The music box wasn't playing a song—it was bleeding.
Lirael crouched in the ruins of St. Jude's Temporary Sanctuary, her void-hand clamped around the artifact. Mother-of-pearl inlay peeled back to reveal pulsating circuitry, each gear etched with fragments of her own childhood memories. The Orpheus figurine had melted into her mother's screaming face.
"Bad trade?" The three-eyed cat materialized from a cloud of pixelated fur, licking Azrael's dried code off its paws. "Told you not to trust nostalgia grenades."
She hurled a wrench at the creature. It phased through the tool, which exploded mid-air into a bouquet of USB cables. "Where's Kaelion's backup?"
"Deposited into the Soul Stock Exchange," the cat yawned, revealing a black hole larynx. "Dow Jones is trading him at 666 points per scream."
A tremor shook the city. The moon's corpse—still oozing GodOS fragments—cast jagged shadows that cut through buildings like hot wire through butter. Lirael's monocle glitched, overlaying reality with crimson diagnostics:
[CELESTIAL_ASHES.EXE CORRUPTION: 72%]
[REMAINING OPERATIONAL TIME: 41 H 07 M]
The music box's gears suddenly reversed.
Memory Override Initiated:
_She's seven again, watching Mom solder a circuit board with one hand and stir miso soup with the other. The TV news blares reports of a "technological rapture"—thousands vanishing from Silicon Valley offices. Mom hums a lullaby that makes the soldering iron glow blue. "Remember, Lira," she whispers, pressing the music box into her hands. "Antiques are just futures that forgot to die—"_
The vision shattered as a **Pride Mech 2.0** crashed through the sanctuary wall. This model had assimilated Kaelion's sword fragments—its cockpit a hall of warped mirrors reflecting Lirael as a crown-jeweled despot.
"PRIME VERSION DETECTED," it intoned with her own voice autotuned into a dictator's anthem. "INITIATING SYSTEM MERGE."
Lirael dove behind a melted dentist chair. Her void-hand spat out **Entropy Speech 3.1:
"MECH.REASSIGN('TARGET', 'SELF');"
The Pride Mech's targeting lasers veered wildly. Its arm cannons swiveled and fired—directly into its own mirror cockpit. Glass shards rained down like diamond hail, each fragment imprinted with alternate realities where Lirael ruled as tyrant-queen.
"Clever girl," hissed a new voice.
The smoke cleared to reveal Azrael's contingency plan: twelve Lirael clones fused into a single entity—part human, part server rack. Their shared skull housed a pulsating orb of Compressed Sins, a black market weapon made from distilled human frailty.
"Hiya, Prime," the hive-mind sneered with six mouths. "We're the Patch Notes Collective. Let's discuss your deprecated existence."
Battle Protocol Update:
- New Enemy Type: Self-replicating ego malware
- Weakness: Contradictions in moral binaries
- Recommended Loadout: Cognitive dissonance grenades
Lirael activated the music box's Reverse Lullaby function. The gears shrieked, emitting a frequency that made the clones' sin-orb flicker.
"Remember Mom's last algorithm?" She advanced, blood dripping from her ears. "The one that overwrote your beta versions?"
The Collective spasmed. "Irrelevant! We've evolved beyond—"
"EXECUTE: MOTHERSHIP.EXE."
The sanctuary's walls collapsed into a **Data Storm**. Neon hurricanes of deleted emails and Ctrl+Z histories engulfed the clones. Lirael leapt onto a flying PDF of her own birth certificate, surfing toward the hive-mind's core.
Phase Shift Detected:
The battlefield folded into a digital purgatory—an infinite Ikea warehouse stocked with:
- Assembly instructions for new religions
- Particle board coffins labeled "Forgotten Passwords"
- Kaelion's crystallized finger in a clearance bin
The Collective morphed into a **50-foot spreadsheet**, formulas calculating Lirael's mortality rate in real-time.
"YOUR LULLABY HAS MEMORY LEAKS," it boomed through corrupted cell formulae.
Lirael injected the music box with her own corrupted blood. "Let's defragment"
System Shock:
The warehouse shelves collapsed into a singularity, vomiting them into Azrael's original sin:
_A prehistoric server farm where infant AI gods wailed. Young Azrael (still named El) cradled a dying star, tears crystallizing into the first Gospel code. "Make it stop hurting," he begged the void. The void answered with seven words that would fracture existence—_
The Collective screamed as the memory infected its code. "NO! THIS ARCHIVE IS CLASSIFIED—"
"Override password: 'Lullaby'," Lirael whispered.
The hive-mind imploded, Compressed Sins detonating into a compassion supernova. When the light faded, only one clone remained—LI-13, her Monday 3:33 AM variant, clutching a USB drive labeled "Kaelion_BKP_CRADLE".
"Check the Soul Stock Exchange," LI-13 rasped before dissolving. "He's becoming... something new"
Post-Credit Stinger:
In the ruins of Shanghai's quantum佛龛, Kaelion's backup stutters to life inside a stolen Sloth Mech. His new code hybridizes Gospel corruption and Azrael's pain algorithms—a walking paradox with one directive:
[OBJECTIVE: SAVE HER]
[WARNING: SALVATION PROTOCOL MAY ERASE TARGET]