Chapter 21

 Hanabi ran through the fog-covered streets, following the drone like its shadow. The scene flickered, another memory echo. Why were they always so inconvenient?

Rain falling down on a field of metal and blue. There’s a hooded boy there, wrapped up in a cloak. He shows her a device. It activates. They see green, a tear in reality. The image fades, she’s hiding now, someone has appeared, someone big, someone scary. The scene fades, she’s alone, there’s fire. What happened to her friend, why did she wind up all alone?

“Where did you go?”

The scene changes back, Hanabi was still running. There’s no time to think about those memory echoes, she just needed to focus on the task at hand.

A figure stepped out of the fog, causing Hanabi to skid to a stop. They locked eyes for a brief moment before Hanabi jumped back to gain some distance.

“. . . . .”

“. . . . .”

The two women stared each other down, as if waiting for the other to make the first action. Hanabi scanned the woman’s frame, she didn’t seem like the villagers or someone from Soluna. However, despite looking just a normal woman, Hanabi’s scan showed that she was chromed from head to toe.

The information window that popped up next to her profile was just generic information, nothing that seemed out of place. Though, something about it felt wrong. There was nothing that seemed out of place, she was marked as just a wandering merchant. But what kind of merchant had military-grade chrome?

Something didn’t feel right about this. None of her scans showed up anything off or unusual, but call it the residual embers of her human intuition. Hanabi wanted to draw her gun, but maybe she was mistaken. “Identify yourself.” She commanded.

“...” She stayed silent and stoic.

“Are you one of the residents?” Her scan said she wasn’t, but she asked anyways.

“. . . . .”

What was she thinking, was she a threat? It was impossible to read her, she didn’t even seem all that concerned about the attack going on around them.

In addition… there was something vaguely familiar about her. “Wait… I’ve seen you before.”

At this, she reacted, her eyebrow briefly twitched. It was just a second, but there was something there. The woman dropped the case she was holding and then kicked it closer to Hanabi.

Hanabi’s gun was drawn just as the case stopped at her feet.

Irene’s voice broke Hanabi out from the drone. “Hanabi! I just scanned that case, there’s a crazy amount of Anomalous Energy coming off it!”

“What?”

“Ya know the stuff surrounding that make up the dome? Whatever’s in the case is made of it! That’s way too dangerous to just be leaving in the hands of some random person!”

“So, don’t open it then?”

“DON’T OPEN IT!”

“Okay, fine, so what do I do here?”

“We don’t have time for this, we gotta deal with the Supers, and there’s a high chance that she’s involved in the attack, take her down and we’ll sort it out later!”

A brief violet flash and a glowing streak was all she saw. The gun twisted out of her hand as her center of gravity tilted, followed up by a hard strike delivered to her face. Her vision buzzed and self-corrected as she skipped across the ground like a stone on a pond, finally stopping when she slammed into the side of a building.

She winced from the pain in her face and twisted arm as she unsteadily lifted herself off the ground. ‘Wait a minute, that hurt?’ From what she remembered, Gatekeepers don’t have their pain sensors removed entirely, but rather it’s closer to being dulled. So if that strike hurt then…

“Hanabi!” Irene’s worried voice called out to her, the drone having been tossed directly at her.

With no time to think, she batted the drone off to the side. ‘Sorry!’ She apologized mentally, returning her attention to where the woman had been, but then she saw that violet streak again!

“Reactive Dilation… Conditions Met… Activating!”

Her vision took on that blue tint from last time, this time she wasn’t so fast. She could see the woman rapidly advancing for a follow-up strike.

She quickly pulled out her second gun and steadily aimed, but something felt wrong. The intensity of the woman’s violet eyes increased, her speed increased even through bullet time! She pulled the trigger!

Her shots would not find their mark, as her wrist came under control of the mysterious woman and twisted again.

Frustration. As her center of gravity shifted again, she hooked her free hand around using the generated momentum to land her blow into the woman.

Then her vision buzzed, and an image of an old cyborg replaced her field of vision. She was standing in an old warehouse, alongside another kid.

“Remember kids, you can’t let the bad guys dictate the pace of the fight!”

‘Not now!’ There could not have been a worse time to have a memory echo.

When her vision returned, the woman had caught her wrist, and opened her arms up, allowing for an easy hit to her torso. She then drove her foot into her abdomen and kicked off during the release of her arms.

Once again, Hanabi dented the sheet metal wall. Her sensors were all indicating damage and advising her on actions to take, but it was too chaotic. She wasn’t used to this sort of thing yet. And then there were-

“Hey, check out this new move I just learned!”

The memory echoes were really getting in the way!

She saw the woman rear her leg back behind her, but before she could react, the woman swung her leg with such force into Hanabi’s already damaged abdomen that she was knocked halfway through the wall.

She tried to pull herself out of the hole, but by then it was too late. She saw the woman’s arm glow a sickly green hue, and then… sink into her chest. As in, her arm had somehow become intangible and pierced through her.

For a moment, nothing happened but suddenly a debilitating shock spread out from where she’d been pierced and flowed out to all parts of her frame, all her sensors were malfunctioning, her vision buzzed, and her limbs quivered and acted on their own.

As the woman backed off, Hanabi pushed off from the edge of the hole and tried to strike but found that if she tried to move forward, her legs moved left while her arm moved in another direction. Unable to stand properly, she fell face-first into the dirt and stone. “Wh-Wh-What… what d-d-d-did you d-d-d-do?” Her voice notably cracked and her voice varied in pitch with every word.

The woman remained stoic, even as she looked down at Hanabi. She rubbed the side of her cheek where Hanabi’s hookshot had apparently gotten her — not that it did any damage. Her gaze drifted past her, into the building itself. She simply walked around Hanabi’s flailing and glitching form and into the store.

“W-W-Wait! We-we-we’re n-n-not donnnnnnne y-y-yet!” Hanabi tried to stand but it was no use, her body just refused to move as she wanted it to. Frustration built up in her as she desperately tried to get up!

“Are you wondering why you lost?” The woman finally spoke. “To put it simply, your specs are higher than mine, under any other circumstances, you’d have dismantled me easily.” She seemed to be moving something around inside, something metal. “Did you know that your people used to be much more durable? Sometime around the 3rd-generation of Gatekeepers, the Forge managed to engineer the technology that would be used for your self-repair functions. Unfortunately, in order to offset costs of making you, they decreased your overall durability. Essentially meaning that you people would take more damage but unlike older generations, you were capable of self-repair. So it balanced out. Didn’t really help you much here though. This arm of mine won’t kill you or take your abilities away forever, but it will mess with you for a while. In other words, it’s like I just generated an EMP directly into your system.”

“Wh-what a-a-a-are you? A-a-a-are youuuuuu a-a-a-a Suuuuuuper?”

“...No, I have killed a lot of them though. And the technology in this arm, that did this to you, did once come from a Super.”

“What do you-” a memory started clicking, the identity of this woman. She knew where she saw her from! That memory that Sofia showed her. This woman… she was…

“I think you’ve figured it out.” Her footsteps were heard coming around Hanabi, as she was still just trying to get up off the ground, and failing miserably. The sound of a long, metal pipe dragging across the dirt reached her ears. “The second reason you lost, is while your specs are higher than mine; I’ve been in countless battles, and you’re still just an inexperienced BloodLass.”

“Not… Bl-l-loodlass… aaaaaanymore.”

“Oh? My apologies then.” She stepped in front of Hanabi, looking down at her, barely regarding her presence. What was that look in her eye? She didn’t seem like that in Sofia’s photo.

“Wh-what… c-c-c-changed……… youuuu? How… How d-d-did you be-e-e-ecome l-l-like this?” She grabbed onto her leg. “Aren’t…we… b-b-both g-g-g-gatekeepers?”

“. . . . . . “ She silently regarded Hanabi was pity. She sighed. “Perhaps, once upon a time, we could’ve been.” She shook herself out of Hanabi’s grip. “But… that was when Vera was still a Gatekeeper. Back before she was betrayed, before she was left for dead, before they took everything she ever cared about. When Vera the Gatekeeper died that day, this Vera here… whatever was left of her was just too broken to go back to the way things were.” then she raised the pipe. “I’ve already come too far to go back now. So, I’m sorry it has to end this way. If it makes you feel any better, it’s just the current you that’ll die, they’ll recover your body and then place a new version of you in the repaired frame. So it’s not really the end, just a see you later.”

She swung down and Hanabi reflexively shut her eyes, she heard the sound of metal striking flesh but it wasn’t her that was hit.

“What do you think you’re doing, Ghost?”

She slowly opened her eyes to see that another person had joined the fray. A man in a long robe was gripping the end of the pipe that Vera had intended to smash Hanabi’s skull with.

“More importantly, if I hadn’t slowed my strike, you probably wouldn’t have that arm anymore.”

“. . . . .”

“Hm, maybe you’re right. You’ve survived worse. Still though, what is the meaning of this? Of all the times to show an emotion, you pick now?”

The man simply stayed silent, he released Vera’s pipe but did not step aside to let her continue attacking Hanabi.

“Will you explain why you won’t let me dismantle her? She could be a problem later, Gatekeepers present an unexpected issue with the plan. We destroy her frame and she won’t be a problem anymore, you understand this right?”

He nodded.

“And you still won’t let me finish this?”

He shook his head.

For a while, the two of them just stared at each other. Until, Vera sighed. “Fine.”

He nodded, seemingly grateful. He took a look at Hanabi over his shoulder, but whatever he was feeling under that mask was impossible to discern.

“W-w-why d-d-did youuuuu help me?”

He didn’t answer her question, was he even capable of talking, the mask he wore in addition to his indeterminate body language made it impossible to carve a clue out of his actions. It just didn’t make sense to her.

Well, no, there was one reason he might’ve stopped Vera from destroying Hanabi’s frame. It was a brief hope, it seemed so impossible, the odds of it were so unlikely that if it were in a piece of fiction, one might find it completely unbelievable.

However, the possibility wasn’t zero. She reached out to them, and asked: “Did… you… know me? In the past… h-h-have we met… before?”

Once again, he didn’t answer. Instead he knelt down in front of her, and raised his hand to her face.

She winced, expecting pain or some sort of power to be used on her! Instead, the mysterious man just pat her head.

It was a strange gesture, something that her logic centers couldn’t make sense of her. But then, another memory echo. She didn’t know why, but this was familiar. Someone long ago, someone she cared deeply about used to do something similar. She remembered feeling weird about it, like she was being seen as a small animal that needed to be protected. Still, she didn’t dislike it. On the contrary, she felt… calm for the first time since she woke up to her new life. She was calm.

His mask clicked. “Don’t… worry.” He said through a heavily modulated, pained voice. “Never… hurt you.” And then, he left with Vera and the case.

She reached out to him, but her limbs refused to obey her commands. Her emotions were a storm of contradictions. She was frustrated, happy, and sad all at once.