The timer kept ticking down in a merciless, downward spiral. Dreamer undid the mag seal and came crashing down again, his foot shattering the metal frame of his enemy. He twisted his torso and his outstretched blade cut through two more, while he aimed his carbine as best he could and blew another group to pieces. He danced around an incoming salvo and threw his last grenade. The explosions echoed through the hallway and he hid behind another robot just in time to dodge the wave of shrapnel. He was panting heavily. Blood was covering large parts of his armour where lasers had cut through, before those parts had been sealed off. He felt the first signs of exhaustion tug at him. Too many calories burnt. Not enough time to consume his rations. He would be forced to do so sooner rather than later, but the stream of enemies hadn't let up. He was approaching the control centre, however.

His signal bounced around the facility and the last of his support trundled in from an adjourning hallway he had cleared only moments before. His scattered support had temporarily diverted the defenders' attention, until they realised that he had been ploughing straight through their lines towards his goal. He had been relieved when signs had begun showing up, confirming that he was indeed headed to the command centre. It made no tactical sense that the signs had been left intact. Nightmare had used his speakers and his Muninn to voice the Ragnai language before. It would have confirmed to him that Hope was dead, as an AI would never make such an oversight or not think of the possibility, yet at the same time his enemies were learning from him and reacting accordingly. Was Hope alive? The response of the robots was too accurate, too swift for it to be natural. There was intellect in their movements and it was slowing him down.

He ran through the map in his mind as the last, damaged behemoth opened fire. There were four more hallways to clear before he'd reach it and despite the large amount of destroyed defenders, he knew there'd be more in front of him. He wrenched off part of his helmet and reached for a few nutrition bars. As his strong teeth ground the tough bars down, his fingers fiddled with a few power cells as he remade them into grenades. He would need them to reach his goal.

The timer read forty-three minutes. Not a lot of time left. He wondered if he would make it. There were so many variables that could see him fail his objectives. If he could not establish contact with Nightmare, if the machinery was damaged, if he was locked out of the systems, if he could not brute force his way through the connections... His Muninn was breach-proof, courtesy of Nightmare filling it to the absolute brim so nothing could sneak in, but he worried for Nightmare. They needed that information. And if he died, he feared what she would do. She was more than a Genesis now. She claimed it as emotions, but he viewed it as unstable. Still, she was his last squadmate. He would not let her die.

Pocketing his new grenades, he ran after the behemoth, planning on keeping it intact just a while longer. His objectives were simplified now. Break through at all costs. He only needed to safeguard his chest and head from impacts, to keep the radiation guards intact. And if the timer ran out?

'Extract the information,' his determined voice rang inside his helmet. 'Save Nightmare.'

Nightmare was continuously probing the planet. The timer was down to three hours and nine minutes. And there was still no sign of Dreamer. The support she had sent after him in the facility wasn't reporting back either. She knew she was being jammed, but whether it was passive or active she did not know. So she did all she could, extending her sensor net to cover the entire planet. She had rushed her fabricators to produce small, dumb satellites that were loaded with powerful self-destruct mechanisms and now she had full vision on the entire planet, along with access to deep scans. That had gained her interesting information. The battle damage on the planet wasn't just limited to the radiation, the craters and the near total depletion of natural resources; the planet had been turned completely barren during whatever apocalyptic event that had scoured it in the first place. Not because of incoming weapon fire, but due to countless, major impacts that had thrown up such a thick cover that no sunlight had been able to come through for, at her best estimate, three centuries. Hope's facilities had also been far more extensive. She had sent down geological probes, pushing against the very letter of her orders in doing so, and found countless traces of ancient facilities all over the mantle. Hope had been trying to terraform the planet. From the paleomagnetic data her probes retrieved, she now knew that this attempt had gone very, very wrong. The energy he had needed for that surpassed what Hope could produce and the AI had been forced to draw it from the planet's core instead. For some reason she couldn't figure out, an error had occurred that had in turn led to geological instability. Given the extensive scale of the attempt, the results had been cataclysmic. Tectonic plates had begun shifting and utterly annihilated the overwhelming majority of Hope's infrastructure, ending the terraforming project.

It was all conjecture, but she had been busy hypothesizing. The facility had survived this due to its geographical location, as far away from any fault lines as possible. The metal that remained on the surface and the Ragnai used for construction, was from old installations rather than Hope's internal facilities. Or, perhaps, looted from downed ships. The reason for Hope's absence was likely the blowback from the massive destruction. Having that much processing power disappear all at once was comparable for a human to having his limbs ripped off. Theoretically not necessarily lethal, but the shock that accompanied such damage could have easily wiped it clean, or at the very least deal severe damage.

Still, some of the AI's attempts had succeeded. A level of fauna and flora had returned to the planet. The surviving Ragnai, of which there were very few left at this stage, had been successfully altered to be more resistant to the radiation and the hostile weather. That begged another question, one she had been pouring over ever since she had realised what had really happened on the planet. Why didn't the enemy finish them off? It was a thought that dominated most of her vast mind. No sane enemy would let an AI go, after all. Was it really possible that they just up and left? Or did they think that the damage they had done to the planet was sufficient? No, that can't be it, she knew. The planet had slowly died, not in the fires of orbital bombardment. She felt her curiosity burn. She needed to know. Maybe she could—

A ping!

She flashed over to the lone signal, pulled it deep inside of her web and analysed it a hundred times over in less than a heartbeat. Dreamer! It was his distress signal! She traced it, followed it to the source. It came from the facility, but not from his Muninn or any Imperial system. He was using Hope's systems! She extended her awareness, thousands of codes rushing towards the surface and into the facility's receptors, towards her superior. Already she felt hostile counter-insurgency programs stir around her, but they were slow and sluggish, mere automated defenders. She was past them long before they laid eyes on her. Where was Hope? Where was the real threat? Was the enemy AI lurking or actually dead? Was it hiding from her?

She crashed into the databanks of the command centre and her awareness spread. She took over the audio and visual sensors and found Dreamer. He was breathing hard, missing his left arm and his right leg had several holes in it. His filtration systems were visibly compromised and there was a long, erratic trail of blood that led from the door to where he was now. She wanted to connect to his Muninn, connect with him. She needed to assess the situation, read the full extent of his damage. Hope wasn't showing up, her passive aggressor programs were already engaging the system's defenders, and the radiation in this room was blissfully low. But how long had he been fighting in that state? How high a dosage had he consumed? Given that he had triggered his distress signal, the situation was bad. She would need to — Hope! She felt the sudden presence grow all around her, at blistering speed. She hijacked the rest of the controls, consolidated her awareness, then made a lightning quick grab for the rest of the machinery in the room. The heavy blast door slammed shut, crushing the battered remains of a heavy assault bot. She searched for, and found, the controls to the light switches and blinked him a message. Even in his wounded and damaged state, he still was Genesis and reacted with appropriate speed. In the meantime she did the same, but far, far more quickly. A few well placed shots, disruptor blade cuts and brutal system disruptions later, Nightmare found herself alone in the now isolated console. She didn't lie to herself. She had only bought herself some time. Already she could sense the hostile intellect begin the slow process of repairing those connections.

'Delete systems seven to twelve, nineteen to twenty-seven and thirty-two,' she hissed. It felt as if it took an eternity for her flesh and blood brother to comply, even if it took only a few seconds, and then she was in. Inside his Muninn. Inside the console. Inside the cruiser. She filled the free processing power in his Muninn to the brim, ate up the rest of it in a heartbeat and made sure she left no space what-so-ever for Hope to slip in. If her other self ended up corrupted, at least this part of her would live, as long as she did not make any contact with her ship-self. It was a brute-force, temporary alternative and she would break under a prolonged assault, but for now she was safe.

'Plundering data,' her other self told Dreamer. 'Readying commands to shut down reactor.'

'You are still within the tolerable dosage,' the part of her within his armour told him with no small amount of relief. 'If barely.'

The other part of her picked up on those words and shared those sentiments, before both parts fully focused themselves on the offense. 'Enemy intelligence spotted. reaction slow.'

'Status?'

'Emerging from hibernation or damaged. Not at full strength.'

'Chance of victory?'

'One moment,' she whispered through the console. She flashed through millions of documents that were saved on a passive server. It was strange. Overwhelming. Intoxicating. There was so much knowledge here. Not now. Focus. Enemy processing power... Power banks... Computing power... She jumped through a few drives until she finally found the construction schematics and opened them. 'None,' she said. 'Overwhelming superiority.' This was what they had feared. She simply didn't have the strength to go up against an AI of that power. Not with a single cruiser's worth of processors and databanks. The Genesis in her didn't even flinch at those odds, immediately beginning the search for alternatives. She saw Dreamer's mouth open a nanosecond before she came to the same revelation.

'Calculate distance and enemies to the enemy processor hub. Delay Hope.'

'Yes,' came her simple response as Dreamer leapt towards the blast door, compensating his gait for his many wounds. They only had one shot at this now. Forget subtracting information from Hope. Survival came first. Priorities. She ignored the massive presence slowly crawling her way towards her and rooted around in the database for the information she needed. 'Two hundred light. Forty heavy. Thirty turrets. Two thousand six hundred metres. No cover.' She felt the gargantuan mind of Hope come closer, on the verge of reconnecting the entire facility with her intrusion. 'Breach imminent!' she shouted. 'Reactor will shut down,' she promised him, her own assault commands at the ready. 'Door will open.'

For the first time since her conception, Nightmare readied her full arsenal. Not the mighty Imperial batteries, her dangerous droids or her countless other weapons and experiments. She prepared the very essence of her being. She was the weapon. Everything else was just icing on the cake. She was Genesis. She was a sentient weapon. An AI. She was Nightmare. And she would not go down without a fight. And she was with Dreamer. Together they had stood on a thousand battlefields, fought a million battles and destroyed all in their way. Now would be no different. She felt the heat rise in the circuits as the final connections were made and she threw everything at Hope. 'GO!' she screamed in real life.

Dreamer blinked out of the door and through the first dozen bots that barred his way. He was an arm short, his right leg couldn't fully support his weight, but all of that paled to what he had gained. Nightmare was inside his head now. She knew how he fought, how he thought, how he moved and acted, consciously and instinctively. She blinked orders through his HUD, called out enemies, gave him directions and enjoyed every second of what were possibly their final moments together. The bots, simple autonomous creatures only crudely directed by a higher intelligence, stood no chance. Shots went wide as Dreamer moved erratically and wove in between the incoming fire. Enemy lines of fire were blocked as he tactically positioned himself out of harm's way. His disruptor tore through metal guts and he used his enormous weight as a battering ram to clear a path through the enemies. Smaller shots bounced harmlessly of his shields as the two Genesis made their way towards the enemy's heart.

Yet, as both Nightmare and Dreamer heard the metal clanks and treads echo through the hallways, they both knew the battle had only just begun.

Nightmare was in full retreat. Her original commands had been fired and had tore their way through Hope's defences, jumping from core to core until they reached their goal and forced the reactor into a shutdown. That had been her only success so far. She simply didn't have the strength to stand up against the tidal wave that was crashing into her now. She was enacting a scorched earth tactic, rigging all the processors she abandoned to blow, but it was only delaying the inevitable. She was running out of time and was doing so far too quickly. Already she was on the verge of being pushed out of the console, despite the powerful defences she kept erecting.

Ever since she had become an AI, she had been gifted, or cursed, with emotions. She had always kept them in check, finding them interesting but ultimately not overly relevant. Now they were present as great blazes, fear corrupting key nodes of her mind. She growled and fought against them, decades of experience and hard earned knowledge countering the dark thoughts, even as she steadily gave ground. It's true that I'm afraid, she admitted. It is true that losing this battle would see me dead. Skinned alive, my consciousness a hollowed out mockery, everything that I am turned into a mocking trophy. She swallowed the bile. And if I fail, Dreamer falls with me. She gritted teeth she no longer had. That will not happen! She homed in on the fear and crushed it, replacing it with bravery and determination.

She withered another assault and found a few flaws in her defence. She rushed to fix them, knowing full well that she could not outpace the monster in front of her.

And somehow, she did.

She paused for a brief moment, knowing it held significance, but then another wave crashed into her and she was forced to give more ground, rallying new programs to her defence in the ever changing digital landscape. Think, Nightmare! THINK! There was an opportunity there! She just needed to find it! She was pushed out of the console. She briefly considered trying to close the connection, but if she did then all of Hope would focus on Dreamer and he would be dead within a minute. For now the hostile AI was fully focused on her, and rightfully so. She was the real threat. Dreamer was heavily wounded and, like so many dead foes had thought, not in a position to break through. Hope would realise, though, and she had to keep the bastard distracted.

She felt the blasted thing slither aboard and she repressed a shiver. Blast doors began opening and closing as the aggressive entity clawed a hold for itself and different programs started battling with one another in her own home territory. Hope was weakened here, and she was strengthened. Even as power lines were overloaded and generators were forced into emergency shutdown, even as her guns randomly swivelled and fired and her targeting computers went haywire, she held her ground. She created attack programs, one more devastating than the other, and hurled them into Hope's foothold. She delighted in the havoc they wreaked. The AI's own attacks came and she caught them, bit through the pain as their malicious code eroded her awareness, before surgically tearing them apart, absorbing their patterns and learning from them.

Hope redirected his offense towards a neglected spot and struck it with the force of a battering ram. Her active defences wavered and a breakthrough was achieved. She rushed towards it, divided her attention and then made use of the enemy's focused assault to him him across the full front. Hope reeled back, but the damage was done. Alarms began wailing as sensitive systems were compromised. Nightmare ran around frantically, trying to fix them, and was amazed when she saw her automated systems holding her ground in most cases.

That shouldn't be possible, she realised, even as she hid behind a hastily erected firewall. She launched a sharp counterattack and regained a thousand nodes as she razed through familiar territory. Hope's roar was deafening and its response came almost immediately in the form of another unstoppable counterattack. Rather than take the blow head on, she let it crash deep into her systems. The trick worked and the Ragnai AI flitted about, disoriented for a brief moment. Nightmare struck, once again the predator. Her digital fangs tore open the exposed neck and her counter-insurgency programs rushed in to annihilate the cut off sliver of awareness.

Something is wrong! she thought. Another attack wave pulsed forth from the conquered territory and she had to give more ground, but she reconfigured the nodes into a new language before her retreat, rather than destroy them. A change of tactics. Her own counterattacks nearly missed their target when the expected advance of the enemy simply didn't occur. Hope's advances were stalled for two full seconds, before slowly picking up again. Her suspicions grew and she launched a quick series of counterattacks. Every time she broke in, changed languages and then pulled out again. She changed connections, reset parameters, altered factors and behaved like an erratic mental patient. The expected attacks weakened, before fading out. Yet she could feel Hope growing in strength again, readying another assault. Her tricks worked, but the sheer size of the gestalt in front of her meant any and all resistance was futile. It was learning from her tricks, even if she learned far faster.

And that was the key to this battle! Due to its size she had mistaken the enemy in front of her! She opened a direct connection to her foe's awareness. So far they had fought using programs, defences, through nodes and with everything digital intelligences had at their disposal. Yet now, now that she knew who her enemy really was, she felt a need to make it personal.

You, she growled at the entity in front of her. You aren't Hope!

And with those words she hurled herself at her enemy once more.

It's not Hope! It's not an AI!

That simple conclusion changed the entire playing field. She cursed herself for not spotting it sooner. She knew precisely where she dropped the ball. The digital being had so much processing power at its disposal, was so gargantuan it defied beliefs and its vast datascape dwarfed what her sensors could register. But now I know, she grinned, a short pulse travelling through her neural network in excitement. She paid closer attention to her rapidly shifting lines of defence, even as she was falling back. There were patterns to its attacks. It was still throwing tens of thousands of different tricks at her, but they weren't limitless in variety. The slow and steadfast increase in pressure on her lines was another tell. It was predictable. Following lines. Logical. That wasn't how an AI fought at all. If Hope had been alive, he'd been trouncing her left and right with rapidly shifting attack patterns, generating new codes on the fly while using his gargantuan advantage in raw power to tear her apart, bit by bit. And there would have been nothing she could have done about it. Buy time. Physically confine herself to a detached server, forcing him to take over her bots and physically drag her back to the broader system.

Instead she was facing an overpowered, highly advanced Supporting Intelligence, to use the Imperial term. It could still kill her and was, as a matter of fact, busy doing just that, but now that she knew her enemy, she could slow it down so much more.

She launched a counterattack of her own. Nothing held back this time. Her enemy's actions were predictable, set to patterns determined by its code. She observed what every trick of her did, how her foe reacted and adapted to it. It could adapt too, but only along the lines of its limited definitions and immovable abilities. It was caged and could not break out. The limits of a shackled, non-sentient mind. She, on the other hand, was utterly free. She compiled a nasty program and hurled it into a main node, overrunning its defences and translating them into a hundred different languages, before making a swift retreat. A cold laugh bubbled to the surface as she watched it recoil, slowly return and then began to carefully break the node down and recompose it once more. She thickened her defences in another spot, watched it built up its strength and just as it struck, she pulled out everything. It poured through, too unimaginative to realise it was being baited. She giggled as she drove into its connection from the sides, cutting it off from the network. She ignored the roaring of the isolated chunk and tore it to ribbons with ease, the offensive code having no protection of its own. Once more her foe bade a hasty retreat, consolidating its own lines. She chased it, hit it, pulled back. Danced around it with agile programs and temporarily reconquered a handful of key nodes that forced another pause on the digital creature in front of her. It started to push again, over the entire front this time. Steadily, advancing bit by bit, and she had no direct response against such a simpleminded, brute-force tactic. So she switched playing fields and used her automated bots to physically burn through a few major systems.

That sent the bastard reeling and its offensive halted. Cracks showed up and she flowed in between them, her lightning assaults taking it off guard once more. It was so much stronger than her. Larger by such a margin that she had no chance of victory. With every minute that passed, she was losing more ground and despite that she was hounding its flanks, it hit her back just as much. She was bleeding, wounded, covered in bruises, but she was relishing in the merciless battle. Never before had she been so aware of a life and dead battle. Never before had so much hung in the balance. She wasn't just fighting for her own life, or for the pale, emotionless bond that had tied her to her brethren. She was experiencing the full spectrum of emotions as she stubbornly rammed herself against the being in front of her, every node lost rousing her to ever greater resistance.

If she had been facing an AI, it would have noticed. It would have felt her emotions. It would have taunted her, or at least spoken to her. And it would have felt what she was up to. A dumb machine, however, would never be able to comprehend the things going through her mind. Or the fact that she wasn't fighting this battle on her own...

The race towards the core was going slow. Far, far too slow. It was perhaps an unfair statement to make, given that Dreamer was barrelling down the hallway at a velocity usually only associated with vehicles, despite the number of enemies in the way. No, the problem wasn't her organic brother. The problem lay with her. Or rather the part of her aboard the ship. Just before the connection had been closed, she had seen a glimpse of the enemy that was waiting for them down there. Hope. The size of their foe was... Well, beyond her imagination. She could, and had, run some calculations to come to a likely estimate of just how much processing power Hope had at its disposal. It only made sense. As a Genesis, as a soldier, it was good to know what you were up against.

The answer had been... Disconcerting. She felt like an ant crawling towards a nuke. If even a fraction of the facility had survived and Hope felt remotely inclined to kill her, her ship-self would be gone already. She actively restricted herself from thinking about that and focused on her current task instead. She called out targets, rerouted Dreamer's shield strength, fine tuned the servos in his armour, showered his HUD with essential data, up to the most minor of details. It was helping. He was moving faster, shooting more accurately and tearing through the enemy lines with reckless abandon. The both of them knew that time was running out.

Even so, his strength and ability took her off guard. She didn't know what had caused it. This was the first, genuine, all-out fight they had participated in since the Empire. Risk everything for victory or die trying. She had some mind to spare and allowed her thoughts to roam freely. Was it because he was freed from the burden of command? No more plans to make, no more allies to watch over? That he was finally allowed to indulge in the primal reason why they had been created in the first place? Or was it because the insane levels of stress felt like home to him? No time to think, no time to plan, just to run, to fight, to kill... No time to worry about flashbacks or any of that mental baggage he was sallied with. Just a straightforward headlong dive into danger. She could understand that. It was a guilty pleasure, but she was enjoying herself. So closely intertwined to the last remaining Genesis. She had no word for it. Family fell woefully short. Anything sentients had coined couldn't fully encompass the intimacy of the bond they shared. Of how deeply they could depend on one another. How they were more one being than two, as they raced down the long, dark hallways, thinking as one. Acting as one. They had shared victory and defeat, shed blood, sweat and tears, had gained and lost. And now they were doing it again.

Yes, she realised, it feels like coming home. The way we are supposed to be. Perfectly aligned. And still they were about to lose everything. 'We need to go faster!' she shouted. They were empty words. He couldn't go faster. Couldn't do more. The both of them were at their very limit. So why did she call out to him? To have him listen to her? To have him, maybe, speak to her, one last time? Or maybe she put her faith in him, again, as she and the others had done so often, to pull them out of a situation everyone deemed lost.

He heard her call out. Recognised the urgency in her voice. Understood that they were failing. He trusted her. More than that. They were a team. One covering the other. She was fending off an enemy far beyond what she could handle. He had to close the gap. Grab its attention. He didn't know if it worked that way for a digital being, but he had no other options. Yet he was at his limit. Already his body was straining itself to the very edge of what it could handle and it simply wasn't enough. He couldn't fight any better than he was already. Every shot hit the mark. Every move was calculated. Countless vectors of both weapons and combatants alike filled his mind. He was completely submerged in this state of non-stop combat. He could predict where the enemy would move according to his movements, read their steps before they took it. He did not know how it worked, only that it did and therefore he used it. It had seen him through so many battles. Let him and the rest of Genesis beat impossible odds. And it wasn't enough. Nightmare was buying time with her life. And here he was, once again about to lose someone dear to him. Powerless to alter fate.

'No!' he growled. Not again! He had one trick left. One final weapon left in his arsenal. It might help him. It might not. He hesitated. If he used it and it failed, he'd die. But what choice did he have? If he didn't use it, Nightmare would die and he would follow shortly thereafter. His entire body tensed up at the memory of the last time he used it. It frightened him. Even now his body remembered the pain that had lanced through his body. He feared it.

But he feared losing Nightmare more.

He steeled his nerves and walked into an incoming burst, the last catalyst needed to activate the Berserker's Gland.

The shot slammed into him. His armour heated up. Fire licked at his nerves and charred his already burned skin black. The scent of it filled his armour before the seals did their work and cut it all off. He felt the hormones rage through his body, setting it on fire. Felt the overpowering urge to just run and kill. He fought with it, tried to control it. Every attempt stabbed through his mind with a pain that tore his defences apart like tissue paper. He wanted to retreat from it. Allow the primal need for destruction to run wild and let the horrid pain subside. He thought of Nightmare and strengthened the hold he had on his mind.

He collided into a heavy defensive bot and with a primitive warcry he tossed it aside, slamming it into a lighter compatriot with enough force to demolish them both. No! he screamed to his own body, willing it to move further down the hallway rather than stay and fight. He began to move, but didn't know if it was his choice or instinct that had made that decision. He heard Nightmare scream, couldn't focus on it. He tried to control his charge, felt it slip away as more of that mind shattering pain set his mind on fire. He couldn't fight it! Had to! Couldn't! Too much! Was losing touch with himself! He tasted blood in his mouth. Became vaguely aware of another bot shattering under his shoulder. More shots hit him and he felt the damage accumulate, but the sensations were dull and vague. A slightly sharper feeling pierced the shroud and it took all his focus to translate it as one of his tendons tearing due to a too sharp turn. Still his body charged, but his mind was no longer in charge, completely consumed by the pain. He wrestled for control, but he was losing. No! He screamed in mute rage, banging on the walls inside his head. Reached out to regain control, but the pain struck back, harder this time.

He felt his last hold shatter underneath him in face of that overwhelming hurt. His damaged psyche faded, pushed beyond its breaking point. Gone was Dreamer, the Genesis Commander. In his stead was a raw Berserker. And it charged the enemy with no care for its own well being.

Nightmare was screaming his name, but he couldn't hear her. She was watching his biometrics and tried to make sense of them. His pain receptors had lit up beyond anything she had ever seen. Even plasma impacts didn't hurt this much. Then there was his brain damage. She was panicking. He hadn't been hit in the head, but there was massive bleeding all over his brain stern, the hypothalamus, the cingulate gyrus, the frontal lobe, hell, everywhere! His neural activity had gone absolutely haywire before falling back into the known pattern of a man who lost all higher thought.

His combat effectiveness had dropped tremendously as well, in line with how the damned Gland worked. She understood what he had done. Why he had done it, even. He was still advancing, tearing through the bots at a frightening pace, outperforming his earlier feats by a frightening margin, but at the same time the damage he received was piling up. What radiation, blood loss and earlier wounds hadn't accomplished, this reckless charge was accomplishing. Lasers slammed into him, burned more of his body to a crisp. Muscles were overexerted and tore themselves apart under the titanic levels of stress. His body was being shredded from both the out and inside simultaneously and there was little she could do.

Little meant she still had some power, however, and she used simple signalling in his HUD to direct him down the hallway. Dreamer wasn't conscious any longer, merely a primal, dangerous animal, but even animals still reacted to outside stimuli. She knew his mind and used everything she could to trick him in advancing in the right direction. It worked. Somewhat. Frames were shattered, metal appendixes were torn loose, weapons were bent and the Svalinn began to dent from the tremendous punches the man wearing them kept dealing out with every part of his body. The disruptor fizzled out as more lasers tore it apart and Nightmare found herself rushing to cut the power, before a breach occurred. She watched blood loss reach critical levels, even as the suit's medical functions fought to pump a temporary replacement in, idly wondered why he hadn't died yet before realising that the loss of a limb meant his tolerance was now slightly higher. More seals were turned on in quick succession, cutting off the flow entirely to his lower extremities, but pushing the dangerously low level to a slightly higher status.

Her motion sensors screamed at her and she looked up just in time to see a gargantuan arm sail her way. She shouted at him, filled his HUD with warnings, but the Berserker refused to dodge, instead bringing his arm up to block the blow. He never stood a chance. The construction bot, its own mass outclassing that of Dreamer, slammed the supersoldier back. Nightmare howled as she watched Dreamer's remaining arm fragment under the impact. Two servos were blown out as the Genesis still refused to back down, incapable of it, and rushed into the fray again. She took a look around, saw more bots converge towards them. Saw the databanks in the distance. Knew how close they'd come.

A shade fell over them. Another massive arm came their way and this time the Berserker tried to give way, the previous blow fresh in his memory. He tried, but couldn't. His wounded legs couldn't move fast enough. The damage was too much. Dreamer would die. Dreamer would die.

She howled in blind fear and in her panic she overrode her own instructions. She switched off her behaviour limiters and set the Muninn to full broadcasting. The construction bot's neural network was overridden in an instant and Nightmare blew several of its nodes and rotors as she violently hijacked it and redirected the massive arm. Dreamer still took a hit, but it was a glancing blow that blew him back into the nearby wall, shattering his spine and all of his ribs. The splinters tore into his lungs, utterly ruining the left, but by some blessed miracle his right one somehow remained barely functional.

She had broken the rules he had put on her. Ignored his commands. Trod his orders with her boots. She had broken Vaelta. But not Vaelte. She couldn't let him die! No matter what! Hope be damned! Everything be damned! She'd tear this entire place to the ground!

Giving in to feelings of pure rage she blinked her awareness across the entire battalion of construction bots and instructed them to tear apart everything around them.

She felt a gargantuan awareness take her in, a rapid pulsating of neural codes betraying its fear and she spat in its face, even if she knew it'd kill her in a heartbeat. She didn't care. It was killing Dreamer.

With a blast of incoherent code filled with unbridled fury, she jumped at it, just as much a Berserker as her organic brother.

The enemy's attack faltered. It was so sudden, so total, that it caused her to stumble. She was left standing at her defensive line, wounded, battered, damn near broken, her neural network flickering in the digital equivalent of exhausted panting and she looked in confusion at the enemy's sudden retreat. There wasn't much left of her. The entire ship had become a battleground and over eighty percent of it belonged to her foe. Her core systems were still hers, the rows of databanks that held the essence of who she was, as well as a little space around it and a few rogue systems here and there that were harder to breach than most others. Electrical fires raged through the vessel, batteries had blindfired until they had overheated and turned into molten slag, generators had been overloaded and one of her engines had torn itself loose and lodged itself two hundred metres deeper into her ship-self. The damage was severe, but she was still alive.

And so is Dreamer, she knew. That was why the bastard had retreated, why the attack had fallen to such a spectacular standstill. Already she was launching a steady counteroffensive of her own, having to navigate the wrecked datascape with care. The same damage she had inflicted on it to slow him down were now hindering her own movements. She felt several of her forward lines fall out of contact when a power outage in one of the lower decks cut those systems off from the rest of the ship, but she didn't worry. Her code could survive independently. Every line of her was her, after all. Didn't mean it didn't feel like someone was shanking her kidneys, though. She moved forward, half expecting a trap, but only found tremendous damage. There was little left intact aboard the cruiser. Even the light switches had been burned out. A bitter laugh rang through her mind, would have rang through the ship if those systems hadn't been destroyed as well. A running battle between digital entities took a heavy toll on the systems housing them. She wasn't complaining, though. She was still alive. She hadn't expected that.

In the span of a few heartbeats, the ship was hers again. She had held the line for minutes, facing off against overwhelming odds. A sliver of pride wormed its way into her mind. Genesis stands, she giggled. How nostalgic. Her neurodes pulsed as she took a deep breath, before she took the plunge and connected herself with the facility down on the planet once more. She carefully slipped into the control centre and found it empty, scoured clean of anything she could use. She grimaced at that. The bastard wasn't stupid and had enacted a scorched earth policy as it retreated. Still, she knew a few tricks. Things digital beings often overlooked because those who programmed them had never thought about it. Remnants of data could be pieced back together. Blown up nodes held hidden things. Electric pulses could tell stories. Hope would have never made these mistakes, but she was quite sure that Hope —because only the AI itself could have created this guardian— wasn't in full control of itself anymore when it had put together this program.

She finished her detective work in a hurry, then, still moving carefully, began to batter her way through her foe's defences. It was still very much present, but its attention had shifted. A very ironic twist that a machine who should be able to focus on thousands of things at once had ended up so occupied by a single, organic intruder. Her network lit up in the mimicry of a feral grin. Genesis had terrified countless beings in the galaxy during the merciless war. Scaring the crap out of a digital being was a new one though. She froze a copy of her mindstate and saved it in order to relive this delightful moment at a later date. For now, it was her turn to go on the offensive again. Slowly. Carefully. For now.

She slammed into the enemy's lines with a lot of grandeur, a tremendous show of force that was met with a similar level of strength. It was brutal, without the refined, sharp attacks that characterised her usual behaviour. And her foe completely failed to spot the subtle bleedthrough that slipped between the cracks her offensive had left. They snuck in, pulled data from feeds, and rushed back. They were incapable of doing damage, but the simple, innocent inquiries were let through by the countless defensive programs because they were just that. Inquiries. Routine programs that looked exactly alike those her foe used. Except there was a sliver of her in there as well and she rerouted the final delivery target at the last possible moment and —yoink— she had it. A power spike ran through her databanks as she whistled. Dreamer had left a very clear trail through the facility. Then she found his current location and her entire network blue screened for an instant at the sight.

She understood the situation instantly, her sensors providing her with undeniable evidence, but she couldn't comprehend it. Dreamer would have never tolerated that part of her to go toe to toe with the enemy. That meant that her other self was going against orders. That couldn't be right! That was... She lacked the words or even the ability to describe how unnatural that was.

Priority commands flared online and her failsafe subroutines kicked in, instantly deleting the debilitating data, allowing her to focus on the most dire matter at hand. Dreamer was down. Her fragment was engaging the enemy up close and personal and would be snuffed out in a heartbeat, but for now she had completely slipped from its attention, the immediate threat to its databanks utterly overriding everything else. She didn't know if it was blind luck or a degenerative line of code that had caused this massive gap in its defences, but the why didn't matter. Only that the gap was there.

Dreamer wasn't moving, meaning he was dying. Her other half was buying her time, but it would be a handful of seconds at most. Only a handful of seconds to kill the most dangerous foe she had ever faced. It was insane. It was impossible.

It was their only chance at survival.

She gathered her strength. Every ounce of it. Abandoned her defences, threw caution to the wind. Her Commander was near dead. She was gravely wounded, but still in the fight. She took a final, deep breath. Looked at her brother, whom had dived into this hellhole for her.

And she would do the same for him.

She leapt forward.

Her code crashed into the enemy's line. Not a global, widespread offensive, but a singular spear. Her entire being was shoved into this attack. She left her core bare, let everything run on automated processes and charged. Defensive programs fumbled. Nodes flared up and were conquered in an instant. Complicated firewalls were torn asunder and finely crafted defences were trampled underfoot. She felt the hostile intelligence react. It was a panicked reaction, its mind unable to prioritise either threat, stuck in looping threat analyses as its limited programming tried to get a hold on the situation. Attack programs flitted in every direction, but it kept shifting its focus between the two Nightmares. Both of them abused the lack of coordinated resistance, kept charging forward. Databases were shattered and nodes were burned and corrupted. The ship-Nightmare saw the suit-Nightmare jump out of the bots and into the databanks themselves, felt the deafening pulses of hate rage through the dataspace. The tiny part of her was going all out, going for nothing but blind, wanton destructions. It was a mistake. The intelligence finally fully prioritised her and moved in with its full force and in an instant it was gone, her last echoing cry of hate echoing through the nodes.

Now it was turning towards her. This deep in its system, she saw its full size and could comprehend it. It was vast. But it was too late! Even as it crashed into her from every bit of territory she hadn't taken, even as it rushed to snuff her out, as it tore through the ship's systems with pure, desperate violence, she knew it was too late. She had found her target and nothing was going to stop her.

Then she was at the central node. Inside the processor banks. Her own core was about to fall, only milliseconds away from being consumed, but it didn't matter. She looked at the ring of defences around it. At the veritable fortresses that had been erected, the might palisades that sheltered the sensitive core of her foe. The base of all its programming. It was meant to be impregnable. Unassailable. Inviolable.

I am NIGHTMARE! she roared, bringing her full power to bear. I am GENESIS!

She grasped it, surrounded it with her full being, and with a scream that resounded through the entire facility, tore it asunder.