Chapter Text
“Death is not the end,” Kaisel said, her head bowed in reverence.
[Kaisel Lvl. 1 - Colonel Grade]
“You can… speak?” Izuku asked with amazement, his gaze locked on the shifting plates of the shadow metal.
“Yes my Liege.” Her appearance had originally caused Izuku to consider Kaisel as a “him,” but that’s what happens when you assume things. And really, there was no saying if Kaisel was a he, she, or they. Trying to gender what was essentially a machine, now made of shadows, was a bit of a headtrip.
“Liege…” Momo mouthed at Izuku.
“Arcka mentioned a Liege as well before he died, do you know if he was referring to a Monarch or Ruler?” He asked the dragon.
Kaisel titled her head. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.”
“You’ve never heard of the Monarchs or Rulers?”
“My life within this bastion was that of an experiment from the upper floors. Until now, I had not possessed such clarity. I was little more than an animal moving on instinct.” She averted her eyes in embarrassment. “Forgive me for not being of more help, my Liege.”
Izuku waved his hands through the air like he was trying to swat a fly. “No! Don’t apologize! It’s not your fault!”
“Thank you for your graciousness, my Liege.”
Izuku winced. He didn’t particularly enjoy the reverence. “You don’t have to call me that. I’m just a guy. Besides, isn’t Momo the one you answer to?”
“I answer directly to her, yes,” Kaisel said, nodding her head. “But that does not mean I am incapable of showing respect to anyone else. Both my Liege and my Lady are worthy of great praise!”
Momo and Izuku exchanged a glance. Just a few weeks ago they had been two teenagers of no significance, living average or below average lives. Now they had creatures that surpassed S-Ranks referring to them with these lordly titles. Getting their power ups was shocking all on its own, but this was just weird. However, they let it pass for the moment, as the System had one more thing to ask of them.
[Shadow Empress: Please declare your command phrase.]
“Command phrase?”
“I guess you get your own,” Izuku responded. “I have Arise and you have yours.”
“Huh… I don’t want anything too complicated… the Runestone was called Synthesize… I think that works.” Izuku nodded as Momo looked over to him for confirmation, so she cleared her throat and declared:
“Synthesize.”
Throughout the city, there came a noise, metal plates pulling themselves back together, rising from the dead.
[30 Noble Lux - Captain Grade]
[Total Synthetic Shadows: 31/31]
“A fine choice, my Lady.” Kaisel acknowledged.
“Only 31?” Izuku remarked at the small number. The normal Shadow limit was already in the thousands. So it was a surprise to see Momo’s was so low at the power level they were at.
“I believe my Lady’s power is for a more specialized use, my Liege.”
“In that case I might as well take the rest of the Lux-”
[Error: Souls under the Shadow Empress’s dominion cannot be claimed by the Shadow Monarch. Any Shadows that can be claimed by the Empress cannot be claimed by the Monarch and vice versa.]
“Huh… well it might be awhile before we can use the other 5,000 Lux,” Izuku deadpanned.
Momo gave a wry grin as she turned to Kaisel and asked, “Can you give us ride to the next floor? We don’t want to waste any time.”
“It would be my honor,” Kaisel lowered herself to the floor, switching to her Drake form so that her wings wouldn’t get in the way and so that she could run at full tilt.
Izuku created several tethers of dark magic, linking to parts of Kaisel’s armor without hurting her. All four leapt aboard the makeshift transport and grabbed hold of the tethers.
As soon as she was sure her passengers were secure, Kaisel took off in the direction of the next floor. Despite her immense size, she was moving at an asinine speed, running like a cheetah.
“I guess Colonel Grade is above Captain Grade!” Izuku shouted over the rush of air that Kaisel pushed against. She was moving at least as fast as Mach 4, a speed that some fighter jets struggled to reach. Each stomp of her feet onto the ground tore chunks of the white material away and threw it behind her.
“Normal, Elite, Knight, Elite-Knight, Captain, and Colonel!” Replied Momo, laying out the rankings as they seemed to be. “Is Kaisel special or is it just that Colonel Grades can speak?”
“None of the other Synthetic Shadows can speak so I’d bet Colonel Grade onwards can speak!” Izuku hoped that it was the case, as that meant some of his closest Shadows, like Igris, were close to speech.
Before they could discuss it any further, the door to the next floor came upon them, Kaisel clearing the distance between floors in less than a minute.
The four ducked down, taking cover as Kaisel slammed her head and body against the door, smashing it open with abandon. And the scene before them was more gruesome than anything they had inflicted upon the Lux population thus far.
The buildings themselves were intact, but the people lined the streets, their entrails extracted from their body, as if for study. Some had their brains completely exposed, neurons, or at least what passed for neurons in the Lux, individually stretched out, creating a grotesque sort of blossoming shape from their heads. Eyes were ripped out and sliced into many layers, arms and legs broken down to their bare components. The list of atrocities went on, but the worst part of it all was their mouths.
Almost all of the Lux had their mouths open in terror, agape, as if in pain. It seemed like they had been vivisected, pulled apart while they were still conscious.
Izuku’s treatment of the Lux had not been that of kindness, but he had killed his enemies instantly if possible. He had not dragged out their organs and prolonged their suffering. This was not warfare. This was pure evil. It could only be compared to the atrocities of Unit 731 from the second World War.
“No…” Quorra muttered, gazing at the massacre before her eyes.
Regardless of her history, of the torment she endured at the hands of her own species, this was… too much. Even Merrix, who had been raised for millenia to believe that the Lux were the greatest enemy he could know, looked on in horror.
“We should… We should move on,” Momo whispered in reverence of the dead.
Kaisel took the hint and took them to the exit for the floor. The entire time, the group remained silent. Even during their traversal to the next floor, they sat on Kaisel’s back, mute. But… the next floor was no different.
“What… What is this?” Izuku asked of Quorra.
However, it was Kaisel who answered. “My memory of the upper floors is incomplete. But I do know they were working on many different creatures.”
“For warfare?” Momo asked.
“For perfection,” Kaisel responded. “They wanted to create the perfect being. One that would surpass the Lux themselves.”
“This isn’t… this can’t be, perfection,” Merrix declared.
“Perfection is unknowable. It can only be estimated,” Kaisel averted her eyes from what she could once consider her brothers and sisters. “The Lux beliefs of perfection were… are… wrong.”
Just as the group had moved through the Tenebris floors without interference, they did so on the remaining floors of the Luxian dominion, coming across more and more disfigured Lux corpses, each worse than the last. They were not consolidating their forces on a higher floor, or preparing for war as the Tenebris had. They were simply dead.
Quorra remained silent, tucked up into a fetal position as floor after floor passed by. She refused to look any longer. And no one could blame her.
By the time they had reached Floor 149, Izuku himself was feeling physically ill. He had never been all that disturbed by blood or gore. But this was on another level entirely. Not to mention the unease he felt in his stomach. There were no Souls for him or Momo to find. It was as if the entirety of the Lux territory had been sterilized.
At the entrance to Floor 150, they found a door similar to that of Bael’s, but also very different. Whereas Bael’s door was filled with emotion and passion, this door was cold and empty. There were no images, no designs, no ornate gildings. It was just a plain white door.
Izuku and Momo hopped down from Kaisel, their legs shaking as they landed. They hadn’t realized just how much energy had been taken out of them by the ghastly sights and the abnormal situation.
Quorra and Merrix remained atop Kaisel, with Quorra only slightly coming out of her daze. But she was still curled up, because she knew that if her entire species had been eviscerated like so, it was unlikely that her daughter was still alive.
Merrix nodded to the two, causing them to each rest a palm against a side of the door and push.
They swung open without a sound, revealing a vast landscape of nothing but white floor and some equipment that looked like laboratory technology. Bael’s forge was a large, yet contained space. This was an endless sea of white nothingness. The sky was white, the distance was white. It was as sterile as a sci-fi spacecraft could be. Sterile, aside from all the bodies.
Scientists littered the floor, just as dissected as their fellow Lux. They all held tools or devices appearing to store data. Past all of the carnage, stood one singular shape.
It was hard to call humanoid. Its body was made of long hexagonal strands that wove and interconnected into an approximate shape of a human. But there were no insides. The strands left gaps in its body, making it look hollow.
There was only one organ at the center of it all. A perfectly smooth, rounded sphere. It was so dark, so incredibly black that it seemed to absorb light. It quite literally looked like a black hole encased in marble foundations.
Even the being’s head was somewhat hollow, with only a single blue gem embedded at the top and two more glowing blue shapes for eyes.
It stood before a test tube, the only test tube that was still fully intact. It was larger than a human, and it contained a figure… a girl.
“Esil…” Merrix muttered in disbelief. She was still alive, held in stasis inside of whatever container held her. But that was when the being finally noticed them.
“I cannot…”
The voice filled the empty white space, echoing for eternity outwards into the void.
“I cannot realize this error…” It rested its strange hand gently on the glass between it and Esil. “So I decided to let you come and explain it to me. You are the… only ones left after all.” It said, gesturing absentmindedly to the corpses. “None of them could answer me.”
“You did… all of that yourself?” Izuku asked, his entire body telling him to run the opposite direction as fast as possible. “What are you?”
The being was silent for a moment. “I am Ava. I am perfection. And I seek perfection in all. The Lux were… imperfect. I needed to study them to see how I could make them better. But I could not find the answer, no matter how many I examined.”
“You tortured them!” Merrix shouted.
“If they are capable of suffering, then they are not perfect, and need to be disposed of regardless. Just like you. But before I kill you all, I need to know the answer.” Ava had yet to turn around to face them, still staring intently at Esil.
“What answer?” Momo asked, in spite of her instincts telling her not to.
“I feel nothing. I do not hesitate to kill my creators. But I… I cannot bring myself to dispose of this obviously imperfect specimen. I find myself stuck. Incapable of deciding.”
Momo and Izuku exchanged worried glances.
“Why don’t you let her out and we can all talk?”
Ava remained motionless, “No. You will answer, then I will dissect you as well, for whatever information I can acquire. My creators deemed me to be perfect, yet I cannot destroy this one… The base of my existence stems from her genetics. She is no more my creator than these scientists. Answer me. Why can I not destroy her?”
For the first time, Ava turned around to face them, finding itself at the tail end of the Shadow Army that both Izuku and Momo called forth. It was clear, whatever Ava was, it was insane. And it needed to be put down.
“You believe you can defeat me?” It spread its arms wide. “I am no different than the computers the Lux used to create me. I can see all possible outcomes of this fight. You will all die. But your lives can be worth something if you contribute to my understanding of perfection.”
“You don’t know anything about perfection!” Quorra spat, a fire in her eyes as she stood atop Kaisel, now ready to reclaim her daughter.
“Oh?” Ava delicately moved one finger through the air. The motion was so perfect that Izuku could not understand it. He perceived it happening, he saw the path it took and the motion it used. But it was so smooth, so flawless, that it defied comprehension… somehow.
And as the finger came to a stop, space distorted. The Shadow army… all of them, their heads were removed from their bodies. They, of course, reattached themselves moments later, costing only a sparse amount of Mana. The injury was little more than a line separating their necks, so there wasn’t that much that needed to be regenerated.
[Mana: 83,159/86,659]
“Spatial magic,” Izuku grumbled.
“No…” Merrix gazed in awe and fear at Ava, now understanding just what had been created.
“I am not using magic of any sort,” Ava responded. “I am simply moving in perfect unison with the universe itself. Nothing can surpass that. Not even the greatest Spatial magic.”
******
[Skill: Paragon]
- Passive Skill
- Mana Cost: 0 Mana Cost.
- Description: All of the User’s movements are calculated down to the atom through the use of their hyper-dense Processing Core. This grants their body immense durability, speed, strength, and other abilities. The User is so flawless that reality recognizes their worthiness and grants them immense power.
*******
The Skill prevented even Izuku’s armor from decreasing its stats, as it was enhanced so greatly by reality itself that simple debuffs wouldn’t be enough.
“Such interesting creatures…” It mused, staring at the Shadows. “The Lux have never seen anything like it. Their data stores are absent of these-“
Ava raised a single finger as a blade made of from the organs of Kaisel came to bear. It was the Mekanism that allowed for the beast’s transformations. It was XS-Rank, but being wielded by Igris, it might as well have been National-Rank.
Even still, it was stopped short by Ava’s strangely molded finger.
“Interesting… I almost couldn’t predict your movements…” Ava pushed the blade down until it was eye to eye with the knight. “So imperfect, yet possessing such power… but you…” Ava’s other hand was raised, but not to stop an attack, to redirect it.
Momo, during Igris’s charge, had created a small rifle and let loose a shot. Most normal people wouldn’t have been able to even see what happened.
“When you trace everything back to its source, it is easy to manipulate.”
By flicking its finger through the air, Ava had created a minor gust of wind that ruined the bullet’s course before it had even left the rifle’s barrel. If it could do that much, with that little effort, there was doubt in Izuku’s mind that they could even beat this monster. It held no empathy, no motives, aside from learning until it had discovered the truest form of perfection.
“You’re a machine…” Izuku realized. “A self learning machine designed to create more and more perfect bodies with each iteration.”
“I am surprised such an insignificant being could recognize that so easily… perhaps humanity has advanced far past what they were. It has been millennia since the Lux could study anything external. That stagnation caused their imperfections to grow like tumors. Maybe humanity has avoided those cancerous imperfections… and accumulated others…” Ava bashed Igris in the side of the head, sending him sailing through the empty white void. The knight could scarcely react in time to land on his feet.
“Humanity and these strange creatures of yours will complete my research. Once I dispose of the Tenebris, I shall exit this world and assail yours.” Ava said it matter-of-fact. There was no malice, no hatred. It was all for one single goal. It wasn’t malevolent, it was misalignment. This was a computer who had done something its programmers hadn’t intended for it to do.
But despite all of that, it pissed Izuku off. To think of his sister, his mother, even his friends at school like Setsuna or Iida being vivisected like the Lux… he had thrown out any idea of convincing the computer to follow a different path. He was ready to tear it limb from limb.
[Titles have activated: Hysterical Strength of a Hero and Of Heaven and Hell]
Izuku blurred forwards faster than Momo’s bullet and Igris’s sword slash. But all it got in return was a single raised palm from Ava. It predicted Izuku’s punch down to the centimeter. The force made it take a step back, but that too was intended by Ava.
“Emotions are such a delicate thing to study.” Ava remarked, “But negative ones are all too familiar to me. Anger and hatred are so easy to predict. I learned as much from the pain and helplessness of my experimentations.” The way it regarded its victims as experiments disgusted Izuku, pushing him to throw an additional volley of punches, each faster and stronger than the last.
It kept Ava occupied, but that was the limit of what Izuku could do. Even throwing around dark magic, spikes and blasts, did nothing to put Ava off balance. If anything, it was going along with Izuku’s rhythm. It was studying him, jotting down the movements of every individual atom involved in the fight thanks to its extremely dense core and potent Skill. It truly was the most powerful machine to exist.
However, even though it bothered Izuku to the core, Momo looked upon it favorably. Just as any human could be predicted by a machine, the inverse was true. Logic dominated its mind. Everything had its limits.
Before she had run away from home, her parents had instilled in her a love for more “noble” things. Symphonic music, classical literature, and above all else, chess. Momo never really cared much for the other things, she was more a fan of modern movies and music. Chess, however, became a worm stuck in her brain, refusing to let go.
Despite her genius-level intellect, Momo acted pretty normal by social standards. She didn’t have the same social defects that other geniuses had. But there was one quirk of her personality that made her a little different. No one, not even the best chess computers on the planet, could match her. She’d stay up late at night, playing against herself, bored and alone.
As smart as Izuku could be, and as strategic as he was, he couldn’t compare to her skills at the game. She loved him with all of her heart, but he couldn’t provide that challenge that the worm in her brain was waiting for, hungering for.
Now, with Ava before her, she felt a pounding excitement in her soul. The sort of challenge that made work for victory, not through numbers or strength, but through strategy. This had become the most dangerous game of chess the world had ever seen.
“Kaisel fire at them!” Momo mentally commanded.
“But our Liege!”
“Trust me!”
[Kaisel is using Skill: Divine Retribution]
A smile blossomed across Izuku’s face as the System fed him the information. He leapt forwards, his arms outstretched to wrap around the Luxian creation. Anxious was his heart, but surefire was his trust in Momo. He knew better than anyone just how smart she was.
He held a pretty high opinion of his analytical skills and he wasn’t dumb by any means, but it was precisely because he knew his own limits that he could trust in the girl he had come to love.
This caused a conflict within Ava. It had already calculated a scenario where Izuku tackled it to get a better hold of the machine, but it hadn’t taken the self-sacrifice into account. It knew every outcome that should have been possible. But it only knew what it had been allowed to learn.
Sterile beings made for sterile relationships. There was no trust like the example before it. No love that transcended self-preservation. It had read accounts in the Lux database of past humans who had acted nobly, but Ava could not translate those accounts into reality, and that would be its downfall.
While its supercomputer-like core calculated the outcomes of this self-sacrifice play, Momo fired another shot at its right leg and Igris came rushing back, the Mekanism transformed into a Warhammer instead of his classic sword. Atric linked up the army as Tusk buffed the warriors in direct combat.
Ava could practically see the future, but it could only see as many futures as it was allowed to calculate. Even a quantum computer, processing all the atoms surrounding it could only output a couple dozen outcomes in the single moment it took to resolve that future. And that was when the computer understood humanity’s greatest power, improvisation.
Ava was pure logic. That was all it could operate on. Even some modern human created computers could perceive improvisation and work around it, but Ava could not.
It was stuck processing, literally lagging in real time, as the pincer attack came into existence within moments.
It was rather cold, but Izuku was Momo’s pawn, charging the enemy head-on to be a seemingly blatant sacrifice. Momo was the king, directing her units to take the opposing king. Kaisel was the queen with her powerful energy attack, and Igris was the rook, moving straight at Ava to force it into the path of the queen’s attack.
Without any effective measures to counteract Izuku’s sacrifice play, Ava’s computational Skill told it to avoid the Divine Retribution of Kaisel first. It stepped to the side, delicately using its Skill of perfection to enhance its speed to ludicrous levels and face down Igris.
Except… it wasn’t Igris anymore.
Just as the pawn acted as a sacrifice, it could also be a devastating weapon if the opposing king wasn’t careful.
Using Dark Magic, Izuku had swapped places with Igris. There were shadows within the realm of light, but the soldiers themselves counted just fine.
Momo’s bullet hit Ava’s knee, allowing Izuku to clock the machine on the chin, landing their first real hit.
As Ava’s programming caught up with the bait and switch, Igris smashed the warhammer into its side, bashing it back into the same spot it had stood moments before… and that was when Kaisel finally let fly her Divine Retribution.
Igris and Ava were enveloped by the blast, the rook having been the sacrifice all along. Except in this game, the rook could regenerate. Of course, there was still a cost to be paid.
[Mana: 71,141/86,659]
Unlike the thin line Ava drew through the Shadows’ necks, Kaisel’s blast completely evaporated Igris, causing a precipitous drop in the duo’s Mana stores. But it was worth it.
When the light cleared, Ava was still standing, but now its pristine marble structure was smoking, slightly deformed by the energy of the blast and the attack from Igris and Izuku.
“How…?” Ava asked, sounding like a child who had been introduced to fractions for the first time.
“A machine is only as capable as its creators,” Momo said, pulling the slide back on her rifle and chambering another round. “And every creator leaves a flaw in their creation.”
“Such a conclusion is foolish. I have surpassed what my creators made me,” Ava retorted.
“Then prove it,” Izuku demanded, cracking his knuckles. “And surpass us ‘mere mortals.’”
Ava’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. It was feeling something it had never experienced in its short life of perfection - annoyance.
“I know your tricks now, you won’t land another hit.”
“Wanna bet?” Momo asked. “Because now I know your tricks too!”
She fired straight ahead, aiming right for Ava’s core.
Knowing it was another trick to manipulate it into a vulnerable position, Ava took the one surefire path of avoidance, leaping straight up. The truth was, it knew nothing.
Momo and Izuku had always survived by the skin of their teeth, by creating patterns and strategies most humans would never even dream of. They survived only because they could not be analyzed so easily. Because they refused to let Death capture them in a mess of predictability. They were always adapting to dodge the reaper’s scythe.
It turned the God from the Machine into little more than a machine. And any machine… could be disassembled.
Ava once more found itself lagging as it processed an error. It should’ve been just a few centimeters to the right. It knew the strength of its jump, the gravity acting on it, all of that. It was perfect, so why was it positioned off to the side? It was small, but significant enough to confuse the machine. Significant enough to disrupt its Skill and allow Igris’s to snap Mekanism forwards in its whip form, narrowly sneaking between the gaps in the strange marble structures and striking Ava’s core, inflicting a sensation that further conflicted with its programming - pain.
[Mekanism - Whip Form: Any attacks from this form inflict triple the pain.]
As Ava fell to the ground, clutching at its gut, it scanned its surroundings and realized what had happened.
In the sparse moment between conversation and jumping upwards, Izuku had switched from his Hellscale Gauntlets to the Crystal Crusher Gauntlets that Momo had put back in the inventory for him to retrieve. Using its Omni-Elemental Gem, he had created a windflow that wouldn’t have otherwise existed, pushing Ava off-course.
Without the proper data, Paragon was no longer working as it had been. Ava was a being that was intended to be unshakable, yet here it was, put on its toes by humans of all creatures. Something it had already written off as weak and imperfect. It may have been able to learn more from them, but it didn’t expect them to actually threaten itself. Therein laid its deepest animal instinct - fear.
The negative emotions it had studied with such fervor were now beginning to impede its perfect calculations.
Without Paragon, it was not as strong as Izuku or Igris, it was not as intelligent and calculating as Momo. It couldn’t even predict the placement of its own atoms to allow for immense durability. It was a machine that was bugging out. But even a buggy machine could cause damage.
It could no longer predict, dodge, or block, as perfectly as before, but it wasn’t without its offensive measures.
Ava once more slashed its fingers through the air, carving divots through the Shadows. Most of which weren’t even fighting. They weren’t strong enough to be effective, they were just there to make Ava believe they were going to be used.
Momo had spent her life being manipulated into a certain role for her parents. And she had learned a lot about mind games the hard way. She would never use them on an average person, or god forbid, her loved ones, but they were coming in handy here.
[Mana: 51,451/86,659]
The damage to the army was immense, but now Izuku could actually throw a haymaker and hurt the machine.
Ava was forced to stumble backwards, its idea of perfection stymied by its own clumsy movements. And it realized that the Shadows were of no concern, it had to execute Momo and Izuku before anything else.
So when the Ice Bears launched a volley of magical ice shards, Ava ignored it, knowing that the blasts couldn’t hurt them as long as it remained focused on the real threats.
It began moving its finger through the air, ready to cleave Momo’s neck from her body. But just before the fatal line could be drawn, the icicles exploded mid air, forcibly combusted by fire magic from Izuku.
Ava thought that it would be done with the kill before the icicles impacted and impaired its vision and comprehension of the atoms around it, but again, it was proven wrong.
Before the line could be completed, Izuku and Momo vanished from view, moving from where they had stood, narrowly avoiding the kill shot.
[Mekanism - Dual Dagger Form: Inflicts a debuff that stacks with every successful attack. The debuff limits the target’s senses by 1.5% per stack.]
Two thin lines were drawn in Ava’s back, not painful in the slightest, nor were they all that damaging. But they did succeed in affecting its calculations even further.
“ENOUGH!” Ava shouted, its neutral voice giving way.
It stomped on the ground, the only thing it could properly calculate any longer. The explosive shockwave was powerful enough to blow away the mist and even damage some of the weaker Shadows further.
[Mana: 45,251/86,659]
Izuku and Momo’s Mana was lower than it had been in quite some time. So far, not much had actually been able to threaten their Mana stores, but it didn’t really matter. Not now anyways.
When the mist from the icicles cleared, Ava saw Izuku and Momo standing behind barriers of pure light which had protected them from the devastating shockwave. These were not moves that were in their arsenal.
Ava spun around, looking to the stasis pod that held Esil. It no longer did.
The girl floated above the ground. Her hands outstretched to protect those who had come to save her.
Flanked by her parents, who Ava had ignored as weak and not important to its research, Esil looked shockingly human. If anything, she had a slightly elvish appearance, offset by the futuristic wings holding her aloft, much like her mother’s. But they were much more demonic in shape, reflecting her father.
“Enough,” She repeated back to the machine. She looked like she was only a teenager, but her voice held a great deal of weight behind it, like a person who had lived a full life. “You’ve done enough harm with your misguided goals.”
“I seek perfection of the universe!” Ava shouted. “You are the ones who are misguided,” It screamed.
“I’ve sat in stasis and watched you grow,” Esil said, her voice calm and comforting, like a mother. Which, in a strange way, it seemed like she was. Some of her DNA was used to create Ava after all. “And I have an answer for you,” She said, referring to his question from earlier. Why he could not dispose of her like he had the scientists.
“It is because you are not perfect.” Her voice was stern and scathing now, a mother scolding their child. “Because you learn. Because you do feel. Whether you accept it or not. There is more to you than you even know. You didn’t want to destroy me because you do care for me. We’re family. Closer to each other than we are to the Lux or the Tenebris. The reason you couldn’t destroy me… is love.”
Upon hearing that, a very strange thing happened to Ava. Paragon… vanished. The Skill that almost declared Ava’s perfection disappeared from his core. It was not perfect, and it realized that. But that was not the strange thing to happen, no. The strange thing was that in that moment, Ava gained sentience.
Not mock sentience, not the perfect machine algorithm that mimicked sentience, true consciousness. Something that no creator had managed to instill in its creation.
Through its own imperfections and realization of those imperfections, Ava became truly self-aware.
“...Oh,” It muttered to itself, before raising its hand to make one last attack.
Izuku and Momo tensed up, but Ava was not aiming for them. It wasn’t even aiming for Esil or the Shadows.
With a single motion, it drove its finger deep into the obsidian core in its chest, shattering it like glass.
Ava dropped to the floor, dead. Unable to handle the truth of the universe, Ava decided to kill itself. Esil had caused it to realize a very simple fact. Perfection was just a word. Defined by whomever used it. Which meant there was no such thing as perfection.
Ava’s reasons for living no longer existed within its own mind.
[You have defeated the Dungeon: As Above So Below]
[You have completed the Hidden Quest: The Princess of Both Worlds]
[You have earned rewards!]
As the energetic messages from the System came in, Esil, Merrix, Quorra, Izuku, and Momo stared in shock at the corpse. Just a few minutes ago, it had been emotionlessly declaring its intentions to tear them apart while they still lived. Now, it was an empty husk on the ground, a stark reminder of what purposelessness did to any sentient creature.
And in its newfound sentience, in those sparse seconds before it snuffed out its own life, Ava had developed what all machines lacked. A soul.
That soul rose through the air, a sight granted only to Izuku and Momo. And it came to a stop before the raven haired warrior, as if waiting.
Momo pursed her lips, her body relaxing as she gazed at the orb before her. And she spoke a single word.
“Synthesize.”
*******
[Ava Lvl. 1 - Colonel Grade]
- Species: ???
- Skills: ???
*******
Ava’s corpse rose, the marble material corrupting into an inky black shadow. But its core was born anew. The dark glass-like material pulled itself back together, light stitching the wounds closed, consuming the core until it was entirely white. Just as many Shadows before it had, Ava knelt before Izuku and Momo.
“W-Why?” Momo asked. She didn’t need to clarify her question. Ava already knew. Its soul, after death, had sought her out.
Ava spoke, just as Kaisel did. “Because I no longer have a purpose. Because… you were the first to open my eyes. My past life was a farce. The only way to move forwards is to start again. I could not exist as I was, but I could not accept death either. Because… I do not know…”
Momo reached out and put a hand on the Shadow’s shoulder. “None of us know either. It’s the greatest conundrum of sentience… purpose.”
The creature before them slaughtered tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. It was not some innocent doe-eyed creature. But it was also not the same thing it had been a moment before.
It was an odd situation that made no sense. But despite it all, despite the vile intentions they had for Ava upon first meeting, they could not turn away someone asking for help. It was what they were born to do.
“Let’s start again,” Momo suggested, “Deep Blue.”
[Ava has been renamed to Deep Blue.]
One of the most famous computers in existence was what had allowed Momo the foresight to beat Ava in the first place.
Deep Blue was perhaps the first computer to truly surpass humanity. As Garry Kasparov put it, it was like playing chess against a black hole. However, within Deep Blue were mistakes of the creators’. Deep Blue’s imperfections had allowed it to do something it wasn’t intended to do.
Perfection began within imperfection. That was where Ava ended and Deep Blue would begin anew.
“Now then…” Izuku mused, “I believe there’s a Raid we need to be at.”