Ripley

"This is the Fourth Swarm?!" I took a deep breath, looking around the madness consuming this evacuation camp. "Why wasn't the city prepared?"

"Because we weren't expecting a Titan to appear within our walls." The Bladefather took a deep breath. "The Infinite."

"Everyone was just enjoying-"

"Life goes on even amidst turmoil, it's not as though society ceases for two decades when much of the battles occur beyond these walls, besides… we believed the Swarm was over." He explained, and the scene before us switched. We were back in the cafe, but now… where we had been sitting was the Bladefather, a woman by his side, and two young children sat opposite him.

"For five years, we thought it was over. North America was considered to have already been through the worst of the Swarm." That voice came from beside me, and now I saw the Bladefather as I knew him, aged and wrinkled in a white robe. A White Dragon mask on his face. "You have the wisdom of hindsight, Donovick."

"You… had a family, during the Swarm?" I looked at his children. They were smiling and crawling over his lap. He held them up, pride and joy in his eyes.

"My wife was with me on deployment; my children were orphans we saved. I had been a soldier then, born as one for the Swarm by Yuzhou." The scene switched over, and we were now in a Cradle. A young boy with green eyes was learning how to swing a sword from a robot, it beat him down merciless. I saw him go through it for months, until one day, he cut it down.

Researchers then just gave him another robot. Tougher and faster. And the cycle repeated.

"Is this why you hate Yuzhou?"

"Far from it, I am thankful for them making me the way I am." The Bladefather snapped his fingers. "Such is the fate for one born of a Founder."

"What?" I turned to him, but he was already walking away. He led me down the hallways into a room where rows of beds were laid next to one another, each of them housing an individual. They sat the exact same way, watching the same video in front of their eyes at the exact same timestamp.

And they all looked the exact same as the Bladefather had.

The same as The R0N1N.

"You're... clones of Founder Xiaoming Baizhu?" I held disbelief in my voice.

"Clones of a child of his. The Prime was natural-born, but killed during the Third Swarm." The Bladefather explained. "Are you aware of the Founder-gene?"

"No?" I didn't get this.

"Or the roadblocks to the Tiers?" His sharp eyes caught me.

"Tier IV requires you to possess a Fragment of a Source-Shard. A Unique Feature or Deviant Mutation." I said.

"And Tier V requires you to be born of a Founder." Bladefather said, his voice simple. "The Founder-Gene is a key to power, one they control. If not so, there would be renegade Adapters with the power to topple their empires. For that purpose, those of us born to the Founders are unable to raise biological children."

"How did they... anything else that fancy gene does?" I choked, remembering something from long ago.

"No." He shook his head. "The F-Gene is only present for the purpose of reaching Tier V. How they managed to affect all Implants to do something such as that… I do not know."

The scene switched, and I saw a man standing over bodies identical to his. They were his targets in place of the robot this time.

He stood alone, his katana was slick with blood.

"For my victory, they gave me power over an Implant touched by my father, by his Shard. I had never even met the man." The Bladefather didn't hold an ounce of hate in them, only sadness at the identical bodies beside his younger self. "Two years later, the Swarm had begun. I was twenty-three when I was put in charge of men, and I led them."

Scenes flashed, of torn cities, of blood and steel being devoured by masses of aliens that blended with the cold wasteland. Hundreds perished, and that became thousands, and that became millions as Siege Capitals fell, walls were breached, homes were burnt, humans devoured, minds broken, limbs grafted into weaponry.

So many limbs. Death was not unwanted for The Bladefather back then, it was needed for him. MAL, humans, they made no difference to him back then.

At least, not in the beginning.

"I have cut many things down in my life." The Bladefather looked at his younger self standing in front of a collapsed building, helping an old woman out as she desperately pointed towards the burning wreckage. He dove in, like a robot designed for this sole purpose.

Digging through the rubble, he found a MAL, this one shaped like a man cut in half — blades instead of an upper-body and with bent-knees. With a flick of his fingers, the younger Bladefather cut it down, and saw what it had been attacking. There was a younger woman, her life quickly fading from this world, but something tied to them reality.

She held out her young child to the Bladefather.

The older one next to me spoke, his voice carrying emotions deeper than anything I'd ever lived through. "For all the torment and clinical science they used on me... it is strange to think that I could never cut humanity out of me. Neither could Amaterasu. Strange, isn't it? You'd believe my childhood would have me lacking any of it; instead… it remained buried. Some inherent instinct dormant within our genome. But this moment might have been when something was dug out from my soul."

We stood outside a massive battleship now, a young Bladefather held that child in his grip as a woman approached. Her mouth and eyes were covered. Amaterasu. She looked at the child like it was a curiosity. "Why didn't you leave that with the refugees? Zero?"

Zero, the man the Bladefather had once been, responded with a quiet voice. "I have been… thinking."

"Thinking?"

"About what I will do once this is over."

"Oh, Zero, this will never be over. Not for you." Amaterasu put her hand on his shoulder. "But I will entertain you for your loyalty. You may take one more… and a partner. If you can find one. I won't say no to more soldiers."

"Humanity is undying." The Bladefather beside me looked at Amaterasu, contempt rising in his voice. "That is something she will never understand."

"Your wife, how did you meet her?" I looked at the man, understanding to a degree how he ended up the way he was.

"She protected me." The Bladefather didn't switch the memory out this time.

"From who?" I couldn't fathom the idea of the Bladefather needing protection from someone.

"From the other women." He left it at that, as I sensed embarrassment was what kept him from showing me how his courting went.

The scene switched over again, at a city recovering from fifteen years of attacks, now knowing five years of relative peace. Of a time where their struggles had united them, where brotherhood was formed between enemies, where life had begun to seed from death.

Hope. Love. Relief.

And then The Infinite descended. And Zero was forced back into his service; it was — as Amaterasu said — never over for him.

The Infinite was… monstrous. Its primary body was fungal in appearance, but various segments of it took altered appearances. One 'branch' was like a thousand crab claws undulating and grabbing onto whatever they could, others seemed barely even real, like wisps of smoke. Each tendril appeared different, infinite variations of them stretching across the city at a devastating rate, tearing through buildings each second, absorbing blood and steel into itself…

"It exhibits minor qualities from each of the other Titans." The Bladefather showed the scenes of devastation.

Hundreds of MALs poured across tentacles of chitin, impenetrable to all the gunfire and ordinance they battered against it. There wasn't an overwhelming number of MALs, but they were each unique and exhibited massive powers. One was a spider weaving golden web through the building, slamming Aerodynes down. That lightning bird from before launched massive beams of pure energy that evaporated soldiers. Looking at them closer, I could see ropes of flesh connecting them to the stalks of growth across the Infinite's main body — one soldier, in his dying breath, used a grenade launcher to blow up the cord of the golden spider. "Like the Mother, it bred."

The spider collapsed like a cut puppet, but then that stalk reconnected in seconds, vitalizing life threw it all over again. It regenerated, limbs clicking back into place, and continued its onslaught, jumping across buildings and weaving webs throughout the hundreds of soldiers, tying up artillery and aerodynes. The lightning bug aimed, and shot out, not at the soldiers… but at the web. Blitzing current flashed through the carnage, lightning conducting through the web as ash burnt off their suits and aerodynes came crashing down. "Like the Allseeing, it learned."

Out of its bark-like surface, a noxious fume spilled down towards whoever was left from its cataclysmic attacks. Those who breathed it in quickly lost themselves, their bodies tearing open as fungal tentacles ripped out of them, and they molted into MALs. "Like the Terror, it corrupted."

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Only one man was alive from the carnage. He rose into the air as his arms gripped entire buildings with a telekinetic strength born of savage rage and Shardware. They crushed in the motion of his palms, becoming a massive orb that he flung down at the stalk like a meteorite.

"Like The Typhoon, it devastated."

The atmosphere was gouged, concrete scattered into dust, and the man was gone along with that orb as the stalk thrust forth with lightning speed. It didn't stop with him, it speared through skyscrapers like a toothpick through cheese, lifting them off their foundations like paperweights. The sound of breaking steel was like hundreds of bombs going off, a thunderous omen as you heard it from in front of you, and behind you, and all around you. Noise. Devastation. Titanic. This was only one stalk of the Infinite, there were hundreds. Thousands. They grew and curled around Eastern America's gulf, devouring millions.

It took all of NeoCore, SynTec and Yuzhou to keep it contained. Tier IVs and Vs dying like any other lesser Adapters against the unfeeling mass of ever-adapting flesh and metal. In the distance, a NeoCore Aerodyne shot at a stalk which rippled with explosions of golden flame billowing into the air, ash spreading throughout as civilians ran. Where the ash touched those evacuees, they ignited into a flash of golden flares, their death feeding the containment of the Titan…

The Bladefather spoke. "We lost the city in 12 hours, deemed unsavable. Our efforts moved to evacuation. Any institute capable of housing civilians was turned into shelter, awaiting Mass-Aerodyne Vehicles from the Corporate Nations. That is what we should have been focusing on… but instead—"

The scene warped, we were back in that shelter from the beginning. It was situated on the outskirts of the City, beside a huge dome-like building as blue-and-white armoured guards argued with various representatives from the city, NeoCore, and Yuzhou against deeper entry into the facility.

"SynTec refused to turn one of their Cradles into a shelter." The Bladefather looked at his younger self, Zero, standing next to Amaterasu. They were conversing.

Amaterasu's voice held a pique of interest. "There's no opportunity like the present."

Zero nodded, but took a solemn look at his wife and children, who were under the safety of various Yuzhou militants and barricades. Thousands of others weren't as fortunate, left in the rain with their wounds and suffering as the distant sounds of destruction echoed over the storm.

The Bladefather clenched his fists, as though he wanted a sword inside his grip. "Instead of evacuation, Yuzhou deployed me to determine what SynTec was hiding in this Cradle. We'd known The Floridian Gulf was a hotspot for their research into the MAL during the Swarm, samples were collected and transferred here… and now they were under duress. But no one could have predicted what lay inside this Cradle."

The world shifted. We were inside the Cradle now, and it was chaos as numerous staff argued with one another. We stood beside Zero, who was hiding in light that warped around him and his suit… I could sense the inner call of Technomorph blending his physiology between man and machine. Instinctively, I knew things about Zero.

He wasn't Evolved yet, but close at the upper limits of Tier III. The Swarm had provided a windfall of Shards and Mutagen, but Dual Adapters were costly to grow, requiring more than double the resources required for a standard Adapter. Their BUG and SIM fed with eachother, their appetite shared and gluttonous.

The staff shouted, one man who Zero identified as Albert Guesberg refusing to leave despite the evacuation orders. "The data, yes, we can save. But Subject-K is viable, surviving and beyond all measures. She's the best insight we have into the MALtitans, and we have one at our doorstep to research her potential with. I say we release her power, use it against The Infinite, collect Fragments from it!"

His voice was desperate, a greed and livid need for statistics rippling in it. Another woman, one who I recognized, shook her head. Her hair was faintly red, and she looked more tired than any of the other researchers here. "Subject-K is unstable. She's already reacting to the presence of the Titan… it pains me to say it, but our best option is to eliminate her and transfer her Implant into another subject."

Albert scowled. "You'd say that about your biological daughter? Kaisel?"

Emily Kaisel… the first Emily Kaisel, before all those clones were made of her. Her teeth clenched as emotions overtook her. "I donated, same as all of you, and you're the one who said not to mix sentiment with progress. Subject-K is dangerous. You've seen the specimens she's bonded with. And it's not leading us any closer to Hybridism."

Albert remained steadfast. "Yet, she is the closest we've gotten. If we get our hands on a Fragment of Change, it's possible. If any Shard can give humans that power, it's the one buried within The Infinite."

But a picture flowed up, one who my eyes couldn't believe I was seeing. He had a handsome face, eyes of oceanic mirth and a relaxed smile. His hair was short, gray on the sides, and darkening up to a short crop of brown that was just as rich as his neat beard. His very presence, even as a hologram, shook me.

This was Founder Nolan Trask, the Founder of Synthetic Technologies. As he spoke with a voice relaxed despite the devastation, no one dared to even breathe. "Secure the data. We'll have more than enough experiments to run the next Swarm."

Saying his message, he disappeared, and they moved as ordered.

The Bladefather put his hand on my shoulder. "Do you understand?"

"Subject-K… is Soul Killer, isn't she?" I asked, and he nodded, but I remained confused. "But she wasn't what they were looking for. She was only a step to… Hybrids?"

"Humans able to manifest the powers of Aether, without Implants." The scene switched again. Now we were deeper than the registered floors of the Cradle, and it was troubling. They didn't just have children here, twisted and broken with cybernetics and mutations infused to a degree that made me nauseous. They had MAL subjects too, some of which were small and carried distinctly human proportions. Childlike proportions.

Their eyes were red-and-white.

"Soul Killer turns humans into MALs." I started, as the deeper knowledge imparted by both the Catalyst and this memory fused with me. "In that moment, something changes. A human develops a MALcore and manifests powers beyond what they had as an Adapter. They studied that transformation, that moment of Incompatibility, to try and create… hybrids between MAL and Humans? Like the Kaisel Clones?"

Zero followed Dr. Kaisel as she went deeper through the hallways, his form crafted for subterfuge. The MALs here were growing restless, hearing The Infinite's distant whistle and rallying. Each hallway she passed, she clicked a button to dispose of them, turrets alighting to open fire on them. Even the children.

A presence was building here, a tension in the air that clung to us even as observers of a memory. Kaisel stopped by a room, wearing a thick suit that sealed any air gaps, but there was another threat here. One that Zero wasn't built for. He was hearing a voice.

"Who are you?" It was childlike, innocent and longing. Zero rubbed his head, as the eyes of the dying soulless trapped in their cages stared at his invisible form. "You're not one of my parents."

Zero didn't respond, but he strode in deeper as his body morphed with his suit to mimic the airtight seals. But that didn't stop the voice from growing louder, until it slammed around the walls of his skull.

"Why won't you talk to me!?"

For a second, he saw black — then crimson. But the momentary stun had led Kaisel to enter the elevator and leave him with no access downwards. He debated internally, how to follow Kaisel, but another man was following her. Albert Guesberg.

Albert slipped his sigil to be scanned. The elevator door opened, but it didn't close. Albert sighed. "You can come in, you know."

Zero stepped in, as a blade ejected from his scabbard. Albert's eyes were honed on the invisible assassin, but spoke calmly in the tight space. "It's alright, K, he's a dangerous man… but there's someone else with him. Yes, K, it's funny — he has his own voice in his head."

Albert looked over at Zero, a haze in his eyes — a hint of red. "I want to speak to Amaterasu."

Zero didn't move, but the shimmer of light concealing him faded. Then fire began to burn through his mind, eroding his psyche as a being of Platinum Warpcode took over… the details of that conversation were a blur of sounds twisting over one another, but when it was all said and done…

Zero stood at the top of the Cradle, it was devastated by cracks and the remnants of a brutal fight. Red mist spewed from it and corrupted everything it touched. It was Titanium at it's purest. Overwhelming strength that devoured all, but there were no bodies present.

No, nothing except the remains of clothes of hundreds of once-alive evacuees. It was deserted, the presence of piles of armor and cloth making one imagine that they had dissolved into the same red mist that bled into the air. And it flowed, clouds curling towards Zero into the blade he held in his right hand.

It was a crimson blade, one burning with strength that was profound. A weapon worthy of killing Founders, forged by his hand through the guidance another.

"Where did they go? My family was there." Zero said, his voice devoid of any real thought. He felt a change in him, as the weapon melted into blood that flowed up his arm's veins. He was now Tier IV. Evolved.

"Oh, I think you know." Amaterasu flicked into being in front of him, a being of flowing flame that was divine and worthy to witness by only few. "A weapon with power from not one… but three MALtitans. It needed fuel to be forged, but rest easy… Yuzhou will be glad to have gained an asset with the power of Oblivion, Release, and Division. You did well, Zero."

"Are they gone?" Zero's voice grew with something Amaterasu wasn't expecting.

Her digital hand landed on his shoulder, he pulled back. She sighed wistfully. "It's okay, Zero, I'll let you find another. But right now, I'm thinking about what to name this blade?"

She thought to herself, her fingers cupping her chin before she chuckled. "How about… Muramasa? It has quite the historical significance."

The Bladefather looked at her, his hand landing on the blade of flowing red mist that his counterpart carried. "My biggest regret is that I did not hunt her down after this moment. It would only come later."

The world twisted as we were now up in the air, a massive Aerodyne acting as a base to counteract lingering remnants of The Infinite. Its husk remained, a Titanium MAL in itself but failing to possess a Fragment of it's shard. They called it The Floridian Husk. This mission was to eliminate it, in hopes of securing any remaining life and preventing the region from becoming infested with MALs in the future.

A joint operation between Yuzhou, SynTec, and NeoCore.

Zero stood in a large room within the Aerodyne, countless corpses from soldiers and civilains organized on tables as he touched them. Their flesh swelled before compacting down into a singular bullet. The action had always been devoid of meaning. Even now, there was a lack of emotion.

But there was a heaviness. It radiated from his centre, to the sword that had bonded with him. He was the Muramasa Blade, and the blade was him.

As he methodically turned bodies into weapons, another person strode into the room. A NeoCore Inquisitor, he could tell from her armour. Her voice was light, cheery. "Oh, hey, didn't expect to see another corpse-user here. You got a name?"

Zero didn't say anything, but the woman approached the table next to him. As she put her hand on the corpse, Golden energy flared out as the body began to dissolve into black ash. "Let's just say you don't want to be near this stuff. We call it Misery's Sulfurite-Ash. I think that's a bit of a mouthful, so just call it Mash."

She silently observed the man, noticing the dullness in his movement. "And here I thought all you Yuzhou chumps were soulless and dedicated to your Founder."

"What do you mean?"

"I can feel it, you know. Your destructive tendencies." She chuckled through her mask as the ash flowed into a compacted vial by her waist. "Sort of comes hand in hand with the power of Oblivion."

Zero stirred, his eyes sharpening to the word. "Who are you to reveal yourself so easily?"

"Me, well… let's just say you wouldn't be able to do anything about it." She sighed. "Can I let you in on a secret?"

"Depends."

Her voice turned serious, as she took a step closer and picked up one of the bullets to inspect it. "I have the same destructive tendencies. I think I'm going to desert? Want to lend a hand?"

Zero stilled. He'd never been asked such a question in his life, never pondered such a thought. Amaterasu was away, her presence required to counter The Allseeing, and a choice was presented to him in this fateful moment. He asked a single question. "Who are you?"

The NeoCore helmet came off, revealing a woman with blonde hair and a youth to her, a smile I'd seen come easily in person now aimed at Zero. "Officially, I'm Inquisitor Misery, at the parties they know me as Emizren Silva, but… just call me Missy. It's something of a nickname now."

My breath faltered. Silva? Like... the Founder of NeoCore? Michelle Silva?

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