Ernst hauled the Rook's corpse the final step and tipped it forward.
Armor scraped metal.
Then the body vanished into the grinder.
Gears caught plate and bone alike. Steel was torn apart, compressed, liquefied. Red flooded into the transparent conduits, mixing with pressure gauges twitching as the system compensated.
"Not enough."
The Rook had been Team 1.
A fine piece. Not enough.
He turned.
Across the chamber, Kamina's office was losing ground. [Remains of a Metal Ship.] advanced step by step, each impact driving Kamina farther back. The hydraulic claw fired another compressed torrent. Kamina crossed his blade and angled it. The water beam split against the steel, shearing off in two violent streams that shredded the ceiling and tore through machinery behind him. The recoil drove him to one knee. He forced himself up and charged again.
CLANK.
CLANK.
CLANK.
The anchor chain snapped forward. Kamina ducked but he was getting slower each time he dodged. The serrated links clipped his side and sent him skidding across flooded concrete.
Imogen fired.
The shot grazed the helm, sparks bursting from the red visor slit.
She swore under her breath and cycled the bolt.
Another shot.
Missed. The round tore through a support beam instead.
Her breathing was uneven. Too fast and shallow.
Four hours and forty minutes of combat before this.
Four hours of fire and recoil and reload rituals.
Her mind had not recovered.
Her crosshair trembled.
She fired again anyway.
The round struck the chest plating and ricocheted wide.
Kamina slipped under the claw and slashed at the exposed inner arm where Imogen had crippled it earlier. Sparks burst. A piston split.
[Remains of a Metal Ship.] answered with a full-bodied charge.
Kamina barely sidestepped. The impact cratered the floor where he had stood.
He staggered.
Ernst watched it all.
His staff trembled in his hand.
"If I had known," he began softly, conversationally with the empty air, "that remaining here would culminate in my life being extinguished in a basement laboratory… I might have reconsidered my ambition."
Another water blast erupted.
Kamina deflected it, but the force forced him backward again, boots carving long grooves through brine.
"I was so desperate to escape Team 2," Ernst continued. "Battle after battle, thrown into fields of meaningless slaughter. I believed that if I secured a position here… as lead researcher… I would be safe."
Imogen fired again.
The shot went wide.
[Remains of a Metal Ship.] swatted Kamina with its humanoid arm. He rolled with it, but slower now. He rose slower.
Ernst gave a humorless breath of laughter.
"What a ridiculous world. People convince themselves they are making the correct decision to survive."
He looked down at his shaking hands.
"And yet, every decision made in the name of survival is merely a path toward one's end."
Another clash.
Steel rang.
Kamina's strike slipped. The blade screeched harmlessly across armor.
The anchor chain wrapped around his leg and flung him across the chamber.
Imogen shouted the thing's name and fired again, the recoil slamming into her shoulder. The shot clipped the tail, but her timing was late.
Ernst turned back to the tank.
Bruno floated within the vertical cradle. A half-formed body, pale and incomplete, fed by red-lit conduits that pulsed with stolen mass.
Her chest rose faintly.
He stepped closer.
"You will suffer far more than I," he told her quietly. "To awaken in a world that will use you. To serve as a replacement for something that couldn't be allowed to die."
His reflection wavered across the glass.
"It is kinder that you experience it quickly."
Behind him, Kamina staggered to his feet again, breathing ragged.
Imogen missed another shot.
"All hail the Izan," Ernst said. "And its damaged successor. The chosen Queen piece."
He lowered his staff.
Placed one hand against his own neck.
Twisted.
A sharp crack echoed through the machinery's hum.
His body sagged for half a second.
Then he stepped forward and let gravity take him. Ernst's corpse fell into the grinder. The gears caught him immediately. Bone, flesh, cloth, and splintered staff vanished into crushing metal. The conduits flared brighter, the flow surging thick and heavy as alarms flickered green instead of red.
Pressure climbed.
Bruno's suspended form twitched.
Across the chamber, [Remains of a Metal Ship.] turned its helm toward the tank.
The moment the surge stabilized, the moment the conduits brightened and the suspended body in the tank twitched with renewed current, inside the sealed hull responded. The red visor burned hotter. The hum beneath its chest plating deepened.
Hate was often loud.
This was not that kind of hate.
This was the quiet, suffocating kind.
Inside the metal coffin that had once been Shmuel, there was no confusion about what the shape in the tank represented. It was not Bruno, who argued softly. Not the Bruno who stood beside him in cramped corridors full of students and an exhausted smile. Not the Bruno who once hesitated before stepping into the chess tournament because she still believed that the only person she could beat in chess is Shmuel.
That Bruno had been fragile and stubborn.
The thing in the tank was continuity forced by others. Flesh assembled without history. Muscles grew without shared memory. It was a solution to grief that required erasing the grief itself.
To Shmuel, that was unforgivable.
The ocean inside him churned with the certainty that if this thing awakened and was allowed to breathe, then the original would truly be gone. Replaced not by death, but by correction. By revision. By something smoother and more obedient to design.
[Remains of a Metal Ship.] dropped to all fours.
The reinforced pylons that were once legs dug into the flooded floor, cracking it further as it launched forward with a speed that belied its mass. Water exploded behind it in twin waves. The anchor-chain tail lifted and streamed behind like a rusted banner dragged through a storm.
Imogen saw the shift instantly.
"No!"
She fired.
The first round struck the shoulder plating and glanced off in a spray of sparks. The second hit a piston housing but failed to penetrate deeply enough to stall it. She cycled the bolt with shaking hands, breath uneven, mind lagging just a fraction behind the sight picture every time she tried to correct her aim.
She knew.
Somewhere beneath exhaustion and recoil and the lingering echo of [Effloresced EGO: Wedlocked], she knew that if Shmuel reached the tank and completed the act his distorted mind demanded, there would be no path back. Distortions solidified around fulfilled purpose. If he destroyed the object of his contradiction, then there would be nothing left to pull him toward humanity.
She fired again.
Missed.
The round tore through a lighting rig instead.
"Stop!" she shouted, though she did not know whether she was speaking to him or to fate itself.
[Remains of a Metal Ship.] did not slow. Each stride was a thunderclap. Each impact of metal on concrete sent tremors through the chamber. Steam vented from its chest in violent bursts as internal pressure spiked with every meter gained.
Kamina tried to intercept, but his footing failed him. Four hours of battle had stolen the explosive sharpness from his movements. He lunged, slashed at the tail, and was forced back by a backhanded sweep of the humanoid arm that shattered the railing beside him.
Imogen fired again.
This time the round punched into the damaged hydraulic claw. The limb stuttered but did not stop. It dragged uselessly for half a step before stabilizing through brute structural compensation.
She swore and kept shooting, shots going wider as panic crept into her grip.
The tank loomed ahead.
Bruno's half-formed body twitched again within the vertical cradle, red-lit conduits pulsing faster as the recycled mass integrated. The glass vibrated as [Remains of a Metal Ship.] closed the final distance, anchor-chain tail snapping upward to counterbalance the impending strike.
For a split second, everything narrowed.
The monster rose to its full height, claw arm lifting despite the damage, plating grinding against plating as it gathered all its weight into a single, terminal blow meant not to crack the glass but to obliterate the concept of continuation inside it.
The claw came down.
The impact never landed.
The tank exploded outward from within.
It fractured in a bloom, something inside had chosen the moment and direction of its own emergence. Fluid and shards burst across the chamber in a crimson wave.
A figure launched through it.
The blow landed square against the armored chest of [Remains of a Metal Ship.].
The industrial mass was lifted clean off its feet, anchor-chain tail whipping wildly as the entire hull was hurled backward. It smashed through a bank of machinery and embedded into the far wall, concrete spiderwebbing from the point of impact.
Water cascaded down around it.
In the space where the tank had stood, amid hanging cables and severed conduits, a silhouette straightened slowly, red fluid sliding from skin that no longer looked incomplete.
The Queen piece had been recycled.
Kamina saw her clearly when the spray settled.
Long brown hair, wet from suspension fluid, clung to pale skin that looked almost luminous beneath the red emergency lights. Her blue eyes were open and unfocused, as the world had been handed to her without instructions. There was no tremor in her stance. No weakness in her spine. She stood barefoot amid broken glass and torn cables.
"Shmuel!" Kamina shouted, voice cracking through the chamber. "Stop! That's enough!"
[Remains of a Metal Ship] tore itself free from the cratered wall in a shower of concrete and twisted rebar. The red visor flared, steam venting in violent bursts from its chest housing. It launched forward again, anchor-chain tail carving a trench behind it.
Bruno did not move and she stood there watched
The hydraulic claw came in low, faster than before, pistons shrieking as it aimed to cleave her in half.
The blade-like edge of metal carved through her arm at the bicep.
For a fraction of a second, the limb separated cleanly.
Then it grew back.
The flesh simply reassembled, fibers weaving, bone knitting, skin sealing as if the cut had been a temporary disagreement rather than damage. The severed arm dissolved into particulate strands before even touching the ground.
Her expression shifted, faint confusion tightening into focus.
She stepped forward.
Her fist struck the armored torso.
The impact rang like a hammer against a hull.
[Remains of a Metal Ship] staggered half a step.
She struck again.
And again.
Each punch grew sharper, more directed, as muscle memory was loading in increments. The body moved with increasing efficiency, footwork correcting itself mid-step, shoulders adjusting angle as she recalibrated from inherited reflexes that did not yet fully belong to her. It was as though she had been handed blueprints of an old vessel and was testing each plank to see which still held.
Somewhere within her, fragments aligned. A gesture repeated from memory. A stance mirrored from someone else's life. Piece by piece replaced, yet arranged in the same pattern. If one were to ask whether the original remained, the question itself would begin to feel unstable.
She drove her palm into the metal helm and forced [Remains of a Metal Ship] backward through a suspended conveyor line. Machinery snapped. Cables whipped like severed nerves.
Kamina stared, breath heavy, mind racing to anchor what he was seeing.
He didn't understand what Bruno was now. He didn't understand whether she was whole, whether she was borrowed, whether she was simply an answer Izan had engineered to avoid loss. But he knew one thing.
"Listen to me!" he roared over the grinding metal and collapsing supports. "That monster is Shmuel! If you're Bruno, if any part of you is still her, then react to that name! Don't treat him like debris. He's not just something in your way!"
Her next strike faltered.
Just slightly.
The name landed somewhere inside her, like a stone dropped into deep water. The surface did not break. No dramatic realization dawned in her eyes. But something rippled. A hesitation in the rhythm of her breathing. A fraction of a second where her gaze flickered toward the red visor instead of past it.
Too vague and incomplete.
[Remains of a Metal Ship] exploited it immediately.
The anchor-chain tail lashed around her waist and hurled her sideways. She tore through a bank of processors and rolled across the floor, rising almost instantly as shattered panels sparked around her.
She lunged back.
The two collided mid-charge.
Metal claw met bare fist. Regenerating flesh pressed against corroded plating. Water beams blasted point-blank, carving trenches through walls as she twisted aside, only to answer with a kick that dented the reinforced torso inward.
They crashed into the grinder's support structure.
Gears shattered. Rotors dislodged. The massive feeding funnels buckled as their bodies slammed through them. The machinery that had consumed Ernst moments earlier groaned under the strain, then tore free from its anchors as the fight carried across it.
They did not remain in one place.
They tore through the lab in widening slash, smashing through and collapsing gantries, ripping conduits from ceilings. Water flooded from ruptured reservoirs, mixing with oil and bloodless fluid. Steam filled the air in blinding clouds as alarms screamed their last warnings.
Kamina chased the openings, darting in when he could, blade slashing against exposed joints of [Remains of a Metal Ship], shouting Bruno's name between clashes like someone trying to pull a memory from the bottom of a well.
But the two at the center moved like opposing conclusions to the same argument.
One was grief sealed in iron, desperate to erase what it could not accept.
The other was continuity assembled from fragments, learning in real time whether inheritance was the same as identity.
And around them, Izan's laboratory came apart piece by piece, as the world around them could not endure the question they embodied.
Imogen's vision doubled.
Then tripled.
Then aligned.
A thin line of red slid from the corner of her eye as the mechanical lens whirred and shifted from white to crimson. Data streams flooded her perception, trajectories overlaying trajectories, vectors colliding and separating in branching possibilities.
Bruno was fighting on instinct alone.
Her movements were reactive, not predictive. She struck what entered her range and advanced toward pressure without anchoring intent. She did not defend objectives. She did not anticipate patterns. She was responding to forces.
Imogen inhaled slowly.
She let it bloom again.
[Effloresced E.G.O:: Wedlocked]
The chamber's heat shifted.
For a single breath, her presence sharpened the air itself.
The scope aligned through accelerated cognition.
The exposed reinforcement in [Remains of a Metal Ship]'s right leg. Microfractures from earlier impacts. Weight distribution compromised from tail counterbalance.
She fired.
The shot cracked through the battlefield like judgment.
The round punched cleanly into the knee joint. Pistons ruptured. The massive frame buckled half an inch lower than intended mid-step.
Imogen cut the E.G.O immediately.
The crimson dimmed. The burning presence vanished. Her mechanical eye flickered back toward white as blood continued to trail down her cheek. She staggered but did not fall.
"Now!" she shouted.
Bruno's next strike landed exactly into the imbalance.
Her fist drove into the dented torso while the destabilized leg failed to absorb recoil. The impact launched [Remains of a Metal Ship] sideways through a half-collapsed gantry. Steel beams twisted. The anchor-chain tail flailed wildly, carving into the ceiling before dragging the massive body back upright.
Kamina surged in.
He was even slower now. Arms trembling from accumulated strain. Four hours before this had already carved away his reserves, and the metal giant in front of him did not forgive fatigue.
But retreat was not in him.
He darted beneath a sweeping claw, blade flashing into the exposed knee joint Imogen had cracked. Sparks burst. Hydraulic fluid sprayed. He pivoted, slashed again at the neck seam, then again at the shoulder where plating had begun to peel.
Each strike barely mattered.
Each strike still came.
Because that was what he did.
He did not abandon people to their worst state.
[Remains of a Metal Ship] retaliated with a point-blank water beam. Kamina twisted aside, the compressed torrent tearing through the floor where he had stood. The backwash caught him anyway and sent him skidding across flooded concrete.
He forced himself back up.
Bruno did not look at him.
Not once.
Her blue eyes were locked entirely onto the red visor. Her movements tightened with each exchange, blows becoming more economical, less exploratory. She absorbed strikes without flinching, regenerated shallow tears instantly, and answered with punishing force aimed at structural weaknesses.
To her, Kamina was peripheral. Shmuel was the only thing at the moment she was forcusing on.
They collided again in the center of the chamber. Metal claw against regenerating limb. Anchor-chain wrapping and snapping. Bruno driving forward relentlessly as if some incomplete equation inside her demanded resolution through impact.
Kamina charged to flank.
His wrist spasmed mid-swing.
The katana slipped.
His fingers refused to close properly around the hilt. Nerves burned. Muscles trembled uncontrollably.
He caught the falling blade before it hit the ground.
His hand would not obey.
So he changed the method.
He clenched the handle between his teeth.
Breath flared through his nose. Jaw locked tight.
And he went back in.
He ducked under the tail, bit down harder, and twisted his torso to drive the blade's edge across the damaged knee joint again. The angle was rough. Inelegant. But it cut.
He rolled, came up beside the torso, and jerked his head sideways to carve another shallow groove along the neck seam.
It was absurd.
It was desperate.
It was entirely HIM.
Steam roared. Water detonated outward. Bruno hammered both fists into the armored chest and forced [Remains of a Metal Ship] backward step by grinding step as Kamina slashed at every exposed line he could reach, refusing to let Shmuel sink fully into the hull that had claimed him.
The grinding slowed.
The hydraulic claw twitched once and then twice. Then locked in place.
Plates along [Remains of a Metal Ship]'s torso began to shear apart with dull metallic pops, as if the pressure inside had finally exceeded what even distortion-forged steel could contain. Rivets snapped. Steam vented in long, exhausted sighs. The anchor-chain tail dropped heavily to the flooded floor and lay still, half-submerged in brine.
The massive frame staggered.
One reinforced pylon leg buckled fully.
It knelt.
Water continued to pour from its seams, but no beams fired. The red visor flickered, dimming in uneven pulses.
Kamina stumbled back a step, blade falling from his teeth at last. His jaw ached. His arms hung useless at his sides. He remained standing only because collapse had not yet been granted permission.
Bruno moved first.
She approached without haste, bare feet stepping through the pooling saltwater. Machinery sparked around them, half-destroyed grinders choking on shredded remains. The chamber trembled under distant structural failures.
She stopped before the kneeling mass of corroded steel.
For several long seconds, she simply watched.
The red slit of its helm flickered against her blue eyes.
Something passed between them that neither Kamina nor Imogen could quantify.
A resonance.
Bruno tilted her head slightly, as she was listening to a voice too faint for anyone else.
Then she stepped closer and lifted her hand.
She placed her palm gently against the metal helm where a forehead would have been.
The steel hissed at her touch.
Her lips parted.
The first word the new Bruno ever spoke was soft, almost fragile.
"Love."
The word did not echo.
It did not ignite.
It did not heal.
The red visor flared violently.
A sound tore through the chamber, not mechanical, not human. A deep, resonant groan like stressed hull plating bending under abyssal pressure. The kneeling body convulsed once, every plate rattling out of rhythm. The brine pooling beneath it began to vibrate unnaturally, droplets lifting into the air and hanging suspended as if gravity had briefly forgotten its duty.
Imogen felt it instantly.
Her mechanical eye glitched.
"No," she whispered.
The distortion did not recede.
It shattered again.
If the first break had turned Shmuel into [Remains of a Metal Ship], this was something far worse. This was the erasure of the last remaining seam of individuality. The second collapse of a mind already fractured beyond repair.
The metal helm split down the center.
Light poured out, not red, not white, but a deep oceanic black threaded with distant stars.
The armored body went still.
Utterly still.
Then it cracked open.
The hull did not explode outward. It unfolded. Plates peeled back like petals of rusted steel, and from within came a sound older than machinery. A horn call. Long. Mournful. Distant.
The laboratory dissolved.
Reality sheared.
Walls stretched upward into endless vertical darkness. The ceiling tore away into night sky filled with freezing constellations. The grinders and tanks bent, elongated, and warped into railings and smokestacks. The brine flooded outward in a tidal surge that swallowed broken machinery whole.
Kamina staggered as the floor vanished beneath him.
He did not fall.
He was standing on polished deck wood.
Cold wind howled across an open expanse.
Before them, rising from a sea that had not existed seconds before, was a vessel of impossible scale.
Four towering funnels pierced the starlit void. A black hull stretched into horizonless distance, its rivets gleaming wet beneath phantom moonlight. Windows lined its flank in endless rows, glowing faintly like lifeless eyes. Frost crept across railings already dusted with salt.
On its bow, etched in proud white lettering.
RMS TITANIC.
The Royal Mail Steamer loomed in full, terrible grandeur.
Not a memory nor an illusion.
An Abnormality.
The kneeling distortion was gone.
In its place stood the totality of something that could no longer be called Shmuel. No individuality remained in the structure before them. No trembling human will inside dented armor.
Only the manifestation of a sealed tragedy given form.
The deck beneath Kamina's boots groaned as if under immense unseen pressure. Distant doors slammed open somewhere deep within the ship's corridors. A low, endless hum vibrated through the steel bones of the vessel, like an engine turning without destination.
Imogen stood rigid, blood still trailing from her eye, staring up at the towering funnels.
"…Abnormality," she breathed.
Bruno remained at the bow, hand still outstretched where metal had once been.
The sea around the ship was black and without horizon.
There was no laboratory.
No grinder.
No exit.
Only the vast deck of a doomed ocean liner suspended in frozen night, and the certainty that what had once been Shmuel had hatched into something that could never return.
Abnormality [RMS TITANIC].
RISK LEVEL WAW-1