Shmuel's boots hammered against the pristine white tiles of the corridor.
The air down here was different. Gone was the stench of rust, sweat, and cheap beer from the arena above.
He sprinted past glass-walled server rooms humming with blue light. He vaulted over a cleaning drone that skittered across the polished floor. The walls were lined with panels displaying biological data streams. It was high-tech. Far too clean for a syndicate hideout in the backstreets.
He turned a sharp corner, his mechanical arm scraping the wall to check his momentum, and nearly collided with a figure standing in the middle of the hallway.
Shmuel skidded to a halt, his combat stance rising instinctively.
The man didn't flinch. He didn't even spill the contents of the ceramic mug held loosely in his right hand.
He was dressed in white from head to toe, a clinical white suit that matched the hallway perfectly. His hair was the color of bone, falling in straight lines around a face that looked bored. Strapped to his back was a long, cylindrical staff made of a matte material that absorbed the hallway's fluorescent glare.
He took a slow sip from his mug, eyes tracking Shmuel over the rim.
"Where is this place?" Shmuel demanded, his voice echoing in the sterile silence.
The man lowered the mug. He tilted his head slightly.
"Who are you?" the man asked. His voice was soft and completely unbothered by the intruder shouting in his face.
"I asked first," Shmuel said. "So I get the answer first."
The man pursed his lips. He tapped a finger against the side of his mug, considering the logic.
"A fair assessment," he admitted. He gestured vaguely around them with the hand holding the coffee. "This is the Observatory and Research Quarter of the Izan. We process... raw materials."
He took another sip, his gaze sharpening.
"Now," the man said. "You. Name."
"Shmuel."
"Shmuel," the man repeated. "Biblical. 'God has heard.' I wonder what He heard."
The mug dropped.
It smashed against the white tiles, coffee splashing outward in a dark starburst.
In the same motion, the man's hand blurred over his shoulder. The staff was in his grip and swinging before the ceramic shards settled.
Shmuel threw his arms up in a cross-guard block.
CRACK.
The impact was heavier than anything he had felt in the arena.
The staff struck the exact intersection of his mechanical radii, driving the shockwave straight down his spine. The floor tiles beneath Shmuel's feet spiderwebbed. His knees buckled, servos screaming in protest as they fought to hold the weight.
Shmuel gritted his teeth, forcing his head up, straining against the crushing pressure of the staff.
On the left breast of his pristine white suit, a plastic identification card dangled from a clip.
Name: Ernst
Designation: Bishop Piece
Role: Head Researcher
"Fascinating," Ernst murmured, pressing down harder.
Ernst twisted the staff in his hands, a fluid, casual motion, and swung it like a bat.
There was no time to dodge.
The matte-black cylinder slammed into Shmuel's ribs. The air left his lungs in a sharp gasp. He flew backward, crashing through a pane of reinforced glass that shattered into a thousand glittering diamonds.
Shmuel hit the floor of the room beyond, rolling once to disperse the momentum before skidding to a halt. He coughed and looked up.
He was in the control room. The walls were lined with monitors. Hundreds of them.
Every single screen showed the same thing.
A vast, industrial chamber. A funnel of polished steel descending into a pit of rotating gears. A grinder.
Shmuel watched as the chute opened. Bodies tumbled down. They hit the teeth of the machine. The gears turned. The bodies broke apart, liquefied into a slurry of crimson and white bio-matter that flowed down through pipes into a central containment tank.
And floating in the center of that tank, suspended in the slurry like a fetus in a womb of gore, was a shadow.
A person.
Curled tight. Wires trailing from their spine. Tubes feeding the rendered biological soup directly into their veins.
Shmuel felt bile rise in his throat. The sheer, mechanized scale of the slaughter was nauseating. It was a factory line of death.
Ernst stepped through the broken window, crunching glass under his pristine white shoes. He looked at the wall of monitors, shaking his head with mild annoyance.
"I never understood the architectural redundancy," Ernst commented, gesturing at the screens with his staff. "We know it is the heart of the facility. But to have fifty cameras pointed at one room from fifty slightly different angles? It wastes processing power. If it were for security, they should spread the eyes outward."
He looked back at Shmuel.
Shmuel didn't speak. The revulsion turned cold, hardening into something sharp and kinetic.
His left arm clicked. The chamber inside the elbow joint spun. One bullet primed.
He launched himself.
The explosion in his joint fired. The recoil accelerated his fist to a velocity that blurred the air. It was a strike meant to punch through tank armor, aimed directly at Ernst's midsection.
Ernst didn't panic. He simply shifted his grip. He brought the staff vertical, bracing it against his hip and shoulder.
CLANG.
The impact created a shockwave that cracked the monitors closest to them. Shmuel's fist slammed into the staff, the metal groaning under the stress. Ernst slid back three inches, his boots screeching against the floor, but he held. He tanked a bullet-accelerated strike with a piece of matte plastic and calm physics.
"Forceful," Ernst observed.
Then, on the screens behind them, something changed.
The vibration of the gunshot had traveled.
In the tank, amidst the swirling gore, the shadow moved.
It wasn't the drift of a floating body. It was a twitch. A spasm. The figure's head snapped up. The wires connected to the spine pulsed with sudden light.
Ernst's eyes widened slightly. He looked at the screen, then at Shmuel.
"Curious," Ernst murmured. "The Queen Piece shouldn't be awake yet. The integration isn't complete."
Shmuel felt it then.
A pull.
A gravitational force yanking at his chest, hooking into his heart. It was a physical sensation, a magnetic drag urging him toward that tank, toward that room, toward that shadow. His heart hammered against his ribs, beating out a rhythm that wasn't his own.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
It felt like a call.
Shmuel lowered his fist, his breathing ragged. He pointed a trembling mechanical finger at the screens.
"Who..." Shmuel rasped, the air struggling to leave his throat. "Who is that?"
Ernst glanced at the monitor, then back to Shmuel, his expression bored again.
"The Successor," Ernst answered simply. "The vessel constructed from the recycled remains of a defective Queen. Her name is Bruno."
The world narrowed to a pinprick.
The logic in Shmuel's mind, the careful calculations of ammo and stamina, the strategic assessment of the Bishop Piece in front of him, it all evaporated.
Bruno.
She was in the grinder.
Shmuel roared.
He didn't attack Ernst. He turned his back on the Bishop entirely. He faced the wall, the solid, reinforced concrete wall that separated this control room from the corridor leading deeper in.
His left arm clicked. The chamber spun.
BANG.
He punched the wall. The bullet detonated on impact, blowing a hole through the concrete, sending dust and rebar flying. Shmuel scrambled through the breach, ignoring the jagged edges tearing at his coat.
"Leaving so soon?" Ernst called out, sounding mildly offended.
Shmuel didn't hear him. He was running. He needed to be there. He needed to be there now.
He reached a junction. A heavy security door blocked the path.
Logic would dictate hacking it. Logic would dictate finding a vent.
Shmuel raised his right arm.
Click.
BANG.
The punch buckled the steel door, tearing it off its hinges. He kept running.
Another wall blocked the path to the central chamber.
Click.
BANG.
Another bullet spent.
He was burning his most precious resource, the ammunition that gave him the strength to fight high-grade opponents, just to open doors. It was wasteful.
The actions of a man who had lost his mind to the gravity of a name.
He clawed through the rubble, his mechanical hands scarred and smoking, sprinting toward the heart of the grinder.
He ran until his lungs burned, a fire that consumed the oxygen before it could reach his blood.
The hallway stretched, a white tunnel narrowing toward a singular point of obsession.
A figure stepped out from an alcove, blocking the path. White hair. White eyes. A uniform so pristine it mocked the filth dragging behind Shmuel's heels. A Knight Piece.
The Knight drew a sword, the steel humming with a lethal vibration. It was a perfect obstacle, placed to halt a vessel that had lost its rudder.
Shmuel did not slow down. He did not dodge.
To navigate around the storm is to admit the storm dictates the course. He simply crashed into it.
The sword flashed a horizontal slash. Shmuel threw his body forward, taking the steel not on his mechanical arm, but across his chest. The blade bit deep, carving through his coat, through skin, grating against the sternum. A plank shattered. A timber splintered.
He didn't care.
The impact of the blade brought them close, intimate in the violence. Shmuel didn't waste a bullet. He didn't waste a punch. He used the moment of connection, the friction of the blade stuck in his own ribs, to torque his body and shove the Knight into the wall.
He left a piece of himself on the sword edge and stumbled past.
He was lighter now. A ship shedding its cargo to stay afloat in the gale. If the hull is breached, does the destination vanish?
He kept running. The pain was distant, a signal from a part of the vessel that no longer mattered.
Then, the hallway dissolved. The smell of ozone faded. The sound of his boots slapping the tiles dampened.
A voice, warm and cloying, curled around his auditory nerve. It felt like wet silk draped over the brain.
"Have you ever thought about hating the person you loved?"
Shmuel's stride hitched, but he forced his leg to cycle.
"Never," he rasped, the word tearing his throat. "Not once."
"Even if the design changes?" the voice purred, walking pace with him inside his skull. "If the timber rots and is replaced with cold iron... if the sails are stripped and replaced with engines of war... is the vessel still the one you christened?"
"It doesn't matter," Shmuel hissed. "She is Bruno."
"Is she?" The voice pressed closer, intimate, a lover's whisper in the dark. "If I take the memories that shaped her smile and replace them... if I take the hands that held yours and replace them with claws... at what point does the name on the hull become a lie?"
Shmuel slammed his shoulder into a corner, banking hard, ignoring the centrifugal force trying to tear him apart.
"The name remains," he thought, or perhaps he shouted. "The origin remains."
"The origin is dust," the voice countered gently. "You are running toward a reconstruction. A patchwork of meat and metal stitched together to resemble a memory. Tell me, Shmuel... if every plank is swapped, if every thought is rewritten, if the heart beats with a rhythm you do not know..."
The voice paused, letting the silence hang heavy and suffocating.
"Then is the person you are about to see the same person that you loved?"
Shmuel opened his mouth to answer.
No sound came.
The silence stretched, filling the hollows of his chest where the certainty used to be. The paradox hooked into him, dragging at his resolve. If the object of his devotion was entirely replaced, piece by piece, was his devotion directed at a person, or at a ghost haunting a new machine?
He didn't have the answer.
He only had the momentum.
He reached the final blast door. It was massive, sealed with magnetic locks, marked with hazard stripes that screamed of the atrocity beyond.
Shmuel didn't use a card. He didn't use a bullet. He jammed his mechanical fingers into the seam of the doors and pulled. The servos in his arms screamed, overheating, the metal glowing dull red. He tore the doors apart through sheer, hysterical force.
The roar of machinery washed over him. The smell of copper and processed meat hit him like a physical blow.
He stepped onto the gantry.
Below him, the grinder churned. The slurry of bodies swirled in a grotesque vortex. And in the center, suspended in the transparent tank, was the figure.
Wires. Tubes. A body rebuilt.
Shmuel took a step forward.
THUNK.
The sound was wet and dull.
A spear tip burst from the center of his chest.
It had come from behind, thrown with the precision of a Rook Piece lurking in the shadows of the doorway he had just forced open. The steel shaft vibrated, slick with his own heart's blood.
Shmuel looked down at the metal protruding from his sternum. It had pierced the core. The engine room was breached. The keel was snapped. By all laws of biology, the vessel should sink.
But the ship did not stop.
He did not turn to look at his attacker. He did not fall to his knees.
He took another step.
The spear slid inside him, grating against bone, but he moved forward.
And another step.
Toward the tank.
If the ship sails on after the heart is destroyed... what is powering it? Is it life? Or is it simply the inertia of a damned soul refusing to dock?
He walked into the middle of the machinery, a dead man refusing to die until he saw the face of the thing he loved.
"It is You."
Shmuel forced the thought through the haze of pain, gripping the answer Kamina had given him like a lifeline in a hurricane.
"The self isn't the timber," he rasped, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. "It isn't the sails. It isn't the memory. It is simply... the person standing there. It is the definition I hold. You are Bruno because I say you are Bruno."
It was a desperate theft of philosophy. He wielded Kamina's words, but he did not hold Kamina's heart. Kamina's logic was a celebration of the present. Shmuel's logic was a cage for the past, a refusal to accept that the ship had sunk, insisting that the driftwood washing ashore was still a vessel.
"Ah... you misunderstand the lesson," the voice whispered, coiling around his dying synaptic firings. "You are not defining her. You are defining your need for her. You are pointing at a pile of rotten planks and calling it a home because you are afraid to sleep in the cold."
Shmuel reached the tank.
He raised his mechanical fist. The metal was dented, the servos whining in protest, but he drove it forward with everything he had left.
CRASH.
The reinforced glass shattered.
A torrent of pink, viscous nutrient fluid exploded outward, washing over Shmuel, stinging the open wound in his chest where the spear still protruded.
The figure inside tumbled out with the fluid.
It hit the wet grating with a wet, boneless slap.
Shmuel looked down.
It wasn't a girl. It wasn't a woman.
It was a mound of pale, shivering meat. Limbs were fused into the torso. Muscles bulged and writhed beneath translucent skin, knitting and unknitting in a constant, agonizing cycle of regeneration. There was no face, only a smooth surface where features should have been, interrupted by a mouth that gasped for air it didn't know how to breathe.
Bruno.
The hatred hit Shmuel like a physical blow.
It surged up from his gut, hot and acidic. He hated it. He hated the wet sound it made. He hated the way it twitched. He hated that this grotesque lump of biology was wearing the name of the girl who used to beat him at chess. It was a mockery. It was an insult to the memory he was trying to save.
"See?" the voice whispered. "The ship is gone. This is just debris."
No.
Shmuel bit his tongue until it bled, forcing the hatred down, locking it away in the darkbox of his mind where he kept his fear.
This is her. This is the ship.
He fell to his knees in the fluid. His mechanical hands, designed for crushing, moved with trembling gentleness. He scooped the wet, heavy mass of flesh into his arms.
Wires and tubes trailed from the thing's spine, anchoring it to the machinery above.
Shmuel gripped the tubes. He pulled.
Squelch. Pop.
Fluid spurred. The thing in his arms convulsed, a low, gurgling moan vibrating through its chest.
"I've got you," Shmuel whispered, the lie tasting like bile. "We're leaving."
He stood up. The weight of the spear in his heart dragged at him. The weight of the flesh in his arms dragged at his soul. But he turned. He took a step toward the exit.
He made it two paces.
From behind him, a hand gripped the shaft of the spear sticking out of his back.
It wasn't a gentle touch. It was a yank.
SHHLUCK.
The Rook Piece ripped the spear backward, pulling it free from Shmuel's body.
The vacuum in his chest collapsed. A torrent of blood erupted from the exit wound, splashing the pristine white floor. The sudden drop in blood pressure turned his vision gray. His knees buckled.
But he didn't drop her. He held on.
Then the air whistled to his right.
The Knight Piece was there. The sword chopped. A clean stroke aimed at the joint of Shmuel's burden.
CLANG-SNAP.
Shmuel's right mechanical arm was severed just below the elbow.
The metal limb hit the ground with a heavy clatter.
And with it, the support gone, the mass of flesh that was Bruno slipped from his remaining grasp.
"NO!" Shmuel screamed, reaching out with his left hand, clutching at empty air.
The blob of flesh tumbled but it didn't hit the floor.
A white shoe caught it. A gentle, controlled kick lifted the mass upward, suspending it in the air for a second, before a hand in a pristine white sleeve caught it with casual ease.
Ernst stood there, holding the writhing Bruno against his chest like a sack of groceries. He looked down at Shmuel, who was swaying on his feet, blood pouring from his chest and the stump of his arm.
"Messy," Ernst critiqued. "You're leaking all over the sterile field."
The Rook stood behind Shmuel, blood-slick spear in hand. The Knight stood to the side, sword leveled. And Ernst, the Bishop, stood in front.
Shmuel fell to his knees. He looked up, vision tunneling, watching the thing he hated being cradled by the monster who made it.
"That's..." Shmuel choked, blood spraying his lips. "That's... mine..."
"Incorrect," Ernst said, adjusting his grip on the flesh.
Ernst shifted the mass of flesh in his arms, careful not to let the dripping fluids stain his cuff. He looked down at Shmuel and sighed with the weariness of a manager dealing with a staffing shortage.
"Honestly, the security budget has been abysmal lately," Ernst muttered, almost to himself. "Ever since Team 1 and Team 2 mobilized to that sector in District 12, we've been left with skeleton crews."
He turned away, dismissing Shmuel as a threat that had already resolved itself.
The world grayed out. The hum of the grinder faded into a soft, ambient static.
Shmuel lay in the pooling blood, staring at the white ceiling tiles. The pain in his chest was cold now. Numbing.
The voice returned. It didn't come from the hallway or the room. It bloomed from the center of his own skull, warm and intimately familiar, like a memory of sunlight he had forgotten.
"You are trying so hard," the voice crooned. "It is painful to watch you sail against a wind that stopped blowing years ago."
Shmuel's thought was a jagged shard. She is… she is still…
"She is debris," the voice corrected. "You looked at that thing and you didn't feel love. You felt horror. Why do you lie to your own heart?"
Because… if I don't love her… then who am I?
"You are the captain of a ghost ship," the voice whispered. "You cling to the rotting planks, insisting they are still sturdy. You paint over the rust and pretend the hull isn't breached. But tell me… isn't it exhausting?"
The warmth spread through his freezing limbs.
"Isn't it tiring to force yourself to love a monster just to preserve a memory?"
Shmuel's breath hitched. A tear leaked from his eye, mixing with the blood on the floor.
I hate it, he admitted, the thought finally surfacing from the dark depths. I hate what she became. I hate that shape. I hate that it isn't her.
"That's right," the voice encouraged, soothing as a mother's lullaby. "That hatred… it isn't a sin. You cherish the Bruno that was. You despise the Bruno that is. The paradox of the ship is only a paradox if you refuse to acknowledge that the old ship is gone."
The ship sank, Shmuel thought.
"Yes. The ship sank. So why are you still treading water, pretending to float?"
The voice swirled around his core, wrapping him in a protective embrace.
"If the world insists on rebuilding her into something unrecognizable… then why don't you become the monument to what was lost? Don't repair the ship, Shmuel. Be the wreckage. Be the cold, hard steel that refuses to change. Be the anchor that drags everything down with you."
Be the remains…
"Yes. Let the metal consume the flesh that betrayed you. If they want to play with pieces… then show them what a broken piece can do."
Shmuel closed his eyes.
He stopped fighting the cold. He let the hatred for the flesh-blob, the hatred for Ernst, the hatred for the City that demanded constant recycling, flood his veins like liquid iron.
I accept it.
Inside the control room, the air pressure plummeted.
The Knight Piece took a step back, sensing the shift. "His vitals… they just spiked."
Ernst paused, looking back over his shoulder.
Shmuel's body convulsed.
The wound in his chest didn't bleed anymore. Metal plates erupted from his skin, grinding together with the screech of a hull buckling under pressure. His remaining flesh turned gray, then silver, then hardened into cold, rivet-studded steel.
His severed right arm burst outward, not with blood, but with a swarm of cables and pistons that wove themselves into a massive, hydraulic claw. His legs fused and expanded, heavy and stomping, resembling the pylons of a deep-sea rig.
From his back, a long, segmented tail lashed out, heavy, serrated, looking like a rusted anchor chain. The patterns on his new metallic hide swirled like oil on water, mimicking the blueprint of a vessel that had been torn apart and welded back together by madness.
Remains of a Metal Ship.
The Rook Piece, closest to the body, raised his spear.
He lunged.
He never finished the motion.
Shmuel, no, the Remains, moved.
The mechanical claw lashed out, faster than the eye could follow, and caught the Rook by the torso.
CRUNCH.
The sound was wet and metallic all at once.
The Rook gasped as the claw compressed, ribs shattering, armor folding like tin foil.
Shmuel lifted the Rook high into the air. The distortion's face was a featureless steel visor, glowing with a singular, vertical red slit.
With a flick of its wrist, the distortion slammed the Rook into the floor. The impact shook the entire facility, cracking the foundation and sending dust raining from the ceiling. The Rook lay embedded in a crater of concrete.
The metal beast straightened, steam venting from its joints with a mournful hiss. It turned its gaze toward Ernst.
And it roared.