A bunch of scribbled lines. [https://i.vgy.me/m3xLqx.png]

She was weak, obviously. This is why she had become so fragile lately, letting poser half-hunters get the upper hand on her during what had always been easy skirmishes in the past. She had always been the best, no one her equal, no one her superior. The century she had spent serving the militia powers of The Formation had been a violent whirl of blood and sweat, any weakness or vulnerability had been stamped out and replaced by weaponized augmentations. Ever since she had enrolled herself in her teens, they had cut her up, sewn things inside her, ripped her apart again, stitched together what was left... She was a patchwork woman of mechanized bits and pseudo-anthropomorphic body parts that resembled something vaguely humanoid, but ultimately no longer human. Humans were weak, and she had never been weak. Humans snapped under the strength of her industrial-strength piston muscles. Humans cried as they watched her strangle their platoon buddies into submission. Humans were her prey and always had been. She was not weak.

She was a killing machine, and that had always been her identity for her entire adult life. She killed who they'd tell her to kill, she'd do what they'd tell her to do. She liked being ordered around and always had. She loved being screamed at by her apathetic, abusive leaders and loved being treated like dirt. That was what she was. She was dirt. She had always been dirt. She liked getting her hands dirty, she told herself, she liked being dirt. She hated herself for thinking herself any better than dirt because that's what she was and had always been. She was nothing and had always been nothing. Why, she asked herself, why had she ever considered herself to be anything more than what she was? Why did she ever think she could aspire to anything more than a soulless, empty-headed, unfeeling, unflinching, killing machine? That was what she was, and that was what she had always been. She did not feel, she did not think, she did not breathe. What was there to prove otherwise? All she did was kill, make money, kill, make money, kill... this was everything she was. She was her job, and she loved being her job. She had always been her job, and if she wasn't her job, then she was nothing. If she did not work, then she was nothing. If she ever stopped working for a second, she was worthless. She was nothing if not productive. If she felt tired, she might as well be dead. She deserved to be dead if she was not productive. That was all she was, she insisted to herself. She was productive.

Why had Nnolyth-Ma lied to her face, so many years ago, telling her that she was anything other than a machine? That was all she was, and that was all she had ever been. That was all she deserved to be. Nnol had told her that she did not have to fight, that she did not have to kill, that she did not have to be a soldier, or a machine, or anything she did not want to be. However, this was obviously incorrect, as she had always had to fight, she had always had to kill. It followed, therefore, that she did have to be a soldier, and she had to be a machine. She had to be what she did not want to be, but what she did not want to be was not relevant. Machines did not think, and she was a machine. Machines like her were designed to kill, and if she did not kill, then she did not deserve to live. It was as simple as that.

Enevelen stared at herself in the mirror. It was a large mirror, very thin and somewhat warped, making her appear much thinner than her already-twig-like, lanky body was originally. She knew that this mirror had always been somewhat warped, but for some reason, in the heat of rage, she refused to acknowledge her reflection as anything other than the real thing. Perhaps she wanted to see herself as warped, as thin and weak, as a distorted monster. Something about the mirror made her unable to look away, as if it validated every internal insecurity she held so tightly with total authority. She was weak, she was thin, she was warped, she was pathetic, etc.

Why was she so disgusted with cyborgs, she thought in a cloud of fury. What was wrong with augmentations? Machines tied to human organs, flesh burned into metal... it was one of her species' greatest achievements! To modulate the human being, to butcher and distort the anthropomorphic form was an incredible feat, one which allowed the human race to ascend past itself to a god-like, self-mutilated form! It was childish to give herself so easily to nausea, to indulge what could easily be a pathetic, unconscious deviation of mechanophobia. She had been surrounded by cyborgs her entire life, every single individual she had engaged with since enrolling in the military had been augmented in some way. Purely organic humans did not exist anymore, and in fact, they were disgusting! Weak, floppy blobs of sweating flesh, obese and neurotic, with no logic or code to their thinking at all. They were animals, and she was something leagues more efficient, more sleek.... She was an electric car to their horse and buggy. She was superior, obviously, and that was why machines were so much better. Why would she possibly consider the innards of her own body to be even remotely grotesque? Even the organic parts, woven deeply into her artificial structures, were simply pieces of the larger whole, nothing to be afraid of. She could kill herself for being so pathetic, being so overwhelmingly disgusted by such imagery. She would gladly kill herself for being so weak.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

As she stared, her green, vibrant eyes glowing daggers at herself in the mirror, she decided it would be a good idea to begin tearing away at her face with her hands. The visor (recently replaced for an exorbitant fee) had already been removed, sitting to the side of her unmade bed. Her skeletal, lipless grey teeth were visible in the mirror, frothing acidic fuzz into her rebreather, which she tore away with a gorilla grip. The metal around her jawline bent and snapped as she tugged at it, leaving behind a gaping hole in her neck where torn silicon met an exposed organic throat. Her breathing became a gut-wrenching choke, the oxygen escaping the wound like a fleshy steam pipe. Her silicon tongue dangled from the flesh of her throat like a tumor, flexing and writhing as it struggled to find itself with the jaw absent. Having thrown it to the floor, and feeling no pain in doing so, she began to tug away at her nose and the roof of her mouth. With a sickening crack, the plastic came away from her face as well, a decent amount of her helmet's frame joining it in a frightening display of anger-fueled strength. She looked down with her disembodied eyes to the gibs of teeth and nostrils she held in her metal hands, still exhaling and flexing as if still attached to the rest of the face. She let it drop to the floor as well, causing the interior of the mouth to dent further upon impact with the ground. She could not feel it, but found herself pained upon returning her vision to the mirror. Her eyes sat above an empty void, held in place by what remained of her grey, mechanical neck. The tongue remained attached to the torn throat, and continued to frolic involuntarily. It jumped up and down in an open space below what remained of the head, wrapping around the back of the neck like a disoriented snake. Her eyes blinked, looking less angry momentarily and more frightened. This brief glint of fear angered her. Machines were not supposed to feel fear. She was infuriated with this observation, and took to peeling away her left eye as well. It popped out with minimal strength, after which her vision became one-sided. She tossed the small orb of flesh, complete with a disgusting wet tail of wiring and veins, across her room and onto her bed. It bounced, falling back behind her pillow with a sickening squelch.

She tugged violently at the socket of her skull where the eye had sat, tearing with great difficulty a majority of the left half of her head. Her right side, appearing in the mirror, standing alone like a freakish one-eyed snake, felt almost satisfying. The exposed brain behind the face pulsed and ripped, now exposed to the open air. Staring deeply into the lone eye, and its overall frightening visage however, she began to feel an overwhelming feeling of disgust and nausea. With her remaining tear duct she began to cry, and in the following bout of frustration at herself for betraying her previously enraged and unfeeling exterior, shattered the mirror before her. Blood-oil trickled from her fist, sliced by the disorderly cracks of the mirror. She was horrifying.

Her nausea came to a head, and acidic puke voided itself onto her chest, splattering out from the exposed throat. Unable to keep her footing, Enevelen collapsed to the floor, curling fetal among the broken glass. The pool of greyish-green vomit was invaded by curdling mechanical oil from her torn fist, her quiet sobbing echoing along her cavern's thick walls as she shivered in a mixture of rage and terror.