Rose made his way to a secluded viewing balcony overlooking the sprawling, neon-soaked valley of Chongqing. The cool night air hummed with distant city noise. He found Eve standing at the edge, her gaze scanning the dark perimeter.
"Has Adam not initiated contact?" Rose asked.
"Not yet," Eve muttered, her hands gripping the cold steel railing. "But the moment he steps into this light, he walks straight into a meat grinder."
"Has the structural damage to your abdomen fully repaired?"
Eve averted her gaze, her jaw tightening. "That's irrelevant. I have a more vital sequence to execute. Tell me, Rose... do you feel it? Do you feel yourself starting to care for someone?"
Rose stood in absolute silence, offering no verbal confirmation.
"Caring is a dangerous gateway, Rose," Eve continued, her voice hollow. "It flings the doors wide open to a flood of chaotic variables. And at the end of that corridor lies pain. It will warp you into something entirely unrecognizable. Neither human nor machine. Denied heaven, rejected by hell. You'll become nothing more than a synthetic phantom, drifting aimlessly through this rotten world."
"What data do you possess regarding my origin, Eve?" Rose demanded.
Eve let out a long, heavy sigh. "I just—Ugh!"
Spike!
Without warning, a massive, jagged pneumatic iron rod erupted through the floorboards, impaling Eve squarely through the chest. A grotesque, elongated hydraulic arm surged from beneath the balcony, lifting her off her feet.
A heavy spray of thick, dark red blood splattered violently across Rose's pale face.
Adam had arrived.
"Eve..." Rose's optic sensors dilated in sheer horror.
"Ro... se..." Eve gasped, blood bubbling from her lips before her body was violently snatched over the railing.
Below, a monstrous silhouette crashed into the manicured hedges and fled into the darkness. Without a millisecond of hesitation, Rose vaulted over the balcony, plunging into the dark forest below.
"Feng, I have established visual contact with the target," Rose reported, his legs pumping as he pushed his chassis to its absolute limits. "Heading sixty-seven degrees northeast."
"Copy that! I'm en route!" Feng's voice crackled back.
Severing the comms, Rose rerouted power to his lower extremities, shifting his knee and ankle joints into a high-elasticity spring configuration. His velocity doubled instantly. With a fluid, mechanical snap, he drew his short katana from his spinal scabbard and hurled it with lethal precision.
The blade sliced through the air, embedding itself deep into Adam's ankle actuator. The monster stumbled, crashing hard against the damp earth. Like a wild predator, Rose leaped through the air, tackling the thrashing beast to the ground.
He ripped his katana from the creature's leg and drove it down toward its chest, but the blade screeched against reinforced, military-grade plating. The chassis was far too thick to penetrate.
"Why do you protect her?! Why do you protect her?!" Adam roared, his dual vocal processors screeching in unison.
Two horrific mechanical appendages burst from the monster's back, wrapping tightly around Rose's legs like iron serpents.
"Get back! She is rewriting your core directory! You ignorant puppet!" Adam bellowed.
Rose didn't listen. He slammed his forehead violently into Adam's optic cluster, shattering the lenses.
The pale moonlight filtered down through the canopy, illuminating the brutal, desperate struggle. Below them, the brilliant, multi-colored neon lights of Chongqing cast a surreal, rainbow-hued glow across the wet grass, painting their bloody duel in brilliant, artificial shades.
"Argh! If you refuse to listen, then perish with her!"
With a burst of monstrous strength, Adam flung Eve's limp, bleeding body toward the edge of a sheer cliff. With a sickening rip, the monster tore the synthetic skin from his own left arm, exposing a rusted, terrifying mass of industrial hydraulics.
Adam drove his heavy metal fist forward, punching clean through Rose's abdomen. The impact left a massive, gaping cavity in the machine's midsection.
Ignoring the system warnings flashing across his vision, Rose clamped his left hand down on Adam's arm, locking his joints to prevent the monster from withdrawing his fist.
BANG!
A heavy slug fractured the night air, striking Adam directly in the forehead.
"Drop!" Feng's voice roared from the shadows.
Rose ducked instantly, releasing his grip. Feng's iron staff whistled through the air, striking the monster across the temple with bone-shattering force. The concussive blow sent Adam reeling, his balance completely destroyed as he stumbled backward toward the edge of the abyss.
Seizing the window, Rose snatched up his katana, identified a critical structural weakness, and lunged forward. The tip of his blade drove straight through Adam's remaining eye. The momentum carried them both over the edge, plunging down to crash violently onto the jagged rocks below.
"Ugh... cough... you... you don't know anything..." Adam wheezed, his hydraulic fluid mixing with dark synthetic blood on the stones. "The truth... of what they did... to me..."
Rose brutally wrenched his blade from the shattered skull. "What truth?"
"These... monsters... they are all the same. Systemic... corruption. Reconstructed. Tortured. Erased."
"Whatever data you have compiled, disclose it," Rose demanded, his voice cold and leveling the blade at the dying creature's core. "And I will determine the parameters of your termination."
"Heh... naive child..." With a sickening mechanical whir, Adam's facial plates split open, revealing a glowing data drive slotted deep within his skull. With a final, rattling hiss, his core light went dark.
Rose reached down, extracting the drive and securing it within his internal storage compartment. He flicked his wrist, spraying the dark fluid off his katana before sheathing it.
"Eve! Can you hear me?! Wake up!" Feng's desperate, agonizing screams echoed from the cliffside above.
Rose scaled the jagged rock face, dragging his damaged chassis back to the plateau. There, he found the woman who had acted as his mother lying in a widening pool of crimson on the cold, unforgiving earth.
Rose's green eyes dilated to their limit, staring at the lifeless, freezing shell of the first anchor in his synthetic life.
Feng pressed two trembling fingers to Eve's neck. "Her pulse... it's gone, Rose."
Rose crawled forward on his knees, staring down at the vacant face. "What was your plan, Eve?"
His words sparked a sudden, horrifying realization in Feng's mind. "Or... was her plan always... you, Rose?"
The diagnostic light on Rose's face shifted from its calm, neon green to a sterile, empty white.
"I do not comprehend," the machine whispered.
Feng scrambled to her feet, grabbing Rose's shoulders in a state of sheer, unadulterated panic. "Rose! Something is wrong! You need to run—"
BANG!
A deafening gunshot shattered the night.
"..." Feng gasped, her knees buckling as she collapsed onto the dirt, a massive exit wound blooming through her chest. Rose's cold, analytical facade shattered, replaced by a raw, terrifying look of dread in his eyes. Emerging from the shadows behind them, holding a smoking, heavy-caliber firearm, was HIM.
"So you are the worm after all," Xu Wen murmured, stepping forward. "Just as Eva predicted."
"Run... Rose... Runnnnn!"
BANG!
A second bullet tore through the lady's heart, silencing her forever.
A drop of her warm, crimson blood splattered onto Rose's neck, trickling down to coat his silver heart-shaped pendant, staining it a brilliant, bloody red.
"Why?" Rose asked, his voice trembling as he stared at the tycoon. "Why did you do this?"
"What she was doing was a variable I could not tolerate," Xu Wen replied coldly. "My empire cannot remain pristine if there are worms eating away at its core."
Rage, pure and volatile, surged through Rose's processors. He lunged forward, grabbing Xu Wen by the collar and slamming him violently to the ground. Behind them, with her final, involuntary reflex, Feng's body slipped over the edge of the cliff, plunging into the dark, yawning abyss of the forest below, her iron staff falling with her.
"You made this happen... just to take their lives for your corporation?" Rose snarled, his grip tightening around Xu Wen's throat.
"Feng and that kid? Yes," Xu Wen choked out, a cruel smirk playing on his lips. "But not Eva."
At those words, Rose's head snapped toward Eve's corpse. With a sickening, disjointed crackle of artificial joints, the "dead" body twisted, rising back onto its feet.
"Ugh..." Eve smiled, spitting a glob of blood onto the grass. She casually popped her dislocated shoulders back into place, her body contorting with an unnatural elasticity that defied human anatomy.
"You must understand," Xu Wen said, his voice hardening as he looked up at the machine. "This is the reality of existence. Loss is the catalyst that drives us forward."
"You used me... as a tool to execute your dirty work?" Rose spat, his faceplate flashing from a sterile white to a violent, burning crimson.
Xu Wen nodded, his expression devoid of remorse. "For our investors? Yes. For the people who believe in us? Yes. For capital? Yes. For power? Absolutely! A mindless machine like you doesn't need to understand. Your only function is to serve as a slave."
"Arrogant fool..." Rose roared, deploying his razor-sharp titanium talons, aiming to tear Xu Wen's face from his skull. But before his claws could connect, they were intercepted by a terrifying, immovable grip.
It was Eve. Her strength was immense, completely halting his strike.
Rose stared at her, his processors fracturing under the weight of her betrayal. "The atrocities he has committed against the innocent... it is more than enough. Why do you ally yourself with a monster like this, Eva? Why was I brought into existence... only to be subjected to this? Why did you lie to me?"
Eve's lips curled into a wide, monstrous grin.
"Because you are the most magnificent creation this world has ever seen, Rose... You should be thanking me. Adam was merely a pawn in this game. And as for the final piece..."
Eve smiled, pointing her finger toward the edge of the cliff.
Xu Wen grabbed Rose by his hair, forcing the machine to stare down into the dark, hollow abyss that had just swallowed his loved one.