Milo's that he can feel his cold, rhythmical breath. The hunter's dirty silver dreads touch Milo's scalp as he scoffs and spits at the floor, a dark oily substance leaving his mouth. "You killed her," he mutters. It's a laughably untrue lie — Milo doesn't need his in-built pulse detectors to tell him that — but the Fae doesn't care. It helps him get the job done, so he whispers the following all the same: "Now die for it."

Heeding his own words, the Fae brings up his other arm. Milo lets out a silent whimper as the glowing thaumic circle built into its palm starts to rotate. Its dim, blue light suddenly bursts asunder, and turns into a burning sun.

He can't even finish his thoughts as the glow turns into a flame, and S'amh Armh's hand turns Milo's silicon face into smoldering cinders.

* * *

There is a silent humming sound as reality recompiles itself back into existence.

At first, it is just a white light, supported by nothing except the unfailing rotation of thaumic resonators working at max speed. Obeying what the ritual circles order them to do, the myriad circuit boards and processors turn magic into electricity and then back into magic again. They swirl and they twirl, trying their very best to not explode into a billion thaumically-charged particles every time the memory-replaying spells travel through their wires. They somehow make do.

And in the middle of that, S'amh Armh sits.

"There you are, honey," a voice fills the fake reality now unraveling behind his similarly unreal eyes. The sweet, sweet words he so desperately craves are more than enough to make him feel high. "I was getting worried you wouldn't come."

His electronic eyes blink twice. They try to analyze the situation — as is expected of such a model — but S'amh ignores all input, shafting the data right into the digital bin. He focuses on nothing but the image before him, and stabilizes the simulation. He cannot afford to break it. Not now.

"You know I would never leave you," he repeats for the two hundred twenty-sixth time. He already knows the words he needs to speak.

The woman in front of his masquerade smiles gently. She throws her golden locks to the side as her lavender eyes focus on where S'amh's own had been so many years ago. "Especially not today."

Armh's real mouth joins her smile as his fake self extends a tired hand to the one he had loved so long ago. She accepts the gesture, and takes him into her loving embrace. They look at each other, knowing that everything is calm, everything is good, and everything is perfect. He feels her soft skin meet his own, and after that, nothing matters.

For an unfathomable second, his worries and bloodlust turn to dust as he smiles with genuine joy.

The illusion falls apart in just a fraction of a second as he feels his sub-systems screaming at his consciousness that someone is trying to enter his apartment.

He sighs soundlessly, but rises with a brief note of hesitation. Maneuvering through the server room, he pulls up the thin screen showing him the camera snooping into the elevator that leads to his basement. He sighs again; this time, though, it is not because he is disappointed. It is because he sees someone whose arrival he should have foreseen.

That someone is average height and build, her own heavy augments hidden behind a facade of regular clothing. Her head is perfectly bald, with tens of wires and circuit boards visible beneath her nearly-translucent skin. If it wasn't for the few remaining patches of skin behind her sunglasses and the fact she'd told him, S'amh would say that she is a Mekhanite. Truth be told, he's still not sure she isn't.

"You still interested in the job?" Ann Lukas suddenly asks. Her voice is so devoid of emotion that S'amh barely distinguishes between it and the white noise of whirling computers.

With no words in his mouth, he nods. His arm is already extended forward, waiting for her to hand him the papers on his next target. He'd been through this cycle fourteen times already. He is more than ready for their fifteenth repetition.

The woman in the photos is young, very slightly more so than Armh. The high heels inbuilt into her robotic legs almost persuade him that she's taller than she actually is. Her straight, brown hair and blue eyes feel fake enough to trigger at least three different programs within his artificial brain. For just a moment, he raises an eyebrow, but continues reading regardless. Nicole Aaron. Marshall, Carter and Dark affiliated. The small "MC&D Employee" engraved onto her forehead in dull black ink only reassures that image. Big fish in their Eurtec office.

Before he is able to close the stack, those unreal eyes catch his attention once again. He squints, and zooms in sixfold, trying to discern whether he's seen them anywhere before. What really irks him about them is that they are fully baseline. No augments — she lacks even the most basic eye-computer connection to her company's database. And yet, after a full 5,2 seconds of searching, his brain assures him this has to be the first time it's felt her presence.

Armh shrugs, but the uncertainty doesn't leave his body. It just doesn't add up for someone in her position to have such human eyes. Unable to resist that spark of fascination tingling at the edge of his brain, he asks: "Who is she?"

Lukas wrinkles her nose. "No questions, I thought." She crosses her arms, and her black leather jacket follows the movement. "Or has something changed?"

"Right," he says, knowing full well he nearly breached his contract. He doesn't back down. "But her eyes. Something is wrong with them. Can't tell you what. But something is. I just know it."

She just rolls her own in response. "They're probably replaced. Who gives a damn. Just take her out and the usual ninety grand will meet you in no time." She looks at the computers around them, slight disgust in the movement. "Unless you don't want to see her again this week."

"Right." S'amh clears his throat, and hands her back the papers. "Give me three days."

"As always," she nods, already readying to take her leave.

"As always," he replies, trying his best to make his voice sound unmoved.

* * *

In Armh's line of work, safety is beyond precious; most people in the business will pay with quite literally everything they have just to know no hired gun is coming after them. Very few people can say without a drop of sarcasm they are truly in no danger. And even fewer people will trade that confidence to gain anything in return.

But S'amh Armh isn't one of those people. And he needs information.

Standing outside the booming nightclub, he lets himself sigh. The dark neon of Thunderknight's sign — as the place is proudly called — reflects off of his eyes as the raindrops fall upon his metallic body. If he was a cheapskate, they would already burn all of the wires buried underneath his silicon skin. If he was a cheapskate, he'd also never risk his own safety by going inside that wretched place.

But he has a job to do. So without further complaints, he walks through the sliding glass doors.

The first thing that hits him is the music. The frankly baffling combination of memetic techno mixed in with just a bit of cyberrock immediately blasts all of his systems into feeling he is nothing but prey here. The alien sounds mixed in with flashing purple lights make him feel like an animal that doesn't yet know it has just entered the maw of its predator.

The second thing that catches his attention is the club's attendees. The bunch are weird, even by Eurtec's standards. From tall frog-like creatures souped up with the paratech equivalent of a drunk engineer's fever dream to Yeren all covered in shining telekill armors, they aren't your average Eurtec junkies. Most of them aren't even all that high, either. Not in the conventional thaumic paradrug sense, at least; Armh can still see them slurping up their clown milk as if there was no tomorrow.

He resists the urge to scoff — both because he'd rather not reveal his presence and at the fact such an act would most likely cost him his head. Things have been bad as of recent — the paranormal underbelly didn't take the slow end of the Cold War and the collapse of the paratech market as nicely as the rest of the world. And what Armh is looking at are the worst of the worst of those scumbags — pent up with anger over losing their upper hand in the business. Anger that might explode with just a single spark to raise it all ablaze.

He prefers not to be their arsonist.

The third — and final — thing he focuses on is a lounge at the far end of the locale, where three figures are sitting.

Bingo.

Without another thought, he pushes through the dancing crowd right into the place where Thunderknight's true kings sit.

The first person — the one that sits in the middle — is built like a brick shithouse. Two-and-a-half meters tall, the Yeren growls as he sees Armh approach. For just a second, he lets himself tighten the grip in his mechanical fist the size of an oven, before realizing the time for violence hasn't yet come. So instead of smashing the Fae's skull with just the tap of his index finger, he straightens his jacket, making the knife in a triangle engraved upon it more than visible to the newcomer.

The two people next to him — one human and one Fae, respectively — don't even look up as Armh approaches. They simply continue staring at the table. One of them throws a set of dice carved up from wyvern bones, trying his best to score that sweet max score. But the other — a kinetomancer, Armh notices as he recognizes the characteristic spark in his greedy golden eyes — already has his grasp on the situation, manipulating the throw to land on nothing but ones.

As Armh stops to greet the tall Yeren, he hears the gamblers curse, but doesn't pay them any attention. He just nods slowly, recognizing the authority of the mercenary before him.

Within a moment's notice, the Yeren's growl turns into a smile.

"Sammy, you old bastard!" He shouts in a tone as rough as rocks, showing the newcomer to sit opposite of him. "I thought I'd never see you after that Druv'tuul heist."

Armh takes the seat. "For what it's worth, I didn't think I would, either." He pauses for a moment.

"So," somehow, the Yeren's smile widens even further. "what can I do for you? You looking for another job? Or," he taps the Primordial sigil mounted on his jacket, looking Armh dead in the eyes. "have you maybe finally changed your mind?"

"I'm afraid I haven't," Armh chuckles politely, but turns his tone serious just a few moments later. With a quick movement, he tosses over the printed out stack of papers he got on Nicole Aaron. "I'm looking for information."

The other raises an eyebrow, but doesn't comment. Instead, he just picks up the papers, looking through them one at a time. With each passing sentence, his surprise turns even bigger.

After a moment, he begins, "MC&D, huh? You lost your mind or something?"

Armh shakes his head. "No. One of my guys wants one of theirs gone. Willing to pay double, too."

The Yeren quietly whistles. "This is stupid, even for you. Nobody walks into House Darke's tomb and gets out alive. You've heard what the Merchant does to his enemies."

"That is besides the point. I know what the pyramid — fuck that noise — is. I know what it can do. But I also know what it can't."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

With just a snap of his fingers, Armh sends the other a series of recordings he had borrowed from his previous targets and their contractors. "I have everything I possibly can on good ol' Percy and his tomb of Darkness. All I need is to actually put it into motion."

"So what do you need me for, anyway?"

Eyeing it nervously, Armh taps the photo of his target that now lies before the Yeren. "Her. Look at her eyes."

The other squints. "…What about them?"

"They're normal. Too normal for somebody in her position," he says as he holograms a set of data he's previously compiled right onto the table. "I've checked all accounts of previous MC&D people working within Eurtec — all of them have eye augments. All of them except her."

"…And?"

"Well, if there's something it indicates, I'd rather know it before I try to blow her goddamn head off. And I didn't think anyone but you knows more than me."

The Yeren chuckles. "Fair point." Rubbing his eyes, he gives the photo another look, clearly searching through his own mental archive, too. After a few moments, he blinks twice, and returns eyeing Armh with an apologetic smile. "Yeah, no. I've got nothing. She's as clean as day. No records, no transactions — nothing. Outside the MC&D connection, she's practically a nobody."

Armh sighs. "Goddamnit." He rubs his temples, and quickly stands up. "Well, in any case, thanks for your time." Without another word, he begins to walk off.

"Hey," the Yeren's voice stops him mid-step. "you really sure you want to take this job?"

The Fae narrows his eyes. "Yeah. Why?"

"You must be really desperate to see that lady of yours if you're willing to go against the Company. Especially Darke. You know what—"

It takes all of Armh's strength to block the rage from him calling her "his lady" from erupting. "I do," he grinds through his teeth, his posture suddenly sharp. "and I don't care. I'm not letting some stupid fucking pyramid stop me from finishing my job."

The Yeren puts his hands up in a theatrically innocent matter. "Hey man, you do you. I'm just saying," he taps the Primordial logo again, this time more firmly. "If you ever need to skip town afterwards, you know where to go."

With an apologetic smile plastered all over his face, the mercenary extends his hand towards Armh in a sign of peace. The Fae just glances at it, nothing but disdain in his eyes, and walks off before the other can even notice.

* * *

The monumental megastructure of House Darke's DEATH PYRAMID stands tall above Eurtec. But not nearly tall enough for S'amh Armh to not get inside.

Its five hundred floors stand protected by a collection of sigils, runes, and rituals so complex that most of Eurtec's citizens could barely even comprehend them. From the ancient concrete foundations to the irrilite-enforced glass tops, every single centimeter of the pyramid was altered to keep out every punk cyborg or half-human that'd dare to question MC&D's rule over paratrade within the city.

What had once been the necropolis of the first Darkes so many millennia ago is now not just its Eurtec headquarters and hotel staffed by the dead souls of its past servants — it is also a monument to pure, unfiltered greed and immesurable power, now, following its teleportation into the city, available to everyone within the contrasting Eurtec to see. Many — perhaps foolishly — have tried in their hubris to prove themselves as equal to the Company. All of them have invariably failed, and the black graveyard the Darke family had for millennia called its home was an intimidatingly real monument to their stupidity.

But Armh has the advantage of knowing what all of them did wrong.

Skittering through the tower's internal information highway, he silently groans. The cold data running through it tries to get inside his head for the millionth time this evening. If it wasn't for the fact he'd protected his hard drive with six different firewalls — and the fact that to even be able to get inside, his thaumic life imprint had to be dead, so he wasn't as much of an advertising target anymore — he'd have even more reason to be unsatisfied.

Right now, though, he has more urgent issues than someone's credit records pressing against his cerebral cortex. Or the fact the highway's infrastructure opens up to a three-kilometer-tall void below, filled with nothing but the lamenting souls of those who have crossed the Darke bloodline over its long, long existence. One of those issues being the chained techno-lich, patrolling the data highway in the full might of its digitilized soul.

He doesn't know if he's more impressed by the paranoia that makes someone summon a literal death spirit to guard their already unreachable data highway or the fact it actually works. Either way, he closes his eyes, and tries to sense the EVE pattern reverberating through the being of terminus in front of him. He fears he won't be able to get into its necrotic mind, already tired from the four times he had to do it this evening on the rest of its colleagues. He's not sure if the mindjacker can handle this much pressure in twenty-four hours.

He fears that he won't be able to sense its alien thought waves with his own faerie brain, too caught up in the way his own organism operates. That horrid wail of trapped souls below and the feeling that if he fails he might just join them doesn't help, either. He knows that, technically speaking, no lich can detect a being that's thaumically dead, and in that regard, he's already a corpse. A least until the moment he wants to strike, that is; then, the inhibitors release all of their latent EVE and let him fuel his own paratech however he likes. But his job shouldn't hinge on technicalities.

Armh can feel the lich's cold breath enter all of his senses into overdrive, now; they too know what it means. They too can feel the approach of the being, feeling every single step of its ghostly body shake them to their very core. And just like him, they are also afraid.

Suddenly, he takes a deep breath.

Unwilling to hear another word of this irreason, Armh cuts out the feed of all of his nerves that can still feel the unending oppression of the millions of petabytes pressing against his forehead, severing the connection between emotional responses and his thaumRAM. For an infinitely brief second, his mind operates on pure logic.

And then, he finds it.

Bingo, Armh whispers to himself as he establishes a connection between his own brain and the frequency of thoughts that run his hunter. Gently, he starts to push his will through onto the other side. He knows he needs to be quick, but he's not sure if he can manage. He takes a deep breath, and starts to click all the right mental buttons required to fire his piece of paratech junk sky high.

Before the spirit can sense the two-way connection S'ahm has established, Armh reaches deep down into the tens of compartments inside his own mind. He finds the anger he needs. The fury of being the victim in the hunt he's taking part in, the determination of finishing a job he was given, and the sadness of losing her so long, long ago. He takes them and breaks them and mashes them and pushes them and feels them and fears them as he channels them all into that awful piece of paratech that sits inside his brain, putting every single part of his being into executing the command that follows.

And as the lich starts to shiver, the veil of confusion put upon its undead mind, the operation works.

Armh sighs, a silent relief exiting his dry lips. Without another comment, the guard wanders off, unable to understand his existence for just long enough to make it count.

S'ahm is utterly alone, now; the only thing that still remains by his side is the never-ending stream of emails and company records that booms into his senses with its full weight once again. He groans slightly as he throws out all of the files into his own mental bin, but pushes through. He just needs to get up ten more floors, and he's good. Just ten more floors.

He allows himself a moment of rest. He knows he doesn't truly have the time, but something inside him tells him he needs a few minutes to continue. So he listens, and takes a deep breath, letting the ghostly atmosphere of the Darkes' tomb weigh down on him.

A flicker of light goes through his internal hard drive as he searches for the file he has on Nicole Aaron. Wanting to refresh his memory as his systems cool down, he tries to find it buried between the bites of data saved up by his brain. Thinking he's got it, he boots up the file, connecting his augmented Fae pupils to the outpour of digital data in front of them.

It takes him 0.092 seconds to realize that target.acd isn't the file he was looking for.

His reaction is nearly immediate, but still not nearly quick enough to not see a fraction of the recording. He turns it off, his pulse quickening, and stares blankly at the space before him. There is a moment of total silence before the recognition of the memory he just played back sets in. But when it does, it hits him like a truck.

He's sworn to himself he's never going to replay that file. Not ever. He thought burying it beneath so many other folders and files would do the job, but, apparently, even that wasn't enough. He didn't do the job well, and now, he hates himself for it.

Though now closed, the recording still plays within his vision. The face of the Prometheus technician is still engraved at the edges of his eyes, wounding every single mechanical part of him, the image re-awoken after so many years of being nearly forgotten.

That awful, awful scream of a horrid man, driven to death by a sidhe boy that at the time didn't yet know his surname was Armh, still ripples inside his ears, phantom pains surging through the living body he had once had. And that sadness and fear present inside her standing next by his side still don't want to escape his thoughts. He hates it. Hates it more than anything in his life. Even more than the Prometheus doc. Even more than what he'd done to him. Even more than the thing he'd made him into. Even more than the pain of seeing her die.

But before he can shake his head and carry on, he thinks about her one more time. The 0.092 seconds it took him to murder a memory wasn't long, no, but it was long enough to make him question the nature of her fear. Whether it was at the man Armh had slain…

…or at Armh himself.

He closes his eyes, and clears his head. Thinking about this is of no use. It always will be of no use. He has a job to do. And he's going to do it well.

So he climbs.

* * *

He climbs and he climbs, one segment of the never-ending pyramid after another. Like a man claiming Everest as his own, he pushes past the cold and takes the first step forward, until all that is left inside his brain is the unbent will to move up. Pulling up on the exoskeleton of a highway like this is hard — hard like almost nothing he'd done in his life — but it's nothing he cannot do, he thinks to himself as he propels himself forward for the nine hundredth time tonight. He tries to ignore the gigantic drop below him.

And in time, he reaches his destination.

Spitting and cursing, Armh fades through the wall of the destined bathroom. His spiky feet nearly shatter the glass mirror that covers one of the walls of the place as he awkwardly fumbles into the room. The silence that surrounds him feels almost unsettling, as if it was artificial; but after a few moments, his systems realize it's just a quirk of them having felt nothing but the relentless and overwhelming pour of data for six hours prior. Armh shakes it off, but still puts all of his sensors into search mode.

Armh finds nothing. Suspicious (have they expected him?), he slowly makes his way to the room immediately adjacent. He taps the sliding glass door and it opens up without even asking for credentials, his eyebrow almost raised. Whether it's at the fact that nobody is guarding the room, or at the fact there are no security cameras present — or at both at the same time — he cannot quite tell.

The bedroom is large. Larger than any single human being could possibly ever need. It opens up to reveal all of Eurtec below it, its purple neons and black skyscrapers visible through the pane that covers the entire wall. The sheer amount of unnecessarily expensive abstract paintings and lighting almost irks Armh, but just almost. The only thing that keeps Sahm from being angry at the thought of someone ordering this stupidly unnecessarily luxurious place to be built is the fact they won't enjoy it for much longer.

With feline grace, he treads the tropical wooden floorboards beneath his silent, metal feet. Slowly, he makes his way towards the heavy steel door which connects the room with the outside corridor. He takes a deep breath, turning his vision to infrared, and readies the incinerator inside his left hand. His weapon starts to slowly rotate, already preparing for the final blow that is about to come in a few minutes. Armh inhales again, this time thinking a few thoughts that make that rotation faster. His pulse begins to slowly speed up as he looks at that mirror ceiling once more.

He doesn't know why he's nervous. He's never been nervous. Not since his first mission, not since his childhood, not since he's lost all of it. When he burnt all emotions at the altar of strength so, so long ago, he promised himself he was never going to be afraid again, that he would take care of his own destiny, no matter what it took. But tonight, that promise fails to an image of some pathetic banker with strange eyes. Why, he does not know. But he's not sure whether he wants to know.

The metal doors he's hidden behind start to creak.

Within a fraction of a second, all of Armh's digital senses go into overdrive. He sharpens his vision as he puts his hand forward, anticipating for Nicole Aaron to walk inside. His whole body feels like it is sprinting as every single muscle inside him — both artificial and organic — prepares for the exact moment he plans to strike. He squints his eyes and readies his hand, focusing on nothing but the burning will to take the woman out running through his veins.

Nicole Aaron walks through, her own metal arm already aimed at where Armh is standing.

As she pushes a flicker of thunder through her cold, metallic fingers, Armh's automated hips make him duck down before he can even register the attack. It hits the white wall behind him to the sound of a storm rippling through the night sky, making the abstract blobs of paint that previously decorated it explode in a fountain of colors. Armh tightens his lips and draws forth his irrilite katana, its runes already glowing with arcane energy. His weapon doesn't wait for Aaron to strike again; it simply goes right for her throat, booming with its own life the moment Armh pushes his arm forward.

Instead of waiting for the executioner to reach her, she snaps her fingers, and an invisible force parries the strike. She jumps forward, and her long, blade-like legs cut the air, utilizing the motion well enough for the rest of her exhausted body to follow. She turns her eight-fingered hand into a rock-solid first and aims it at Armh's eyes, trying her very best to be faster than his mechanical muscles and the sword they wield. She fails.

Meeting the katana once more, her fingers break and she lets out a scream of pain. But she doesn't back down. Her other hand — this time shaped into a long blade of her own — is already flying at the speed of sound towards Armh's chin. A bright light formed from desperate, final drops of magic inside her glows at the appendage's end, focused on nothing but putting the Fae mercenary right in his grave.

Armh might be fast, but the velocity of luxomancy is well beyond even the most advanced of his robotic systems. So before he can do as much as put his katana forward to block the attack, Aaron's attack sends him flying towards the previously destroyed wall.

Without even a moment to react, Armh hits the exposed pipes and wires behind him. He readies his guard once more, anticipating the inevitable final impact that is to come within seconds. He shifts his weapon from a purely defensive stance to an offensive position, channeling the stored EVE once more into the sigils that make the sword crackle with red electricity.

He can see her. He can feel her. And, most important of all, he knows how she attacks.

He grins as he recognises a weak point the moment she starts to run towards him.

Before his target can finish him once and for all, he grabs her by her extended arm and throws her at the steel floor of the bathroom. He pins her entire body with his own artificially-increased weight, immediately increasing the pressure by releasing the agility inhibitors. Aaron lets out a single exhausted scream and tries to block her face with her smashed hand, but it is not enough. With a smirk of satisfaction, Armh grabs that buzzing stump and throws it to the side. He aims his own arm at her, already feeling the rotation begin.

As he starts to pant, his entire body overheating, he utters his quiet mantra. This time not to help him get the deed done, but solely out of habit: "You killed her." He spits out, furious venom dripping from his every word. "Now DIE f—"

Her strangely normal eyes suddenly widen. "S-S'amh?"

His own irises expand twice, and Armh falls back. He is unable not to shiver. "I… I… What?" He just spits out, feeling like the prey again for just a single moment. His eyelid twitches — even though it should by no means even need to blink — and another cold sensation travels down his wire-ridden spine. "What the hell are you?"

Slowly, Nicole stands up. Armh doesn't stop her. Not breaking eye contact, she twitches her index finger in her remaining hand. Without blinking, her irises change from that cold, wrong blue into that deep sidhe black. Armh shivers once more.

"No, no. No, no, no no no, no!" He shouts out, his head shaking both from data overload and overheating. If he still had tear ducts, they would have made themselves known by now. "You're dead. I've seen you die, you…!" He finds no words to finish his sentence, even among the library of six hundred thirty-two languages packed up inside his brain.

"No, Armh. It's… It's me." She snaps her fingers, and the glamour falls down. The once-human figure of the cyborg accountant slowly fades to reveal a tall Fae woman, standing there in a sad exhausted manner. Smiling gently, Ne'amh Alana whispers towards him: "It's me."

Armh doesn't reply.

His mind is running at a speed too high to comprehend, now. As every compartment of that cybernetic brain goes haywire from the sheer amount of confusion and realization he can feel the buried emotion that turns into guilt and fear and hopelessness and hope and anger and fury and madness and— and— and—

—and rage.

"Why have you never told me?" He slowly asks, his tone no longer quiet or shocked. It is calm now, unsettlingly so. He doesn't even try to mask it with the various filters which previously masqueraded its true tone. "I thought you were dead for so long. Why?"

The expression on her silicon Fae face changes within an instant. "And why do you think, you son of a bitch?" Alana's no longer standing in an inviting manner. Her whole body tenses up, readying for another confrontation. Her chance to get away is blown, that much she can see; the only way out then is to fight.

"I don't know." He squints. "Maybe because you're a coward. A traitor. You—"

She scoffs. "A traitor? I'm a survivor."

Tense silence lays the room.

"I'm a survivor," she grinds the words from between her teeth. "I know who you were, Armh. Who you are. Always, ever since you were a stupid kid I'd fallen in love with. A cold-hearted murderer."

Rage rushes to his cheeks. "I killed him to sa—"

"To what?" Those awfully normal eyes drill into his own. Despite their lack of augments, they still pierce directly into his soul. "To save me? To save us? No. No, Armh. You killed that man because you wanted to. And you enjoyed every second of it."

Under normal circumstances, that tone and those words would be all he needed for a death warrant. But he doesn't think rationally anymore.

"You don't understand—"

She scoffs again, starting to rapidly approach him. "I don't understand? I?" She shakes her head. "I'm the only one that does. You haven't changed one bit. You never have. Just look at yourself, for god's sake!" He doesn't even notice the vague sparks of magic running inbetween Alana's fingers. He's too focused on the sheer anger that sentence induces in him. "You're still you. Still the person that'd justify anything, just with fancier toys."

"I loved you—" Armh tries to get in again. He doesn't know why he's even trying to explain himself. But something deep inside him — some remaining shred of humanity, perhaps — tells him he just has to.

Ne'amh scoffs. "You didn't do it for me. You didn't do it to let us escape," she continues. "You did it for yourself. It just so happened you considered myself one of your interests. But, well," she extends her arms wide. "you no longer do, do you?"

Armh remains silent. Using it as an excuse, she comes closer towards him. He can practically feel her heartbeat, now.

"The only difference between the man that killed Prometheus people and the one that's standing before me now is the fact the first one at least tried to hide he was a murderer."

The silence that follows is almost enough to make the attack seem a surprise.

In one final desperate attempt, Ne'amh Alana charges at Armh. Both her hands are burning with a yellow light, so dense as to be almost blinding. She pushes forward at his shocked face, aiming for the eyes. There is nothing but determination inside her.

But she misses.

As Armh grabs her arm in a steel-tight grip, she lets out a quiet whimper. In just a moment, the thaumic energy running through her fades as it recognizes her anger suddenly change into fear. S'ahm doesn't even look at her; he just quietly stares at the floor below, not a single word exiting his mouth.

When he does look up again, though, his sight is ice cold. "And yet, you used the chance I've given you regardless." He's no longer shocked. He's no longer even sad. He's simply furious.

Because deep down, he knows she's right.

The expression on her face changes within an instant. She knows she's no longer in control. "I didn't— I… I couldn't— I…"

Armh lets her go, his right arm twitching slightly. He slowly begins to move it forward, making the distance between it and her face smaller by the second. "Twenty years. I've waited twenty years. For anything — a fucking sign you didn't die. Don't you think I deserve at least something for getting you out of that fucking lab?"

"Pl—"

"Not once — not fucking once! — did you even try to reach out, not even to say fuck you," his voice is nothing but cold. He looks her directly into those awful, normal, lying eyes, and skews his head seventy degrees counterclockwise. "Why?"

"I—" she tries to say something — anything — but there is no longer any energy left inside of her. She put everything out on that final, lost gambit. She doesn't even have the strength to still be angry.

"I loved you. I really did." No empathy lies inside his mind anymore. Just the chilling realization of being abandoned as every single system and calculation suddenly stops. "I risked my life to fucking try and save you, and this is how you pay me back?" He knows he's not being rational when he moves his face so close to her she can see the circuits inside his cold, furious eyes. He knows he's being exactly the same person she hates. But he does it all the same.

She swallows hard. "Sammy, I…"

The incinerator in his left arm begins to rotate once more, this time burning with the unfiltered hatred running through his every cell at maximum speed. Its light is no longer cold and blue, as it had always been — it is now glowing with red, so dense that it nearly blinds his target and her unprotected, biological eyeballs.

"…'m sorry," she tries to get out, even though she knows it's not sincere. It never was. He sees it, now; her and all of her lies. Her manipulations. That faked, awful love that forced him to get them out from under the scalpel of the monster which had called itself a doctor.

His brain, now running on max speed again, keeps on feeding him everything within his memory archive he needs to justify what he is about to do. He knows he's not thinking clearly; he doesn't even need the flashing [ERROR! OVERHEATING IMMINENT!] in the corner of his vision to realize that. But he truly doesn't care either way.

"I really, really am," the fake Nicole Ne'amh grabs him by his slowly turning arm, and looks into his eyes again. She knows what she's done. So she pleads for mercy. But it is not enough. Nothing will ever be enough. Not even those gorgeous black eyes he'd loved so long ago.

He looks at her, his entire body devoid of any emotion or sign that he once might've been human. He doesn't even sigh as he overpowers her grip and aims at her nearly crying face. "I really wish you were."

* * *

Below Eurtec, there sits a place. A place nobody except Armh can find. It is hidden with so many veils and glamours and forcefields that not even GOC soldiers that patrol the Silicon Nornir passageways around it or Darke's hired guns can reach him. Not unless he wants them to, that is.

It sits beneath all that neon and those artificial men and that horrible, horrible hullaballoo of the city above, unbothered by any changes the metropolis may undergo. It's a calm constant, a safe haven for anyone that enters it. It was constructed solely to be the only part of reality its occupants could possibly want to live in.

Its tens of systems and computers hum in an almost unnoticeable harmony. They make sure everything inside that wonderfully safe bunker works nothing but perfectly. For most, to live there would be torture. Most people could not imagine existing upon nothing but memories. But S'amh Armh isn't most people. For him, that place is nothing short of paradise.

Long ago, he risked everything he had — his life and well-being — to gain just a few more minutes with the one he had loved so much. With his skills and talent, he could have lived as one of the richest men in all of Eurtec. But he didn't. Instead, every paycheck, every penny he could scrape off, he put towards only one goal — to keep those servers that made sure he can relive his past running.

And even after so much had changed, that desire to prolong his memories never vanished.

Long ago, the vision that replayed inside his head was happy; it was a memory of the single most careless time in his entire life, replayed so many times it eventually lost almost all meaning. And yet, even then, it was good. Good enough for Armh to turn his whole life into an everchase for more of that sweet drug of absolution he craved so much.

But times have changed. And so has the vision.

Now, it is no longer happy. Armh isn't even sure whether it's fulfilling. But every single time he watches himself snap her throat over and over and over again, he cannot help but smile. He knows it is unhealthy. He knows it is twisted. He knows it is sick.

And yet, he craves it all the same.