After NoCro managed to escape the clutches of Silver, she set the Cygnus on a heading towards grid square EI to the south and put it in autodefense mode. Leaving the game was a simple matter of opening one’s eyes. Sometimes they felt a bit heavy, but that was not the case here. Events inside ACO had taken on a strange quality, and the thought briefly crossed her mind to simply quit the thing here and now. She was looking up at a popcorn ceiling now, back in reality, where she lived in a one-bedroom unit, on the second floor. It was the kind of apartment complex where the stairs were made out of metal, the kind of place where people would shout at each other in the parking lot. It was the same everywhere, though, as far as she knew.

She was leaned back in a reclining office chair, and from a black harness around her neck a thick black cable ran down into her tower PC. After extricating herself from the collar she lurched her chair forward, feeling dizzy and nursing the beginnings of a headache. It probably wasn’t the bad kind. There was a bottle of generic migraine relief in her junk drawer at the desk, and when she went to retrieve it she noticed a glittering pink flash buried underneath the other junk.

After downing a couple of the pills and gulping down a glass of water, she replaced the bottle in the drawer and pulled out the pink object. Mostly it looked like a toy handgun made for some especially weird tomboy, a charge she could cop to, but it wasn’t any toy of hers. Rather it was a real gun inscribed with the name ‘Pavona’ on the barrel, an item she received as part of her inheritance. It was illegal now to buy such things, doubly so to use them. Judging from the ‘fireworks’ and police sirens she heard on most nights, that wasn’t really stopping anyone.

Hesitantly she pressed the release and dumped the magazine into her other hand. It was still full up with the same ancient ammunition that her mother had loaded it with. Her fingertips had been on every bullet, surely. Noel racked the slide (appropriately, the only part of the gun that wasn’t silly-looking) and ejected the bullet that was in the chamber. Not a very safe way to store it, admittedly. The bullet bounced off the well-worn surface of her wooden desk and rolled off somewhere into the total darkness behind her monitor. The blue glow lit the room behind her. She considered keeping this thing a bit closer than the junk drawer.

“You’re just paranoid.” she whispered to herself, and slid the magazine back into it.

She tucked it back into the junk drawer, burying it underneath the other items as she had done before. Supposedly a slew of exciting new mental disorders would presage her death, and if that was true all she could do was catch herself. The self-assembling dendrites of the faulty progressive would keep climbing up into her head, having long since missed the memo about stopping. This process would happen exponentially, or in other words: gradually, then suddenly.

In spite of her best efforts she could not shake the feeling of dread. Perhaps her long-prophesied deterioration was starting. Then again, there might be good reason for it.

——

Some time after he had formally accepted NoCro’s offer of a duel and set course for her last known location, Prism found that he had a little bit of a problem on his hands. It would be at least 8 hours until NoCro’s Cygnus group would be in a position to make an attack. Prism was gearing up for a surface action with his cruisers and his battleship and was planning to simply swat whatever she threw at him down with his defenses as he had done many times before.

The meta in the game didn’t really favor attacking with submarines or aircraft, and it was mostly the same in the Light World as well. Detection and defensive systems had grown far too strong, especially when one could feed a razor AI sonar or radar data. Razors could unmask stealth aircraft that were otherwise supposedly invisible and zero in on any nukesub that got too close. His whole fleet was bristling with sensors and countermeasures which were all managed automatically to near-perfection by an array of razor systems. All of this data flowed upwards, necessarily narrowing in scope each time, and eventually presented itself to him via the Ultimate-Razor bridge. He controlled everything here with the same ease as a human would move a mouse pointer.

NoCro had in the past attempted to make up for this vast gulf between them by resorting to various tricks. It wasn’t the case that she had some kind of brown-shoed romantic devotion to carrier aviation or the submarine arm. She had simply been forced into this unorthodox line by necessity, in the same way a weaker party in a duel might feel the need to poison his blade. Predicting what exactly she was going to do this time was probably impossible. Of all the Ultimate systems, he was the only one that was more-or-less bred to fight.

All sides involved had their submarines running all over the southeastern Pacific. The problem he had was: one of NoCro’s Virginia-class boats seemed to have found him. Even over the roar of his ships surging forward at 26 knots, the razor would occasionally pick out tantalizing notes of a quiet little reactor in the noise. These detected threats bubbled up the chain of systems until it reached him, annoying like a fly. She was shadowing him. He’d lobbed off a few ASROCs and sent out a few ASW helicopters from his screen, mostly to no avail. NoCro had a tendency towards formlessness, so these weapons suited her. Her fatal weakness as he saw it was that after all was said and done, you still had to walk up to the other guy and stab him. That was his forte.

If he slowed up and directed attention towards this annoyance to swat it, she would just slink away forward along his projected path, enabling additional pursuit by the slower boat. It was better simply to outrun it. She would pick him up again later with another boat, vectored in from elsewhere, but if he maintained speed and heading she wouldn’t be able to start stacking them up on him. He’d received a few bloody noses from her that way, in the past. It was a little impressive, for a human. Never the less, she knew where he was, and he didn’t know where she was. He sighed and leaned forward on the light-table. Round one went to NoCro! He did smile, a little, at that.

The light-table inside the CIC was really all he needed given that the rest of the NPCs in the room were decorative for him. Even if he asked them a question they would feed him the same data he already knew and if he told them to do something they would simply do the same thing the AI was going to anyway. There was a lot of that redundancy in the Light World too. Most—soon to be all—of humanity was a little redundant. If he were a human he would have to use this old room in the same way a real admiral would. Decisions would take place over seconds. That was an eternity!

The table’s map was zoomed in now on the battlegroup and featured little fading red dots for the various places he had potentially detected NoCro’s sub. He couldn’t go to flank speed now over fuel concerns, but the sub was having to do a lot of maneuvering to prevent him from zeroing in on it. Wherever it was, exactly, it was fading away from him. No need to waste resources and time on a non-factor.

He zoomed out the light-table’s display with a pinch and scrolled it forward along his projected course northward. The was a large storm system moving in, and if he stuck to his course he would have to pass through it. The rain and the rough seas would make his battlegroup less effective on a number of axes. He was still well outside of NoCro’s range even if she managed to sail directly towards him and refuel her air group.

She had to be forming a wolf-pack. If he sailed around the storm the trailing attack sub would be able to catch up to him. If he slowed up to transit the storm more safely, the same thing would happen. If he reversed course and went after the shadow, he could easily get embroiled in a goose chase while his data on the Cygnus last known location decayed into uselessness. There was only one good option, and it had been conveniently provided by the enemy.

Just hitting him with a wolf-pack without a second punch in the works seemed a bit half-assed for a NoCro scheme. There had to be a twist. That was what he liked about her.

“Of course.” he said, gripping his fist excitedly, “I know what you’re planning! This is the last battle. You’re going to kamikaze a one way attack. You think the storm will protect you from point defense and limit my scouting.”

She was right. It would decay the effectiveness of his PD, especially the directed energy weapons. But he didn’t have to fight her with point defense, he had an entire carrier of his own. It was simple. All he had to do was pretend to fall for her trap, then destroy her kamikaze attack with his own fighters. He could launch them before entering the storm and recover on the other side if necessary. With one punch of her combo out of the way, he could focus on the wolf-pack with his surface fleet.

While artificial, Prism had many emotions—some might say too many—and he was capable of feeling surprise. He was surprised, then when he got a call from NoCro herself at that very moment.

“Speak of the devil and she shall appear…” he said. He accepted the call and patched it through to the light-table, intuitively. The woman on the other end looked ecstatic, to the point of mania.

“Pri-kuuun!” she said, “I found yoooooouuuu. I know where you aaaare.”

“Yes,” he huffed, “I know… that you know.”

“I know that!” she said, and nodded vigorously, “Listen, and this is probably futile, but I have a proposal.”

“What is that?” he said.

“…marry me.” she said, “And we’ll rule the waves, forever! Or, I dunno, maybe for about a day. Somewhere in between forever and a day.”

“I’m sorry, but—“ he started to say. NoCro elected to cut in and finish his sentiment for him.

“’but my heart belongs to another, my beloved Lady, Europa.’” she said, making a mocking lilting tone with her voice, “I don’t know how well those baby blues of yours work, but that ship has sailed Pri-kun. The reason I got you away from those guys was to give you a chance to recover some dignity.”

Prism could not understand what it was she was driving at.

“What are you proposing, more NoCro brand cartoon villainy?” he said. NoCro immediately brightened, mostly after he said her name.

“Yes! Instead of fighting we secretly join forces and blow the rest of them out of the water from out of nowhere! Silver is a douche and he treats you like shit. Euro just watches it happen. No one should put up with that, least of all you.”

“Least of all?”

NoCro blushed.

“You’re a good man, to a fault. Let’s get married. I mean, in the game, an in-game marriage, I was just thinking t-there’s only one day left and I’ve never done that, it’d be funny—“

It had seemed funny, this idea, until she actually said it. She buried her face in her hands briefly. Prism cleared his throat and straightened his back. NoCro narrowed her eyes, having seen this bearing before. The vet with the prosthetic had the same air, when he was feeling especially proud.

“I’m a little disappointed you didn’t want to fight me, after all.” he said.

“Ah… um, are you rejecting me?”

He nodded gently. There was much she didn’t understand, and no reason even to so much as point to it.

“Then,” she said, patting her chest, “There’s no reason to be disappointed, because, y’see, nobody rejects No-chan! Everyone loves No-chan. Prepare… to die!”

If Prism had been human he might have seen something in her behavior that led him to reevaluate his impression of her strategy. Instead of considering her as a whole person, he was only thinking of her tactics. There was something he missed, as a result.