The blade extended.
William's sword segmented like a snake's spine, each section connected by flexible joints that Carmilla had spent years perfecting. The weapon stretched impossibly long thirty meters, forty, covering the length of the entire facility floor. It whipped through the air with lethal precision, a flexible death dealing instrument that could strike from any angle.
Pranit's right ear vanished in a spray of blood. He stumbled, surprised for the first time, his hand going to the side of his head.
Florencia gasped as the blade tore through her stomach, punching through artificial organs and synthetic tissue. Black fluid leaked from the wound not quite blood, something else.
But both Sinners smiled through the pain.
"Clever," Pranit said, holding his bleeding ear, his voice still calm and amused. "Very clever. But not clever enough, I'm afraid."
*If they come at this speed again, my sword can definitely kill them,* William thought, pulling the segmented blade back into a defensive position. His enhanced hearing tracked their heartbeats, their breathing, the subtle shifts in air pressure as they moved. *They're being stupid, rushing straight into my range. I can end this. I can—*
Pranit threw his chopper knife.
The movement was so fast William's senses barely registered it. Florencia caught the knife with her chain mid-flight, using the momentum to swing the weapon in a wide arc. The knife became a long-range projectile, bypassing William's extended blade entirely, coming from an angle his defensive position couldn't cover.
William focused all his enhanced senses, tracking the weapon's path through sound and air displacement. At the last possible second, he moved cutting the chain, deflecting the knife, even severing Florencia's right hand that had been controlling the weapon.
Her hand hit the floor with a wet thump, still twitching.
*It's over,* William thought with grim satisfaction, his blade repositioning for a killing strike. *They've lost their coordination. Now I can—*
Florencia's left hand moved. A hidden compartment in her forearm opened with a mechanical click, ejecting a small spear
barely larger than a human bone, compact and aerodynamic. But it moved at hypersonic speed, propelled by compressed gas or something more exotic.
Pranit caught it one-handed with perfect timing and immediately hurled it at William's head.
The spear was too small, too fast. William's enhanced hearing caught the whistle of displaced air, but by then it was already too late to dodge.
The projectile punched through his skull just above his right eye socket, driving directly into his brain.
Time stopped.
William felt his body beginning to fall, felt his enhanced senses dying one by one smell fading, hearing cutting out, the proprioception that let him navigate while blind dissolving into static. Everything that made him William, everything that let him fight and protect and serve, was shutting down in rapid sequence.
But his last thought wasn't fear or regret.
It was relief.
*Now I can go to heaven,* he thought, and despite everything the pain, the failure, the knowledge that he hadn't saved Eve or Michae he smiled. That same selfish, desperate smile from when he was seven years old, sitting with his father's corpse and believing the lie.
*Finally. Finally, the test is over. I passed. I protected them as long as I could. I was good. I helped people. I earned it.*
*I can see Mom and Dad and Michael again. We'll be together. No more pain. No more tests. Just peace.*
*Heaven. I'm going to heaven.*
William's body hit the ground, his sword clattering beside him, and everything went dark.
William's eyes opened.
Or did they? He couldn't tell. There was no sensation of eyelids moving, no feeling of light hitting retinas he no longer possessed. Just... awareness. Consciousness existing without body, without reference point, without anything except the knowledge that he still somehow existed.
Darkness. Absolute, endless darkness. No light anywhere. No sound. No temperature. No sensation of any kind except the horrible awareness of his own consciousness floating in nothing.
"Where...?" His voice made no sound. He had no mouth. No throat. No lungs to push air through vocal cords. Just the thought of speaking, echoing in a void that swallowed even thoughts.
*Where is heaven?*
He tried to look around or what his consciousness interpreted as looking around. There was no up or down. No left or right. No direction at all. Just void extending infinitely in all directions, or perhaps in no directions. Space itself seemed meaningless here.
*This must be the transition,* he thought, clinging to the belief like a drowning man clings to driftwood. *The passage between life and heaven. It's dark now, but soon... soon the light will come. The gates. The angels. My family waiting.*
But nothing changed. The darkness remained absolute.
*Is this hell?*
Panic began to build a purely mental panic without adrenaline, without racing heartbeat, without any of the physical symptoms that usually accompanied fear. Just raw, cognitive terror expanding through his consciousness like ink in water.
He tried to move, tried to run, tried to do anything. But there were no legs to run with. No ground to run on. No body to animate. Just consciousness suspended in nothing, unable to move or interact or affect anything.
*How long have I been here?*
Time had no meaning in the void. Every second felt like eternity. Every moment of nothing stretching forever, with no way to mark progression, no heartbeat to count, no external changes to indicate the passage of time.
Had it been minutes? Hours? Years? Centuries? There was no way to know.
William tried to scream, but had no voice. Tried to cry, but had no eyes. Tried to pray, but to what? To whom? If this was God's domain, then God had created a torture more refined than any hell described in scriptfro the torture of consciousness aware of its own helplessness, suspended in nothing, for what might be forever.
*Was it all a lie?*
The realization crept over him slowly, horribly, with the inevitability of dawn after a terrible night. His father had died believing in heaven. His mother had been taken believing she'd see her family again. Baby Thomas never had the chance to believe anything at all.
And William had devoted thirty years from being good, to protecting others, to sacrificing and serving and enduring, all to earn his place in paradise.
For this. For nothing. For endless, solitary darkness without even the mercy of unconsciousness or madness.
*It was all a lie,* he realized, and the weight of that understanding was worse than any physical pain he'd ever endured. *Heaven was a lie. Hell was a lie. God was a lie. All of it designed to make us behave, to make us serve, to make us sacrifice. And we believed it because the alternative that death is just nothing, forever was too terrible to face.*
*I wasted my entire life chasing a promise that was never real.*
Then something changed.
Above him if there was an above in this dimensionless void an eye opened.
Not a human eye. Not anything that could be comprehended through human categories. It was massive and microscopic simultaneously, containing galaxies and atoms in the same impossible space. It saw everything and nothing, perceived all possible realities and none of them, existed and didn't exist in the same eternal moment.
The eye stared at William for one eternal instant.
And William understood.
This wasn't God. This wasn't divine judgment or cosmic justice or anything from human religious frameworks. It was something else entirely something that existed so far beyond human concepts of good and evil, morality and sin, reward and punishment, that those categories simply didn't apply.
Whatever William had done in life the people he'd saved, the suffering he'd endured, the faith he'd maintained none of it mattered to this thing. It wasn't judging him. It wasn't rewarding or punishing him. It simply existed, vast and terrible and utterly indifferent.
He hadn't failed some cosmic test. There had never been a test at all. Just beings telling themselves stories to make existence bearable, and then dying to discover the stories were never true.
The eye closed and vanished, leaving William alone in darkness once more.
He floated there, truly alone now. Not tested. Not judged. Not even acknowledged. Just... irrelevant. A brief consciousness that had flickered into existence, suffered, struggled, and then dissolved back into the nothing it came from.
*Lady Carmilla...* he thought desperately, clinging to the only real connection he'd ever had, even if that connection was built on manipulation and lies. *Please don't die. Please survive. Please...*
Even if heaven was a lie, even if God didn't exist, even if nothing he'd done mattered to the universe she was real. She'd saved him. She'd given him purpose, even if that purpose was built on the exploitation of a traumatized child's desperate need for meaning.
*Please don't die the way I did, still believing in something that was never real.*
The darkness swallowed even that final thought, and William's consciousness began to dissolve, fragments of identity scattering into the void like ashes on wind that didn't exist.
Pranit walked to William's fallen body. He knelt, examining the corpse with detached interest.
"Poor him," Pranit said gently. He placed his hands on William's head and twisted sharply. The neck snapped with a wet crunch.
Pranit stood, brushing off his hands. "All that faith, and in the end, just meat and bone."
Behind him, Carmilla's voice came low and dangerous.
"You made a big mistake."
Pranit and Florencia turned.
Carmilla stood transformed by fury. Her eyes blazed with rage and grief. Behind her, reinforced doors finished opening with a hydraulic hiss.
A machine emerged from darkness.
Nine feet tall, four arms, each holding a different weapon. Sword, katana, battle axe, spear. Full body armor covered every inch experimental alloys that gleamed under the lights. The head bristled with additional weapons. Four red optical sensors tracked both Sinners simultaneously.
"You killed William," Carmilla said, her voice breaking for just a moment. "And now you pay the price."
The machine raised all four weapons, targeting systems locking on with lethal precision.
Pranit and Florencia exchanged a glance. Both thought the same thing: *We can't waste more time, or we'll lose our sanity.*
The machine surged forward with impossible speed for something so massive.
Florencia dodged, rolling to the side with professional precision. But Pranit
The sword cleaved through him before he could react. His body separated into pieces torso from legs, arms from shoulders. Blood sprayed across the floor in arterial arcs. The pieces hit the ground with wet, heavy sounds.
Florencia's eyes tracked the machine's movement, calculating. "Interesting. So it has insane speed despite that heavy body."
*Pranit's down,* she thought, her mind racing through tactical options. *But we're already taking too much time. The longer we stay, the more our sanity fragments. I can feel it at the edges thoughts becoming harder to hold, reality starting to slip.*
She launched herself at the machine, firing her remaining weapons in controlled bursts. The armor absorbed the impacts, but she wasn't trying to damage it she was testing response time, mapping weak points, buying seconds to think.
*Mission objective: Capture the synthetic girl and Angela. The Scientist wants them alive. Everything else is secondary.*
The machine's katana swept toward her. Florencia ducked under it with practiced ease, simultaneously firing at its knee joint a classic weak point. The shot ricocheted harmlessly off reinforced plating.
*No obvious vulnerabilities. Carmilla designed this thing to be a fortress.*
She glanced toward where Eve and Angela huddled. Eve was recovering, Angela bleeding but alive. Both vulnerable. Both achievable targets if she could just get past this machine.
*But every second here costs us. I can already feel it the edges of my thoughts fraying. How long before I can't think straight? Before I forget why I'm here?*
The machine's battle axe came down in a devastating arc. Florencia twisted away, feeling the displacement of air as the weapon missed her by centimeters and cratered the floor. Concrete fragments sprayed like shrapnel.
*It's stronger than me. Faster in short bursts. Better armored. But it's still a machine it has to follow predictable patterns.*
She fired her chain weapon, not at the robot but at the ceiling support beam above it. The chain wrapped around the beam, and she yanked herself upward, gaining altitude and perspective.
From above, she could see the whole battlefield. The machine tracking her with all four optical sensors. Carmilla standing at the control panel, tears streaming down her face but hands steady. Eve trying to help Angela. William's corpse.
*If I can separate Carmilla from the machine's controls—*
The machine's sword extended on a telescoping arm, reaching her elevated position faster than should be possible. Florencia released the chain and dropped, barely avoiding being skewered.
She landed hard, rolled, came up firing. Her shots targeted Carmilla now, trying to disrupt the neural link.
But the machine intercepted every round with its weapons, moving with inhuman precision to protect its operator. It was faster at defense than she was at attack.
*Damn it. The link is too strong. And I'm running out of time.*
She could feel it more clearly now—the sanity degradation. Her peripheral vision flickered with things that weren't there. Her thoughts took longer to form, had to fight through static. The facility's walls seemed to breathe.
*How long have I been here? Five minutes? Ten? It feels like hours.*
The machine advanced, all four arms moving in lethal coordination. Florencia countered, matching its rhythm, deflecting attacks she couldn't dodge. Her combat training was extense decades of experience, modifications that pushed her beyond human limits.
But the machine never tired. Never hesitated. Never made mistakes.
And with every passing second, Florencia felt her own capabilities degrading.
*I need to end this. Now. Either capture the targets or retreat before I lose myself completely.*
She made her decision.
Florencia feinted toward the machine, then suddenly broke away, sprinting toward Eve and Angela. If she could grab them, use them as hostages, force Carmilla to stand down
The machine was faster.
It appeared in her path like it had teleported, all four weapons raised in a defensive wall. Florencia skidded to a halt, barely avoiding impaling herself on the spear.
*No. No, I can't fail. The Scientist is counting on me. If I return empty-handed, after Pranit's failure—*
Her thoughts scattered. For a moment, she forgot why she was fighting. Forgot where she was. The facility walls rippled like water.
Then clarity snapped back, sharp and painful.
*The sanity loss is accelerating. I have minutes at most.*
The machine struck. Not to kill Florencia realized this with professional appreciation but to disable, to capture, to neutralize. Carmilla wanted information. Wanted revenge.
Florencia parried the sword with her remaining chain weapon, deflected the katana with her reinforced forearm, twisted under the axe. But the spear caught her in the side, punching through synthetic organs.
Black fluid leaked from the wound. Pain signals that her modified nervous system almost didn't register.
*I'm losing,* she acknowledged with cold clarity. *The mission is failing. Pranit's in pieces. I'm wounded. My sanity is fragmenting. And I still don't have the targets.*
She looked at Eve and Angela one more time. So close. The Synthetic Soul that could access the Tree of Hope. The girl who carried secrets about the Sinners' plans.
Both slipping away.
The machine's four arms converged on her from impossible angles, weapons moving in perfect synchronization.
Florencia made her final calculation.
*Retreat. Survive. Report to the Scientist. Regroup and return with better preparation.*
*Or stay and lose everything, including my mind.*
Across the room, Eve finally felt well enough to move. Her damaged systems were slowly rerouting, compensating. She looked toward the battle, then saw William's broken body.
"What?" Her voice was barely a whisper. "He... he died for us?"
She felt something scatter inside her consciousness confusion, grief, incomprehension. "Why did he do that? We don't even know him."
Carmilla's voice came flat, drained. "He did it for God."
"For God?" Eve repeated.
"It's a human belief," Carmilla said, controlling the machine with steady hands despite her tears. "They think it gives them meaning to live."
Eve said nothing, processing.
Angela still breathed heavily, clutching her wounds. Blood seeped through her fingers.
"We have to do something," Eve said desperately. "Lady Angela is—"
"We can't," Carmilla interrupted coldly. "I can't let them leave alive."
But her thoughts spiraled backward through eighteen years of memories. Training William. Using his faith. Exploiting his trauma.
*I lost my family in that war too, William,* she thought, grief cracking through rage. *We were both orphans. Both broken by the same war.*
*I should have told you. Should have been honest instead of using you.*
*But I was too damaged to save you properly. I could only turn you into a weapon and tell you the lies you needed to hear.*
The machine's four arms struck simultaneously at Florencia, weapons converging with lethal precision.
Carmilla looked at William's body one more time. The boy she'd saved and corrupted. The last connection to anything human.
She turned back to the battle, tears still falling:
"I lost my family in the war too, William."
The machine's weapons descended.