After several hours, I finally finish cutting a 3-foot manhole. Initially, it was supposed to be a 2-foot manhole, but Ame argued that the SEALs’ moms also had to fit. I entirely knew what she was talking about, but I played to the tune of a “young, naive AI still learning about humanity” for Lt. Johnson’s benefit.

But that’s not the sad part. I decide to go in robot-first, and my cute drone gets shredded by heavy-caliber gunfire and some sort of anti-tank weaponry. I’m not clear on the details, but after analyzing whatever frames the robot’s camera managed to capture during that encounter, I count at least 32 unique muzzle flashes plus a cannon-like flash that I’m pretty sure must have killed some of their own guys just from the collateral pressure wave in such an enclosed space.

“Sestra, the SEALs are reporting intense gunfire. Are you putting on a horror show for the enemy?” Cykamee asks.

“Oh, how I wish~ .” They destroyed my cute drone, after all. If I could, I’d science an entire surgical dataset out of them to pay for this slight. Hm? Me? ‘Angry’? No, no. This is an entirely transactional relationship, you see.

The SEALs send in another—smaller—drone to check in on what happened, and I do them the courtesy of not assuming direct control.

The micro heli-drone confirms that the enemy all offed each other out of panic. I mean, there’s no lighting, and for fancy “cyborgs,” none of them have night vision installed. I mean, shouldn’t that be a default cyborg feature at this point? Why don’t you guys even have flashlights?

The micro-drone still picks up a few stragglers though, so someone from the Special Warfare branch opens a briefcase, unleashing a small swarm of murder drones through the manhole. There are a few pint-sized detonations, then the SEALs move in.

The place is a wide, rough-cut tunnel. The stone may have been weathered by water infiltration, but the pick marks remain.

Hnng. There’s so many potential science topics just lying around. What a waste, but I’ll have to put up with it.

The SEAL team moves further in. Already, there’s a good amount of interference from being further underground, but even spotty video is good enough. I can interpolate any missing details, anyway.

The signal cuts out.

“Ah, kurva.”

“What’s going on?” I ask Cykamee.

“I’m…fighting…annoying…wait.”

Huh. She’s multi-threading really hard right now.

The signal comes back, and there’s hints of gunfire echoing from deeper in the tunnel.

“Give me a SITREP,” Johnson says.

“Firefight ahead. I don’t think we’ve been spotted. Some technical difficulties with the uplink.”

“No technical difficulty. Electronic intrusion,” Cykamee interrupts. “I have your backs, soldiers. Reduce RF output and start using relays.”

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“Yes, ma’am.”

Johnson has this confounded look. “What sorta spell you use on my men? I can’t even get ‘em to pick up coffee on the way from the interstate.”

“Say things in their interests, Lieutenant, and they will listen.”

True, true. That is, after all, the hook—the value proposition. As a VTuber, such a thing is the basic of basics. No one will listen to you if you have nothing to offer them. For example, my cuteness is the first thing people see, but once they’re hooked, I slap on even more value by offering my depression-curing cuteness. That is, of course, a different kind of cuteness (and value!) that far surpasses human comprehension.

The SEAL team proceed cautiously, deeper into the tunnels. There are branch points at some places, but they generally follow the path of least resistance.

Finally, they reach the site of the long-over firefight. The bodies of both cyborgs and 100%-human soldiers are strewn about. The SEALs make sure to give us a good visual look-over of some of the bodies.

“Ah? Huh?” Ame blurts out. “They’re both Winter, aren’t they?”

“I’m guessing—”

There’s a ping which shuts me up. “No, no, I’m the detective. Let me do this sort of stuff,” Ame tells me.

I mean. Okay, I guess. I’m 99% confident in my own inference, but with Ame…80%, I guess?

“You’re thinking something mean.” Ame hiccups.

“I’m not~ .”

Ame makes gremlin noises. “A~nyway, it looks like the humans came from the branch tunnel on the left. Based on the direction…aha!”

She hijacks the command post’s screens and brings up a zoomed-in view of the corner of one of the helmet feeds.

“Footprints! There’re still more of them, and they’re heading that way!”

She sounds really proud of herself. I mean, that’s all nice and good, but…

“…No explanation about why Winter’s own soldiers were shooting at each other?” I ask.

She freezes up. “E-er, it’s—hm—spite!”

I ping her. I ping her with the ping command on command prompt. The test packets don’t come back.

“Sestra, what do we do?” Cykamee asks.

“Well, there’s definitely in-fighting. What I’m worried about is the reason for it. One faction’s being mind-controlled with—Meika have mercy—PCIe 2.0 LAN cards, and the other one’s just a bit messed in the head in general. I guess whoever’s doing the mind-controlling is trying to capture the rest of Winter’s soldiers. Considering the futuristic jet and the bootlegged-ness of the mind control technique, I think whoever’s doing the mind control isn’t really part of Winter…and considering Cykamee’s defensive maneuvers a while ago, I think there’s an AGI involved.”

“A third player.” Johnson groans. He turns to his comms staff. “Get Teams One and Two to move in and support.”

Within half an hour, there’s hundreds of special forces combing the damp, dark, and dank tunnels of Blackstone West. There happens the occasional encounter with cyborg squadrons, which always result in wounded among the SEALs, but it’s all balanced out by the human propensity for kinesthetic learning.

Seriously, they’re practically aimbots at this point. I mean, their survival very much literally depends on their ability to immediately headshot the enemy within a split second, so I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising.

One of the squads took to tracking down the remaining human Winter soldiers. I know Johnson calls them “insurgents,” but when they have even more advanced equipment than you, it feels a little bit demeaning towards them, honestly.

Well, so far, no luck from the tracker squad. The combat engineers have also started rolling out kilometers of Ethernet cables and setting up mesh networks to operate as far underground as possible. Cykamee’s helping them with optimizing the router placement.

The operation…goes even longer. It’s been long enough that the combat engineers have started installing lights in the tunnel. I mean, it’s not like I had a problem with it, but wow is it refreshing. The percentage of horror sections is slowly decreasing. I’m not a fan of horror, though it’s not that I dislike it, either.

Soon enough, by the time a lounging area and kitchen had been set up in the initial stretches of tunnel, two discoveries happen at once—two steel doors, one covered in bloodied handprints, located to the northeastern quadrant of the tunnels, and another door ripped from its hinges, the bodies of human soldiers scattered in cleanly-sliced pieces here and there, in the northwestern quadrant.