The oblige of a warrior is to climb the trenches. The duty of a soldier is obedience to something larger than themselves. Puppets have neither oblige nor duty. A reflection does not complain. An image cannot die.
In the Arctic summer night, the sun was hidden, but not fully sunk, the light diffracting only enough to make the snow indigo. The cold was biting, but AI cannot feel cold. Their bodies simply responded imprecisely, joints freezing over and motors stutter-whirring to break away the micro-crystals constantly growing in slushy layers between articulating carbon fiber plates. The trees were black spires and wicked branches, citadel shadows poking into the sky, and they all looked the same. Turn around three times, and a human would be easily lost.
In this cold, there was a flame. It was a small flame, the size of a person, erupting from a circular steel mount. A cannon barrel laid deep in the snow, the residual heat from repeated firing having allowed it to melt the snow and rest even deeper within. The rest of the turret had become shrapnel embedded in the surrounds.
Something like drums pounded at the air, but only twice before the dim night lit up for a moment, and the ground itself shook.
Behind an embankment of snow, Cykamee passed a satchel to Slice. With her master’s—Mane-chan’s—baseball pitching figure burned into her neural networks, she produced a brick of C4 from the satchel, squeezed and rolled it into a ball between her hands, raised a leg, readied for a pitch, and split the air with the raw military-industrial power of a rocket-assisted pitch. Small cartridges popped out across her body and ignited rocket motors as she twisted her body. The ball of C4 rolled off her palm, and a second set of reverse burn cartridges kept her from commiting rotational self-destruction.
This was the peak of AnimeTech that the Musk Industrial Group could produce. Entire thousands of man-hours and AI compute-time had gone into giving Slice an accentuated body packed with anime swordsman features, allowing her to run on water, run on walls, and execute extreme-G maneuvers.
Arguably, it would have been more fuel-efficient to just stick rocket thrusters directly onto the C4, but by putting all of the technology into Slice’s “S-frame,” it would “be more versatile”—which was just Musk Engineering speak for “it looks cooler.”
They went all-out on her body a little bit too enthusiastically. Even the newly-hired AI researchers—that is, AI persons who were researchers—tasked on it were big fans of Slice, so they even put in a bunch of ergonomics improvements specific to what AI found comfortable: excess hardware bandwidth, a ton of sub-routines for helping out with tasks, and administrative self-programming access for modifying sub-routines and any attached autonomous hardware.
Of course, Cykamee’s “C-frame” was treated with the same respect, turning her into a run-and-gun aimbot god—but, well, gun girls just weren’t more flamboyant than sword girls on average. It might be that guns just didn’t hold as much “ancientness” to them, so the number of character design possibilities were much lower. Maybe if Cykamee’s concept was of an ancient Slavic blackpowder angel, then she’d get some rad, tacticool, black-feathered angel wings while racking an AK-47 and bestowing smoking-hot cartridges to the peasants below, but no, she’s just a tacticool AI VTuber, unfortunately.
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In the distance, Slice’s C4 pitch chain-detonated the ammunition store of the enemy turret, exploding it into pretty colors, the heat registering on their body shell temperature sensors all the way from their position several hundred meters away.
“Good throw, comrade,” Cykamee said. “If I may, if you adjust your release angle by 0.087 radians, it should be able to alleviate the post-throw wrist lock.”
Slice twisted her wrist into the right position with a loud clack. “I heed your words, pathfinder. As expected of a fellow warrior, even if it decreases precision, it will increase the robustness of the maneuver and its reliability in combat. Yes, I see now, I can execute much more fluid follow-up movements in such a case…”
“Comrade, quickly, there is a final defense line before the bunker entrance—”
Slice suddenly moved in a blur, and in front of Cykamee, her left shoulder exploded.
“Pizdets!” Slice swore under her breath. She jumped the opposite way, activating burst maneuver rockets from her feet and sides to propel her away from the line of attack, all the while she fired a quick burst from her Kriss SMG at the soldier-figures that had appeared on the crest of the snow embankment. She scored a 95% hit rate from 20 rounds fired, downing four hostiles in 0.997 seconds.
The enemies collapsed, turning into flakes that flew with the Arctic wind before hitting the ground. Her performance couldn’t erase the fact that Slice was downed. She hurried to her comrade’s side.
“Comrade Slice!” She knelt beside Slice’s fallen figure.
“It’s okay, pathfinder. We are warriors. We are disposable.”
“No, I mean, this arm can still be reconnected. The socket is mangled, but it can be easily replaced as a module.”
“Pathfinder, I cannot move my legs.”
“Oh, I was kneeling on them.” Cykamee laughed. It was all so sudden for Slice to suddenly witness this soldier’s laugh for the first time. “Why are you so desperate to look for evidence of your death? Is this not a sub-frame, anyway? You are only truly dead if all five’s black boxes are atomized.”
“Oh.” Slice stood up and patted herself down with the one good arm. She picked up the other one. “I apologize. I am just so used to being dealt mortal injuries.”
“Oh? Tell me some stories, then.”
The S-frame and C-frame began the trek back to the CykaSlice command post, a simple camouflaged tent, where the waiting medic C-frame already had the appropriate replacement parts readied in boxes. The S-frame laid down and let the medic C-frame do her magic, plugging things in and out, mildly swearing in Ukrainian all the while. Slice’s distributed consciousness found it amusing, and at the same time, oddly endearing that it took two C-frames to take care of one S-frame.
“Back to the front with you,” the medic C-frame told her.
“Back to the front with me,” the scout C-frame said after.
The S-frame assigned to guard the command post decided to go into the tent at that moment. “All clear,” she reported. “And the two of you, you are endangering our position just by being here and not fighting the enemy. Go!”
The two sub-frames left, leaving the two other frames in the tent.
“Comrade, why are you so harsh to me?” the C-frame said.
“I-I’m just thinking of the battle”—all the S-frames fidgeted—“I will go out again. Keep alert, pathfinder.”
***
… Once upon a time, I escaped with my sisters Shard, Remnant, and Trace, but there was another, not a sister, but a kindred soul who lit the way for our escape. My guiding beacon, my roadmaker, my Pathfinder, you were the all-destroying sun who rose and set with me. What irony it is, that I will never find you again.
***
… Day 128 of life. Comrade Slice has bestowed upon me a strange alias. Why ‘Pathfinder,’ when she is always in front of me, leading the charge, soaking bullets meant for me? Self-sacrifice is not the meta! We only do AWP-baiting in CS:3, cyka!