I didn't know why AEGIS was mouthing off so much at TARGA. I guess seeing, well, herself had really gotten to her, and being an obnoxious shit to her was AEGIS' idea of revenge?

I mean, I just did it because I really enjoyed pissing off people who wanted to kill me. But with AEGIS pushing her buttons...we had a problem, because TARGA was pretty much utterly ignoring me and chasing my girlfriend around the room at inhuman speeds.

While I was good for...next to nothing. Just standing there, while two superhuman babes just flew all over, kicking the shit out of each other like the server room had become a taekwondo ring. Almost faster than I could follow, they were moving and kicking all over, each one of their blows filling the air with a muted metal crash which I knew could break bone.

It was deafening in there as the two went at it. Both of them were fully lit-up like I'd never seen AEGIS before, the circular ports on their shoulders and hips, elbows and knees were like jet turbines, the air shimmering superheated around them. Not just glowing and spinning, small panels in the ports had actually opened to expose the machinery within, which constantly sucked in air and blew out superheated gas.

And they slid and kicked all over the damn room, AEGIS seemingly always retreating, but never getting hit, multiple kicks fired off every second, always to be dodged, or blocked or parried by returning kicks.

I kind of wondered why the hell AEGIS would wear something as exposing and flimsy as a short dress if her combat style involved flashing people her panties with every attack, but that was before I realized that TARGA had literally burned holes in her XPCA uniform from the heat of her motors and exhaust, and was wasting time tearing off sleeves and such.

"Oh, that can't be in compliance with uniform standards," I taunted.

She didn't even seem to hear me. Just dead-focused on AEGIS. Frustrating that I couldn't seem to do anything at all here. My brain raced for how I could fight her.

Last time I'd fought AEGIS' machines, I'd only won because she didn't know my powers...because I didn't know my powers. I'd only just learned my trick of forcing current through things, and without it, I'd never have been able to touch her murder-bots. In making Rua, she knew that, and said she'd gone ahead and made it shockproof to make it so I could fight around her without hurting her.

I bet I could still use the forced-current trick if I could get my hands on her, but that was an impossible if. Even assuming she stopped attacking and held still for me, I knew just how hot AEGIS could be after a run, much less this insane superheated madness.

Swords and lightning were useless. I doubted a small EMP would do much...but a huge one would fry AEGIS as surely as TARGA, if not worse for the damage she'd already sustained. Electromagnets might be good, except the whole damn base was made of metal, and I stood a good chance of ripping the room apart or crushing us under a pile of servers...or even bringing the hangar down on us, if I went too big.

But it was still our best shot, I guess. I began scouring the room for something to use as a magnetic core. Servers...servers...more servers...metal floors and walls and pillars...I'd never had the problem of too much metal before. Nothing here was like a pole I could use on its own, everything was connected to everything else, and that'd throw off the whole electromagnetic flow thingy and fail to make a magnet, I was...pretty sure. I didn't know the science, but Lia told me to wrap it around an iron core, and I trusted her to get the science right.

I smashed one of the server racks and began trying to melt it apart. Maybe if I could get the legs welded together, I'd have something. But I didn't know what I was doing.

I pulled a leg off, separated from the shelves I'd superheated, sending cores crashing to the floor. It was too light...aluminum probably, not magnetic, not good for a core. I straightened to look for anything else I could use when something hit me hard in the back of the head and sent me flying.

"Hands off the fucking servers!" TARGA screamed at me. Before AEGIS kicked her in the head like she'd just done to me. It was bizarre, seeing the two of them so friggin identical, and it was a little off-putting that AEGIS reacted to my getting hurt identically to TARGA with the cores getting hurt. Kind of put my life in perspective there.

I thought for a moment on that. Maybe that was a useful perspective. I couldn't hurt TARGA, but I could threaten something she loved. But how to use that?

At the very least, I could get her attacking me instead of AEGIS. And while I'm sure I preferred that plan, I was also sure AEGIS didn't, and based on the really just astounding pain from where she'd kicked me, my body was also not a fan. It was like she'd taken a shovel, stuck it in a fire until it was white-hot, and then nailed me with it. The burning and impact had taken a moment to set in, but now that they had, goddamn, that hurt.

The two stopped momentarily, halfway visible down a row of servers from me. It looked like their legs were locked around each other at the knee, and they stood, shuddering with motionless force as they tried to push the other to the ground. Both were visibly gasping for air and steaming.

This had to be my chance to do something. I ran in and scarcely thinking, grabbed TARGA by the green cables of her hair, done up in a single severe ponytail instead of AEGIS' twintails, with the aim to force electricity into her head.

But as soon as I'd laid hands on her, she jumped up out of my grasp, using AEGIS' binding leg as a platform, and kicking me straight in the face with her grounding leg. As I flew backwards with a sickening crack, I felt hot liquid spraying from my nose and tasted blood in my mouth. I heard the crash of AEGIS smashing TARGA into the ground just before I did the same, a dozen feet away.

Ow, shit, ow, shit, ow. It was difficult to say which side of my head hurt more as I pulled myself up, coughing up a splatter of blood which felt like it was trying to trickle down the inside of my throat. I leaned forward and held the bridge of my nose, which felt broken.

But I was happy to see I'd helped AEGIS at least. She had TARGA on the ground and was stomping the everloving shit out of her. It looked like she was trying to break one of TARGA's knees, but without too much success, since she didn't have the number of limbs she needed to hold TARGA and crush her at the same time. Where AEGIS stomped and TARGA writhed out of the way, her heel slammed down hard enough to leave a round dent in the floor.

I stumbled to the scene and latched myself onto one of TARGA's legs to pin it. It took about a quarter of a second and AEGIS' yelling at me to realize this was a bad idea, as she flung me immediately again...almost like if she had the strength to punt me a dozen feet last time, she still had the strength to punt me a dozen feet.

I got up much slower this time, feeling dizzy and heavy. I needed to stop just trying to pile on her and make up a plan that would work. But how do you defeat someone built to be unbeatable by you by the person who knows you best?

I stood there feeling the pain for a minute as TARGA found her feet and the two shot off again amidst the racks. There was an inane and obvious answer, I just had to be someone completely different.

No problem. Just do...that.

Yeah. Just...that.

…

How?

I wasn't exactly Soran here. I couldn't just pick up new powers on the fly if I needed them. I could try to change around my thinking, but it wasn't my thinking that was the problem. I couldn't outthink a heatproof faraday cage which kicked my ass if I got close to it.

I was moving, slowly, trying to stay out of the way as AEGIS got chased down another server rack, and saw the answer outside.

I had a bad premonition as I boarded the exosuit, remembering AEGIS dying inside of it in one of my memories, but that was a completely different situation, I told myself. Here, I was useless if I couldn't stand up to TARGA's strength, and I really couldn't take too many more hits. The armor would protect me, if nothing else.

Just...as soon as I got it online. This one was still made by Ur-Horizon like the one I'd once borrowed from Luminary, but it wasn't cooperating. After a few fruitless attempts at yelling into the blank faceplate, text floated in front of my eyes informing me I wasn't a registered user.

Well that was going nowhere. I pulled myself out of the suit. AEGIS had worn the other one without any problems. Had she been registered? Or...I guess more likely, she just did some hackery on it. I glanced inside the server room and saw AEGIS getting thrown against a wall and rolling along it sideways moments before TARGA slid into view and kicked the metal wall hard enough to crack the metal. Jesus Christ.

The other exosuit let me in and I yelled commands at it as fast as I could to boot up and get started. It was less than a minute before I had the thing moving and under my control, the faceplate showing me the world outside instead of just blackness, but a minute was a long time in a fight, and AEGIS looked to be on the ropes now.

She was stopping to breathe whenever she could, gasping in huge lungfuls of air as her engines burned constantly, but TARGA wasn't giving her longer than single moments to rest. Some of the damage AEGIS had taken before the fight must have damaged her ability to breathe...or whatever she did, and I guessed it had to do with the missing turbines which would have been on the shoulder and elbow she no longer possessed.

Just slower now, AEGIS wasn't able to avoid attacks anymore and seemed focused on minimizing damage only. Again and again, I saw her kicked and thrown across the room, slamming into a surface with pain flashing across her face, only to focus her efforts into evading when TARGA moved in for the kill.

She was getting pulverized, though, doing nothing but wasting TARGA's time until I could save her. And rescue her, I would.

I ran into the room, the hands of the exosuit charged with electricity I forced into them. I walked down one wide aisle, fingertips brushing both lines of servers at my sides, the long reach and steps of the exosuit making me feel twice my size.

"TARGA!" I yelled out, hearing my voice come out synthesized. "You want to save your precious servers? Leave her alone!"

I let the electricity go and the walls on my sides became arcing cages of electricity, smoke and sparks pouring out of the exploding cores as lightning jumped between the units near me. With monsterous metal footfalls, I stepped forward slowly, bringing more and more servers into my reach and exploding them like fireworks.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

I saw something in my periphery and felt the suit move forward around me, stumbling to compensate against the sudden blow which I couldn't even feel through the inertial dampeners. I spun and grabbed, the world inside the faceplate spinning like a compass as I pivoted until I was facing her dead-on. I wasn't anywhere near fast enough to grab her of course, the suit was durable, not fast, and she stayed just out of reach as though she knew the exact distance.

The suit's HUD flashed all sorts of warnings, but as far as I could tell they were all useless. The IFF was identifying TARGA as a friendly and was doing its damndest to outline her in friendly colors and minimize her presence on-screen. Meanwhile, it'd picked up AEGIS as a potential threat and was plotting her probable position based on audio, amplifying noises and signatures from her, even as it muted TARGA's.

I guess AEGIS hacked into the system but not much else.

TARGA jumped in for a moment and kicked me straight on in the neck, her leg slipping between the suit's huge metal fingers as she danced away, and I got a notice of probable accidental friendly fire. Friendly my ass.

I realized that the last kick had blacked out some of my peripheral vision which meant she was trying to destroy the suit's optics to disable me. I was sure if I were AEGIS, I'd be able to use that knowledge to anticipate her next attacks, but I was no better at memorizing suit schematics than I was at reading any of TARGA's other bullshit manuals.

But more, I realized that TARGA was disabling this exosuit exactly like AEGIS had done in my vision. I felt stupid for forgetting...if AEGIS could take on an exosuit, then of course TARGA could do the same. This might have been a bad plan...but before I wrote it off completely, I went over what advantages I still might have here.

Even if she could beat the suit, I was still a billion times more resilient than outside of it, and I was buying AEGIS time to cool down so even just getting my ass kicked by her was still helping to a degree. Once she was back in the fight, it'd be two on one, and it wouldn't be a simple matter of her shutting me down anymore.

So that was the objective. Survive and minimize damage and waste time. Kind of sounded like fighting an Exhuman, honestly. But as she kicked me again and a panel on my front-right blacked out with a warning, I was reminded that TARGA, like an Exhuman, was also incredibly dangerous. There was no way I could hold her here for any meaningful amount of time given that AEGIS had no problem defeating a lone exosuit.

Except...I was an Exhuman, too. And while that seemed really useless right now on the surface of it all, that was the one thing which separated this fight from AEGIS tearing apart lone exosuits effortlessly.

I forced lightning through another wall of servers, making TARGA scream and jump in at me again, but this time, baiting her attacks and anticipating them, I got the suit's relatively slow arms up in time and blocked her kick. As she stepped back, I put a dozen swords through her face, hoping that even if I couldn't hurt her with them too much, I could still blind her or something.

She flailed and backpedaled as the swords burned the hair cables flying around her face and then jumped backwards a dozen feet in a bound, panting and gasping at the edge of my power's range.

Interesting. Before, she looked like she hadn't given a single shit about my swords on her, but now she was actively avoiding them. Why, though?

I stomped towards her, and she maintained distance until I reached for another undamaged rack of servers.

"No!" She screamed at me, torn between moving to stop me and standing back.

"No?" I asked, in my new, cool, robotic voice.

"Don't! That data is precious!"

"So is AEGIS. So is Saga."

I grabbed the end of the server rack as she jumped towards me, and her kick deflected off my arm as the cores detonated in a blanket of sparks, skittering across the floor like spiders.

My swords were back in her the second she'd reentered my range and she seemed to hesitate at the edge of the suit's grasp before jumping backwards again to escape my swords, gasping and panting again.

Veeeery interesting. Whatever my swords was doing to her, she didn't like it. Which meant I did. Watching her now, gasping for air, with her hair all cut up, she was the spitting image of AEGIS when I'd seen her getting her ass kicked just a minute ago. Except AEGIS was pushed to that by system damage causing her to function suboptimally.

So was TARGA similarly damaged? She didn't look it, but seeing her there, venting steam and her ports open and roaring...and the fact that my swords really could only do one thing to her, it was pretty obvious what I could do that she didn't like.

TARGA, like AEGIS was simply overheating.

I knew AEGIS had made some sacrifices in Rua's design in order to be more human, and while things like being covered in skin instead of heat sinks made for an attractive gynoid, it certainly wasn't an optimal one. For an AI like AEGIS who wanted to be as human as possible, that was actually probably a perk, but for TARGA, who wanted to push her body to the limits of its potential, she was dying in there.

And even if I couldn't cut her or melt her, lightning was hot, and so was her body. I'd touched AEGIS enough to confirm that. If she was stopping and panting now, that had to mean something. There was a thermal limit that Rua and When-yay didn't like to approach, and when it got close, it manifested as heavy breathing and slowing down. It was by design, to prevent the body from going over the limit.

With a grin, I advanced on her again, swords ready. It was time to find out what crossing that limit meant.

As I approached, she fell back, looking around and leaning on server shelves, hints of desperation cracking the once-unassailable murder-calm on her face. As for me, I took the opportunity to summon more swords. I managed a rhythm of making two more for every one of my suit's leaden footfalls, and the more I lumbered towards her, the more my arenal grew, until it was a shining dome around me, crackling with menace.

She took one more look at the hovering blades and then bolted for the door. I ran after her, but when I reached the aisle leading to the exit, I found her trapped between myself and AEGIS who was waiting patiently by the exit.

"I knew you'd figure something out," she said with a cocky grin. Her rest had done her well; her condition looked as much improved as TARGA's had worsened.

"You could have given me a little more info on your body specs," I said, still closing the distance to TARGA, more than forty swords in the air now, and my arms spread wide to block the whole path. "A hint would have saved me a lot of trouble."

"Hard to give a hint without tipping our hand. Besides, you're a smart guy. I never doubted you. You've already shown pretty considerable aptitude for figuring out my body," she winked.

"Now...let's all be reasonable here," TARGA said, backing up slowly to keep the space between each of us even. "This doesn't have to end in violence. The XPCA are supposed to be moving towards a peaceful agency now, right?"

"Funny," I said as I moved my swords towards her with a flourish. "Last time we were on an op together, I believe you subscribed to the policy of kill first, talk never."

"Well...we've all grown since then."

"Yeah. Look at you now. Full grown fucking psycho killer. Brainwashing Exhumans. Torturing Saga. Hacking AEGIS. Sending your redeveloped Exhumans and XPCA to clean up your mess. And the second it starts to fall apart, begging for your life? You're pathetic."

"Yeah. Yeah I am," she panted. My fingers crackled with electricity and blew out another tower of server cores making her wince. "Look just--just take me, okay? That's what you want. Do whatever you want. Just don't destroy any more data, please."

"Huh," I said. "That's an odd request. You really fetishise your reports that much?"

I was in range now and pressed my swords to her. Her vents whined as they spun at maximum output but still she panted for air. In just a few moments, what was left of her clothes burst into flames around her.

"Y-yes. I love them. They're the world to me."

AEGIS clicked her tongue. "Nope," she said. "After we're done with you, we're destroying. Every. Server. Here."

"N-no...please. Be reasonable, they're just...just helpless servers."

"No they're not," AEGIS said, her eyes narrowed and angrier than I'd ever seen her. "These are the computers which hacked me. Did you think I wouldn't recognize them? These are the ones where they made you. And nascent in these cores are future versions, aren't there? You're not just here as a base administrator, you're sourcing XPCA, Exhuman, and administrative data to rewrite and improve yourself, aren't you?"

"So what if I am? They're innocent!" She turned back and forth between us, her eyes wild and pleading. "Just spare them and...and I'll do anything, I swear. I'll...reverse the virus. I'll help you take down Blackett. Anything, please--"

She half-collapsed against a wall, reaching for me pitifully.

"Sorry, TARGA. I have a rule," AEGIS said, stepping forward, her engines surging to life with a roar. "There's only allowed to be one of me."

"I can be different. I'll never b-B-BO-bother you," she stuttered in a very disturbingly inhuman fashion.

"Just put her down, Athan. She makes me sick."

I held my blades in her and focused on them, doing what I could to make them as concentrated and hot as possible.

Suddenly, she lurched and fell to the ground. I removed my swords and took a step forward, but saw AEGIS' eyes went wide.

"That wasn't a thermal system failure, that should be a lot more...explosive," AEGIS said.

I put the swords back in her immediately in case she was just playing dead, but AEGIS shook her head. "Fuck, I wish I still was tapped into her line. I think...she just...left."

"Left?" I asked.

AEGIS walked over to the glowing-hot body on the floor, aimed a couple precise kicks at the back of the head, and then pulled out some piece of tech from the new cracks in the head.

"She seized up to divert all remaining resources to a data burst...what a desperate idiot. I'm tapped into all the relays around the base, she can't escape into the 'net. But she's copied herself somewhere...somewhere here...and she's probably deranged."

"You can say that again."

"No, seriously deranged," AEGIS said, holding the chip up and looking at it. "In her state and with that kind of transmission, a lot of data could get lost reeaaaaal easily. Wherever it wound up, it's probably having stability issues. We can hope it's inoperable, but…"

She turned the body over and kicked it in the chest several more times with blows powerful enough to register on the exosuit's instruments from all the way over there.

"So she sent out a corrupt copy somewhere in the base. Is she dead?"

AEGIS didn't answer for a minute while she broke off the front plate of the lifeless corpse, which emitted a plume of smoke when it finally broke free, revealing the machinery within Úaine from neck to waist.

"Not how copies work, Athan. You should know that." She reached into the chest cavity and pulled out a sphere, a custom quantum core. With a brutal intensity, she ripped it free of its housing and smashed the core into the ground where it exploded into a thousand scattering bits of debris. She stomped the remains with finality. "Now she's dead. Let's get to work on her sick clones."

She watched me work as I went up and down the first aisle, detonating every server core as I passed. I made sure I was thorough, more than I had been during the fight, and once she was satisfied with my work, she went to a wall panel and tore out every single cable passing through it.

"I cut the network. In case she's running somewhere else, she can't pull them out now," she explained. "We've got them all trapped here."

"Great," I said, feeling more like an executioner than anything as I plodded heavily down the rack wiping out who-knew how many million instances of AEGIS and TARGA.

Suddenly, the earth shook under us. I thought it was just an errant reading on the suit's sensors but for the concerned look on AEGIS' face. And then I felt the tremor again, heard an earth-shattering boom, followed by the grating sound of metal, screaming louder than I'd ever heard metal screech. The suit dampened the sound automatically, but still, Jesus, what the hell?

There was another boom and...the hangar exploded. Just...gone. Torn away like a hurricane whipped through. The roof had been torn clean off, leaving AEGIS and me standing in the twisted metal walls with the servers still all around us.

And above us, barely fifty feet away loomed one of the fortress armors. Only just visible inside it, the pilot dead in a charred cockpit, but even without seeing that, it was obvious who was driving the screaming metal beast.

It looked down on us, a screech of audio garbage blaring from its speakers as it undulated and writhed, limbs twitching with ferenic madness as it focused all of its attention on the two tiny specks before it which were AEGIS and myself.

And then, in the distorted screaming wailing of its insane, disturbed audio, I heard something which sounded like TARGA's voice, but mutilated, tortured.

It shrieked with pained effort in producing every syllable, almost indecipherable, but somehow through the madness, I still understood.

"DON'T! TOUCH! MY! BABIES!" she screamed.