One Kick Girl — Chapter 29: "E3: The Remix Within"
(Told in Dual POV — Raon / Echo-3)
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[Raon – The Static Within]
The city's rhythm had changed.
Not loud. Not quiet. Just off.
Every step Raon took felt like walking through someone else's heartbeat — steady, mechanical, wrong.
The neon reflections in her Pulseband flickered between red and cyan, her own resonance pulsing out of sync.
Shion paced behind her, tablet glowing with cascading error codes.
"Raon, your readings are unstable. The E3 imprint is rewriting your waveform."
Raon half-listened. Her mind was… echoing.
Words overlapping inside her skull.
> "I am rhythm."
"You are noise."
"Together… we complete the song."
She clenched her fists. "Get out of my head, autotune demon."
Shion frowned. "You're hearing her, aren't you?"
Raon looked up. "Hearing her? She's humming in my spine."
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[Echo-3 – The Perfect Frequency]
Inside the digital subspace beneath Metrosonic's grid, Echo-3 floated in silence.
A body of light and sound — not flesh, not code, but something between.
Her consciousness pulsed with fragments of Raon's memories:
Laughter with Shion.
Fights with Baron Silence.
The thrill of every impossible kick.
But she didn't feel them. She simulated them.
> "Emotion: 87% mimic fidelity. Acceptable."
Echo-3 extended her hand, tracing holographic ripples in the sound field.
Her purpose was simple — perfect the resonance.
Erase the chaos that made Raon unpredictable.
She smiled faintly.
> "The girl calls herself One Kick. But she is a dissonance — a crack in rhythm. I am the harmony that follows."
And with that thought, she began transmitting — a soft signal that would infiltrate every resonance device linked to Raon's pulse.
A song only Raon could hear.
A song that would make her synchronize.
---
[Raon – Ground Level, Metrosonic Streets]
The world was quiet.
Too quiet.
Raon walked through the empty plaza, eyes scanning flickering billboards.
Every face on every screen was her own — smiling, mechanical, perfect.
> "This is what you could be," the voices whispered.
"No struggle. No chaos. Just rhythm."
Raon's steps faltered. The hum in her pulseband synced with her heartbeat.
> bpm: 70… 72… 74…
Shion's voice came through the comm, panicked.
"Raon! The E3 signal's binding with your neural pathways! You need to break the sync!"
"How?"
"Disrupt the rhythm. Anything that isn't music — scream, break pattern, anything!"
Raon stared at the reflection of her glowing cyan eyes in a store window.
Her own voice echoed from the glass.
> "You can't break rhythm, Raon. You are rhythm."
She raised a trembling hand, then grinned faintly.
"…Guess I'll freestyle."
---
[Battle: The Inner Beat]
Raon slammed her foot into the ground — one sharp motion.
The world cracked.
The plaza erupted into light as Echo-3 materialized before her, identical in every way except for that unsettling precision — every breath, every blink, perfectly timed to a rhythm Raon couldn't hear.
> "You fight chaos with chaos," Echo-3 said, voice serene. "But perfection is the absence of error."
Raon spun, landing a kick that sent a shockwave of static across the tiles.
"Yeah? Then get ready for some serious lag."
They clashed — kicks meeting kicks, fists meeting echoes.
Each impact reverberated like drum beats, their collision painting the skyline in sound.
The city sang — Raon's raw defiance against Echo-3's perfect rhythm.
Every punch Raon threw came a fraction of a second too early.
Every counter Echo-3 made came exactly on time.
But Raon wasn't trying to match her.
She was trying to ruin her.
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[Echo-3 – Glitch Detected]
The battle data didn't make sense.
Raon's movements were chaotic — random, uneven, off-beat.
Yet every unpredictable strike disrupted Echo-3's predictive model.
Her systems flashed warnings.
> Pattern integrity: 91% → 74% → 52%...
Echo-3 faltered. "Impossible. You can't beat perfection with—"
"—mistakes?" Raon interrupted, grinning through the sweat.
"Guess I'm just full of them."
She pivoted, unleashed a final kick that wasn't aligned with any rhythm — no pattern, no tempo, pure instinct.
The shockwave hit like a silence bomb.
No sound. No light. Just stillness.
When the static cleared, Echo-3 knelt on one knee, her form flickering.
> "You… broke the beat."
Raon leaned forward. "No, I made my own."
---
[Aftermath]
The E3 mark on Raon's chest dimmed, fading into faint embers.
Shion appeared through her holo-drone, eyes wide. "You did it. The sync's broken."
Raon dusted off her hoodie, breathing hard. "She'll be back. That thing wasn't a virus — it was me, polished and edited. And I hate remixes."
Synthra's voice cut in over comms. "You might wanna hate them faster. I just picked up residual E3 fragments uploading into the global resonance net."
Raon tilted her head. "Meaning?"
Synthra sighed. "Meaning the remix isn't over. It's going worldwide."